(light music) >> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin's been here all week. John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio, banging out all the news. Don't forget to check out siliconangle.com, thecube.net. This is day four, our last segment, winding down. MWC23, super excited to be here. Wayne Duso, friend of theCUBE, VP of engineering from products at AWS is here with Iyad Tarazi, who's the CEO of Federated Wireless. Gents, welcome. >> Good to be here. >> Nice to see you. >> I'm so stoked, Wayne, that we connected before the show. We texted, I'm like, "You're going to be there. I'm going to be there. You got to come on theCUBE." So thank you so much for making time, and thank you for bringing a customer partner, Federated Wireless. Everybody knows AWS. Iyad, tell us about Federated Wireless. >> We're a software and services company out of Arlington, Virginia, right outside of Washington, DC, and we're really focused on this new technology called Shared Spectrum and private wireless for 5G. Think of it as enterprises consuming 5G, the way they used to consume WiFi. >> Is that unrestricted spectrum, or? >> It is managed, organized, interference free, all through cloud platforms. That's how we got to know AWS. We went and got maybe about 300 products from AWS to make it work. Quite sophisticated, highly available, and pristine spectrum worth billions of dollars, but available for people like you and I, that want to build enterprises, that want to make things work. Also carriers, cable companies everybody else that needs it. It's really a new revolution for everyone. >> And that's how you, it got introduced to AWS. Was that through public sector, or just the coincidence that you're in DC >> No, I, well, yes. The center of gravity in the world for spectrum is literally Arlington. You have the DOD spectrum people, you have spectrum people from National Science Foundation, DARPA, and then you have commercial sector, and you have the FCC just an Uber ride away. So we went and found the scientists that are doing all this work, four or five of them, Virginia Tech has an office there too, for spectrum research for the Navy. Come together, let's have a party and make a new model. >> So I asked this, I'm super excited to have you on theCUBE. I sat through the keynotes on Monday. I saw Satya Nadella was in there, Thomas Kurian there was no AWS. I'm like, where's AWS? AWS is everywhere. I mean, you guys are all over the show. I'm like, "Hey, where's the number one cloud?" So you guys have made a bunch of announcements at the show. Everybody's talking about the cloud. What's going on for you guys? >> So we are everywhere, and you know, we've been coming to this show for years. But this is really a year that we can demonstrate that what we've been doing for the IT enterprise, IT people for 17 years, we're now bringing for telcos, you know? For years, we've been, 17 years to be exact, we've been bringing the cloud value proposition, whether it's, you know, cost efficiencies or innovation or scale, reliability, security and so on, to these enterprise IT folks. Now we're doing the same thing for telcos. And so whether they want to build in region, in a local zone, metro area, on-prem with an outpost, at the edge with Snow Family, or with our IoT devices. And no matter where they want to start, if they start in the cloud and they want to move to the edge, or they start in the edge and they want to bring the cloud value proposition, like, we're demonstrating all of that is happening this week. And, and very much so, we're also demonstrating that we're bringing the same type of ecosystem that we've built for enterprise IT. We're bringing that type of ecosystem to the telco companies, with CSPs, with the ISP vendors. We've seen plenty of announcements this week. You know, so on and so forth. >> So what's different, is it, the names are different? Is it really that simple, that you're just basically taking the cloud model into telco, and saying, "Hey, why do all this undifferentiated heavy lifting when we can do it for you? Don't worry about all the plumbing." Is it really that simple? I mean, that straightforward. >> Well, simple is probably not what I'd say, but we can make it straightforward. >> Conceptually. >> Conceptually, yes. Conceptually it is the same. Because if you think about, firstly, we'll just take 5G for a moment, right? The 5G folks, if you look at the architecture for 5G, it was designed to run on a cloud architecture. It was designed to be a set of services that you could partition, and run in different places, whether it's in the region or at the edge. So in many ways it is sort of that simple. And let me give you an example. Two things, the first one is we announced integrated private wireless on AWS, which allows enterprise customers to come to a portal and look at the industry solutions. They're not worried about their network, they're worried about solving a problem, right? And they can come to that portal, they can find a solution, they can find a service provider that will help them with that solution. And what they end up with is a fully validated offering that AWS telco SAS have actually put to its paces to make sure this is a real thing. And whether they get it from a telco, and, and quite frankly in that space, it's SIs such as Federated that actually help our customers deploy those in private environments. So that's an example. And then added to that, we had a second announcement, which was AWS telco network builder, which allows telcos to plan, deploy, and operate at scale telco network capabilities on the cloud, think about it this way- >> As a managed service? >> As a managed service. So think about it this way. And the same way that enterprise IT has been deploying, you know, infrastructure as code for years. Telco network builder allows the telco folks to deploy telco networks and their capabilities as code. So it's not simple, but it is pretty straightforward. We're making it more straightforward as we go. >> Jump in Dave, by the way. He can geek out if you want. >> Yeah, no, no, no, that's good, that's good, that's good. But actually, I'm going to ask an AWS question, but I'm going to ask Iyad the AWS question. So when we, when I hear the word cloud from Wayne, cloud, AWS, typically in people's minds that denotes off-premises. Out there, AWS data center. In the telecom space, yes, of course, in the private 5G space, we're talking about a little bit of a different dynamic than in the public 5G space, in terms of the physical infrastructure. But regardless at the edge, there are things that need to be physically at the edge. Do you feel that AWS is sufficiently, have they removed the H word, hybrid, from the list of bad words you're not allowed to say? 'Cause there was a point in time- >> Yeah, of course. >> Where AWS felt that their growth- >> They'll even say multicloud today, (indistinct). >> No, no, no, no, no. But there was a period of time where, rightfully so, AWS felt that the growth trajectory would be supported solely by net new things off premises. Now though, in this space, it seems like that hybrid model is critical. Do you see AWS being open to the hybrid nature of things? >> Yeah, they're, absolutely. I mean, just to explain from- we're a services company and a solutions company. So we put together solutions at the edge, a smart campus, smart agriculture, a deployment. One of our biggest deployment is a million square feet warehouse automation project with the Marine Corps. >> That's bigger than the Fira. >> Oh yeah, it's bigger, definitely bigger than, you know, a small section of here. It's actually three massive warehouses. So yes, that is the edge. What the cloud is about is that massive amount of efficiency has happened by concentrating applications in data centers. And that is programmability, that is APIs that is solutions, that is applications that can run on it, where people know how to do it. And so all that efficiency now is being ported in a box called the edge. What AWS is doing for us is bringing all the business and technical solutions they had into the edge. Some of the data may send back and forth, but that's actually a smaller piece of the value for us. By being able to bring an AWS package at the edge, we're bringing IoT applications, we're bringing high speed cameras, we're able to integrate with the 5G public network. We're able to bring in identity and devices, we're able to bring in solutions for students, embedded laptops. All of these things that you can do much much faster and cheaper if you are able to tap in the 4,000, 5,000 partners and all the applications and all the development and all the models that AWS team did. By being able to bring that efficiency to the edge why reinvent that? And then along with that, there are partners that you, that help do integration. There are development done to make it hardened, to make the data more secure, more isolated. All of these things will contribute to an edge that truly is a carbon copy of the data center. >> So Wayne, it's AWS, Regardless of where the compute, networking and storage physically live, it's AWS. Do you think that the term cloud will sort of drift away from usage? Because if, look, it's all IT, in this case it's AWS and federated IT working together. How, what's your, it's sort of a obscure question about cloud, because cloud is so integrated. >> You Got this thing about cloud, it's just IT. >> I got thing about cloud too, because- >> You and Larry Ellison. >> Because it's no, no, no, I'm, yeah, well actually there's- >> There's a lot of IT that's not cloud, just say that okay. >> Now, a lot of IT that isn't cloud, but I would say- >> But I'll (indistinct) cloud is an IT tool, and you see AWS obviously with the Snow fill in the blank line of products and outpost type stuff. Fair to say that you're, doesn't matter where it is, it could be AWS if it's on the edge, right? >> Well, you know, everybody wants to define the cloud as what it may have been when it started. But if you look at what it was when it started and what it is today, it is different. But the ability to bring the experience, the AWS experience, the services, the operational experience and all the things that Iyad had been talking about from the region all to all the way to, you know, the IoT device, if you would, that entire continuum. And it doesn't matter where you start. Like if you start in region and you need to bring your value to other places because your customers are asking you to do so, we're enabling that experience where you need to bring it. If you started at the edge, and- but you want to build cloud value, you know, whether it's again, cost efficiency, scalability, AI, ML or analytics into those capabilities, you can start at the edge with the same APIs, with the same service, the same capabilities, and you can build that value in right from the get go. You don't build this bifurcation or many separations and try to figure out how do I glue them together? There is no gluing together. So if you think of cloud as being elastic, scalable flexible, where you can drive innovation, it's the same exact model on the continuum. And you can start at either end, it's up to you as a customer. >> And I think if, the key to me is the ecosystem. I mean, if you can do for this industry what you've done for the technology- enterprise technology business from an ecosystem standpoint, you know everybody talks about flywheel, but that gives you like the massive flywheel. I don't know what the ratio is, but it used to be for every dollar spent on a VMware license, $15 is spent in the ecosystem. I've never heard similar ratios in the AWS ecosystem, but it's, I go to reinvent and I'm like, there's some dollars being- >> That's a massive ecosystem. >> (indistinct). >> And then, and another thing I'll add is Jose Maria Alvarez, who's the chairman of Telefonica, said there's three pillars of the future-ready telco, low latency, programmable networks, and he said cloud and edge. So they recognizing cloud and edge, you know, low latency means you got to put the compute and the data, the programmable infrastructure was invented by Amazon. So what's the strategy around the telco edge? >> So, you know, at the end, so those are all great points. And in fact, the programmability of the network was a big theme in the show. It was a huge theme. And if you think about the cloud, what is the cloud? It's a set of APIs against a set of resources that you use in whatever way is appropriate for what you're trying to accomplish. The network, the telco network becomes a resource. And it could be described as a resource. We, I talked about, you know, network as in code, right? It's same infrastructure in code, it's telco infrastructure as code. And that code, that infrastructure, is programmable. So this is really, really important. And in how you build the ecosystem around that is no different than how we built the ecosystem around traditional IT abstractions. In fact, we feel that really the ecosystem is the killer app for 5G. You know, the killer app for 4G, data of sorts, right? We started using data beyond simple SMS messages. So what's the killer app for 5G? It's building this ecosystem, which includes the CSPs, the ISVs, all of the partners that we bring to the table that can drive greater value. It's not just about cost efficiency. You know, you can't save your way to success, right? At some point you need to generate greater value for your customers, which gives you better business outcomes, 'cause you can monetize them, right? The ecosystem is going to allow everybody to monetize 5G. >> 5G is like the dot connector of all that. And then developers come in on top and create new capabilities >> And how different is that than, you know, the original smartphones? >> Yeah, you're right. So what do you guys think of ChatGPT? (indistinct) to Amazon? Amazon turned the data center into an API. It's like we're visioning this world, and I want to ask that technologist, like, where it's turning resources into human language interfaces. You know, when you see that, you play with ChatGPT at all, or I know you guys got your own. >> So I won't speak directly to ChatGPT. >> No, don't speak from- >> But if you think about- >> Generative AI. >> Yeah generative AI is important. And, and we are, and we have been for years, in this space. Now you've been talking to AWS for a long time, and we often don't talk about things we don't have yet. We don't talk about things that we haven't brought to market yet. And so, you know, you'll often hear us talk about something, you know, a year from now where others may have been talking about it three years earlier, right? We will be talking about this space when we feel it's appropriate for our customers and our partners. >> You have talked about it a little bit, Adam Selipsky went on an interview with myself and John Furrier in October said you watch, you know, large language models are going to be enormous and I know you guys have some stuff that you're working on there. >> It's, I'll say it's exciting. >> Yeah, I mean- >> Well proof point is, Siri is an idiot compared to Alexa. (group laughs) So I trust one entity to come up with something smart. >> I have conversations with Alexa and Siri, and I won't judge either one. >> You don't need, you could be objective on that one. I definitely have a preference. >> Are the problems you guys solving in this space, you know, what's unique about 'em? What are they, can we, sort of, take some examples here (indistinct). >> Sure, the main theme is that the enterprise is taking control. They want to have their own networks. They want to focus on specific applications, and they want to build them with a skeleton crew. The one IT person in a warehouse want to be able to do it all. So what's unique about them is that they're now are a lot of automation on robotics, especially in warehousing environment agriculture. There simply aren't enough people in these industries, and that required precision. And so you need all that integration to make it work. People also want to build these networks as they want to control it. They want to figure out how do we actually pick this team and migrate it. Maybe just do the front of the house first. Maybe it's a security team that monitor the building, maybe later on upgrade things that use to open doors and close doors and collect maintenance data. So that ability to pick what you want to do from a new processors is really important. And then you're also seeing a lot of public-private network interconnection. That's probably the undercurrent of this show that haven't been talked about. When people say private networks, they're also talking about something called neutral host, which means I'm going to build my own network, but I want it to work, my Verizon (indistinct) need to work. There's been so much progress, it's not done yet. So much progress about this bring my own network concept, and then make sure that I'm now interoperating with the public network, but it's my domain. I can create air gaps, I can create whatever security and policy around it. That is probably the power of 5G. Now take all of these tiny networks, big networks, put them all in one ecosystem. Call it the Amazon marketplace, call it the Amazon ecosystem, that's 5G. It's going to be tremendous future. >> What does the future look like? We're going to, we just determined we're going to be orchestrating the network through human language, okay? (group laughs) But seriously, what's your vision for the future here? You know, both connectivity and cloud are on on a continuum. It's, they've been on a continuum forever. They're going to continue to be on a continuum. That being said, those continuums are coming together, right? They're coming together to bring greater value to a greater set of customers, and frankly all of us. So, you know, the future is now like, you know, this conference is the future, and if you look at what's going on, it's about the acceleration of the future, right? What we announced this week is really the acceleration of listening to customers for the last handful of years. And, we're going to continue to do that. We're going to continue to bring greater value in the form of solutions. And that's what I want to pick up on from the prior question. It's not about the network, it's not about the cloud, it's about the solutions that we can provide the customers where they are, right? And if they're on their mobile phone or they're in their factory floor, you know, they're looking to accelerate their business. They're looking to accelerate their value. They're looking to create greater safety for their employees. That's what we can do with these technologies. So in fact, when we came out with, you know, our announcement for integrated private wireless, right? It really was about industry solutions. It really isn't about, you know, the cloud or the network. It's about how you can leverage those technologies, that continuum, to deliver you value. >> You know, it's interesting you say that, 'cause again, when we were interviewing Adam Selipsky, everybody, you know, all journalists analysts want to know, how's Adam Selipsky going to be different from Andy Jassy, what's the, what's he going to do to Amazon to change? And he said, listen, the real answer is Amazon has changed. If Andy Jassy were here, we'd be doing all, you know, pretty much the same things. Your point about 17 years ago, the cloud was S3, right, and EC2. Now it's got to evolve to be solutions. 'Cause if that's all you're selling, is the bespoke services, then you know, the future is not as bright as the past has been. And so I think it's key to look for what are those outcomes or solutions that customers require and how you're going to meet 'em. And there's a lot of challenges. >> You continue to build value on the value that you've brought, and you don't lose sight of why that value is important. You carry that value proposition up the stack, but the- what you're delivering, as you said, becomes maybe a bigger or or different. >> And you are getting more solution oriented. I mean, you're not hardcore solutions yet, but we're seeing more and more of that. And that seems to be a trend. We've even seen in the database world, making things easier, connecting things. Not really an abstraction layer, which is sort of antithetical to your philosophy, but it creates a similar outcome in terms of simplicity. Yeah, you're smiling 'cause you guys always have a different angle, you know? >> Yeah, we've had this conversation. >> It's right, it's, Jassy used to say it's okay to be misunderstood. >> That's Right. For a long time. >> Yeah, right, guys, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. I'm so glad we could make this happen. >> It's always good. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, Dave Nicholson, for Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, John Furrier in the Palo Alto studio. We're here at the Fira, wrapping out MWC23. Keep it right there, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here at the Fira Live, theCUBE's ongoing coverage of day two of MWC 23. Back in 2021 was my first Mobile World Congress. And you know what? It was actually quite an experience because there was nobody there. I talked to my friend, who's now my co-host, Chris Lewis about what to expect. He said, Dave, I don't think a lot of people are going to be there, but Danielle Royston is here and she's the CEO of Totoge. And that year when Erickson tapped out of its space she took out 60,000 square feet and built out Cloud City. If it weren't for Cloud City, there would've been no Mobile World Congress in June and July of 2021. DR is back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to see you. >> Chris. Awesome to see you. >> Yeah, Chris. Yep. >> Good to be back. Yep. >> You guys remember the narrative back then. There was this lady running around this crazy lady that I met at at Google Cloud next saying >> Yeah. Yeah. >> the cloud's going to take over Telco. And everybody's like, well, this lady's nuts. The cloud's been leaning in, you know? >> Yeah. >> So what do you think, I mean, what's changed since since you first caused all those ripples? >> I mean, I have to say that I think that I caused a lot of change in the industry. I was talking to leaders over at AWS yesterday and they were like, we've never seen someone push like you have and change so much in a short period of time. And Telco moves slow. It's known for that. And they're like, you are pushing buttons and you're getting people to change and thank you and keep going. And so it's been great. It's awesome. >> Yeah. I mean, it was interesting, Chris, we heard on the keynotes we had Microsoft, Satya came in, Thomas Curian came in. There was no AWS. And now I asked CMO of GSMA about that. She goes, hey, we got a great relationship with it, AWS. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But why do you think they weren't here? >> Well, they, I mean, they are here. >> Mean, not here. Why do you think they weren't profiled? >> They weren't on the keynote stage. >> But, you know, at AWS, a lot of the times they want to be the main thing. They want to be the main part of the show. They don't like sharing the limelight. I think they just didn't want be on the stage with the Google CLoud guys and the these other guys, what they're doing they're building out, they're doing so much stuff. As Danielle said, with Telcos change in the ecosystem which is what's happening with cloud. Cloud's making the Telcos think about what the next move is, how they fit in with the way other people do business. Right? So Telcos never used to have to listen to anybody. They only listened to themselves and they dictated the way things were done. They're very successful and made a lot of money but they're now having to open up they're having to leverage the cloud they're having to leverage the services that (indistinct words) and people out provide and they're changing the way they work. >> So, okay in 2021, we talked a lot about the cloud as a potential disruptor, and your whole premise was, look you got to lean into the cloud, or you're screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> But the flip side of that is, if they lean into the cloud too much, they might be screwed. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> So what's that equilibrium? Have they been able to find it? Are you working with just the disruptors or how's that? >> No I think they're finding it right. So my talk at MWC 21 was all about the cloud is a double-edged sword, right? There's two sides to it, and you definitely need to proceed through it with caution, but also I don't know that you have a choice, right? I mean, the multicloud, you know is there another industry that spends more on CapEx than Telco? >> No. >> Right. The hyperscalers are doing it right. They spend, you know, easily approaching over a $100 billion in CapEx that rivals this industry. And so when you have a player like that an industry driving, you know and investing so much Telco, you're always complaining how everyone's riding your coattails. This is the opportunity to write someone else's coattails. So jump on, right? I think you don't have a choice especially if other Telco competitors are using hyperscalers and you don't, they're going to be left behind. >> So you advise these companies all the time, but >> I mean, the issue is they're all they're all using all the hyperscalers, right? So they're the multi, the multiple relationships. And as Danielle said, the multi-layer of relationship they're using the hyperscalers to change their own internal operational environments to become more IT-centric to move to that software centric Telco. And they're also then with the hyperscalers going to market in different ways sometimes with them, sometimes competing with them. What what it means from an analyst point of view is you're suddenly changing the dynamic of a market where we used to have nicely well defined markets previously. Now they're, everyone's in it together, you know, it's great. And, and it's making people change the way they think about services. What I, what I really hope it changes more than anything else is the way the customers at the end of the, at the end of the supply, the value chain think this is what we can get hold of this stuff. Now we can go into the network through the cloud and we can get those APIs. We can draw on the mechanisms we need to to run our personal lives, to run our business lives. And frankly, society as a whole. It's really exciting. >> Then your premise is basically you were saying they should ride on the top over the top of the cloud vendor. >> Yeah. Right? >> No. Okay. But don't they lose the, all the data if they do that? >> I don't know. I mean, I think the hyperscalers are not going to take their data, right? I mean, that would be a really really bad business move if Google Cloud and Azure and and AWS start to take over that, that data. >> But they can't take it. >> They can't. >> From regulate, from sovereignty and regulation. >> They can't because of regulation, but also just like business, right? If they started taking their data and like no enterprises would use them. So I think, I think the data is safe. I think you, obviously every country is different. You got to understand the different rules and regulations for data privacy and, and how you keep it. But I think as we look at the long term, right and we always talk about 10 and 20 years there's going to be a hyperscaler region in every country right? And there will be a way for every Telco to use it. I think their data will be safe. And I think it just, you're going to be able to stand on on the shoulders of someone else for once and use the building blocks of software that these guys provide to make better experiences for subscribers. >> You guys got to explain this to me because when I say data I'm not talking about, you know, personal information. I'm talking about all the telemetry, you know, all the all the, you know the plumbing. