 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApps. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media here with Keith Townsend, my co-host for the day. CTO advisor. Our next guest is Brent Roscoe, Vice President of Process and Solutions Marketing at NetApp, and Manj Miller, who's the director of Worldwide Public Relations, PR. So, how you guys feeling? The end of the day, a lot of action. A lot of stuff going on. I mean, I felt like I was about to reinvent all these announcements, almost you needed another keynote. We do, we definitely do. A lot of really great announcements happening this week, and a lot of really big excitement in the halls about what is happening with our announcements, and Microsoft, HCR. How many did you have, roughly? We had three, but we wrapped them into our, only three. Three big ones. Three press releases, right? We had multiple features, products, and each one. I mean, it felt like there was 60 announcements in there. It did. Kind of bundled in, but you packaged them up into three. Yes, to map to our three IT imperatives, and to map back to the data visionary transformation that NetApp has been undergoing this past year. So, you've been busy? Very busy. Heard in the cats internally, put it all into the blocks, the three transformation zones are one, data center, traditional data center, modernization and extension, new next generation data center, and then Power of the Cloud. Yeah, hard to see in the Power of the Cloud. Hard to see in the Power of the Cloud. Which is on everyone's mind. As a portfolio, not a product anymore, because in the old days, you had the product now, it's not a portfolio. The data fabric is really taking new territory down. How do you put that together when you take it to the market? Because, you know, representatives implementations are great, but customers are different. You can't just put one customer in a box and say there's 10 other customers that like that, because they might have a mix of hybrid cloud, a little bit on-prem. Yeah, well, you know, if you hear, so I'm sure you've heard data fabric, right? That is our, that's how we talk about connecting to the hybrid cloud. So that spans really all three of those, right? So whether you're in a modernized next-gen data center or a harness of Power of the Cloud, the data fabric kind of spans all of those. And it creates a unique, really, story for NetApp about how we break down boundaries between traditional on-prem and cloud-based environments, right? So that really spans a portfolio, right? But then when you, so as you get into these different solutions, you know, even though they may be something around modernized, we still talk about how you're going to harness the Power of the Cloud within that modernized capability, right? So all of our announcements this week is really cool to see that hybrid cloud capability coming through all of that, right? It's one of the key investments in our product roadmap and you're seeing that come as we announce new capabilities. And Jean did a great job on the market, but I get excited by Sheila Fitzpatrick because she's driving the passion around privacy, which is not so much security, but it's data security, data privacy, data tech, data for developers. You got governance going on, you got privacy, GDPR going on in Europe. So you guys are in a lot of touch points. They got a lot of irons on the fires relative to the market opportunities outside the core base. Right. What's just the plans? I mean, because everyone's like, what's my reference implementation? How do I use NetApp? Well, we started using use case terminology, right? So as you, we have nine different use cases that we use. So that's really about the issue or the problem or the project the customer is working on, right? So if they're trying to build, they're trying to accelerate a traditional application or if they're trying to harness new modern data services from the cloud or if they're trying to build a DevOps environment. So we use that buyer journey, right? To kind of come in and talk to the customer and say here, you know, this is what we think you're trying to do. Here's the unique capabilities, right? With our portfolio that we can bring to that solution. Right? So we really try to make the product kind of the last part and really talk about the capabilities across the portfolio, how they address and differentiate us into each of those use case environments, right? So that's really the way we try to simplify it so that we don't, you know, we're not talking about all these different products. We're talking about NetApp's capabilities. So I was pretty impressed with the keynote yesterday. We got an hour into the keynote without even mentioning a product. However, this conference is typically, has traditionally been a storage conference. So how has the average attendee, as you walk the floor and you've talked to customers and attendees, how they've been receptive of that message of data first. And now today we get to the meat of the actual speeds and fees. I think really the thing about the conversation that NetApp is having now, and just like you saw on stage at the keynote, is that we're allowing people to elevate their role within their organization. So everyone's coming to the IT department and saying, you know, how do I create these new services? How do I monetize data? And now we're giving our folks that we've worked with traditionally for years the opportunity to step in that conversation and be experts and really come and be the hero in that conversation just like you saw on stage. So they can take their knowledge of those speeds and fees and they can come in and interpret them for new services, new revenue models for data. And you guys do a great job with the Aids. You can get a bunch of them on here in theCUBE. They're the greatest analysts come in because they're on the front lines. They're a mix of tech geeks and also partners. Yeah, they're great advocates, right? And I also spent, I spent the whole day meeting with our analyst community, right? As they come away and get their impressions. And they were very positive, very excited. They've kind of been on this journey with us and watch this kind of transform as we go through our own digital transformation about becoming a data-focused company, right? Around meeting customer needs and how they extract value and create new customer touchpoints and optimize operations and look for new innovative ways to use data. All right, so where's the focus on the solution? And also the comms is important too because as you have comms and solutions, you're like on the landscape, we're going to know the community action going on. You also got to look at what's going on in the narrative of the industry for thought leadership. You got to come in and pick and choose your resources. For instance, Cloud Native Compute Foundation is one of the hottest things on the planet for cloud. So that's a more open source but there's a lot of influences in there. A lot of 18 potential. You got to make some choices. So as you go out to the market, how do you look at the landscape? Because there's almost too much to do for you guys. If you hit every single piece, where's the focus? Yeah, I think that's really where our core message of being the data authority in the hybrid cloud world comes in and looking back at those three, you know, IT imperatives that we talked about. Really, our focus is on building out those core strengths and that's really what you saw from our