hello everyone and welcome back to the Cub's live coverage of Neta converge here in Sin City I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host and analyst Rob stretche Rob the event it's really in full swing now and we're really getting a sense of all of the partners andjust the ecosystem aroundthat app yeah I mean again it's one of those things that again having been with net apppp and seeing all the old friends both on the partner side and the people in the Salesforce that are here the energy is just really awesome everybody's learning and absorbing all the new announcements that were made today and Ithink again I can't wait to talk about this because this is a special part of the ecosystem that we're going to get at right now that is a large part of the ecosystem too so I would like to welcome our next guest she is Michelle Rudi president of NetApp US public sector to the cube welcome Michelle well thank you I'm so glad to be here and glad to be at converge too well as Rob was just saying there were so many uh important announcements and enhancements and refinements that were announced this morning um so much of it is best-in-class performance and data availability how do these new features and enhancements really align with what the public SE whatyour public sector customers are looking for in terms of data management yeah and when you look at our public sector customers they're not drastically different from a lot of the commercial customers and for net apppp public sector actually I should say US federalgovernment was one of our first customers so they've been with us for a long time and the features that they loved about net apppp over the years are really great right so back in 2002 when we started with unified storage simplifying on protocols that was really good to them if you look at how data has changed over the ages and access and everything it's become more complicated but net app's been on the front of innovation adding in um hybrid cloud and multi-protocol and if you look at our announcements today it's really taking us into this new age of the intelligent data infrastructure and so with that the announcements arereally exciting because it'sjust a build on everything so if we look at what's going on in the government you know they're looking for that simplification right how did they start to slim simplify their environments how do they and um and more importantly especially on the federal side but I say also all the way across public sector States and everything they need to save money right so what can we do for cost savings and if you look at these new announcements the performance enh enhancements that we have being able to do twice as much um with what you know with within the same cost right or looking at it the other way it's like we're going to be able to reduce their Costs in half right likewise we we've increased the throughput um up to 40 million iops right so now for those com customers that are performance sensitive again they can do a lot more for up to 55% less so just driving on those savings uh is really important to them yeah and Ithink Gaby brought it up really well and the way she put it is built in andI think part of it having been here and been around the storage market for quite a while Ithink one of the things about built-in is cyber security and I think especially for public sector both fed and sled Ithink that has to be one of the top challenges they're trying to solve for oh absolutely right if we look at it just inherently and again this has been top of mind for na for a long time we were we actually still are we were the first to get it and we are the only storage vendor that has the commercial solutions for uh secret environments right uh certification that's done by NSA so that inherently build security into our systems we're able to old secret top secret and Beyond data but then also if I look at it on the landscape of the market ransomware is a big problem going across you know more on thestate and local side right so having anti-ransomware protection inherent built in um and AI powered right so we actually are able to get up to 99% accuracy in terms of anti-ransomwareprotection and we'll give customers a uh a ransomware recovery guarantee which is unique in the industry so just fabulous things for our customers so on the cube we interview manyTech Executives who are trying to figure out how they can adopt AI Technologies and really unlock the value of it how do you describe net app's approach to supporting government agencies in terms of their AI strategies andhow do you feel that netf is uniquely positioned to do that yeah and so when you look at aiI feel a little bit like AI today is like Cloud was maybe 10 years ago it's a really big landscape and different customers are doing different things within that so if you look like with University of Albany we help them to build a highp speed high performance environment because they're going to be a shared service center for to support customers doing Ai and going even more broadly if you think about AI data is the fuel right that powers Ai and we've been in the data business so being able to give our customers secure environments with governance um to help them be able to take their data from anywhere any place right our connectivity to the cloud allows us for to help customers whether they're doing their applications and their data resident in the cloud or resident on Prem so those enhancements really help position us to help our customers with AI yeah Ithink that to me is one of the keys is that ontap is common across all of those different environments and that you're able to bring it like you said compartmentalized and other federally really secure things and shifts and all of this other stuff that both of us have dealt with over the years Ithink what was also really interesting about this from a fed and a sled perspective is that itscales from all different sizes I mean you have the a1k announcement today but you can scale down and scale up and like you said and be able to go to any of the hyperscalers for the most part and you know so if you have a customer that wants to get in small they're getting in on ontap right large customers are getting in on ontap onts that same IP as you said we're the only Company that actually has our IP built into all three major hyperscalers right now we've got ANF with uh with Microsoft the uh gosh I'mblanking FS with AWS and then the native services with Google so we're able to do it whichever Cloud our customers U choose