Live from the BuildGram Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Pure Accelerate 2018 at the BuildGram Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, Moonlining is Prince Today, joined by Dave Vellante, Moonlining as the who?  Yeah, Roger, Keith, Moonbat. We are, it's a very cool concert venue in case you don't know that. We are joined by a couple of guests, Cube alumni, welcoming them back to theCUBE. Rajiv Vasaredy, the VP of Product Management and Solutions at Pure Storage, and Siva Kumar, the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco. Gentlemen, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. So talk to us about lots of announcements this morning, Cisco and Pure have been partners for a long time. What's the current status of the Cisco Pure partnership? What are some of the things that excite you about where you are in this partnership today? You want to take that, Siva? You want me to take that? I think if you look back at what brought us together, obviously both of us are looking at the market transitions and some of the ways that customers were adopting technologies from our side. The converged infrastructure is truly how the partnership started. We literally saw that the customers wanted simplification, wanted a much more of a cloud-like experience. They wanted to see infrastructure come together in a much more easier fashion, that we bring the IT, make it easier for them. And we started, and of course, the best of breed technology on both sides, being a flash leader from their side, networking and compute leader on our side, we truly felt the partnership brought the best value out of both of us. So it's a journey that started that way and we look back at it now and we say, this is absolutely going great and the best is yet to come. So from my side, basically PureHit started what we now call FlashStack, a converged infrastructure offering, roughly about four years ago. And about two and a half years ago, Cisco started investing a lot in this partnership. We were very thankful to them because they kind of believed in us. We were grown, obviously. But we are not quite as big as we are right now. But they saw the potential early. And so about roughly two and a half years ago, they, I talked about them investing in us. I'm not sure how many people know about what a Cisco-validated design is. It's a pretty exhaustive document. It takes a lot of work on Cisco's side to come up with one of those. So in a nine, and usually a single CVD, it takes about two or three of their TMEs, the highly technical resources, and about roughly three to six months to build those. Per CVD. Per CVD. Wow. And like I said, it's very exhaustive.  So in a nine month span, they kind of did seven CVDs for us. That was phenomenal. We were very, very thankful that they did that. And over time, that investment paid off. There was a lot of go-to-market investment with Cisco and Pure jointly made. All of those investments paid off really well in terms of the customer adoption and the acquisition. And essentially, we are at a really good point right now. When we came out with our FlashArray X70 last April, Cisco was about the same time they were coming out with the M5 servers. And so they invested again and gave us five more CVDs. And just recently, they've added FlashBlade to that portfolio. And as you know, FlashBlade is a new product offering, not so new, but relatively new product offering from Pure. So we have a new CV that just got released that includes FlashArray and FlashBlade for Oracle. So FlashArray does the online transaction processing. FlashBlade does data warehousing. Obviously, Cisco networking and Cisco servers do everything, OLTP and data warehouse. It's an end-to-end architecture. So that was what Matt Burhead talked about on stage today. We are also excited to announce that we had introduced ARI, AI-ready infrastructure along with NVIDIA at their expo recently. We were excited to say that Cisco is now part of that ARI infrastructure that Matt Burhead talked about on the stage as well. So as you can tell in the two and a half year period we've come a really long way. We have a lot of customer adoption every quarter. We keep adding a ton of customers and we are mutually benefiting from this partnership. So I want to ask you about follow-up on the Oracle solution. Oracle would obviously say, okay, you buy our database, buy our SaaS, buy the RedStack, single-throat to choke, we're going to run better, take advantage of all the hooks we have, you've heard it before. And it's an industry discussion. If customers have it, Oracle comes in hard. So what's the advantage of working with you guys versus going with an all-RedStack? Let's talk about that a little bit. Sure, do you want it? Yeah, I think if you look at the Oracle database as being deployed, this really powers many companies. This is really the IT platform. And one of the things that customers or major customers standardize on is, again, if they have a standardization from an Oracle perspective, they have a standardization from an infrastructure perspective. A database alone is not necessarily easy to put on a different infrastructure, manage them, operate them, go through life cycle. So they look for a architecture. They look for something that's an overall platform for IT. I want to do some virtualization. I want to run some desktop virtualization. I want to do Oracle. I want to do SAP. So the typical IT operates as more of, I want to manage my infrastructure as a whole. I want to manage my database and data as its own island or its own way of looking. So while there are ways to make very appliances behaviors that actually operates one better, the approach we took is truly delivering a architecture for data center. The fact that the network as well as the compute is so programmable and makes it easy to expand really brings a value from a compute perspective. But if you look at Pure again, there's flash arrays truly have world-class performance. So the customer also looks at, while I can get everything from one vendor, am I getting the best of breed? Am I getting the world-class technology from every one of those aspects in perspective? So we certainly think there are a good class of customers who value what we bring to the table and who certainly choose us for what we are. And to add to what Shiva has just said, right? So if you looked at pre-flash, you're mostly right in the sense that, hey, if you built an application, especially with mission-critical application, you wanted it siloed. You didn't want another application jumping in and kind of messing up the performance and response times and all that good stuff, right? And so in those kind of cases, yeah, appliance has made sense. But now when you have all-flash and then you have servers and networking that can actually leverage the performance of all-flash, you don't really have to worry about mixing different applications and messing up performance for one at the expense of the other. It's basically, it's a win-win for the customers to have much more of a consolidated platform for multiple applications as opposed to silos because silos are always hard to manage, right? So yeah. Steve, I want to ask you, Pure has been very bullish really for many years now. Obviously Cisco works with a lot of other vendors. What was it a couple of years ago? Because you talked about this significant resource investment that Cisco has been making for a couple of years in Pure Storage. What is it that makes this, so maybe this flashback, I'm kind of thinking of the three-legged stool that Charlie talked about this morning, but what were some of the things that you guys saw a few years ago, even before Pure was a public company, that really drove Cisco to make such a big investment in this? I think when you look at how Cisco has evolved our data center portfolio, I mean we are in a very significant part of enterprise today powered by Cisco, Cisco networking, Cisco, and then we grew into the compute business. But when you looked at the way we evolved in this compute business, the traditional storage as we know today is something we actually led through a variety of partnerships in the industry. And our approach to the partnership is first of all technology, technology choice