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  • Customers Accelerating Their Digital Transformation, Says HPE CEO

    Customers Accelerating Their Digital Transformation, Says HPE CEO

    “Customers continue to affirm the need to accelerate the digital transformation and take advantage of the explosion of data we see around us,” says HPE CEO Antonio Neri. “This ultimately is the core aspect of how they derive an improved business outcome. We have a very complete portfolio from the edge to the cloud. Digital transformation starts with secure connectivity. We have a phenomenal platform called Aruba that provides a mobile-first cloud-first approach.”

    Antonio Neri, President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discusses on CNBC the companies latest earnings driven by customers continuing to accelerate their digital transformation:

    Customers Accelerating Their Digital Transformation

    Customers continue to affirm the need to accelerate the digital transformation and take advantage of the explosion of data we see around us. This ultimately is the core aspect of how they derive (an improved) business outcome. Obviously, the uncertainty (do to the China trade war) can create a little bit of a pause. It takes a little bit longer for them to make decisions, particularly with larger deals. That’s what we saw (this quarter), elongated sell cycles.

    We executed with incredible discipline both on the cost side and on the pricing side. We actually have done a remarkable job in the last seven quarters to continue to make our cost structure more competitive and to streamline everything across the company. When I became the CEO I established three key priorities for ourselves. One of them, at the core, was to start with our HP Next next program which was to rearchitect the company from the ground up. That included a cost-benefit but at the same time, a portfolio shift. We are seeing the benefit of the portfolio shift today in our margin profile. That gives us the ability to expand margins significantly. I believe we will deliver record levels of year-to-date free cash flow which gives us the confidence to raise the guidance again for seven consecutive quarters.

    Digital Transformation Starts With Secure Connectivity

    It (the Huawei issue) is an opportunity for us. We have a very complete portfolio from the edge to the cloud. Digital transformation starts with secure connectivity. We have a phenomenal platform called Aruba that provides a mobile-first cloud-first approach. At the same time, we are here to serve our customers in the countries where they participate. We have a very diverse global supply chain that allows us to navigate through these challenges. I take this as an opportunity for us to serve our customers better and continue to provide the value they’re looking for. Obviously, we need to navigate through this uncertainty, whether it is Huawei or others. At the end, we are really focused on our business and our customers.

    As our CFO Tarek Robbiati said we are focusing this year on stabilizing our business. We continue to shift our portfolio to higher value, higher margin and deliver everything we can as a service to our customers. You see the results of that in a portfolio mix in key strategic growth areas like high performance compute, which is the backbone for how analytics and AI will be run going forward. We are extremely excited about the completion almost of the acquisition of Craig which will be completed by the end of Q4. At the same time, in the core business, we have to continue to deliver what I call world load optimized hybrid cloud solutions delivered as a service. We are on that journey. We have made tremendous progress. We have a truly differentiated offer called HPE GreenLake, which is to deliver everything as a service.

    Customers Accelerating Their Digital Transformation, Says HPE CEO Antonio Neri
  • 5G Poses New Security Risks, Says Avast CEO

    5G Poses New Security Risks, Says Avast CEO

    “5G brings a couple of things,” says Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek. “One is the density of the network which is enabling things like IoT, the Internet of Things. That’s an exciting thing but also poses some new security risks. Second is speed of connectivity which we all want and which we all sort of are hoping to get better. But in terms of timing, it kind of differs geo by geo. East Asia is always ahead in that regard. In Europe, we can realistically expect something within two or three years.”

    Ondrej Vlcek, CEO of Avast, discusses new security risks with 5G and how privacy is becoming a big part of their business in a conversation on Bloomberg:

    5G Poses Some New Security Risks

    There were really two drivers (to our earnings results this quarter). The first one was our consumer direct segment, desktop direct, which grew 12.5 percent. The second was consumer indirect, which is actually powered by both the Jumpshot business that we have as well as the Secure Browser. These were kind of the two main things.

    5G brings a couple of things. One is the density of the network which is enabling things like IoT, the Internet of Things. That’s an exciting thing but also poses some new security risks. Second is speed of connectivity which we all want and which we all sort of are hoping to get better. But in terms of timing, it kind of differs geo by geo. East Asia is always ahead in that regard. In Europe, we can realistically expect something within two or three years.

    Privacy Is The Other Side Of The Security Coin

    I think privacy is a new category. We see it as the other side of the security coin. We are heavily investing in creating privacy-oriented solutions. So actually our portfolio today is not just security, antivirus protection is now actually less than half of our business. Now the second half is made of tools like privacy controls because we see a big opportunity. At the same time, the need is real. Consumers are more and more realizing there are privacy risks in what they are doing online and there is something that needs to be done about that.

    I got sort of inspired by the captains from the Silicon Valley such as Google and Facebook. So I gave up my salary and my bonus and I’m only getting compensated by stock which I think is the right thing for the CEO to do. Clearly, my objective is to keep the company growing. We’ve got a great runway and I’m very optimistic, being new in the role and seeing the opportunities. This is a good position to be in.

    5G Poses New Security Risks, Says Avast CEO Ondrej Vlcek
  • Zebra Tech Tracking Technology Integrating Deep Into Sports and Business

    Zebra Tech Tracking Technology Integrating Deep Into Sports and Business

    “We’ve learned this past year that the tracking system we have with the NFL is actually considered to be the best by the broadcasters, coaches, and the fans,” says Zebra Technologies CEO Anders Gustafsson. “Our type of technology works particularly well with football but it would also work for basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. With ice hockey, the challenge is the puck. How do you track the puck and put the tag inside the puck? We can do it but it’s more costly. With basketball, they have been more focused on the ball than the players.”

    Anders Gustafsson, CEO of Zebra Technologies, discusses how their tracking technology is being integrated deeply within sports and business in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Our Tracking Technology Works Particularly Well With Football

    We’ve learned now this past year that the tracking system we have with the NFL is actually considered to be the best by the broadcasters, coaches, and the fans. The NFL owns the data so we can’t give (fantasy players) access to the data. I think they give access to some of the data but not all the data. Then you would have all the information you could possibly want to have about every player on all of the teams. 

    Our type of technology works particularly well with football but it would also work for basketball, ice hockey, and soccer. With ice hockey, the challenge is the puck. How do you track the puck and put the tag inside the puck? We can do it but it’s more costly. With basketball, they have been more focused on the ball than the players. 

    Zebra Tracking Technology Works Particularly Well With Football

    We Are Becoming An Essential Part of Retailers’ Strategies

    Savannah is our data platform. We can connect all sorts of devices or sensors on the south side and on the north side we can have APIs to all sorts of other applications. We can provide a lot of analytics around what’s happening there. We integrate with a lot of independent software vendors. If you look at large companies like Oracle, SAP, Manhattan, and JDA, they’re all partners of ours. We exchange data with them and we provide data that they use for their operations. We also have our own software capabilities. We bought a company called Profitect. It does any predictive analytics. This is a good example of this but we have other software capabilities also.

    We are now becoming an essential part of retailers’ strategies for building omnichannel and ecommerce capabilities. Historically, we were probably viewed a bit more as a tactical device supplier. Today we’re much more of an integral part of enabling them to execute on their strategy. We moved ourselves up the solution stack to be able to deliver more value to them.

    Companies are now tracking employees, patients, assets

    Today, more and more things are being tracked and there are more and more efficiencies out of this. Companies are now tracking employees, patients, assets, all of these things. We said we provide the performance edge to the front line of business by having every employee, device, and technical thing being connected and optimally utilized and visible to the network. 

