 Live from Berlin, Germany. It's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight 2017. We're here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Peter Burris. We have two guests on the program now. We have Rory McBride, who is the technical account manager at Aero, and Brian McCloskey, who is the vice president worldwide for hyper-converged infrastructure at NetApp. Brian Rory, thanks so much for coming on the show. Oh, thanks. So I want to start with you, Brian, and just talk a little bit, tell our viewers a little bit about the value that HCI delivers to customers, and especially in terms of simplifying the data center. Okay, in a nutshell, what NetApp HCI does is it takes what would normally be hours and hours and hours to implement a solution and literally hundreds of inputs. Generally, over 400 inputs, and it simplifies it down to under 30 inputs, and an installation that'll be done within 45 minutes. Now, traditional HCI solutions have similar implementation characteristics, but you lose some of the enterprise flexibility and scale that customers of NetApp have come to expect over the years. And what we've done is we've provided that simplicity while allowing customers to have the enterprise capabilities and flexibility that they've grown accustomed to. And is this something that you were talking with customers? I mean, in terms of the simplicity, what were you hearing from customers? Well, most customers these days are challenged of, everybody has to find a way to do more with less or to do a minimally, a lot more with the same. And if you think of NetApp, we've always been wonderful about giving customers a great production experience. So when you buy a typical NetApp product, your colleague gonna own it for three, four, or five years, and it will continue. And NetApp's always been great for that three, four, and five year timeframe. And what we've done with HCI is we've really simplified the beginning part of that curve of how do you get it from the time it lands on your dock to implement it and usable by your users in a short manner? So that's what HCI's brought to the NetApp portfolio that's incremental to what was there before. So one of the advantages to third parties that work closely with NetApp is that by having a simpler approach to doing things, you can do more of them. But on the other hand, you want to ensure that you remain focused on the value at. So in the field, when actually sitting down with a customer and working with them to ensure that they get the value that they want in these products, how do you affect that balance as the product becomes simpler to the customer now being able to focus more on other things other than configuration implementation? I think what I've been able to get to, to doing something with your data is the key. You needed a low bar of entry, which a lot of the software and hardware providers are trying to do today. And I think HCI just helps to pull all of that together, which is great. We're hearing from those third party vendors that it's great that from day one, they've been integrated into the overall portfolio message. And I think customers are just going to be pretty excited at what they can do from day zero with this hardware. But when you think about ultimately there, how they're going to spend their time, what are they going to be doing instead of now all this configuration work? Especially what is there going to be doing now that you're not doing that value added configuration work? Well, hopefully we'll be helping them to realize the full potential of what they bought. So rather than spending a lot of time trying to make the hardware work, they're concentrating more on delivering a service or an application back to the business that's actually going to generate some sort of revenue. You know, in Arrow we're talking a lot to people about IoT. And I think it's going to be the next wave of information that people are going to have to deal with. And having a stable product that can support and provide some sort of value of information back to the business is going to be key. So Brian, HCI, as you noted, dramatically reduces the time to get to value. Not only now, but it also sustains that level of simplicity over the life of the utilization of the product. But how does it fit into the rest of the NetApp product that you said, the rest of the NetApp portfolio? What does it make better? What makes it better in addition to just the HCI product? Okay, so NetApp has a really robust portfolio of offerings that we, at a high level, categorize into our next generation offerings, which are SolidFire, FlexPod SolidFire, StorageGrid, and Hyperconverged. And then the traditional NetApp on tap-based offerings. And what the glue between the whole portfolio is the data fabric. And HCI is very tightly integrated into the data fabric. One of the innovations we are delivering is SnapMirror integration of our HCI platform into the traditional on tap family of products. So you can seamlessly move data from our Hyperconverged system to a traditional on tap-based system. And it also gives you really seamless mobility to either your own private cloud or to public cloud platforms. And as a company with a wide portfolio, it gives us the ability to be really consultative with our partners and our customers. Because what we want is, and we feel customers are best served on NetApp, and we want them to use NetApp. And if an on tap-based system is a better solution for them than Hyperconverged, then that's absolutely what we will recommend for them. And to your earlier question about the partners, one of the interesting things with HCI is it's the first time as NetApp, we're delivering an integrated system with compute and with a hypervisor. It comes pre-configured with VMware. And it's a wonderful opportunity for our partners to add incremental value through the sales cycle to what they've generally brought to NetApp in the past. Because as NetApp, we're really storage experts where our partners have a much wider and deeper understanding of the whole ecosystem than we do. So it's been interesting for us to have discussions with partners because we're learning a lot because we're now involved in layers and we're deeply involved at higher levels of the stack than we have been. I'm really interested in that because you say that you have this kind of consultative relationship with these customers. How are you able to learn from them, their best practices, and then do you then transfer what you've learned to other partners and other customers? Yeah, from the customer end, we try and disseminate the learnings as much as we can, but we're a