was very, very critical that we bring the best of breed for the customers, but also again the customer themselves speaking to us and then our channel partners who are very critical for our enablement of the business is very, very critical. So the way we and when Pure really launched and forade into all flash, and they created this whole notion that storage means flash and that was never the paradigm before. That was a game-changing sort of a model of offering storage, not this capacity, but also flash as my capacity as well as the performance point. We really realized that was going to be a good set of customers will absorb that, some select workloads will absorb that, but as flash in itself evolved to be much more mainstream, every day's data storage can be in a flash media. They realized, customers realized this technology, this partner has something very unique. They've thought about a future that was coming, which we realized was very critical for us. When we evolved network from 10 gig fabric to 40 gig to 100 gig, the workloads that are the slowest part of this any ecosystem is the data movement. So when flash became faster and easier for data to be moved, the fabric became a very critical element for the eventual success of a customer. We realized a partnership with Pure, with the all flash and the faster network and faster compute. We realized there is something unique that we can bring to bear for the customer. So our partnership mindset really said, this is the next big one that we are going to invest time and energy. And so we clearly did that and we continue to do that. I mean, we continue to see huge success in the customer base with the joint solutions. This issue of best of breed versus kind of integrated stacks has been around forever. It's not going to go away. I mean, obviously Cisco in the early days have converged infrastructure, put a lot of emphasis on integrating, on obviously partnerships. Since that time, I don't know what it was, 2009 things have changed a lot. Cloud was barely a thought back then and the cloud has pushed this sort of API economy. Pure talks about platforms and integrating through APIs. How has that changed your ability to integrate best of breed more seamlessly? Actually, I've been working with UCS since it started, right? And perhaps it was a first server system that was built on an API first philosophy. So everything in the Cisco UCS system can be basically anything you can do to it from the GUI or the command line, you could do it through their XML API, right? It's an open API that they provide and they kind of emphasize the openness of it. When they built the initial conversion infrastructure stacks, right? The challenge was the legacy storage ways didn't really have the same API first programmability mentality, right?  So Pure, having the advantage of being built from scratch when APIs are what people want to work with, does everything through REST APIs. All function features, right? So the huge advantage we have is that with both Pure, Pure actually unlocks the potential that UCS always had to actually be a programmable infrastructure. That was somewhat held back, I don't know if I agree or not, but I will say it, that kind of was held back by legacy hardware that didn't have REST-based APIs or XML or whatever. So for example, they have Python and PowerShell-based toolkits based on their XML APIs that they built around that. We have Python PowerShell toolkits that we built around our own REST APIs. We have puppet integration, salt and all the other stuff that you saw on the stage today and they have the same things. So if you're a customer and you've standardized, if you've built your automation around any of these things, right? If you have the end to an infrastructure that is completely programmable, the cloud paradigms that you're talking about is mainly because of programmability, right? That people like that stuff. So we offer something very similar, the joint value proposition. You're bringing that DevOps kind of infrastructure as code mentality to systems design and architecture. And it does allow you to bring the cloud operating model to your business on- An aspect of the cloud operating model, right? There's multiple different things that people think about. Yeah, maybe not every single feature, but the ones that are necessary to be cloud-like on- Yeah, absolutely. That's kind of what the goal is. Let's talk about some customer examples. I think Domino's was on stage last year and they were mentioned again this morning about how they're leveraging AI. Are they a customer of FlashJoc? Because that may be something you can kind of dig into. Let's see how the companies that are using this are really benefiting at the business level with this technology. No, I think, absolutely. Domino's is one of our top examples of a FlashJoc customer. They obviously took a journey to actually modernize, consolidate many applications. In fact, interestingly, if you look at many of the customer journeys, the place where we find it much, much more valuable in this space is the customer has got a variety of workloads and he's also looking to say, I need to be cloud-ready. I need to have a cloud-like concept, whether I have a hybrid cloud strategy today or it'll be tomorrow, I need to be ready to be able to consume on-prem and cloud. And the customer also has the mindset that while I certainly will keep my traditional applications such as Oracle and others, I also have a very strong interest in the new and modern workloads, whether it is analytics or whether it is even things like containers, microservices and things like that, which brings agility. So while they think that I need to have a variety of things going, then they start asking the question, how can I standardize on a platform, on an architecture, on something that I can reuse, repeat, and simplify IT? That's by far, it may sound like you've got everything kind of thing, but that is by far the single biggest strength of the architecture, that we are versatile, we are multi-workload, and when you really build and deploy and manage, everything from an architecture, from a platform perspective, looks the same. So they only worry about the applications they're bringing on board and worry about managing the lifecycle of the apps. And so a variety of customers, so what has happened because of that is, we started with commercial or mid-sized customers to larger commercial, but now we are much more in enterprise, large, many large IT shops are starting to standardize on Flash Tag, and many of our customers are really measured by the number of repeat purchases they will come back and buy, because once they like and they bought, they really love it and they come back and buy a lot more. And this is the phase where, it gets very exciting for all of us that these customers come back and tell us what they want. Whether we build automation or whether we build management architecture, our customer speaks to us and says, you guys better get together and do this. That's where we want to see our partners come to us and say, we love this architecture, but we want these features in there. So our feedback and our evolution really continues to be a journey driven by the demand in the market, driven by the customers who we have. And that's hugely successful when you are building and launching something into the marketplace. Your best reward is when customer treats you like that. So to basically do a dovetail into what Shiva was talking about in terms of customers, so he brought up a very valid point. So what customers are really looking for is an entire stack, an infrastructure that is near invisible. It's programmable, right? And you can kind of cookie cutter that as you scale. So we have an example of that. I'm not going to use the name of the customer because I'm sure they're going to be okay with it, but I just don't want to do it without asking the permission. It's a healthcare service provider that has basically literally dozens of these flash tags that they've standardized on. Basically, they have vertical applications, but they also offer VM as a service. So they have cookie cutter this with full automation integration. They roll these out in a very standard way because of a lot of automation that they've done. And