How are you doing? Well, so we are we were going to be recording with someone else tonight, but they've had a bit of plumbing emergencies. We thought let's do our coffee chat now. So how are you guys? I'm good. You know, it's it's Monday. It's usually we do these on Thursday, so it's awesome to have a early week coffee chat, but I feel good. I feel like the energy of the world right now is pretty exciting, or maybe it's just me. I don't know. How are you? How's your kitty? Yeah, it's lovely doing it on Monday because I've had a really different weekend this weekend. We took Friday off.  We went for a really gorgeous long walk and have a pub lunch, which is a very British thing to do. So we went for like a 10 kilometer walk all across country to this lovely pub. And then Saturday, I went to it's my friend Andrew's birthday and her girlfriend Matt's. So we went down to Brighton and had a lovely lunch out with them and saw them and had such good fun. So it's been a really, really lovely weekend. And obviously I've got my new cat who's I've just put inside. She's been out here. It's interesting. They're reclaiming his favorite spot. So it's really good. But amongst all that, of course, you've got your inner world, haven't you, in terms of what's going on sort of within yourself and in your immediate vicinity. And then you've got all the other stuff. So it's been a really great time of reflection to me. I've been putting into practice a lot of what you and I have been talking about about the meditation, about reflection, about there's a few things that cropped up this week that have really triggered me and looking at, you know, okay, what's this trying to teach me? Why am I reacting? What is it that's really unresolved for me to actually feel I've got to react to this? Yes. Yeah. And that's been huge for me too, because we know that we cannot control everything that happens in the exterior and the outside world. The only thing we can control is our own self and our own reaction to that experience. And, you know, it's kind of like we talked about last week. And I think as we talk about this, it's for us as well, like we're not, you know, I've said this before, kind of one of jokes about philosophy teachers as we teach what we need to learn the most. You know, it's talking this through because this is one of my teachers used to call this the unsolvable riddle. Like how do you experience your emotions, your triggers, but also learn from them enough to understand that they're just an attachment to an illusion. It's just mind blowing to actually contemplate that. But the best we can do is focus on our inner world.  And if we all did that, if we all took the time to really engage in what we call praptia hara self study, then I think where we want to be collectively will come a lot faster than it is. It does that makes like, does that makes like if we're all in the mirror, you know. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And it's so true because I've been involved in lots of conversations over last week, as I'm sure every single person watching this has about the Russian Ukraine situation won't say those words too many times. And the thing is, so I would say it's like assholes, everyone's got an opinion on it. Most of us do not know at the moment how vital our opinion is. There's so many probably other options that haven't even been discussed that could be happening there. So people think it's this or it's this or, you know, you know, he's good, he's bad, and so we've spoken about that. And what I was really hit home to me actually over probably about really since the Ukraine situations happened is I thought, wow, I've got to stop focusing on other people and what they think, but because I'm seeing a reflection that I don't think that most of you can see has learned anything over the last two years. Now, of course, that's just my perception of how I'm seeing people react to things. And therefore, I'm just thinking, okay, enough time to really just concentrate on myself. And by that, I don't mean I'm not going to have conversations with people like you, because I love learning, but it's got to not be about other people, because if we're dependent on anyone, whether it's our husband, whether it's our neighbor, whether it's our children, whether it's a world leader, that's outside our control. Yeah. And that's the whole point. I think that's the whole point of this great awakening is that we can't hand our power away. And also, when something goes wrong, and you get mad at somebody else for something going wrong, that's also handing your power away. You know what I'm saying? It's not that people don't need to be vindicated or have some sort of justice, but it's almost like we're at this point where we still haven't learned to let go of the matrix in the sense that we need a leader or we need somebody to do this for us, or it's only true if this person says it, or it's only true if that person says it, and we're forgetting to take that power back ourselves. Because the whole thing that we know about, like the higher self, that's our higher selves, our higher selves already know everything that's going to happen. Our higher selves are aware of everything.  And so, but if we learn to settle into that and know that everything is going as it's supposed to, whether that's good or bad, or however you perceive that, we can start to then take that power back ourselves and start to work on our own experience in this timeline, because that's what it's about. And I know that there's panic. I know people are panicked right now. I understand it. And there's something interesting about the human body. And I think this happens with the human brain too. So, I'm involved in heavy exercise and very extreme yoga practice. I also do other things too. And I see it in myself and I see it in my students that right before the body is on the precipice of change. So, right before there's a breakthrough in the body, right before someone gets that leg behind their head or is able to do a drop back into a back bend, the body panics. And so, the body pulls back. And so, that's when the person is the most sore, the most emotional. And it's because the body knows that it's about to enter into a territory that it doesn't know, that it's not familiar with. And so, it would rather sit back in the area it knows for sure instead of venture into this new territory. Well, I think the same thing happens with our psyches as well, what actually I know it does because the body is the mind field. And it's almost like you see this repetitive with people. Like instead of taking a chance and healing and going into a new place that's unfamiliar, they'd rather stay in the toxic cycle because they know it. And so, I think that's happening collectively. We're still acting out behaviors that we were taught in the matrix of relying on a ruling elite, on relying on a celebrity, on relying on somebody else to tell us what to do versus venturing into this new territory where we only rely on ourselves. It's so important. And I think you and I are also talking in those conversations off camera, that that also links into really understanding yourself and understanding what you personally stand for. Because one of the things I think we both experienced, and again probably lots of other people have as well, is a lot of people can be very on their soapbox, I stand for this, I'm going to stand up for that until it either involves hitting them in their own pocket, or they're making some quite difficult change in their life. So, I'm seeing a lot of on a micro level, a lot of people demonstrating quite a lot of epoxy and saying, yeah, I stand for this, I stand for justice, I stand for this, as long as it doesn't affect my decisions. I can do it because I'm talking about something that's far away that doesn't directly involve me at the moment. But actually, how am I acting out and behaving on my day-to-day decisions, on my day-to-day way that I'm living my life, the way I'm speaking to people, the way I'm spending my money, are they in line with my core values or not? Absolutely. And if they're not, then we're no better than the virtue signalers on the other side. The last episode I did with Sean Stone, which we're going to be filming with him later, he said something genius, like if you don't agree with The Matrix, then why are you still shopping at certain coffee shops? I won't say the name of them. You have to start, and it's going to make you uncomfortable, like change is always uncomfortable. But change is never, for a lot of people, that friction of change can be not pleasant. If you've ever done a detox, you know how unpleasant that can be for a while, right? But it brings you to a new place. And so, yeah, at the end of the day, it is that man in the mirror. You've got to start with you. And what is that true character? Is how you behave when nobody else is looking? Absolutely. And I think this is why a lot of the stuff, as you were saying, that the teacher teaches what they most need to learn. So part of the stuff why we're having this series on meditation, I'm doing my manifestation one, is because you and I have found this so instrumental in terms of how we cope with trying to stop getting drawn into things when we see ourselves. And I do, you know, I see myself getting drawn into things, but I catch it a lot quicker these days. And also, I then know what to do about it. When I'm seeing my sort of reactivity levels go up, I know what I can do that works for me. So for me, it is either a bit doing the meditation, or getting out and walking the dogs or walking the horses or, of course, cuddling a cat. But yeah, you find what works for you as an individual. And that can take some time to build up, can't it? Yeah, there's a great book. I was actually telling our friend Stephanie this morning, there's a great book, of course, written by Rom Doss. You would think I was one of his publicists, even though he's no longer with us. But I really just really, Rom Doss is one of my favorite teachers ever. And it's called Polishing the Mirror. And it's it's his own story. But the first time I read it, I cried my way through it, because he talks a lot about this. He talks a lot about being able to observe your emotions, being able to be that's a power move. If I'm kind of on this kick of power moves, you know, so many times we get swept up into our emotions, right to the point where it's all you know, that expression seeing red when you're mad, like that's all you can be in is this vibration of whatever emotion it is, be it good or bad. And part of your power move as a living breathing soul is to be able to feel that emotion. But no, it's just an emotion. And observe it as interesting. And then you start when you start to be able to do that, according to like yogic philosophy, you start to bring power away from the ego. And you're bringing it back to the humility of the soul. You know, and I think I think and this again is for me too, I have to catch myself in this all the time because I'm super emotional.  