and Azure net app files is the acronym for that and FSX isnet app ontap in correct FSX so it's okay I work in government I'm used to like acronyms and three letters here and there so for us welike to break it down for the people because again Imean you I was atactually Amazon when that was launched and I think what's really interesting to organizations is the fact that you can go these different ways do you see that as you know again obviously three-letter acronyms aside potentially in some cases or maybe in some cases they're using it in those secure clouds do you see that as apiece that draws it back together and gives them the power hey we don't we can do Disaster Recovery differently we can do data protection differently uh it is again our government customers and University customers are not unlike other customers where depending on their particular situation in their choice they do like to have the choice of where and when they're running their applications and our ability to help them move and migrate their data and have that connectivity is really important as we look atum the federal space we are working with those same hyperscalers in their secure Cloud so it does give the capability across all of our landscape and having the certifications is really important and that's what the hyperscalers carry inthe federal environment intalking about what your customers are looking for and youmentioned Simplicity that they want an easy button they also are looking for cost savings they also want Innovation they'relooking to net app forthe creativity the secret sauce so how are you working with customers uh at the federal and state level and University level too toreally come up with those innovative solutions that they so desperately need so we you know we partner with them we actually have a pretty large ecosystem of partners because a lot of times when the government goes out to buy they're not just looking forstorage they're looking as you said for solution so we'll partner with large systems integrators who can deliver a much more comprehensive solution to help them um tohelp deliver whether it's a full backup or full it infrastructure or whether you need they're buying an airplane and we'redesigning stuff for that all you know going over to the sled side of the business also for the inherence system such as sap or people soft that they need so we do it with Partners we bring our Innovation combine it with our partners Innovation to really hit on those pain points yeah no Ithink again we have some great ones here we're going to have CDW on later on today we have Insight who's around here in wwt just a great and that's just skimming the surface of all the ones you have here yeah you mentioned wwt we partner with them they've got a great Innovation Center and you know that features a lot of ournet app products and featuring our AI solution along with them so love taking our customers there to be able to um access and be able to show them how we can do the things right because it's really easy to talk about but sometimes showing it is a little bit harder so you've spent your career in public sector technology I'd love for you to reflect a little bit about what this moment in time islike foryou interms of your leadership position in terms of all you've seen in the past and with the emergence ofAI and what you were talking about earlier about how that that's where Cloud was nowwe're looking at AI so how do you describe this moment in time in your career wow you know we are on it's that digital transformation that you know I think has been a buzzword for quite some time you know we've seen the government come through digital transformation which is really hard for them because they've got a lot of custom applications and they don't always get the budget right a lot of oversight and things so as we're watching them they've come through this wave but it's just started going faster and faster right the acceleration that and the rate and Pace right gen aI just really sped everything up a bit but it's all focused around data right so which is what makes it really exciting for net app because we're at the center of that right and we're at the center of also two things right two things that are going on it's the AI and theproliferation of data but security right it's like if I talk to a lot of my customers number one right it's all about security so um being able to deliver security around their data keeping it protected and helping them to um get the business insights out of the data that they have yeah andIsuspect that you know if we're back here next year hopefully we will be at converge or what it gets called for next year when you start to look at it what are the things that you hope that your customers will have learned over this next year that you can be here and say hey wesaid we were going to do this and yeah well uh so I hope we deliver on the promise of the new announcements andI'm sure we will so uh case in point we did theannouncement uh broadcast what two hours ago I got a text from one of my guys he's like yep one of our customers is on it they're asking about all of the things and they're wanting to understand the features so making sure that we're getting them to be able to take advantage of those helping them to move forward cuz sometimes it's it just takes us a little bit longer to go through that procure process and get them in use so what I hope we're going to see is that we're going to have all of our customers and they'll be out there being references for us talking about the you know how they're running government on that app very exciting times is there anything else that you want to say about what is most exciting about being here in Las Vegas at converge uh so you know I have to say because since this is a team event just the excitement of all the people you know we just came through the pandemic and people working from home and everything just having everybody here together the collaboration cu the excitement Builds on the excitement right my good friends Mo and mentum right you just love having that and I think that's the energy that carries us and will carry us as we go forward and hopefully spread the word on everything that we're doing here well that's the word of the day momentum it's palpable here thank you so much Michelle R Nikki for coming out cube thank you I'm Rebecca KN for Rob stretch stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of Neta converge you're watching the cube the leader in technology Enterprise coverage and Analysis