    Tableau (a company recently bought by Salesforce) would more than likely integrate our data. We could be a source for data insight analytics for them. We aspire to get those kinds of valuations (and the higher multiples that Tableau got when they sold to Salesforce). We also overlap (with Honeywell) in a number of areas but we do quite a few different things also. We have our own strengths and we compete with them but not everywhere.

    Zebra Tech Tracking Technology Integrating Deep Into Sports and Business – CEO Anders Gustafsson
  • 50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO

    “You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten,” says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen. “We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment.”

    John Van Siclen, CEO of Dynatrace, discusses the impact of 50 years of datacenter that will shift to the cloud over the next ten years, in an interview on CNBC:

    Software Is Now Eating the World

    Software is now eating the world as a lot of folks know. It’s how we bank, how we shop, how we do just about everything. These applications have gotten much more complex over the last five years as they have moved to cloud platforms. The spend in the traditional datacenter is declining quickly and the move is over to the cloud. It’s going to redefine how businesses work in the future. It is the new revenue streams, the new connective tissue with customers, providing a whole new environment. 

    For example, Carribean Cruise, one of our customers, is reinventing the travel experience for Millenials. They’re doing it all through software on their ships. They provide a little wrist band that interacts with software on ship and on shore to transform the experience. What we’re seeing is really still a continued focus on growth. New revenue streams, new opportunities, and taking in existing core application environments and rebuilding it to be cloud-native. That’s the shift that we see. Still growth, still attack market, still competitive advantage for most companies that are pushing forward aggressively. 

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud

    We’ve always built the company around a direct sales approach. Our products are used by enterprises. Enterprises want to connect directly with the company that builds these products. We’ve really always gone to market that way and it has served us very well. It makes it a very predictable business and a very strategic platform for these enterprises. We run across all of the cloud platforms and then some. We target the global 15,000 enterprise companies. We expect to talk to the CIO, CTO, and sort of the executive level that are driving this shift within their organizations’ digital transformation projects. That’s our focus. 

    What’s happening now is that the cloud is moving from the early days where people would put applications in the cloud to where they really are taking their entire datacenter and shifting it to the cloud. That’s what’s driving these webscale multi-cloud environments that we do so well in. It’s still early days. There’s a lot of room to go in this marketplace. You have 50 years of datacenter that is shifting to the cloud in the next ten. We are early days. There’s a lot of room to go and I’m sure a lot of changes in front of us. The movement to the cloud and this whole move to software is a global phenomenon. Every enterprise around the world is moving and moving fast.

    Cloud Is So Much More Efficient and Economical For Companies

    This market is very large. We estimate it’s about $18 billion. Others have the estimates in the $20 billions. It’s plenty of room for a company like us to grow and actually probably multiple companies to grow in this space. We feel very secure and happy with our organic innovation. We’ve been able to reinvent the business several times now. It’s a very dynamic space, this application world. Organic innovation is our thrust going forward.

    The cloud is so much more efficient and economical for companies that as there is any kind of disruption anywhere in their markets they’re going to lean toward applications. The things that really drive connective tissue with their customers and their marketplaces that create more automation and more information that they gather when they go through digital channels.

    50 Years Of Datacenter Shifting To Cloud, Says Dynatrace CEO John Van Siclen
  • Bank of America CEO: Our Efficiency Is Driven By Technology

    Bank of America CEO: Our Efficiency Is Driven By Technology

    “It’s absolutely a fair statement that we are actually a technology company that is really fabulous at banking,” says Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. “We have 37 million digital customers, 28 million mobile customers. It’s all been automated, wires and stuff, but now the interface with the customers is much more automated. That efficiency is driven by the technology enablement of the consumer and wealth management companies and it’s always more efficient to serve it that way. So that 57 percent efficiency ratio, that’s enabled by technology.”

    Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, discusses how their massive investment in technology has made them dramatically more efficient and customer-centric. Their focus on digital banking through their app has, in particular, appealed to Millenials. Moynihan says that if Bank of America were a “Millenial-Only” bank, it would still be one of the largest banks in the country. Moynihan was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC: 

    Our Efficiency Is Driven By Technology

    It’s absolutely a fair statement (that we are actually a technology company that is really fabulous at banking). At the end today, we have really talent teammates, the computers that they operate and the technology that they operate, and then frankly buildings to keep it all dry so it works. That’s what we have. Those teammates use those computers to either build them so clients can work themselves or work with them to help serve clients. We have 37 million digital customers, 28 million mobile customers, the numbers just roll in. 

    By the way, what we highlight in our earnings report on the institutional side, you’re seeing in the treasury services, it’s all been automated, wires and stuff, but now the interface with the customers is much more automated. That efficiency is driven by the technology enablement of the consumer and wealth management companies and it’s always more efficient to serve it that way. Yet you have to have great people when the face-to-face meeting comes up when the need is there. 

    So that 57 percent efficiency ratio, we ran about $13.3 billion in expenses, that is seven of the last eight quarters we ran between 13.1 and 13.3, one was a little higher. In that time we’ve invested in thousands of relationship management people, $3 billion a year in technology, probably 60-70 brand-new branches and retooled probably a thousand branches. All of that investment going in at the same time expenses were flat. That’s enabled by technology. 

    If Bank of America Were a “Millenial-Only” Bank, It Would Still Be Huge

    That’s the key (making a banking app design that does appeal to everybody). It works for general consumers, it works for wealthy consumers that work for small companies, it works for big companies. With that many digital customer’s everybody’s using it. Now does it cohort on age a little bit younger? What I said in yesterday earnings about Millennials was more about a debate about whether banks like us are appealing to Millennials? 

    We open accounts at three times the population rate in our new sales. We have about twice the population rate of Millennials in our customer base today. They have $60-70 billion in checking deposit, just the Millennials. Then with Gen Z, add another chunk on top of it. It’s already a huge customer base. Then the 16 million customers who are digital-only Millennials have $200 billion of investments, deposits, and loans with us. It’s already a big business. As a Millennial only bank, it would be one of the biggest banks in the country, probably the fifth or sixth largest bank.

    Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan: Our Efficiency Is Driven By Technology
  • The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World

    The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World

    “What Fungible is set to do is to revolutionize the economics, the reliability, and the performance, of data centers at all scales and in all geographies,” says Fungible CEO Pradeep Sindhu. “The reason that it is time to do this is because of some of the really important trends that have been happening over the last 15 to 20 years. There is, of course, the flattening of Moore’s Law. There is the hyper-connectivity that the internet has brought. Then there’s big data. The confluence of these three things is bringing us to a data-centric world.”

    Pradeep Sindhu, CEO of Fungible, discusses how technology trends are driving us towards a data-centric world in an interview on CNBC:

    The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World

    What Fungible is set to do is to revolutionize the economics, the reliability, and the performance, of data centers at all scales and in all geographies. The reason that it is time to do this is because of some of the really important trends that have been happening over the last 15 to 20 years. There is, of course, the flattening of Moore’s Law. There is the hyper-connectivity that the internet has brought. Then there’s big data. 

    The confluence of these three things is bringing us to a data-centric world. It is time now to invent a new kind of microprocessor and this is exactly what we are doing. We’re inventing something called the DPU to improve the economics and reliability and performance of data centers. That’s what Fungible is doing.

    In Five Years 90 Percent of All Servers Will Have DPUs Inside

    Many, if not most, new applications are data-centric in that the amount of data that they ingest and they process is very large. As a result of this change in application, there’s a new workload that we call data-centric. In fact, the change that we see happening in data centers will happen in the redefinition of what we call a server. In five years we expect 90 plus percent of all servers to have DPU’s inside. 

    It will reflect in the way in which the networks are put together inside datacenter buildings. They’ll be much flatter, much faster, much lower latency, and with much more predictable latency. The DPU will enable that. Finally, the global architecture of the way data centers are built in the future will include Edge Datacenters in addition to these massively scalable data centers. The DPU is said to play a very important role in all three areas.

