>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (light airy music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is in the house. John Furrier is pounding the news from our Palo Alto studio. We are super excited to be talking about cloud at the edge, what that means. Charles Tsai is here. He's the Senior Director of product management at Dell Technologies and Peter Fetterolf is the Chief Technology Officer at ACG Business Analytics, a firm that goes deep into the TCO and the telco space, among other things. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> So I've been in search all week of the elusive next wave of monetization for the telcos. We know they make great money on connectivity, they're really good at that. But they're all talking about how they can't let this happen again. Meaning we can't let the over the top vendors yet again, basically steal our cookies. So we're going to not mess it up this time. We're going to win in the monetization. Charles, where are those monetization opportunities? Obviously at the edge, the telco cloud at the edge. What is that all about and where's the money? >> Well, Dave, I think from a Dell's perspective, what we want to be able to enable operators is a solution that enable them to roll out services much quicker, right? We know there's a lot of innovation around IoT, MEG and so on and so forth, but they continue to rely on traditional technology and way of operations is going to take them years to enable new services. So what Dell is doing is now, creating the entire vertical stack from the hardware through CAST and automation that enable them, not only to push out services very quickly, but operating them using cloud principles. >> So it's when you say the entire vertical stack, it's the integrated hardware components with like, for example, Red Hat on top- >> Right. >> Or a Wind River? >> That's correct. >> Okay, and then open API, so the developers can create workloads, I presume data companies. We just had a data conversation 'cause that was part of the original stack- >> That's correct. >> So through an open ecosystem, you can actually sort of recreate that value, correct? >> That's correct. >> Okay. >> So one thing Dell is doing, is we are offering an infrastructure block where we are taking over the overhead of certifying every release coming from the Red Hat or the Wind River of the world, right? We want telcos to spend their resources on what is going to generate them revenue. Not the overhead of creating this cloud stack. >> Dave, I remember when we went through this in the enterprise and you had companies like, you know, IBM with the AS400 and the mainframe saying it's easier to manage, which it was, but it's still, you know, it was subsumed by the open systems trend. >> Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important thing to probe on, is this idea of what is, what exactly does it mean to be cloud at the edge in the telecom space? Because it's a much used term. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about cloud and edge, in sort of generalized IT, but what specifically does it mean? >> Yeah, so when we talk about telco cloud, first of all it's kind of different from what you're thinking about public cloud today. And there's a couple differences. One, if you look at the big hyperscaler public cloud today, they tend to be centralized in huge data centers. Okay, telco cloud, there are big data centers, but then there's also regional data centers. There are edge data centers, which are your typical like access central offices that have turned data centers, and then now even cell sites are becoming mini data centers. So it's distributed. I mean like you could have like, even in a country like say Germany, you'd have 30,000 soul sites, each one of them being a data center. So it's a very different model. Now the other thing I want to go back to the question of monetization, okay? So how do you do monetization? The only way to do that, is to be able to offer new services, like Charles said. How do you offer new services? You have to have an open ecosystem that's going to be very, very flexible. And if we look at where telcos are coming from today, they tend to be very inflexible 'cause they're all kind of single vendor solutions. And even as we've moved to virtualization, you know, if you look at packet core for instance, a lot of them are these vertical stacks of say a Nokia or Ericson or Huawei where you know, you can't really put any other vendors or any other solutions into that. So basically the idea is this kind of horizontal architecture, right? Where now across, not just my central data centers, but across my edge data centers, which would be traditionally my access COs, as well as my cell sites. I have an open environment. And we're kind of starting with, you know, packet core obviously with, and UPFs being distributed, but now open ran or virtual ran, where I can have CUs and DUs and I can split CUs, they could be at the soul site, they could be in edge data centers. But then moving forward, we're going to have like MEG, which are, you know, which are new kinds of services, you know, could be, you know, remote cars it could be gaming, it could be the Metaverse. And these are going to be a multi-vendor environment. So one of the things you need to do is you need to have you know, this cloud layer, and that's what Charles was talking about with the infrastructure blocks is helping the service providers do that, but they still own their infrastructure. >> Yeah, so it's still not clear to me how the service providers win that game but we can maybe come back to that because I want to dig into TCO a little bit. >> Sure. >> Because I have a lot of friends at Dell. I don't have a lot of friends at HPE. I've always been critical when they take an X86 server put a name on it that implies edge and they throw it over the fence to the edge, that's not going to work, okay? We're now seeing, you know we were just at the Dell booth yesterday, you did the booth crawl, which was awesome. Purpose-built servers for this environment. >> Charles: That's right. >> So there's two factors here that I want to explore in TCO. One is, how those next gen servers compare to the previous gen, especially in terms of power consumption but other factors and then how these sort of open ran, open ecosystem stacks compared to proprietary stacks. Peter, can you help us understand those? >> Yeah, sure. And Charles can comment on this as well. But I mean there, there's a couple areas. One is just moving the next generation. So especially on the Intel side, moving from Ice Lake to the Sapphire Rapids is a big deal, especially when it comes to the DU. And you know, with the radios, right? There's the radio unit, the RU, and then there's the DU the distributed unit, and the CU. The DU is really like part of the radio, but it's virtualized. When we moved from Ice lake to Sapphire Rapids, which is third generation intel to fourth generation intel, we're literally almost doubling the performance in the DU. And that's really important 'cause it means like almost half the number of servers and we're talking like 30, 40, 50,000 servers in some cases. So, you know, being able to divide that by two, that's really big, right? In terms of not only the the cost but all the TCO and the OpEx. Now another area that's really important, when I was talking moving from these vertical silos to the horizontal, the issue with the vertical silos is, you can't place any other workloads into those silos. So it's kind of inefficient, right? Whereas when we have the horizontal architecture, now you can place workloads wherever you want, which basically also means less servers but also more flexibility, more service agility. And then, you know, I think Charles can comment more, specifically on the XR8000, some things Dell's doing, 'cause it's really exciting relative to- >> Sure. >> What's happening in there. >> So, you know, when we start looking at putting compute at the edge, right? We recognize the first thing we have to do is understand the environment we are going into. So we spend with a lot of time with telcos going to the south side, going to the edge data center, looking at operation, how do the engineer today deal with maintenance replacement at those locations? Then based on understanding the operation constraints at those sites, we create innovation and take a traditional server, remodel it to make sure that we minimize the disruption to the operations, right? Just because we are helping them going from appliances to open compute, we do not want to disrupt what is have been a very efficient operation on the remote sites. So we created a lot of new ideas and develop them on general compute, where we believe we can save a lot of headache and disruptions and still provide the same level of availability, resiliency, and redundancy on an open compute platform. >> So when we talk about open, we don't mean generic? Fair? See what I mean? >> Open is more from the software workload perspective, right? A Dell server can run any type of workload that customer intend. >> But it's engineered for this? >> Environment. >> Environment. >> That's correct. >> And so what are some of the environmental issues that are dealt with in the telecom space that are different than the average data center? >> The most basic one, is in most of the traditional cell tower, they are deployed within cabinets instead of racks. So they are depth constraints that you just have no access to the rear of the chassis. So that means on a server, is everything you need to access, need to be in the front, nothing should be in the back. Then you need to consider how labor union come into play, right? There's a lot of constraint on who can go to a cell tower and touch power, who can go there and touch compute, right? So we minimize all that disruption through a modular design and make it very efficient. >> So when we took a look at XR8000, literally right here, sitting on the desk. >> Uh-huh. >> Took it apart, don't panic, just pulled out some sleds and things. >> Right, right. >> One of the interesting demonstrations was how it compared to the size of a shoe. Now apparently you hired someone at Dell specifically because they wear a size 14 shoe, (Charles laughs) so it was even more dramatic. >> That's right. >> But when you see it, and I would suggest that viewers go back and take a look at that segment, specifically on the hardware. You can see exactly what you just referenced. This idea that everything is accessible from the front. Yeah. >> So I want to dig in a couple things. So I want to push back a little bit on what you were saying about the horizontal 'cause there's the benefit, if you've got the horizontal infrastructure, you can run a lot more workloads. But I compare it to the enterprise 'cause I, that was the argument, I've made that argument with converged infrastructure versus say an Oracle vertical stack, but it turned out that actually Oracle ran Oracle better, okay? Is there an analog in telco or is this new open architecture going to be able to not only service the wide range of emerging apps but also be as resilient as the proprietary infrastructure? >> Yeah and you know, before I answer that, I also want to say that we've been writing a number of white papers. So we have actually three white papers we've just done with Dell looking at infrastructure blocks and looking at vertical versus horizontal and also looking at moving from the previous generation hardware to the next generation hardware. So all those details, you can find the white papers, and you can find them either in the Dell website or at the ACG research website >> ACGresearch.com? >> ACG research. Yeah, if you just search ACG research, you'll find- >> Yeah. >> Lots of white papers on TCO. So you know, what I want to say, relative to the vertical versus horizontal. Yeah, obviously in the vertical side, some of those things will run well, I mean it won't have issues. However, that being said, as we move to cloud native, you know, it's very high performance, okay? In terms of the stack, whether it be a Red Hat or a VMware or other cloud layers, that's really become much more mature. It now it's all CNF base, which is really containerized, very high performance. And so I don't think really performance is an issue. However, my feeling is that, if you want to offer new services and generate new revenue, you're not going to do it in vertical stacks, period. You're going to be able to do a packet core, you'll be able to do a ran over here. But now what if I want to offer a gaming service? What if I want to do metaverse? What if I want to do, you have to have an environment that's a multi-vendor environment that supports an ecosystem. Even in the RAN, when we look at the RIC, and the xApps and the rApps, these are multi-vendor environments that's going to create a lot of flexibility and you can't do that if you're restricted to, I can only have one vendor running on this hardware. >> Yeah, we're seeing these vendors work together and create RICs. That's obviously a key point, but what I'm hearing is that there may be trade offs, but the incremental value is going to overwhelm that. Second question I have, Peter is, TCO, I've been hearing a lot about 30%, you know, where's that 30% come from? Is it Op, is it from an OpEx standpoint? Is it labor, is it power? Is it, you mentioned, you know, cutting the number of servers in half. If I can unpack the granularity of that TCO, where's the benefit coming from? >> Yeah, the answer is yes. (Peter and Charles laugh) >> Okay, we'll do. >> Yeah, so- >> One side that, in terms of, where is the big bang for the bucks? >> So I mean, so you really need to look at the white paper to see details, but definitely power, definitely labor, definitely reducing the number of servers, you know, reducing the CapEx. The other thing is, is as you move to this really next generation horizontal telco cloud, there's the whole automation and orchestration, that is a key component as well. And it's enabled by what Dell is doing. It's enabled by the, because the thing is you're not going to have end-to-end automation if you have all this legacy stuff there or if you have these vertical stacks where you can't integrate. I mean you can automate that part and then you have separate automation here, you separate. you need to have integrated automation and orchestration across the whole thing. >> One other point I would add also, right, on the hardware perspective, right? With the customized hardware, what we allow operator to do is, take out the existing appliance and push a edge optimized server without reworking the entire infrastructure. There is a significant saving where you don't have to rethink about what is my power infrastructure, right? What is my security infrastructure? The server is designed to leverage the existing, what is already there. >> How should telco, Charles, plan for this transformation? Are there specific best practices that you would recommend in terms of the operational model? >> Great question. I think first thing is do an inventory of what you have. Understand what your constraints are and then come to Dell, we will love to consult with you, based on our experience on the best practices. We know how to minimize additional changes. We know how to help your support engineer, understand how to shift appliance based operation to a cloud-based operation. >> Is that a service you offer? Is that a pre-sales freebie? What is maybe both? >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> Guys- >> Just really quickly. >> We're going to wrap. >> The, yeah. Dave loves the TCO discussion. I'm always thinking in terms of, well how do you measure TCO when you're comparing something where you can't do something to an environment where you're going to be able to do something new? And I know that that's always the challenge in any kind of emerging market where things are changing, any? >> Well, I mean we also look at, not only TCO, but we look at overall business case. So there's basically service at GLD and revenue and then there's faster time to revenues. Well, and actually ACG, we actually have a platform called the BAE or Business Analytics Engine that's a very sophisticated simulation cloud-based platform, where we can actually look at revenue month by month. And we look at what's the impact of accelerating revenue by three months. By four months. >> So you're looking into- >> By six months- >> So you're forward looking. You're just not consistently- >> So we're not just looking at TCO, we're looking at the overall business case benefit. >> Yeah, exactly right. There's the TCO, which is the hard dollars. >> Right. >> CFO wants to see that, he or she needs to see that. But you got to, you can convince that individual, that there's a business case around it. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And then you're going to sign up for that number. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And they're going to be held to it. That's the story the world wants. >> At the end of the day, telcos have to be offered new services 'cause look at all the money that's been spent. >> Dave: Yeah, that's right. >> On investment on 5G and everything else. >> 0.5 trillion over the next seven years. All right, guys, we got to go. Sorry to cut you off. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> But we're wall to wall here. All right, thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave: Fantastic. >> All right, Dave Vellante, for Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin's in the house. John Furrier in Palo Alto Studios. Keep it right there. MWC 23 live from the Fira in Barcelona. (light airy music)

