i think we're gonna start this session with something that's probably a little bit different for you guys i know that you know you come here and you expect to hear like a lot of technology discussionsand before we get into that i want to really dive a little bit deeper into you know why are we doing what we're doing you're going to see what we're doing but you know what's driving that and i'm a marketing person right so i'm in the uh portfolio and product marketing group and you know one of the main things that we focus on is customer researchum so you know i want to help i want to share with you guys you know some of the insights and the trends that we're seeing so that you know you can understand why it is that we're doing what we're doing um but i want to start with something thatkind of inspired a new set of research that we just did and it was actually in this forum stephen will be you know pretty familiar with this is it was um back in february on one of theuh on-premise it roundtable podcast there was a panel who had a really interesting discussion and you know they talked about is the traditional cloud dead um is the hyper cloud more important than the cloud and you know steven defined the hyper cloud as a layer above the cloud that abstracts all the resources and um allows you to build on them in auniform way so i was like wow that'sreally interesting let's see you know like let's do some new research and ask customers what they think about this well so we did and 83 of them said yes we agree with this panel um the hyper cloud will be part of our cloud evolution strategy in the next three years so we said okay all right that's really interesting um and you know enrico senoretti uh analyst from gigaom was in this panel too andhe said something that i really loved and he said you know what's happening is a revolution here umandyou know we're seeing this and we're like yeah you know actually this really is a revolution we've been looking at this for a long time you know wedo surveys of our customers we pull them we do interviews you know we do you know a lot of uh one-on-one conversations we get customer uh stories you know wepublish some of those but anyway we see this trend we see that hybrid and multi-cloud it just keeps growing um a research study that we did at the end of last year so about like six months ago we asked our customers how do you plan to operate your architecture 77 said that they plan to operate as a hybrid cloud for the foreseeable future so this made sense to us and you know inthis same survey we asked them why what's driving this and they said well you know from a business perspective it's the ability to innovate faster hands down and then also just from an operational perspective it's about flexibility you know it's about like being able to pivot quickly as your business needs change and you know having theflexibility and the scale umto be able to do that so that's you know that that's great but then there were some other things you know getting back to the panel discussion that sort of piqued our interest and we said well let'sgo out and do you know a study and ask more questions about things that you know we're not really quite sure and that this panel raised and sort of you know made some assumptions but we said let's put some data to it because we wanted to find out you know are the experts right in some of these assumptions are you know could they possibly be wrong so let's ask and one of the things that we found um in this discussion you know there was some debate well you know our customers really multi-cloud you know i think a lot of them are really just starting out and they'rejust adopting you know single clouds right now are they really multi-cloud so we said well let's ask so we went out you know in this most recent survey that we did which actually is going to be published any day now umand we worked with gartner the pear insights team to do this and what we found out was 93 of them said yeah uh we're using multiple public clouds you know when we ask them so helpdescribe you know help us understand how you're using hybrid are you on-prem with a single public cloud and only seven percent of them said yeah um but 93 said yep we're multiple public clouds and i think this is pretty unjust understandable right because this then gives them the ability to leverage a lot of different resources and capabilities from different providers i have a question about the audience that was surveyed for this yeah what types of companies and like where were they located what size i'm just curious what the demographic information is for the people yeah surveyed yep so this was medium and large it was cut across the globe the majority of them like 70 percent of them were uh in the us uh we had like then about another 20 percent in emea and then 10 apac and it cut across different verticals okay so but something interesting here and i know i'm sort of running out of time so i have to get through this fast but um but there is something interesting so hold that thought for a second about um the makeup of that we um also you know found out from them you know whatkind of challenges are you facing with this so you know multi-cloud brings a lot of advantages to customers but it introduces a lot of complexity right so we said well what are some of the issues interoperability we heard compatibility um you know lack of standardization creates a lot of operational headaches so complexity was the key thing you know there's different management tools they're different data services different workflows inconsistent storage formats was a big one which you know may require application refactoring um and we heard from customers look this just increases the operational chaos and because of that it also increases the cost and not having visibility across all these disparate um environments you knowcreates um additional costs too because you may have some resources that you don't even know that you have or they're you know not being utilized uh to the best way that they could be it also introduces security risksso now you have multiple attack vectors and more surface areas you have you know no holistic visibility which then just you know creates an inconsistent approach to security to data governance and then this you know they told us look this is leaving us vulnerable and then the last bit here is just you know lock-in when you have different silos of data and infrastructure you know that's stuck in separate locations this makes it much more difficult to move data so you know portability problems um you know and data mobility thenis limited is limited soyou know one of the things too though in the panel discussion there was a lot of debate about well our customers even really moving data you know like what about data gravity um so we said you know that that's interesting too let's find out let's ask customers and what we heard was yeah actually 90 percent said to us that yeah we're moving data and apps um between clouds and you know this shows you the frequency so most of them are you know monthly quarterly but when it comes down to understanding well who are these customers you know the question that you raised we saw actually that manufacturing finance um insurance and banking they're moving data more than some of the other verticals and you know it was kind of funny because thismade sense to us umbecause you know if you if we look for examples within our own customer base we see this you know um aston martin theircognizant formula one racing team said you know we've got a really cool use case for moving data we've got um you know compute instances on the track andwe're collecting a lot of data about the cars during races we're sending that back um to the factory you know we're analyzing that data we're then like making decisions and telling drivers to do different things um you know so that they can compete better so you know in a case like this when you know seconds count they're moving this data to make those decisions and to impact their ability to compete and you know we see this in other industries too um this was also dow jones you know they're saying that hey we move data everywhere and this is a game changer for us it gives us flexibility um you know thatwe didn't have before so it was interesting to see you know people they are moving data our customers um you know it pros that aren't in our customer base that are in the survey base they're moving data umand one of the things that i actually thought was really interesting and when we asked about the complexity and the challenges that customers had a few times i heard this that it's just there's so much unknown we're afraid of the unknown and that's really limiting us from you know taking risks andgetting the benefits from those risks so you know we think about this and we think yeah i mean you don't want the unknown in your it environment right i mean that'sprobably the last thing that you want so i think you know whatwe're hearing from customers is hey if you guys can give us a way to take that risk out to make our uh experience more predictable more compatible across these environments more uniform you know going back to that idea of the hyper cloud right it's like about the uniform aspects that enable you to do things you know in a more consistent way more predictable so i think that's really um you know what we're thinking about and you know how do we do that andchange you know the way we approach our servicesso i think for us it boils down to really three key things that you're going to be hearing you know throughout the day number one it's about simplicity how do we make things more simple for our customersobviously security i think that's no surprise to anybody customers want things that are secure they want to improve their security postures and then the last thing here is flexibility so again a key driver for the hyper cloud it's really about being able to have flexibility to pivot quickly and uh you know tomove at the speed that your business needs tomove at