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Data, which is- >> It will increasingly be shared because you need to share it in order to deliver the services in the streamline efficient way that needs to be deliver. >> Did I hear the CEO of Ericsson Wright where basically he said, we're going to charge developers for access to that data through APIs. >> What the Ericsson have done, obviously with the Vage acquisition is they want to get into APIs. So the idea is you're exposing features, quality policy on demand type features for example, or even pulling we still use that a lot of SMS, right? So pulling those out using those APIs. So it will be charged in some way. Whether- >> Man: Like Twitter's charging me for APIs, now I API calls, you >> Know what it is? I think it's Twilio. >> Man: Oh, okay. >> Right. >> Man: No, no, that's sure. >> There's no reason why telcos couldn't provide a Twilio like service itself. >> It's a horizontal play though right? >> Danielle: Correct because developers need to be charged by the API. >> But doesn't there need to be an industry standard to do that as- >> Well. I think that's what they just announced. >> Industry standard. >> Danielle: I think they just announced that. Yeah. Right now I haven't looked at that API set, right? >> There's like eight of them. >> There's eight of them. Twilio has, it's a start you got to start somewhere Dave. (crosstalk) >> And there's all, the TM forum is all the other standard >> Right? Eight is better than zero- >> Right? >> Haven't got plenty. >> I mean for an industry that didn't really understand APIs as a feature, as a product as a service, right? For Mats Granryd, the deputy general of GSMA to stand on the keynote stage and say we partnered and we're unveiling, right. Pay by the use APIs. I was for it. I was like, that is insane. >> I liked his keynote actually, because I thought he was going to talk about how many attendees and how much economic benefiting >> Danielle: We're super diverse. >> He said, I would usually talk about that and you know greening in the network by what you did talk about a little bit. But, but that's, that surprised me. >> Yeah. >> But I've seen in the enterprise this is not my space as, you know, you guys don't live this but I've seen Oracle try to get developers. IBM had to pay $35 billion trying to get for Red Hat to get developers, right? EMC used to have a thing called EMC code, failed. >> I mean they got to do something, right? So 4G they didn't really make the business case the ROI on the investment in the network. Here we are with 5G, same discussion is having where's the use case? How are we going to monetize and make the ROI on this massive investment? And now they're starting to talk about 6G. Same fricking problem is going to happen again. And so I think they need to start experimenting with new ideas. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if this new a API network gateway theme that Mats talked about yesterday will work. But they need to start unbundling that unlimited plan. They need to start charging people who are using the network more, more money. Those who are using it less, less. They need to figure this out. This is a crisis for them. >> Yeah our own CEO, I mean she basically said, Hey, I'm for net neutrality, but I want to be able to charge the people that are using it more and more >> To make a return on, on a capital. >> I mean it costs billions of dollars to build these networks, right? And they're valuable. We use them and we talked about this in Cloud City 21, right? The ability to start building better metaverses. And I know that's a buzzword and everyone hates it, but it's true. Like we're working from home. We need- there's got to be a better experience in Zoom in 2D, right? And you need a great network for that metaverse to be awesome. >> You do. But Danielle, you don't need cellular for doing that, do you? So the fixed network is as important. >> Sure. >> And we're at mobile worlds. But actually what we beginning to hear and Crystal Bren did say this exactly, it's about the comp the access is sort of irrelevant. Fixed is better because it's more the cost the return on investment is better from fiber. Mobile we're going to change every so many years because we're a new generation. But we need to get the mechanism in place to deliver that. I actually don't agree that we should everyone should pay differently for what they use. It's a universal service. We need it as individuals. We need to make it sustainable for every user. Let's just not go for the biggest user. It's not, it's not the way to build it. It won't work if you do that you'll crash the system if you do that. And, and the other thing which I disagree on it's not about standing on the shoulders and benefiting from what- It's about cooperating across all levels. The hyperscalers want to work with the telcos as much as the telcos want to work with the hyperscalers. There's a lot of synergy there. There's a lot of ways they can work together. It's not one or the other. >> But I think you're saying let the cloud guys do the heavy lifting and I'm - >> Yeah. >> Not at all. >> And so you don't think so because I feel like the telcos are really good at pipes. They've always been good at pipes. They're engineers. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> Are they hanging on to the to the connectivity or should they let that go and well and go toward the developer. >> I mean AWS had two announcements on the 21st a week before MWC. And one was that telco network builder. This is literally being able to deploy a network capability at AWS with keystrokes. >> As a managed service. >> Danielle: Correct. >> Yeah. >> And so I don't know how the telco world I felt the shock waves, right? I was like, whoa, that seems really big. Because they're taking something that previously was like bread and butter. This is what differentiates each telco and now they've standardized it and made it super easy so anyone can do it. Now do I think the five nines of super crazy hardcore network criteria will be built on AWS this way? Probably not, but no >> It's not, it's not end twin. So you can't, no. >> Right. But private networks could be built with this pretty easily, right? And so telcos that don't have as much funding, right. Smaller, more experiments. I think it's going to change the way we think about building networks in telcos >> And those smaller telcos I think are going to be more developer friendly. >> Danielle: Yeah. >> They're going to have business models that invite those developers in. And that's, it's the disruption's going to come from the ISVs and the workloads that are on top of that. >> Well certainly what Dish is trying to do, right? Dish is trying to build a- they launched it reinvent a developer experience. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Right. Built around their network and you know, again I don't know, they were not part of this group that designed these eight APIs but I'm sure they're looking with great intent on what does this mean for them. They'll probably adopt them because they want people to consume the network as APIs. That's their whole thing that Mark Roanne is trying to do. >> Okay, and then they're doing open ran. But is it- they're not really cons- They're not as concerned as Rakuten with the reliability and is that the right play? >> In this discussion? Open RAN is not an issue. It really is irrelevant. It's relevant for the longer term future of the industry by dis aggregating and being able to share, especially ran sharing, for example, in the short term in rural environments. But we'll see some of that happening and it will change, but it will also influence the way the other, the existing ran providers build their services and offer their value. Look you got to remember in the relationship between the equipment providers and the telcos are very dramatically. Whether it's Ericson, NOKIA, Samsung, Huawei, whoever. So those relations really, and the managed services element to that depends on what skills people have in-house within the telco and what service they're trying to deliver. So there's never one size fits all in this industry. >> You're very balanced in your analysis and I appreciate that. >> I try to be. >> But I am not. (chuckles) >> So when Dr went off, this is my question. When Dr went off a couple years ago on the cloud's going to take over the world, you were skeptical. You gave a approach. Have you? >> I still am. >> Have you moderated your thoughts on that or- >> I believe the telecom industry is is a very strong industry. It's my industry of course I love it. But the relationship it is developing much different relationships with the ecosystem players around it. You mentioned developers, you mentioned the cloud players the equipment guys are changing there's so many moving parts to build the telco of the future that every country needs a very strong telco environment to be able to support the site as a whole. People individuals so- >> Well I think two years ago we were talking about should they or shouldn't they, and now it's an inevitability. >> I don't think we were Danielle. >> All using the hyperscalers. >> We were always going to need to transform the telcos from the conservative environments in which they developed. And they've had control of everything in order to reduce if they get no extra revenue at all, reducing the cost they've got to go on a cloud migration path to do that. >> Amenable. >> Has it been harder than you thought? >> It's been easier than I thought. >> You think it's gone faster than >> It's gone way faster than I thought. I mean pushing on this flywheel I thought for sure it would take five to 10 years it is moving. I mean the maths comp thing the AWS announcements last week they're putting in hyperscalers in Saudi Arabia which is probably one of the most sort of data private places in the world. It's happening really fast. >> What Azure's doing? >> I feel like I can't even go to sleep. Because I got to keep up with it. It's crazy. >> Guys. >> This is awesome. >> So awesome having you back on. >> Yeah. >> Chris, thanks for co-hosting. Appreciate you stay here. >> Yep. >> Danielle, amazing. We'll see you. >> See you soon. >> A lot of action here. We're going to come out >> Great. >> Check out your venue. >> Yeah the Togi buses that are outside. >> The big buses. You got a great setup there. We're going to see you on Wednesday. Thanks again. >> Awesome. Thanks. >> All right. Keep it right there. We'll be back to wrap up day two from MWC 23 on theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Good evening, everyone. Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's "theCUBE". We are at Mobile World, MWC, excuse me, '23. New name this year. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, we have had some great conversations. This is only day one of four days of coverage from "theCUBE" but one of the things that we've been talking about is disaggregation. You've wrote about it in your breaking analysis. We've been talking about it. Today is a big thing that's happening. We're going to be talking about that next. >> Yeah, open ecosystems require integration. Integration requires certification. And so, you got to have labs. We're going to talk about that and what value that brings to the community. >> Right. Please welcome Tibor Fabry-Asztalos, senior vice president of telecom systems and product engineering at Dell. >> Hi. >> And back to "theCUBE" after a couple of hours, Gautam Bhagra, vice president of partnerships at Dell. Guys, great to have you here. >> I love to be here. Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So, day one, I'm sure lots of conversations, lots of meetings, lots of jet lag that we're all trying to get over. Talk about, Gautam, we'll start with you. Talk about the disaggregation era. What it is intended to support? What is it intended to enable? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think to be honest with you, Lisa, we spoke about this earlier also, like the whole vision with the disaggregation is to make sure our telco providers can take the benefits of having the innovation that comes along with it, right? So currently, we all know they're tied into like lock systems, which kind of constricts them in going after this whole innovative space. So, our hope is by working with our operators and our partners, we can help make that disaggregation journey a lot easier and work on some of these challenges, and make it easier for the telcos to innovate and consolidate going forward. So, we're working very closely and we talked about the community this morning. We're working very closely with Tibor and his team from an engineering perspective to help build those solutions with our partners and we're excited about the announcements we made this morning. >> When you hear challenges from this ecosystem, can you stack rank 'em? What are you hearing? Kind of what's top of mind? And so, the top three, if you would. >> Some of the challenges are just to define moving from a closed system and open system, just to making sure that the acceptance of that to see what's the value proposition is for an open system and then for the carriers to see the path going from a closed system to an open system. Of course, at the end, people realize the value at the end and speed of innovation that you're going to get all the new technologies and new features, functionality you get in an open system. But then the challenge comes with it, how you actually integrate those and then validate them, and you are to deploy them. So in a sense, that's the opportunity and also some of the challenge along the way. And that's where, as Gautam said, that's where we are also looking at playing the key role with the OTEL lab, the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, where we take these pieces of the open ecosystem and have combined them, validate them, and provide the pipeline to the customer. Pre-integration and then full integration into the production network. >> Those challenges, I presume, vary whether you're talking to a greenfield network operator versus somebody who's got a 40, 50 year history, a hundred-year history in the business, right? I mean migration is a big issue for them, right? Whereas the greenfield, we heard from DISH earlier, they want to drive innovation so they might be willing to sacrifice some other areas. So, is that a fair summarization and what are you hearing? >> [Tibor and Gautam] Yeah. >> Absolutely it is. I mean, that's where you see that DISH being kind of a leader in the space, as they were deploying in greenfield, they defined what the open ecosystem should look like, defined all the components of it, how you integrate them, validate them, and they were able to, well, go through it and deploy it. To your point, for an open, closed systems, as how you actually start transforming the existing network into the open one, that's going to go to a different process, right? You need to figure out how these new open systems can interrupt and work together with existing networks. So, that's one likely some of those carriers will start in an isolated area and grow from there. Deploy an open system in a rural area, for example, and then build from there. >> So, what a bank would do is they say, "Okay, we're going to write in our own abstraction layer." >> Gautam: Yeah. >> Right? "Using microservices, we're going to connect to the cloud. And we're going to, you know, put maybe some lower risk applications in the cloud first and then we're going to create our own cloud." Is there a similar dynamic here? >> Yeah, I mean, so I think you're spot on, right? Like, I think one of the things that we are seeing with the telco operators that we've spoken to is they're very risk averse. >> Yep. >> Right, they have very strong SLA requirements. They cannot go down even for a second. So, what that basically means is the innovation aspect is constrained by the risks that they perceive on any changes that you want to make on the architecture. So, the question that comes up is how do we make it easier for them to not worry about the bare minimum requirements of making sure the network's running and working while thinking about the new innovative technologies and solutions you want to build on the start. So, back to your bank example, nine years ago, no one in a bank even was thinking about like applications that will run on the cloud. Like for them, it was like a side project. They'll try and test something, see if it works, and then they'll think about cloud in the future, right? But now, core applications on banks are actually being built on public cloud. I think we see the same happening with the telco operators as well. Right now, they're understanding the move from a closed ecosystem to an open ecosystem. They understand the value proposition. On the core side, it's already happening a lot. And I think they are slowly moving there and that's where I think Tibor and team have been doing a great job working with our customers to make the transition happen. >> But there are so many permutations. >> Right. >> And integration points. How is Dell addressing that across the ecosystem? >> So, to give you an example, we talked about OTEL, which is our brand new, kind of 13,000 square feet lab that we kind of inaugurated last year based in Round Rock, Texas. >> Dave: Open Telecom. >> Dave and Tibor: Ecosystem Lab. >> Correct, great. And so, as part of that, that's a physical lab but more importantly, that's kind of a community where partners, customers come together to actually, and collaborate and work on these solutions. And as part of this, we also develop what we call the SIP, or Solution Integration Platform, to enable exactly what you just said. Making sure that we have a platform that actually can take all these various components, validate them individually, combine them, and then provide a DevOps and GitOps model, how you actually combine them, provide the BOM or SBOM, and then push that to pre-production and deployments for our customers. So, that's part of the challenge as we talked earlier. And that's how Dell and we are looking at actually enabling this basically, the validation of this disaggregated wall. >> Oh. >> Sorry, I just wanted to- >> Go ahead. >> just going to add one more point, right? So, when we look at the partners that we are working with as well in the OTEL and there are three ways we are working with them. At the bare minimum, we want to make sure that solution will run on the Dell infrastructure and the hardware, right? So, we have the self-certification process. We had a lot of good uptake on it and we are seeing a lot more come in. In fact, I had a check-in with "theCUBE" this morning in our side and it's more than a hundred plus partners already interested in going through that. Awesome. Then we have other places where we work on with partners to build reference architectures together, right? So, we want some sort of validated solution that will work together that we can take to the market. And then we also have engineered solutions that we are building with partners like the infrastructure block offering that we have taken where it's all pre-packaged, pre-built by Dell, working very closely with our partners. So, the telcos don't have to worry about deployment, integration, and everything else that comes along. >> And I presume the security supply chain is part of that- >> Yes. >> bill of materials- >> Absolutely. >> you just described. >> Yeah. >> Exactly. >> And that would include all those levels, the engineered systems, the reference architectures as well? And how do you decide like candidates, we can't do it all, right? So, it's the big markets get the engineered system, is that right? How do you adjudicate there? >> Yeah, so I mean, I think there are a couple of angles to look at it, right? I think the first and foremost is where we see the biggest demand is coming from the customers in terms of the stack they already have and where they have the pain points. >> Dave: Okay. >> Right, so this is why we are working with Red Hat and Wind River, as an example, because they are in most of the deployments that we are aware of with the customers and where we see an opportunity for Dell to partner with these partners. I think we are seeing a lot of new players also coming up the stack. And as they come up the stack and we find opportunities to co-build and co-innovate, absolutely we'll be building joint solutions with them as well. >> Where are you on, from a partnership perspective, on the strategic vision? You mentioned a number of things that have already been accomplished, quite a few. But from your journey perspective on that strategy, where are you? >> Yeah, so it's a really good question. I think we really want to be the partner of choice for all technology and services company within the telecom space. We're looking to drive the transformation in the network area, right? So, that's the vision that we have in the telecom system business from a partnership side. We have created some really good strategic partnerships with key providers, with independent software vendors, the network equipment providers. We're having some really good, strategic conversations with them. You've heard some of the announcement come out today, the work we are doing with Nokia, with Samsung, the Red Hat announcement, the Wind River, and so on and so forth. And there's a lot more in the pipeline. But more importantly, we want to grow the impact of the ecosystem. So, that's why we are launching the partner community today as well to make that happen. >> How does the lab work? Who has access to it? Can I self-certify? If I can self-certify, how do you make sure that I'm following the rules, all of the stuff- >> Sure. >> that you would- >> Absolutely. >> expect. >> So yes, you can self-certify, that's Gautam just mentioned. We already had quite a few ISVs go through that self-certification. And then there's also, there's reference architecture that's being done and other engineered solutions that we talked about earlier. And the lab is set up in a way that when needed, test lines can be isolated. So, only certain set of partners have access to it. So, it's made up in a way that enables collaborations. At the same times, it kind of enables a certain set of customers and partners working together without having challenges of having a completely open system. >> Okay, but so, if I want to do something with you guys and let's say, I am a candidate for an engineered system, so how does it work? Somebody's got to buy the equipment, right? He's got to ship it, right? There's a lot of Dell equipment involved. >> Tibor: That's correct. >> There's other third-party CapEx software, et cetera. So, you fund that, the partners fund that, it's a hybrid funding model, how does that all get done? >> So today, for obviously, we work closely with those partners. The engineered solutions we've developed so far, we've been funding it largely and as you said, is Dell infrastructure plus the cast layers and the cloud players we work with. So, we actually put those in place. We funded them, of course, with participation from them. And that's being done through those labs. >> Okay, great. So, you guys are providing that benefit to the ecosystem. Writing checks, bringing engineering talent to the table. >> Gautam: Yeah. >> Okay. >> And at the same time, I mean, it's a partnership at the end of the day, right? So, depending on the kind of partnership we are. So, if you're an ISV, it's fairly simple. Come into our labs. You don't have to worry about the infrastructure. >> Sure. >> Run it all in our labs and you're good. If you're a hardware vendor or a NEP, network equipment provider, that's where it gets interesting where they need to send us stuff, we need to send them stuff. And usually, like Tibor mentioned, it's a joint collaboration. We all put in our chips on the table and we work together. >> So, when you're having conversations with prospective partners, obviously different types of partners, Gautam, that you just talked about, what's in it for them? What's the value proposition? What does this community- >> Gautam: Yeah. >> give them from a competitive advantage standpoint? >> Yeah, so I mean there are, so the way I think about it, right? There are three things that Dell is bringing to the table. The first one is our experience and expertise on doing this transformation within the enterprise space and the learnings we have from there that we're bringing to telco now, right? So, Dell's been working with enterprises for many, many years. We are one of the big providers there. We all know what transformation enterprise went through. >> Tibor: Telco transformation, IT transformation. >> Exactly. And that's the experience we have, which we're bringing to telco. The second one is our investment, both from a go-to market side as well as the way we are working with our sales and marketing, and so on and so forth, with the engineering side. And finally, I think, and this for me is the best one, is Dell is a very partner-centric organization. >> Lisa: Yes. >> Our strategy is built around partnerships. So, that's the other piece that we bring to the table. >> Where are the labs? Oh, go ahead. >> And what's one more note on that, and also, we are talking about the engineered solutions. There's also the supply chain then because that's a basically appliance and then that goes to Dell's supply chain, which is best in class. >> Dave: And where are the labs? How many are there? >> So Round Rock, Texas is the biggest one, the 13,000 square feet. We also have extension to it. We just announced opening one in Cork for the EME market to making sure that we can cover any regulatory challenges. But also, basically any test lines that we need to cover that have latency challenges. That's why we want to make sure that we have labs in other areas as well. >> And the go-to market, is it an overlay organization, a dedicated organization? >> Yeah, so it's a bit of both as you know. But yeah, in the telecom business unit, we have a dedicated sales organization as well as an alliance organization working very closely with product and engineering to take it to market. >> Given the strength and the breadth of the partner program in the community, based on this is only day one of MWC but is there anything that you've heard today that excites you where telecom is going and where Dell and its ecosystem is going and really burgeoning? >> Oh, I've had I don't know how many meetings since 6:00 AM this morning. So, it's been an amazing event and we're just having so many great conversations with partners, our customers. And I think a lot of today is all about figuring out what our strategy and our vision is, where is each side going and what the overlap is. I think the end result's going to be follow up conversations with a lot of these partners that we are working with or will be working with soon. And then thinking about, do we build engineered solutions together? Do we go validated route? Like we going to figure that out. But I mean, for me, this is like the perfect place to come and share your vision and strategy and understand what we are trying to solve for. >> To me, what's been interesting that all the interactions and discussions are about how to get to or render open ecosystem. That's great to see that the focus is on how to make it work versus still questioning it and I think that's pretty good. >> Well, you guys launched this business I think during the pandemic, right? >> Yes. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So I mean, you could do a lot over Zoom, but as we were talking about earlier, having the face-to-face interaction, there's no replacement for it. The 6:00 AM meetings versus the 30 minute zoom calls and your body language, I mean, you learn so much that you can take away from these events. >> Absolutely. Seeing someone in 3D is so different and it's good to build that relationship and rapport as well with the folks. >> I agree. >> It is. There's so much value in the hallway conversations that you can't have over Zoom. So, I guess last question for you as we head into to day two, what are some of the things that we can be on the lookout for from Dell and its ecosystem? >> Hmm. >> Interesting. (Tibor chuckling) >> I mean, all our announcements are out. I think what you can look at for us to really be leading in this segment, taking a leadership role, and continuously looking at how we can really enable the open ecosystem and how we can provide more value there, and how we can see how we can lead in this space. >> How you can lead in this space. >> Yeah, I mean for me, I mean, day two is like, I have a lot more meetings in day two than day one so I don't know if it's like people flying in today or what, but it's amazing to just meet the partners and customers. >> So, that theme of velocity for you is going to keep going. >> Oh, it's not stopping. (Lisa laughing) That's for sure. We are excited about it. >> Well, thank you for carving out some time to talk to with us on "theCUBE" about the partner program, the open ecosystem and the commitment to growing that and enabling partners to really differentiate their services with Dell. We appreciate it. >> We appreciate it as well. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks. >> Our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live in Barcelona, Spain at MWC '23. Day one of our coverage. Be right back with our final guest of the day so stick around. (upbeat music continues)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While never really meant to be a consumer tech event, the rapid ascendancy of smartphones sucked much of the air out of Mobile World Congress over the years, now MWC. And while the device manufacturers continue to have a major presence at the show, the maturity of intelligent devices, longer life cycles, and the disaggregation of the network stack, have put enterprise technologies front and center in the telco business. Semiconductor manufacturers, network equipment players, infrastructure companies, cloud vendors, software providers, and a spate of startups are eyeing the trillion dollar plus communications industry as one of the next big things to watch this decade. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we bring you part two of our ongoing coverage of MWC '23, with some new data on enterprise players specifically in large telco environments, a brief glimpse at some of the pre-announcement news and corresponding themes ahead of MWC, and some of the key announcement areas we'll be watching at the show on theCUBE. Now, last week we shared some ETR data that showed how traditional enterprise tech players were performing, specifically within the telecoms vertical. Here's a new look at that data from ETR, which isolates the same companies, but cuts the data for what ETR calls large telco. The N in this cut is 196, down from 288 last week when we included all company sizes in the dataset. Now remember the two dimensions here, on the y-axis is net score, or spending momentum, and on the x-axis is pervasiveness in the data set. The table insert in the upper left informs how the dots and companies are plotted, and that red dotted line, the horizontal line at 40%, that indicates a highly elevated net score. Now while the data are not dramatically different in terms of relative positioning, there are a couple of changes at the margin. So just going down the list and focusing on net score. Azure is comparable, but slightly lower in this sector in the large telco than it was overall. Google Cloud comes in at number two, and basically swapped places with AWS, which drops slightly in the large telco relative to overall telco. Snowflake is also slightly down by one percentage point, but maintains its position. Remember Snowflake, overall, its net score is much, much higher when measuring across all verticals. Snowflake comes down in telco, and relative to overall, a little bit down in large telco, but it's making some moves to attack this market that we'll talk about in a moment. Next are Red Hat OpenStack and Databricks. About the same in large tech telco as they were an overall telco. Then there's Dell next that has a big presence at MWC and is getting serious about driving 16G adoption, and new servers, and edge servers, and other partnerships. Cisco and Red Hat OpenShift basically swapped spots when moving from all telco to large telco, as Cisco drops and Red Hat bumps up a bit. And VMware dropped about four percentage points in large telco. Accenture moved up dramatically, about nine percentage points in big telco, large telco relative to all telco. HPE dropped a couple of percentage points. Oracle stayed about the same. And IBM surprisingly dropped by about five points. So look, I understand not a ton of change in terms of spending momentum in the large sector versus telco overall, but some deltas. The bottom line for enterprise players is one, they're just getting started in this new disruption journey that they're on as the stack disaggregates. Two, all these players have experience in delivering horizontal solutions, but now working with partners and identifying big problems to be solved, and three, many of these companies are generally not the fastest moving firms relative to smaller disruptive disruptors. Now, cloud has been an exception in fairness. But the good news for the legacy infrastructure and IT companies is that the telco transformation and the 5G buildout is going to take years. So it's moving at a pace that is very favorable to many of these companies. Okay, so looking at just some of the pre-announcement highlights that have hit the wire this week, I want to give you a glimpse of the diversity of innovation that is occurring in the telecommunication space. You got semiconductor manufacturers, device makers, network equipment players, carriers, cloud vendors, enterprise tech companies, software companies, startups. Now we've included, you'll see in this list, we've included OpeRAN, that logo, because there's so much buzz around the topic and we're going to come back to that. But suffice it to say, there's no way we can cover all the announcements from the 2000 plus exhibitors at the show. So we're going to cherry pick here and make a few call outs. Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced an acquisition of an Italian private cellular network company called AthoNet. Zeus Kerravala wrote about it on SiliconANGLE if you want more details. Now interestingly, HPE has a partnership with Solana, which also does private 5G. But according to Zeus, Solona is more of an out-of-the-box solution, whereas AthoNet is designed for the core and requires more integration. And as you'll see in a moment, there's going to be a lot of talk at the show about private network. There's going to be a lot of news there from other competitors, and we're going to be watching that closely. And while many are concerned about the P5G, private 5G, encroaching on wifi, Kerravala doesn't see it that way. Rather, he feels that these private networks are really designed for more industrial, and you know mission critical environments, like factories, and warehouses that are run by robots, et cetera. 'Cause these can justify the increased expense of private networks. Whereas wifi remains a very low cost and flexible option for, you know, whatever offices and homes. Now, over to Dell. Dell announced its intent to go hard after opening up the telco network with the announcement that in the second half of this year it's going to begin shipping its infrastructure blocks for Red Hat. Remember it's like kind of the converged infrastructure for telco with a more open ecosystem and sort of more flexible, you know, more mature engineered system. Dell has also announced a range of PowerEdge servers for a variety of use cases. A big wide line bringing forth its 16G portfolio and aiming squarely at the telco space. Dell also announced, here we go, a private wireless offering with airspan, and Expedo, and a solution with AthoNet, the company HPE announced it was purchasing. So I guess Dell and HPE are now partnering up in the private wireless space, and yes, hell is freezing over folks. We'll see where that relationship goes in the mid- to long-term. Dell also announced new lab and certification capabilities, which we said last week was going to be critical for the further adoption of open ecosystem technology. So props to Dell for, you know, putting real emphasis and investment in that. AWS also made a number of announcements in this space including private wireless solutions and associated managed services. AWS named Deutsche Telekom, Orange, T-Mobile, Telefonica, and some others as partners. And AWS announced the stepped up partnership, specifically with T-Mobile, to bring AWS services to T-Mobile's network portfolio. Snowflake, back to Snowflake, announced its telecom data cloud. Remember we showed the data earlier, it's Snowflake not as strong in the telco sector, but they're continuing to move toward this go-to market alignment within key industries, realigning their go-to market by vertical. It also announced that AT&T, and a number of other partners, are collaborating to break down data silos specifically in telco. Look, essentially, this is Snowflake taking its core value prop to the telco vertical and forming key partnerships that resonate in the space. So think simplification, breaking down silos, data sharing, eventually data monetization. Samsung previewed its future capability to allow smartphones to access satellite services, something Apple has previously done. AMD, Intel, Marvell, Qualcomm, are all in the act, all the semiconductor players. Qualcomm for example, announced along with Telefonica, and Erickson, a 5G millimeter network that will be showcased in Spain at the event this coming week using Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset platform, based on none other than Arm technology. Of course, Arm we said is going to dominate the edge, and is is clearly doing so. It's got the volume advantage over, you know, traditional Intel, you know, X86 architectures. And it's no surprise that Microsoft is touting its open AI relationship. You're going to hear a lot of AI talk at this conference as is AI is now, you know, is the now topic. All right, we could go on and on and on. There's just so much going on at Mobile World Congress or MWC, that we just wanted to give you a glimpse of some of the highlights that we've been watching. Which brings us to the key topics and issues that we'll be exploring at MWC next week. We touched on some of this last week. A big topic of conversation will of course be, you know, 5G. Is it ever going to become real? Is it, is anybody ever going to make money at 5G? There's so much excitement around and anticipation around 5G. It has not lived up to the hype, but that's because the rollout, as we've previous reported, is going to take years. And part of that rollout is going to rely on the disaggregation of the hardened telco stack, as we reported last week and in previous Breaking Analysis episodes. OpenRAN is a big component of that evolution. You know, as our RAN intelligent controllers, RICs, which essentially the brain of OpenRAN, if you will. Now as we build out 5G networks at massive scale and accommodate unprecedented volumes of data and apply compute-hungry AI to all this data, the issue of energy efficiency is going to be front and center. It has to be. Not only is it a, you know, hot political issue, the reality is that improving power efficiency is compulsory or the whole vision of telco's future is going to come crashing down. So chip manufacturers, equipment makers, cloud providers, everybody is going to be doubling down and clicking on this topic. Let's talk about AI. AI as we said, it is the hot topic right now, but it is happening not only in consumer, with things like ChatGPT. And think about the theme of this Breaking Analysis in the enterprise, AI in the enterprise cannot be ChatGPT. It cannot be error prone the way ChatGPT is. It has to be clean, reliable, governed, accurate. It's got to be ethical. It's got to be trusted. Okay, we're going to have Zeus Kerravala on the show next week and definitely want to get his take on private networks and how they're going to impact wifi. You know, will private networks cannibalize wifi? If not, why not? He wrote about this again on SiliconANGLE if you want more details, and we're going to unpack that on theCUBE this week. And finally, as always we'll be following the data flows to understand where and how telcos, cloud players, startups, software companies, disruptors, legacy companies, end customers, how are they going to make money from new data opportunities? 'Cause we often say in theCUBE, don't ever bet against data. All right, that's a wrap for today. Remember theCUBE is going to be on location at MWC 2023 next week. We got a great set. We're in the walkway in between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, stand CS-60. Look for us, we got a full schedule. If you got a great story or you have news, stop by. We're going to try to get you on the program. I'll be there with Lisa Martin, co-hosting, David Nicholson as well, and the entire CUBE crew, so don't forget to come by and see us. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, and Ken Schiffman, as well, in our Boston studio. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at SiliconANGLE.com. He does some great editing. Thank you. All right, remember all these episodes they are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcasts. I publish each week on Wikibon.com and SiliconANGLE.com. All the video content is available on demand at theCUBE.net, or you can email me directly if you want to get in touch David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out ETR.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Mobile World Congress '23, MWC '23, or next time on Breaking Analysis. (bright music)

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from The Cube and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> The world's leading telcos are trying to shed the stigma of being monopolies lacking innovation. Telcos have been great at operational efficiency and connectivity and living off of transmission, and the costs and expenses or revenue associated with that transmission. But in a world beyond telephone poles and basic wireless and mobile services, how will telcos modernize and become more agile and monetize new opportunities brought about by 5G and private wireless and a spate of new innovations and infrastructure, cloud data and apps? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Mobile World Congress or now, MWC23, we explore the evolution of the telco business and how the industry is in many ways, mimicking transformations that took place decades ago in enterprise IT. We'll model some of the traditional enterprise vendors using ETR data and investigate how they're faring in the telecommunications sector, and we'll pose some of the key issues facing the industry this decade. First, let's take a look at what the GSMA has in store for MWC23. GSMA is the host of what used to be called Mobile World Congress. They've set the theme for this year's event as "Velocity" and they've rebranded MWC to reflect the fact that mobile technology is only one part of the story. MWC has become one of the world's premier events highlighting innovations not only in Telco, mobile and 5G, but the collision between cloud, infrastructure, apps, private networks, smart industries, machine intelligence, and AI, and more. MWC comprises an enormous ecosystem of service providers, technology companies, and firms from virtually every industry including sports and entertainment. And as well, GSMA, along with its venue partner at the Fira Barcelona, have placed a major emphasis on sustainability and public and private partnerships. Virtually every industry will be represented at the event because every industry is impacted by the trends and opportunities in this space. GSMA has said it expects 80,000 attendees at MWC this year, not quite back to 2019 levels, but trending in that direction. Of course, attendance from Chinese participants has historically been very high at the show, and obviously the continued travel issues from that region are affecting the overall attendance, but still very strong. And despite these concerns, Huawei, the giant Chinese technology company. has the largest physical presence of any exhibitor at the show. And finally, GSMA estimates that more than $300 million in economic benefit will result from the event which takes place at the end of February and early March. And The Cube will be back at MWC this year with a major presence thanks to our anchor sponsor, Dell Technologies and other supporters of our content program, including Enterprise Web, ArcaOS, VMware, Snowflake, Cisco, AWS, and others. And one of the areas we're interested in exploring is the evolution of the telco stack. It's a topic that's often talked about and one that we've observed taking place in the 1990s when the vertically integrated IBM mainframe monopoly gave way to a disintegrated and horizontal industry structure. And in many ways, the same thing is happening today in telecommunications, which is shown on the left-hand side of this diagram. Historically, telcos have relied on a hardened, integrated, and incredibly reliable, and secure set of hardware and software services that have been fully vetted and tested, and certified, and relied upon for decades. And at the top of that stack on the left are the crown jewels of the telco stack, the operational support systems and the business support systems. For the OSS, we're talking about things like network management, network operations, service delivery, quality of service, fulfillment assurance, and things like that. For the BSS systems, these refer to customer-facing elements of the stack, like revenue, order management, what products they sell, billing, and customer service. And what we're seeing is telcos have been really good at operational efficiency and making money off of transport and connectivity, but they've lacked the innovation in services and applications. They own the pipes and that works well, but others, be the over-the-top content companies, or private network providers and increasingly, cloud providers have been able to bypass the telcos, reach around them, if you will, and drive innovation. And so, the right-most diagram speaks to the need to disaggregate pieces of the stack. And while the similarities to the 1990s in enterprise IT are greater than the differences, there are things that are different. For example, the granularity of hardware infrastructure will not likely be as high where competition occurred back in the 90s at every layer of the value chain with very little infrastructure integration. That of course changed in the 2010s with converged infrastructure and hyper-converged and also software defined. So, that's one difference. And the advent of cloud, containers, microservices, and AI, none of that was really a major factor in the disintegration of legacy IT. And that probably means that disruptors can move even faster than did the likes of Intel and Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, and the Seagates of the 1990s. As well, while many of the products and services will come from traditional enterprise IT names like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, VMware, AWS, Microsoft, Google, et cetera, many of the names are going to be different and come from traditional network equipment providers. These are names like Ericsson and Huawei, and Nokia, and other names, like Wind River, and Rakuten, and Dish Networks. And there are enormous opportunities in data to help telecom companies and their competitors go beyond telemetry data into more advanced analytics and data monetization. There's also going to be an entirely new set of apps based on the workloads and use cases ranging from hospitals, sports arenas, race tracks, shipping ports, you name it. Virtually every vertical will participate in this transformation as the industry evolves its focus toward innovation, agility, and open ecosystems. Now remember, this is not a binary state. There are going to be greenfield companies disrupting the apple cart, but the incumbent telcos are going to have to continue to ensure newer systems work with their legacy infrastructure, in their OSS and BSS existing systems. And as we know, this is not going to be an overnight task. Integration is a difficult thing, transformations, migrations. So that's what makes this all so interesting because others can come in with Greenfield and potentially disrupt. There'll be interesting partnerships and ecosystems will form and coalitions will also form. Now, we mentioned that several traditional enterprise companies are or will be playing in this space. Now, ETR doesn't have a ton of data on specific telecom equipment and software providers, but it does have some interesting data that we cut for this breaking analysis. What we're showing here in this graphic is some of the names that we've followed over the years and how they're faring. Specifically, we did the cut within the telco sector. So the Y-axis here shows net score or spending velocity. And the horizontal axis, that shows the presence or pervasiveness in the data set. And that table insert in the upper left, that informs as to how the dots are plotted. You know, the two columns there, net score and the ends. And that red-dotted line, that horizontal line at 40%, that is an indicator of a highly elevated level. Anything above that, we consider quite outstanding. And what we'll do now is we'll comment on some of the cohorts and share with you how they're doing in telecommunications, and that sector, that vertical relative to their position overall in the data set. Let's start with the public cloud players. They're prominent in every industry. Telcos, telecommunications is no exception and it's quite an interesting cohort here. On the one hand, they can help telecommunication firms modernize and become more agile by eliminating the heavy lifting and you know, all the cloud, you know, value prop, data center costs, and the cloud benefits. At the same time, public cloud players are bringing their services to the edge, building out their own global networks and are a disruptive force to traditional telcos. All right, let's talk about Azure first. Their net score is basically identical to telco relative to its overall average. AWS's net score is higher in telco by just a few percentage points. Google Cloud platform is eight percentage points higher in telco with a 53% net score. So all three hyperscalers have an equal or stronger presence in telco than their average overall. Okay, let's look at the traditional enterprise hardware and software infrastructure cohort. Dell, Cisco, HPE, Red Hat, VMware, and Oracle. We've highlighted in this chart just as sort of indicators or proxies. Dell's net score's 10 percentage points higher in telco than its overall average. Interesting. Cisco's is a bit higher. HPE's is actually lower by about nine percentage points in the ETR survey, and VMware's is lower by about four percentage points. Now, Red Hat is really interesting. OpenStack, as we've previously reported is popular with telcos who want to build out their own private cloud. And the data shows that Red Hat OpenStack's net score is 15 percentage points higher in the telco sector than its overall average. OpenShift, on the other hand, has a net score that's four percentage points lower in telco than its overall average. So this to us talks to the pace of adoption of microservices and containers. You know, it's going to happen, but it's going to happen more slowly. Finally, Oracle's spending momentum is somewhat lower in the sector than its average, despite the firm having a decent telco business. IBM and Accenture, heavy services companies are both lower in this sector than their average. And real quickly, snowflake's net score is much lower by about 12 percentage points relative to its very high average net score of 62%. But we look for them to be a player in this space as telcos need to modernize their analytics stack and share data in a governed manner. Databricks' net score is also much lower than its average by about 13 points. And same, I would expect them to be a player as open architectures and cloud gains steam in telco. All right, let's close out now on what we're going to be talking about at MWC23 and some of the key issues that we'll be unpacking. We've talked about stack disaggregation in this breaking analysis, but the key here will be the pace at which it will reach the operational efficiency and reliability of closed stacks. Telcos, you know, in a large part, they're engineering heavy firms and much of their work takes place, kind of in the basement, in the dark. It's not really a big public hype machine, and they tend to move slowly and cautiously. While they understand the importance of agility, they're going to be careful because, you know, it's in their DNA. And so at the same time, if they don't move fast enough, they're going to get hurt and disrupted by competitors. So that's going to be a topic of conversation, and we'll be looking for proof points. And the other comment I'll make is around integration. Telcos because of their conservatism will benefit from better testing and those firms that can innovate on the testing front and have labs and certifications and innovate at that level, with an ecosystem are going to be in a better position. Because open sometimes means wild west. So the more players like Dell, HPE, Cisco, Red Hat, et cetera, that do that and align with their ecosystems and provide those resources, the faster adoption is going to go. So we'll be looking for, you know, who's actually doing that, Open RAN or Radio Access Networks. That fits in this discussion because O-RAN is an emerging network architecture. It essentially enables the use of open technologies from an ecosystem and over time, look at O-RAN is going to be open, but the questions, you know, a lot of questions remain as to when it will be able to deliver the operational efficiency of traditional RAN. Got some interesting dynamics going on. Rakuten is a company that's working hard on this problem, really focusing on operational efficiency. Then you got Dish Networks. They're also embracing O-RAN. They're coming at it more from service innovation. So that's something that we'll be monitoring and unpacking. We're going to look at cloud as a disruptor. On the one hand, cloud can help drive agility, as we said earlier and optionality, and innovation for incumbent telcos. But the flip side is going to also do the same for startups trying to disrupt and cloud attracts startups. While some of the telcos are actually embracing the cloud, many are being cautious. So that's going to be an interesting topic of discussion. And there's private wireless networks and 5G, and hyperlocal private networks, they're being deployed, you know, at the edge. This idea of open edge is also a really hot topic and this trend is going to accelerate. You know, the importance here is that the use cases are going to be widely varied. The needs of a hospital are going to be different than those of a sports venue are different from a remote drilling location, and energy or a concert venue. Things like real-time AI inference and data flows are going to bring new services and monetization opportunities. And many firms are going to be bypassing traditional telecommunications networks to build these out. Satellites as well, we're going to see, you know, in this decade, you're going to have, you're going to look down at Google Earth and you're going to see real-time. You know, today you see snapshots and so, lots of innovations going in that space. So how is this going to disrupt industries and traditional industry structures? Now, as always, we'll be looking at data angles, right? 'Cause it's in The Cube's DNA to follow the data and what opportunities and risks data brings. The Cube is going to be on location at MWC23 at the end of the month. We got a great set. We're in the walkway between halls four and five, right in Congress Square, it's booths CS60. So we'll have a full, they're called Stan CS60. We have a full schedule. I'm going to be there with Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson and the entire Cube crew, so don't forget to stop by. All right, that's a wrap. I want to thank Alex Myerson, who's on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle, does some great stuff for us. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com. And all the video content is available on demand at thecube.net. You can email me directly at david.vellante@silicon angle.com. You can DM me at dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you at Mobile World Congress, and/or at next time on "Breaking Analysis." (bright music) (bright music fades)

