 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hello everybody, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Dave Faithful, who's the Chief Architect of WEI. Dave, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So, first tell me about WEI and then I want to understand your role there. Sure, at WEI I'm our Chief Architect responsible for driving technology solutions that we work with our customer base on. So, WEI is a value-added reseller supporting Fortune 1000 Enterprise customers. It takes us all over the world in supporting their environments. And we're typically designing and architecting IT service delivery models for those customers and aligning those architectures with their business needs. So, you typically describe the sweet spot of your customer base. You mentioned basically large companies and you're interacting. Who's your point of contact? Is it the architect to architect? Who are you talking to? It's all levels of the IT organization typically from the CIO on down. So, understanding what the business goals of our customers are and then working with those IT directors, IT managers and IT architecture leads to develop solutions that fit those business models. So, these days software-defined data center computing is big, creating service delivery models that are cloud-like in nature, whether on-prem or in a hybrid environment or a public service are things that our customers are trying to do. Migrating from that traditional IT architecture to this new software-defined world. So, we're going to talk about storage later on, but I wonder, thinking about the top level, the C-level executive in IT, is he or she, are they concerned about storage? What's on their mind? What's top of mind for those guys? Typically, it's really just how do they leverage IT to deliver value back to the business? How do they make their companies more competitive than the marketplace? How do they get their products out to market faster? Faster than before and faster than their competition. So, they're trying to leverage IT as a service, as a utility, and they're trying to create that utility model, that service delivery model, to support their business needs, which IT has to be more responsive than ever before. They don't have months to get something out. They have sometimes days or hours. And so, they've got to build those models while at the same time, right? They've got to support their existing traditional environment. So, they've got this juggling act. At the C-level, that's typically what we see they're worried about. How they get there is up to their IT organizations, right? Then, that's where we're helping them to architect those solutions. Yeah, so the CIOs that we talked to, I think they bought into the cloud narrative of, hey, you don't want to do this heavy lifting. You want to shift those resources to support whatever, digital transformation, or application delivery. But to get from point A to point B and keep the lights on is obviously challenging. So, you talked about some of the underlying rip currents and trends. You mentioned SDDC. Why is that important? First of all, what is it in your mind? How do you guys look at that? And why is it so important? Well, so, Suffer to Find Data Center Computing is really, Suffer to Find Anything is really the decoupling of the control plane from the data plane, right? How can we manage all of this data? Where it comes from and where it goes from a centralized, automated point. And so, what's important about that is it allows us to provision more quickly than ever before. It allows us to make changes more quickly than before. And it allows our data to be more portable than ever before. Giving us the ability to move information and data on-prem to a public service and back. Be able to replicate and back up data to really any place that we need it to be. And then making it more available for our global organizations to be able to get access to it at any time. In development environments, they follow the Sun methodology, right? Of being able to have access to that data for development teams all over the world is critically important. And public services as well as hybrid and other cloud delivery models allow them to do that. So it used to be pretty straightforward. We didn't maybe realize at the time that you'd build a basically an infrastructure stack, you'd support an application, you'd harden that and it kind of became its own silo as cloud comes into play, hybrid cloud. Now you're talking about multi-cloud. The picture gets a lot more complex. And you mentioned separating the control plane and the data plane as you go into this multi-cloud. Well, first of all, multi-cloud, I've said is kind of a symptom of multi-vendor. We sort of just got here. But now I think as is often the case in IT, people are saying, well, we have to control this. We have to have governance and compliance and security. So we better get IT to come fix this problem. Is that a viable sort of narrative from my standpoint? Is that how we got here? Or has it really been a strategy in your view? Well, I think it's both. I think more mature organizations understand now, maybe not at first, understand now that there's different reasons to use different services. So it may be that a particular public service has has some application environment or some process that is appealing to them. Maybe it complies with some sort of governance or compliance requirement. But there may also be times, and there are with most of our customers where they need to keep that information, that data on-prem for whatever reason, either due