they love the flash tag just because of the programmability and everything else that Shiva was talking about. With new workloads coming on, do you see any architectural limitations, what am I saying, new workloads? Data-driven, machine intelligence, AI workloads. Do you see any architectural limitations to scale and how do you see that being addressed in the near term? Yeah, that's actually a really good question. So basically, let's start with the... So if you look at bare metal VMs and containers, that is one vector. In that vector, we're good because we support bare metal and so does the entire stack. When I say we, I'm talking about the entire flash tag, servers and storage and network VMs, and then also containers because most of the containers in the early days were ephemeral, right? Then persistent storage started happening and a lot of the containers were deployed in the public cloud. Now, we are getting to a point where customers are basically experimenting with large enterprises with containers on-prem. And so the persistent storage that connects to containers is kind of nascent, but it's picking up. So there's Kubernetes and Docker are the primary components in there, right? And the Docker, we already have Docker native volume plugins and Cisco has done a lot of work with Docker for the networking and server pieces. And Kubernetes has flex volumes and we have Kubernetes flex volume integration and Cisco works really well with Kubernetes. So there are no issues in that vector. Now, if you're talking about machine learning and artificial intelligence, right? So it depends. So for example, Cisco's servers today are primarily driven by Intel-based CPUs, right? And if you look at the NVIDIA DGXes, these are mostly GPUs. Cisco has a great relationship with NVIDIA and I will let Shiva speak to the machine learning artificial intelligence pieces of it, but the networking piece for sure, we've already announced today that we're working with Cisco in our ARI stack, right? So... Yeah, no, I think the next generation workloads or any newer workloads always comes with a different set of, some are just software level workloads. See, typically software type of innovation, we, given the platform architecture is more built with programmability and flexibility, adopting our platforms to a newer software paradigms such as container microservices, we certainly can extend the architecture to be able to do that and we've done that several times. So that's a good area that covers, but when there are new hardware innovations that comes with either it's interconnect technologies or whether it is new types of flash models or machine learning GPU style models, what we look at from a platform perspective is what can we bring from an integrated perspective that of course allows IT to take advantage of the new technology, but maintain the operational and an IT cost of doing business to be the same. That's where our biggest strength is, of course NVIDIA innovates on the GPU vector, but IT doesn't just do GPUs, they have to integrate into a data center, flow the data into the GPU, run compute along that, run applications to really get most out of this information and then of course process it for any kind of real time or any decision making for that matter. Now you're really talking about bringing it in house and integrating into the data center. Anytime you start in that conversation that's really where we are, I mean we welcome more innovation, but we know when you get into that space we certainly shine quite well. It's secure, it's protected, it's move it, it's all kinds of things. So we love these innovations but then our charter and what we are doing is all in making this experience of whatever the new be as seamless as possible for IT to take advantage of that.  We thank you so much for talking about the Cisco Pure Partnership, what you guys have done with Flashdack, how you're helping to customers from pizza delivery dominoes to healthcare services to really modernize their infrastructures. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much. For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back.


Tired of the everyday grind? Ever dream of a life of romantic adventure? Want to get away from it all? We offer you... Escape! Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure. You are standing in inky blackness looking up a long flight of stairs at the top of which looks something unbelievably evil. While in the moving shadows behind you coming closer to you is the shadowy figure of something that could only come from a nightmare. Listen now, as Escape brings you Anthony Ellis' terrifying story, I saw myself running. Who threw the magazine section, sweetie? No, it's all right. Here. Well, what if you're not through it? No, you'll have it. Thanks. Want a woman's page? No, thanks. Buddy. I had the strangest dream last night. Huh? Anybody we know? Don't be funny. If you stop reading for a minute, I'll tell you about it. Okay. I was scared. Oh, why didn't you wake me up? Why? Wouldn't have done any good. It's the funniest thing. It was a nightmare, I guess. You know the kind where you see yourself running away from something or from somebody? Too much beer. I want to ask you. It's very important. What darling? Do you notice how sometimes in a dream everything is happening to you and then suddenly you find yourself standing there watching it, watching yourself, and you say to yourself, it's a dream and I don't have to be frightened because in a minute I'll wake up. Well, I guess so. Something like that, I guess. Well, last night, a lot of other nights, Freddie, it's been different. It starts the same way, like any other dream, I suppose, but then I'm running away. Somebody I don't know is following me and then there are two of us, both me, running. Coffee still hot? Freddie. Honey, I don't know anything about dreams. If you're asking me what I think it means, I don't know. Offhand, I'd say that last bottle of beer. Coffee. Thanks. Freddie. Nothing. How do you explain a dream? You don't. You can't. At first it frightened you and then as the morning passes it fades and by lunchtime, forgotten. Freddie and I went to bed early that night. I think I was a little surprised when it began again. I didn't realize I was asleep yet, but it was there. The same as the last time. A face, only a face, not unkind, not anything. And it was so far away. Around it was a piece of cardboard with circles drawn on it. The face in the center and it went round and round. First toning a dot and then it came closer and the noise came with it. Everything was spinning so much it made me dizzy, but I could always see it right side up. It was very close to me and the face was somebody I'd never seen before. It was a man, I think, and I knew that he didn't care and I wanted to cry. Then it was gone. I was alone in a big hall and I thought I'd seen the place before, but I couldn't have done it because I knew it was only a dream. Even then I knew I was dreaming because I could see myself. There was a wide staircase going up into a dark place that was higher than any place I'd ever seen. I was at the foot of the stairs, looking up, and my face was frightened. I saw myself open my mouth to say something, to call upstairs into the dark. I don't come down, please don't! I don't want to see you! But I'd never heard myself before, not really. I'd always thought I'd said things in dreams, but not this way, not so that I really heard. And the voice wasn't my own. I found myself looking up the staircase with her, and there were two of us standing next to each other, touching. I could feel her hand. It was warm. I don't! You mustn't come down! Who is it? I don't know, Susan. I never know. But it's up there, in the shadows. It's too dark, I can't see anything. What does it look like? Well listen, you can hear it. I'm afraid it'll come down soon and I'll try to run, but I won't be able to get away. It's always the same! This is a dream. It's a dream. I'm having a dream. I can wake up now, if I want to. I'll be here alone then. You always leave me here alone? That's silly. How can I leave you alone when you're me? It's only a dream. I can wake up now. Oh no, you've got to stay this time. Look up there. It'll be coming down in a minute. We'll have to run. I won't run. I always do. I have to. No, I want to see it.  