It's so hard when someone pisses you off or there's been some injustice done for you to say like, okay, I just have to settle into this and just let it be. I'm feeling this emotion right now because of cause and effect of what happened. It's just an emotion. It's just a thought. It's going to pass. But I need to focus on myself. But it also goes back into this too, which we see it a lot. And you know, like 20 year olds get into this, but they're 30 and 40 year olds that get to this as well, where we're basing our inner happiness on somebody else. We see this a lot of love relationships. Like you're never going to be happy in a relationship until you're actually able to love yourself. So you're actually able to be happy by yourself. Then you can come into a healthy place within a relationship as well. And so you think about that with your relationship to the outside world and to your own nature. You have to be able to observe and that power move is like you said, going, ah, I see this. I see when this is coming. I can spot this coming instead of just living in that emotion and projecting it out of you. I hope that makes sense. I know this is all kind of fluffy, but yeah, no, this really does. And one of the things that I was having an interesting discussion with someone about weekend was about how that links in to boundaries and not allowing yourself to be ghastly to walk all over. And actually, I think for me personally, it works perfectly with boundaries, because when you've got control, you recognize your own emotions and you've got tools and techniques in place to bring them under control. It's so much easier not to get walked all over, isn't it?  Yes, exactly. Well, also, when you start noticing when you're doing that to people, then you can have a healthy way of stopping other people doing that to you as well, because you start to recognize patterns. Human beings, we live in patterns. Nature lives in patterns.   So you have to learn how to establish those boundaries for yourself and understand that toxic people will give pushback to your boundaries. And that's okay. And that's a healthy friendship, a healthy person will respect when you put a boundary up and we'll back off. It's like, with everything I've been through these last three months, I've just now made it a rule on my channel that when we have Stephanie on that, we're not going to ask about anybody else in the chair readings. It's just going to be about yourself. And that's because I realized that because of what had happened to me, like that wasn't cool. That's not cool. It's not cool to channel someone or look at their natal chart without their permission. Like that's not cool. It doesn't feel good. And so because I can recognize the issues that caused for me and the pain that caused for me, I'm not going to inflict that on somebody else, regardless of whether I know them or not. And so now we've established that rule. That's a boundary now that we're only going to take questions that pertain to you and how it can help, how the tarot cards can assist you and your growth, you know, and hopefully that will help people shift instead of looking in somebody else's backyard to see what they're doing, looking in your own backyard. And therefore, true healing can happen. True healing can't happen through somebody else. You can have a great therapist, a great healer that's a conduit, but the person who has to do the work is you. It's you. Yeah. And finding sort of who resonates you if you need to, to help you on that journey is really, really important. And I think most people that are watching this over the last couple of years, they're really working out what the balance is right for them in terms of listening and being aware of external information. And you and I, both in our respective areas, we love researching. We just love it. So, you know, that's something that gives me a lot of energy, gives me a lot of joy. It really keeps me sort of ticking over nicely. But equally, you've got to balance all about balance about, okay, I'm looking externally at certain things. And I've got to balance that with my own inner work, because it's very, very easy to sort of get particularly with what we've all been discovering over the last couple of years to focus your intention on what's wrong in the world, what's wrong with other people without doing the inner work. And I think I am noticing a lot of people certainly in our audiences are really recognizing that and really, you know, stepping up that balance. Yeah, it's so exciting to see people getting excited about meditation and doing their own healing. And that is going to bring up, you know, it's not, you know, when you go for healing, the scary thing is it is going to bring about the dark night of the soul. There are, there is going to be an ego death. And those are not fun to go through. It takes a very brave person to be able to stop looking into somebody else's backyard and to look at their own self that takes bravery and courage and guts.  And so it's exciting to see so many people rediscovering themselves. You know, if we all were able to settle into our spirit and our vibration of who we really are instead of focused on somebody else, then this world would be such an incredible place. And we can all do that. It's not unattainable. It's absolutely attainable. We can all do that. And when you start stepping into this, so let's take meditation because it's one of the things of, you know, what we were going to be talking about today, both here but also with when we're talking going to be spoken to Shaun Stone later in the week now. For me personally, you know, we talked about before, I think I've been playing at meditation for years and years. But when I really decided to make a practice of it, a consistent practice of it, everything changed. And suddenly I can almost remember, I mean, for me, the biggest breakthrough I have was at the first one day Joe dispenser seminar that I went to. And it was a really interesting day because I bought my husband a ticket for his Christmas present. He really didn't want to go. But I really wanted him to get into it because I thought it would really help him. But unfortunately at that time had a really dear friend who's no longer with us. But because she was had a very serious illness, and she was coming along with us, and it was really important to her. My husband knew he had to be on his best behavior and take it seriously.  Because he sat there and he saw just how amazing Joe dispenser was in real life and how, you know, nothing was scripted. He didn't read from any presentation. It was all off the cuff. And then most importantly, he was sitting down and doing it and being guided through by an expert. And he just got it straight away because he's really good at quietening his mind. And what we've done so far, and it's been it was really helpful for me because then when he was on board, we were able to carve out time together, not not even if we did the meditations together, but that just to really keep ourselves accountable that yes, this is really important. And we are going to make a consistent practice of it. And I can honestly say that since we've done that, everything in my life has changed everything, the connection with the animals, the connection with other people, the connection with myself, the connection with nature and a lot of the other fun things that you and I talk about, you know, the telepathy and things like that, all these other hidden parts of our brains and abilities start able to show themselves, don't they? Yeah, in yoga, we call those the cities. They come out in the third and fourth pada, which I'm technically not supposed to be talking about, but I'm going to talk about anyway, because I can do it. I want someone adult, I'm just kidding. But the cities, yeah, that's um, so what tends to happen, what we learn about the ego is not only does the ego or the fault sense of self make you more pompous and more fear based, but the ego also hides things from you. It hides things that you don't know you can do. And only until that ego death starts to happen, do you realize that there is a whole other side of your consciousness that the ego itself was hiding. And that is one of the telepathy, the heightened intuition that is part of the cities of the third and fourth pada. There's more cities. There's like levitation is a city being able to make things appear like consciously create like two apples out of one is a city. I can't do that. I've read stories of people who can, but that's a cool city to have. But you know, so all these things that deal with like how you start to understand your own consciousness, because we know like consciousness is not really this hardcore matter. It's constantly moving and changing.  