(upbeat techno music) >> From Mountain View California, it's the Cube covering the 15th Annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with the Cube on the ground at the Computer History Museum for the 15th annual ACG SV Awards. And in Mountain View California excited to welcome to the Cube for the first time, John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet and the co-founder of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. JOHN, it's truly a pleasure to have you on the Cube today. >> Well delighted to be here, Lisa. >> So I was doing some research on you. And I see Marc Andreessen has called you the godfather of Silicon Valley. >> Marc very generous (loughs) >> so I thought I was pretty cool I'm going to sit down with the godfather tonight. (loughs) >> I have not done that yet. So you are keynoting the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight. Talk to us a little bit about the takeaways that the audience is going to hear from you tonight. >> Well, they're going to hear some things about leadership the importance of leadership, obviously the importance of innovation. We're in the middle of Silicon Valley innovation is a big thing. And the role that technology plays in our lives and how we should be thinking about that, and how do we ensure the technology is something that serves the public good. >> Definitely. So there's about I think over 230 attendees expected tonight over 100 sea levels, the ACG SV Is has been it's it's much more than a networking organization. there's a lot of opportunities for collaboration for community. Tell me a little bit about your experience with that from a collaboration standpoint? >> Well, I think collaboration is a critical ingredient. I mean, for so many years, you look at the collaboration is gone. Just take between between the universities, my own Stanford and Silicon Valley and how that collaboration has developed over time and lead the founding of great companies, but also collaboration within the valley. This is the place to be a technology person in the whole world it's the best place partly because of this collaboration, and this innovative spirit that really is a core part of what we are as a place. >> I agree. The innovative spirit is one of the things that I enjoy, about not only being in technology, but also living in Silicon Valley. You can't go to a Starbucks without hearing a conversation or many conversations about new startups or cloud technology. So the innovative spirit is pervasive here. And it's also one that I find in an in an environment like ASG SV. You just hear a lot of inspiring stories and I was doing some research on them in the last 18 months. Five CEO positions have been seated and materialized through ACG SV. Number of venture deals initiated several board positions. So a lot of opportunity in this group here tonight. >> Right, well I think that's important because so much of the leadership has got to come by recruiting new young people. And with the increase in concerned about diversity and our leadership core and our boards, I think building that network out and trying to stretch it a little bit from the from perhaps the old boys network of an earlier time in the Valley is absolutely crucial. >> Couldn't agree more. So let's now talk a little bit about the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program at Stanford. Tell us a little bit about it. When was it founded? >> So we are we are in our very first year, actually, this year, our first year of scholars, we founded it in 2016. The motivation was, I think, an increasing gap we perceived in terms of the need for great leadership and what was available. And it was in government. It was in the nonprofit world, it was in the for profit world. So I being a lifelong educator said, What can we do about this? Let's try to recruit and develop a core of younger people who show that they're committed to the greater good and who are excellent, who are innovative, who are creative, and prepare them for leadership roles in the future. >> So you're looking for are these undergraduate students? >> They are graduate students, so they've completed their undergraduate, it's a little hard to tell when somebody's coming out of high school, what their civic commitment is, what their ability to lead is. But coming out of coming out of undergraduate experience, and often a few years of work experience, we can tell a lot more about whether somebody has the potential to be a future leader. >> So you said, found it just in 2016. And one of the things I saw that was very interesting is projecting in the next 50 years, there's going to be 5000 Knight-Hennessy scholars at various stages of their careers and government organizations, NGOs, as you mentioned, so looking out 50 years you have a strong vision there, but really expect this organization to be able to make a lasting impact. >> That's what our goal is lasting impact over decades, because people who go into leadership positions often take a decade or two to rise to that position. But that's what our investment is our investment is in the in the future. And when I went to Phil Knight who's my co-founder and donor, might lead donor to the program, he was enthusiastic. His view was that we had a we had a major gap in leadership. And we needed to begin training, we need to do multiple things. We need to do things like we're doing tonight. But we also need to think about that next younger generation is up and coming. >> Some terms of inspiring the next generation of innovative diversity thinkers. Talk to me about some of the things that this program is aimed at, in addition to just, you know, some of the knowledge about leadership, but really helping them understand this diverse nature in which we now all find ourselves living. >> So one of the things we do is we try to bring in leaders from all different walks of life to meet and have a conversation with our scholars. This morning, we had the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in town, Michelle Bachelet, and she sat down and talked about how she thought about her role as addressing human rights, how to move things forward in very complex situations we face around the world with collapse of many governments and many human rights violations. And how do you how do you make that forward progress with a difficult problem? So that kind of exposure to leaders who are grappling with really difficult problems is a critical part of our program. >> And they're really seeing and experiencing real world situations? >> Absolutely. They're seeing them up close as they're really occurring. They see the challenges we had, we had Governor Brown and just before he went out of office here in California, to talk about criminal justice reform a major issue in California and around the country. And how do we make progress on that on that particular challenge? >> So you mentioned a couple of other leaders who the students I've had the opportunity to learn from and engage with, but you yourself are quite the established leader. You went to Stanford as a professor in 1977. You are a President Emeritus you were president of Stanford from 2000 to 2016. So these students also get the opportunity to learn from all that you have experienced as it as a professor of Computer Science, as well as in one of your current roles as chairman of Alphabet. Talk to us a little bit about just the massive changes that you have seen, not just in Silicon Valley, but in technology and innovation over the last 40 plus years. >> Well, it is simply amazing. When I arrived at Stanford, there was no internet. The ARPANET was in its young days, email was something that a bunch of engineers and scientists use to communicate, nobody else did. I still remember going and seeing the first demonstration of what would become Yahoo. Well, while David Filo and Jerry Yang had it set up in their office. And the thing that immediately convinced me Lisa was they showed me that their favorite Pizza Parlor would now allow orders to go online. And when I saw that I said, the World Wide Web is not just about a bunch of scientists and engineers exchanging information. It's going to change our lives and it did. And we've seen wave after wave that with Google and Facebook, social media rise. And now the rise of AI I mean this this is a transformative technology as big as anything I think we've ever seen. In terms of its potential impact. >> It is AI is so transformative. I was I was in Hawaii recently on vacation and Barracuda Networks was actually advertising about AI in Hawaii and I thought that's interesting that the people that are coming to to Hawaii on vacation, presumably, people have you know, many generations who now have AI as a common household word may not understand the massive implications and opportunities that it provides. But it is becoming pervasive at every event we're at at the Cube and there's a lot of opportunity there. It's it's a very exciting subject. Last question for you. You mentioned that this that the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program is really aimed towards graduate students. What is your advice to those BB stem kids in high school right now who are watching this saying, oh, John, what, what? How do you advise me to be able to eventually get into a program like this? >> Well, I think it begins by really finding your passion, finding something you're really dedicated to pushing yourself challenging yourself, showing that you can do great things with it. And then thinking about the bigger role you want to have with technology. In the after all, technology is not an end in itself. It's a tool to make human lives better and that's the sort of person we're looking for in the knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, >> Best advice you've ever gotten. >> Best advice ever gotten is remember that leadership is about service to the people in the institution you lead. >> It's fantastic not about about yourself but really about service to those. >> About service to others >> JOHN, it's been a pleasure having you on the Cube tonight we wish you the best of luck in your keynote at the 15th annual ACG SV Awards and we thank you for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. I've enjoyed it. Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube on the ground. Thanks for watching. (upbeat tech music)

(upbeat music) >> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 15th annual ACG SV GROW! Awards. Can you hear the energy and all the innovation happening behind me? Well, I'm here with one of the board members of ACG SV, Ashley Tarver, big data evangelist for Cloudera. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, I'm glad to be here. >> Lot of collaboration going on behind us, right? >> It's a great networking event. >> It is. >> 'Cause so many people have showed up. >> There's over 230 people. >> Oh, easily. >> Expected tonight, over 100 of those are C-levels. Before we get into your association with ACG SV, talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cloudera, just the Hortonworks acquisition was just completed, the merger, a couple months ago, what's going on there? >> It's very exciting. As most people might know, we just did a major collaboration merger with a company called Hortonworks. And the two companies together, we're about twice the size as we were before and for the industry and for our customers, it's been really exciting because we've been able to really create what we call the enterprise data cloud that really enables our customers to bring all their data together into one single platform and we call it an edge-to-AI solution. We're really one of the only companies right now in the world who have the ability to do that in a comprehensive manner and we can do it on the premise, we can do it in the cloud, a hybrid cloud environment, so it gives you the ultimate flexibility and the merger has allowed us to really accomplish that for our customers. >> As we and every company that's succeeding today is living in this hybrid, multi-cloud environment where the edge is proliferating, the security perimeters are morphing dramatically, companies need to be able to transform digitally in a secure way, but also enable access to data from decades ago. >> Yeah, most anybody's who's listening to the media will hear IoT is really the big play and the ability to capture all that data from multiple in-points, edge devices, and bring it all into a single data repository is a major challenge. So, having the ability to do that in a. You can do it now with the way we're doing it, the way your company wants to do it. So if you're already in the cloud, you can stay there, if you wanted to keep it on the premise. So there's a lot of options that we now bring to the table. So hopefully, it becomes a little easier for our customers. >> So when you're talking with customers that maybe have a lot of workloads, enterprise workloads, maybe legacy still on prem, and you're talking to them in your role as the big data evangelist, where does the topic of AI come up? I mean, are you talking to them about here is a massive opportunity for you to actually leverage AI, you got to go to the cloud to do it? >> Absolutely. I mean, AI is kind of a marketing term that you hear a lot about. For us, it's really about machine learning and machine learning is taking large sets of data and putting logic on top of it and so you can tease out valuable insights that you might not otherwise get. So the ability to then apply that in an AI environment becomes extremely important and the ability to do that across a large data set is what's really complicated. But if you're a real data scientist, you want to have as much data as you can so your models can run more accurately. And as soon as you can do that, you'll have the ability to really improve your models, extract better insights out of the data you do own, and provide more value to your own company and your own customers. >> Absolutely, it's a fascinating topic, but since we're low on time here, we are at the 15th annual GROW! Awards. ACG SV recognizing Arista Networks for the Outstanding Growth Award and Adesto Technologies for the Emerging Growth Award. You've been involved as a board member of ACG SV for about a year now. What makes this organization worthy of your time? >> Well, it's really exciting 'cause in Silicon Valley, it's unique 'cause it's all about collaboration. The innovation that we create out of this location of the globe is through networking with our peers and ACG opens up that window, provides a door that allows you to meet with your peers, your competitors, your friends, and as a result, you can create insights and capabilities about your own company and technology directions that's really helpful. So, it's the networking, they also put on excellent C-circle events, which is really good because if your company is looking at growing as a startup, you might be able to get some valuable insights from peers who know how to do HR, merger acquisitions, finance. And so, the ability to do networking like at an event like this, the ability to come in and learn how to do business processes more effectively, it all plays a really important role at ACG. >> Well Ashley, thank you so much for carving out some time to join us on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From Mountain View California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th Annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with theCUBE at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the 15th Annual ACG SV Grow! Awards. This is a event with nearly 300 attendees, about 100 plus C-levels, and I'm excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Hannah Kain, the CEO of Alom. Hannah, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. >> And here you are, and I are, in the lobby where there is a lot of innovation and collaboration going on right here, so thank you for joining me in this energetic time at the event. >> Oh, I absolutely love it. You can feel the energy of Silicon Valley here. >> Yeah, you're right, you can. So tell me about, you are the CEO and founder of Alom. Tell me about your company, what you guys do, what makes you different. >> So, we do supply chain excellence. We execute and plant