How do you know? You haven't even seen it.  I'm afraid. This is a dream. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's coming down! Run! We ran, both of us. And all this time and all my dreams, that girl I'd seen hadn't been me at all. And then the Great Hawn's staircase weren't there. We were in a lovely garden. And it was very quiet except for a single bird. And it sang strangely and sadly. Why do you dream? That's a silly question. Everybody dreams. If you didn't dream, I wouldn't have to be here. I wouldn't be afraid all the time. There's nothing to be afraid of. It's warm. So peaceful. Look at the roses. And the caterpillars. I'm afraid of caterpillars. I used to be. I'm not anymore. I'm still afraid of them. I remember the first time you dreamed of them. You'd been frightened when one crawled on your hand. You were very small then. That's the first time I had to be afraid of them. That was a long time ago. I don't mind them now. I do. I mind everything you think you've forgotten. Look, there's one crawling on my shoe. Will you squash the caterpillar? I can't. I'm afraid. All right. What is this place? It's an airplane. I've never been in an airplane before. I know. I'm afraid of them. I'll fall out. And there'll be such a long time for me to know that I'm going to die. I don't want to fall. Hold on to me. You won't fall. It's only a dream. You see, Freddie's the pilot. And he can't fly. I know he can't. You keep saying that. What? It's only a dream. It doesn't matter to you. You can wake up. I can't. I have to stay. I have to live with this all the time. Where are we going? I don't know. Look, the plane's breaking out. We're going to fall. We're going to fall now. It'll be all right. We've got our parachutes on. I know. You have to count to three or ten and then pull the ring. I've seen them do it in the movies. It'll be all right. We'll jump. No, I can't. I can't. Floating sensation. I had no idea we were so high. I've got to count to ten and pull the ring. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Nine, ten. I can't find it. It's all right. You're okay now. It was a nightmare. Turn on the light. Falling. I fell out of an airplane. I was going to die. Oh, darling. It was that TV show we watched. It's all right. I love you. You don't have to be afraid. You're right here. Everything's fine and it's nearly four o'clock. Emma, you climb in with me. Freddie, I don't want to dream anymore. I'm afraid. It was like last night. The other nights. But words. Freddie, look at me. Do I sound the same? Do I sound the same? There's two of us. When I go to sleep, when I dream, there's another woman there. That's who I've been seeing all these years. It's not me. It's someone else. She's there all the time. Freddie, I don't want to dream anymore. Something's going to happen. I'm afraid. Back to escape. Freddie took me to the doctor. And I tried to tell him about the dreams. And when I finished, he examined me. Tested my heart. Blood pressure. Then he said, Susan, you're tired. That's what the matter with you. I haven't been doing anything to be tired. Really, I haven't. You're overwrought. It could be a vitamin deficiency, any number of little things, but it's not serious. You're in good shape. Now what you need is to get away for a few days. I feel all right. It's just that dream. The girl, the one who looks like me. I want you to forget about that dream. It's only because you're tired that you have the dream in the first place. Now, I'm going to give you a sedative to take just before going to bed. A few nights, good sleep. You'll be fit as a fiddle. I don't want a dream anymore. That's all. He patted me on the arm, smiling. Freddy smiled. And I took the little box of sedative pills home with me. I couldn't tell them. I couldn't make them understand. It wasn't just a dream. It was something that was happening, really happening. And that night, I decided that I wouldn't sleep. I'd stay awake. And if I was awake, I couldn't dream. After Freddy was asleep, I got up and went into the living room. I got a new library book and I began to read. It was 11 o'clock then. Oh, he must have. I almost did. I wish we had something to make me stay awake. This is silly. I'm a grown woman. Why should I behave like a child? But I'm afraid. Who is she? That girl. It's not a dream. And because it's not, I'm not going to sleep. I'm not. I'm not. The more time it gets late, the easier it's life. I'll read some more. Make some coffee. At 7 o'clock, I got back into bed and pretended to still be asleep when Freddy got up. I heard him making coffee, then he came back in, kissed me, left for the office. Somehow I stayed awake the whole day. I tried to buy something that the drugstore stopped me from sleeping, but they wouldn't give it to me without a prescription. And then Freddy called to say he had to entertain some out-of-town people that night. After that, I had to lie down on the living room couch because I felt sick. It was 8 o'clock. I won't. I won't. I'm not going to go to sleep. I'm not going. I won't. I won't. No, but I don't feel well. I just gotta lie down a little while. But I won't sleep. In a minute, I'll feel all right. And I can get up. In a minute, just a minute. I'll wake up in a minute. There's that big hall again in the staircase. I can see her looking up into the dark. You didn't come last night. I know. I was waiting here. It didn't come down, though. The thing up there. You couldn't have been here. You're only me in a dream. And when I don't dream, you're not here. I'm always here. I have to see the things happen. Things don't really happen in dreams. It's imagination. No, it isn't. Look up there in the dark. It's up there waiting. Soon it'll start to come down. How do you know? It does. And we'll have to run. If we run, we can't see it. Perhaps if we didn't run and we saw it, we wouldn't be afraid anymore. Oh, no. Listen. It's going to come down. I know it is. We won't run. We'll wait for her. I can't. I'm afraid. You and me. I'm not afraid now. You can't be. The darkness, the top of the stairs seem to move. Take shape. And I heard her screaming. I saw myself screaming, but it wasn't my voice. It was the girl I stood next to. And slowly, painfully, she turned away from the stairs and tried to run. It was like a slow motion picture. Her legs moved, but she stayed in the same place. Then the darkness started to come toward us. It swirled down the stairs and there was a figure in it and a face, but the mouth. The face wasn't a mouth at all. It had no form and the face changed and grew bigger, came closer around it. We were standing in a narrow stone passageway. It was cold and damp. And the other girl who wasn't me was holding a gun. We both were. And we looked behind us because around the corner, out of sight, it was following her. I heard the telephone ringing and I couldn't understand how there could be a telephone in that place. I'm tired. I can't run anymore. We'll rest for a minute. I wish somebody would answer the telephone. You do it. It sounds like my telephone. How can it be? Because this is only a dream. And if I wake up, I'll answer it. It's on the table at the end of the couch. I can wake up and answer it. No, you can't. I won't let you. I'm not going to stay here alone. I've got to wake up. You can't now. Well, listen. We've got to run again. It'll catch us now. There's a cold horror behind us. And I ran, following a twisted passageway. And I knew that the telephone had been my last chance. My last chance to wake up. And I hadn't. I couldn't. There's a light ahead. He won't dare to follow us into the light. Are you tired? Are you? No. It's funny how we seem to almost float. I'm not tired at all. I don't think we need the guns now. I'm going to throw mine away. I'm not. I'm afraid of guns. I used to be. I'm not anymore. Wait a minute. Those two men, you see? In the entrance? Yes. I wonder whether they're... Maybe they'll try to stop us from getting out. I've got the gun. Oh, I shouldn't have thrown mine away. We'll be all right. Come on. Hey, Freddie and Dr. Peters. I know. Freddie! Susan! Say where you are, Susan. Don't come any closer. But it's following us. We've got to get out. You'll have to go back. No! Go back into the passage. No! Susan! But I must let me talk to them, Susan. You let me talk to them. I'll take care of it. You'll see. I saw her walk slowly to the entrance to where it was light and no sunshine. And the three of them talked very quietly. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I knew it was about me. And ever so faintly I heard the sound of this thing that was waiting somewhere in the blackness of the passage. She was pointing at me and Freddie was laughing. It has made me angry. So angry that I forgot to be afraid. I ran over to them and as I did so they blocked the entrance linking their arms to keep me back. She's told us all about you, Susan. It's taken a long time to find you out. Stop it! There's no such person. She's me. She's Susan. This is only a dream. I can wake up whenever I want. Stop it! Ask her. She'll tell you. My dear Susan, how can we ask her if you say she doesn't exist? You're tired. Overwrought. Oh, I'm not. You mustn't say that. It isn't true. Please, let me out. I'm cold. I'm afraid. You kept her down here all your life now because you're afraid and cold.  Freddie, it's me. I'm your wife. Freddie! I've always been fair. I want to be fair this time. Oh, yes. We have to be fair. Sue? What do you think? Should we let her out? Oh, no. She'll only wake up and leave me here. I want to wake up this time. Let her stay. You're crazy. She's not Susan. I am. She's nobody. She's in the dream. We have to be fair. We really do. If you only want so tired, so overwrought. I suggest we take a vote. Yes, that's evidently fair. A vote. I think so too. We'll vote yay or nay on the proposition. That's the way it's done at board meetings in my office. Yay or nay. We let her out. Yay? We don't let her out. Nay. Sue? Nay. Doctor? Nay. And I cast my vote. Nay. The vote has been taken and Julie recorded. You can't let him stay here. I won't. I think that you'd better talk to her, Susan.  It's better that way. Doctor and I'll wait for you outside. All right. I don't be afraid. You don't have to be afraid now. That comes later when you have to go back into the passage. When I wake up. You can't wake up. Never. You're not alive. I want to tell you something. When I wake up, I'm not going to be like you. I'll never dream ever again. You're going to stay here alone. Just the way you made me do it all your life. You can run. You can run and never be able to escape. But I shan't come here to be with you. Listen. It's waiting for you. Can you hear it? No. Please. Don't make me. Please. It'll get me. Please. It won't get you if you keep running. But you mustn't ever stop. I'm afraid. I'm afraid. Oh, please.  I'm Susan. I've got to wake up. I think I'll wake up now. Susan. I called you, but there was no answer. I was worried. You all right feeling better? You look better. Say, you know what? I've arranged to take five days off in the office. We'll go up to the mountains. That's what the doctor ordered. How about it? It sounds wonderful, friends. I figure if we... Susan. Yes, darling? Your voice. It sounds funny. My voice? Well, it's me. It's the only voice I've got. But it doesn't sound like you. Are you sure you're... Oh, silly. How can it be me and not sound like me? Oh, you are silly. Give me a kiss. Sus, what's the matter with your voice? You, I saw myself running, written and directed by Anthony Ellis, starring Georgia Ellis as Susan, with Fanny Hill as Sue, featured in the cast with John Stevenson and Edgar Bellier. Editorial supervision is by John Messon, and the central music for the case is composed and conducted by Lee Stevenson. Next week. Next week. So, listen, next week, when a case brings you Anthony Ellis' exciting story, The Trash.


Emma Raducanu, winning the U.S. Open, was extraordinary. The 18-year-old's victory in the competition was the first time ever that a player who had to qualify to get into the tournament as opposed to gaining entry through their rank, won the final competition. Just three months ago, Raducanu was ranked 338 in the world. In her first Grand Slam this July, she made the fourth round and the rest is history. However, Raducanu's win hasn't just been celebrated for its incredible sporting merit due to her immigrant background. Raducanu was born in Canada and is of Chinese and Romanian descent. It's also served as fuel for the political take factory. Responses ranged from the Anadine like this from London Mayor Sadiq Khan. Emma Raducanu's story is London's story born in Canada to Chinese and Romanian parents. She moved to London at two years old here in London. We embrace and celebrate our diversity. And if you work hard and get a helping hand, you can achieve anything. Her win also reached the more outrageous corners of FBPE Twitter. Will Hutton is a columnist at the Observer. He tweeted the following. Bit by bit, the Brexit case collapses. Afghanistan foretells a new era of America first. She's Chinese, menace grows and now Emma Raducanu's tennis brilliance, fearful of nothing, daughter of immigrants, is testimony to the value of openness. We need to stand with and in an open EU. So Emma Raducanu winning the US Open is evidence that we need to rejoin the European Union. This guy is considered quite a serious thinker, an author of multiple books for a while. He was head of a college at Oxford, I think, and a regular columnist at the Observer. When it came to online controversy, most debate was prompted by those celebrating it, who were deemed to have no right to. Nigel Farage was top of the pile in this respect. He tweeted, a global megastar is born. Emma Raducanu winning the US Open is truly incredible. Unsurprisingly, that tweet got ratioed because of Farage's previous statements about migration and in particular, his statements about Romanians. David Lammy tweeted, Emma Raducanu is half Romanian. Here is one of the countless stories that demonstrate the immense value migration brings to the UK. But you said, I wouldn't want to live next door to a Romanian. You have no right to piggyback on her incredible success. Dr. Shola Moshogbemimu, she tweeted, forgot she's half Romanian and Chinese. Nigel, a xenophobic racist hypocrite would kick people of Emma Raducanu heritage and talent out of UK without second thought. Nigel Farage is shameless on Emma Raducanu victory when he won't live next door to Romanians and constantly demonizes immigrants. Ash, I want your thoughts on this. This has become familiar, especially it seems this summer that sporting victories end up being a moment for lots of people to make political points, especially when it is people who are of immigrant background, often second or third generation when it came to the football, who are then made as examples of why immigration is a good thing, why multiculturalism is a good thing, and then also from the right for, I suppose, very cynical point scoring. What do you make of it? Is this well-meaning people making a reasonable point or is this is it an odd way of doing politics, let's say? Let's take the Will Hutton tweet first, where he in the same breath is praising Emma Raducanu for her astonishing performance at the US Open, but also referencing Xi Jinping as the Chinese menace. Because this to me seems to be just a classic, perfect specimen of FBPE racism. It's something that we heard a lot from people during the EU referendum, which is actually being in the EU doesn't even have an impact on non-EU immigration. So if you wanted to get rid of all those awful Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, you could or after Brexit actually happened being like, oh my God, it's so unfair that my lovely Italian barista has to apply for settled status. But any old Indian could come to this country. There was a lot of that within the Remain site, something which really alienated me from other people who voted Remain was the sense of ranking of different countries, different backgrounds in order to make the point that you wanted to make about EU immigration. I think that Will Hutton's tweet falls into that trap. Of course, what Nigel Farage is saying is completely hypocritical. But that hypocrisy, when it comes to the good immigrant, the one who excels in their field, the one who puts their head above the rest and does so in the name of Great Britain and glory to the flag, that's always been something which racists have been quite comfortable with not just celebrating, but sometimes appropriating. It's also a way for them to demonstrate of like, hey, I'm not a xenophobe.  