announcements at the show is building up to those core strengths that we have in continuing to build them out. How about customer saving? I mean, community sectors, open source obviously is still growing like crazy. Open source is important for us. Looking at hyperscalers is very important for us. Looking at cloud native partners as we go forward, which is part of what our announcement with Microsoft was about today. It's moving more into that cloud native conversation as NetApp with our core services and things that were really known for it and made us who we are today. Craig, you got to look at the cloud thing with Microsoft as a huge thing. Now they have not only are they a great channel for you guys, and you guys got to step up to the plate and deliver some good value because they're finicky. They have sales guys out in the streets. Got to be reliable, be rock solid, so purchase on you. But this opens up a lot of doors for NetApp, doesn't it? Well, I think it's a fantastic opportunity for us, right? It's an honor that Microsoft chose this as a partner in this space. But at the same time, I do believe we are the best, we have the best capability in this space, right? A true scale ball enterprise capability that we bring to Azure I think is going to be right, is going to hit the heart of the market for them and really provide a high quality, high enterprise scale kind of service. So I think, you know, I'm super excited that this partnership came together. I think it makes total sense. You know, you look at the number one hyperscaler, the number one data vendor out there and say they've come together to address customer needs. All right, here's the trick question at the end of the day. Let's see if we can get out of here, because this is Dave Vellante and I have one. We know we're good at trick questions. Okay, we're all punchy. We always fall for that. We're totally good at that. I should have said that in the queue. This is more of a philosophical question because Dave Vellante and I always saw it, never fight fashion. Fashion is key in success because you can ride the wave and be fashionable. So the question is what is the fashion in the market that you see? Because you guys now are at a level, in my opinion, where you can walk in the front door of all the fault leader theaters and saying, hey, cloud native guys, we got a great story for you. Hey, governance, we got a great story there. So you have now a whole new level of territory that you can take down and have conversations in. So that comes to fashion question. What's fashionable that you guys are focused on if that's the fashion trend? What is NetApp wearing? Are they wearing designer cloud native? Are they wearing? Not my best analogy. You didn't hit my strong point. You couldn't use a sports analogy or something like that. No, no, no. If you're a baseball team, do you use a Patriots or are you the Niners? No, no, no, she's already. Go ahead, you got the fashion. You do your sports, no, no, no, do a sports analogy. Go ahead. Let's go to the offense, of course. Fashion, right? Yes, we could totally do a fashion analogy. I think that what you saw us wearing today, around our data fabric, momentum around our cloud announcement, even around the digital customer experience with Elio and ActiveIQ, the way we're using our partnership with Watson, IBM Watson. Those are the types of things that you'll see from us in the future. The customer experience message really is around us using our own systems and amplifying those in a way that we hope our customers will in the future. So you'll see a lot more of those types of things from us into the next fashion season. Yeah, and the old expression, if you got sizzly bit out of the steak, and then again, it's a nice fabric you're wearing. So since we're talking analogies, you guys are actually building up a lot of political capital. The Microsoft announcement is huge. That's just from a optics perspective. You can, that gets you into the door. Wait, hold on. This NFS thing is powered by NetApp. Opens up a set of conversations with a completely different set of customers. How do you spend that capitalness? What's the next level of conversations with CIOs, CDOs, CMOs? CXO, yeah. Well, we're in those conversations today, right? So we've had ONTAP Cloud and several even PureSaf space products for a while and they're making great traction. There's huge growth in those new products. Obviously with the Microsoft partnership, it allows us to kind of actually reach, I'm excited about hitting new buyers that may have not seen NetApp as a vendor that they would leverage. Maybe just through association or because maybe their persona or the job they do wouldn't put NetApp right in front of them. So now we have a new audience, right? We have a whole new audience that we can show our value. We, I think, will have ways to work with Microsoft to bring additional capabilities into that service that they're going to provide and how do we work with them to do that and make sure that customers see value, see additional future capabilities that they can leverage from us? It's a tremendous opportunity and it's now, it's our market to go, it's, this is our opportunity to go show value to them and this is a great opportunity. We need to take advantage of it and it's ours to, you know, it's ours to, to really show strength. Yeah, you guys are going to take more territory. Great stuff. Final word, give you guys the final word in the segment. For the folks that couldn't make it, they're watching this segment. Share with them what were the key things here happening that you should know about? The takeaway from NetApp Insight. What are the key things? Brett, you want to take this one? You start and I'll finish. Okay, okay, we'll tag team this one. I think the big thing obviously is the Microsoft announcement. It's us moving more into that cloud native territory. That's a really big one. Also, the digital customer experience, the Elio and Active IQ for customer support. I think those are very big too, showing us using our own capabilities for our customers as a company. Okay, look, I think you said earlier, portfolio announce, right? We continue to come with multiple, with several new capabilities across a portfolio, right? And I think if you look at our focus, which is, hey, we're building more software capability, we are building more hybrid, you know, more capabilities in the cloud, more capabilities in hybrid, and forcing that data fabric message. I tell you, I don't think, you know, I know I'm biased, but nobody does it better, right? Nobody can come in and provide the position that NetApp has to help customers through this transformation, leveraging cloud, leveraging new technologies, new microservices into their architecture in a way that we do it that's as seamless and easy. And the cloud orchestrator is just one example of that's multi-cloud. If that shift would be first to market with true multi-cloud right out of the gate. So congratulations. And you know, sorry to hear about all the tragedy that happened around your event. You guys handle it with class and respect. Thank you. Yeah, it was definitely a tough situation. I thought the entire leadership team did a fantastic job of working through that. Props to the NetApp leadership and the whole team. It's theCUBE here live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay for the NetApp Insight 2017. We'll be back with more after the short break. Calling all barrier breakers. Status quo smash.