So, we are talking about multicloud today, but before we do that, I just want to, I guess, talk about alittle story. We just finished our summer break in here in the United States. And I remember a couple of weekends ago, I was sitting on the couch with my partner and his three kids, and we were all on our devices because we're a family of this generation of this millennia, and we were all watching something different on a streaming service. We had the kids watching Spider-Man, Harry Potter, and I was watching Pride and Prejudice, and my boyfriend was watching something else. And it made me realize how lucky we are to have this at the palm of our hands, be able to watch anything we want, to stream it um just at the click of a button and at a really simple uh monthly cost. And we have a number of these services today to let us do that as well. And it's that ease and that flexibility that makes it really powerful and makes my summer holiday, my summer vacation really easy. And it reminded me a little bit of how enterprises are approaching multicloud as well. That there are lots of cloud services out there for us to choose, different cloud providers offering different capabilities and we like them all and we want to use them at different times. And just like streaming services, we sometimes end up with more than one, sometimes more than two. And just like streaming services, we sometimes also have a little bit of billshock at the end of the month. But unlike our movie platforms where we can uh turn off a subscription, we can't so easily move out of a single cloud provider into another one. Um we have a lot of other things in enterprise IT that we think about things like security. I'm not just remembering passwords. I'm remembering all of the resources that I have in a single provider or across all of my platforms. There's a lot of requirements around data protection, around data sovereignty, about where we host our data. And of course, we want to use all of the platforms and all of the capabilities within those services as well. So today, we're going to be talking about some of that complexity and we're going to be talking about the way that NetApp is helping our customers and we're looking forward to helping a lot of people solve these problems in the multicloud. So first up, I'd like to introduce Jeff Baxter. So Jeff has been at NetApp for quite some time actually >> about 15 years. Yeah, getting there. >> So maybe could you introduce yourself and I remember when I joined NetApp um you were in a very different role with a very different experience. So perhaps introduce yourself and a little bit of your background. >> Yeah. So I've beenin NetApp now for 15 years. Before that I was an enduser Unix admin, storage admin, right? And I uh ended up using NetApp not knowing what the heck it was, ended up liking it so much I joined the company, right? So um aswith many things. So um I joined as a systems engineer back in the time right andworked with end users and then um after doing that for a while I was CTO for the Americas and that was cool until the 99% travel and having toddlers didn't really mix very well right they're like who's that guy who I see every month right um so I switched uh over to the product side and I ended up running um product management for ONTP for several years andmore recently in the last year I moved over to the marketing side as part of my trying to get every job in the company. So, I just need to finish with legal. They say something about needing a law degree, but legal, finance, and I think housekeeping, and I will cover every job in the company. >> Well, thank you. Yeah, that's quite a story in history. Um, and I think we are very fortunate to have you here today because of that background. So, like I said, we're talking about multicloud and I guess you're in a perfect position to see, you know, what is multicloud in the definition of uh how NetApp would define hybrid multiloud. Yeah, it's a great question and I think we should bythe way iterate for the delegates here, right? We'll do some question and answer, but this is a great time for you to jump in as well if you have opinions on all this. So, it's intended to be because no one wants to listen to me talk for 25 minutes, right? That's been verified by multiple family members. So, um the more you can join in on this, but when we think about wetalk about hybrid multicloud and I think most people understand that instinctively at this point, right? What we mean by that, but just for a definitional standpoint, um hybrid meaning there's usually still some connection to the data center. We certainly see companies that were born in the cloud and have lived in the cloud that are cloudnative andhave never touched a data center in their life, right? An increasing number of companies like that. But if we look at the large enterprises and still the majority of IT spend out there, there's some connection to a data center. There's something still going in a data center. So this concept of hybrid is still very important both for us and for many of our partners in the hyperscalers and the public clouds, right? Working with those on-prem data centers. And then obviously multicloudis you know relatively self-explanatory in terms of being on one or more clouds. So we know that um over 80% of cloud users today are multicloud right according to multiple different um end analysts ESG other people like that. And when they talk about over the next 3 years, the number of customers that are going to be in more than three clouds and three or more clouds is going to grow from they project from almost double, right? 