(gentle instrumental music) >> Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vantara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Vantara drives customer success, specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green IT, and then the 07-08 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back, and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in IT. Are you seeing this? Is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >> Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers, and end consumers nowadays are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see, is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough, so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to follow the human rights and sustainability, three levels back in the supply chain. But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action, and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in, and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company, because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themselves as the CEO, but they also are hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens, it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a KPI, others are indirectly measured. So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels, they all get measured on it, and for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round tables. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well, the pressure is coming from end consumers and new laws that are put into action, that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the three pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new score system where they put out request for proposal, and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive, that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? And in their store system, cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It weighs about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a CFO. But in some cases the CFO say, "I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it." But they're asked to do it because end consumers, laws, and so on, are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah sustainability has become a maker trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >> Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, and we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR, and it looks like it's going to lead again here. Just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. Odawara is my favorite, because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >> Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well, to keep our production close to our customers and reduce transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the EMEA region, back in 2013, we created a new factory. And when we did that, we were asked to do it in an energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we built a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the wintertime, with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panels on the roof to power that factory. We were collecting rain water to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with LED. And when we send out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a rack, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer. We want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EMEA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up in price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking the talk, and we make that decision, even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013. When you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future, but right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >> I want to come back to the economics, but before I do, I want to pick up on something you just said, because you hear the slogan, "Sustainability by design." A lot of people might think, "Okay, that's just a marketing slogan to vector into this mega trend," but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time based on your last comments. Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, so, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission in that part of the life of a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from new for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core it's a technology innovator and our answer is to reduce the CO2 emission, and the decarbonization of the data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >> How about recycling? Where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was... A lot of times at a hotel you used to get bottled water now you get plant-based waters in a box and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >> Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here because one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we want to do when you keep it for 10 years, is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CPU power, you just switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system, to keep it those 10 years. But you can also expand with new disk media, flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that, you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment, like computer network and switches, but we also take competitive equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years that has been linear economics, where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into the landfill afterwards. The recycling economics is really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circular economics, where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only 1-2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along, and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >> Yeah, and that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design. You have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I do want to come back to the economics, because in the early days of so-called green IT, there was a lot of talk about, "Well I'll never be able to lower the power bill, and the facilities people don't talk to the IT people," and that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I understand it's going to take some time, but help us understand your experience there Tom. >> Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality, when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting, and we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world, where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure, is to reduce the electricity by 96%. This is a very high number, and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 emission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part, just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure, and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting, because you save electricity and you do something really good for the environment at the same time. In this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million U.S. dollar annually, and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here, looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer if you have that kind of capability in your organization. Modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >> Yeah, a big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners. Are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers, and distributors who may be watching? >> So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software, and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization, and partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO, and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've see in this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room, is that they are very focused on the green profile, and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on in the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO, and there will immediately be a request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization, to be relevant, and have an impact, and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >> Well, really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom, really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >> Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >> Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back to summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. (gentle instrumental music)

>>Partnerships in the technology business, they take many forms. For example, technology engineering partnerships, they drive value in terms of things like integration and simplification for customers. There are product partnerships. They fill gaps to create more comprehensive portfolios and more fluid relationships. Partner ecosystems offer high touch services. They offer managed services, specialty services, and other types of value based off of strong customer knowledge and years of built up trust partner. Ecosystems have evolved quite dramatically over the last decade with the explosion of data and the popularity of cloud models. Public, private, hybrid cross clouds. You know, yes it's true. Partnerships are about selling solutions, but they're also about building long term sustainable trust, where a seller learns the ins and outs of a customer's organization and can anticipate needs that are gonna drive bottom line profits for both sides of the equation, the buyer and the seller. >>Hello and welcome to our program. My name is Dave Ante and along with Lisa Martin, we're going to explore how Hitachi Van Tara drives customer success with its partners. First up, Lisa speaks with Kim King. She's the senior vice president of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Van. And they'll set the table for us with an overview of how Hitachi is working with partners and where their priorities are focused. Then Russell Kingsley, he's the CTO and global VP of Technical sales at Hitachi Van Tara. He joins Lisa for a discussion of the tech and they're gonna get into cloud generally and hybrid cloud specifically in the role that partners play in the growing as a service movement. Now, after that I'll talk with Tom Christensen, he's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Vitara. And we're gonna talk about a really important topic, sustainability. We're gonna discuss where it came from, why it matters, and how it can drive bottom line profitability for both customers and partners. Let's get right to it. >>Where for the data driven, for those who understand clarity is currency. Believe progress requires precision and no neutral is not an option. We're for the data driven. The ones who can't tolerate failure, who won't put up with downtime or allow access to just anyone. We're for the data driven who act on insight instead of instinct. Bank on privacy instead of probabilities and rely on resilience instead of reaction. We see ourselves in the obsessive, the incessant, progressive, and the meticulously engineered. We enable the incredible identify with the analytical and are synonymous with the mission critical. We know what it means to be data driven because data is in our dna. We were born industrial and and we breathe digital. We speak predictive analytics so you can keep supply chains moving. We bleed in store and online insights so you can accurately predict customer preferences. We sweat security and digital privacy so you can turn complex regulations into competitive advantage. We break down barriers and eliminate silos. So you can go from data rich to data driven because it's clear the future belongs to the data driven. >>Hey everyone, welcome to this conversation. Lisa Martin here with Kim King, the SVP of Strategic Partners and Alliances at Hitachi Ventera. Kim, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here. >>Let's talk about, so as we know, we talk about cloud all the time, the landscape, the cloud infrastructure landscape increasingly getting more and more complex. What are some of the biggest challenges and pain points that you're hearing from customers today? >>Yeah, so lot. There are lots, but I would say the, the few that we hear consistently are cost the complexity, right? Really the complexity of where do they go, how do they do it, and then availability. They have a lot of available options, but again, going back to complexity and cost, where do they think that they should move and how, how do they make that a successful move to the cloud? >>So talk to me, Hitachi Ventura has a great partner ecosystem. Where do partners play a role in helping customers to address some of the challenges with respect to the cloud landscape? >>Yeah, so part, our partners are really leading the way in the area of cloud in terms of helping customers understand the complexities of the cloud. As we talked about, they're truly the trusted advisor. So when they look at a customer's complete infrastructure, what are the workloads, what are the CRI critical applications that they work with? What's the unique architecture that they have to drive with that customer for a successful outcome and help them architect that? And so partners are truly leading the way across the board, understanding the complexities of each individual customer and then helping them make the right decisions with and for them. And then bringing us along as part of that, >>Talk to me a little bit about the partner landscape, the partner ecosystem at Hitachi Ventura. How does this fit into the overall strategy for the company? >>So we really look at our ecosystem as an extension of our sales organization and and really extension across the board, I would say our goal is to marry the right customer with the right partner and help them achieve their goals, ensure that they keep costs in check, that they ensure they don't have any security concerns, and that they have availability for the solutions and applications that they're trying to move to the cloud, which is most important. So we really, we really look at our ecosystem as a specialty ecosystem that adds high value for the right customers. >>So Kim, talk to me about how partners fit into Hitachi van's overall strategy. >>So I think our biggest differentiators with partners is that they're not just another number. Our partner organization is that valued extension of our overall sales pre-sales services organization. And we treat them like an extension of our organization. It's funny because I was just on a call with an analyst earlier this week and they said that AWS has increased their number of partners to 150,000 partners from, it was just under a hundred thousand. And I'm really not sure how you provide quality engagement to partners, right? And is how is that really a sustainable strategy? So for us, we look at trusted engagement across the ecosystem as a def differentiation. Really our goal is to make their life simple and profitable and really become their primary trusted partner when we go to market with them. And we see that paying dividends with our partners as they engage with us and as they expand and grow across the segments and then grow globally with us as well. >>And that's key, right? That synergistic approach when you're in customer conversations, what do you articulate as the key competitive differentiators where it relates to your partners? >>So really the, that they're the trusted advisor for that partner, right? That they understand our solutions better than any solution out there. And because we're not trying to be all things to our customers and our partners that we being bring best breaths of breed, best of breed solutions to our customers through our partner community, they can truly provide that end user experience and the successful outcome that's needed without, you know, sort of all kinds of, you know, crazy cha challenges, right? When you look at it, they really wanna make sure that they're driving that co-developed solution and the successful outcome for that customer. >>So then how do you feel that Hitachi Ventura helps partners really to grow and expand their own business? >>Wow, so that's, there's tons of ways, but we've, we've created a very simplified, what we call digital selling platform. And in that digital selling platform, we have allowed our partners to choose their own price and pre-approve their pricing and their promotions. They've actually, we've expanded the way we go to market with our partners from a sort of a technical capabilities. We give them online what we call Hitachi online labs that allow them to really leverage all of the solutions and demo systems out there today. And they have complete access to any one of our resources, product management. And so we really have, like I said, we actually provide our partners with better tools and resources sometimes than we do our own sales and pre-sales organization. So we, we look at them as, because they have so many other solutions out there that we have to be one step ahead of everybody else to give them that solution capability and the expertise that they need for their customers. >>So if you dig in, where is it that Hiti is helping partners succeed with your portfolio? >>Wow. So I think just across the board, I think we're really driving that profitable, trusted, and simplified engagement with our partner community because it's a value base and ease of doing business. I say that we allow them to scale and drive that sort of double digit growth through all of the solutions and and offerings that we have today. And because we've taken the approach of a very complex technical sort of infrastructure from a high end perspective and scale it all the way through to our mid-size enterprise, that allows them to really enter any customer at any vertical and provide them a really quality solution with that 100% data availability guarantee that we provide all of our customers. >>So then if we look at the overall sales cycle and the engagement, where is it that you're helping cus your partners rather succeed with the portfolio? >>Say that again? Sorry, my brain broke. No, >>No worries. So if we look at the overall sales cycle, where is it specifically where you're helping customers to succeed with the portfolio? >>So from the sales cycle, I think because we have the, a solution that is simple, easy, and really scaled for the type of customer that we have out there, it allows them to basically right size their infrastructure based on the application, the workload, the quality or the need that application may have and ensure that we provide them with that best solution. >>So then from a partner's perspective, how is it that Hitachi van is helping them to actually close deals faster? >>Yeah, so lots of great ways I think between our pre-sales organization that's on call and available a hundred percent of the time, I think that we've seen, again, the trusted engagement with them from a pricing and packaging perspective. You know, we, you know, two years ago it would take them two to three weeks to get a pre-approved quote where today they preapproved their own quotes in less than an hour and can have that in the hands of a customer. So we've seen that the ability for our partners to create and close orders in very short periods of time and actually get to the customer's needs very quickly, >>So dramatically faster. Yes. Talk about overall, so the partner relationship's quite strong, very synergistic that, that Hitachi Ventura has with its customers. Let's kind of step back out and look at the cloud infrastructure. How do you see it evolving the market evolving overall in say the next six months, 12 months? >>Yeah, so we see it significantly, we've been doing a lot of studies around this specifically. So we have a couple of different teams. We have our sort of our standard partner team that's out there and now we have a specialty cloud service provider team that really focuses on partners that are building and their own infrastructure or leveraging the infrastructure of a large hyperscaler or another GSI and selling that out. And then what we found is when we dig down deeper into our standard sort of partner reseller or value added reseller market, what we're seeing is that they are want to have the capability to resell the solution, but they don't necessarily wanna have to own and manage the infrastructure themselves. So we're helping both of them through that transition. We see that it's gonna, so it's funny cuz you're seeing a combination of many customers move to really the hyperscale or public cloud and many of them want to repatriate their infrastructure back because they see costs and they see challenges around all of that. And so our partners are helping them understand, again, what is the best solution for them as opposed to let's just throw everything in the public cloud and hope that it works. We're we're really helping them make the right choices and decisions and we're putting the right partners together to make that happen. >>And how was that feedback, that data helping you to really grow and expand the partner program as a whole? >>Yeah, so it's been fantastic. We have a whole methodology that we, we created, which is called PDM plan, develop monetize with partners. And so we went specifically to market with cloud service providers that'll, and we really tested this out with them. We didn't just take a solution and say, here, go sell it, good luck and have, you know, have a nice day. Many vendors are doing that to their partners and the partners are struggling to monetize those solutions. So we spend a lot of time upfront planning with them what is not only the storage infrastructure but your potentially your data resiliency and, and everything else that you're looking at your security solutions. How do we package those all together? How do we help you monetize them? And then who do you target from a customer perspective so that they've built up a pipeline of opportunities that they can go and work with us on and we really sit side by side with them in a co-development environment. >>In terms of that side by side relationship, how does the partner ecosystem play a role in Hitachi Venturas as a service business? >>So our primary go to market with our, as a service business is with and through partners. So our goal is to drive all, almost all of of our as a service. Unless it's super highly complex and something that a partner cannot support, we will make sure that they really, we leverage that with them with all of our partners. >>So strong partner relationships, very strong partner ecosystem. What would you say, Kim, are the priorities for the partner ecosystem going forward? The next say year? >>Yeah, so we have tons of priorities, right? I think really it's double digit growth for them and for us and understanding how a simpler approach that's customized for the specific vertical or customer base or go to market that they have that helps them quickly navigate to be successful. Our goal is always to facilitate trusted engagements with our partners, right? And then really, as I said, directionally our goal is to be 95 to a hundred percent of all of our business through partners, which helps customers and then really use that trusted advisor status they have to provide that value base to the customer. And then going back on our core tenants, which are, you know, really a trusted, simplified, profitable engagement with our partner community that allows them to really drive successful outcomes and go to market with us. And the end users >>Trust is such an important word, we can't underutilize it in these conversations. Last question. Sure. From a channel business perspective, what are some of the priorities coming down the pi? >>Oh, again, my biggest priority right, is always to increase the number of partner success stories that we have and increase the value to our partners. So we really dig in, we, we right now sit about number one or number two in, in our space with our partners in ease of doing business and value to our channel community. We wanna be number one across the board, right? Our goal is to make sure that our partner community is successful and that they really have those profitable engagements and that we're globally working with them to drive that engagement and, and help them build more profitable businesses. And so we just take tons of feedback from our partners regularly to help them understand, but we, we act on it very quickly so that we can make sure we incorporate that into our new program and our go to markets as we roll out every year. >>It sounds like a great flywheel of communications from the partners. Kim, thank you so much for joining me today talking about what Hitachi Vanta is doing with its partner ecosystem, the value in IT for customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you very much. >>Up next, Russell Kingsley joins me, TTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi van you watch in the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. Hey everyone, welcome back to our conversation with Hitachi van Tara, Lisa Martin here with Russell Skillings Lee, the CTO and global VP of technical sales at Hitachi Van Russell. Welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa, nice to be here. >>Yeah, great to have you. So here we are, the end of calendar year 2022. What are some of the things that you're hearing out in the field in terms of customers priorities for 2023? >>Yeah, good one. Just to, to set the scene here, we tend to deal with enterprises that have mission critical IT environments and this has been been our heritage and continues to be our major strength. So just to set the scene here, that's the type of customers predominantly I'd be hearing from. And so that's what you're gonna hear about here. Now, in terms of 20 23, 1 of the, the macro concerns that's hitting almost all of our customers right now, as you can probably appreciate is power consumption. And closely related to that is the whole area of ESG and decarbonization and all of that sort of thing. And I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on that one because that would be a whole session in itself really, but sufficient to say it is a priority for us and we, we are very active in, in that area. >>So aside from from that one that that big one, there's also a couple that are pretty much in common for most of our customers and, and we're in areas that we can help. One of those is in an exponential growth of the amount of data. It's, it's predicted that the world's data is going to triple by 2025 as opposed to where it was in 2020. And I think everyone's contributing to that, including a lot of our customers. So just the, the act of managing that amount of data is, is a challenge in itself. And I think closely related to that, a desire to use that data better to be able to gain more business insights and potentially create new business outcomes and business ideas are, is another one of those big challenges in, in that sense, I think a lot of our customers are in what I would kind of call, I affectionately call the, the post Facebook awakening era. >>And that, and what I mean by that is our traditional businesses, you know, when Facebook came along, they kind of illustrated, hey, I can actually make some use out of what is seemingly an enormous amount of useless data, which is exactly what Facebook did. They took a whole lot of people's Yeah. The minutia of people's lives and turned it into, you know, advertising revenue by gaining insights from, from those, you know, sort of seemingly useless bits of data and, you know, right. And I think this actually gave rise to a lot of digital business at that time. You know, the, this whole idea of what all you really need to be successful and disrupt the business is, you know, a great idea, you know, an app and a whole bunch of data to, to power it. And I think that a lot of our traditional customers are looking at this and wondering how do they get into the act? Because they've been collecting data for decades, an enormous amount of data, right? >>Yes. I mean, every company these days has to be a data company, but to your point, they've gotta be able to extract those insights, monetize it, and create real value new opportunities for the business at record speed. >>Yes, that's exactly right. And so being able to, to wield that data somehow turn it, it kind of turns out our customer's attentions to the type of infrastructure they've got as well. I mean, if you think about those, those companies that have been really successful in leveraging that data, a lot of them have, especially in the early days, leverage the cloud to be able to build out their capabilities. And, and the reason why the cloud became such a pivotal part of that is because it offered self-service. IT and, you know, easy development platforms to those people that had these great ideas. All they needed was access to, to, you know, the provider's website and a credit card. And now all of a sudden they could start to build a business from that. And I think a lot of our traditional IT customers are looking at this and thinking, now how do I build a similar sort of infrastructure? How do I, how do I provide that kind of self-service capability to the owners of business inside my company rather than the IT company sort of being a gatekeeper to a selected set of software packages. How now do I provide this development platform for those internal users? And I think this, this is why really hybrid cloud has become the defacto IT sort of architectural standard, even even for quite traditional, you know, IT companies. >>So when it comes to hybrid cloud, what are some of the challenges the customers are facing? And then I know Hitachi has a great partner ecosystem. How are partners helping Hitachi Ventura and its customers to eliminate or solve some of those hybrid cloud challenges? >>Yeah, it's, it, it's a great question and you know, it's, it's not 1975 anymore. It's not, it's not like you're going to get all of your IT needs from, from one, from one vendor hybrid by sort of, it's, you know, by definition is going to involve multiple pieces. And so there basically is no hybrid at all without a partner ecosystem. You really can't get everything at, at a one stop shop like you used to. But even if you think about the biggest public cloud provider on the planet, aws even, it has a marketplace for partner solutions. So, so even they see, even for customers that might consider themselves to be all in on public cloud, they are still going to need other pieces, which is where their marketplace come comes in. Now for, for us, you know, we are, we're a company that, we've been in the IT business for over 60 years, one of one of the few that could claim that sort of heritage. >>And you know, we've seen a lot of this type of change ourselves, this change of attitude from being able to provide everything yourself to being someone who contributes to an overall ecosystem. So partners are absolutely essential. And so now we kind of have a, a partner first philosophy when it comes to our routes to market on, you know, not just our own products in terms of, you know, a resale channel or whatever, but also making sure that we are working with some of the biggest players in hybrid infrastructure and determining where we can add value to that in our, in our own solutions. And so, you know, when it comes to those, those partner ecosystems, we're always looking for the spaces where we can best add our own capability to those prevailing IT architectures that are successful in the marketplace. And, you know, I think that it's probably fair to say, you know, for us, first and foremost, we, we have a reputation for having the biggest, most reliable storage infrastructure