    It’s not a zero-sum game because of the emergence of this new kind of workload, which has been building now for 30 years. There’s been some 600 X change increase in the ratio of I/O to compute. This demands the invention of a new kind of microprocessor. We don’t have any direct head-to-head competition. We will work in a manner which is completely complementary to the existing two kinds of microprocessors which is Intel x86 and GPUs built by Nvidia. The DPU will be the third kind of microprocessor inside data centers.

    The Confluence of These 3 Things is Bringing Us To a Data-Centric World, Says Fungible CEO Pradeep Sindhu
  • Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything

    Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything

    “Imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything,” says the Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies Joe Batista. “That’s nirvana. That’s not reality, because I have tool fatigue. I need to get to that simplicity. That’s public enemy number one for us. Now, today, with the influx of cash, the level of innovation cycle time and how the industry’s become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity has increased exponentially. And the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. It hasn’t gotten easier, it’s gotten more difficult.”

    Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies, discusses the challenges companies face with the exponential pace of changes in technology and innovation in an interview with theCube at WTGtransform 2019:

    Helping IT Re-Image the Business

    Literally, it (Joe’s ‘Creatologist’ job) sits at the nexus of business and technology. My job, simply, is to help IT re-image the business because now every company’s a technology company. So what does that look like? I’m involved in all sorts of really cool problems, opportunities, that customers are facing by re-imaging IT.

    I’ve been around for a long time, and, in the old days, we had swim lanes. You thought about certain vendors, they were in swim lanes. Now, today, with the influx of cash, the level of innovation cycle time and how the industry’s become more fragmented with lots of products, the complexity has increased exponentially. And the velocity around that complexity is even more accelerated. It hasn’t gotten easier, it’s gotten more difficult.

    You Have To Rethink the Logic

    There’s a couple of thoughts (regarding keeping up with the competition as things constantly change). You have got to look at these vectors that impact a trajectory of the thinking. I love the Peter Drucker quote: If you’re using yesterday’s logic, you’re probably going to get in trouble. You have to rethink the logic, and the example I give was the high jumper and how we did high jumping before and after 1968. As in the Fosbury Flop. So the question becomes what are those vectors?

    At Dell Technologies, we have a huge portfolio of technology. But how do you think about the parameter about how those things change over a depreciation cycle? During a conference talk I got a lot of post questions afterward and a lot of engagement regarding this, so it seemed to resonate with the field. The thing that they liked the most was the business conversation of IT. They’re like, we don’t do that enough.

    Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything

    Imagine if IT had one tool to fix anything. That’s nirvana. That’s not reality, because I have tool fatigue. I need to get to that simplicity. It’s Glass’s Law. Every 25% increase in function is 100% increase in complexity. That’s public enemy number one for us.

    I was absolutely amazed when I did my due diligence (before joining Dell) about all the innovation that happens in this company. Phenomenal. Not only about the hardware but the software. I think, actually, Jeff (Clarke) said it best. I think we have more software engineers now than we have hardware engineers. So the pivots there, we’re pivoting our talent to the software. But it’s the innovation that’s in this company. I think customers are amazed at that innovation.

    The supercharger on it is, how does the innovation apply to the business mechanics of the company, and what value do you extract from that? And that’s where the whole language and conversation usually happens with us. I will tell you, though, I’m really excited that Dell Technologies is doubling down on business outcomes. They’re really trying to change the culture in helping customers understand what the technology means.


    Imagine If IT Had One Tool To Fix Anything – Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Dell Technologies
  • There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO

    “There really hasn’t been a foundational cloud company born from the ground up in the cloud,” says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz. “There’s been no Salesforce of security. We think we’ve taken the right approach and created the right architecture to be that fourth pillar of cloud computing. That’s one of the areas that I think gets our customers most excited. It’s made their lives a lot easier. As I like to say, it just works for them and that’s what customers are looking for.”

    George Kurtz, Co-Founder and CEO of CrowdStrike, discusses their IPO (today) and CrowdStrike’s unique position as the first cloud platform for security in an interview on CNBC:

    We Built The First Cloud Platform For Security

    We’ll let the market dictate the (stock) pricing. What we’re focused on is really building long-term value for shareholders and obviously making sure that our customers are protected. That’s the way we built the business, focusing on preventing breaches for our customers. What is fundamentally different is that we really built the first cloud platform for security.

    When you think about Workday and ServiceNow and Salesforce, there really hasn’t been a foundational cloud platform for security. What is fundamentally different is that we really built the first cloud platform for security. That was one of our goals when Demetri Alperovitch and I started the company in 2011. This cloud platform has allowed us to stop breaches and to scale different modules that really hit a specific customer need. It’s been well received by our customers.

    A Big Part Of Our Platform Is Collecting Data At Scale

    CrowdStrike really runs on your endpoint or computer or your server or workload in the cloud. What we found with traditional antivirus, as an example, we do way more than that, is that signature-based technologies were just not capable of stopping breaches. So a big part of our platform is actually collecting data at scale. We collect a trillion events per week. We use that data to train our machine learning algorithms and we can identify attacks and breaches that have never been seen before at the speed of the network.

    This crowdsourcing aspect, which is the crowd in CrowdStrike, really has enabled us to identify these attacks that are causing the most damage to large and small organizations around the globe. They just haven’t been able to do that with traditional, I call fossilized, vendors that are in the market. This architecture has really changed the game for us.

    Obviously, security is an evolving area. Adversaries continue to change their tactics. The good part about AI is that you can evolve it to identify these sorts of threats no matter if it’s stealing intellectual property or credit card information or breaking in and destroying data on someone’s computer. What’s important to realize is that at cloud-scale, and the way we operate, we have the ability to take all this data, synthesize it, and provide the best protection and prevention methodologies for our customers.

    AI Is Great But It Is Not a Panacea

    It’s really all about the data. You hear a lot about AI and AI is great but it has to be used in the right ways. It’s not a panacea. So it’s easy to come up with an algorithm but it’s really hard to collect this data at scale and be able to train these AI algorithms. This is really one of the things that we spent a lot of time on, building a very scalable architecture to get this data in (into our Threat Graph), which is one of the most advanced security databases around.

    It really allows us to get better efficacy and lower false positive rates in detecting these breaches. In my view, it’s all about the data. We will continue to get more and more data. It’s that network effect. Our threat graph gets smarter the more data we actually consume.

    CrowdStrike Threat Graph

    We See The Tip of The Breach Being The Endpoint

    When we look at the threats, whether it’s a nation-state or whether it’s an e-crime group obviously, the threats are evolving and they’re rapid. There are hundreds of thousands of new pieces of malware that come out every day. It’s incumbent on companies to be able to protect themselves. It’s just been an area that’s been underserved because most of the existing technologies have focused on stopping malware instead of stopping breaches, which is again part of our core mission.

    If you look in the past, there’s been a lot of point product companies that have come out and try to solve a specific problem. But if you just step back, the problem that most companies are trying to solve is not being breached. Whether that’s network technology or endpoint technology, at the end of the day we see the tip of the breach being the endpoint. That’s where the data resides, the servers, the endpoints, the desktops, and that’s what we’re protecting.

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security

    From that standpoint, if you look back in history there really hasn’t been a foundational cloud company born from the ground up in the cloud. There’s been no Salesforce of security. We think we’ve taken the right approach and created the right architecture to be that fourth pillar of cloud computing. That’s one of the areas that I think gets our customers most excited. It’s the ability to rapidly install our technology, just have it work, and be able to scale with us and use different modules with that single agent architecture. It’s made their lives a lot easier. As I like to say, it just works for them and that’s what customers are looking for.