31% up to about 68% of customers out there. So it's not going away. It's not subsiding. In fact, it's growing the number of customers who are going to be out there in data centers as well as in three or more different clouds out there. >> Right. I have a question. >> Yeah. Channeling my Howard Marks here. Um, [laughter] Um, [laughter] Um, [laughter] >> so >> so >> so >> be careful with that. >> Yeah, I know. >> Okay. >> Okay. >> Okay. >> I love you, Howard. Uh, so would you say >> corporations that are in one or more multiple clouds? Yes. Is that distributed workloads or is that just one workload in each, you know, cloud like best of breed? >> Ithink I think it's incredibly rare these days to have one workload that's split among multiple different clouds. I think that we're starting to see a little bit of that, especially in advanced designs where you're designing for ultra high resiliency, right? We're used to in the data center talking about 59s or 69s. In the clouds, we're usually talking about something like 49s and certainly you can leverage regions and availability zones to increase on that. But there are some ultra high architectures where they're trying to, you know, look at balancing and we certainly have some architectures like if you look at um things we're doing with spot and others where we're starting to look at, okay, can we deploy different instances and move them around in clouds for cost efficiency? But I think the vast majority of that multi cloud environment is the I have one workload on this cloud, I have another workload on this cloud and another workload on this cloud. I think the interesting evolution that's going on right now is moving that from being accidental to being purposeful, right? So I think today accidentally people are on multiple clouds, right? They've got um Office 365 over here, they've got some developers doing something on Amazon over here and they've got an enterprise program going on doing something in DevOps with Google Cloud, for example, right? Andit it's just kind of evolved that way. We think it's going to be far more purposeful in the future. I future. I >> I want to add to that as well. I think um we're also seeing companies that are trying to leverage when we say a workload I think that's what we also need to clarify in definition case right what is a workload is it a single instance of a particular application running or is it the way that we are actually running our business processes. And if we think about business processes where we may collect data in one place but want to analyze it somewhere else and that somewhere else may be in another cloud provider. maybe from on premises into the cloud. I think that's when we're starting to see some of those workflows becoming more multicloud and yeah going back to what is a workload. It could be one workload or one application, one team that's thinking about it that way. >> Um I like that >> to take us to take to add to your point, let's step back even further. >> Let's define cloud because I've even had some>> We could be here all day. >> Yeah. Because I've even had some people challenge me go, "Well, SAS isn't really part of the cloud. Are you kidding me? SAS is the original cloud when it's you know the original >> when we talk about cloud so you know there's likeyou suggested office >> is a cloud others may have workloads in AWS or GCP that is multicloud by accent which a lot of organizations do have then you had Salesforce maybe you have Oracle>> so you know do we include SAS or is multicloud inclusive of SAS IAS paz >> Ithink it would be disingen to not include SAS as part of cloud. I mean, >> I would agree with you. >> It'sdelivered as a cloud service. Now, I agree with you that it's traditionally more of a I'll call it easy on-ramp to the cloud, right? You're not choosing the cloud per se. You're choosing the SAS service that you want. And in some cases, the cloud delivery of it is incidental. And in a lot of cases for the end enterprise, right, they don't have a choice as to what cloud it's being delivered on. You choose your SAS provider and they're making the choice in the back end on what hypers scale they want to run on. So I think theinteresting evolution is becoming hybrid multicloud tobring it back to this point on purpose, right? As opposed to accidentally being hybrid multicloud because you've chosen a best of breed SAS vendor for multiple different workloads. Um you're actually directly choosing I want to operate with Google cloud directly as an entity. Um and in some cases it's about where do you have the business relationship, right? Do you have it with a SAS provider? Are you sending your money to that SAS provider? Are you actually sending it directly to Google Cloud orMicrosoft Azure or Amazon Web Services? andthat and that business relationship I think is where itstarts torotate. >> So Iwant to move on to sort of some of the commonmisconceptions about moving into a cloud provider or a multi cloud environment like you said. What are some of those that we think you know moving out of a data center into the cloud should be easy but like you said there are some uh I guess misconceptions or perhaps unknowns there. Ithink you know moving into the cloud in some cases I think is seen as a panacea and I think anyone who's done that recognizes that it's not in and of itself a panacea. You are trading a certain amount of complexity within the data center. I think any of us who operate inside a data center understand that complexity understand theneeds of trying to keep something running at 59s or 69s. If you've ever had a lightning strike on your data center or an actual sewage spill into your data center um that was not a good day by the way. Um, I'll tell you that story over dinner. Actually, I shouldn't tell the sewage spill over dinner. It's not appetizing. Um, but you know, so we'vetraded those sort of complexities for the complexities now of operating in a cloud environment and operating in an environment where not everything is completely under our control. And some things we only learn when we actually sort of trip over them for the first time in the cloud. um especially when you start to get into a multi- cloud environment and you're dealing with the different APIs, the different command sets, the different portals of all of these different clouds and trying to achieve interoperability for