supply chains for very large corporations out of 19 locations globally. We are headquartered right here in Silicon Valley. Using technology to help our customers be agile and get the products to the right place exactly when their customers need it, and protect their brand, do their risk management that makes sure they do everything right in the supply chain. It's super exciting, and no other place is technology used better than in the supply chain. >> So, you founded Alom in the 90s. You have seen a tremendous amount of technology innovation. I mean, things change faster than we can even keep track sometimes. Tell me a little bit about what has been a facilitator of you as the CEO being headquartered in Silicon Valley, and being able to take advantage of technology to grow and scale your business. >> I think back in the 90s, nobody really realized the potential of technology in supply chain. I mean, supply chain wasn't even a word. And so, I always thought that supply chain could be done much differently than it was done in the old days, and that technology would be the big facilitator of it. So right now, we have much more visibility in supply chain. We can see where products are, et cetera, but we've also increased the complexity of the supply chains, driven down the cost of products, but also at the same point of time, driven up the complexity with components being shipped all over the world and assembled in one place and distributed to another place. So, there's a lot of complexity that only technology can resolve. So, being in Silicon Valley, which is the first place of technology, is just fantastic when you're in supply chain. It really leverages innovation that's taking place. >> And you can, like we said when we started, you can feel the energy of the innovation going on here. I read on your LinkedIn profile that you are passionate about excellence, technology, collaboration, and community. The last two, collaboration and community, really underscore the association for corporate growth in Silicon Valley. Tell me about your involvement in ACG SV and what makes this event worthy of your time. >> So, I do believe in collaboration. I think collaboration is a core value in Silicon Valley. I believe that collaborative companies and collaborative people are going to win in the marketplace and also have more fun while doing it, creating much more value. And so, in ACG Silicon Valley, there's just a lot of collaboration, lots of different points of view, but also a lot of very focused, dedicated business people. And so, we get together and get ideas from each other, but also send business to and from each other, and use each other as resources. And I also believe, apart from collaboration, being resourceful is a real winner. You need to be resourceful and be able to make things happen and figure out a way to navigate new landscapes. And that's what having these great contacts in ACG and other associations in Silicon Valley really do for me. >> So last question, Hannah, for you as a female CEO, a leader in technology, what advice would you give to the subsequent generations of women in technology who aspire to be leaders like yourself? >> I think they should be leaders like themselves, not like me, but like themselves. I think you need to be authentic. Bring your own strength to every situation, and I think that's what I really wish for the new generation. That many of the women have paved the way such that the new generation can really be themselves and contribute. And I'd say, focus on what you can contribute and what you can do for the greater community and for business as such. >> I love that advice, Hannah. Authenticity is such a value. Well, thank you so much for spending some time here with us in this energetic 15th Annual Grow! Awards. We appreciate your time. >> Absolutely my pleasure. Thank you. >> You're watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, thanks for your time. >> [Upbeat Tech Music]

>> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin, on the ground with theCUBE at the 15th annual ACG SV Grow Awards, Association for Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, is what that stands for. Can you hear the energy and the innovation going on back here? It's amazing tonight. I'm very pleased to welcome to theCUBE, one of tonight's winners from Arista Technologies Kenneth Duda, the CTO, SVP of software engineering, and one of the founders of Arista Technologies. Kenneth, thank you so much and congratulations! >> Thank you so much, we're honored by the award. >> Well, it's been amazing. Outstanding Growth Award winner, congratulations. I was just looking at some of the recent earnings from Arista, nice Q4 earnings from FY-18. >> Thank you. >> Above the guidance, stock price rising this year. Last month Goldman Sachs added Arista to its conviction buy list. You guys are on nice trajectory, tell me about that. >> Well, it's just been a fantastic journey, you just don't get this many chances to participate in something like Arista from the ground up. Our growth has been driven in no small part thanks to the incredible growth of cloud computing. Cloud computing is changing the world and the cloud data centers need a different kind of network infrastructure. They need something that scales, meet their needs, and is customizable to integrate with all of their management systems, automation, and we've been able to provide that and be part of that journey, it's been incredibly gratifying. >> So you specifically talk with customers a lot, I was reading about one of your recent big wins in Canada, CBC Radio Canada facility in Montreal, but talk to me about what's some of the things now that you're hearing from customers especially those customers who are still in the process of transforming and transitioning workloads to the cloud. What are some of the things that surprise you about where customers are in any industry in this journey. >> Right, well, so I spend most of my time talking to the enterprise customers because there are so many of them and what we've learned there is a couple of things. One is they are very impacted by cloud. Cloud's a big deal, they're moving somewhere closer to the cloud, they're also building their own internal environments in a more cloud-like fashion and, as such, benefit from Arista's approach. But the most interesting thing I've learned is that neither of those is the most important thing. The most important thing is the network has got to work and it might sound strange, but networking gear isn't always reliable and what we've been able to achieve through our architectural approach and through our focus on automated testing has enabled us to produce a higher quality product which has been a major attractor of the enterprise customer. So you need to cover all those bases to succeed in this business. >> You're right, that network is absolutely essential. When anything goes down, whether it's a Facebook outage, it's world news. Tell me, what is the Arista advantage? >> The key advantage is the quality of our products. It's the fact that we have built an architecture that is more resilient to software and hardware errors. It's the way we test. We've made a tremendous investment in automated testing, so that our product has gone through hundreds of thousands of tests before it ever sees a customer. But actually the most important element behind quality, is the culture of your company, what do you believe? What's important to you? What gets you up in the morning? What are you thinking about and talking about to your employees? What's the most important thing, is it profitability? Is it making a deal, is it hitting a schedule? Or is it making sure the network works? We are 100% focused on that and it's been really gratifying to see the impact that's had. >> So last question, and thank you for speaking over the drum noise going on behind us, by the way, to get people into the auditorium. In terms of culture and the impact, what do you think this award means to your peers, your teams at Arista? >> Oh, it's just such an affirmation of the journey we've come through so far and the journey we still have ahead of us. We're very grateful for the award. >> So, I see so much momentum coming into 2019. What are some of the exciting things we can expect from Arista this year that you might be able to share with us? >> I think we're seeing a real transition from network designers focusing on the control plane of their network first to focusing on the management of the network first because management is actually the key to smooth operations. Our cloud vision product addresses that need. We're really excited about that transformation. >> Well, Kenneth, again, congratulations to Arista and yourself and your teams on the Outstanding Growth Award from ACG SV. We also thank you for spending some time with us on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, it was my pleasure. >> I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE. (energetic music)

>> (Announcer) From Mountain View, California it's the Cube. Covering the 15th Annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California for the 15th Annual Grow! Awards for the Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley, ACG SV. That's a mouthful. I'm here with one of the ACG SV board members, Zac Mutrux, the District Sales Manager at Insperity. Hey, Zack, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, I'm pleased to be here. >> So before we talk about what you're doing here at the 15th Annual Grow! Awards, tell our audience about Insperity. I was reading, I love taglines. >> Yes. >> And I see on your homepage, Insperity is obsessed with delivery HR mastery. Wow. >> Oh yeah. >> Obsessed and mastery. Those two words just jumped out. Tell us a little bit about what you guys do. >> Impressive, isn't it? Well, we actually just adjusted our tagline to HR that makes a difference. And that's really what it's all about. We feel like companies that are growing, if they're going to make it from good to the best, it has everything to do with the people. Attracting the best people and keeping them, developing them over time, and that's exactly what we do with our clients. >> So Insperity has been in business since 1986, and if I think of today's modern workforce, highly mobile, distributed, there's the whole on-demand industry. You guys have seen a tremendous amount of change that now can be massively influenced, and your customers can, using technology. Give me a little bit of that historical perspective on Insperity's inception and today's workforce, and how you're helping them attract and retain the best talent. >> Oh, absolutely. Well, when the company started it was in a maybe a 200 square foot room with one telephone between the two co-founders. There's no such thing as email. So, absolutely, there's been immense technological changes and there continues to be. I think that's one of the things that has been responsible for Insperity's success is its adoption of technology. Today we are as much a technology company as we are an employee benefits company, or an HR consulting company. It's really about creating a positive experience for the employees. That's part of being a competitive employer. >> Well it has to be a positive experience, right? For your customers. Because acquiring great talent is one thing, retaining them is another. And I want to kind of pivot off the retention there for a second. As the District Sales Manager, I was asking you before we went live, tell me maybe one of your favorite stories, and you said, "Wow". One of the great things, you guys are coming off great growth and FY18 revenue growth. One of the great things that Insperity has been really successful at is customer retention. And that's hard. You're proud of this. Tell us about that statistic that you mentioned, and how it is that Insperity is evolving and innovating over the last few decades to keep that retention number as phenomenal as it is. >> Well, Insperity's been named one of the most admired corporations in the country, actually, five years in a row by Fortune magazine. And that's the kind of press that you can't buy. One of the accolades that I'm most proud of is that in the past year our own employees named us one of the top 100 companies to work for in the United States. Which is, I think, the proof that we really know what we're doing with our clients. Because there are a lot of different companies out there, various competitors, and almost none of them are on that list. So, it's living our values and expressing through our service team, our extraordinary service team, that, I think, keeps our clients coming back to us year after year. About 85% renew. That's been consistent. A high level of client retention for the past three years. Even more extraordinary is that we've been growing both top line and bottom line revenue at the same time. So there's just a testament to our leadership, to our co-founder and CEO, Paul Sarvadi, and to the best of team-- >> But it sounds like it's a lot of symbiotic relationships between the internal retention at Insperity that is maybe leading through to your customers seeing, hey, there's not a high turnover here. These people are doing, they love what they're doing. They're working for a good company. So there's probably a lot of symbiotic behaviors. >> Well, that's exactly right. I think you really hit the nail of the head. It's about culture. It's a culture that starts from the top with leadership, and it filters down throughout the organization. And we're not looking to do business with every single company. We're looking to do business with the companies that believe the things that we believe. That is, companies that have high levels of commitment, trust, communication. They do better financially then companies that don't have those things. >> And along those lines, mentioning just before we wrap here, we are at the 15th Annual ACG SV Awards tonight, where they're honoring two award winners. The Outstanding Growth Award winner is Arista Networks. And the Emerging Growth winner is Adesto Technologies. I'm excited to talk to them later. But I wanted to get a little bit of perspective on you've been involved as a board member of ACSG since last year. Tell me a little bit about what makes ACG SV worthy of your time. >> Oh, absolutely. That's a great question. It's just an extraordinary community, I think, of the top leaders in Silicon Valley come together. The monthly Key Notes add a lot of value. It's an intimate setting and there's real conversations that are taking place on topics that are relevant to today's professionals. So for me to be able to engage and hopefully add some value as a board member is privilege. >> And you can hear probably a lot of those conversations going on right behind Zac and me tonight. Zac, it's been a pleasure to have you on the Cube. Thank you so much for giving us some of your time. >> Oh, right, thank you, Lisa. >> For the Cube, I'm Lisa Martin on the ground. Thanks for watching. (pop electronic music)