And you think about children, children see things that adults don't see. And that doesn't freak them out. It's because the ego isn't really there yet. It starts to build over time. And I love that he had such an experience. I was we were talking about this on the phone. And I think a lot of people don't really understand what the term guru means. And I know that there are a lot of people that take advantage of the term guru. All the guru really is like someone who's mastered a part of a teaching. And I was telling you that in India, at least like we know the guru can heighten the because they've mastered this to a point themselves doesn't mean they're perfect. It doesn't mean you should lionize them. It doesn't mean they should be on a pedestal. But they've mastered this, this craft, whichever one it is, whatever form of meditation it is, to a certain point that they can hold a certain vibration consciously, hold a certain element of vibration for the student so that the student can experience a potential that they have until they have that marker. So that when they leave the guru and practice on their own, they have more of an ability to to recreate that if that makes sense. Yeah, perfectly. And it's a really, really important point, because I think this is where you start to see the real teachers break away from the sort of more amateur ones, because there's only a certain level in any level of teaching you can get unless you've really embodied that skill yourself. Now, I don't mean say if you're a tennis coach, some some sports coaches can be absolutely brilliant coaches without physically be able to do it. But they've studied it so much, they understand the swing, they understand the technique, they understand how the mind of body works together. So, and whatever level of it is, you have to be sort of quite at a master level. And then you can even be at a master level, but not be able to explain it to other people. That is a different skill. And on top of that, to actually be able to teach that to other people successfully, as you say, hold that vibration. And it's also, you know, the guru, the master teacher's role is to also be able to notice you as the student to your blind spots. That's why in true spiritual form, you have to have a teacher. It's called Parampara. You have to have a teacher, because otherwise, if your blind spots are not being managed, you're going to go off into like Crazyville, you know, because it's now there's not going to be somebody there to manage what you what you're actually working through. And the ego then has the propensity to grow even bigger, because that teacher isn't there to like keep you on your path. Now, the teacher isn't doing the work for you. It's like my teacher in India. If we're in the mice or room and someone does a handstand when they're not supposed to, he goes and pushes them over.  And that's that's that's really, really important that you have someone, whether it's someone like Joe Dispensa, where you go one time or it's someone you're following or something that you have something to help you understand the complexity of who you are. And yeah, again, I want to I want to just say that the guru again, I'm going to say this again is not someone for you to lionize. Don't lionize anyone and a good guru would not allow you to lionize them. They would put a boundary up when it that's a good guru would would definitely put a boundary up and say, No, no, no, no, this is about you. I'm here for you. You're the star, not me.  They have a teacher too. They have so it's all of us keeping each other accountable, but not stepping into each other's way as far as how one grows. So it's it's it's so it's you know, when you get into these deep spiritual practices, regardless of whether because the form of a meditation I practice is the Tristana method. So my meditation is very different from what you see other people doing, which we can talk about in a later date. But that is what works for me because my I am my dosh is Vata, it's air. And so mine, I do have the propensity to overthink. I do have the propensity to put myself in a place of anxiety or are just exhausting a thought. And so the Tristana method works for me in order to get the mind to focus on something else so it can calm itself down. But but yeah, it's it's it's it's interesting and it's fun when you start to I mean, sometimes it's fun.   Because you just change so much so much about you changes. Oh, and you find out so much about yourself that you didn't even know on the way. And I think it's a really important thing that you said about the meditation and we've spoken about it before. There's so many different types. And that none of them are better or worse than another different things will meditate will resonate with you at different times. So you might want to start off with one method and then you might progress on to another. But when I mean progress, I mean, just because you're to stage where you're looking for something different, not in terms of hierarchical progression. And it is literally just natural evolution. And it's really, really important that you know, to drop the comparison side of things. Because, you know, just because someone else might sit there sitting there for six hours a day meditating isn't necessarily better than sitting there for half an hour a day. You need at that time. And there's a purpose for all extremes. And it also depends on where you live in the world. So this is an Ayurvedic trick. So I live in the middle of a city. I'm smack dab in the middle of six million people, like literally living on top of each other. And so for me, a city because of the lights and the sounds and the noise and the energy is considered lotta, which is what I naturally am anyway. There's lots of lights, there's lots of sounds, there's lots of like derangement going on. And so one of the laws of Ayurveda, which is the sister science to yoga is, is that you cannot be as pure as your external world if the imbalance in harmony. And so for someone like myself, meditating for two, three, four hours a day sitting on a meditation pillow would end up causing me to go into vata derangement because of my external world. But someone like Catherine, because she lives in a beautiful country, she has more of ability to sit quietly longer because it matches her outside world. I hope that like it's so it's when you start to look at the Ayurveda of energy, energy works like, oh my gosh, this makes so much sense. It's like if you live in the city of London and you are a strict raw vegan, you would probably have some more health issues than someone who lived where Catherine is and is a strict raw vegan. Catherine and I are both vegetarians. But I always laugh with my students. I'm like, yeah, because you live in a city that means you get to go have a beer every now and again because you have to, you can't be as pure as your environment because you have to keep yourself in that balance. And that's something that's super, super interesting. So therefore it is going to be different literally for every person depending on where they are. There is, I was just looking at my candle here, I have a little sage candle. There is a meditation that's super simple or all you do is for like 10 minutes, you just watch a flicker of light. So you do for 10 minutes, something simple like that and see the calmness that comes over your mind. It doesn't have to be something as elaborate as the Tristanametha like I do or sitting for three hours or there's one in one of Romdoss books, he talks about going to this meditation retreat where they would have to sit up so straight that one of the proprietors would like whack them with a stick if they started to slouch over. It doesn't have to be that extreme guys, he actually laughed about it like I didn't need to do that. But it can be something super simple is just looking at a flickering flame for 10 minutes, start there. I did a Zoom the other night with some girls and I taught them the Om chanting. We did the Om Ganapathayana Ma, the Ganesha Chanta and then we just did just a simple Om and all you need is five minutes and that starts you on your journey. So yeah, everything, everybody's different, every stage of life is different, everybody's physical mental placement in life right now are different and so you have to meet yourself where you are, not where somebody else is. Yeah and that makes such sense about the environment because we've spoken quite a lot before about us all being energy and you know the tuning forks just you set off one tuning fork and the other tuning fork has to match the vibration so it will either come down or up depending on what its starting point was. So if you're an environment, every environment's got a certain vibration and so it might be more challenging for you depending on your personality type and that's where it's really important to recognize recognize when there's the resistance, recognize when there's the blocks and look at do you want to do something about that and making realizing that there's so much about our lives that we can actually change. So even if you can't say you're a country bumpkin like me and you want more life force and you want to go out and live in a city well if you can't go and move house then perhaps you can go and spend one day a week there or something it's looking at what you can do and having that mindset of okay what am I missing what feels out of alignment for me what are my options to do something about it.  I told an episode with Shanti I was engaged in my early 30s to a man who was very abusive and I actually almost lost my life one night I got strangled and I was talking about everything that happened after that and I did go through trauma therapy and I look back at that now and even though people would label that as like oh that's awful that's horrible it was one of the greatest gifts the universe ever gave me because it forced me it forced me to have to change it forced me to have to go deeper into my own work to heal from that and to figure out why I'd attracted that and so and so yeah it every obstacle you have whether you're living somewhere you don't want to live or you're you can't you're stuck because your city's still like super into this you know narrative of you know the the virus that seems to have gone away overnight but you know what is this opportunity teaching me and how what can I do to transform it that's as as our friend Shanti says that's the power of alchemy it's taking the lead and changing it into gold and you have that power and only you only you can do that for yourself nobody else can do that for you only you can and that's scary but that's also a huge power move that you have that power it's so lovely to go through that and acceptance is such a big part of that as you said you know you you can't move on until you accept where you are and accept where you are there's a big difference between guilt and judgment and actually full acceptance what have I attracted into my life um you know I tend to have a giggle about it because I can have been through stages of my life where it's taken me a little bit longer than it should have to learn the lesson and now I look back and now I think that was all perfect because I did need that extra lesson without it I hadn't really internalized what the lesson was I sort of got it at an intellectual level but I hadn't internalized and transmitted it so I think accepting where you are is so so important and when you do that you're from running aren't you yeah and I want to you brought up something interesting that I just want to head on to the difference between guilt and shame guilt and shame are two totally different things and if you've made a mistake in your life if you've done