to security policy or due to compliance reasons or something else. And so organizations started to figure out they couldn't just put everything on one place, right? Even if it was a public service, that they needed the ability to have some data in different places and they needed that to be affordable. And so that was the challenge. And as organizations started to realize that, that hybrid cloud strategy was a sound one. They needed the technology to be able to support that. And so that's when we, when we start taking a look at software-defined solutions, we're looking at the ability of those solutions to be able to communicate back and forth, right? How do we move data back and forth? What products do we select that allow us to create API connectivity to all of those different end points, right? Whether it's a public cloud service or on-prem or both, how are we able to fluidly move data back and forth? Okay, so you had, and you also had a lot of shadow IT, which kind of, I feel like IT is beginning to rein in, at least from the standpoint of setting standards. But okay, so you just described this state of cloud. I'll call it cloud because to us, it seems that you're bringing the cloud experience wherever your data lives, could be on-prem, could be in cloud vendor A, B or C, some kind of hybrid structure. So how do you bring that cloud experience to wherever your data lives and what role does storage play? Yep, all right, so first there's a few high-level elements to, we'll call it this hybrid cloud model, right? One is a financial model. You know, in a public service today, we talk about the ability to go swipe a credit card and now you've got this instant access to infrastructure. That's a financial model that is easy to consume, right? But how do you do that on-prem? So we work with different partners to put together those financial models that are similar to public services in an on-prem consumption model. And so we can do things like capacity on demand, pay for what you need only when you need it, right? Expand and contract on-prem, just like you would in a public service. So that financial model is one place to start. The second place to start is with the infrastructure and you mentioned storage. And storage is a great example of that. So we want to have storage that has the ability to connect out to those public services or other platforms when we need them to, when we need it to. Matter of fact, the WEI, that's one of the things that we look at very carefully is, what is that second, third-mile approach to implementing all of this? How do we automate the movement of that data and the connectivity of all this infrastructure together? Well, you've got to have some automation that is customized to your environment because it's not a cookie-cutter approach. And so to be able to develop that automation is what we call the second-mile, third-mile service where we're connecting all of these things, right? So we want to be able to select a storage platform, for instance, that has API connectivity that we can leverage to connect to Microsoft Azure or to AWS or to Google or someplace else. And that we want to also be able to connect to our compute platforms that we're leveraging on-prem. And so in our network that is on-prem and that is extended out to those public services. And does the intelligence to enable that automation, does that live inside the infrastructure? Is it something that you have to bring to the table? Is it a combination or is it actually intrinsic now to the architectures that are out there? It's both. So there is more and more of that intelligence coming to the hardware being developed into the hardware. And some of our partners that we work with have done a really good job of building that into their solutions. HPE is an example with some of their storage platforms uses their info site capability to build intelligence and AI and machine learning into optimizing their storage platform and being able to give customers the ability to see problems before they even arise. So that's one piece of it. And the other piece of it is, are those APIs already written on the platform? Can we leverage those already? Do we have to develop that ourselves? Have they been developed to work with certain automation platforms that we can leverage? So yeah, a lot of this built into the infrastructure today and then how you customize that for your own use case. It requires someone experiencing and the capability to actually develop us automations. It's interesting, Dave. If you go back five, six, even seven, maybe even longer, years ago, people were really afraid of automation. They wanted knobs to turn. And so my question is, do you see people much more receptive? Why? What's changed? I mean, I do. People see much more receptive automation, but what's changed? Well, I think it's kind of actually what you just mentioned, right? People thought that there was this magic dial, magic knob that they could turn when they wanted infrastructure. I want more infrastructure. I'll turn it this way. I want less infrastructure. Turn it that way. Not really understanding the effort it took to make that happen in the background. And I think that there's more awareness now of what that effort is. We see organizations moving resources, meaning their people and their skills from traditional IT roles into these automation roles, giving them new skills to be able to support all of this ongoing automation requirement to be able to make the business more responsive. So instead of IT organizations being reactive like they used to, i.e. they would receive a request