>> From Mountainview, California, it's The Cube, covering the 15th annual Grow! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at the 15th annual ACG SV Grow! Awards. At the Computer History Museum in Mountainview, can you hear the buzz of 230 plus attendees behind me? I'm very pleased to welcome one of the ACG SV board members Dr. Shampa Banerjee, technology executive, and chief product officer at Eros Digital. Shampa, thank you so much for giving us some of your time this evening. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure. >> So lots of great, innovative, and inspiring conversations, no doubt, going on behind us. >> I'm trying to listen to it. >> Yeah, so talk to us a little bit about Eros Digital, who you are, what you do. >> So Eros International is the largest studio in India. It produces or distributes around 60 to 70 percent of the films made in India, Bollywood films. So I run the streaming platform, the Netflix for Bollywood, that's what I call it. >> The Netflix for Bollywood, I love it. Now, tell us more about that. >> So, you know, it's a streaming platform, a lot of the titles are from what we produce. A lot of the titles we lease from other production houses, and that is the entire technology platform, and then how do you get to the, we connect the consumers, rather, to the entertainment, right? So we like to help them discover, we help them indulge in the whole experience, and then as they keep coming to us more and more, we personalize the experience for them, so that's really what we give them. >> You know, personalization is so key. We expect it right in our lives, and whatever it is that we're doing, we're engaging with an Amazon or a Netflix or at Eros for example, we kind of now expect that. We're sort of demanding consumers, right? We expect them to know what I want, just what I want, don't give me any things that I don't want, so is that one of the things that you've seen, maybe surprising in your career, is this increasing demand for personalization? >> Absolutely, because, you know, there's so much content out there, so much information, and unless there's a filtering mechanism that makes sense for you, people don't want to, you know, it's very hard for them, so they want you to do the work for them. It's entertainment, right? So absolutely. Everyone kind of expects it. It's not said. It's not explicit, but that's the expectation. >> And obviously, with the goal of delighting and retaining those customers, you as the chief product officer have to listen and react to that. >> I spent, I'll tell you a short story. I spent once a month going through all the customers' comments in different platforms, right? And one of the stories I read was this 17-year-old French gal in Paris, she loves watching Bollywood because she was suffering from leukemia and after she gets a treatment, she comes home, she wants to watch something that makes her happy, and we had some issues with that subtitles, and she was having a problem watching our movies and she begged "Please bring them back". And I ran out of my office, went to my team, and I said, "Guys, this is who we wake up for every day. We give her joy, we give her pleasure." So to me, that's how listening to the customers to me is primary, to me they are my biggest stakeholder, and I've told the CEO and founder that, look at the end of the day, I leave and argue with you if it doesn't serve my customers. That's what I believe, listening to the customers, listening to them, understanding, of course, we do a lot of data collection and we look at what we are doing and the patterns, and based on that we make modifications, we test different things to see what makes sense, what's working, and what's not working, because people don't always tell you, and even if you ask them, they're shy to tell you. But then you can see what they're doing, and that's an indicator. >> Well that makes you feel really good, seeing and hearing and feeling the impact that you're making, and speaking of impact, you have been, in the last minute or so that we have, you've been on the board of ACG SV for about the last five years. We're here tonight to honor Arista as the Outstanding Growth Award winner and (mumbles) Technology as the Emerging Growth winner, but really quickly, what makes ACG SV worth your time? >> So ACG honestly is a fantastic organization and you know, living in the Bay Area, there are many organizations, there are many events that are always going on, you know. ACG has been a place where I've seen it's a very, very, very, very diverse organization, of course I still wish there were more females, you know, but it's a very diverse organization, people of all ages, people from different walks of life, from different kinds of companies, you know, and people are very, very collaborative and help each other to do business. I've become personal friends with many of them, but the main thing is, you know, you come here, if you're new to the Valley especially, whether as a company or as an individual, this is one of the best places to come to because it's not too large, it's not too small, it has the right number of people, and it helps you quickly on board. They'll introduce you to people, introduce you to events, they give you what you need to kind of get started. So to me it's like, when I joined, I joined before I was on the board, almost, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, and I've seen this whole thing transform and it's just an excellent, supportive, the people are very open-minded, great ideas, and it's just an excellent organization, love it. So it's worth my time, you know, to take the extra hours, and I would love to see it get even bigger and more diverse and more interesting. >> Well it sounds like, I love how you kind of described ACG SV as being that Goldilocks type of organization, not too big, not too small, just right, but we thank you so much. I wish we had more time to talk, as a female in technology, but we'll have to have you back at the studio on The Cube! >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much for your time. For The Cube, I am Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (music)

>> from Mountain View, California It's the Cube covering the fifteenth annual Grow Awards. Brought to you by A C. G S V. >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with the Cube at the Computer History Museum for the fifteenth annual TGS Grow Awards. Can you hear the collaboration of the innovation going on behind me? Very excited to welcome to the Cube, one of tonight's award winners from a Jaso Technologies, Norby, Jericho B and the President and CEO of Modesto. Congratulations on the Emerging Growth Award that adjuster has been honored with tonight. >> Thank you very much. We're very honored to be here. So you've been at >> the helm of a desert for a long time. I'd like our audience to hear a little bit from you about whom destiny is what you do. What makes you different. >> Perfect. So we are at a technology company on our products are used primarily in Internet of things, applications across many, many segments. Most off our businesses within the industrial segment on our customers use our products to actually build a Iot solutions for their end markets. Our products include semiconductor chips that are used at the edge of Coyote EJ gateway devices that connects the local networks to the more broad networks on. Basically, we enable our customers to take data from the physical world and send it up into the clouds >> to you guys. Our have had a great great trajectory, obviously being recognized by the emerging growth winner from a C. G S B. Tell me a little bit about it was looking at some information from you guys and on twenty eighteen, You guys did a great job of executing on your strategic initiatives to really make twenty eighteen a transformative year couple of acquisitions to us about the last year, in particular in the group that you have seen the momento and you're bringing into twenty nineteen. >> Correct? Correct. So we started. We enter twenty eighteen as a provider up application specific memory devices for I ot however, we realize that for our customers to take true benefit off the technologies we provide, we need to be a more holistic supplier of solutions. So as a result, we went through a whole process off looking at other technologies that can complement what we have in a very similar way, with strategic focus in the markets that we were focused, and as a result, we made two acquisitions in past summer that ended up its expanding our market opportunity, broadening our reach within existing customer and significantly expanding our offering portfolio to foreign markets. >> Negroes have a really strong position with tear one customers in the industrial sector. You mentioned that expecting Don't be a little bit more than about your leadership here in what makes these large industrial cheer. One players say Augusto is for us, >> right? So before I asked her that let me talk a little bit about the difference between industrial I ot and Consumer >> Riley's Yes, >> So if you think about consumer, I ot, it's what grabs headlines. It's the fitness trackers, the latest home smart thermostats, and the smartwatch is on so forth. The's are new markets. Volumes are girl very fast, but if next year and new shiny object is created, it's easy for the consumers to replace. They basically buy the new one. Repent replaced the old. One interesting thing about industrial I ot is that industrial I ot has this fragmented legacy systems that today run in their businesses. So if you look at the building we're in Today there is a fired and safety system that runs there's H Vac system that runs the business. There's a security systems, and this could have been installed here decades ago. There are billions of connected things in that industrial network today, but the data is unable to go up into the cloud. Where come cloud providers? Aye, aye. Providers can actually take the data on provide benefits to the business owners. We understand the language of industrial I ot very well because off our roots in that space. And we also understand this universe very well because of our roots being in Silicon Valley. So for industrial customers to benefit from this transformation, it's very important to be able to understand the OT world operational technology world of old days on the IT world that we're very familiar with. So with addition off these acquisitions that we've done this summer very well, positions with the building blocks that way can put together on offer differentiated solutions to our customers? >> Well, no, but it's been a pleasure having you on the queue. But the fifteenth annual acey GSP grow words. Congratulations to adjust of your whole team for the emerging growth award. And we look forward to seeing what happens this year in the space with you. Thank >> you. Thank you very much. Thank you. >> Lisa. Martin, you're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching.

Jeffrey Kier with the Qbert Computer History Museum in Mountain View California for the 14th annual association of corporate growth Silicon Valley grow Awards we've been here for a couple years now and it's a big event 300 people coming in to talk about really an ecosystem that helping other companies grow always great to be on the cube [Music] essentially what we are is an organization that's dedicated towards providing networking opportunities educational opportunities programming for c-level executives and other senior level executives at companies to help them develop their career and also grow their businesses tonight it's about tech as a force for good and I'm gonna talk about what I call the four superpowers today mobile unlimited reach cloud unlimited scale ai unlimited intelligence and IOT bridging from the digital to the physical world and how those four superpowers are reinforcing each other today very sophisticated population I mean it's just wonderful living in this seventy some people our biggest thing that we see is just the whole better together message that all of the resources from the strategically line businesses all working together to support the customers technology is evolving at a remarkable speed you know that's being driven largely by the availability of increased processing power less and less expensive faster and faster digital transformation IT transformation security transformation and work force transformation those are the big things for us this year it's great to be able to have a computer that really understands how to generate meaningful realistic text it's our opportunity to improve the quality of lives for every human on the planet as a result of those superpowers and really how it's our responsibility as a tech community to shape those superpowers for good there are issues created operationally day to day that we have to sort of always be on the watch for like you know readiness distance or these technologies it's the two sides of the same point always you can use it for good or you can use it for bad and unfortunately the bads within the news more than the good but there's so many exciting things going on in medicine health care oh yeah agriculture energy that the opportunities are almost endless not just the first world problems those of us here in the Silicon Valley see every day but really open our eyes to what's happening in other parts of the globe the need for water clean water water filtration clean air having access to information education so these are some things that are you know really personally dear to me in the last 50 years we've taken the extreme poverty rate from over 40 percent to less than 10 percent on the planet we've increased the length of life by almost 20 years these are stunning things and largely the result of the technological breakthroughs that we're doing that's the beauty of this right that's all of these things actually create opportunities you just have to stick with it and look at solutions and there's no shortage of really talented creative people to go address these opportunities and it's so fun to be involved in it right now the scale that we're able to now conduct business to be able to develop software to reach customers and truly write to change people's lives there are in many ways the technology halves and the technology have not absolutely and a lot of it is not just about making the product but then taking the product you've made and then implementing it in various use cases that really make a change from about in the world as I say today is the fastest day of tech evolution of your life it's also the slowest day of tech devolution of the rest of your life the rest of your life I'm Jeff Rick you're watching the cube from the a cts-v Awards thanks for watching [Music]

>> Announcer: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering ACG Silicon Valley GROW! Awards brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the 14th Annual ACG SV GROW! Awards. There's about 300 people coming together. It's their once-a-year big event for the awards. They do about two events a month for the balance of the year. And we're really excited to have one of the speakers on. She's Dr. Karen Lojeski, the founder and CEO of Virtual Distance International. Karen, great to meet you. >> It's great to be here, Jeff. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so virtual distance. What does virtual distance mean? >> Well, that's a long story but the short answer is virtual distance is actually a measure that I discovered that basically describes what's lost when the human being gets translated through our devices and it actually shows up as an emotional and social detachment that grows unconsciously when we are constantly talking through mediated communications. >> Jeff: Right. >> And when virtual distance is high, it has a very significant impact on things we care about as business leaders. But we can predict virtual distance, we can reduce it, we can manage it, and therefore we can improve performance while maximizing the technology but minimizing the impact it's having on human beings. >> So before we jump into that, so virtual distance can be really close physical distance, right? >> Karen: Yeah. >> I think I saw something >> Exactly >> in one of your research, doing some research where people are sending IMs and emails to somebody who's sitting right across the way. >> Yeah. >> So it's just so prolific because we're so used to communicating via these devices. >> That's right. I mean we see it all the time. You go out to restaurant to have dinner and you and I could be sitting just this close and both of us are doing this, there's virtual distance right at that table. >> Right. Right, or the kids not doing what what they're supposed to >> That's right. >> And you text them, "Hey, look up." You know? >> Yeah. >> "Let's pay attention." >> And then it's actually affecting how that child develops or how we feel about each other >> Right. >> but it's invisible. >> So, how do you measure it and what are some of the really key indicators that leaders should be looking for, measuring, keeping track of to try to minimize some of the negative impacts of this? >> Well, we measure through the Virtual Distance Index Assessment and our clients take that and then we generate analytics reports and we actually give them predictive solutions on how to reduce it so that they can impact performance in a positive way. >> So what are some of the examples? Some of these cases you can share that where it just went way one way >> Yeah. >> or way the other way? >> I'm glad you brought up, it can sort of be, virtual distance can be even as close as we are and also between people who are thousands and thousands of miles apart. And we've also seen virtual distance very low between people who sit oceans away and who've never met. For example, I had a large financial services company that actually had 90% of their employees clock in to the same location every day and we went in and measured virtual distance and we found that it had caused multimillion dollar losses in a strategic IT project even though the people on that project were literally as close together as you and I. So, we were able to show that. We knew exactly where it was coming from and we could prescribe solutions to reduce it which they did >> Right. >> And they saw immediate bumps in performance. >> So what are some of the things you can do because we're so addicted to these things? The stats of the number of times we touch them and look at them, it's mind-boggling actually. So what are some of the things you tell people to reduce that virtual distance? >> Well, I actually start by telling them that what they have to realize is that when they're talking to the screen, they're actually talking to themselves. And I know it sounds crazy but that's actually how we operate as human beings. >> Right, right. >> So just by becoming aware that that's what we're doing actually pulls