something that you regret sometimes people get stuck in this hamster will of shame shame is all encompassing for the whole physical being and I think you can look at someone you love or care about family or friend and if they do something wrong and it hurts your feelings you know you still love that person because you know it was the action that was wrong that's when the guilt that's where the guilt comes from but the shame and so a lot of times I think we get stuck in our own habitual patterns because we get stuck in the sense of shame that because we did something wrong or because something bad happened in our life that we might have caused we are now bad no it was just one action that was misaligned and once you realize that you become so liberated and so free to then course correct and understand that you're not that you're not that obstacle you can use that to transmute it into gold and so I would encourage people too to get out of the shame understand guilt is guilt for a reason but shame is different and no one should be ashamed of being a human being because we're all enough and we all you we all have guilt but shame is something that's different and so that yeah I like that you said about the whole like things like learning yeah yeah absolutely and we always joke about learning from our animals and you saw Idris arrive here who's in here now Idris what did you do today so this is a perfect example so we've got my new cat Mitzi who's in a separate room and they're sniffing through the bars and when I bought Mitzi out into the office here and he went into the room she's been in did you spray did you spray urine all over her room to mark it as yours Idris his work is tell he doesn't feel any shame or territory and does this look like a cat that's feeling any shame or guilt no I don't know he's in my house but actually quite so I think that's a nice haste and it's we joke about animals teachers so much but he's like you know I'm king of the roost now this is my thing I'm going to go and spread it urine all over my son's room where the cat is sorry Joe I promised it wouldn't happen but it has um um so you know so it's Idris isn't feeling guilty about it I won't either yeah just it is what it is yes do not be ashamed of yourself you've done something bad recognize it as a separate action course correct and if you've done something that you're regretting your guilt for you can course correct and transmute that led to gold anyway and so it's not at that point it's not a mistake anymore but a valuable tool in your tool belt so too right too right oh thank you so much for a nice coffee turtle and my my lovely herbal tea um and we've both got exciting weeks coming out we've got a lot of um you know fullness in our lives at the moment of spending time doing things that lift us and everything haven't we yeah yeah and I'm super excited about our guests we have coming on later this week too because I think that will be a very interesting conversation a very full conversation and I want to hear what you guys do too like what lessons have you and we said last week we want to do a coffee chat tour and you guys all responded positively that'd be so much fun so let's make that happen eventually when we can but in the meantime since we have a virtual coffee table with all with everybody watching let us know your thoughts like what have you transmuted in your life how do you meditate how do you course correct have you mastered the ability to catch your emotions before they become out of hand um let us know I want to hear I want to hear from you too because that's why we have this channel is not for us to preach but for us to learn so yeah and learning from other people's approaches is so so important this is what I love most about the comments that we see below because people are so helpful and they will literally say well this worked for me or this didn't work for me and it's really it's really healing isn't it sometimes to put that down but also everyone who's sharing what has and hasn't worked for them that is a direct benefit there will be someone in that chat that needs to know that probably us but you know it is really really important so we really appreciate anyone who takes the time to do that and takes the time to watch it and until our next coffee chat thank you all so much bye


Hey, Alex. Hello. How are you? Good. It's good to see you, man. Yeah, see you here. Right on. And I think we'll be spending some time like in the next hour or two today as well with the CNS day content planning. So you thought, I hope you missed me, Alex, because it looks like you're gonna get a lot of me now. We love you. You are best. How's that? How's everything going for you, Alex? Oh, no, all good. All good. Super busy, but all good. Are you getting ramped up for Amsterdam? Yeah. It's always super busy. There's always a lot of, let's say, motivation that comes along in time for KubeCon. This is the gist. I get a whole lot done right around the two months before KubeCon, let's say. I know. It's like, and then you have like projects, like in project review requests six weeks before, you know. Yeah. I wonder what's driving that? Are the meeting notes linked from the RICO? Or you just put it in the chat, Alex? Yeah, so I put the Meteor agenda there. Afternoon. Evening, depending on time zone, everyone. So I just posted the agenda in the chat window. We have a fairly long set of agenda items to cover today. So I think we won't hang around and we can get right through it. So the first thing on the agenda is the Rook project. So the Rook project was introduced as a CNCF project probably 18 months ago now, 24 months ago. Yeah, January 18th. And it started off as Sandbox progressed to incubation and then the Rook projects are looking to upgrades to a graduated project. So I've invited Jared and I see there's Travis here on the call as well from the Rook team to kind of give us an update on the status and what we are going to expect from the due diligence process that we need to just cover off from the SIG to get the project over the line. Cool. All right, Alex. Thank you very much. Let me go ahead and share my screen so I can just walk through a couple of things real quick if you don't mind. So just to put things into perspective, I don't think we're yet at the stage where you have a formal presentation or a formal PR yet, right? So this is the pre-work. Yes, exactly. Can you see the slide deck here now? We can. Okay, awesome. And actually the first slide here, Alex, is about what the expectations are for today. So we went through the process for going from Sandbox to incubation last year over a year ago and we did the whole formal presentation to the TOC and writing up all the due diligence and a pull request to the TOC repo, all the criteria steps. We went through that whole thing and we're in the middle of that right now for graduation, the graduation criteria. So after talking to our, you know, CNCF liaisons, Amy and Chris and a check, you know, one of the things that we learned is necessary as a step this time for graduation is to talk to the SIG and get the review and diligence done by the SIG here. So we wanted to just go ahead and get the conversation started today. We are not ready for a full proposal, but we want to go ahead and figure out where do we have gaps, where are some obstacles and things that we should be concerned about. And, you know, what are the next steps that we need to need to work through? So the goal, the hopeful goal here is that we would be able to finish the graduation process and all the diligence and have a vote by the TOC before we've gone and answered down, which is at the very end of March. So that's the hopeful timeframe we have here. And so the quick introduction about Rook, we'll go to this quickly here, is that the whole Rook project here was started about three years ago and it is a cloud-native storage orchestrator. So what that means is that it has a lot of automation and through custom controllers and CRDs within Kubernetes that automates a whole bunch of storage management and deployments, operational tasks. And it started off as being a operator specifically for CEP, distributed storage system. And around the time of getting transitioning from sandbox to incubation, we went ahead and started an effort on a framework to allow other storage providers and solutions to be part of the Rook project and to get the benefits of orchestration and automatic management in Kubernetes environments. So as Alex was saying, we got accepted into the sandbox stage in January of 2018. It was the first storage project to be accepted into the CNCF and at that time our sponsor was Ben Heineman. And then we went to the incubation stage in September of 2018. And so for this next stage graduation, we have a proposal. We're going to be talking to Saad more about that for Saad and his new, one of his first tasks as being a new TOC member is to hopefully sponsor the Rook project. So hopefully and Kubernetes, Saad's on the call. Yes, he is. I saw that. And I've got a meeting scheduled with Jared later today. Yep, so we'll be chatting. And thanks for all your effort and support over the years Saad, for sure. So let's go ahead and call it real quick. Some of the things we know are to-dos right now, things we have not done. So submitting the diligence poll request and official proposal to the TOC repo, that is going to be all written up and submitted formally. We have a list of production users and adopters of the Rook project. We need to finalize that and flesh that out a little bit more. We have a couple of governance updates that Travis will be walking through in a second. And we are updating or implementing our security disclosure process. So we have a poll request that's almost done with that. So that should be done soon. And we also know that we need to do our core infrastructure initiative, best practice badge, like 80% through that. And so we need to finish that off as well. So those are the things we know we have not done, the gaps we're aware of. And just a quick walk through before I head it over. Sorry, just a quick one. The security audit, that's being completed, but you just need to cover off the results and stuff. Yes. So the security audit is completely done. And we did that with the trail of bits. They also did one of the upstream Kubernetes security audits. So that's fully completed all of the issues were identified in the, I think that's on one critical issue that has been since fixed and patched and released. And