your business across them. >> Sure. >> Sure. >> Sure. >> Well, hold on a second. Yeah. >> So, I mean we come back to Fala's question of >> Sorry, I am so sorry. >> It's okay. >> Uh oflet's define cloud. I mean, >> so fromthe perspective of this presentation, are we defining cloud as quote as hyperscaler? you know, GCP, AWS, Azure. I mean, there's an entire other end of the spectrum >> that takes care of all of those things still, but it's still more traditional workloads. And I think that'sall part of the conversation. Is that in scope here as well or >> Oh, that absolutely in scope. I think that's a good point. Do you want to say a little bit more about that? Are you talking about cloud service providers? Are you talking down that direction? Well, I mean that some clouds were perhaps out on a different island than other>> Yeah. [laughter] Uh, no, Uh, no, Uh, no, >> there was an inside joke there that someone's going to explain to me at some point. Yeah. point. Yeah. point. Yeah. >> Uh, so yeah, so I mean there are cloud service providers, but I mean Iwould make the argument that once we started virtualizing workloads, we were creating clouds.>> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Andso, you know, it's a hybrid cloud should take all of those things somewhat into account and Definitely we should be optimizing for each of those. You know, different workloads have different needs. The reality of it is there's still legacy applications that aren't going to be cloudnative now or probably in the next 10 years, >> right? >> right? >> right? >> You know, unfortunately, >> I wish that they were gone, but yeah. Um, but yeah, I just >> definitely let's keep, you know, that in scope. Yeah, I absolutely want to talk about that a little bit as well that when we think about cloud at Netup and I think sometimes we are we see the cloud providers andI mean all cloud providers even uh private cloud providers people providing platforms for their business units for their application teams for their you know for other users as well as part of the cloud story and we don't really I mean we differentiate logically that there is apublic cloud or hyperscala cloud and a private cloud but we really want to think about them as a single place that you would go or something that you would build and then the place that a developer might go or data scientist might go to get a service. >> And so, you know, one of the things thatI'm seeing definitely andwe talked about a little bit before this, Jeff, was um the evolution of how platform engineering is really becoming again a cool term where it was a cool term a couple of years ago um where we are trying to build these platforms and it shouldn't matter. What you really want at the end of the day is do I get the outcome that I was actually looking for? was that in do I care that it was in a public cloud provider on premises? As long as I got the right security and I had the right service and I have the right, you know, time to delivery, then itshouldn't really matter. And that's really one of the things that I think um, you know, we're seeing a lot more andwe'll be demonstrating. Yay.>> Yeah. [laughter] Every time we look forward to >> Ithink it really is that evolution that you're talking about of cloud to Ithink we have to be careful when we talk about abstraction layers because that means something technically, right? And when we talk about virtualization that means something technically but it's this concept of instead of it having to be a net new learning curve with every new data center cloud service provider um hyperscaler orpublic cloud provider and it's a completely new learning curve that it's part of the platform each company is building for themselves right and I think that's the important evolution where um we're looking at a world where we move beyond sort of walled gardens where each individual is its own individual experience and every time you stand up a new workload mode. It's a brand new learning experience to how can we abstract that up so that just as you know you mentioned virtualization just as if you bring in a server from another vendor it's not relearning everything. You might be, you know, going back a couple years, maybe you're dealing with theoffline management is a little bit different, right? The BIOS is a little bit different, but everything up the stack has been abstracted, has been built into a process and is, you know, part of a workflow, right? How do we do that, but uplevel it to the cloud layer essentially?>> So, I'm going to ask that. Can I Yes. Can I ask a question onyour multi cloud environment in the mobile industry right we've got 5G being deployed by the service providers also the enterprise and have very much a concept of moving data towards the edge to reduce back hall and also latency. So how does the multicloud then incorporate data on the edge for those kind of environments? What's your perspective there and how are you working on that? So Ithink there's it's a great question andhonestly I think it's a good open conversation. I think that we're very nent today as to whether the edge is considered to be its own domain, its own category that'streated entirely differently or if the edge is extensions of the cloud and will be managed as the cloud service, right? And I think that even I I'll be really honest, you know, vendors like to come up here and say we've figured everything out, right? I mean, I think we're learning as well about how we want to treat the edge because, you know, we'll demonstrate uh my colleague will demonstrate sort of uh ourcloud manager software and how we think about managing resources across the cloud. When you start thinking about thousands or tens of thousands of endpoints, if every car is an endpoint, some of those traditional models start to break down, right? You're not going to model it as though you have 10,000 data centers, even though in some cases you have 10,000 data centers on wheels. So, I think that this is I don't think