I really celebrate immigration when they pull off a once in a lifetime sporting achievement. So I think that that vein of hypocrisy is pretty well established when you think about British political discourse. And then I think you've got the third thing that you were talking about, which is, is this a good way to think about the politics of sport and the meaning of, you know, fame and immigrant excellence when it's happening on the public stage. And I think we've got to draw a bit of a distinction between when sports stars of colour or, you know, cultural figures of colour more generally are speaking out against racism and are politically expressing themselves in a very explicit way, which is what we did see with the England football team. The commitment to taking the knee is something that we've also seen, for instance, with Lewis Hamilton in Formula One, where the murder of George Floyd was really a catalyst for his outspoken turn, where before he was much more of a guarded kind of sports star and someone like Emma Radikani, who hasn't, hasn't yet said, this is how I want to engage with the world. This is how I want to think about not just my own ethnicity and my heritage, but also what I want that to mean and what kind of political work I want that to do. Because when you take that outside or beyond somebody's own hands, I think we then fall into this quite pernicious trap of the good immigrant again, which is you abstract and dehumanise. You take this human being who's got a rich wealth of experiences and thoughts and heritages and influences that they're pulling from and he flattened them into a symbol of either the kind of nation you want or the one that you don't want. So the good immigrant is by necessity, by the way in which we construct this image, just the flip of the bad immigrant, right? Both are dehumanised and de-individualised. So I think that we do have to be wary of extrapolating further and saying, and this is the political meaning of Emma Radikani. Well, of course, she says something about this country and the fact that this is a diverse country where the fastest growing ethnic background is mixed heritage people. That's the change that's happening to this country. And we're going to see that reflected in sports, popular culture, politics and more. But I don't think that you can say and this means that we have to rejoin the EU. Ask her.


No one expected it, really, in the context of the game. But they pulled it off fantastic, tremendous. No, you've got to put that behind you and prepare for the backlash. And you've got to be ready to take on the Austrians at their own game once again. It's easier said than done, of course. But the fact that they won, and won so famously, just a couple of days ago, they should build on that, not with the expectation, again, that, okay, don't worry. The skipper's going to get the bulk of the runs. Stefanie Taylor's going to make a significant contribution and they're going to take us home.  You have to tell yourself that, look, I am going to be the one stepping forward. I am going to be the one to deliver. If it is that the captain falls early, it's not the end of the world. We're going to continue, whether we're setting a target or chasing a target. That has to be the belief in the side.


Okay, so in this video we're going to be going over the top five dropshipping niches of 2024. So what I've done is I've taken the most popular niches you hear people talking about, at least the top five niches I get asked about quite a lot. As a beginner, it can be overwhelming starting a business, especially when there's financial and time risks involved. And one of the most popular questions I get asked from people when I jump on the phone with them is, what's the best niche? Should I go into this niche? Should it be this niche? So I thought what I would do is do a video, take your top five, take you through the pros and cons from my perspective. As somebody who's been dropshipping now for seven years, I've sold in the pet niche, which is number one, which you can see on the screen now. I'll go through the others and explain my experience with those as well. So we'll get into them. Before we get into it though, I do have a mentorship program where I work with up to five people per month. It is quite an exclusive program. There is a short application process of half a dozen questions or so, so I can kind of get to know where you are and what you want to achieve realistically in the next two to three months. It allows me to kind of vet the people who are applying. For example, people who say they want to buy a Ferrari or Lamborghini in the next two months is unrealistic and I don't accept those. If it's the sort of thing you are interested in, and this is perhaps one of the first times you're watching my videos and you think I like this guy, I'm going to see what he has to say, then I'll show you at the end of the video how you can jump on a call with me and we can have that discussion. So that being said, let's jump into the pet niche. The biggest niche, most popular niche in the drop-shipping space and for good reason to be honest, I've sold in this niche for many, many years. So pros-wise the amount of products, there's pretty much unlimited products. When I'm talking about pet niche, I'm typically thinking dogs and cats. The amount of products there's dozens if not hundreds of, well there's certainly thousands of products, but when I say amount of products, I mean potential winners. There's dozens if not hundreds of potential winning products in the niche. Scalability, because of the size of the market, there's obviously scope to make a significant amount of money. I think it's like 16 million households in the UK have a pet of some, in fact I think that's just dogs in fact. I don't know what it is, cats included, it's probably higher than that. So it's a significant size of people and that's just in the UK, that's not considering obviously. The bigger beast which is the United States, this is also an evergreen niche. So what this means? So this is where people, sometimes you'll hear people or say bad things about the pet niche. Number one thing is usually, ah it's saturated, it's too competitive, but what they're forgetting is it's evergreen. So a million people a year on average, to be fair I haven't checked these numbers since COVID and COVID it went up. So it's a million people on average across the year in the UK would adopt a dog. That's potentially up to a million brand new customers. You only need a hundred thousand customers to make a lot of money. So potentially up to a million new customers every single year. So every single year there's a million people potentially that need everything. They need a bed, they need a dog bowl, they need a carry cart, they need a lead, they need all that sort of stuff. So there's always new and new people, so it's difficult for something to come truly saturated or truly too competitive when it's so evergreen like that. Number four, passion at niche. So passion is super super important, people buy of emotions not with logic. So when you can spark an emotion in somebody's, well when you can spark an emotion with somebody they're much more likely to purchase something like some of the most effective ad creatives. If you think of crown and paw where you can upload a picture of your dog and they'll produce a portrait for it. Some of their best ad creators or their best ad creators were people ripping open this thing and seeing their dog and just bursting out into laughter. But then also on the opposite end of the scale you get those necklaces to commemorate and remember loved ones. We have to look like really close into them. And they obviously spark a different emotion and emotion gets traction. It's what gets eyeballs on and what makes successful ad creatives in my opinion. Target ability as well. So I'm speaking more so from platforms, social media platforms where you can target people based on their interests. You can target specifically specific dog breeds on Facebook so I couldn't get, I was about to say easier than that or nothing's easy when it comes to business but couldn't get any straightforward in that. If you're selling a product for large dogs just target large dog owners. Like you couldn't get any easier than that. It's not like with TV advertising you don't, you can't guarantee who's going to see your ad.  