the full write up of that is published and available. I think we need to link it from the repo. So it's more available in public, but that's done. This year is just a security disclosure process of if someone in the wild finds the security bug, how do they responsibly disclose it? And what is our process around that? So the audit is done, but then the process for finding new security bugs and disclosing them is the thing that's not done yet. Perfect. Yep. And then real quick, some numbers on a slide here. So on the left is what our stats were for the project in the community at the incubation acceptance stage. And then on the right is where we are current day. So, you know, container downloads is another 10x from sandbox to incubation was 10x from like 1 million to 10 million and then now 10 million to 100 million. So the project continues to grow in popularity with GitHub stars. We have a lot more releases where, you know, doing a lot more agile release process there to get more fixes out contributed a lot of most most everything is at least to 2x to 3x growth since the incubation phase. So you know, the community still expresses interest and, you know, they're gaining more adopters and the project continues to grow pretty healthily with both contributors commits and usage as well. So I'll hand it off to Travis to talk about some of the actual accomplishment in work. Yep, the real work we're getting down here. So since since incubation, we've definitely had a lot of a lot going on in the project. We have basically a quarterly cadence as far as getting releases out. So from vo.9 up to 1.2 was our latest release in December. You know, some of the major things going in, like edgafast, Cassandra, NFS operators are all new back in the O.9 release, UGBI-DB in 1.1. So up to six storage providers now in Rook. There are a couple others in early phases of called a PR open right now for Apache Ozone, which is a possibility. But anyway, stored providers and making it available for others has been a journey. Two of those, SF and edgafast have been declared stable as far as the CRDs and supportability. Like Jared said, we've completed the security audit. We don't really have time to dive into all the features of all the operators, but maybe one dimension is CSI drivers for both SF and edgafast have been implemented and consider those stable and lots of other features. But we really will miss the flex volume driver. Are you sure? No. It'll be around for a while, but CSI is definitely the future. And then we've been collecting our production adopters. A lot of them, probably, I think Jared, you said 60% of the people who surveyed don't want to publicize what company they're from. So there are a lot more than this list, but here are some of them that said we could publish their names. So we are following up with them to get quotes and things for how they're using Rook and how big their clusters are and things. Also, I guess, missed in this list, there are products based on Rook and production. We haven't collected those stats either. I know at least Red Hat and Sousa and maybe others are building on it. So that's another avenue. But we didn't query those users, just the upstream people. And I think that's about it. What did I miss, Jared? No, I think that's really what we wanted to share today here. And we know there's a busy agenda today, so we don't want to take up too much time. But if there's any obvious feedback or we can follow up in other channels, like on the mailing list, or you can email us directly, and we can talk about what are the things we really need to focus on and worry about such that we'll have good chances of proceeding with our next steps for the graduation. Jared, I think this is perfect. This is kind of like the textbook process that you follow through sandbox and incubation graduation. I don't personally see any major stumbling blocks. What I can say is that, you know, just the nature of the TOC's busyness before KubeCon, you should try and get those last checkbox items wrapped up in the next week because practically it takes a couple of weeks before there's a TOC meeting and then they vote, and people are out of office. It can take up to a month just to get that process completed. So it sounds like you've got most of the checkboxes checked, and it sounds like you really know what's going on here. But just leave enough time for the bureaucracy to take shape. Yeah, that sounds great, Quentin. Thank you very much for that advice there. Brilliant. Okay, so I think the follow-up item then will be to if you finish off those checkbox items and the security order, etc., and finish off the presentation, then maybe at the next SIG meeting we can do the formal presentation and have that recording, and then we can put together the docs for the SIG box. Alex, your voice is fading in and out. Oh, sorry. Can you hear me better now? Yeah, much better. Thanks. Okay, sorry. So I was just saying, so the next steps is if we finish off those checkboxes and then have a proper formal presentation in the next SIG meeting, then we can have that recording, plus the due diligence doc, and our recommendation for the TOC votes for the next, for the early, early March, I guess that would make it. Yeah, that sounds great, Alex, and we'll follow up on all that. And we'd love to be on the agenda to do the proper presentation proposal next SIG meeting. Awesome. All right. Thank you. So we'll put you on there. Should we assign somebody from the SIG to do the kind of formal review? Yes, we are great in needs to allocate someone. I'm guessing that's not going to be you now, right? Because you're on this thing. Right, that would be of interest, yep. Yeah, I'll just be clear. I don't think there is a conflict of interest there. I think you can represent the TOC and the SIG, and by the way, congratulations on. So I wouldn't personally worry too much about that unless there's some major concerns that this seems like a very straightforward graduation process to me. Just to be clear, the majority of the due diligence happens in the migration to immigrate to, what is the word I've just lost? Incubation. That's the one. So unless there have been major regression since then, it's mostly getting this badge, getting the security order done, making sure that you have enough contributors, enough maintainers from different companies, etc., most of which it seems you've done. You're just getting the final reports together. So we can get somebody else to do the due diligence, but the due diligence is essentially making sure that all those things have actually been done. It sounds like they have, so there's not much to do. Okay, that makes sense. I just don't want there to be any question or my double involvement potentially derailing this. So I think it would be safer just to have someone else do it. Yeah, we can do that. Before we, one last item just before we move on from Rook, are there any particular reservations that anyone on the call has that we haven't done the due process here? Seems to me like we have. Okay, thanks. I think we're good. Okay, so I added in, so just moving on to the next item on the agenda. So the Harbor Project, at the last meeting we put in links for the different PRs and the DD docs and Saad was allocated to do an overview with them. With the project, has that gone ahead? I have not gotten a chance to follow up on that. That's still a to-do for me. Okay. So this is, this is Michael from the Harbor team. I mean, the, what we've done with Sea Grantime and I put a link there is, they, you know, they're also as busy as everybody else. And they've asked me to create a PR that basically kind of drives some of the due diligence that the SIG was supposed to do. And that PR essentially is just one file that kind of puts all the checks and balances that the SIG is supposed to do. And they were going to just go through it really quickly and verify it. They, that we've done what we're supposed to and answer in those 10 questions. Saad, we really appreciate it. If we have some time to look at it, we're really trying to at least get a decision from the TOC if we're going to graduate before Cubicon and we've been on hold now for like almost four months. So it'd be good if we can actually get the process moving a little bit. Yeah, I'll try to find some time in the next couple weeks. Thank you. I'll reach out to you on Slack. Thank you. Do you want me to create a similar document like what I did for SIG Runtime where all you have to do is with your good with it, you just merge the PR? Yeah, that would work. Okay, I can do this. I'll do this and pink you. Perfect. And just shoot me an email. My email is on GitHub. That'll be my way to track this. You prefer email or the Slack? I do email. The email. Okay, I'll try to find your email. All right. Thanks, Michael. Awesome. Okay, so then just an update to the team. We completed the review of the Dragonfly project. We submitted... Lex, you're fading away again. Oh, no. Can you hear me now? A little bit better. Sorry about that. So we completed the review for the Dragonfly project. We submitted a couple of queries to the team. They've provided the replies this week, which is great. And I think going through the replies, this covers off the queries I had anyway. So I am going to give this a thumbs up and put an addendum in the DD that we covered this off. And we can have that closed off from a SIG review point of view. Okay. Then, moving on, this week, we had... No, late last week, sorry. We had the SIG chairs and TOC meeting where we covered off the process and templates for SIG project reviews. The good news is that this is now being agreed. We have the process which Liz had been driving, which is covered in the slide deck, and she has created a PR to update the existing criteria and process on the TOC GitHub. Erin's templates, which is basically a merge of templates we already had in the SIG storage together with the templates in SIG apps has been combined. And we put it into the issue 344, which is linked there. And that template was agreed on too. So this needs to be finally converted to... The issue just needs to be converted to a PR so it can get approved. But I think we now have a proper easy to follow process and set of templates that we can use for sandbox incubation projects. So I think this is a really good milestone between the TOC and the SIG. Thank you everyone for the work involved to get us to this point. Okay. Next point. So we have two sets of edits, which we're looking to merge into