huge, huge organization with many, many account teams. But it all starts with what the customer wants to accomplish. I mean, minimally, they need a solution that's going to plug in and do what they expect it to do today. But what's the more important part is where what their vision is for where they want to be three years down the road, five years down the road, 10 years down the road. And it's really that vision piece that tends to drive more towards one part of the portfolio than the other. But take us through how this works. So you walk into an account, presumably ROECS has a customer. Yep. The ROECS customer says, well, we have an issue that's going to require some specialized capabilities and how we use our data. So you could look at a lot of different options, but you immediately think NetApp. What is it that leads you to NetApp, HCI versus ONTAP versus SolidFire? Is there immediate characteristic that you say, that's HCI? I would say that the driving factor was the fact that they wanted something that's simple and easy to manage. They want to get, I don't know, say a Mongo database up and running or they've got some other application that really depends on their business and the underlying hardware needs to function. Brian was saying there that it's got Element OS sitting underneath it which is in its 10th iteration and you've got VMWare version six which is probably the most adopted virtualization platform out there. These are two best-of-breed partnerships coming together and people are happy with that and can move on and manage it from a single pane of glass moving forward from day one right the way through to when they need to transition to a new platform which is seamless for them. I think that's great from any application point of view because you don't want to worry about the health of things or whatever. You want to be able to give an application back to the business and also we talked about education. I mean this event is geared towards bringing customers together with NetApp and understanding the messaging around HCI which is great. One of the things that you keep hearing from customers is this need for data simplicity, this need for huge time-saving products and services. What do you think if you can think three to five years down the road what will the next generation of concerns be and how are you, I'm going to use the word that we're hearing a lot, future-proof, what you're doing now to serve those customer needs of the future? Three to five years down the road. Well I think to the future, I can't predict three to five years out, very reliably, but the data- But you can't predict they're going to have more data. Yes. They're going to merge it in new and unseen ways and they need to do it more cheaply. But the future-proofing really comes in from the data fabric. So like you can, with the integration into the data fabric, you could have a information that started on a NetApp system that was announced eight years ago seamlessly moves into a solid-fire all-flash array which seamlessly moves to a hyper-converged system which seamlessly moves to your private cloud which eventually moves off to a public cloud and you can bring it back into any tiers and wherever you want that data in six, seven, eight years the data fabric will extend to it. So that's really where the, and there are within each individual product there are investment protection technologies within each one, but it's the data fabric that really should make customers feel comfortable that no matter where they're going to end up is taking their first step with NetApp, is the step in the right direction. So the value-added ecosystem that NetApp and others use, and obviously ROECS is a good player in that, has historically been tied back into hardware assets. How does it feel to be moving more into worrying about your customers' data assets? I think it's an exciting time to be bringing those things together. I mean, at the end of the day it's what the customer wants. They want a solution that integrates seamlessly from whether that be the rack right the way up to the application. They want something that they can get on their phone. They want something they can get on their tablet. They want the same experience regardless of whether they're in an airplane or right next to a data center. And I think the demand on data is huge and will only get bigger over the next five years. I was looking at a recent cover of I think Forrest Magazine which was said about, it's actually from a number of years ago about Nokia and how can anybody ever catch them and where are they now. So I think you need to be able to spot the changes and adapt quickly and to steal one of the comments from the keynote yesterday, it's moving from a survivor to a thriver with your data. It's going to be key to those companies. Well, just in talking about the demands on data growing, it's also true that the demands on data professionals are growing too. How is that changing the way you recruit and retain top talent? Well, for us as NetApp, if you were to look at sort of what we wanted in the CV five years ago, we wanted people that understood storage. We wanted people that knew about volumes, that knew about data layouts, that knew how to maximize performance by physical placement of data. And now what we're looking for is people that really understand the whole stack and that can talk to customers about their application needs, their business problems, can talk to developers because what we've done is we've taken, like even those people that were good at all those other things I mentioned, when you ask them like, what do you love about this product? Like none of them ever came back and said, I love the first week I spent installing it. So we've taken that away and we let them do more interesting work. And our challenge for us is, and I think us as a collective society is to make sure we bring people forward and enable from an education perspective skills enablement so they're capable of rising to that next level of demand. But we're taking a lot of the busy work out. Right, and then making sure that they have the skills to be able to take what they're seeing in the data and then take action. Yeah, but we, you know, we want our customers to look at NetApp as a data expert that can work with them on their business problem, not a storage expert that can explain how an array works. Well, Brian, Ruri, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a great conversation. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. You are watching The Cube. We will have more from NetApp Insight. I'm Rebecca Knight for Peter Burris in just a little bit.