people back and makes them stop and think, "Do I really know what this person means?" Because in essence what happens is we lose all the context we need as human beings to actually figure out what people really mean. So I work with leaders to bring that context back and constantly be explicitly referring to it because unconsciously it's all disappeared behind these virtual curtains. >> Right, and consciously we actually see evidence of it all the time. Email I think is one of the worst communication vehicles of all time. It's certainly convenient but so many times the nuance is not carried through. The intention or the degree of pissed-off-ness, I'll just use which is probably not a vocabulary word but that's okay. >> That's okay. >> It doesn't really come through either way over-positive or way over-negative depending on a whole bunch of factors when you read that or just bad choice of words. >> That's right. >> Or unintentional affect onto those words. >> That's right. >> It's not a great form of communication. >> Well, I would add to that that it actually is a good form of communication but in certain circumstances. So what Virtual Distance analytics, measurable, quantifiable things tell us is that email is great for things like, "Jeff, let's have lunch at 12 and meet "at the Computer History Museum." or, "Here's the file you wanted. "Please have a look and give me a call." It is actually a very good tool for things like that. But what we do all the time is we try to explain ourselves in email and that is not a good use of email because as you're saying, what happens is since we have no context we use our own context and that's not good because it's usually wrong. >> Usually wrong. >> And then we misinterpret everything and people think other people are just jerks or something when in fact it's really just virtual distance. >> Now what about Zoom and Webex and the virtual meeting rooms that are so prolific now as an alternative to the actual phone call? Do those things work from your point of view? Do they not work, are they a nice substitute and better than the alternative with all these distributed teams? What's your take on video conferencing? >> Yeah, so the first thing I would say is virtual distance is actually not about the technology, it's about the people, so we have to recenter ourselves on that notion. But things like Zoom and Webex and things can be helpful but only if they work properly when we need them. If they don't, one of the ways to reduce virtual distance in the operational sense is we need to have plan A, plan B, plan D, plan C if that technology goes down because the problem with it is it's not always reliable and you know, you've been on calls, right? >> Right. >> Where if there's a problem, it takes about 10 seconds maybe before you're off doing something else while someone is trying to fix it and that actually adds to virtual distance. >> Still one of my favorite YouTube videos, and very sad that it's still so relevant is the joke one about the Webex meeting or the virtual meeting, especially at the end where it's like, "Bob, you've been here the whole time?" >> Yeah (laughs). >> And it's still the same. It's so much wasted time trying to get the thing to work. So I want to wrap it up with what are the consequences from leadership skills? What should leaders be thinking about? It's the world we live in. We're still connected to these things. What are some of the concrete things that they can do to reduce the virtual distance and have better comms amongst their people? >> Yeah, so the first thing we have to do is to know, I've been collecting data on this for 14 years, more, and virtual distance is now everywhere. It's not a matter of geographic distance as we said in the beginning. First, they have to understand that they have to be managing it all the time. The second thing is that there are issues created operationally day to day that we have to always be on the watch for readiness instants or these technologies failing. But the big thing they have to understand is that they things that cause the most significant and negative impact to performance are the things about us as human beings that lie underneath the surface and that disappear behind virtual curtains. So what leaders need to do is make those explicit in everything they do and we have specific tactics on how to do that so that everybody can see each other in a deeper way because when virtual distance is high we get much lower trust by 90% and it's not just lower trust, it's distrust. >> Jeff: Right. >> So if we reduce virtual distance, we increase trust, we get better performance and it's immediately seen by executives all over the world. >> And trust is one of these foundational things. >> Absolutely. >> That if you don't have trust it just crushes everything. >> No, and without giving away what I'm about to go talk about tonight, I can tell you that we're at the point where we have so much data that statistically speaking, high virtual distance is the statistical equivalent of distrust. So if we lower virtual distance, we statistically get the equivalent of strong trust. >> All right, well if you want to see Karen speak, you got to go watch her key note or I think you've got books and all kinds of great, great research around this. >> Yeah, and they can visit us at virtualdistance.com and all kinds of good places. >> All right, she's Dr. Karen Lojeski, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from ACG SV. Thanks for watching. >> Karen: Thank you. (upbeat music)

>>que presents on the ground. Wait. >>Hi. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, and we're on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley with the Association for Corporate Earth or a CG. Tonight is a CG 12th annual Growth Awards, and we're very fortunate to be joined by one of the longest sponsors of a CG Deloitte Gary Herbert from Delight. Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you so much. >>So not only is a long time sponsor base did you get through the second biggest with the presumably a lot of options that Dylan has a sponsor and engage in communities like that. What next? A CG unique and warrant Deloitte sponsorship and active participation >>Delights been involved with a CG for over 10 years. And the reason is they collect a great group of senior leaders in Silicon Valley to talk about things that are really important. And a lot of great networks air here and make great things happen in the community. >>Excellent. And you can hear and feel the buzz of the innovation and the history of veterans in the room. We're here tonight to honor men who won the 2016 outstanding growth award, as well as Ambarella, who won the 2016 Emerging Growth Award in terms of the metrics used to select the winners, can you give us a little insight into what those metrics are and what this metrics and key criteria really mean for these types of award winners? >>One of the key metrics that we look at his revenue growth and Fitbit has had an incredible run over the last five years. But what's particularly amazing about Fitbit is they've been doing it very profitably, so it's really been a great testament to that. You can grow and grow in a profitable matter. >>And as we look at the next 2 to 3 years, in your perspective, what are some of the market drivers that you're going to see really influencing the fifth Mrs Your predictions there expect >>Fitbits and continue to be very successful. They've really done a great job from an execution perspective. They got great products and they define their brand. It's not just a just a tracker of steps. It is really a wellness brand. And that's why I think they're gonna continue to be successful. >>Same question for Amarillo in terms of emerging growth where some of the market drivers over the next two years, Amarilla will face. What are your >>predictions for them with Amber? I mean, since they're in the chip business, they they place themselves or have been very successful with getting successful with successful products, and that'll help their continued growth as well. Excellent. And >>what that said, Tell us what's next for Deloitte. >>Deloitte and we're diversified. Professional service is firm. I mean, people think of Deloitte as part of the Big Four, which is people think of audit Tax, I think people don't know is we're also actually were a consulting firm and an advisory firm. In fact, that makes up more than half of our revenues here. Look excellent. >>As we look forward to the future, we know tonight think that an emerald are in some great company with past winners. Lengthen Trulia Gopro What? Your predictions >>for the next class of candidates for 2017 grow awards. That's what's really exciting about this is you don't know who's successful. Companies are. If you told me three years ago is gonna be here today, I wouldn't have necessarily thought that. Um So what's exciting about this is you get to see what is next and who's who's being successful. And it really gets to celebrate the growth of those companies. Absolutely great closing to celebrate, not just the growth of these companies tonight fit, but an amber alert that we're here to celebrate, but >>also all of the >>leadership and expertise and sponsorship that we have here in Silicon Valley. Garrett, thank you so much for taking time to join us. It was a pleasure having you on the Cube. Thank you so much, Lisa. And with that said, Thank you for watching the Cube. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and we'll see you next time.

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies: "Creating technologies that drive human progress." >> Good late afternoon from Barcelona, Spain at the Theater of Barcelona. It's Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson of "theCUBE" covering MWC23. This is our third day of continuous wall-to-wall coverage on theCUBE. And you know we're going to be here tomorrow as well. We've been having some amazing conversations about the ecosystem. And we're going to continue those conversations next. Honore Labourdette is here, the VP global partner, Ecosystem Success Team, Telco Media and Entertainment at Red Hat. And Tony Jeffries joins us as well, a Senior Director of Product Management, Telecom Systems Business at Dell. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Great to have both of you here. So we're going to be talking about the evolution of the telecom stack. We've been talking a lot about disaggregation the last couple of days. Honore, starting with you, talk about the evolution of the telecom stock. You were saying before we went live this is your 15th at least MWC. So you've seen a lot of evolution, but what are some of the things you're seeing right now? >> Well, I think the interesting thing about disaggregation, which is a key topic, right? 'Cause it's so relative to 5G and the 5G core and the benefits and the features of 5G core around disaggregation. But one thing we have to remember, when you disaggregate, you separate things. You have to bring those things back together again in a different way. And that's predominantly what we're doing in our partnership with Dell, is we're bringing those disaggregated components back together in a cohesive way that takes advantage of the new technology, at the same time taking out the complexity and making it easier for our Telco customers to deploy and to scale and to get much more, accelerate the time to revenue. So the trend now is, what we're seeing is two things I would say. One is how do we solve for the complexity with the disaggregation? And how do we leverage the ecosystem as a partner in order to help solve for some of those challenges? >> Tony, jump on in, talk about what you guys announced last week, Dell and Red Hat, and how it's addressing the complexities that Honore was saying, "Hey, they're there." >> Yeah. You know, our customers, our operators are saying, "Hey, I want disaggregation." "I want competition in the market." But at the same time who's going to support all this disaggregation, right? And so at the end of the day, there's going to be an operator that's going to have to figure this out. They're going to have an SLA that they're going to have to meet. And so they're going to want to go with a best-in-class partner with Red Hat and Dell, in terms of our infrastructure and their software together as one combined engineered system. And that's what we call a Dell Telecom infrastructure block for Red Hat. And so at the end of the day, things may go wrong, and if they do, who are they going to call for that support? And that's also really a key element of an engineered system, is this experience that they get both with Red Hat and with Dell together supporting the customer as one. Which is really important to solve this disaggregated problem that can arise from a disaggregated open network situation, yeah. >> So what is the market, the go to market motion look like? People have loyalties in the IT space to technologies that they've embraced and been successful with for years and years. So you have folks in the marketplace who are diehard, you know, dyed red, Red Hat folks. Is it primarily a pull from them? How does that work? How do you approach that to your, what are your end user joint customers? What does that look like from your perspective? >> Sure, well, interestingly enough both Red Hat and Dell have been in the marketplace for a very long time, right? So we do have the brand with those Telco customers for these solutions. What we're seeing with this solution is, it's an emerging market. It's an emerging market for a new technology. So there's an opportunity for both Red Hat and Dell together to leverage our brands with those customers with no friction in the marketplace as we go to market together. So our field sales teams will be motivated to, you know, take advantage of the solution for their customers, as will the Dell team. And I'll let Tony speak to the Dell, go to market. >> Yeah. You know, so we really co-sell together, right? We're the key partners. Dell will end up fulfilling that order, right? We send these engineered systems through our factories and we send that out either directly to a customer or to a OTEL lab, like an intermediate lab where we can further refine and customize that offer for that particular customer. And so we got a lot of options there, but we're essentially co-selling. And Dell is fulfilling that from an infrastructure perspective, putting Red Hat software on top and the licensing for that support. So it's a really good mix. >> And I think, if I may, one of the key differentiators is the actual capabilities that we're bringing together inside of this pre-integrated solution. So it includes the Red Hat OpenShift which is the container software, but we also add our advanced cluster management as well as our Ansible automation. And then Dell adds their orchestration capability along with the features and functionalities of the platform. And we put that together and we offer capability, remote automation orchestration and management capabilities that again reduces the operating expense, reduces the complexity, allows for easy scale. So it's, you know, certainly it's all about the partnership but it's also the capabilities of the combined technology. >> I was just going to ask about some of the numbers, and you mentioned some of them. Reduction of TCO I imagine is also a big capability that this solution enables besides reducing OpEx. Talk about the TCO reduction. 