Whereas on Facebook you can eliminate the people who aren't interested in your products and just focus for example on the people who are. The last one is repeat business up sales because there's so many different range of products. If somebody's looking to buy a color they're probably going to buy lead to go with that color as well. So when it comes to lifetime customer value getting people back onto your store to buy other and similar products. It's a lot more straightforward in the pet niche for obvious reasons. There are some cons competitive because it's one of the bigger ones I'm spoken about then every man and his dog excuse the pun usually starts in the pet niche. All this means it doesn't mean that you can't be a success. All it means is you have to have higher standards. You have to advertise better than people. You have to have higher quality products. You have to have a better designed and professional looking Shopify store. Cheap products. This one is really avoidable quite easily. It's a pitfall that most people fall into when they think drop shipping as a whole. They usually think five or $10 plastic products from China. It doesn't have to be that way. There's some really nice luxurious high quality products that you can sell in pretty much any niche.  So what I mean by this is that a lot of dog products or cat products not so much cat products because dogs go outside and they have to go out. Well they do dogs have to go outside. I suppose they do really. I don't know what would happen if you had just an inside dog if that's even a thing. But dogs they get walked every single week which means they get walked in the winter. They get walked in the summer which means the winter products will be super popular and when the weather gets warmer they'll die off. So you do have to be quite savvy and have different products lined up and know what you're doing when it comes to launching a product. So you can kind of replace one with another if that makes sense. Home decor niche and this is a really good niche. Again another popular one. The size of the market has got to be the first pro. Obviously anybody who lives in a house is pretty much your target market so that's pretty much the majority of the country. Well it is the majority of the country. Pros the profit margins. Home decor niche products are usually a bit more expensive because they're made out of high quality materials or a bit of fancy pansy or they're decorative that sort of things. The profit margins are definitely better than the pet niche I would say. Product range is pretty much endless isn't it. You can get motion lights. You can get figurines. You can get lamps. You can get I mean you can drop ship furniture. You can drop ship sofas, office chairs, desks, tables, vases, flowers. It's pretty much endless and a pros obviously seasonal trends. When it comes to things like Halloween decorations, Christmas decorations, Valentine's things then demand is going to be super super high for a limited period and if you've got your business in order it allows you to capitalize on that cons target ability. This can be kind of product to product but if you're selling just like a generic ornament or something like that it can be really difficult to focus down on the people who are going to be interested in ornaments unless there's a specific interest you can target then I suppose you can target people who are interested in home design and that sort of thing but it's not as specific as say the pet niche hence why I've put it on the cons list. Lack of passion people are definitely not people are more passionate about pets than they are about an ornament or making the home look nice. I guess it's going to vary person to person but it's going to be difficult to make somebody feel passionate or spark some sort of emotion emotional response when it's selling a figurine or an ornament or some sort of lamp or something like that if you know what I mean. Shipping because they're typically heavier items or larger items or contain some sort of technology maybe electronical and then shipping can also cause some issues from time to time. This follows on into safety issues as well if you are selling anything that's like rechargeable has batteries or plugs into the mains I probably stay away from anything that plugs into the mains you limit the potential risk with battery powered stuff but anything that plugs into the mains you've got to be careful obviously who you're dealing with get the required certifications customer variability so with the pet niche when you're selling dog products every single person who buys a dog product is a dog owner and is therefore going to be applicable for any other products whereas with customer variability in the home decor niche somebody who buys this one ornament won't necessarily be interested in the next one or won't necessarily be interested in say an LED motion light so when so how do I explain this so in the pet niche everything you do compounds into one audience that are all going to be interested within reason obviously in the same products whereas in the home decor niche inside that alone there's so many different kind of mini niches that means the customer variability will be quite high so it's not going to compound as well basically so when you do release another product it's not like in a dog niche where it will apply to them because they own a dog and a dog is a dog within the home decor niche people like different styles people have different needs different whatever so customer variability means that everything doesn't compound as well I would say I would then return same reason for shipping is that larger items more likely to get damaged during transit that sort of thing can cause more headaches in my opinion than the pet niche moving on to the beauty niche then I'm going to go over this quick because I've never sold in it myself I don't take much time or attention when it comes to my own beauty so it's not it's something that interests me to be honest so I tend to stay away from the things that I don't have a personal interest or knowledge of pros besides the market it's probably one of the biggest markets in the world people are obviously super super super super passionate about it which makes it great for social media because you can take advantage of that a really nice piece of ad content people will be sharing people will be commenting tagging friends sending it to each other whatever it may be and this kind of leads on to what I just mentioned easy content super easy nowadays in most niches but I would have thought so especially in the beauty niche to contact some small-time influencers people who like to do different tutorials with the new beauty niche send them some gear ask them to film some content for you there's so many different ideas so many different possibilities when it comes to marketing which is always a good thing and then upsells too because of the range of different products if somebody is going to buy oh god I don't know some makeup they might buy some eyelashes to go with that or I don't know there's upsells and cross sales available okay cons wise competition it's obviously super super competitive market it's because of that you have to be it comes down to the content or the branding you're obviously never going to be able to compete with big-time influencers because people buy that because of who the influencer is just think of Kylie cosmetics and this kind of jumping ahead to brand loyalty when it comes to the beauty niche people tend to buy certain products because of the brands that it is because they like being part of that brand and that culture if that makes sense no profit margins beauty products are typically low margin which is obviously something to keep into consideration kitchen each another big big one so the amount of products again is pretty endless size of market it's huge anybody who has a house probably has a kitchen in