we've entirely figured this out, right? I think this is a challenge thatall of us in the industry have to figure out right now is how we're going to model that, right? And isdata truly going to live out in the manufacturing facility in the car, you know, in the air or is it arespit for um you know, a IML togather some insights and those insights are going to be pushed back, right? And Ithink it's probably going to be more the latter just because even though with 5G and everything like that, bandwidth is not increasing at the same rate as the rate of data growth, right? So we're still going to have that inequity in the pipe getting to the data. >> One of the things I see and I'm not a storage person so jump all over me but [laughter]but one of the things I see is that when we look at data um the same piece of data needs to be in different places in the network now to be acted on in a different way. So at the edge it's much more responsiveness. We want to act on it. in the center it's more analysis and dealing with how we deal with data when it's when it doesn't exist in one place I think isperhaps the biggest challenge to think re rearchitect our networks that way does that make sense >> yeah no it makes sense a lot of what we've been doing especially in the a IML space is moving away from the idea of storage right where data goes to a place and think of as a pipeline right where data is always in transit in some cases it's in more than one place right and so when we built out like our data science toolkit and other things like that. It's based upon the assumption that there may not be an authoritative final state where the data is. It may be constantly existing in this pipeline that will go from edge to maybe a data center, right? Maybe a cloud. We think most likely it'll go from edge to cloud, right? Do some processing there and then maybe be stored on a data center for long-term archival sort of, you know, use. Um butyeah, definitely I think it's going to be moving into more of a pipeline. >> So I have a question there and this relates to the pipelines and the workflows, right? Because we're do you guys see that we're at the point wehave workflows that are that maybe even the people who you sell to and who actually manage traditional data centers now. Do they even understand these terms? I mean we've spent this long talking about the definition of cloud and multicloud. So, you know, are we do you guys see us at a state or getting to the state where people need to start >> really understanding what these workflows are because that's how applications are being written or do are the developers there with these ideas? I mean, like where because it seems like there's a mismatch of how infrastructure will be to how infrastructure needs to be when we finally start developing applications this way. >> Yeah. And I think wego back and I come from an architecture background, so I'm always asking, okay, that's cool, but so what why do I need this? what is the reason that we are building a really cool feature in and I think it comes back to yeah we need to understand what those requirements are you know whether it's an application that's going to live in a place withpersistent data in a single location or whether it's a workflow and the data is going to move around we really need to understand what is it that we are trying to do and then the infrastructure has to support thatflexibility and I think that's what we're looking towards and I mean not to speak for you know for Jeff here but Ithink what we're definitely seeing ishelping the infrastructure be more flexible. helping your the decisions that you make be flexible so that you are not going through a single decision path that is going to lead you down you know a particular architectural route that then you realize oh gosh I now need that at the edge how you know do I have to unwind all of those decisions so yeah I definitely see that happening >> with it also being said that if I was going to create cloud I'll use quotes here [laughter] as a good operational guy I to say you know cloud is an operational model it's not a destination right we've heard that used multiple times before >> and I think it's interesting in all these different discussions that we hear there are things that we take for granted now like platforms like for instance if I go to you know AWS it has a guey that I can go clickboomand then all suddenly stuff gets spun up and it just works right>> and we've getused to this idea of cloud as that platform so I you know is maybe that is what is the connector when we talk about all these multiclouds Because at the end of the day, it's an operations model thattakes things into assumption kind of like a declarative language. Like it knows that there are things that are going to be there and then it builds based off of that.>> Ithink that's exactly right.I was while you're saying I was thinking there was an old SNL skit talking about something that was both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Right. I don't know if you're I'mdating myself. Right. So I think cloud ishonestly both of those things and I think that's where a lot of the confusion st stems for, right? Because I think it's Ithink to be fair cloud can describe you know the hyperscalers at a certain scale because there does become almost like this transformation called a cloud singularity or something when you get to a certain number of cores in data center under management something transforms something happens right something that none of us are going to be able to achieve even in the fortune five right within the scope of a data center it's just itit's more than the sum of its parts when you get to that sort of scale not to mention the number ofsheer bodies and intelligence that people like AWS or Azure or Google Cloud and throw at problems when they want to solve them. So,it is a thing, right? Iknow we were joking offline before about thebumper sticker, right? Cloud is just someone else's data center. And Ithink that'strue, but it's a massive reinvented data center, right? It'slike saying that a battleship is just a upscaled sailing boat, right? It's like I mean, they both go across the water, but one's got scale, right? So, and but at the same time, I think what's more important is cloud as a model, right? in cloud as this way in which you operate across disparit resources and across the hybrid multicloud.