    There’s Been No Salesforce of Security, Says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz
  • We Are Iterating At a Faster Clip, Says Amazon Web Services CEO

    We Are Iterating At a Faster Clip, Says Amazon Web Services CEO

    “We have a pretty significant market segment leadership position in this infrastructure cloud computing space,” says AWS CEO Andy Jassy. “There are a few reasons for it. The first is we just have much more functionality by a large amount than anybody else. We are also iterating at a faster clip. When you actually look at the details that gap in functionality is widening.”

    Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services, discusses how AWS began as the leader in the infrastructure cloud computing space and how that gap in functionality is widening in an interview with Kara Swisher at the 2019 Code Conference:

    In My Wildest Dreams, I Never Imagined a 6-Year Head Start

    We were trying just to get to launch (2006) without our friends across the lake (Microsoft) knowing about it. At that time Amazon was not known as a technology provider to companies. We felt it was really important for us to be first to market to have a chance to be successful. I was hoping we could just get to launch without anybody else knowing and beating us to the market. In my wildest dreams, of the many surprises we had, I never imagined we would have a six-year head start. I don’t know exactly why others didn’t follow. I think for some of the older guard technology companies our model was very disruptive to their existing businesses. It’s really hard to cannibalize yourself.

    I think they kind of wished it away (Oracle, IBM, etc.). It’s hard when you have an existing business that’s working it’s hard to cannibalize it with a product with a much lower margin. I think that some of the other players probably were distracted by some of the other things they were working on. Then their initial attempt at the business turned out to be the wrong abstraction. It turned out to be a higher abstraction when builders really wanted the individual building blocks to construct and stitch together however they saw fit.

    We Are Iterating At a Faster Clip

    We have a pretty significant market segment leadership position in this infrastructure cloud computing space. There are a few reasons for it. The first is we just have much more functionality by a large amount than anybody else. We are also iterating at a faster clip. When you actually look at the details that gap in functionality is widening. That turns out to really matter if you’re an enterprise or a government who is going to move all their applications to the cloud. Or if you want to be able to unleash your builders to build anything they can imagine.

    The second thing is we just have a much larger ecosystem of partners around our platform. It’s not just the thousands of systems integrators who build practices on AWS. Most ISVs and SAAS providers will adapt their software to work on one technology infrastructure platform, few will do two and hardly any will do three. They all start on AWS just because of our leadership position. You get to move to the cloud with a lot more of the software that you want to use.

    The third thing that is pretty different is that we’re just at a different operating maturity than these other providers having been at six years longer. It turns out it’s really different running large scale infrastructure for yourself and your company where you get to tell everybody the way it’s going to be it is for running it for millions of external customers with every imaginal use case all over the world where they get to use you without any warning. It just forces a different kind of operating discipline and rigor. You can see that borne out in the operational performance.

    Microsoft Is the Clear Number Two Player Right Now

    We are pretty early in this space right now. It the infrastructure technology space I don’t think there are going to be 25 winners because scale really matters. But there’s not going to be just one. The market segments that we address in infrastructure software, hardware, and data center services globally is trillions of dollars ultimately. There are going to be several successful players. I do believe that Microsoft will have a business there. They are building the business and they are the clear number two player at this point. I think there will be other players who are successful as well. As for Google, I think they are working at it.

    In all of our businesses, there are startups that none of us know about today that have the ability to disrupt. If you think the technology changes in the last ten years have been disruptive, and I think they have been unbelievably dynamic, I think the next ten years is going to be faster than the last ten. There are all kinds of new technology that will evolve that will give people a chance to build businesses and pursue various segments. I don’t know exactly who they will be in our space, but I’m confident there will be.

    We Are Iterating At a Faster Clip, Says Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy
  • Salesforce Now Has 1.4 Million Learners On Trailhead

    Salesforce Now Has 1.4 Million Learners On Trailhead

    “If you haven’t been on Trailhead.com this is an amazing place to go,” says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “You can learn all the technical skills to be successful in this Salesforce ecosystem. Our customers are just on there at an incredibly high rate. We have more than 1.4 million users on Trailhead now and 25 percent said that they changed jobs in the last year because of the skills that they got on Trailhead.com.”

    Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, discusses the signing of the White House Job Training Pledge and announced that they now have over a million users on Trailhead.com in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    More Than a Million Users On Trailhead.com

    That (White House Job Training Pledge) is probably the most exciting thing that I have seen happening in the Salesforce ecosystem. We have this broad ecosystem that surrounds our company. While we’re talking about these incredible (quarterly) results here today, the one thing that makes me even more excited is the work we’re doing with people retraining them. Reskilling them is kind of the technical word.

    We’re able to get people onto this service. We call it Trailhead. If you haven’t been on Trailhead.com this is an amazing place to go. You can learn all the technical skills to be successful in this Salesforce ecosystem. Our customers are just on there at an incredibly high rate. We have more than 1.4 million users on Trailhead now and 25 percent said that they changed jobs in the last year because of the skills that they got on Trailhead.com.

    White House Job Training Pleadge – Ivanka Trump at Toyota Plant in Georgetown, KY.

    We Signed the White House Pledge For Jobs To Reskill America

    We even had an amazing event in Indianapolis just a couple weeks ago with Ivanka Trump. We signed that White House pledge for jobs because we’re reskilling America. That’s our job. We want to make sure everybody can participate in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. That’s really exciting to me. To see the success on the faces of the broad range of people who’ve had this capability that is just setting us up for a tremendous future.

    Anybody who participated in jobs that don’t exist anymore, they can get onto Trailhead.com and they can reskill. This is proven, it’s easy, and it’s free. That’s why we’ve had such great support, not just from the White House but from thousands of our customers who are also now deploying this inside their own companies. We have a product called myTrailhead.com so you as a Salesforce customer can set up your own internal reskilling system with your products. That’s a build your own ecosystem. We want everyone to be as successful as we are.

    Mark Benioff added these comments during the recent earnings call:

    Learners Changing Their Careers and Lives on Trailhead

    Our ecosystem just developed in a huge economy around Salesforce, one that is going to create more than 3 million jobs and more than $850 billion in GDP by 2022, and that is why we’re so excited about Trailhead, which is our online learning platform and our online reskilling platform that empowers everyone.

    Now we have more than 1.4 million learners changing their careers and their lives on Trailhead, and I’m sure so many of you have met these inspiring people and their incredible stories of how they transformed themselves using Trailhead. And in the quarter, our new myTrailhead product became generally available and now any of our customers can actually create their own branded service just like what we have done and reskill all their employees, customers and partners too.

    myTrailhead Is a Force Multiplier

    So it will be a huge driver of workforce development, which is why we are so excited that two weeks ago, we were with Ivanka Trump at our First-Over Trailblazer Day in Indianapolis, in our headquarters in Indiana, where we signed the White House Pledge to America’s Workers and we plan to give more than 1 million Americans the skills they need and earning Salesforce credentials and badges and do everything necessary to make them successful and to get top jobs in our ecosystem over the next 5 years.

    myTrailhead is an excellent example and an excellent solution, not just how they can scale their people up on this modern technology, but also to prepare them for this modern world. And we see this again everywhere in the world. And we have special programs with companies all over the world to talk about how they reskill the workforce. I mentioned the meeting I had with the CEO of Telstra and his executive team and how concerned they were about the modern reports and what they wanted to do with our reskilling their workforce.

    We have the same conversations with CEOs all over the world. So myTrailhead is a force multiplier. It is so important on so many levels when you think about modern skills and we’re very, very excited about that. Bret, do you want to comment more from a product perspective?