the landscape document. So the first being the database update stock, which Sugu had written. I've made some changes and asked for a review. Sugu and Quinton have put in their comments, which all look great to me. So I'm just going to add that into the document. It would be great if anybody else who has comments would have a quick look at that database update document, which is now being outstanding for a little while, but we would love to close this off. So assuming there aren't any more updates by the end of this week, I'll look to merge this into our landscape white paper. Similarly, Jing had an action to update the orchestration and management interfaces section to reflect the current state of the market. Given that over the last 18 months since we published the white paper, there have been sort of a number of changes around CSI and things like that. So there's a link to the updated doc that she has refreshed in the link attached on the agenda as well. And she has also sent it out as an email. It would be really great if people could review that. It looks good to me. And again, assuming there are no major review points this week, I'll look to merge that into the landscape documents. And what this will give us will then be a landscape document, which is sort of refreshed for 2020 with the database updates and will become sort of our 2.0 white paper, which we will then look to publish and publicize and market, etc., in the run up to in the run up to KubeCon. Any comments or questions on that? So this is so good. That optional section, we are going to use that content for the use case document, right? That's correct. So we're going to move that optional content into the use cases and I'll cover that in a little bit. Sounds good. I think that was the person complaining about that previously. But now that Alex's table is in there, I'm very happy to move the optional stuff to the other doc. Awesome. All right. So it sounds like we have agreement there. Jing, did you want to add anything around the management and orchestration updates that you shared out? No, just if someone could review it and add comments. That would be great. Great. Okay. And then we have the performance and benchmarking paper. So the author team met last week and we, no, the week before last now, and agreed on some of the work that we needed to do and started with the updates. We've, Paul Sobi has joined the sort of the white paper team and he's contributed a large chunk of content around the common pitfalls and considerations. So we've kind of got four or five pages there of new content, which is progress. And the rest of the team are working on some of the other benchmark tool documentation. Also, I'm following up with Josh after the TOC call. He mentioned that there were some other tools that we may look to consider that he had been working with as part of the Kubernetes benchmarking performance SIG and we'll probably look to see if there is some commonality or some overlap that we can include in here too. So again, looking for some feedback or points, we're all specifically, we're kind of interested in, are we missing anything obvious? Or if there are overlaps that you are aware of with other documents or other initiatives, it would be kind of good to point them out so that we can put the appropriate references in there. But otherwise, we continue to work on the DOC with a name of having a draft available to share before KubeCon. Any questions on that document? I just had a quick look at it. It looks fantastic, Alex. I think this is going to be a huge benefit to the community in general. I can take a look at it in the next week or so and give you some comments, but superficially it looks very well headed in the right direction. Brilliant. Thank you. All right. So any other things on that or can we move on? Wow, we're going through this agenda pretty quick. So the use case documents. So just to recap on this, the use case documents is something we wanted to work on and has also been the subject of sort of end user feedback. So following on from the content we provided in the landscape white paper, we agreed to put some use case information together to kind of show some of the best practice considerations for specific sets of use cases. And we've had a lot of deliberations. Louise had put together a template, which we had discussed quite a bit. And following some of the feedback, we kind of sort of regrouped and tried to figure out a way forward. So Louise, Erin and myself met last week and we agreed a couple of steps to move forward. So first off, we're going to move the current template, which is in GitHub, to a Google doc to make it a little easier to collaborate. We're going to change the focus of the template so that rather than being specific product use cases, they will be focused on use case categories rather than the specific product. And this is to sort of address concerns of creating unfair bias or showing preference to any particular project or vendor or whatever else. So specifically, we had a bit of a think and again, this is kind of open to debate, but we kind of thought, okay, which categories do we want to have templates drawn up for? And we put together databases, message queues, instrumentation. So to cover things like, say, Prometheus or Thanos use cases, key value stores and object stores. The template that we have currently is pretty good, but we're going to add in we're going to add in a table that will cover the storage attributes from the storage landscape documents. So the availability, consistency, durability, performance, scalability, etc. And we will also add in, we will also add in a sample of the options, similar to the content that Sugarhead put together in the database document. So the options section from the database document. And that will form the basis of the new template. So I'd really love to hear your thoughts on this. Are we heading in the right direction? Are there any, you know, serious objections to this idea? If not, I'll pull together to Google Doc and send it out for review in terms of a template. And then hopefully maybe we can, assuming we can get agreement on the templates, we can move forward with that template and create, you know, the first category. And sort of just make sure that the template works. Thoughts, comments, violent objections. Yeah, I totally agree, Alex. I think that's pretty much a feedback I gave you guys a while back. So I'm totally supportive of what you just proposed. Violent agreements. Well, that's cool. Okay. So in that case, I'll proceed with that. I'll get a Google Doc circulated in time for the next meeting. And maybe we can spend some time at the next meeting to review the template. And then finally, the last thing I had on the agenda was there is some logistics and tidying up that we'd like to do on the repo. So we'd like to have, we'd like to update the repo with things like the list of projects that we're covering and their current status and their current sort of category, whether they're sandbox or incubation or graduation. And maybe put some links to the projects and that sort of thing as well to get some publicity there and to cover projects that have recently been introduced to the CNCF like TribalFS and Longhorn, for example. So I'm happy to do that. But if anybody else wants to volunteer to do a PR, to add that list to the CIG repo, I could do it some help save on time. Alex, I'll take that up. I'll do it. Awesome. Thanks, Karen. I'll just put that down. Okay, so unless anybody has any other agenda items, we've actually gone through a fairly large agenda in a record amount of time. So you can get 25 minutes back. Thank you. Asad, I want to head and create the PR already and send you an email. Perfect. I'll take a look at that. Thank you. Thanks, Michael. No problem. All right. Take care, everyone. All right. Thanks, everyone. Have a good day. Good to see you guys. Bye. See you. Bye.


Now, being that we actually do a whole bunch of business, on the federal level, the state level and the local level, around with my tax dollars, I think that we should first implement a program that stop paying people who actually implement policies that structurally discriminate against me.


Welcome folks, we had the Dow industry was finished down to 87, Nasdaq was up 32, S&Ps up 7.5. And if we go over, first we'll take a look at the spy, folks, what we have with the spy is this, it traded up 68 million shares, traded, yesterday it did 65, bottom line is still going into 214 million, big numbers, and the X100, three Q's, you get a failure in price, failure in volume as you got into the highs of the 4th of March. We hit a high today of 176.14, you closed at 175.69, which was below the high that we're trading into, you did 32 million shares versus 38, so bottom line, subtle, but you got a failure there, price and volume. Small caps, now the small caps have been the weakest, bottom line is still the weakest out here, small caps are up 8 cents today, the high in the small caps is 159.50 inside the IWM here at 154, and 154.37, bottom line, no action there. Gold contract, gold contract caught a bid as did silver, the gold contract today, you got $10.90, you traded in the 1302, you've done 19, 193,000 contracts, nice contract volume, you're going into big contract volume however, we're going into the downdraft that was created out here on the 1st, that's when gold went down 1316 to 1291, that being said, you're eating right into that line, and silver also came up with really good bids out here today, silver was up 1.1%, you did volume of 51,000 contracts, nice contract volume. Notes and bonds are still saying that all that they want higher price, lower yield, what has also happened folks is this, is that as these want higher price, lower yield, what you're dealing with is that that is what's also pushing that metals market, because guess what, when we're talking about interest rates that continue to go down, right now the 10-year is just, it's at 2.600, so we are going to be under 2.6 tomorrow, what we have out here in the 10-year is that you've come into the swing point today, you have the volume come into the swing point, this is going to go after the highs of January 3rd, and I expect we're going to see that tomorrow, and it looks like the 30-year wants to actually take it out, which is pretty amazing. Stay right there folks, you're going to be coming back with numbers after the close, recapping of the Dow industrials, down 96, Nasdaq up 32, Esquiz up 6.5, come right back.