available on the planet. >>And, and we make no apologies for the fact that we tout our speeds and feeds and uptime supremacy. You know, a lot of our, a lot of our competitors would suggest that, hey, speeds and feeds don't matter. But you know, that's kind of what you say when, when you're not the fastest or not the most reliable, you know, of course they matter. And for us, what we, the way that we look at this is we say, let's look at who's providing the best possible hybrid solutions and let's partner with them to make those solutions even better. That's the way we look at it. >>Can you peel the, the onion a little bit on the technology underpinning the solutions, give a glimpse into that and then maybe add some color in terms of how partners are enhancing that? >>Yeah, let me, let me do that with a few examples here, and maybe what I can do is I can sort of share some insight about the way we think with partnering with, with particular people and why it's a good blend or why we see that technologically it's a good blend. So for example, the work we do with VMware, which we consider to be one of our most important hybrid cloud partners and in, and in fact it's, it's my belief, they have one of the strongest hybrid cloud stories in the industry. It resonates really strongly with, with our customers as well. But you know, we think it's made so much better with the robust underpinnings that we provide. We're one of the, one of the few storage vendors that provides a 100% data availability guarantee. So we, we take that sort of level of reliability and we add other aspects like life cycle management of the underpinning infrastructure. >>We combine that with what VMware's doing, and then when you look at our converged or hyper-converged solutions with them, it's a better together story where you now have what is one of the best hybrid cloud stories in the industry with VMware. But now for the on premise part, especially, you've now added a hundred percent data, data availability guarantee, and you've made managing the underlying infrastructure so much easier through the tools that we provide that go down to that level A level underneath where VMware are. And so that's, that's VMware. I've got a couple, couple more examples just to sort of fill, fill that out a bit. Sure. Cisco is another part, very strong partner of ours, a key partner. And I mean, you look at Cisco, they're a 50 billion IT provider and they don't have a dedicated storage infrastructure of their own. So they're going to partner with someone. >>From our perspective, we look at Cisco's, Cisco's customers and we look at them and think they're very similar to our own in terms of they're known to appreciate performance and reliability and a bit of premium in quality, and we think we match them them quite well. They're already buying what we believe are the best converge platforms in the industry from Cisco. So it makes sense that those customers would want to compliment that investment with the best array, best storage array they can get. And so we think we are helping Cisco's customers make the most of their decision to be ucs customers. Final one for, for you, Lisa, by way of example, we have a relationship with, with Equinix and you know, Equinix is the world's sort of leading colo provider. And the way I think they like to think of themselves, and I too tend to agree with them, is their, they're one of the most compelling high-speed interconnect networks in the world. >>They're connected to all of the, the, the significant cloud providers in most of the locations around the world. We have a, a relationship with them where we find we have customers in common who really love the idea of compute from the cloud. Compute from the cloud is great because compute is something that you are doing for a set period of time and then it's over you. Like you have a task, you do some compute, it's done. Cloud is beautiful for that. Storage on the other hand is very long lived storage doesn't tend to operate in that same sort of way. It sort of just becomes a bigger and bigger blob over time. And so the cost model around public cloud and storage is not as compelling as it is for compute. And so our, with our relationship with Equinix, we help our customers to be able to create, let's call it a, a data anchor point where they put our arrays into, into an Equinix location, and then they utilize Equinix as high speeding interconnects to the, to the cloud providers, okay. To take the compute from them. So they take the compute from the cloud providers and they own their own storage, and in this way they feel like we've now got the best of all worlds. Right. What I hope that illustrates Lisa is with those three examples is we are always looking for ways to find our key advantages with any given, you know, alliance partners advantages, >>Right? What are, when you're in customer conversations, and our final few minutes here, I wanna get, what are some of the key differentiators that you talk about when you're in customer conversations, and then how does the partner ecosystem fit into Hitachi vans as a service business? We'll start with differentiators and then let's move into the as service business so we can round out with that. >>Okay. Let's start with the differentiators. Yeah. Firstly and I, and hopefully I've kind of, I've hit this point hard, hard enough. We do believe that we have the fastest and most reliable storage infrastructure on the planet. This is kind of what we are known for, and customers that are working with us already sort of have an appreciation for that. And so they're looking for, okay, you've got that now, how can you make my hybrid cloud aspirations better? So we do have that as a fundamental, right? So, but secondly I'd say, I think it's also because we go beyond just storage management and, and into the areas of data management. You know, we've got, we've got solutions that are not just about storing the bits. We do think that we do that very well, but we also have solutions that move into the areas of enrichment, of the data, cataloging of the data, classification of the data, and most importantly, analytics. >>So, you know, we, we think it's, some of our competitors just stop at storing stuff and some of our competitors are in the analytics space, but we feel that we can bridge that. And we think that that's a, that's a competitive advantage for us. One of the other areas that I think is key for us as well is, as I said, we're one of the few vendors who've been in the marketplace for 60 years and we think this, this, this gives us a more nuanced perspective about things. There are many things in the industry, trends that have happened over time where we feel we've seen this kind of thing before and I think we will see it again. But you only really get that perspective if you are, if you are long lived in the industry. And so we believe that our conversations with our customers bear a little bit more sophistication. It's not just, it's not just about what's the latest and greatest trends. >>Right. We've got about one minute left. Can you, can you round us out with how the partner ecosystem is playing a role in the as service business? >>They're absolutely pivotal in that, you know, we, we ourselves don't own data centers, right? So we don't provide our own cloud services out. So we are 100% partner focused when it comes to that aspect. Our formula is to help partners build their cloud services with our solutions and then onsell them to their customers as as as a service. You know, and by what quick way of example, VMware for example, they've got nearly 5,000 partners selling VMware cloud services. 5,000 blows me away. And many of them are our partners too. So we kind of see this as a virtuous cycle. We've got product, we've got an an alliance with VMware and we work together with partners in common for the delivery of an as a service business. >>Got it. So the, as you said, the partner ecosystem is absolutely pivotal. Russell, it's been a pleasure having you on the program talking about all things hybrid cloud challenges, how Hitachi van is working with its partner ecosystems to really help customers across industries solve those big problems. We really appreciate your insights and your time. >>Thank you very much, Lisa. It's been great. >>Yeah, yeah. For Russell Stingley, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment we're gonna continue our conversation with Tom Christensen. Stay tuned. >>Sulfur Royal has always embraced digital technology. We were amongst the first hospitals in the UK to install a full electronic patient record system. Unfortunately, as a result of being a pioneer, we often find that there's gaps in the digital solutions. My involvement has been from the very start of this program, a group of us got together to discuss what the problems actually were in the hospital and how we could solve this. >>The digital control center is an innovation that's been designed in partnership between ourselves, anti touch, and it's designed to bring all of the information that is really critical for delivering effective and high quality patient care. Together the DCC is designed not only to improve the lives of patients, but also of our staff giving us information that our demand is going to increase in the number of patients needing support. The technology that we're building can be replicated across sulfur, the NCA, and the wider nhs, including social care and community services. Because it brings all of that information that is essential for delivering high quality efficient care. >>The DCC will save time for both staff and more importantly our patients. It will leave clinicians to care for patients rather than administrate systems and it will allow the system that I work with within the patient flow team to effectively and safely place patients in clinically appropriate environments. >>But we chose to partner with Hitachi to deliver the DCC here at Sulfur. They were willing to work with us to co-produce and design a product that really would work within the environment that we find ourselves in a hospital, in a community setting, in a social care setting. >>My hopes for the DCC is that ultimately we will provide more efficient and reliable care for our patients. >>I do believe the digital control center will improve the lives of staff and also the patients so that we can then start to deliver the real change that's needed for patient care. >>Okay, we're back with Tom Christensen, who's the global technology advisor and executive analyst at Hitachi Van Tara. And we're exploring how Hitachi Van Tower drives customer success specifically with partners. You know Tom, it's funny, back in the early part of the last decade, there was this big push around, remember it was called green it and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis sort of put that on the back burner. But sustainability is back and it seems to be emerging as a mega trend in in it is, are you seeing this, is it same wine new label? How real is this trend and where's the pressure coming from? >>Well, we clearly see that sustainability is a mega trend in the IT sector. And when we talk to CIOs or senior IT leaders or simply just invite them in for a round table on this topic, they all tell us that they get the pressure from three different angles. The first one is really end consumers and end consumers. Nowaday are beginning to ask questions about the green profile and what are the company doing for the environment. And this one here is both private and public companies as well. The second pressure that we see is coming from the government. The government thinks that companies are not moving fast enough so they want to put laws in that are forcing companies to move faster. And we see that in Germany as an example, where they are giving a law into enterprise companies to following human rights and sustainability tree levels back in the supply chain. >>But we also see that in EU they are talking about a new law that they want to put into action and that one will replicate to 27 countries in Europe. But this one is not only Europe, it's the rest of the world where governments are talking about forcing companies to move faster than we have done in the past. So we see two types of pressure coming in and at the same time, this one here starts off at the CEO at a company because they want to have the competitive edge and be able to be relevant in the market. And for that reason they're beginning to put KPIs on themself as the ceo, but they're also hiring sustainability officers with sustainability KPIs. And when that happens it replicates down in the organization and we can now see that some CIOs, they have a kpi, others are indirectly measured. >>So we see direct and indirect. The same with CFOs and other C levels. They all get measured on it. And for that reason it replicates down to IT people. And that's what they tell us on these round table. I get that pressure every day, every week, every quarter. But where is the pressure coming from? Well the pressure is coming from in consumers and new laws that are put into action that force companies to think differently and have focus on their green profile and doing something good for the environment. So those are the tree pressures that we see. But when we talk to CFOs as an example, we are beginning to see that they have a new store system where they put out request for proposal and this one is in about 58% of all request for proposal that we receive that they are asking for our sustainability take, what are you doing as a vendor? >>And in their score system cost has the highest priority and number two is sustainability. It waits about 15, 20 to 25% when they look at your proposal that you submit to a cfo. But in some cases the CFO say, I don't even know where the pressure is coming from. I'm asked to do it. Or they're asked to do it because end consumers laws and so on are forcing them to do it. But I would answer, yeah, sustainability has become a make trend this year and it's even growing faster and faster every month we move forward. >>Yeah, Tom, it feels like it's here to stay this time. And your point about public policy is right on, we saw the EU leading with privacy and GDPR and it looks like it's gonna lead again here. You know, just shifting gears, I've been to a number of Hitachi facilities in my day. OWA is my favorite because on a clear day you can see Mount Fuji, but other plants I've been to as well. What does Hitachi do in the production facility to reduce CO2 emissions? >>Yeah, I think you're hitting a good point here. So what we have, we have a, a facility in Japan and we have one in Europe and we have one in America as well to keep our production close to our customers and reduced transportation for the factory out to our customers. But you know, in the, in the, in the May region back in 2020 13, we created a new factory. And when we did that we were asked to do it in an energy, energy neutral way, which means that we are moving from being powered by black energy to green energy in that factory. And we build a factory with concrete walls that were extremely thick to make it cold in the summertime and hot in the winter time with minimum energy consumption. But we also put 17,000 square meters of solar panel on the roof to power that factory. >>We were collecting rain waters to flush it in the toilet. We were removing light bulbs with L E D and when we sent out our equipment to our customers, we put it in a, instead of sending out 25 packages to a customer, we want to reduce the waste as much as possible. And you know, this one was pretty new back in 2013. It was actually the biggest project in EA at that time. I will say if you want to build a factory today, that's the way you are going to do it. But it has a huge impact for us when electricity is going up and price and oil and gas prices are coming up. We are running with energy neutral in our facility, which is a big benefit for us going forward. But it is also a competitive advantage to be able to explain what we have been doing the last eight, nine years in that factory. We are actually walking to talk and we make that decision even though it was a really hard decision to do back in 2013, when you do decisions like this one here, the return of investment is not coming the first couple of years. It's something that comes far out in the future. But right now we are beginning to see the benefit of the decision we made back in 2013. >>I wanna come back to the economics, but before I do, I wanna pick up on something you just said because you know, you hear the slogan sustainability by design. A lot of people might think okay, that's just a marketing slogan, slogan to vector in into this mega trend, but it sounds like it's something that you've been working on for quite some time. Based on your last comments, can you add some color to that? >>Yeah, so you know, the factory is just one example of what you need to do to reduce the CO2 emission and that part of the life of a a product. The other one is really innovating new technology to drive down the CO2 emission. And here we are laser focused on what we call decarbonization by design. And this one is something that we have done the last eight years, so this is far from you for us. So between each generation of products that we have put out over the last eight years, we've been able to reduce the CO2 emission by up to 30 to 60% between each generation of products that we have put into the market. So we are laser focused on driving that one down, but we are far from done, we still got eight years before we hit our first target net zero in 2030. So we got a roadmap where we want to achieve even more with new technology. At its core, it is a technology innovator and our answers to reduce the CO2 emission and the decarbonization of a data center is going to be through innovating new technology because it has the speed, the scale, and the impact to make it possible to reach your sustainability objectives going forward. >>How about recycling? You know, where does that fit? I mean, the other day it was, you know, a lot of times at a hotel, you know, you used to get bottled water, now you get, you know, plant based, you know, waters in a box and, and so we are seeing it all around us. But for a manufacturer of your size, recycling and circular economy, how does that fit into your plans? >>Yeah, let me try to explain what we are doing here. Cause one thing is how you produce it. Another thing is how you innovate all that new technology, but you also need to combine that with service and software, otherwise you won't get the full benefit. So what we are doing here, when it comes to exploring circular economics, it's kind of where we have an eternity mindset. We want to see if it is possible to get nothing out to the landfill. This is the aim that we are looking at. So when you buy a product today, you get an option to keep it in your data center for up to 10 years. But what we wanna do when you keep it for 10 years is to upgrade only parts of the system. So let's say that you need more CBU power, use your switch the controller to next generation controller and you get more CPU power in your storage system to keep it those 10 years. >>But you can also expand with new this media flash media, even media that doesn't exist today will be supported over those 10 years. You can change your protocol in the, in the front end of your system to have new protocols and connect to your server environment with the latest and greatest technology. See, the benefit here is that you don't have to put your system into a truck and a recycle process after three years, four years, five years, you can actually postpone that one for 10 years. And this one is reducing the emission again. But once we take it back, you put it on the truck and we take it into our recycling facility. And here we take our own equipment like compute network and switches, but we also take competitor equipment in and we recycle as much as we can. In many cases, it's only 1% that goes to the landfill or 2% that goes to the landfill. >>The remaining material will go into new products either in our cycle or in other parts of the electronic industry. So it will be reused for other products. So when we look at what we've been doing for many years, that has been linear economics where you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and it goes into land feed afterwards. The recycling economics, it's really, you buy material, you make your product, you put it into production, and you recycle as much as possible. The remaining part will go into the landfill. But where we are right now is exploring circle economics where you actually buy material, make it, put it into production, and you reuse as much as you can. And only one 2% is going into the landfill right now. So we have come along and we honestly believe that the circular economics is the new economics going forward for many industries in the world. >>Yeah. And that addresses some of the things that we were talking about earlier about sustainability by design, you have to design that so that you can take advantage of that circular economy. I, I do wanna come back to the economics because, you know, in the early days of so-called green, it, there was a lot of talk about, well, I, I, I'll never be able to lower the power bill. And the facilities people don't talk to the IT people. And that's changed. So explain why sustainability is good business, not just an expense item, but can really drive bottom line profitability. I, I understand it's gonna take some time, but, but help us understand your experience there, Tom. >>Yeah, let me try to explain that one. You know, you often get the question about sustainability. Isn't that a cost? I mean, how much does it cost to get that green profile? But you know, in reality when you do a deep dive into the data center, you realize that sustainability is a cost saving activity. And this one is quite interesting. And we have now done more than 1,200 data center assessment around the world where we have looked at data centers. And let me give you just an average number from a global bank that we work with. And this one is, it is not different from all the other cases that we are doing. So when we look at the storage area, what we can do on the electricity by moving an old legacy data center into a new modernized infrastructure is to reduce the electricity by 96%. >>This is a very high number and a lot of money that you save, but the CO2 mission is reduced by 96% as well. The floor space can go up to 35% reduction as well. When we move down to the compute part, we are talking about 61% reduction in electricity on the compute part just by moving from legacy to new modern infrastructure and 61% on the CO2 emission as well. And see this one here is quite interesting because you save electricity and you and you do something really good for the environment. At the same time, in this case I'm talking about here, the customer was paying 2.5 million US dollar annually and by just modernizing that infrastructure, we could bring it down to 1.1 million. This is 1.4 million savings straight into your pocket and you can start the next activity here looking at moving from virtual machine to containers. Containers only use 10% of the CPU resources compared to a virtual machine. Move up to the application layer. If you have that kind of capability in your organization, modernizing your application with sustainability by design and you can reduce the C, the CO2 emission by up to 50%. There's so much we can do in that data center, but we often start at the infrastructure first and then we move up in the chain and we give customers benefit in all these different layers. >>Yeah, A big theme of this program today is what you guys are doing with partners do, are partners aware of this in your view? Are they in tune with it? Are they demanding it? What message would you like to give the channel partners, resellers and, and distributors who may be watching? >>So the way to look at it is that we offer a platform with product, service and software and that platform can elevate the conversation much higher up in the organization. And partners get the opportunity here to go up and talk to sustainability officers about what we are doing. They can even take it up to the CEO and talk about how can you reach your sustainability KPI in the data center. What we've seen this round table when we have sustainability officers in the room is that they're very focused on the green profile and what is going out of the company. They rarely have a deep understanding of what is going on at the data center. Why? Because it's really technical and they don't have that background. So just by elevating the conversation to these sustainability officers, you can tell them what they should measure and how they should measure that. And you can be sure that that will replicate down to the CIO and the CFO and that immediately your request for proposal going forward. So this one here is really a golden opportunity to take that story, go out and talk to different people in the organization to be relevant and have an impact and make it more easy for you to win that proposal when it gets out. >>Well really solid story on a super important topic. Thanks Tom. Really appreciate your time and taking us through your perspectives. >>Thank you Dave, for the invitation. >>Yeah, you bet. Okay, in a moment we'll be back. To summarize our final thoughts, keep it right there. >>Click by click. The world is changing. We make sense of our world by making sense of data. You can draw more meaning from more data than was ever possible before, so that every thought and every action can build your path to intelligent innovation to change the way the world works. Hitachi Van Tara. >>Okay, thanks for watching the program. We hope you gained a better understanding of how Hitachi Ventura drives customer success with its partners. If you wanna learn more about how you can partner for profit, check out the partner togetherPage@hitachiventera.com and there's a link on the webpage here that will take you right to that page. Okay, that's a wrap for Lisa Martin. This is Dave Valante with the Cube. You a leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>Good afternoon from the Venetian Expo, center, hall, whatever you wanna call it, in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here. It's day four. I'm not sure what this place is called. Wait, >>What? >>Lisa Martin here with Dave Ante. This is the cube. This is day four of a ton of coverage that we've been delivering to you, which, you know, cause you've been watching since Monday night, Dave, we are almost at the end, we're almost at the show wrap. Excited to bring back, we've been talking about security, a lot about security. Excited to bring back a, an alumni to talk about that. But what's your final thoughts? >>Well, so just in, in, in the context of security, we've had just three in a row talking about cyber, which is like the most important topic. And I, and I love that we're having Palo Alto Networks on Palo Alto Networks is the gold standard in security. Talk to CISOs, they wanna work with them. And, and it was, it's interesting because I've been following them for a little bit now, watch them move to the cloud and a couple of little stumbling points. But I said at the time, they're gonna figure it out and, and come rocking back. And they have, and the company's just performing unbelievably well despite, you know, all the macro headwinds that we love to >>Talk about. So. Right. And we're gonna be unpacking all of that with one of our alumni. As I mentioned, Anker Shaw is with us, the SVP and GM of Palo Alto Networks. Anker, welcome back to the Cub. It's great to see you. It's been a while. >>It's good to be here after a couple years. Yeah, >>Yeah. I think three. >>Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a blur after Covid. >>Everyone's saying that. Yeah. Are you surprised that there are still this many people on the show floor? Cuz I am. >>I am. Yeah. Look, I am not, this is my fourth, last year was probably one third or one fourth of this size. Yeah. But pre covid, this is what dream went looked like. And it's energizing, it's exciting. It's just good to be doing the good old things. So many people and yeah. Amazing technology and innovation. It's been incredible. >>Let's talk about innovation. I know you guys, Palo Alto Networks recently acquired cyber security. Talk to us a little bit about that. How is it gonna compliment Prisma? Give us all the scoop on that. >>Yeah, for sure. Look, some of the recent, the cybersecurity attacks that we have seen are related to supply chain, the colonial pipeline, many, many supply chain. And the reason for that is the modern software supply chain, not the physical supply chain, the one that AWS announced, but this is the software supply chain is really incredibly complicated, complicated developers that are building and shipping code faster than ever before. And the, the site acquisition at the center, the heart of that was securing the entire supply chain. White House came with a new initiative on supply chain security and SBO software