    Salesforce Now Has 1.4 Million Learners On Trailhead.com says Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
  • Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace Cloud

    Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace Cloud

    “One of the things powering our growth too is that more and more technology leaders and people in the security industry and customers and users are understanding the importance of identity,” says Okta CEO Todd McKinnon. “They’re going from a world where they were thinking about cloud computing, firewalls, and VPNs, and now they’re thinking about identity as being the central platform to really embrace the cloud, create a great digital experience for customers, and also keep it all secure.”

    Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, discusses how identity has become the central platform for companies to embrace the cloud in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    We Have 6,550 Happy Customers Across the Entire Globe

    We have 6,550 happy customers across the entire globe. We come to work every day making sure that we make them secure, make them successful, and help them adopt cloud and transform their businesses. One example is Major League Baseball. We do a couple of very important things for MLB. The first is that we help their employees log into the applications they need in order to be productive at work. They can log in securely and with a very positive simple user experience.

    The second thing, which is more recent, is we are the login system and the security layer for MLB.com. If you’re logging in and streaming those baseball games you’re logging in through Okta to get to MLB.com. It’s really helpful for them because that they can take their awesome developer and engineering talent and focus it on building core parts of that application and that experience versus the security parts that we can do better.

    To Deliver Trusted Technology You Have To Start With Identity

    Zoom (a customer of Okta) is a great company with another great product experience. They’ve revolutionized a market a lot of people thought was really entrenched with a lot of competitors. They came out with a better product and its results are kind of speaking for themselves. What we’re seeing in our business and it’s really driving these results you’re seeing is that every organization from sports league like MLB.com to a university like Seton Hall to the largest enterprises in the world, financial institutions and governments, they all have to connect more closely and more securely with the people in their ecosystem.

    Whether that’s students or alumni or faculty or employees or customers, what’s at the center of all that interaction is technology. If you want to talk about trusted technology and delivering that to people you have to start with identity. That’s what we’re doing for all these organizations around the world and that’s what’s powering our results.

    Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace the Cloud

    It’s a really important role we’re playing. If you think about it, especially in the case of Zscaler, companies are moving away from the old world, which was they had a firewall around their network and everything inside was secure and everything outside was blocked. Now they’re moving to this world called Zero Trust which means they basically don’t trust anything. They want to verify everything. When you have to verify everything you have to have this passport, you have to have this digital identity, and that’s we’re providing. For a lot of companies, we’re turning a world that’s pretty daunting in terms of how you give this flexibility or this openness and making it secure and very simple to use.

    One of the things powering our growth too is that more and more technology leaders and people in the security industry and customers and users are understanding the importance of identity. They’re going from a world where they were thinking about cloud computing, firewalls, and VPNs, and now they’re thinking about identity as being the central platform to really embrace the cloud, create a great digital experience for customers, and also keep it all secure. It’s that mindset and that consciousness in the market of the importance of identity as a platform that is really leading people to come to Okta and driving our results.

    Our businesses are global of course. We don’t have as much exposure to China as other companies have but in an indirect way, we’re helping companies of every organization across the entire world be successful with their businesses as well. We do think about powering business globally. So it’s in everyone’s interest I think to have as much free trade and as much economic commerce as possible. Indirectly, we do benefit from that, so we have a close eye on that as well.

    Identity Is the Central Platform For Companies To Embrace Cloud, says Okta CEO Todd McKinnon
  • We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security, Says Zscaler CEO

    We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security, Says Zscaler CEO

    “I looked at the world changing and saw that the way we work, how we work, and where we work was changing,” says Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry. “The security that was being offered by many vendors was meant for protecting offices. I said let’s build security in the cloud as a cloud security platform similar to what Salesforce did to take CRM to the cloud and what Workday did take HCM to the cloud. We are doing this kind of thing to disrupt old-school legacy security.”

    Jay Chaudhry, founder and CEO of Zscaler, discusses how Zscaler is disrupting old-school legacy security in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security

    I built this company starting in 2008 with a simple mission, let’s make internet and cloud a safe place to do business. I looked at the world changing and saw that the way we work, how we work, and where we work was changing. We could work anywhere on any device. The security that was being offered by many vendors was meant for protecting offices. I said let’s build security in the cloud as a cloud security platform similar to what Salesforce did to take CRM to the cloud and what Workday did take HCM to the cloud. We are doing this kind of thing to disrupt old-school legacy security.

    The cloud is being adopted at a fairly good pace. It has taken a while but Office 365 adoption has changed a lot of things. All traffic of email is moving to the cloud. Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow are all on the cloud. As applications move to the cloud that drives the adoption of security to the cloud. We are seeing significant momentum where customers with CIOs are asking for security to be done right.

    100 Million Security Threats Blocked by Zscaler Per Day

    In fact, I was talking to a CIO who said, “I asked this question to my people. If something can be done in the cloud you can’t do it in the data center. If security needs to be done in the cloud, why are we buying these security hardware boxes?” I see the world rapidly changing. In the past couple of weeks, you’ve seen some vendors announcing earnings and acknowledging that security is moving to the cloud faster than they thought.

    A lot of the (100 million threats blocked by Zscaler per day) are (state-sponsored). The scariest ones we see are phishing attacks. Every day we see tens of thousands of phishing attacks. These are highly targeted. People are tricked to click into these things. They click on something and their credentials get stolen and then the botnet attacks out there. To really protect against all these things you need to sit in line to inspect traffic going in and out.

    Blocking the Bad and Protecting the Good

    Zscaler acts as a check post, almost like an International Airport. We’re inspecting everything that goes in and out of your device to make sure that we’re blocking the bad and that we are protecting the good to help people do good business. That’s why the biggest of the big companies like GE and Siemens and United Airlines all depend upon Zscaler to protect their enterprise.

    Okta is a wonderful company that’s in the identity business. Their job is to make sure that employees and the departments are properly listed for a given company. It’s like a phone book or a directory. They’re the source of information. Think of us as the airport. When I travel and leave the airport they scan my passport. When they scan the passport a call goes to the database of passports asking is Jay Chaudhry the right person? Can he travel? That’s what Okta does. Zscaler is in line to enforce policy.

    We Are Disrupting Old-School Legacy Security, Says Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry
  • VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation, Says CEO

    VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation, Says CEO

    “We believe that our conversations now have gone from targeted to holistic to be this platform for their digital transformation,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. “That core idea of how do they get to that digital future, that’s not an IT discussion anymore, that’s a business strategy conversation. That’s why we are seeing this real uplift in the position in the conversation that we are having with customers globally.”

    Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, discusses how VMware has become a complete digital transformation platform for companies in an interview on CNBC:

    VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation

    We believe that our conversations now as we’ve expanded from selling compute Hypervisor to a complete cloud infrastructure, complete end-user computing, a transformation of their network and security offerings, our conversations have gone from targeted to holistic to be this platform for their digital transformation. That core idea of how do they get to that digital future, that’s not an IT discussion anymore, that’s a business strategy conversation.

    That’s why we are seeing this real uplift in the position in the conversation that we are having with customers globally. As we’ve positioned in the past, as people move to the full VMware offering that is a multiplier. A company or an institution that is using us as a Hypervisor, now the full cloud stack of network, compute, management, and automation, that is a business expansion opportunity for us.

    VMware Seeking Ability To Be a Government Cloud Provider

    As I said on the (earnings) call we are now in the FedRAMP High process. We are seeking that ability to be a cloud provider for the government and many of the government. Many of the government in defense and intelligence are big VMware footprints. We see this as a great opportunity. We are in process to get approval. As the JEDI contract gets resolved we hope to be able to be positioned with Amazon and Azure, given our relationships with both.

    Even as our preferred relationship with Amazon is very strong we do see this ability for us to participate for government business being an essential element of our multi-cloud strategy where Amazon, Azure, IBM, and our other cloud partners all give us a great opportunity to participate for government contracts.