'Cause I know there's some numbers there that Dell and Red Hat have already delivered to the market. >> Yeah. You know, so these infrastructure blocks are designed specifically for Core, or for RAN, or for the Edge. We're starting out initially in the Core, but we've done some market research with a company called ACG. And ACG has looked at day zero, day one and day two TCO, FTE hours saved. And we're looking at over 40 to 50% TCO savings over you know, five year period, which is quite significant in terms of cost savings at a TCO level. But also we have a lot of numbers around power consumption and savings around power consumption. But also just that experience for our operator that says, hey, I'm going to go to one company to get the best in class from Red Hat and Dell together. That saves a lot of time in procurement and that entire ordering process as well. So you get a lot of savings that aren't exactly seen in the FTE hours around TCO, but just in that overall experience by talking to one company to get the best of both from both Red Hat and Dell together. >> I think the comic book character Charlie Brown once said, "The most discouraging thing in the world is having a lot of potential." (laughing) >> Right. >> And so when we talk about disaggregating and then reaggregating or reintegrating, that means choice. >> Tony: Yeah. >> How does an operator approach making that choice? Because, yeah, it sounds great. We have this integration lab and you have all these choices. Well, how do I decide, how does a person decide? This is a question for Honore from a Red Hat perspective, what's the secret sauce that you believe differentiates the Red Hat-infused stack versus some other assemblage of gear? >> Well, there's a couple of key characteristics, and the one that I think is most prevalent is that we're open, right? So "open" is in Red Hat's DNA because we're an open source technology company, and with that open source technology and that open platform, our customers can now add workloads. They have options to choose the workloads that they want to run on that open source platform. As they choose those workloads, they can be confident that those workloads have been certified and validated on our platform because we have a very robust ecosystem of ISVs that have already completed that process with open source, with Red Hat OpenShift. So then we take the Red Hat OpenShift and we put it on the Dell platform, which is market leader platform, right? Combine those two things, the customers can be confident that they can put those workloads on the combined platform that we're offering and that those workloads would run. So again, it goes back to making it simpler, making it easy to procure, easy to run workloads, easy to deploy, easy to operate. And all of that of course equates to saving time always equates to saving money. >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> Oh, I thought you wanted to continue. >> No, I think Honore sort of, she nailed it. You know, Red Hat is so dominant in 5G, and what they're doing in the market, especially in the Core and where we're going into the RAN, you know, next steps are to validate those workloads, those workload vendors on top of a stack. And the Red Hat leader in the Core is key, right? It's instant credibility in the core market. And so that's one of the reasons why we, Dell, want to partner with with Red Hat for the core market and beyond. We're going to be looking at not only Core but moving into RAN very soon. But then we do, we take that validated workload on top of that to optimize that workload and then be able to instantiate that in the core and the RAN. It's just a really streamlined, good experience for our operators. At the end of the day, we want happy customers in between our mutual customer base. And that's what you get whenever you do that combined stack together. >> Were operators, any operators, and you don't have to mention them by name, involved in the evolution of the infra blocks? I'm just curious how involved they were in helping to co-develop this. I imagine they were to some degree. >> Yeah, I could take that one. So, in doing so, yeah, we can't be myopic and just assume that we nailed it the first time, right? So yeah, we do work with partners all the way up and down the stack. A lot of our engineering work with Red Hat also brings in customer experience that is key to ensure that you're building and designing the right architecture for the Core. I would like to use the names, I don't know if I should, but a lot of those names are big names that are leaders in our industry. But yeah, their footprints, their fingerprints are all over those design best practices, those architectural designs that we build together. And then we further that by doing those validated workloads on top of that. So just to really prove the point that it's optimized for the Core, RAN, Edge kind of workload. >> And it's a huge added value for Red Hat to have a partner like Dell who can take all of those components, take the workload, take the Red Hat software, put it on the platform, and deliver that out to the customers. That's really, you know, a key part of the partnership and the value of the partnership because nobody really does that better than Dell. That center of excellence around delivery and support. >> Can you share any feedback from any of those nameless operators in terms of... I'm even kind of wondering what the catalyst was for the infra block. Was it operators saying, "Ah, we have these challenges here"? Was it the evolution of the Telco stack and Dell said, "We can come in with Red Hat and solve this problem"? And what's been some of their feedback? >> Yeah, it really comes down to what Honore said about, okay, you know, when we are looking at day zero, which is primarily your design, how much time savings can we do by creating that stack for them, right? We have industry experts designing that Core stack that's optimized for different levels of spectrum. When we do that we save a lot of time in terms of FTE hours for our architects, our operators, and then it goes into day one, right? Which is the deployment aspect for saving tons of hours for our operators by being able to deploy this. Speed to market is key. That ultimately ends up in, you know, faster time to revenue for our customers, right? So it's, when they see that we've already done the pre-work that they don't have to, that's what really resonates for them in terms of that, yeah. >> Honore, Lisa and I happen to be veterans of the Cloud native space, and what we heard from a lot of the folks in that ecosystem is that there is a massive hunger for developers to be able to deploy and manage and orchestrate environments that consist of Cloud native application infrastructure, microservices. >> Right. >> What we've heard here is that 5G equals Cloud native application stacks. Is that a fair assessment of the environment? And what are you seeing from a supply and demand for that kind of labor perspective? Is there still a hunger for those folks who develop in that space? >> Well, there is, because the very nature of an open source, Kubernetes-based container platform, which is what OpenShift is, the very nature of it is to open up that code so that developers can have access to the code to develop the workloads to the platform, right? And so, again, the combination of bringing together the Dell infrastructure with the Red Hat software, it doesn't change anything. The developer, the development community still has access to that same container platform to develop to, you know, Cloud native types of application. And you know, OpenShift is Red Hat's hybrid Cloud platform. So it runs on-prem, it runs in the public Cloud, it runs at the edge, it runs at the far edge. So any of the development community that's trying to develop Cloud native applications can develop it on this platform as they would if they were developing on an OpenShift platform in the public Cloud. >> So in "The Graduate", the advice to the graduate was, "Plastics." Plastics. As someone who has more children than I can remember, I forget how many kids I have. >> Four. >> That's right, I have four. That's right. (laughing) Three in college and grad school already at this point. Cloud native, I don't know. Kubernetes definitely a field that's going to, it's got some legs? >> Yes. >> Okay. So I can get 'em off my payroll quickly. >> Honore: Yes, yes. (laughing) >> Okay, good to know. Good to know. Any thoughts on that open Cloud native world? >> You know, there's so many changes that's going to happen in Kubernetes and services that you got to be able to update quickly. CICD, obviously the topic is huge. How quickly can we keep these systems up to date with new releases, changes? That's a great thing about an engineered system is that we do provide that lifecycle management for three to five years through this engagement with our customers. So we're constantly keeping them up with the latest and the greatest. >> David: Well do those customers have that expertise in-house, though? Do they have that now? Or is this a seismic cultural shift in those environments? >> Well, you know, they do have a lot of that experience, but it takes a lot of that time, and we're taking that off of their plate and putting that within us on our system, within our engineered system, and doing that automatically for them. And so they don't have to check in and try to understand what the release certification matrix is. Every quarter we're providing that to them. We're communicating out to the operator, telling them what's coming up latest and greatest, not only in terms of the software but the hardware and how to optimize it all together. That's the beauty of these systems. These are five year relationships with our operators that we're providing that lifecycle management end to end, for years to come. >> Lisa: So last question. You talked about joint GTM availability. When can operators get their hands on this? >> Yes. Yes. It's currently slated for early September release. >> Lisa: Awesome. So sometime this year? >> Yes. >> Well guys, thank you so much for talking with us today about Dell, Red Hat, what you're doing to really help evolve the telecom stack. We appreciate it. Next time come back with a customer, we can dig into it. That'd be fun. >> We sure will, absolutely. That may happen today actually, a little bit later. Not to let the cat out the bag, but good news. >> All right, well, geez, you're going to want to stick around. Thank you so much for your time. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson. This is Lisa Martin of theCUBE at MWC23 from Barcelona, Spain. We'll be back after a short break. (calm music)

(soft corporate jingle) >> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat jingle intro) >> Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here live at the Fira. (laughs) Just amazing day two of MWC23. It's packed today. It was packed yesterday. It's even more packed today. All the news is flowing. Check out siliconangle.com. John Furrier is in the studio in Palo Alto breaking all the news. And, we are here live. Really excited to have Udayan Mukherjee who's the Senior Fellow and Chief Architect of wireless product at Network and Edge for Intel. And, Manish Singh is back. He's the CTO of Telecom Systems Business at Dell Jets. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you >> We're going to talk about greening the network. I wonder, Udayan, if you could just set up why that's so important. I mean, it's obvious that it's an important thing, great for the environment, but why is it extra important in Telco? >> Yeah, thank you. Actually, I'll tell you, this morning I had a discussion with an operator. The first thing he said, that the electricity consumption is more expensive nowadays that total real estate that he's spending money on. So, it's like that is the number one thing that if you can change that, bring that power consumption down. And, if you talk about sustainability, look what is happening in Europe, what's happening in all the electricity areas. That's the critical element that we need to address. Whether we are defining chip, platforms, storage systems, that's the number one mantra right now. You know, reduce the power. Electricity consumption, because it's a sustainable planet that we are living in. >> So, you got CapEx and OpEx. We're talking about the big piece of OpEx is now power consumption? >> Power Consumption >> That's the point. Okay, so in my experience, servers are the big culprit for power consumption, which is powered by core semiconductors and microprocessors. So, what's the strategy to reduce the power consumption? You're probably not going to reduce the bill overall. You maybe just can keep pace, but from a technical standpoint, how do you attack that? >> Yeah, there are multiple defined ways of adding. Obviously the process technology, that micro (indistinct) itself is evolving to make it more low-power systems. But, even within the silicon, the server that we develop, if you look in a CPU, there is a lot of power states. So, if you have a 32 code platform, as an example, every code you can vary the frequency and the C-states, power states. So, if you look into any traffic, whether it's a radio access network, packet code. At any given time the load is not peak. So, your power consumption, actual what we are drawing from the wall, it also needs to vary with that. So, that's how if you look into this there's a huge savings. If you go to Intel booth or Ericson booth or anyone, you will see right now every possible, the packet code, radio access network, everything network. They're talking about our energy consumption, how they're lowering this. These states, as we call it power states, C-state P-state they've built in intel chip for a long time. The cloud providers are taking advantage of it. But Telcos, with even two generation before they used to actually switch it off in the bios. I say no, we need peak. Now, that thing is changing. Now, it's all like, how do I take advantage of the built in technologies? >> I remember the enterprise virtualization, Manish, was a big play. I remember PG&E used to give rebates to customers that would install virtualized software, VMware. >> And SSDs. >> Yeah. And SSDs, you know, yes. Because, the spinning disc was, but, nowhere near with a server consumption. So, how virtualized is the telco network? And then, what I'm saying is there other things, other knobs, you can of course turn. So, what's your perspective on this as a server player? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me just back up a little bit and start at the big picture to share what Udayan said. Here, day two, every conversation I've had yesterday and today morning with every operator, every CTO, they're coming in and first topic they're talking about is energy. And, the reason is, A, it's the right thing to do, sustainability, but, it's also becoming a P&L issue. And, the reason it's becoming a P&L issue is because we are in this energy inflationary environment where the energy costs are constantly going up. So, it's becoming really important for the service providers to really drive more efficiency onto their networks, onto their infrastructure. Number one. Two, then to your question on what all knobs need to be turned on, and what are the knobs? So, Udayan talked about within the intel, silicon, the C-states, P-states and all these capabilities that are being brought up, absolutely important. But again, if we take a macro view of it. First of all, there are opportunities to do infrastructure audit. What's on, why is it on, does it need to be on right now? Number two, there are opportunities to do infrastructure upgrade. And, what I mean by that is as you go from previous generation servers to next generation servers, better cooling, better performance. And through all of that you start to gain power usage efficiency inside a data center. And, you take that out more into the networks you start to achieve same outcomes on the network site. Think about from a cooling perspective, air cooling but for that matter, even liquid cooling, especially inside the data centers. All opportunities around PUE, because PUE, power usage efficiency and improvement on PUE is an opportunity. But, I'll take it even further. Workloads that are coming onto it, core, RAN, these workloads based on the dynamic traffic. Look, if you look at the traffic inside a network, it's not constant, it's varied. As the traffic patterns change, can you reduce the amount of infrastructure you're using? I.e. reduce the amount of power that you're using and when the traffic loads are going up. So, the workloads themselves need to become more smarter about that. And last, but not the least. From an orchestration layer if you think about it, where you are placing these workloads, and depending on what's available, you can start to again, drive better energy outcomes. And, not to forget acceleration. Where you need acceleration, can you have the right hardware infrastructures delivering the right kind of accelerations to again, improve those energy efficiency outcomes. So, it's a complex problem. But, there are a lot of levers, lot of tools that are in place that the service providers, the technology builders like us, are building the infrastructure, and then the workload providers all come together to really solve this problem. >> Yeah, Udayan, Manish mentioned this idea of moving from one generation to a new generation and gaining benefits. Out there on the street, if you will. Most of the time it's an N plus 2 migration. It's not just moving from last generation to this next generation, but it's really a generation ago. So, those significant changes in the dynamics around power density and cooling are meaningful? You talk about where performance should be? We start talking about the edge. It's hard to have a full-blown raised data center floor edge everywhere. Do these advances fundamentally change the kinds of things that you can do at the base of a tower? >> Yeah, absolutely. Manish talked about that, the dynamic nature of the workload. So, we are using a lot of this AIML to actually predict. Like for example, your multiple force in a systems. So, why is the 32 core as a system, why is all running? So, your traffic profile in the night times. So, you are in the office areas, in the night has gone home and nowadays everybody's working from remote anyway. So, why is this thing a full blown, spending the TDP, the total power and extreme