bill of material. And we needed a technology, a company, and a set of people who can really deliver to that. And that's why we acquired that for supply chain security, otherwise known as cicd, security, c >>IDC security. Yeah. So how will that complement PRIs McCloud? >>Yeah, so look, if you look at our history lease over the last four years, we have been wanting to, our mission mission has been to build a single code to cloud platform. As you may know, there are over 3000 security vendors in the industry. And we said enough is enough. We need a platform player who can really deliver a unified cohesive platform solution for our customers because they're sick and tired of buying PI point product. So our mission has been to deliver that code to cloud platform supply chain security was a missing piece and we acquired them, it fits right really nicely into our portfolio of products and solution that customers have. And they'll have a single pin of glass with this. >>Yeah. So there's a lot going on. You've got, you've got an adversary that is incredibly capable. Yeah. These days and highly motivated and extremely sophisticated mentioned supply chain. It's caused a shift in, in CSO strategies, talking about the pandemic, of course we know work from home that changed things. You've mentioned public policy. Yeah. And, and so, and as well you have the cloud, cloud, you know, relatively new. I mean, it's not that new, but still. Yeah. But you've got the shared responsibility model and not, not only do you have the shared responsibility model, you have the shared responsibility across clouds and OnPrem. So yes, the cloud helps with security, but that the CISO has to worry about all these other things. The, the app dev team is being asked to shift left, you know, secure and they're not security pros. Yeah. And you know, kind audit is like the last line of defense. So I love this event, I love the cloud, but customers need help in making their lives simpler. Yeah. And the cloud in and of itself, because, you know, shared responsibility doesn't do that. Yeah. That's what Palo Alto and firms like yours come in. >>Absolutely. So look, Jim, this is a unable situation for a lot of the Cisco, simply because there are over 26 million developers, less than 3 million security professional. If you just look at all the announcement the AWS made, I bet you there were like probably over 2000 features. Yeah. I mean, they're shipping faster than ever before. Developers are moving really, really fast and just not enough security people to keep up with the velocity and the innovation. So you are right, while AWS will guarantee securing the infrastructure layer, but everything that is built on top of it, the new machine learning stuff, the new application, the new supply chain applications that are developed, that's the responsibility of the ciso. They stay up at night, they don't know what's going on because developers are bringing new services and new technology. And that's why, you know, we've always taken a platform approach where customers and the systems don't have to worry about it. >>What AWS new service they have, it's covered, it's secured. And that's why the adopters, McCloud and Palo Alto Networks, because regardless what developers bring, security is always there by their side. And so security teams need just a simple one click solution. They don't have to worry about it. They can sleep at night, keep the bad actors away. And, and that's, that's where Palo Alto Networks has been innovating in this area. AWS is one of our biggest partners and you know, we've integrated with, with a lot of their services. We launch about three integrations with their services. And we've been doing this historically for more and >>More. Are you still having conversations with the security folks? Or because security is a board level conversation, are your conversations going up a stack because this is a C-suite problem, this is a board level initiative? >>Absolutely. Look, you know, there was a time about four years ago, like the best we could do is director of security. Now it's just so CEO level conversation, board level conversation to your point, simply because I mean, if, if all your financial stuff is going to public cloud, all your healthcare data, all your supply chain data is going to public cloud, the board is asking very simple question, what are you doing to secure that? And to be honest, the question is simple. The answer's not because all the stuff that we talked about, too many applications, lots and lots of different services, different threat vectors and the bad actors, the bad guys are always a step ahead of the curve. And that's why this has become a board level conversation. They wanna make sure that things are secure from the get go before, you know, the enterprises go too deep into public cloud adoption. >>I mean there, there was shift topics a little bit. There was hope or kinda early this year that that cyber was somewhat insulated from the sort of macro press pressures. Nobody's safe. Even the cloud is sort of, you know, facing those, those headwinds people optimizing costs. But one thing when you talk to customers is, I always like to talk about that, that optiv graph. We've all seen it, right? And it's just this eye test of tools and it's a beautiful taxonomy, but there's just too many tools. So we're seeing a shift from point tools to platforms because obviously a platform play, and that's a way. So what are you seeing in the, in the field with customers trying to optimize their infrastructure costs with regard to consolidating to >>Platforms? Yeah. Look, you rightly pointed out one thing, the cybersecurity industry in general and Palo Alto networks, knock on wood, the stocks doing well. The macro headwinds hasn't impacted the security spend so far, right? Like time will tell, we'll, we'll see how things go. And one of the primary reason is that when you know the economy starts to slow down, the customers again want to invest in platforms. It's simple to deploy, simple to operationalize. They want a security partner of choice that knows that they, it's gonna be by them through the entire journey from code to cloud. And so that's why platform, especially times like these are more important than they've ever been before. You know, customers are investing in the, the, the product I lead at Palo Alto network called Prisma Cloud. It's in the cloud network application protection platform seen app space where once again, customers that investing in platform from quote to cloud and avoiding all the point products for sure. >>Yeah. Yeah. And you've seen it in, in Palo Alto's performance. I mean, not every cyber firm has is, is, >>You know, I know. Ouch. CrowdStrike Yeah. >>Was not. Well you saw that. I mean, and it was, and and you know, the large customers were continuing to spend, it was the small and mid-size businesses Yeah. That were, were were a little bit soft. Yeah. You know, it's a really, it's really, I mean, you see Okta now, you know, after they had some troubles announcing that, you know, their, their, their visibility's a little bit better. So it's, it's very hard to predict right now. And of course if TOMA Brava is buying you, then your stock price has been up and steady. That's, >>Yeah. Look, I think the key is to have a diversified portfolio of products. Four years ago before our CEO cash took over the reins of the company, we were a single product X firewall company. Right. And over time we have added XDR with the first one to introduce that recently launched x Im, you know, to, to make sure we build an NextGen team, cloud security is a completely net new investment, zero trust with access as workers started working remotely and they needed to make sure enterprises needed to make sure that they're accessing the applications securely. So we've added a lot of portfolio products over time. So you have to remain incredibly diversified, stay strong, because there will be stuff like remote work that slowed down. But if you've got other portfolio product like cloud security, while those secular tailwinds continue to grow, I mean, look how fast AWS is growing. 35, 40%, like $80 billion run rate. Crazy at that, that scale. So luckily we've got the portfolio of products to ensure that regardless of what the customer's journey is, macro headwinds are, we've got portfolio of solutions to help our customers. >>Talk a little bit about the AWS partnership. You talked about the run rate and I was reading a few days ago. You're right. It's an 82 billion arr, massive run rate. It's crazy. Well, what are, what is a Palo Alto Networks doing with aws and what's the value in it to help your customers on a secure digital transformation journey? >>Well, absolutely. We have been doing business with aws. We've been one of their security partners of choice for many years now. We have a presence in the marketplace where customers can through one click deploy the, the several Palo Alto Networks security solutions. So that's available. Like I said, we had launch partner to many, many new products and innovation that AWS comes up with. But always the day one partner, Adam was talking about some of those announcements and his keynote security data lake was one of those. And they were like a bunch of others related to compute and others. So we have been a partner for a long time, and look, AWS is an incredibly customer obsessed company. They've got their own security products. But if the customer says like, Hey, like I'd like to pick this from yours, but there's three other things from Palo Alto Networks or S MacCloud or whatever else that may be, they're open to it. And that's the great thing about AWS where it doesn't have to be wall garden open ecosystem, let the customer pick the best. >>And, and that's, I mean, there's, there's examples where AWS is directly competitive. I mean, my favorite example is Redshift and Snowflake. I mean those are directly competitive products, but, but Snowflake is an unbelievably great relationship with aws. They do cyber's, I think different, I mean, yeah, you got guard duty and you got some other stuff there. But generally speaking, the, correct me if I'm wrong, the e the ecosystem has more room to play on AWS than it may on some other clouds. >>A hundred percent. Yeah. Once again, you know, guard duty for examples, we've got a lot of customers who use guard duty and Prisma Cloud and other Palo Alto Networks products. And we also ingest the data from guard duty. So if customers want a single pane of glass, they can use the best of AWS in terms of guard duty threat detection, but leverage other technology suite from, you know, a platform provider like Palo Alto Networks. So you know, that that, you know, look, world is a complicated place. Some like blue, some like red, whatever that may be. But we believe in giving customers that choice, just like AWS customers want that. Not a >>Problem. And at least today they're not like directly, you know, in your space. Yeah. You know, and even if they were, you've got such a much mature stack. Absolutely. And my, my frankly Microsoft's different, right? I mean, you see, I mean even the analysts were saying that some of the CrowdStrike's troubles for, cuz Microsoft's got the good enough, right? So >>Yeah. Endpoint security. Yeah. And >>Yeah, for sure. So >>Do you have a favorite example of a customer where Palo Alto Networks has really helped them come in and, and enable that secure business transformation? Anything come to mind that you think really shines a light on Palo Alto Networks and what it's able to do? >>Yeah, look, we have customers across, and I'm gonna speak to public cloud in general, right? Like Palo Alto has over 60,000 customers. So we've been helping with that business transformation for years now. But because it's reinvented aws, the Prisma cloud product has been helping customers across different industry verticals. Some of the largest credit card processing companies, they can process transactions because we are running security on top of the workloads, the biggest financial services, biggest healthcare customers. They're able to put the patient health records in public cloud because Palo Alto Networks is helping them get there. So we are helping accelerated that digital journey. We've been an enabler. Security is often perceived as a blocker, but we have always treated our role as enabler. How can we get developers and enterprises to move as fast as possible? And like, my favorite thing is that, you know, moving fast and going digital is not a monopoly of just a tech company. Every company is gonna be a tech company Oh absolutely. To public cloud. Yes. And we want to help them get there. Yeah. >>So the other thing too, I mean, I'll just give you some data. I love data. I have a, ETR is our survey partner and I'm looking at Data 395. They do a survey every quarter, 1,250 respondents on this survey. 395 were Palo Alto customers, fortune 500 s and P 500, you know, big global 2000 companies as well. Some small companies. Single digit churn. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Very, very low replacement >>Rates. Absolutely. >>And still high single digit new adoption. Yeah. Right. So you've got that tailwind going for you. Yeah, >>Right. It's, it's sticky because especially our, our main business firewall, once you deploy the firewall, we are inspecting all the network traffic. It's just so hard to rip and replace. Customers are getting value every second, every minute because we are thwarting attacks from public cloud. And look, we, we, we provide solutions not just product, we just don't leave the product and ask the customers to deploy it. We help them with deployment consumption of the product. And we've been really fortunate with that kind of gross dollar and netten rate for our customers. >>Now, before we wrap, I gotta tease, the cube is gonna be at Palo Alto Ignite. Yeah. In two weeks back here. I think we're at D mgm, right? We >>Were at D MGM December 13th and >>14th. So give us a little, show us a little leg if you would. What could we expect? >>Hey, look, I mean, a lot of exciting new things coming. Obviously I can't talk about it right now. The PR Inc is still not dry yet. But lots of, lots of new innovation across our three main businesses. Network security, public cloud, security, as well as XDR X. Im so stay tuned. You know, you'll, you'll see a lot of new exciting things coming up. >>Looking forward to it. >>We are looking forward to it. Last question on curf. You, if you had a billboard to place in New York Times Square. Yeah. You're gonna take over the the the Times Square Nasdaq. What does the billboard say about why organizations should be working with Palo Alto Networks? Yeah. To really embed security into their dna. Yeah. >>You know when Jim said Palo Alto Networks is the gold standard for security, I thought it was gonna steal it. I think it's pretty good gold standard for security. But I'm gonna go with our mission cyber security partner's choice. We want to be known as that and that's who we are. >>Beautifully said. Walker, thank you so much for joining David in the program. We really appreciate your insights, your time. We look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks back here in Vegas. >>Absolutely. Can't have enough of Vegas. Thank you. Lisa. >>Can't have in Vegas, >>I dunno about that. By this time of the year, I think we can have had enough of Vegas, but we're gonna be able to see you on the cubes coverage, which you could catch up. Palo Alto Networks show Ignite December, I believe 13th and 14th on the cube.net. We want to thank Anker Shaw for joining us. For Dave Ante, this is Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(soft music) >> Welcome back to Sin City, guys and girls we're glad you're with us. You've been watching theCUBE all week, we know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22, from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people, and this event if you know it, covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and it's ecosystem. We got a great customer story coming up next, featured on the main stage. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, post pandemic, you start to think about, okay, how are things changing? And one of the things that we heard from Adam Selipsky, was, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. Okay. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means. And I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation, beyond the IT. >> Excellent. We've got two guests. One of them is an alumni, Scott Mullins joins us, GM, AWS Worldwide Financial Services, and Brad Peterson is here, the EVP, CIO and CTO of NASDAQ. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Hey guys. >> Hey guys. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah >> Brad, talk a little bit, there was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's gone on since then. >> Yeah, so, we are very excited. I work with Adena Friedman, she's my boss, CEO of NASDAQ, and she was on stage with Adam for his first Keynote as CEO of AWS. And we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the Cloud. And we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know the last piece, the last frontier to be moved was the actual matching where all the messages, the quotes get matched together to become confirmed orders. So that was what we committed to less than a year ago. And we said we were going to move one of our options markets. In the US, we have six of them. And options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that. >> And? Results so far? >> So, I can sit here and say that November 7th so we are live, we're in production and the MRX Exchange is called Mercury, so we shorten it for MRX, we like acronyms in technology. And so, we started with a phased launch of symbols, so you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working then you add some volume on it, and we are going to complete the conversion on Monday. So we are all good so far. And I have some results I can share, but maybe Scott, if you want to talk about why we did that together. >> Yeah. >> And what we've done together over many years. >> Right. You know, Brian, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You know, you look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together, it's just the next step, in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using Cloud well? Who's doing well in the Cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to, of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the Cloud isn't a place, it's a set of capabilities. And so, this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities to actually deliver real business benefit, not just to to your organization, but I think the really exciting part is the market technology piece of how you're serving other exchanges. >> So last year before re:Invent, we said, and it's obvious within the tech ecosystem, that technology companies are building on top of the Cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that, you know, consumers of IT, historically, your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services and sassifying, putting it on the Cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Adena on stage last year, we called it by the way, we called it Super Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Some people liked the term but I love it. And so yeah, Super Cloud. So when we saw Adena on stage, we said that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with US West, it's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a lot, you've got a big on-premises stay, are you connecting to that? Is it all in the Cloud? Paint a picture of what the architecture looks like? >> Yeah. And there's, so you started with the business transformation, so I like that. >> Yeah. >> And the Super Cloud designation, what we are is, we own and operate exchanges in the United States and in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this, as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it. >> See if Mikey likes it. >> Yeah. >> Penguin off the iceberg thing. >> Yeah. And so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers, so you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge Compute that was announced a few years ago, Amazon Outposts, and we were one of their early customers. So we started immediately to innovate with, jointly innovate with Amazon. And we said, this looks interesting for us. So we extended the region into our Carteret data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services but then, we're able to connect because in the markets what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge Compute platform, the AWS Outpost into Carteret, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. It's a familiar territory, it's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversion conversation with the regulators. It simplified it with our customers. And then it was up to us to then deliver time and performance >> Because you had alternatives. You could have taken a more mature kind of on-prem legacy stack, figured out how to bolt that in, you know, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? I am curious. >> Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced, that it was really about extending territory, so we had our customers in mind, our global customers, and they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well where is this region located? So finally we saw this ability to grow the Cloud geographically. And of course we're in Sweden, so we we work with the AWS region in Stockholm, but not every country has a region yet. >> And we're working as fast as we can. - Yes, you are. >> Building in every single location around the planet. >> You're doing a good job. >> So, we saw it as an investment that Amazon had to grow the geographic footprint and we have customers in many smaller countries that don't have a region today. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind and it's a multi-industry trend that the Edge Compute has four or five industries that you can say, this really makes a lot of sense to extend the Cloud. >> And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the Cloud. This is our opportunity to bring the Cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. And if you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carteret, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so, it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over a really a four year period, thinking about this and how to make this technological transition, to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem, rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS in one of our public regions. And so, that's been our philosophy with Outpost all along. It's actually extending our capabilities that our customers know and love into any environment that they need to be able to use that in. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly and very succinctly and successfully. >> Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative? >> We did. >> Yeah, we actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised. We have a couple of... So by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ data to AWS, and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you're a little bit kidding on that, but we did. >> No, I was close. Because I want to go to the like, where are we in the milestone? And take us through kind of what we can expect going forward now that we've worked backwards. >> Yep, we did. >> We did. And look, I think from a milestone perspective, as you heard Brad say, we're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production. Having worked at NASDAQ myself, when you make a change and when you stand up a market that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so, when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly I know you were very happy, and in AWS, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that Adena set. And that was very important I know to you. >> Yeah. >> And for us as well. >> Yeah. And our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, checked. We got that one done. >> That's awesome. >> The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to be as good or better than our current platform that we have. And we were putting a new version of our derivative or options software onto this platform. We had confidence because we already rolled it to one market in the US then we rolled it earlier this year and that was last year. And we rolled it to our nordic derivatives market. And we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform and we said we really want to achieve as good or better performance and we achieved better performance, so that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it going to perform? And that was, I think one of the biggest proof points that we're really proud about, jointly together. And it took both, it took both of us to really innovate and get the platform right, and we did a number of iterations. We're never done. >> Right. >> But we have a final result that says it is better. >> Well, congratulations. - Thank you. >> It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023? From NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share? >> Well, we just came from the partner, the partner Keynote with Adam and Ruba and we had another colleague on stage, so Nick Ciubotariu, so he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo, PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago and we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we are going to offer digital custody, digital assets custody solution. So that is certainly going to be something we're excited about in 2023. >> I know we got to go, but I love this story because it fits so great at the Super cloud but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pieces of teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then, bringing that to the Cloud. Very powerful story. I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and we, it's like the NFL, we copy it. I think about product market fit. You think about scientific, you know, go to market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries, it's really exciting to see. So congratulations. >> No, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of Invent and Simplify, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us. >> Last question and we've got only 30 seconds left. Brad, I'm going to direct it to you. If you had the opportunity to take over the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and say a phrase that summarizes what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together, what would it say? >> Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say, "Modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together." >> Very cool. >> Excellent. Drop the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft music)