and then they would have to go in and architect around that request, they're actually building the infrastructure and the automations upfront. So when the request comes in, it can actually turn that dial up. So they're building the dial up by moving those resources into new skill sets. Well, so that's an interesting point about the skill sets. I mean, I've always often said if your main skill set is managing loans, you really want to update your skill sets and find a new job basically. So what are people doing? Are they moving into development? Are they moving into sort of becoming cloud architects? What would you advise somebody who's traditionally been a storage admin? What's their growth path? That's a good question. So yeah, we would advise them to stop managing loans and to move into different automation skill sets, different programming. Understand some of the programming languages out there now like Python and Perl and other things that are commonly used in developing these scripts. Understand API structures. And most of this is open, right? So if you understand it from a general sense, you'll be able to apply it to just about any platform. Understand automations behind provisioning infrastructure and the tools that are out there that are available to do that. And there's a lot of them. And we work with many of them with our customers today. And if you can develop those skill sets, you'll be able to manage in this new world, in this new hybrid IT and hybrid cloud world. And we talk about DevOps a lot, talk about infrastructure as code. But I still feel as though in many organizations that love your thoughts on this, it's still early days in terms of, there's probably more ops dev than there is DevOps. But what are you seeing in terms of the uptake of that DevOps philosophy programmable infrastructure and the skill sets to be able to support that within some of your larger customers? I think there's a separation there, right? When most organizations think about DevOps, they're thinking about their products or their own internal application development. And I think that when we talk about infrastructure, automation and provisioning, it's generally in most enterprise environments completely separate teams, right? And yes, a lot of that is coming together, but you've got one organization in IT that is creating a service for those DevOps teams, right? In the past, when we talk about shadow IT, was those DevOps teams who were swiping the credit card because they needed something instantly so they could develop something and then share it globally. And now we've got IT organizations who have stopped fighting that. And what they really wanna do is be able to deliver that same experience in a controlled, secured, and financially viable way, right? To be able to support those DevOps initiatives. Let's talk about your partnership with HPE. What are you guys doing with HPE? Kind of what sets you guys apart? Yeah, sure, so WEI is an HPE platinum partner and we work with HPE across really their entire portfolio and we understand their initiatives around data center automation, creating a hybrid IT environment. Some of the solutions that they have around the financial models, for instance, HPE GreenLake, is a way to create those cloud-like financial models in an on-prem environment and extend that out to public services so that you have that same experience of swiping that credit card in a public service. So, we work with HPE as they're a leader in IT infrastructure and have been for a long time and across all of their product lines for compute, storage, and networking. How important is GreenLake and how differentiable is it from other companies who do this? Is it pretty much table stakes to be able to have that sort of pay by the drink? Is there anything unique and different about GreenLake from your perspective? I mean, there is, right? Essentially, it's giving organizations the ability to have that public service experience on-prem and consume what they need, when they need it, and then, more importantly, capitalize that if they really want to. So, many organizations are trying to juggle that capital expense versus operational expense budget and so, GreenLake allows them to have that subscription-like experience in a capitalized model, which is important for many organizations. Ah, okay, but so, is it their choice to go up X or cap X? So, they can, okay. And I can understand why some organizations would want to do that. Maybe there's tax benefits, et cetera. Okay, good. I want to ask you about sort of cloud. So, it's a huge mega trend. One of the superpowers, as they say, we've heard the stats 80% of the sort of install base is still on-prem, only 20% has moved to the cloud. We talk a lot about cloud 2.0, kind of a play on web 2.0. What is that? Well, it's containers, it's hybrid, it's multi-cloud. If you're thinking about the next era of cloud, what do you see as 2.0, if we can kind of define that on the fly? Oh, boy. And on camera for 15 years. Yeah, there you go. I mean, there's a lot more. Are those reasonable parameters? Hybrid, multi-cloud, containers, maybe infrastructure as a code? Yeah, I mean, so. Or is it all BS, just acronym soup in our industry? No, I don't think it's BS, right? I think that, I mean, so let's take a look at the evolution of cloud, right? If you looked at it, say, into five years ago, maybe 10 years ago, everyone said that'll never happen. We would never put our data out there. It's not secure. And then you looked at it, say, five years ago or less, everyone was going to the cloud. We're just going to move