Okay, we're back here live at Sapphire in Orlando, Florida. This is Silicon Angle and Wikibon's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events district to signal from the noise. We are ground zero for Sapphire. This is the Global Communications Center. We're all the actions happening. Vishal Sikha behind us earlier. We broadcasted live the press conference, Kosiya, Jim Snabe, and Bill McDermott. And this is where we get all the action. This is where we're broadcasting. We have three straight days. This is theCUBE. Our guest here is Jamie Erbs, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for VCE. And I'm joined by David Floyer from Co-Founder of Wikibon. David, welcome. Jamie, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. First time in theCUBE. Welcome. Oh, thanks. We've had a lot of conversations over the years about SAP and obviously EMC and EMC world about VCE and the world's changed for VCE over the past two years. Yes. In particular, a lot of activity, integration, prefabrication, and obviously software-defined to everything in the world, software-defined data center. So these are the mega trends that are driving a lot of infrastructure changes at the data center where complexity is a big problem, and David Floyer was pointing that out in our last session. So what's the update on VCE from the product standpoint? Give us a quick intro on the update. Well, as you've said, we've undergone a lot of change over the past now three years, a little over three years. And starting from our roots is kind of a service integrator or service-oriented company to now being a product company. So some very dramatic change over the past year and a half as we moved towards that in becoming a product company. And we came out, we came to market with a series of Vblocks or general purpose workload systems that we offer the last two, last year 300 and the 700 served us quite well in the market. We grew pretty dramatically, pushing out billion dollars in the run rate. So we've had a nice run of it. But this year we started to also think about applications, a lot more significantly about applications because as we went into the data center, saw the complexity there, saw the application landscapes, and we quickly realized that infrastructure really had to adapt to and accommodate the kind of applications that were running there. So we have moved towards as well another product category called specialized systems. And the first offering in that category is SAP HANA. So that is a HANA appliance that's designed and made for execution and support delivery of SAP HANA. And that's our first entry. Others to come in that space for us, but we find that it's a great experience for customers in that we're able to offer the VCE experience as a whole as far as our total value proposition in the context of the mixed workload systems that we sell as well as now HANA right alongside it. So SAP landscape as a whole can be managed in a very ubiquitous and common way. So we've been talking to a couple of your customers during the last day.  And we talked to Mr. Lin from West who works in Philadelphia. And they were talking about the importance for their environment of reducing complexity, reducing, virtualizing things from reducing costs in those SAP environments, these SAP instances. So can you talk a little bit about the process that you go through with a customer in order to fit VCE into the SAP environment? Yeah, well it really starts before the customer engagement and the engineering that we put into the VCE products. The V-blocks themselves, we do a high degree of physical engineering from the get-go to make sure that these V-blocks can be consistently fabricated in factory. So having a quality and consistent build that's done from factory that lands in a very predictable way from the onset is the right starting point that you need for any kind of an application implementation project. So the engineering that we do from a physical side sets the stage. It drives the consistency and standards in the equipment and the elements that go into the V-block. Then beyond that, we do a logical build as well. And in that logical build, that's what we're pulling forward, the software pieces. We're also in the deal cycle talking with customers about the application landscapes or portfolios that they have that they expect to run on the V-block. And we go through an exercise of sizing the V-block appropriately, putting together the right configurations in terms of storage subsystem configurations, VMware configurations, the balancing between say maybe it's a physical to virtual implementation. So what percentage of the V-block should be configured with what we call bare metal to accommodate physical instance of applications running versus how much of their application landscape will be virtualized. And in many cases, customers maybe don't quite have the confidence to run some applications in a virtualized model, but if they can implement them side by side in the V-block environment, watch that operational behavior and then move them as they're ready. You know, it gives them a nice environment to do that in a predictable and in a safe way. Jamie SAP is announcing a lot of innovations in their portfolio in the line of business process. Cloud is the big one, and VCE really was looking at that as a key enable for these private cloud infrastructure. How are you guys vectoring into that today? Obviously with the CEOs on live behind, actually they're not live, they're on the analysts, the financial press conference, the executive team behind us, you know, we're hearing kind of the echo loud on. And so they got to integrate across their portfolio. That means the data centers need to be retooled. How do you guys vector into that trend that they're putting forward? Yeah, so we've always believed in, you know, choice with customers. We believe that private cloud has a place in the data center, and if we're able to, you know, insert V-blocks in an overall construct and in a strategy for customers that allows them to have their applications running in a public cloud model, private cloud model. We have many customers who, for whatever reasons, still have policies, compliance, challenges where they demand certain applications to run in a private cloud model. So we allow them to use cloud and as a service types of operating models, same operating models they may use against public cloud implementations, but to put, you know, underneath, put the V-block under the same operating model that they have. So that's, you know, our strategy is basically to fit into that hybrid cloud strategy. And we see that also there are some customers that looked to public cloud implementations for infrastructure, for SAP HANA that we heard about, especially from a sandboxing or app dev kind of environment, and to use that as a first step and then move towards a production environment that's in more of a controlled and policy managed environment internally. So in building these systems, how do you deal with keeping them up to date? How do you deal with my memory of my environments and operations was that we were forever having problems in terms of the microcode level of this piece of hardware and the software level of this. How do you integrate that and how do you then integrate the hardware along with the level of the right level of software from Oracle and from SAP and others? Yeah, I think you're alluding to release management. Release management is quite a challenge and I know in my days in operations the network guys would come forward with, I've got the latest firmware and I'm going to do a change window this weekend and we'd hold our fingers and hope that it wouldn't crash, you know, my warmth of implementation and yes, everything else. And then you find out after the fact that conflict with your storage subsystem. And so at VCE, that's exactly one of the investments that we made that, you know, when there's a purchase of a V block, it's not just an acquisition of an asset, but there's a service, an embedded service that comes along in the context of release management, for example. We have a team of engineers that full-time are getting the latest patches, the latest releases and doing, we have a test harness set up with, you know, 2,500 plus test regression tests and such that constantly pound the new software patches, firmware, microcode against the combinatorial of all the different V block arrangements that we expect and we provide a quarterly release to our customers. With clear instructions about what to install first or dependencies, that sort of thing, so it matches into their change window. Again, we're very sensitive that, you know, choice and operating model of the customer is something we have to fit into, so depending on their compliance and the way that they do change activity, we also have customer advocates though and residents that sometimes customers want people with cloud management experience in their shop, so we're able to basically drop people on site as well that live with the customer and perform those changes on their behalf. So with some customers, they really kind of have a hands-off experience with a V block. They, you know, bought the asset, we run the asset on their behalf as well and then above the hypervisor is where they tend to pick up the responsibility for the release or change management of applications above. But we're constantly looking out for, again, that balancing of applications and making sure that the tuning of the system with these advocates and with these residents that the tuning of the system matches their application landscape. So what sort of benefit does that give to an operational people? I was talking to one customer and they were sort of doing a back of a napkin on the benefit. They were thinking they probably would say something in the order of 20% of the people they had doing this sort of work. Is that the operational people? Yes. Is that what you're finding is? Yes. We absolutely are seeing that. And we