    VMware Is Now a Platform For Digital Transformation, Says CEO Pat Gelsinger
  • IBM Says Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform Will Dramatically Reduce Costs

    IBM Says Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform Will Dramatically Reduce Costs

    Major ocean container carriers CMA CGM and MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC) are joining TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled digital shipping platform, jointly developed by A.P. Moller – Maersk and IBM. With the addition of these carriers on the TradeLens platform, nearly half of the world’s ocean container cargo will be using blockchain technology to dramatically improve costs and efficiencies.

    Bridget van Kralingen, Senior Vice President of IBM Global Industries, Clients, Platforms & Blockchain at IBM, discusses the addition of major ocean carriers to the TradeLens blockchain-enabled digital shipping platform in an interview on Bloomberg:

    Blockchain Technology Could Reduce Shipping Industry Costs By 20%

    Essentially we announced yesterday that with the addition of MSC and CMA on to the TradeLens blockchain more than 50 percent of the volume of the containers of the world’s shipping industry will be on a blockchain that we’ve developed in collaboration with Maersk. What this means is full transparency and a massive reduction of paper exchange. An average shipment takes about 200 document exchanges between the multiple parties; the freight forwarders, the shippers, the carriers, customs, and ports.

    The World Economic Forum estimates that’s about 20 percent wastage from inefficiencies in the supply chain. The technology of blockchain allows all these multiple parties to immutably store the records and advance the records as the shipments move. This means less wait times. It means carriers and shippers know where the goods are. It basically means things can be cleared a lot faster, all leading to bigger inclusion in the shipping industry.

    Starting To See Blockchain Technology For Enterprise Really Scale

    The whole ecosystem will benefit so much in terms of the efficiencies. If you think about it, rather than having to interface 200 document times, it occurs once by putting your data on the blockchain. This is a situation when the ROI for every single industry participant is very strong.

    The second thing, which is really important and why we’re starting to see the blockchain technology for enterprise really scale in terms of what IBM has been building for our clients across numerous industries, is that there’s a level of security in here and there’s a level of speed and efficiency. It’s easy to actually set up these networks. The difference is that these solve problems that no one company could solve on their own.

    Blockchain Technology Reducing Costs

    The way that the system works is that all the participants pay a very small amount to belong to the blockchain. It is a flat rate but does change according to volume. It is a very de minimis amount and the real way that the blockchain works is by many many participants belonging to the network and by the fact that those participants have a reduced cost.

    Another example of this is we have a blockchain in the consumer and retail industry called Food Trust which tracks provenance and sustainability of food built in conjunction with the industry. It allows food to be tracked and recalled in two seconds versus six days. That has got such a strong economic and consumer value. The other big payback is that for many of our clients they’re looking at the idea to have trackable, sustainable, consumer presentations. So you can put diamonds on a blockchain and say they aren’t conflict diamonds. This is very powerful for consumer provenance and sustainability.

    Blockchain-Powered Shipping Industry Platform To Dramatically Reduce Costs
  • Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica Exec

    “Without data, there’s no great AI, says Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica. “Now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.”

    Amit Walia, President, Products & Marketing at Informatica, discusses how data is the lifeblood of the enterprise in an interview on theCUBE at Informatica World 2019:

    Without Data There is No Great AI

    The language that AI needs or speaks is data. Without data, there’s no great AI. This is something that we’ve known all this while, but now that AI is really becoming pervasive and at scale, you really need to give it relevant good contextual data. We see that happening a lot in the world of enterprise. Finally, enterprise is arriving at the point where they want to use AI for B2B use cases, not just consumer use cases that we are used to. AI is a part of everything that we do in data.

    It has really helped to improve productivity and automate mundane tasks. There’s a massive skills gap and I think you look around the economy is fully saturated with jobs. There is still so much work to be done with more data and different data. AI is helping make some of those mundane activities become a lot easier and autonomous.

    Data is Becoming a Platform of Its Own

    Our data scientists have gone from heroes to superheroes. Think about it. What we are seeing in this world is that data is becoming a platform of its own. It is getting decoupled from the databases, from the applications, and from the infrastructure. To truly be able to leverage AI and build applications on top you cannot let it be siloed and be held hostage to its individual infrastructure components. We’ve seen that fundamental change happening where data as a platform is coming along.

    In that context, the catalog becomes a very pivotal start because you want to get a fuller view of everything. You’re not going to be able to move all of your data to one place. It’s impossible. But understanding that metadata is where enterprises are going and then from there you can have a customer experience journey with MDM. You can also have an analytics journey in the cloud with an AWS or an Azure. You can have complete governance and security and privacy journey while understanding anomalous activity.

    Metadata Is the New OS

    Data is everywhere. It’s like the blood flowing through your body. You’re not going to get all the data in one place to do any kind of analytics. You’re going to let it be there. We say that metadata is the new OS. Bring the metadata, which is data about the data in one place, and from there let AI run on it. What we think about AI is this; LinkedIn is a beautiful place where they leverage the machine learning algorithm to create a social graph about you and me. If I’m connected to John I know now that I can be connected with you. The same thing can happen to the data layer.

    When I’m doing analytics and I’m basically searching for some report, through that same machine learning algorithm at the catalog level now we can tell you that this is another table or another report or another user and so on. We can give you help back ratings within that environment for you to do what I call analytics on your fingertips at enterprise scale. That’s an extremely powerful use case of taking analytics, which is the most commonly done activity in an enterprise and make it accurate at enterprise scale.

    Without Data, There is No Great AI, Says Informatica’s Amit Walia
  • Oracle CIO: Every Enterprise Has the Security it Deserves

    Oracle CIO: Every Enterprise Has the Security it Deserves

    “Every Enterprise has the security it deserves,” says Oracle Chief Information Officer Mark Sunday. “It begins at the very top. It truly begins with the board, CEO, and the Executive Committee to set the culture and to ensure that the people, process, technology, and the governance processes are in place to ensure the security of customers, companies, and employees information.”

    Mark Sunday, CIO of Oracle, discussed the increasing need for enterprises to take a holistic, comprehensive, and automated approach towards information security in an interview with Michael Krigsman of CXOTALK:

    Security is Increasingly a Big Part of the Discussion

    It’s really been interesting to see the dramatic change in the awareness around security. Quite frankly, the threats have gotten much greater. Security is increasingly a big part of the discussion. If I look at the one area that my organization has increased year on year on year, it’s what we’re investing in security. We’re the norm in that. We’re not the exception. Then also the increased sophistication of the threats, the increased sophistication of the tooling, and so forth required, is putting more and more focus on this. It really becomes job one.

    I think that boards have now become aware and that they are accountable to assure that the people, the processes, the technology, that all the steps that one needs to do in order to ensure the integrity, confidentially, privacy, and security, of not only a customer’s data, the company’s data, but in fact the employees data as well.

    Security is Not Just the Role of the CIO

    Security is getting its place at the table, whether it’s within the IT organizations, at the corporate level, or at the board level. Security has always been something that’s been out there, something that we’ve had to take into account, but more recently there have certainly been more high profile incidents that have highlighted just what the impact of security can have. But also it’s been highlighted that you need to have the focus that security is not just the role of the CIO, not just the role of the CISO, but it’s everyone’s responsibility.

    It begins with making people aware of what they need to do, what the threats and the vulnerabilities are, and what their role is in defending against that. Security needs to be built into every line of code we write, every configuration we enable, every computer that we manage the configuration asset the patching level on and the updates on. It affects essentially most roles within the organization.