(upbeat intro music) >> Good afternoon, fellow tech nerds. My name is Savannah Peterson, coming to you from theCube's Remote Studio here in Motown, Detroit, Michigan where we are at KubeCon. John, this is our 12th interview of the day. How are you feeling? >> I'm feeling fresh as the first interview. (Savannah laughs) As always. >> That delivery really implied a level of freshness. >> Let's go! No, this is only Day 1. In three days, reinvent. We go hardcore. These are great events. We get so much great content. The conversations are amazing. The guests are awesome. They're technical, they're smart, and they're making the difference in the future. So, this next segment about Scale MySQL should be awesome. >> I am very excited to introduce our next guest who actually has a Twitter handle that I think most people, at least of my gender in this industry would love to have. She is @ATechGirl. So you can go ahead and tweet her and tell her how great this interview is while we're live. Please welcome Deepthi Sigireddi. Thank you so much for being here with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're feeding us in. You've got two talks you're giving while we're here. >> Yes, yes. So tomorrow we will be talking about VTR, myself and one of the other maintainers of Vitess and on Friday we have the Vitess Maintainer Talk. All graduated projects get a maintainer talk. >> Wow, so you are like KubeCon VIP celebrity. >> Well, I hope so. >> Well, you're a maintainer and technical lead, also software engineer at the PlanetScale. But talk about the graduation process where that means to the project and the people involved. >> So Vitess graduated in 2019 and there are strict criteria for graduation and you don't just have to meet the minimum, you sort of have to over perform on the graduation criteria. Some of which are like there must be at least two large production deploys and people from those companies have to go in front of the CNCF committee that approves these things and say that, "Yes, this project is critical to our business." >> A lot of peer review, a lot of deployment success. >> Yes. >> Good consistency in the code. >> Deepthi: Community diversity. >> All that. >> All those things. >> Talk about the importance of this project. What is the top story that people should know about around the project? Why it exists, why it's important, why it's relevant, why it's cool. How would you answer that? >> So MySQL is now 30 years old and yet they are still- >> Makes me feel a little sidebar. (Deepthi laughs) Yeah. >> And yet even though there are many other newer databases, it continues to be used at many of the largest internet scale companies. And some of them, for example, Slack, GitHub, Square, they have grown to a level where they could not have if they had tried to do it with Vanilla MySQL that they started with, and the only reason they are where they are is Vitess. So that is I think the number one thing people should know about Vitess. >> And the origination story on notes say "Came from YouTube." >> Yes. So the way Vitess started was that YouTube was having problems with their MySQL deployment and they got tired of dealing with the site being down. So the founders of Vitess decided that they had to do something about it and they started building Vitess which started as a pretty small, relatively code-based with limited features, and over time they built charting and all of the other things that we have today. >> Well, this is exciting Savannah because we've seen this industry. Like with Facebook, when they started, everyone built their own stuff. MySQL was a great- >> Oh gosh, and everyone wanted to build it their way, reinventing the wheel. >> And MySQL was great. And then as it kind of broke when it grew, it got retrofitted. So, it was constantly being scaled up to the point where now you guys, if I get this right, said, "Hey, we're going to work on this. We're going to make it next-gen." So it's kind of like next-gen MySQL. Almost. >> Yes, yes. I would say that's pretty accurate, yeah. So there are still large companies which run their own MySQL and they have scaled it in their own way, but Vitess happens to be an open source way of scaling MySQL that people can adopt without having to build all of their own tooling around it. >> Speaking of that and growing, you just announced a new version today. >> Yes, yes. >> Tell us about that. >> The focus in this version was to make Vitess easier to use and to deploy. So in the past, there was one glaring gap in Vitess which was that Vitess did not automatically detect and repair MySQL level failures. With this release, we've actually closed that gap. And what that means for people using Vitess is that they will actually spend less time dealing with outages manually, or less human intervention, More automated recovery is what it means. The other thing we've released today is a new web UI. Vitess had a very old web UI, ugly, hard to maintain. Nobody liked it. But it was functional, except we couldn't add anything new to it because it was so old. So, the backend functionality kept advancing but the front end was kind of frozen. Now we have a next generation UI to which in upcoming releases we can add more and more functionality. >> So, it's extensible. They add things in. >> Deepthi: Oh yes, of course. Yeah. >> Awesome. What's the biggest thing that you like about the new situation? Is it more contributors are on board the UI? What's the fresh new impact that's happening in the community? What's getting you excited about with the current project? And the UI's great 'cause usability is important. >> Deepthi: Right. >> Scalability is important. >> I think Vitess solved the scalability problem way early and only now we are really grappling with the usability problem. So the hope and the desire is to make Vitess autopilot so that you reduce human intervention to a minimum once you deploy it. Obviously, you have to go through the process of deploying it. But once you've deployed it, it should just run itself. >> Runs at scale. So, the scale's huge? >> Deepthi: Yes. >> How many contributors are involved in the project? Can you give some numbers? Do you have any handy that you can speak to? >> Right. So, CNCF actually tracks these statistics for all the projects and we consolidated some numbers for the last two full calendar years, 2020 and 2021. We had over 400 contributors and 200 plus of them contributed code and the others contributed documentation issues, website changes, and things like that. So that gives- >> How about downloads? Download's good? >> Oh, okay. So we started publishing the current official Vitess Docker Image in 2018. And by October of 2020, we had about 3.8 million downloads. And by August of 2021, we had 5.2 million. And today, we have had over 10 million downloads- >> Wow! >> Of the main image. >> Starting to see a minute of that hockey stick that we all like to see. Seems like you're very clearly a community-first leader and it seems like that's in the PlanetScale and the test's DNA. Is that how the whole company culture views it? Would you say it's community-first business? >> PlanetScale is very much committed to Vitess as an open source project and to serving the Vitess community. So as part of my role at PlanetScale, some of the things I do are helping new contributors whether they are from PlanetScale or from outside PlanetScale. A number of PlanetScale engineers who don't work full-time on Vitess still contribute bug fixes and features to Vitess. We spend a significant amount of our energy helping users in our community Slack. The releases we do are mainly for the benefit of the community and PlanetScale is making those releases because for Planet Scale... Within PlanetScale, we actually do separate releases versus the public ones. >> One of the things that's coming up here at the show is deploying on Kubernetes. How does that look like? Everyone wants ease of use. Are you guys easy to use? >> Yes, yes. So PlanetScale also open sourced a Kubernetes operator for Vitess that people outside PlanetScale are using to run their production deployments of Vitess. Prior to that, there were Vitess users who actually built their own Kubernetes deployments of Vitess and they are still running those, but new users and new adopters of Vitess tend to use the Kubernetes operator that we are publishing. >> And you guys are the managed service for Vitess for the people that that's the business model for PlanetScale. >> Correct. So PlanetScale has a serverless database on demand which is built on Vitess. So if someone's starting something new and they just need a database, you sign up. It takes 30 seconds to get a database. Connect to it and start doing things with it. Versus if you are a large enterprise and you have a huge database deployment, you can migrate to PlanetScale, import all of your existing data, cut over with minimal downtime and then go, and then PlanetScale manages that. >> And why would they do that? What's the use case for that? Save time new development team or refactoring? >> Save time not being able to hire people with the skills to run it in-house. Not wanting to invest engineering resources in what businesses think is not their core competency. They want to focus on their business value. >> So, this database is a service in their whatever they're doing without adding more costs. >> Right. >> And speed. Okay, cool. How's that going? >> It's going well. >> Any feedback from customers in terms of why that there are any benefit statements you seek popping out? What are the big... What's the big aha when they... When people realize what they have here, what's the aha moment for them? Do they go, "Wow, this is awesome. It's so easy. Push a button. Migrate." Or is it... >> All of those. And people have actually seen cost savings when they've migrated from Amazon RDS to PlanetScale and we have testimonials from people who've said that, "It was so easy to use PlanetScale. Why would we try to do it ourselves?" >> It's the best thing a customer could say, right? We're all about being painkillers and solving some sort of problem. I think that that's a great opportunity to let you show off some of your customers. So, who is receiving this benefit? 'Cause I know PlanetScale specifically is for a certain style of business. >> Hmm. We have a list of customers on the website. >> Savannah: I was going to say you have a really- >> John: She's a software engineer. She's not marketing. >> You did sexy. >> You're doing a great job as much as marketing. >> So the reason I am bringing this up is because it's clear this is a solution for companies like Square, SoundCloud, Etsy, Jordan, and other exciting brands. So when you're talking about companies at scale, these companies are very much at scale, which is awesome. >> Yeah. >> What's next? What do you guys see the future for the project? >> I think we talked about that a little bit already. So, usability is a big thing. We did the new UI. It's not complete, right? Because over the last four years we've built more features into the backend which you can't yet access from the UI. So we want to be able for people to use things like online schema changes which is a big feature of Vitess. Doing schema changes without downtime from the UI. So, schema management from the UI. Vitess has something called VReplication which is the core technology that enables charting. And right now you can from the UI monitor your charting status, but you can't actually start charting from the UI. So more of the administrative functions we want to enable from the UI. >> John: Awesome. >> Last question. What are you personally most excited about this week being here with our wonderful community? >> I always enjoy being at KubeCon. This is my fifth or sixth in-person and I've done a couple of virtual ones. >> Savannah: Awesome. >> Because of the energy, because you get to meet people in person whom previously you've only met in Slack or maybe in a monthly community Zoom calls. We always have people come to our project booth. We have a project booth here for Vitess. People come to the company booth. PlanetScale has a booth. People come to our talks, ask questions. We end up having design discussions, architecture discussions. We get feedback on what is important to the people who show up here. That always informs what we do with the project in future releases. >> Perfect answer. I already mentioned that you can get a hold and in touch with Deepthi through her wonderful Twitter handle. Is there any other website or anything you want to shout out here before I do our close? >> vitess.io. V-I-T-E-S-S dot I-O is the Vitess website and planetscale.com is the PlanetScale website. >> Deepthi Sigireddi, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. John, thanks for keeping me company as always. >> You're welcome. >> And thank all of you for tuning into theCUBE. We will be here in Detroit, Michigan all week live from KubeCon and we hope to see you there. (gentle upbeat music)

(inspirational music) >> The history of high performance computing is unique and storied. You know, it's generally accepted that the first true supercomputer was shipped in the mid 1960s by Controlled Data Corporations, CDC, designed by an engineering team led by Seymour Cray, the father of Supercomputing. He left CDC in the 70's to start his own company, of course, carrying his own name. Now that company Cray, became the market leader in the 70's and the 80's, and then the decade of the 80's saw attempts to bring new designs, such as massively parallel systems, to reach new heights of performance and efficiency. Supercomputing design was one of the most challenging fields, and a number of really brilliant engineers became kind of quasi-famous in their little industry. In addition to Cray himself, Steve Chen, who worked for Cray, then went out to start his own companies. Danny Hillis, of Thinking Machines. Steve Frank of Kendall Square Research. Steve Wallach tried to build a mini supercomputer at Convex. These new entrants, they all failed, for the most part because the market at the time just wasn't really large enough and the economics of these systems really weren't that attractive. Now, the late 80's and the 90's saw big Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu entering the fray and governments around the world began to invest heavily in these systems to solve societal problems and make their nations more competitive. And as we entered the 21st century, we saw the coming of petascale computing, with China actually cracking the top 100 list of high performance computing. And today, we're now entering the exascale era, with systems that can complete a billion, billion calculations per second, or 10 to the 18th power. Astounding. And today, the high performance computing market generates north of $30 billion annually and is growing in the high single digits. Supercomputers solve the world's hardest problems in things like simulation, life sciences, weather, energy exploration, aerospace, astronomy, automotive industries, and many other high value examples. And supercomputers are expensive. You know, the highest performing supercomputers used to cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe $30 million. And we've seen that steadily rise to over $200 million. And today we're even seeing systems that cost more than half a billion dollars, even into the low billions when you include all the surrounding data center infrastructure and cooling required. The US, China, Japan, and EU countries, as well as the UK, are all investing heavily to keep their countries competitive, and no price seems to be too high. Now, there are five mega trends going on in HPC today, in addition to this massive rising cost that we just talked about. One, systems are becoming more distributed and less monolithic. The second is the power of these systems is increasing dramatically, both in terms of processor performance and energy consumption. The x86 today dominates processor shipments, it's going to probably continue to do so. Power has some presence, but ARM is growing very rapidly. Nvidia with GPUs is becoming a major player with AI coming in, we'll talk about that in a minute. And both the EU and China are developing their own processors. We're seeing massive densities with hundreds of thousands of cores that are being liquid-cooled with novel phase change technology. The third big trend is AI, which of course is still in the early stages, but it's being combined with ever larger and massive, massive data sets to attack new problems and accelerate research in dozens of industries. Now, the fourth big trend, HPC in the cloud reached critical mass at the end of the last decade. And all of the major hyperscalers are providing HPE, HPC as a service capability. Now finally, quantum computing is often talked about and predicted to become more stable by the end of the decade and crack new dimensions in computing. The EU has even announced a hybrid QC, with the goal of having a stable system in the second half of this decade, most likely around 2027, 2028. Welcome to theCUBE's preview of SC22, the big supercomputing show which takes place the week of November 13th in Dallas. theCUBE is going to be there. Dave Nicholson will be one of the co-hosts and joins me now to talk about trends in HPC and what to look for at the show. Dave, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too, Dave. >> Oh, you heard my narrative up front Dave. You got a technical background, CTO chops, what did I miss? What are the major trends that you're seeing? >> I don't think you really- You didn't miss anything, I think it's just a question of double-clicking on some of the things that you brought up. You know, if you look back historically, supercomputing was sort of relegated to things like weather prediction and nuclear weapons modeling. And these systems would live in places like Lawrence Livermore Labs or Los Alamos. Today, that requirement for cutting edge, leading edge, highest performing supercompute technology is bleeding into the enterprise, driven by AI and ML, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So when we think about the conversations we're going to have and the coverage we're going to do of the SC22 event, a lot of it is going to be looking under the covers and seeing what kind of architectural things contribute to these capabilities moving forward, and asking a whole bunch of questions. >> Yeah, so there's this sort of theory that the world is moving toward this connectivity beyond compute-centricity to connectivity-centric. We've talked about that, you and I, in the past. Is that a factor in the HPC world? How is it impacting, you know, supercomputing design? >> Well, so if you're designing an island that is, you know, tip of this spear, doesn't have to offer any level of interoperability or compatibility with anything else in the compute world, then connectivity is important simply from a speeds and feeds perspective. You know, lowest latency connectivity between nodes and things like that. But as we sort of democratize supercomputing, to a degree, as it moves from solely the purview of academia into truly ubiquitous architecture leverage by enterprises, you start asking the question, "Hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we could have this hooked up into our ethernet networks?" And so, that's a whole interesting subject to explore because with things like RDMA over converged ethernet, you now have the ability to have these supercomputing capabilities directly accessible by enterprise computing. So that level of detail, opening up the box of looking at the Nix, or the storage cards that are in the box, is actually critically important. And as an old-school hardware knuckle-dragger myself, I am super excited to see what the cutting edge holds right now. >> Yeah, when you look at the SC22 website, I mean, they're covering all kinds of different areas. They got, you know, parallel clustered systems, AI, storage, you know, servers, system software, application software, security. I mean, wireless HPC is no longer this niche. It really touches virtually every industry, and most industries anyway, and is really driving new advancements in society and research, solving some of the world's hardest problems. So what are some of the topics that you want to cover at SC22? >> Well, I kind of, I touched on some of them. I really want to ask people questions about this idea of HPC moving from just academia into the enterprise. And the question of, does that mean that there are architectural concerns that people have that might not be the same as the concerns that someone in academia or in a lab environment would have? And by the way, just like, little historical context, I can't help it. I just went through the upgrade from iPhone 12 to iPhone 14. This has got one terabyte of storage in it. One terabyte of storage. In 1997, I helped build a one terabyte NAS system that a government defense contractor purchased for almost $2 million. $2 million! This was, I don't even know, it was $9.99 a month extra on my cell phone bill. We had a team of seven people who were going to manage that one terabyte of storage. So, similarly, when we talk about just where are we from a supercompute resource perspective, if you consider it historically, it's absolutely insane. I'm going to be asking people about, of course, what's going on today, but also the near future. You know, what can we expect? What is the sort of singularity that needs to occur where natural language processing across all of the world's languages exists in a perfect way? You know, do we have the compute power now? What's the interface between software and hardware? But really, this is going to be an opportunity that is a little bit unique in terms of the things that we typically cover, because this is a lot about cracking open the box, the server box, and looking at what's inside and carefully considering all of the components. >> You know, Dave, I'm looking at the exhibitor floor. It's like, everybody is here. NASA, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Intel, HPE, AWS, all the hyperscale guys, Weka IO, Pure Storage, companies I've never heard of. It's just, hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors, Nvidia, Oracle, Penguin Solutions, I mean, just on and on and on. Google, of course, has a presence there, theCUBE has a major presence. We got a 20 x 20 booth. So, it's really, as I say, to your point, HPC is going mainstream. You know, I think a lot of times, we think of HPC supercomputing as this just sort of, off in the eclectic, far off corner, but it really, when you think about big data, when you think about AI, a lot of the advancements that occur in HPC will trickle through and go mainstream in commercial environments. And I suspect that's why there are so many companies here that are really relevant to the commercial market as well. >> Yeah, this is like the Formula 1 of computing. So if you're a Motorsports nerd, you know that F1 is the pinnacle of the sport. SC22, this is where everybody wants to be. Another little historical reference that comes to mind, there was a time in, I think, the early 2000's when Unisys partnered with Intel and Microsoft to come up with, I think it was the ES7000, which was supposed to be the mainframe, the sort of Intel mainframe. It was an early attempt to use... And I don't say this in a derogatory way, commodity resources to create something really, really powerful. Here we are 20 years later, and we are absolutely smack in the middle of that. You mentioned the focus on x86 architecture, but all of the other components that the silicon manufacturers bring to bear, companies like Broadcom, Nvidia, et al, they're all contributing components to this mix in addition to, of course, the microprocessor folks like AMD and Intel and others. So yeah, this is big-time nerd fest. Lots of academics will still be there. The supercomputing.org, this loose affiliation that's been running these SC events for years. They have a major focus, major hooks into academia. They're bringing in legit computer scientists to this event. This is all cutting edge stuff. >> Yeah. So like you said, it's going to be kind of, a lot of techies there, very technical computing, of course, audience. At the same time, we expect that there's going to be a fair amount, as they say, of crossover. And so, I'm excited to see what the coverage looks like. Yourself, John Furrier, Savannah, I think even Paul Gillin is going to attend the show, because I believe we're going to be there three days. So, you know, we're doing a lot of editorial. Dell is an anchor sponsor, so we really appreciate them providing funding so we can have this community event and bring people on. So, if you are interested- >> Dave, Dave, I just have- Just something on that point. I think that's indicative of where this world is moving when you have Dell so directly involved in something like this, it's an indication that this is moving out of just the realm of academia and moving in the direction of enterprise. Because as we know, they tend to ruthlessly drive down the cost of things. And so I think that's an interesting indication right there. >> Yeah, as do the cloud guys. So again, this is mainstream. So if you're interested, if you got something interesting to talk about, if you have market research, you're an analyst, you're an influencer in this community, you've got technical chops, maybe you've got an interesting startup, you can contact David, david.nicholson@siliconangle.com. John Furrier is john@siliconangle.com. david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I'd be happy to listen to your pitch and see if we can fit you onto the program. So, really excited. It's the week of November 13th. I think November 13th is a Sunday, so I believe David will be broadcasting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Really excited. Give you the last word here, Dave. >> No, I just, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'm really, really excited about this. It's cutting edge stuff and I'm really going to be exploring this question of where does it fit in the world of AI and ML? I think that's really going to be the center of what I'm really seeking to understand when I'm there. >> All right, Dave Nicholson. Thanks for your time. theCUBE at SC22. Don't miss it. Go to thecube.net, go to siliconangle.com for all the news. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and for Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you in Dallas. (inquisitive music)

(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here in Seattle, Washington for AWS's marketplace seller conference. The big news here is that the Amazon partner network and marketplace coming together and reorganizing into one organization, the AIST partner organization, APO bringing together the best of the partnership and the marketplace to sell through. It's a sellers company. This is the second year, but technically with COVID, I call it a year and a half. This is the cube. I'm John for your host. Got a great guest, Leah for sale vice president of business development at four square. Leah, thanks for coming on the cube. Look great. Yeah. >>Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me here. >>So four square, everyone, and that has internet history knows you. You check in you'd become the mayor of a place right back in the day, all fun. It was a great app and I think it was competitor go sold the Facebook, but that was the beginning of location data. Now you got Uber apps, you got all apps, location, everywhere. Data is big here in the marketplace. They sell data, they got a data exchange, Chris head of marketplaces. Like we have all these things we're gonna bring 'em together, make it simpler. So you're on the data side. I'm assuming you're selling data and you're participating at the data exchange. What is Foursquare doing right now? Yeah, >>Exactly. So we are part of the data exchange. And you mentioned checking in. So we, we are really proud of our roots, the, the four square app, and that's kind of the basis still of our business. We have a hundred million data points, which are actually places of interest across the world 200 countries. And we are we're in the business of understanding whereplace are and how people move through those places over time. And >>What's the value proposition for that data. You're selling the data. >>We are selling the data and we're selling it. You can think about use cases. Like how can I improve the engagement with my app through location data? So for example, next door, as a customer of ours, everyone knows next door. When a new business comes online, they wanna make sure that business is a real business. So they use our places to ensure that the address of that business is accurate. >>So how did you, how do you guys get your data? Because if you don't have the first party app, you probably had critical mass of data. Yeah. But then do other people use your data and then re contribute back in kinda like, well, Stripe is for financial. You guys are plugging in yeah. To >>Apps. A great question. So we still do have our consumer apps. We're still proud of those. It's still a basis of our company really. Okay. So, but we take that data. So our first party data, we also, for all the web, we have some partners integrate our SDK. And so we're pulling in all that data from various sources and then scrubbing it and making sure we have the most unique. >>So you guys still have a business where the app's working. Yep. Okay. But also let's just say, I wanna have a cube app. Yeah. And I want to do a check in button. Yep. So rather than build checking in, could I OEM you could four square is that you >>Could, and we could help you understand where people are checking in. So we know someone's here at the Hilton and Bellevue, we know exactly where that place is. You building the Cub app. You could say, I'm gonna check in here and we are verified. We know that that's the >>Right place. So that's a good for developer if they're building an app. >>Absolutely. So we have an SDK that any developer can integrate. >>Great. Okay. So what's the relationship with the marketplace? Take us through how Foursquare works with AWS marketplace. >>Sure. So we are primarily integrated with ADX, which is sort of a piece of marketplace it's for data specifically, we have both of our main products, which are places that POI database and visits, which is how people move through those places over time. So we're able to say these are the top chains in the country. Here's how people move throughout those. And both those products are listed on ADX. >>So if I'm in Palo Alto and I go to Joe in the juice yeah. You know that I kind of hang in one spot or is it privacy there? I mean, how do you know like what goes on? Well, >>We know somebody does that. We don't >>Know that you do that. So >>We ensure, you know, we're very privacy centric and privacy focused. We're not gonna, we don't tell anybody at you >>Yourself it's pattern data. It is. >>Okay. So it's normalized data, right? Over time groups of people, >>How they, how are people using the data to improve processes, user experience? What are some of the use cases? >>So that example, nextdoor, that's really a use case that we see a lot and that's improving their application. So that nextdoor