powers. You bring it down, different power states, C-states. We talked about it. Deeper C-states or P-states, you bring the frequency down. So, lot of those automation, even at the base of the tower. Lot of our deployment right now, we are doing a whole bunch of massive MIMO deployment. Virtual RAN in Verizon network. All actually cell-site deployment. Those eight centers are very close to the cell-site. And, they're doing aggressive power management. So, you don't have to go to a huge data centers, even there's a small rack of systems, four to five, 10 systems, you can do aggressive power management. And, you built it up that way. >> Okay. >> If I may just build on what Udayan said. I mean if you look at the radio access network, right? And, let's start at the bottom of the tower itself. The infrastructure that's going in there, especially with Open RAN, if you think about it, there are opportunities now to do a centralized RAN where you could do more BBU pooling. And, with that, not only on a given tower but across a given given coverage area, depending on what the traffics are, you can again get the infrastructure to become more efficient in terms of what traffic, what needs are, and really start to benefit. The pooling gains which is obviously going to give you benefit on the CapEx side, but from an energy standpoint going to give you benefits on the OpEx side of things. So that's important. The second thing I will say is we cannot forget, especially on the radio access side of things, that it's not just the bottom of the tower what's happening there. What's happening on the top of the tower especially with the radio, that's super important. And, that goes into how do you drive better PA efficiency, how do you drive better DPD in there? This is where again, applying AI machine learning there is a significant amount of opportunity there to improve the PA performance itself. But then, not only that, looking at traffic patterns. Can you do sleep modes, micro sleep modes to deep sleep modes. Turning down the cells itself, depending on the traffic patterns. So, these are all areas that are now becoming more and more important. And, clearly with our ecosystem of partners we are continuing to work on these. >> So we hear from the operators, it's an OpEx issue. It's hitting the P&L. They're in search of PUE of one. And, they've historically been wasteful, they go full throttle. And now, you're saying with intelligence you can optimize that consumption. So, where does the intelligence live? Is it in the rig. Where is it all throughout the network? Is it in the silicon? Maybe you could paint a picture as to where those smarts exist. >> I can start. It's across the stack. It starts, we talked about the C-states, P-states. If you want to take advantage of that, that intelligence is in the workload, which has to understand when can I really start to clock things down or turn off the cores. If you really look at it from a traffic pattern perspective you start to really look at a rig level where you can have power. And, we are working with the ecosystem partners who are looking at applying machine learning on that to see what can we really start to turn on, turn off, throttle things down, depending on what the, so yes, it's across the stack. And lastly, again, I'll go back to cannot forget orchestration, where you again have the ability to move some of these workloads and look at where your workload placements are happening depending on what infrastructure is and what the traffic needs are at that point in time. So it's, again, there's no silver bullet. It has to be looked across the stack. >> And, this is where actually if I may, last two years a sea change has happened. People used to say, okay there are C-states and P-states, there's silicon every code. OS operating system has a governor built in. We rely on that. So, that used to be the way. Now that applications are getting smarter, if you look at a radio access network or the packet core on the control plane signaling application, they're more aware of the what is the underlying silicon power state sleep states are available. So, every time they find some of these areas there's no enough traffic there, they immediately goes to a transition. So, the workload has become more intelligent. The rig application we talked about. Every possible rig application right now are apps on xApps. Most of them are on energy efficiency. How are they using it? So, I think lot more even the last two years. >> Can I just say one more thing there right? >> Yeah. >> We cannot forget the infrastructure as well, right? I mean, that's the most important thing. That's where the energy is really getting drawn in. And, constant improvement on the infrastructure. And, I'll give you some data points, right? If you really look at the power at servers, right? From 2013 to 2023, like a decade. 85% energy intensity improvement, right? So, these gains are coming from performance with better cooling, better technology applications. So, that's super critical, that's important. And, also to just give you another data point. Apart from the infrastructure what cache layers we are running and how much CPU and compute requirements are there, that's also important. So, looking at it from a cache perspective are we optimizing the required infrastructure blocks for radio access versus core? And again, really taking that back to energy efficiency outcomes. So, some of the work we've been doing with Wind River and Red Hat and some of our ecosystem partners around that for radio access network versus core. Really again, optimizing for those different use cases and the outcomes of those start to come in from an energy utilization perspective >> So, 85% improvement in power consumption. Of course you're doing, I don't know, 2, 300% more work, right? So, let's say, and I'm just sort of spit balling numbers but, let's say that historically powers on the P&L has been, I don't know, single digits, maybe 10%. Now, it's popping up the much higher. >> Udayan: Huge >> Right? >> I mean, I don't know what the number is. Is it over 20% in some cases or is it, do you have a sense of that? Or let's say it is. The objective I presume is you're probably not going to lower the power bill overall, but you're going to be able to lower the percent of cost on the OpEx as you grow, right? I mean, we're talking about 5G networks. So much more data >> Capacity increasing. >> Yeah, and so is it, am I right about that the carriers, the best they can hope for is to sort of stay even on that percentage or maybe somewhat lower that percentage? Or, do you think they can actually cut the bill? What's the goal? What are they trying to do? >> The goal is to cut the bill. >> It is! >> And the way you get started to cut the bill is, as I said, first of all on the radio side. Start to see where the improvements are and look, there's not a whole lot there to be done. I mean, the PS are as efficient as they can be, but as I said, there are things in DPD and all that still can be improved. But then, sleep modes and all, yes there are efficiencies in there. But, I'll give you one important, another interesting data point. We did a work with ACG Research on our 16G platform. The power edge service that we have recently launched based on Intel's Sapphire Rapids. And, if you look at the study there. 30% TCR reduction, 10% in CapEx gains, 30% in OpEx gains from moving away from these legacy monolithic architectures to cloud native architectures. And, a large part of that OpEx gain really starts to come from energy to the point of 800 metric tonnes of carbon reduction to the point of you could have, and if you really translate that to around 160 homes electric use per year, right? So yes, I mean the opportunity there is to reduce the bill. >> Wow, that's big, big goal guys. We got to run. But, thank you for informing the audience on the importance and how you get there. So, appreciate that. >> One thing that bears mentioning really quickly before we wrap, a lot of these things we're talking about are happening in remote locations. >> Oh, back to that point of distributed nature of telecom. >> Yes, we talked about a BBU being at the base of a tower that could be up on a mountain somewhere. >> No, you made the point. You can't just say, oh, hey we're going to go find ambient air or going to go... >> They don't necessarily... >> Go next to a waterfall. >> We don't necessarily have the greatest hydro tower. >> All right, we got to go. Thanks you guys. Alright, keep it right there. Wall to wall coverage is day two of theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. Stay right there, we'll be right back. (corporate outro jingle)

>> From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe. These are Cloud Native Insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we talk about cloud native, we're talking about how do I take advantage of the agility in innovation, in cloud and the ecosystem out there? And a big question is if I'm a company that's not born in the cloud, or if I'm person that's not steeped in the knowledge of leveraging and using all of these wonderful tools out there, how do I get there? To help us dig into the people and company moving to cloud and adopt the use of these technologies, happy to welcome to the program, Forrest Brazeal. He is a senior manager with A Cloud Guru is his official title, but he is the cloud bard, as many people know in a bard, of course, an oral transition. He creates poems, he sings, he's got a book coming out to illustrate the cloud and really great to be able to talk to you Forrest. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Hey, it's great to be on the show, Stu, thanks for having me. >> All right, so first if you could just share a little bit about your background. So you joined A Cloud Guru, you know, relatively recently, I'd seen some of the cartoons and videos you've done in the past. You've got kind of a renaissance man look, you're not just a tech guy, as I said, you do have some of those musical pursuits also. So I'd love to hear a little of your background. >> Yeah, so I've been an engineer for a long time. I've been an engineer, been a manager of engineers, a consultant, and that's from, you know, startups ranging all the way up to the fortune 50. So I've seen a lot of enterprises in other companies at various stages of their cloud journey. From, you know, just trying to figure out how to get to the cloud out of the data center, all the way to being very cloud native. As you were saying in your intro, you know, figuring out how to build directly on cloud services. I'm very passionate about that. Very passionate about helping people figure out how to take that next step. Not to be a stucker, to get into a state where they are, but to figure out how to get, as I say up the Serverless ladder, right to that next stage of cloud native adoption. And I've realized that, you know, a lot of these technologies and a lot of these concepts, these practices are very abstract. And sometimes what helps the most is to put that in a format that people can engage with. And so I draw and I sometimes sing and I write all sorts of things just to try to help people understand. You know, even though these technologies and practices, these ideas are abstract, they don't have to be difficult, right? Everybody's got some intuitive understanding of why a doctor exists or why a lawyer exists. It's a little bit harder to get your head around, you know, why does a cloud architect exist? What do they build, right? And that's what I try to do with things like the book, The Read Aloud Cloud, that's coming out in just a couple of months. >> All right, so I love that, you know, helping companies understand these things because, you know, for so many years it was like, ah, well we need a mandate for the cloud. You know, cloud, cloud, cloud. When I started this, it was, you know, cloud is not a destination. There is how do we really take advantage of cloud? And there was one post that you wrote talking about lift and shift. And it was one of those things that we've seen for years, there's arguments of, you know, is lift and shift good, if it's bad? And of course the reality is sometimes lift and shift is needed, but it is step one of what you need to do, because if you're not taking advantage of the cloud, the rift reaches a certain point that you say, oh my gosh, maybe I'm not taking advantage of it, maybe the cost don't make sense, and therefore we scrambled and we pull things back and we celebrate repatriation, which to my mind was always, oh, geez, we kind of didn't understand it, we failed. And then we kind of went back to doing what we didn't want to do. So walk us through, if you could, we've even got an illustration of yours that we'll talk about, but you know, give us, you know, what is the proper way that people should think about lift and shift? >> Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, I'm not dissing lift and shift as a concept. It's very necessary in a lot of cases and you can reel off a bunch of reasons why lift and shift would be an important stepping stone in a cloud journey. And of course, that could be just, you know, I've got to get out of the data center, right? Because my lease is expiring or, you know, my servers are haunted and the whole thing is on fire. I've talked to people who, you know, have fireworks stored in their data center, literally that they're afraid are going to go off, right? The roof is leaking. It's time to get out of there and just get to someplace that's professionally managed. You could be using a lift and shift migration almost as like a financial engineering tactic to go from a CapEx to an OPEX model, right? And tie what you're doing a little bit more closely to what you're spending. There's several other reasons that you might choose to have lift and shift is that first stage you might want just to get your feet wet a little bit in cloud. You know, you might not have the confidence or the expertise in-house to build on fully cloud native services right now, you've got to go in and get your Ops teams hands-on right with the technologies and with the tooling so that they understand a little better, how to get you to that next step. But the really, really key thing is lift and shift is a phase you've got to get through it, you've got to keep innovating. And a lot of people don't realize that they think they can go to the cloud, pick up their servers, run them pretty much as they did in the data center, they can stop there, and they're going to get longterm benefits from cloud. And over time, that gets less and less true. Because as I say, once you move that first VM into EC2 or whatever the case may be, you've started a shot clock on your chances for success in the cloud. That clock is ticking cause your initial benefits are very front-loaded. You're potentially getting some initial cost wins as your, hopefully matching your usage a little bit better to what you're spending on infrastructure, right? You're potentially getting some time to learn and plan for version two of your cloud infrastructure. But the longer you stay in that lift and shift states, some dangers are going to start compounding. Because in the absence of a true cloud native strategy, your teams, your Ops teams, your governance teams, if you have those, right? They're going to continue to do things the way they did it in the data center. Because they don't have true SRE, they don't have true automation, they're going to build manual slow error-prone processes that are going to drag down your time to value your MTTR, all those operational metrics at you look at. You're going to see those costs winds actually start to evaporate because you know, you're still running that legacy monolith, You can't effectively charge back spend to different units inside of your business, you realize you're not getting that value, you thought you were running. You know, because you're running the cloud like a data center, and let's be honest, that's super expensive. And then unfortunately over time, and usually you start hitting this threshold 18 months, two years out, your best people, the experts who were bringing you to the cloud in the first place, they get disillusioned because they're not seeing the continued forward motion that they'd been led to believe was going to happen. And so they start moving on, you get brain drain, and now you've created this new legacy swamp of poor procedures and practices, the very thing that you were hoping to avoid. And so at that point, the negative side effects of the lift and shift have overwhelmed, the benefits you thought you were going to get. That's when you're lift and shift shot clock has expired. And that's what you want to avoid by continuing to innovate and continuing to refactor towards a true cloud native deployment. >> Yeah, well, again, I thought that the visual was excellent and it's so good to explain, you know, what is the journey we're going through? What are the decision points? You