    Every Enterprise Has the Security it Deserves

    Just given the scale, size, complexity, and the opportunity for human error, you really need to take a holistic, comprehensive, and automated approach towards how you deal with configuration management, change management, and vulnerability management. All of these are key aspects. It’s very difficult if it’s done you know manually. You have to look at a comprehensive program that allows you to simplify, standardize, centralize, and automate all the aspects of how you deal with those things that you know could expose your company to security and privacy concerns.

    Every Enterprise has the security it deserves. It begins at the very top. It truly begins with the board, CEO, the Executive Committee, to set the culture and to ensure that the people, process, technology, and the governance processes are in place to ensure the security of customers, companies, and employees information.

    Oracle CIO Mark Sunday: Every Enterprise Has the Security it Deserves

    Related Articles:

    Huge Volume of IoT Data Managed via AI Creates Real Value, Says Oracle VP

    Oracle CEO: Applications Market Changes Significantly As It Moves to Cloud

    Oracle CEO: Three Big Things in the Gen 2 Cloud… Security, Security, Security

  • Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO

    “The reality is that attackers are targeting people,” says Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele. “They’ve done it traditionally on email but it’s expanding as more and more applications or workloads are running in the cloud. That’s where people are and that’s where they can be targeted. The point when people migrate to the cloud is a very important point where companies reconsider their security strategy.”

    Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint, discusses how the migration of companies to the cloud is significantly impacting security in an interview on CNBC:

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud

    The reality is that attackers are targeting people. They’ve done it traditionally on email but it’s expanding as more and more applications or workloads are running in the cloud. That’s where people are and that’s where they can be targeted. So we’re excited about our announcement of an acquisition last week called Meta Networks. It gives us the ability to help companies control the access of their employees and it fits naturally with this broader cloud strategy that we’ve been rolling out.

    The point when people migrate to the cloud is a very important point where companies reconsider their security strategy. Traditionally it was the perimeter that controlled everything. Today there really isn’t a perimeter as more and more of these apps and workloads end up in the cloud. One of the things that we liked about this new acquisition of Meta Networks is that one compromised person can’t bring the whole network down. You can really control the access for every single person. That’s a natural complement of how we think about securing the cloud.

    Key Driver For Our Business is Broad Migration To the Cloud

    One of the key drivers for our business has been this broad migration to the cloud and specifically to Office 365. We’ve been benefiting as organizations reconsidered their on-premise strategy and think about the cloud. Office 365 is an important way for them to go and they need additional security controls than what Microsoft’s providing today and we’re helping those customers be successful in a Microsoft environment. It’s pretty clear that there’s a lot going on globally. The geopolitical environment is very much at unrest and when those times happen you see a lot more global threat activity. As a result, that bodes well for our business over time, unfortunately.

    Broadly one of the philosophies we’ve had as a company is to have a strong ecosystem to make it easier for customers to digest all that security infrastructure. It’s everybody from an Okta, which we announced a relationship in the Fall, to relationships that we’ve had for a long time like Palo Alto Networks. We have basically done the technical integration between our products to make it out-of-the-box easy for our customers. We have many customers running on the broader G Suite and we support that just like we support Office 365.

    Threat Actors Taking Over Your Email Has Phenomenal Implications

    The one big theme and we’ve been seeing it for a while now, it’s been almost a year, but it’s really important, is threat actors taking over people’s email accounts. Think about someone owning your email account being able to send email as you. That has phenomenal implications. So we’re helping companies today identify that, remediate those kinds of events, and be safer as they move to Office 365 or Google for that matter.

    The primary threat actor that we’re seeing there is a threat actor group out of West Africa. But we do see it broadly used and employed by a range of threat actors. Two-factor authentication is a good start (to prevent this threat). Then we can obviously help detect and remediate.

    Attackers Targeting People as Workloads Move to the Cloud, Says Proofpoint CEO Gary Steele
  • HPE CEO: Reason For Acquiring Cray – The Data Around Us is Exploding

    HPE CEO: Reason For Acquiring Cray – The Data Around Us is Exploding

    Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cray have announced that the companies have entered into a definitive agreement under which HPE will acquire Cray for $35.00 per share in cash, in a transaction valued at approximately $1.3 billion, net of cash. “The main reason why we decided to pursue this acquisition is that the data around us is exploding,” Says HPE CEO Antonio Neri. “That data has value and the need to process that data faster continues to grow.”

    Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, discusses the company’s intent to acquire  global supercomputer leader Cray, in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    Reason For Acquiring Cray – Data Around Us is Exploding

    I’m super excited about the announcement today. The main reason why we decided to pursue this acquisition is that the data around us is exploding. That data has value and the need to process that data faster continues to grow. The need for high-performance computing is one element of processing that data faster. The combination of great technologies with Hewlett Packard Enterprise portfolio, which include both HPE Apollo and SGI, give us a unique set of capabilities to get us to the right business outcome from the data. What we are talking about is (improved outcomes) for machine learning, AI, as well as big data and intensive workloads. Cray brings these capabilities.

    Cray has two-thirds of its business coming from the government side and one-third from the commercial side. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the opposite with two-thirds from the commercial side and one-third from the government side. Obviously, the government has already requested for Cray to build Exascale computing. That’s on the basis of the foundation technologies that Cray has developed for some time which is what we call the interconnect fabric. For us, that level of innovation is important to scale our portfolio and continue to enter new markets like oil and gas, manufacturing, as well as academia.

    Thirteen Acquisitions Under CEO – All Very Successful

    I have done now thirteen acquisitions with this one. We have had an incredible discipline based on return on invested capital where we have acquired (important) intellectual property as well as bringing talent to the organization. Each of them has been very successful including Aruba Networks as well as what I call the SGI acquisition, Nimble Storage, and so forth. They have all been very successful.

    When you think about the type of business it has obviously been a little bit lumpy on the Cray side but that’s because it takes time to build the systems with CAPEX upfront and then acceptance for the backend to recognize revenue. We believe the combinational of Cray added to our scale which is significantly larger will smooth the transition from the revenue profit perspective. It will also limit the CAPEX investment because both companies have similar capabilities and now we can use both in a scalable way that we couldn’t do before.

    HPE CEO Antonio Neri: Reason For Acquiring Cray – Data Around Us is Exploding

    Also Read:

    Next Frontier: Edge Centric, Cloud-Enabled, Data-Driven, Says HPE CEO
    Extracting Value From Data is a Massive Opportunity, Says Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO
  • Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events, Says CEO

    Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events, Says CEO

    “Carbon Black is analyzing 500 billion security events across the globe every single day,” says Carbon Black CEO Patrick Morley. “Of course, you can’t do that with people. You have to do that with a number of techniques. We certainly leverage the compute capability of the cloud. Then we apply AI and machine learning models to that. It allows us to see patterns across the globe that help many many companies stop the bad guys.”

    Patrick Morley, CEO of Carbon Black, discusses how their company uses AI and machine learning to analyze in real-time 500 billion security events daily in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:

    China is the Number One Nation Driving Cyber Attacks

    As a cybersecurity company, we have an interesting relationship with certain nations around the world. This is particularly true with those that are very active from a cyber standpoint. China, in particular, has statistically been shown to be the number one nation across the globe that is driving cyber attacks. So our relationship with China is a different relationship than many other public companies across the globe. We don’t actively sell into the market because we are helping many companies actually protect themselves from attacks that are generated out of China.

    As I tell all of our employees we are building a company for the long term. Our stock is going to be impacted by things we control and many things we don’t control. When I look at my app and I see red everywhere it’s certainly disturbing. Obviously, that will impact companies that are going to buy my product eventually. If that has an impact on other public companies and private companies, it will impact us eventually.