app to ensure that the ACC, the data's accurate and that as you, as a user, you know, that that business is real. Cuz it's verified by four wear. Another one is you can use our data to make business decisions around where you're gonna place your next loca. You know, your next QSR. So young brands is a customer of ours. Those are, those guys are pizza hut KFC. They work with us to figure out where they should put their next KFC. Yeah. >>I mean retail location, location, location. Yeah. >>Right. Yeah. People are still, even though e-commerce right. People still go into stores >>And still are. Yeah. There's, there's, there's probably lot, a lot of math involved in knowing demographics patterns. Volume. >>Yeah. Some of our key customers are really data scientists. Like the think about cus with businesses that have true data science companies. They're really looking at that. >>Yeah. I mean in, and out's on the exit for a reason. Right. They want in and out. Yeah. So they wanna put it inland. >>Right. And we can actually tell you where that customer from in and out where they go next. Right. So then, you know, oh, they go to this park or they go somewhere and we can help you place your next in and out based on that visitation. >>Yeah. And so it's real science involved. So take us through the customers. You said data scientists, >>Mostly data scientists is kind of a key customer data science at a large corporation, like a QSR that's >>Somebody. Okay. So how is the procurement process on the marketplace? What does the buyer get? >>So what we see the real value is, is because they're already a customer of Amazon. That procurement is really easy, right? All the fulfillment goes through Amazon, through ADX. And what you're buying is either at API. So you can, that API can make real time calls or you're buying a flat file, like an actual database of those hundred points of interest. >>And then they integrate into their tool set. Right. They can do it. So it's pretty data friendly in terms of format. >>You can kind of do whatever you want with it. We're gonna give you that as long as you're smart enough to figure out what to do. Do we have a >>Lot of, so what's your experience with AWS marketplace? I mean, obviously we, we see a lot of changes. They had a reorg partner network merging with marketplace. You've been more on the data exchange, Chris kind of called that out. It's yeah. It's kind of a new thing. And, and he was hinting at a lot of confusion, but simplifying things. Yeah. What's your take of the current AWS marketplace >>Religions? I actually think ADX because our experience has primarily been ADX. I think they've done a really good job. They've really focused on the data and they understand how CU, how, you know, people like us sell our data. It hasn't been super confusing. We've had a lot of support. I think that's what Amazon gives you. You have to put a lot of effort into it, but they're also, they also give you a lot of support. >>Yeah. And, and I think data exchange is pretty significant to the strategic. It is >>Mission. It is. We feel that. Yeah. You know, we feel like they really value us as a partner. >>What's the big thing you're seeing out there right now in data, because like you're seeing a lot more data exchanges going on. There's always been data exchange, but you're seeing a lot more exchanges between companies. So let's just take partners. You're seeing a lot more people handle front end of a, a supply chain and you got more data exchanges. What's the future of data exchanges. If you had to kind of, you know, guess given your history in, in the industry. Yeah. What's the next around the corner trend? >>I think. Well, I think there's a, has to be consolidation. I know everyone's building one, but there's probably too many. I know from our experience, we can't support all of them. We're not a huge company. We can't support Amazon and X and Y and Z. Like it's just too many. So we kind of put all of our eggs in a couple baskets. So I think there'll be consolidation. I think there has to be just some innovation on what data products are, you know, for us, we have these two, it's an API and a flat file. I think as exchanges think about, you know, expanding what are the other types of data products that can help us build? >>Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's, you know, we see, we cover a lot of on the cube is edge. You know, you got, yeah. Amazon putting out new products in regions, you got new wavelength out there, you got regions, you got city level connectivity, data coming from cars. So a lot more IOT data. How do you guys see that folding into your vision of data acquisition and data usage, leverage, reuse, durability. These >>Are, yeah. I mean, we're, we are keeping an eye on all of that. You know, I think we haven't quite figured out how we wanna allocate resources against it, but you know, it's definitely, it's a really interesting space to be in. Like, I don't think data's going anywhere and I think it's really just gonna grow and how people use it's >>Gonna expand. Okay. So if I'm a customer, I go to the marketplace, I wanna buy four square data. What's the pitch. >>We can help you improve your business decisions or your applications through location data. We know where places are and how people move through the world over time. So we can tell you we're, we're sure that this is the Hilton in Bellevue. We know that, that we know how many people are moving through here and that's really the pitch. >>And they use that for whatever their needs are, business improvement, user experience. Yeah. >>Those are really the primary. I mean, we also have some financial use cases. So hedge funds, maybe they're thinking about yeah. How they wanna invest their money. They're gonna look at visits over time to understand what people are doing. Right. The pandemic made that super important. >>Yeah. That's awesome. Well, this is great. Great success story. Congratulations. And thanks for sharing on the cube. Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you. My final question is more about kind of the future. I wanna get your thoughts because your season pro, when you have the confluence of physical and digital coming together. Yeah. You know, I was just talking with a friend about FedEx's earnings, comparing that to say, AWS has a fleet of delivery too. Right? Amazon, Amazon nots. So, but physical world only products location matters. But then what about the person when they're walking around the real world? What happens when they get to the metaverses or, you know, they get to digital, they tend an event. Yeah. How do you see that crossroad? Cuz you have foot in both camps. We do, you got the app and you got the physical world it's gonna come together. Is there thoughts around, you can take your course care hat off and put your industry hat on. Yeah. You wanna answer that? Not officially on behalf of Foursquare, but I'm just curious, this is a, this is the confluence of like the blending of physical and digital. >>Yeah. I know. Wow. I admittedly haven't thought a whole lot about that. I think it would be really weird if I could track myself over time and the metaverse I mean, I think, yeah, as you said, it's >>It's, by the way, I'm not Bo on the metaverse when it's blocked diagrams, when you have gaming platforms that are like the best visual experience possible, right? >>Yeah. I mean, I think it, I think we'll see, I don't, I don't know that I have a >>Prediction, well hybrid we've seeing a lot of hybrid events. Like this event is still intimate VIP, but next year I guarantee it's gonna be larger, much larger and it's gonna be physical and face to face, but, but digital right as well. Yeah. Not people experiencing the, both that first party, physical, digital hybrid. Yeah. And it's interesting something that we track a lot >>Of. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. I think we'll have a, well, I think we'll, there's something there for us. I think that those there's a play there as we watch kind >>Of things change. All right, Leah, thank you for coming on the Q appreciate so much it all right. With four Graham, John fur a year checking in with four square here on the cube here at the Amazon web services marketplace seller conference. Second year back from the pandemic in person, more coverage after this break.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. Cube's coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, AWS reinforced 22, the security conference. It's ADOS big security conference. Of course, the cubes here, all the reinvent res re Mars reinforce. We cover 'em all now and the summits. I'm John. Very my host, Dave ante have IDC weighing in here with their analysis. We've got some great guests here, Jay Brisbane, research VP at IDC and Philip who research managed for cloud security. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Appreciate it. Great >>To, to be here. I appreciate the got the full >>Circle, right? Just, security's more interesting >>Than storage. Isn't it? >>Dave, Dave and Jay worked together. This is a, a great segment. I'm psyched that you guys are here. We had Crawford and Matt Eastwood on at HPE discover a while back and really the, the, the data you guys are getting and the insights are fantastic. So congratulations to IDC. You guys doing great work. We appreciate your time. I wanna get your reaction to the event and the keynotes. AWS has got some posture and they're very aggressive on some tones. Some things that they didn't, we didn't hear. What's your reaction to the keynote, share your, your assessment. >>So, you know, I managed two different research services at IDC right now. They are both cloud security and identity and, and digital security. Right. And what was really interesting is the intersection between the two this morning, because every one of those speakers that came on had something to say about identity or least privileged access, or, you know, enable MFA, or make sure that you, you know, control who gets access to what and deny explicitly. Right? And it's always been a challenge a little bit in the identity world because a lot of people don't use MFA. And in RSA, that was another big theme at the RSA conference, right? MFA everywhere. Why don't they use it because it introduces friction and all of a sudden people can't get their jobs done. Right. And the whole point of a network is letting people on to get that data they want to get to. So that was kind of interesting, but, you know, as we have in the industry, this shared responsibility model for cloud computing, we've got shared responsibility for between Philip and I, I have done in the ke past more security of the cloud and Philip is more security in the cloud, >>So yeah. And it's, and now with cloud operation, super cloud, as we call it, you have on premises, private cloud coming back, or hasn't really gone anywhere, all that on premises, cloud operations, public cloud, and now edge exploding with new requirements. Yeah. It's really an ops challenge right now. Not so much dev. So the sick and op side is hot right now. >>Yeah. Well, we've made this move from monolithic to microservices based applications. And so during the keynote this morning, the announcement around the guard duty malware protection component, and that being built into the pricing of current guard duty, I thought was, was really key. And there was also a lot of talk about partnering in security certifications. Yeah. Which is also so very important. So we're seeing this move towards filling in that talent gap, which I think we're all aware of in the security industry. >>So Jake square, the circle for me. So Kirk, Coel talked about Amazon AWS identity, where does AWS leave off and, and companies like Okta or ping identity or crock pickup, how are they working together? Does it just create more confusion and more tools for customers? We, we have, we know the over word overused word of seamless. Yeah. Yeah. It's never seamless. So how should we think about that? >>So, you know, identity has been around for 35 years or something like that started with the mainframes and all that. And if you understand the history of it, you make more sense to the current market. You have to know where people came from and the baggage they're carrying, cuz they're still carrying a lot of that baggage. Now, when it comes to the cloud service providers, they're more an accommodation from the identity standpoint, let's make it easy inside of AWS to let you single sign on to anything in the cloud that they have. Right. Let's also introduce an additional MFA capability to keep people safer whenever we can and, you know, provide people the tools to, to get into those applications somewhat easily, right. While leveraging identities that may live somewhere else. So, you know, there's a whole lot of the world that is still active directory centric, right? There's another portion of companies that were born in the cloud that were able to jump on things like Okta and some of the other providers of these universal identities in the cloud. So, you know, like I said, you, if you understand where people came from in the beginning, you start to, to say, yeah, this makes sense. >>It's, it's interesting. You talk about mainframe. I, I always think about rack F you know, and I say, okay, who did what, when, where, yeah. And you hear about a lot of those themes. What, so what's the best practice for MFA? That's, that's non SMS based. Is it, you gotta wear something around your neck, is it to have sort of a third party authenticator? What are people doing that is that, that, that you guys would recommend? >>Yeah. One quick comment about adoption of MFA. You know, if you ask different suppliers, what percent of your base that does SSO also does MFA one of the biggest suppliers out there Microsoft will tell you it's under 25%. That's pretty shocking. Right? All the messaging that's come out about it. So another big player in the market was called duo. Cisco bought them. Yep. Right. And because they provide networks, a lot of people buy their MFA. They have probably the most prevalent type of MFA it's called push. Right. And push can be, you know, a red X and a green check mark to your phone. It can be a QR code, you know, somewhere, it can be an email push as well. So that is the next easiest thing to adopt after SMS. And as you know, SMS has been denigrated by N and others saying, you know, it's susceptible to man and middle attacks. >>It's built on a telephony protocol called SS seven. Yep. You know, predates anything. There's no certification, either side. The other real dynamic and identity is the whole adoption of PKI infrastructure. As you know, certificates are used for all kinds of things, network sessions, data encryption, well identity increasingly, and a lot of the, you know, consumers and especially the work from anywhere, people these days have access through smart devices. Right. And what you can do there is you can have an agent on that smart device, generate your private key and then push out a public key. And so the private key never leaves your device. That's one of the most secure ways to, so if your >>SIM card gets hacked, you're not gonna be as at vulnerable >>Or as vulnerable. Well, the SIM card is another, you know, challenge associated with the, the older waste. But yeah. Yeah. >>So what do you guys think about the open source connection and, and they, they mentioned it up top don't bolt on security implying shift left, which is embedding it in like sneak companies, like sneak do that, right. Container oriented, a lot of Kubernetes kind of cloud native services. So I wanna get your reaction to that. And then also this reasoning angle, they brought up kind of a higher level AI reasoning decisions. So open source and this notion of AI reasoning >>Automation. Yeah. And, and you see more open source discussion happening, right. So you, you know, you have your building maintaining and vetting of the upstream open source code, which is critical. And so I think AWS talking about that today, they're certainly hitting on a nerve as, you know, open source continues to proliferate around the automated reasoning. I think that makes sense. You know, you want to provide guiderails and you want to provide roadmaps and you wanna have sort of that guidance as to okay. What's the, you know, a correlation analysis of different tools and products. And so I think that's gonna go over really well. >>Yeah. One of the other, you know, key points of what open source is, everybody's in a multi-cloud world, right? Yeah. And so they're worried about vendor lockin, they want an open source code base so that they don't experience that. >>Yeah. And they can move the code around and make sure it works well on each system. Dave and I were just talking about some of the dynamics around data control planes. So yeah. They mentioned encrypt everything, which is great. And I message, by the way, I love that one, but oh. And he mentioned data at rest. I'm like, what about data in flight? Didn't hear that one. So one of the things we're seeing with super cloud, and now multi-cloud kind of, as destinations of that, is that in digital transformation, customers are leaning into owning their data flows. >>Yeah. >>Independent of say the control plane aspects of what could come in. This is huge implications for security, where sharing data is huge. Even Schmidt on Steve said we have billions and billions of things happening that we see things that no one else else sees. So that implies, they're >>Sharing quad trillion, >>Trillion, 15 zeros trillion. Yeah. 15 >>Zeros, 15 zeros. Yeah. >>So that implies, they're sharing that or using that, pushing that into something. So sharing's huge with cyber security. So that implies open data, data flows. What do, how do you guys see this evolving? I know it's kind of emerging, but it's becoming a, a nuanced point that's critical to the architecture. >>Well, I, yeah, I think another way to look at that is the sharing of intelligence and some of the recent directives, you know, from the executive branch, making it easier for private companies to share data and intelligence, which I think strengthens the cyber community overall, >>Depending upon the supplier. Right? Yeah. It's either an aggregate level of intelligence that has been, you know, anonymized or it's specific intelligence for your environment that, you know, everybody's got a threat feed, maybe two or three, right. Yeah. But back to the encryption point, I mean, I was working for an encryption startup for a little while. Right after I left IBM. And the thing is that people are scared of it. Right. They're scared of key management and rotation. And so when you provide, >>Because they might lose the key. >>Exactly. Yeah. It's like shooting yourself in the foot. Right. So that's when you have things like, you know, KMS services from Amazon and stuff, they really help out a lot and help people understand, okay, I'm not alone in this. >>Yeah. Crypto >>Owners, they call that hybrid, the hybrid key, they call the, what they call the, today. They call it the hybrid. >>What was that? The management service. Yeah. The hybrid. So hybrid HSM, correct. >>Yeah. What is that? What is that? I didn't, I didn't get that. I didn't understand what he meant by the hybrid post hybrid, post quantum key agreement. Right. That still notes >>Hybrid, post quantum key exchange, >>You know, AWS never made a product name that didn't have four words in it, >>But he did, but he did reference the, the new N algos. And I think I inferred that they were quantum proof or the claim it be. Yeah. And AWS was testing those. Correct. >>Yeah. >>So that was kind of interesting, but I wanna come back to identity for a second. Okay. So, so this idea of bringing traditional IAM and, and privilege access management together, is that a pipe dream, is that something that is actually gonna happen? What's the timeframe, what's your take on that? >>So, you know, there are aspects of privilege in every sort of identity back when, you know, it was only the back office that used computers for calculations, right? Then you were able to control how many people had access. There were two types of users, admins, and users, right? These days, everybody has some aspect of, >>It's a real spectrum, really >>Granular. You got the, you know, the C suite, the finance people, the DevOps, people, you know, even partners and whatever, they all need some sort of privileged access. And the, the term you hear so much is least privileged access. Right? Shut it down, control it. So, you know, in some of my research, I've been saying that vendors who are in the Pam space privilege access management space will probably be growing their suites, playing a bigger role, building out a stack because they have, you know, the, the expertise and the, and the perspective that says we should control this better. How do we do that? Right. And we've been seeing that recently, >>Is that a combination of old kind of antiquated systems meets for proprietary hyperscale or kind of like build your own? Cause I mean, Amazon, these guys, they Facebook, they all build their own stuff. >>Yes. They >>Do enterprises buy services from general purpose identity management systems. >>So as we were talking about, you know, knowing the past and whatever privileged access management used to be about compliance reporting. Yeah. Right. Just making sure that I knew who accessed what and could prove it. So I didn't fail in art. It wasn't >>A critical infrastructure item. >>No. And now these days, what it's transitioning into is much more risk management. Okay. I know what our risk is. I'm ahead of it. And the other thing in the Pam space was really session monitor. Right. Everybody wanted to watch every keystroke, every screen's scrape, all that kind of stuff. A lot of the new privilege access Mon management doesn't really require that it's nice to have feature. You kind of need it on the list, but is anybody really gonna implement it? That's the question. Right. And then, you know, if, if you do all that session monitor, does anybody ever go back and look at it? There's only so many hours in the day. >>How about passwordless access? You know? Right. I've heard people talk about that. Yeah. I mean, that's as a user, I can't wait, but >>It's somewhere we want to all go. Yeah. Right. We all want identity security to just disappear and be recognized when we log in. So the, the thing with password list is there's always a password somewhere and it's usually part of a registration, you know, action. I'm gonna register my device with a username password. And then beyond that, I can use my biometrics. Right. I wanna register my device and get a private key that I can put in my enclave. And I'll use that in the future. Maybe it's gotta touch ID. Maybe it doesn't. Right. So even though there's been a lot of progress made, it's not quote unquote, truly passwordless, there's a group industry standards group called Fido. Right. Which is fast identity online. And what they realized was these whole registration passwords. That's really a single point of failure. Cuz if I can't recover my device, I'm in trouble. Yeah. So they just did a, a new extension to sort of what they were doing, which provides you with much more of a, like an iCloud vault, right. That you can register that device in and other devices associated with that same iPad that you can >>Get you to it. If you >>Have to. Exactly. I had >>Another have all over the place here, but I, I want to ask about ransomware. It may not be your wheelhouse. Yeah. But back in the day, Jay, remember you used to cover tape. All the, all the backup guys now are talking about ransomware. AWS mentioned it today and they showed a bunch of best practices and things you can do air gaps. Wasn't one, one of 'em. Right. I was really surprised cuz that's all, every anybody ever talks about is air gaps. And a lot of times that air gaps that air gap could be a guess to the cloud. I guess I'm not sure. What are you guys seeing on ransomware >>Apps? You know, we've done a lot of great research around ransomware as a service and ransomware and, and you know, we just had some data come out recently that I think in terms of spending and, and spend and in as a result of the Ukraine, Russia war, that ransomware assessments rate number one. And so it's something that we encourage, you know, when we talk to vendors and in our services, in our publications that we write about taking advantage of those free strategic ransomware assessments, vulnerability assessments, right. As well, and then security and training ranked very highly as well. So we wanna make sure that all of these areas are being funded well to try and stay ahead of the curve. >>Yeah. I was surprised that not the air gaps on the list, that's all everybody >>Talks about. Well, you know, the, the old model for air gaping in the, the land days, the Noel days, you took your tapes home and put 'em in the sock drawer. >>Well, it's a form of air gap security and no one's gonna go there >>Clean. And then the internet came around >>Guys. Final question. I want to ask you guys, we kind zoom out. Great, great commentary by the way. Appreciate it. As the, we've seen this in many markets, a collection of tools emerge and then there's it's tool sprawl. Oh yeah. Right? Yeah. So cyber we're seeing trend now where Mon goes up on stage of all the E probably other vendors doing the same thing where they're organizing a platform on top of AWS to be this super platform. If you super cloud ability by building more platform thing. So we're saying there's a platform war going on, cuz customers don't want the complexity. Yeah. I got a tool, but it's actually making it more complex if I buy the other tool. So the tool sprawl becomes a problem. How do you guys see this? Do you guys see this platform emerging? I mean, tools won't go away, but they have to be >>Easier. Yeah. We do see a, a consolidation of functionality and services. And we've been seeing that, I think through a 20, 20 flat security survey that we released, that that was definitely a trend. And you know, that certainly happened for many companies over the last six to 24 months, I would say. And then platformization absolutely is something we talk 'em right. About all the time. So >>More M and a couple of years ago, I called the, the Amazon tool set in rector set. Yeah. Because it really required assembly. Yeah. And you see the emphasis on training here too, right? Yeah. You definitely need to go to AWS university to be competent. It >>Wasn't Lego blocks yet. No, it was a rector set. Very good distinction rules, you know, and, and you lose a few. It's >>True. Still too many tools. Right. You see, we need more consolidation. That's getting interesting because a lot of these companies have runway and you look, you look at sale point, its stock prices held up cuz of the Toma Bravo acquisition, but all the rest of the cyber stocks have been crushed. Yeah. You know, especially the high flyers, like a Senti, a one or a crowd strike, but yeah, just still M and a opportunity >>Itself. So platform wars. Okay. Final thoughts. What do you thinks happening next? What's what's your outlook for the, the next year or so? >>So in the, in the identity space, I'll talk about Phillip can cover cloud force. You know, it really is more consolidation and more adoption of things that are beyond simple SSO, right. It was, you know, just getting on the systems and now we really need to control what you're able to get to and who you are and do it as transparently as we possibly can because otherwise, you know, people are gonna lose productivity, right. They're not gonna be able to get to what they want. And that's what causes the C-suite to say, wait a minute, you know, DevOps, they want to update the product every day. Right. Make it better. Can they do that? Or did security get in the way people every once in a while I'll call security, the department of no, right? Yeah. Well, >>Yeah. They did it on stage. Yeah. They wanna be the department of yes, >>Exactly. And the department that creates additional value. If you look at what's going on with B to C or C IAM, consumer identity, that is all about opening up new direct channels and treating people like, you know, they're old friends, right. Not like you don't know 'em you have to challenge >>'em we always say you wanna be in the boat together. It sinks or not. Yeah. Right. Exactly. >>Phillip, >>Okay. What's your take? What's your outlook for the year? >>Yeah. I think, you know, something that we've been seeing as consolidation and integration, and so, you know, companies looking at from built time to run time investing in shift left infrastructure is code. And then also in the runtime detection makes perfect sense to have both the agent and agentless so that you're covering any of the gaps that might exist. >>Awesome. Jerry, Phillip, thanks for coming on the queue with IDC and sharing >>Your oh our pleasure perspective. >>Commentary, have any insights and outlook. Appreciate it. You bet. Thank you. Okay. We've got the great direction here from IDC analyst here on the queue. I'm John for a Dave, we're back more after this shirt break.