the house as well which means they're probably going to be part of your target market it's something people are super passionate about as well as their kitchen it's typically the the heart of the house if that makes sense where most families will spend most of their time which makes them passionate about it they want a nice kitchen if they're cooking for their family they want to make their lives as easy as possible Pete baking is super super popular and getting more and more popular it's evergreen too there's always people coming into the niche obviously when they get their first home they might be looking for that well they probably need everything when you move into a new house you need everything from utensils to cutlery to choppers to gadgets to whatever it is so always lots and lots of new people on the lookout for those sorts of things and now obviously you have your season trends as well as a cons target ability again it's going to vary product to product but it's going to be really difficult to find somebody who is interested or has a passion for vegetable choppers so you're not going to be able to target specifically or get that close to people who are definitely looking for your product you kind of just have to target people who are interested in kitchens as a whole and then hope it lands on the right person who actually has a need and wants to buy your product profit margins typically you get a lot of like gadgety type products that are plasticky and or spatula holders or I don't know cookie cutters that sort of thing which means the profit margin is always going to be super super low so you're going to make it it's going to be really difficult to to make that work with paid advertising cons originality you tend to see the same kind of products in the kitchen niche time and time again it's not like in a dog niche a new toy can come out because there's so many different possibilities with a toy whereas in the kitchen niche a vegetable chopper is a vegetable chopper regardless of how it does it so a lot of the products are kind of same same as for passion I've put this in the cons as well because yes you can get those people who are super super passionate about their kitchens and whether they're baking or an actual cook an actual chef but at the same time it's going to be really difficult to make somebody soup have that emotional response when it comes to selling a vegetable chopper like it's not like you can put a video of a cute dog and people fall in love with it straight away it's not like you just put a video of a vegetable chopper and people are going to fall in love with it you can to a degree if you market it really really well but it's more difficult to do so yes there are some people that super super passionate but also there's some people that just won't be interested whatsoever and this kind of goes in conjunction with targetability because it's not an easy thing to do you can't really narrow down on those people who are going to be super super passionate about your product last but certainly not least we have the gadgets niche this is probably one of the biggest if not the biggest it's definitely up there with the pet niche as you can see straight away i struggled to find as many pros as i did cons for this one again i feel like the gadgets niche is one of those niches that most people go into or instantly think of when they think dropshipping because it's usually kind of poor quality products that are knockoff versions of existing big-time brands like cheap airpods or some form of tech so the pros are product variation because it's just endless there's always new gadgets coming out that do slightly different things as an endless stream of products to choose from content as well is always going to be easy because people love to watch things about tech people do youtube videos just talking about tech just talking about different gadgets so content is relatively straightforward and then obviously demand as well as massive massive market people love tech especially if it makes their life a bit easier and especially if you can save the money versus going for one of the big name brands so you can buy some apple airpod pros now for what 300 quid whatever they are or you can get something that does relatively the same thing obviously not to the same degree but probably 80% of what apple airpods do but you pay 10% of the price and there's definitely a market for that cons profit margins i've just mentioned it's usually cheapy plasticky type products that make the margins tight reputation if you fill your store full of lots of different gadgets and they're typically low quality and and cheap products then i think it can harm your reputation as a brand people instantly see you i so here in the uk they used to be a really popular gadget shop i think it was called i can't remember was it called reds or someone might be able to tell me in the comment section but they never really did well i think they've gone out of business red five when they called i can't remember but for whatever reason they just they never really took off i really got that much traction um and it's just purely down to when you're selling gadgets people they won't tend to go to one place for their gadgets because they'll go to apple for example for their earphones or they'll go to bosh for their speakers they won't go to one store if that makes sense if that makes sense so unless you are selling those actual brand names then i think you're always going to be fighting an uphill battle um originality there's a lot of gadgets that pretty much do the same thing unless you're again one of the first people to find or discover a gadget or piece of tech and to bring it onto facebook then the chances are somebody else has probably already been selling it to death as well which is going to make it more difficult to compete and more difficult to succeed and repeat business like i mentioned before gadgets because it's such a wide variation from speakers to headphones to things to drones to hoverboards to god knows what just because somebody buys one thing doesn't necessarily mean they're going to come back and buy a different thing from you as well there's no kind of like loyalty or no reason for the consumer to be loyalty to be loyal to you they have competition which i've touched on briefly already then last but not least we have quality control obviously when you're drop shipping is different cool to quality control any product however when you have gadgets when you have tech that has moving parts and pcbs and some kind of electrical component then obviously it's a lot more a lot more can go wrong with it there's a lot more moving parts involved and therefore it's going to lead to more issues versus selling say like a dog bed where a dog bed can't really go wrong and so with that being said that wraps up the video all five niches that want to go through with you today if there's any mist i'm sure i've missed out some pros and cons out of some of these niches make sure you let me know let me know which you think is the best niche and more importantly i hope i've given you some ideas or maybe answered some of the questions and queries or hesitations you've been having about certain niches before you decide to commit to one and with that being said then as promised if you are interested in a mentorship program i can help you pick a niche that has some relevance to you i can help you find a product in that niche and then launch that business up to five ten k per month in the next couple of months if that sounds the kind of kind of service and program that you're looking for then what you need to do is click this mentorship link in the video description below it'll take you to a series of questions five to six questions takes a couple of minutes it's a chance for me to get to know what your current level of experience is and what it is you're trying to achieve in the next kind of two to three months and if you have got a realistic goal and you've got a good attitude and you're proactive and you're serious about doing this then you can book a time in my calendar we'll jump on a call we'll have a chat for half an hour and see what's what if that sounds good head over there now book in your call and i'll talk to you soon cheers