    Cyber is One of the Most Interesting Spaces in Tech

    We gave (investors) a consistent outlook in Q2. Analysts reacted positively which is good. Again, we are building for the long term a company that matters in cyber. I think cyber is one of the most interesting spaces in tech right now because of everything around us. We come back to cyber again and again.

    If you look at all the news about Facebook cyber is in it. If you look at some of the geopolitical issues in Europe and in the U.S., cyber comes in. It’s an important area and we are a new guard of companies helping to change it and make it better and more effective for companies. We are building value around the company.

    Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Security Events Per Day

    Some of those (competing) providers (such as Cisco and Fortinet) work in a different part of the market than we do. It’s a big market. It’s a $100 billion market that’s going through fundamental change. We do provide a platform that does compete (directly) with some of the traditional players such as Semantic and others. The way we compete is we are based on one core principle. If you look at where the long term trend of where the world is going you need to leverage the power of data in order to figure out what’s happening. We leverage data in a way that allows us to see and to stop the adversary in ways that traditional products can’t.

    Carbon Black is analyzing 500 billion security events across the globe every single day. Of course, you can’t do that with people. You have to do that with a number of techniques. We certainly leverage the compute capability of the cloud. Then we apply AI and machine learning models to that. It allows us to see patterns across the globe that help many many companies stop the bad guys.

    Carbon Black Uses AI to Analyze 500 Billion Daily Security Events
  • Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    “The surprise outcome ten years from now is there’ll be something much bigger than the private cloud and the public cloud,” says Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell. “It’s the edge. I actually think there will be way more computed data on the edge in ten years than any of the derivatives of cloud that we want to talk about. That’s the ten-year prediction.”

    Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, discusses how it has become a critical technology platform for its customers in an interview with theCUBE at Dell Technology World 2019 in Las Vegas:

    Data Has Always Been at the Center of How the Technology Industry Works

    We feel great. Our business has really grown tremendously. All the things we’ve been doing have been resonating with customers. We’ve been able to restore the origins of the entrepreneurial dream and success of the company and reintroduce innovation and risk-taking into a now $91 billion company growing at double digits last year. Certainly, the set of capabilities that we’ve been able to build organically and inorganically, with the set of alliances we have, the trust that customers have given us, we are super happy about the position that we’re in and the opportunities going forward. I think all this is really just a pregame show to what’s ahead for our industry and for the role that technology is going to play in the world.

    Data has always been at the center of how the technology industry works. Now we just have a tsunami, an explosion of data. Of course, now we have this new computer science that allows us to reason over the data in real time and create much better results and outcomes. That combined with the computing power all organizations have to reimagine themselves given all these technologies. Certainly, the infrastructure requirements in terms of the network, the storage, that compute, the build-out on the edge, tons of new requirements, we’re super well-positioned to go address all that.

    Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud

    The surprise outcome ten years from now is there’ll be something much bigger than the private cloud and the public cloud. It’s the edge. I actually think there will be way more computed data on the edge in ten years than any of the derivatives of cloud that we want to talk about. That’s the ten-year prediction. That’s what I see. Maybe nobody’s predicting that just yet, but let’s come back in ten years and see what it looks like.

    Really what we’re doing is we’re bringing to customers all the resources they need to operate in the hybrid multi-cloud world. First, you have to recognize that the workloads want to move around. To say that they’re all going to be here or there is in some sense missing the point because they’re going to move back and forth. You’ve got regulation, cost, security, performance, latency, all sorts of new requirements that are coming at you and they’re not going to just sit in one place.

    This is All Super Important As We Enter This AI Enabled Age

    Now with the VMware cloud foundation, we have the ability to move these workloads seamlessly across now essentially all the public clouds. We have 4,200 partners out there, infrastructure on-premise built and tuned specifically for the VMware platform and empowered also for the edge. All of this together is the Dell Technologies cloud. We have obviously great capabilities from our Dell UMC infrastructure solutions and all the great innovations at VMware coming together.

    Inside the business, the first priority was to get each of the individual pieces working well. But then we saw that the real opportunity was in the seams and how we could more deeply integrate all the aspects of what we’re doing together. You saw that on stage you know in vivid form yesterday with Pat and Jeff and Satya and even more today. Of course, there’s more to do. There’s always more to do. We’re working on how we build a data platform bringing together all of our capabilities with Boomi and Data Protection and VMware. This is all going to be super important as we enter this AI enabled age of the future.

    We’ve Created an Incredible Business

    I think investors are increasingly understanding that we’ve created an incredible business here. Certainly, if we look at the additional coverage that we have as they’re understanding the business, some of the analysts are starting to say hey this doesn’t really feel like a conglomerate. It’s a direct quote. If you think about what we demonstrated today and yesterday and will demonstrate in the future we’re not like Berkshire Hathaway. This is not a railroad that owns a chain of restaurants. This is one integrated business that fits together incredibly well and it’s generating substantial cash flows.

    I think investors over time are figuring out the value that’s intrinsic to the overall Dell Technologies family. We’ve got lots of ways to invest, we got VMware, SecureWorks, Pivotal, and of course the overall Dell Technologies.

    Michael Dell Predicts in 10 Years More Computed Data on the Edge Than Cloud


  • There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World, Says Rackspace SVP

    There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World, Says Rackspace SVP

    “If you think about where we are on the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars of spend that are ultimately going to move, there’s no doubt that it’s a cloud-first world,” says Prashanth Chandasekar, Senior Vice President & General Manager at Rackspace. “But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. How do we take on that hybrid movement? Amazon is very aggressively investing and we’re investing with them and helping our customers along their journey effectively.”

    Prashanth Chandasekar, SVP & GM at Rackspace, discusses how Rackspace has transformed from primarily a hosting company to a technology service company helping enterprises effectively and efficiently move to the cloud on AWS and other platforms in an interview on theCUBE at AWS Summit London 2019:

    Rackspace Helping Companies Navigate to the AWS Cloud

    Ultimately part of the reason why customers in our install base were reaching out to us and saying, ”Hey Rackspace, you’ve done a phenomenal job helping us in the first evolution of our journey, can you help us now in this new world where it’s actually quite complicated?” Over 1,400 features on average are being launched by Amazon on a yearly basis. Despite what we hear in the headlines where cloud first companies and the startups of today are absolutely leveraging Lambda out of the gate or containers out of the gate.

    There are a whole host of companies that are going through this massive digital disruption trying to compete with these startups. They need a lot of help to reskill their workforce to change the way they think about processes within their organizations between their business development and technology and operations teams. Then ultimately, how do they actually build out a much more agile way of responding to customers? That work requires a company like Rackspace to come and help them navigate through that really large set of features.

    There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World

    That’s what’s so dynamic about the space. Nobody would have predicted this ten years ago. Even today we’re seeing a ton of momentum with concepts that were very nascent just a few years ago. Kubernetes is a concept where almost every one of our AWS customers at Rackspace, what we call fanatical AWS, are absolutely looking for help on Kubernetes. When we think about Docker a few years ago and Dock Enterprise and we think about Kubernetes and there was that battle, today the battle has been won. Kubernetes is pretty much the de-facto orchestration engine. Nobody would have predicted that a couple of years ago.


    Hybrid and multi-cloud are becoming a lot more prevalent. I think even Amazon is very much acknowledging that the big opportunity is in hybrid cloud. If you think about where we are on the technology adoption curve and the trillion dollars of spend that are ultimately going to move, there’s no doubt that it’s a cloud-first world or a destination is the cloud. But the vast majority of the workloads exist in traditional IT. How do we take on that hybrid movement? Outposts is a great acknowledgment of that. Amazon is very aggressively investing and we’re investing with them and helping our customers along their journey effectively.

    There’s No Doubt It’s a Cloud First World, Says Rackspace SVP Prashanth Chandasekar