>> So Jeeoff I want to ask then you know we'rehere with some great presenters from NetApp. What is the NetApp perspective on and how is NetApp making what we would consider cloud services whether it's a reinvented data center or whether it's workflows how is NetApp making that better? >> Yeah. So Ithink the number one thing about NetApp to understand is that we have been really all in on the cloud since cloud wasn't cool, right? Like we were like, you know, had our pocket protectors and saying this cloud thing is awesome back when a lot of would have been considered traditionally on-prem companies were seeing the cloud as potentially a threat, right? And we've always seen the cloud as an opportunity. That's the reason why we have these best of breed partnerships with um Google cloud, with Microsoft Azure, with Amazon Web Services, right? um in terms of engaging with them. I think we did our first demo of our software running on the cloud in 2015 2014 something like that right and we were talking about that um it'sgoing close to seven or eight years now right so from our perspective the cloud is absolutely critical it's an absolutely huge imperative and our goal is to build this sort of ecosystem around it so that companies can take advantage of the hybrid multicloud without necessarily having to refactor all their data all their applications or to support them if they are refactoring right as they move to the cloud. >> And when you think about some of the challenges that we talked about here, you know, fromedge to developers to, you know, how are we consuming the cloud? Is it something that we need through APIs? >> Um, whatis happening withNetApp's uh I guess platforms or our products in that space to make them more friendly to people who perhaps are not, you know, familiar with NetApp from 20 years ago. >> Yeah. So, thefirst thing I want to do is not steal Chuck Foley's thunder for the demo later because I think he knows where I live. Um, you know, in Jersey, but theIdon't um so I don't want to steal a lot of that thunder. And in fact, that's where we'll spend the majority of the day. If people are getting tired of listening to me talk, right, cool demos are coming in less than 10 minutes. So, stand by for that. Don't tune out just yet. Um, but we'rebuilding our software to be essentially cloud agnostic and data center agnostic, right? we're building and everything we do now is cloud first in terms of how we deliver things. Delivering it as a SAS sort of offering, right? And so you look at these services and they're all embedded into our cloud offering such that our customers can use it across any of the hypers scales of their choice. Um we even support um when you look at observability, right? And things we've done traditionally there, not just traditional NetApp things in the data center, but basically just about any storage or data infrastructure that can run in the data center. We're trying to offer that visibility for customers so they can actually see what's going on in real time right there. Andwe actually think one of the key things we can do is deliver that observability, right? Because I think that's one of the been one of the biggest challenges is once your data gets out in the cloud iswhere is it? It's kind of a dude where's my data sort of moment, right? And so being able to provide that visibility so that then we can offer value added services around compliance, around governance, around privacy. We really see that as the future of the company, right? We want to provide that visibility and the way NetApp I mean NetApp's a for-profit company right the way we continue to grow and the way we continue tobuild this is to offer not just keeping people in wall gardens or silos but offer these value added services across their data wherever it is. >> That's awesome. So last question for you then um is if we look at themultiloud or the cloud as we've defined it here today, what is one thing that we would like people to do or what what's one thing that you think that they should do in order to really empower and evolve their cloud strategy? >> It's a great question. So Ithink the key thing to be doing right now is to really look at instead of looking at it in silos, instead of looking at it what are we doing with this cloud, what are we doing with that cloud is really trying to establish what is your overall multicloud strategy moving forward, right? Andmove it from being we had this discussion at the very start of our discussion. Move it from being this thing that happens by accident on a workload by workload basis to being intentional, right? Like how am I building a management platform in the future? I think a lot of us for our data centers in some ways almost lucked into having um vSphere as our management console of choice, right? Itkind of came with the package, right? Thatwas weused to, you know, a decade or more ago, we used to say that everyone thought the hypervisor was the secret sauce of VMware, but there were multiple hypervisors. Thereal magic was the first time you did a votion, right, betweenmachines and then you were hooked, right? So, it's the how do we instead of having that happen by accident, how do we start to build out a control plane? How do we start to build out the sort of hybrid multicloud visibility and control intentionally so that we're taking control of our destiny as we move into the multiloud instead of just having it thrust upon us? >> Excellent. Thank you so much. And I like I'll leave you with that point to take control of your multi cloud destiny. Thanks so much for joining me here today.>> Thanks.