actually work with customers as well on a TCO analysis perspective to help them quantify expected savings that they'll see. And we tend to break that down across implementation and across ongoing operational practices, whether it's in the release area that I talked about or in reduced downtime. We haven't actually had a, I started in July. I haven't witnessed a severity one outage of V-Block since I started. And I think the last one that I've heard about was about 18 months ago. That's phenomenal availability that's baked into the product. So customers really appreciate that. That gives them, when you're able to apply your people towards not fighting the fires and the outages every day, but attending to the forward movement of the business that too yields savings for customers. We also have a seamless support model, which around incident management when there is an issue that's going on, a single call. So we're providing a multi-vendor management support model that customers can take advantage of and that we provide with every V-Block. And that then allows them as well to reduce the complexity of incident management and resolutions. So time to resolution is expedited and they have less phone calling and management across the different ticketing systems. We integrate that and provide a seamless experience in that regard as well. Excellent. So VCE has been getting a lot of buzz obviously on the speed side, V-Block in particular, right? So speed to value. Yes. We heard 27 months with EMC's IT group. We were talking earlier yesterday, six months they had a real project and you know what a specific need, but again six months this is unheard of and kind of IT years. Right. I mean six months in IT is like six years, IT years. Right. So that's a real issue, right? And people want more integration, want more prefabricated, but there's still integration involved. What product innovation are you guys driving that's going to increase the speed to value in terms of deployments? Right. Gone are the days of the old ERP deployments, so six year migrations and gravy train, consulting gigs. People want milestones, they want to have quick action. So what are you guys driving on the product side? Yeah, so yes, you're right. Right now time from PO to first implementation and putting applications on the V-Block is around 45 days, 50 days along that time. We have seen some very interestingly aggressive projects that have spun up and have started really, you know, time to value is hitting within a 45 day mark. So that's pretty amazing. However, in looking forward, driving simplicity, driving time to value, those are the hallmarks of VCE, our philosophies and what we're investing towards. If you go to our booth here at Sapphire, you'll see an interesting prototype that we have a demo running in booth that introduces TOSCA. And when you're dealing with a highly standardized infrastructure development, the ability to bring in automation tools or standards like TOSCA and enable fast implementation of applications and in this case SAP applications, you can imagine the kind of reduction in time to value that we can drive with that. So we're looking at, you know, it's a 60 second implementation of a package. Of course, the packaging work has to be done, but we're working with SAP on those fronts. But you'll have to come and see the demo to see what we're talking about there. But driving now those concepts of standardization, automation, time to value. Orchestration. Well, yeah, orchestration. Yeah, now we allow customers to have choice in orchestration tools that they use. But TOSCA is one of the things that we proved out and we have a prototype showing. Well, my final question is David, you have any more questions? I just have one more from your background. Yes. I've been in the large node implementation before, building 10,000 node implementations of systems. So where do you think VCE is in applying that to those scale of operations? Yeah, hyper scale kinds of implementations. Yeah. Very interesting world. And yes, in my background, I've got a rich history across startups and a large enterprise. I was the CTO of EDS data center services. Wow, yeah. Hundreds of thousands of servers under management, millions of VMs, that sort of scale. But that's different because it's a thousand enterprises independently managed in a hyper scale environment. Scaling points are different and we do have customers that have that sort of a demand. And in our product strategy, what we have under design and that we're working towards is to allow a hyper scale type model on a trajectory of, say, compute scale or storage scale. We see different balance depending on the, again, it goes back to the applications that you're hosting and running and what does it mean? What drives your scale? There's not one node. No, there's not one model. I think that's something we've always learned in my team. There's never one size fits all, right? But again, we're looking, it's my job, I think, to design in the right levers for expansion, the right levers for understanding capacity expansion points and the right levers for understanding business expansion as well, whether it's geographic in nature and working with EMC. I can't ask for a better kind of business model to work in because I've got $200 billion of R&D coming into my product line, you know? So it's a startup culture, but with that kind of an R&D backing. So I've got, you know, at my fingertips, the Cisco R&D line that comes into our hands and the EMC and the VMware products. So it's, as a matter of fact, I've got too much. Too much choice, you know? It's a nice playground. It is. It is. It's great. So, you know, a couple more questions to spark in my interest. So obviously you have a background in the large environments. You have a background in HP, labs and the kind of environment. Hyperscale's the big buzzword. Yes. So, you know, what's different about VCE now? I mean, the old VCE, you know, Stu Miniman would say, we can find motherhood in Apple Pie, VCE is great. But now with hyperscale going full mainstream in the enterprise, people want hyperscale in the enterprise. They're just trying to put it together. So what's the new innovation that's driving VCE in hyperscale? How does it compete on a cost basis with some of these hyperscales, which are very low cost? They are. They are. And in my conversation with Stu specifically, I said, can you help us, actually, in the translation? Because most of the hyperscale conversations I've had have been more in the public cloud provider context or, you know, companies that are offering at scale internet-based applications or software kinds of services. And, but in the enterprise, the hyperscale demand has been a little less. But I'm sure that there are value, things like, oh, it's low cost. Everybody says that, you know, but why? You know, because of the high degree of standardization, because of the cookie cutter implementations, you know, application design and architecture is very consistent in those worlds, right? So, do you really see that in an enterprise? So, we're trying to look to see the values and the actual advantages of hyperscale. How does that really translate to an enterprise? And that we need to get clarified. And right now- How does the work go to the cloud for those types of applications? There's a balance, exactly. Is there a balance here? And again, back to that hybrid cloud model and how can I facilitate, you know, working within the context of a hybrid cloud type of environment? But, you know, keeping the needs of the enterprise in mind. But I'm very interested to learn more and to hear more feedback from customers about impact of hyperscale specifically to the enterprise. And then I know a little more about design. But right now, like I said, I'm looking for designing the right configuration levers, designing the right capacity expansion levers in our products so that we're able to grow. Flash is definitely a key contribution there, right? So, that'll bring changes. The advances in Cisco and UCS blades, et cetera. So, advances in those product lines, I'm looking to give us the next advantages in our products. Hey, Jimmy Gray, I want to ask you one final question, parting question. Obviously, around the corner is these big mega trends are exploding. Okay, what have you learned in your VCE that you're dealing with right now that you can share with the folks about? What do you think about the most, on a personal level relative to VCE? As a product person, you've got to kind of have the 20-mile stare. And you have to think tactically at the same time.  Right, right. Well, for myself, interestingly enough, it's less about the technology because, as I said, I've got a $20 billion R&D pipeline to give me lots of technology. My focus is around how can I change the supply chain of the data center? How can I change the way that IT is consumed and to rethink how quickly? Again, it's about time to value. How can I continue to push those hallmarks? And so, that's really what I'm looking for the advances. I think the VCE value and what we can contribute in terms of innovation will play into that sort of an outcome of that accelerated time to value of changing the way that technology is acquired, implemented, used, life-cycled. So, the entire life-cycle assurance, you know, and keeping up with that, to me, that's really the contribution that we can make and keep an eye on. Okay. Jimmy Irves, the Vice President of Product Marketing at VCE. VCE is changing the way things are done with VBlock. Great success. We are here at Ground Zero for Sapphire, live in Orlando. This is SiliconANGLE. We're the ones at Cube. Our flagship program. We go out to the events. I'm sure I can see them from the noise in behind us as we're here. We have the executive team for SAP, and we will meet with it shortly and get some more information. And we are on the ground getting all the data we can live in the Global Communications Center in Orlando. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.