everything. We're going to DR everything over to the cloud, and we're going to get rid of all our data centers. And then a couple years ago, everyone said, well, hold on a second, that's probably not realistic, right? There's a need to keep some data on-prem, either for compliance reasons or for technology reasons. I mean, we need this data close to us for other things. Who knows what it is? So hybrid cloud, and our abilities to create all of these processes internally, those automations to make that on-prem experience feel the same as it would in a public service, is where most enterprises have realized they need to be. So that's kind of been the journey to get here. Now, I think that that hybrid cloud experience that organizations are making these investments into right now is probably where they will be for the next five to 10 years, right? Now, what comes after that? You mentioned multi-cloud before, right? And I think that's probably a realistic expectation, right? As the commoditization of everything in IT occurs, this is just my speculation that that may occur in the cloud as well, right? And so as the affordability and as the network performance and the cost of that ability comes down and more and more commoditized, there'll be fewer and fewer reasons to make those on-prem investments. So I think a multi-cloud strategy becomes realistic for many organizations who have already started that, right? They've got some stuff in Google, we've got some stuff in Azure, we've got some stuff in AWS. But as we can make the platforms that our applications are running on kind of agnostic across cloud, it's just another service, all right? And organizations are gonna go for the lowest costs and lowest risk environment. If I can containerize most of my applications and I can move them from cloud to cloud because containers are very portable, why wouldn't I do that? I think that's where it could possibly go within the next decade or so. Yeah, if you can create that consistent experience across clouds. You and I have talked about this just in terms of the big hyper-cloud guys have taken labor costs out of the equation and now they can charge you for that convenience. But you believe that you can actually close that gap with on-prem infrastructure. And I've often said that the traditional companies, the tech vendors, they don't have to match the cloud capabilities, they just have to be cloud-like. They can be good enough. And so my question is, do you buy that and have they at least close the gap to the point where you can do a lot of the things that you can get in the public cloud and not have to pay for the automation so you can sort of replicate those substantially on-prem? So I agree, right? And here's an example of how I think that is happening. If you look at what, for instance, Microsoft is doing with Azure Stack, right? What is Azure Stack? It's the ability to extend Microsoft Azure Cloud on-prem by putting it in your data center. Now I've got this consistent platform across multiple locations on-prem and the cloud. AWS is doing the same thing. So that tells me that they also believe hybrid is gonna be around for a while, otherwise they wouldn't put effort into developing these platforms, right? To extend their own platform to your data center. So I don't know if that answers your question, but that's an example to me of why I think hybrid is the way that most organizations are going and that the industry in general, including those hyperscalers, believe that this is gonna be around for a while. I'm glad you brought up Microsoft because they're a fascinating example. Everybody talks about the innovator's dilemma and you would think that Microsoft was a company that was going to struggle with that, where they've clearly figured out, and they were early on with Azure Stack. And to your early point, it's about the control plane, the data plane, and being able to have that consistent experience across clouds. So okay, so my takeaway is, so infrastructure still is important these days. All these new emerging workloads matter. It's also important to be able to replicate substantially that cloud experience on-prem, in-hybrid, and that kind of sets up this, really this new architecture. I wonder if you could summarize your vision of what this new architecture looks like over the next five, 10 years. Well, I'll say it once again. The way to, how do I summarize this? Developing an automated IT service delivery model that is cloud-like in nature on-prem, and as well as extending that to public services and creating a single experience for your user base is where IT organizations are trying to put their effort today. That's how they're trying, that's what they're trying to get to you for the future, at least for the next five years or so. Creating a hybrid cloud environment is the way that they're going to accomplish that. Who they choose as public services is generally a business decision. It's not as much a technical decision, but what they put on-prem has got to be able to work with all of those environments. And that sort of summarizes what I think of cloud 2.0. We haven't even talked about the edge, but that's a whole, another equation. But the idea of leaving the data where it is, if that makes sense, and then shipping code to data is something that's been building out massive distributed networks that actually talk to each other. That is a great vision. Dave, you've been an awesome guest. Thanks so much for coming on the queue. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. You're welcome, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.