might look through some of these and say, oh, well, you know, these three definitely apply to my business, some of the others I might not be concerned about, but I can take that and apply it to what I'm doing. So that that's the company side of things. You know, Forrest, you're an AWS Serverless Hero, and also in your day job, your company helps people with the training. So let's talk about people. You know, when it comes to, you know, how do we get involved? One of the things I loved about the Serverless community from the early times that I met it, was, it seemed that the bar to enter was relatively low. So many of these things, it's like, ah, well, do I have the basic skill set? Do I understand how to get there? How do I actually get to where I need to be? And that so many people are hesitant to start that journey, cause it just seems so daunting. So what are you seeing out there? You know, give us the landscape in 2020 as to, you know, how we move forward. And I know you've got a project you've been doing called the cloud resume challenge. So, you know, definitely talk a little bit about that too. >> Yeah, for sure. So look, even going beyond 2020, I think the numbers I've heard, we're looking at potentially a hundred million software developers being added to the workforce over the course of the next decade and change. That's a lot of people who are going to have to interact with these services who are going to have to build and create value on top of cloud infrastructure. And so there's a huge need for us to continue to create abstractions and to create guided, you know, best practices and principles that will help people get where they need to be with as little unnecessary work as possible. And really that's a lot of what underlay the Serverless community and the ideas behind that. I've been involved in Serverless for a long time, going back to when I was, you know, building on Serverless inside of large companies early on in that revolution. And I've carried that forward now with my work as an AWS Serverless Hero, even the work that I'm doing at A Cloud Guru. And really the bar to entry, as you mentioned, is so low, because you're cutting out a lot of things that were seen as sort of gate keeping mechanisms in the past. You know, oh, if you haven't learned this underlying protocol or whatever, then you don't qualify as a real developer. Serverless turns out on its head and says, no, I'm providing you with abstractions that you're going to be able to build on top of. And you're going to be able to focus so much more of your energy on things that actually provide value for the business. And yeah, that kind of started as a very leading edge, early adopter thing, but we're seeing more and more even large enterprises. We're seeing that start to click and they're realizing, you know, wherever I can, wherever I'm not potentially constrained by legacy practices or other code bases, I do want to explore, you know, seeing how quickly I can turn a prototype around, how quickly I can A, B, C, D, E, F, G test something if you will, by spinning up these low cost prototypes in the cloud, right on infrastructure, that's just costing me fractions of a cent to run. There's some really, really compelling avenues that even larger businesses can explore. But taking it back to the individual for a second, Think about, you know, I'm in the middle of a global pandemic, okay? And potentially I'm looking for a career switch now more than ever, I'm thinking, you know, I'd like to get into development, I'd like to get into IT. And it's so close to me now. You look at these services out there, like Networkify which you and I were talking about before the break, right? Talking about how easy those technologies make it for someone to get out there and actually we do web development. But you still need someone to kind of step alongside you and say, you know, these are the things you need to care about, these are things that might be irrelevant. There's an explosion, almost like an infodemic, if you will, of information out there that makes it really hard for folks who are trying to actually skill up, and who're trying to make that transition into tech and into code. That's what A Cloud Guru does of course, which is that the company I work for. We've got about 2.2 million learners on our platform right now that we're helping to scale up and take that step toward the modern tech skills that they need to succeed. The cloud resume challenge, which you mentioned is something I've been doing kind of on the side. And that's a project-based approach that compliments a lot of the additional training that I was talking about. Where we say, you know, I'm going to give you a project, it's going to have some sort of spec based steps to it. So you're going to create a resume, but it's going to be deployed, you know, in the cloud, you're going to have to do some source control, some CICD, some, you know, all these other things that are going to be built into a basic DevOps competency. You're going to have to go away and do some Googling and open some tabs, in order to figure this out on your own cause the project doesn't tell you exactly how to do it. So you actually wind up with some kind of some pain. There's some failure involved there, and that of course is what makes the learning stick. And so we've got people working this on every continent now, we've had many people that have completed it, we've seen people get interviewed. We've seen people get hired coming out of a totally non tech background. So that's really exciting. And you know, those stories, aren't going to be unusual forward. We're going to see more and more of this, and really that's what these cloud abstracting technologies have allowed us to do. Probably it wouldn't be possible to do something like the cloud resume challenge 20 years ago, the barrier to entry with, you know, even just procuring the infrastructure you'd need to be successful in a reasonable amount of time, you know, was accessible to everybody, but now we're there. Those services are at your fingertips. You just need a little bit of guidance, a little bit of curation to get you down the right path. >> Well, yeah, it was actually, you know, what excited me when I first met the ACG team was the bar to entry was so low. In previous decades, you talk about, you know, how much time and how much money I needed to spend just to get some of these courses, even if they were online. And it was just order of magnitudes easier and, you know, built for that cloud environment that I can start I can pause, I have learning resources, and it's been really impressive to watch the expansion of the team there. I'm curious, when you look at, you know, certifications out there, when you look at the need for jobs out there, if I'm not, you know, if I'm in the tech industry, what are some of the things that you think that people should be learning moving forward to? Where would you recommend people start looking there? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think one thing, a lot of people miss is, you know, it's a good idea to get started with technologies that are new, if you're new. Because let's be real, you can't ask for five years of experience in a technology that's only been around for 18 months. So it's really smart to major on something and get good at something that not a lot of people are good at yet. And you say, well, how do I know that technology is going to take off and succeed? Well, the fact of the matter is even if that specific technology doesn't, you still have a much greater understanding of the problem space, and you'll be right at the cutting edge, ready to jump in on, you know, whatever the next thing is. So I always recommend that people look at things like Serverless and the managed services that are coming out. Get really good at automating, you know, services on the major cloud providers pick AWS, Azure, GCP, right? And just make that your thing, don't specialize in too niche of an area, you know, especially if you're very new, but especially pick a cloud provider, get good at working with the basic services, you'll find that that sets you apart more than, for example, I don't know, going after a certification that's been around for 20 years, that tons and tons of people in the job market have, right? That doesn't necessarily set you apart as much as some of these modern skills do. So I definitely recommend that. >> Yeah, it's funny for us, actually, I laugh a little bit. You mentioned that you've been doing Serverless for a long time, and I'm like, well, okay, I remember sitting in the audience at 80 bus Re-invent when Lambda was unveiled, I think it was re:Invent 2014. So, you know, there's nobody out there that's been, "Oh, I've been doing this for a decade." We always laugh, when there's a job applications out there and say, oh, okay, you know, I want 10 years of a technology that's been around for five years. But yeah, maybe there's one other, a cartoon that you brought along talking about the difference between transition cloud, excuse me, cloud translation and cloud fluency. Maybe just walk through that difference. And especially people that have been in the industry for awhile, how do we make sure that we're actually embracing and understanding and moving to that cloud world, not just, you know, cloud washing? >> Yeah, that's a good word. You know, something that struck me, I think a bit of an epiphany that I had around the time that I started at A Cloud Guru and keep in mind, I'm coming out of years of having worked with these large organizations and try and help them figure out how to migrate to cloud. And what I had seen is there's a lot of these kind of central cloud teams, if you will, that get established right at the beginning of an organization's cloud adoption. And that's a well known pattern, you know, this "cloud center of excellence", if you will, that people establish. A lot of times, those are small teams. You take your best cloud people and you say, okay, you define the standards and the processes that are going to get us to cloud, and they do that. And then they're shocked when nobody adopts the standards, right? And the migration sort of stalls, and they're not having the impact that they expected to have. And what turns out is going on is just having that small group of people who understands cloud, surrounded by this huge legacy, diaspora of legacy, you know, product and engineering teams that don't speak the language of cloud, if you will. Means that anytime you want to innovate, or anytime you want to make a move, you've got to go through this process of translation. You've got to go to those legacy teams who were saying, what's EC2 instance again? You know, how do you spell S3? I thought that I wanted to log into the AWS Console, but this access and secret key, isn't going into my password box, right? You know, they have that low level of competency. And so you're constantly having to explain everything you're going back and forth, and that of course leads to kind of less sophisticated architectures that leads to poor outcomes, and it takes you much longer to get where you want to go. That's that process of cloud translation. That's an anti-pattern. So instead of that, what we try to advocate for is what we call cloud fluency. Just like with any other language you want your entire organization as much as possible to speak the language of cloud at some baseline level. We do that through a couple of things. Of course, obviously through training and certification, cloud certifications can be a great proxy to measure how well your organization's cloud competency is improving. But also through taking those cloud experts, those central experts that previously were kind of in their ivory tower doing their own thing and embed them as much as you can in a roving fashion with these legacy product teams and help them to improve, right? Sort of teach them to fish so that you're not putting all the weight on that central team to be the only experts. Because that doesn't scale, those people are going to burn out. They're going to get overwhelmed with support tickets, we see that over and over again. So you want to empower those teams. And we want to actually talk a little bit less about a cloud center of excellence sometimes, and a little more about a cloud center of enablement, right? Where we want to, instead of knowing the most about cloud, we want to show the most about cloud to those other teams. That's a sustainable pattern for success. That's what we try to do through A Cloud Guru, and that's what I try to advocate for individually, wherever I can, because I've seen people burnt out. I don't want that to happen. >> Yeah, for those of us that have been through a few of these waves here, it's something that you're right, you need to actually be involved in embracing these technologies. You don't have a center for internet usage anymore. If you think about, you know, everybody now for the most part has used the internet, understand some of pieces, it needs to be the same way when it comes to cloud. It just becomes the underlying substrate and, you know, bring forward the innovation and agility that people are looking for. All right, Forrest, last thing we talked about, you've got a book coming out a little bit later this year, The Read Aloud Cloud, give us the quick thing, you know, love, it's visual, is very accessible and definitely looking forward to hearing about that. >> Yes, yes, exciting. So it'll be out in September from Wiley. And basically you've seen a couple of the cartoons over the course of this time here. But, you know, I've been drawing for a long time trying to help people get a sense for what the cloud is and in a way that they can understand and get a grasp on. And so what The Read Aloud Cloud is, it's the history and practice of cloud computing. And it takes you from the mainframe days through artificial intelligence. And along the way, we talk about the basics of cloud architecture, we talk about security, We talk about resilience and all those important things. But it's written and drawn in a way that can be accessible even to a nontechnical person. So the person who's never been able to understand what it is that you do. And I include, you know, potentially your CEO in that conversation, right? This is a book you can hand to them that you can put on your desk, it'll give you a chuckle. But I think there's actually some really strong ability for you to gain actually a concrete visual understanding those really abstract terminologies that float around with cloud. Again, what we're doing is not necessarily complicated, it's just really abstract, it's really arcane. So let's put it in a format where we can get our heads around and hopefully have a good laugh while we're doing it. That's what The Read Aloud Cloud is, and you can check that out, wherever books are sold. >> All right, well Forrest Brazeal. Thank you so much for joining us, real pleasure talking with you. And absolutely we need to make sure that "cloud" becomes as ubiquitous as computers and the internet have before us. Really pleasure chatting with you, thanks so much for joining. >> Awesome, thanks so much Stu, it's great to be here. All right, and I'm Stu Miniman, looking forward to hearing more about your Cloud Native Insights. (bright upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to the cube from our Boston area studios we've been doing a series of CXO leadership discussions talking about how everyone's dealing with the global global endemic I've been welcome program a first-time guest Katy Bullard she is the president of a tile guru of course a cloud guru a online learning company we've had on the cube many times over the years Katy thanks so much thank you so much sue for having me I really appreciate it all right so Katie I remember I saw the in I think the announce was the end of at the beginning of the year your based at the headquarters in Austin you know online you know learning is a huge topic cloud of course you know one of those mega waves that we've been walking a long time and then you know out of nowhere global pandemic you know it's striking us so you know bring us inside you know obviously you know taking a new role in a new organization as it own challenges normally it's like okay what am I going to do for the first 90 days and make that plan tell us you know how were you reacted in how the company has reacted with the koban 19 did you get a chance to look at my 90-day plan dude that was exactly where it was no well let me take you back I'll take you back to kind of why I chose to come to ECG because I think it informs actually what's happening right now as well when I when I was looking for the next opportunity what I look for is I look for two things primarily in a company one is a product that's in a market that's growing really really fast and a product that has raving customer bands and obviously ACG really you know check both of those boxes you think about this is pre Co but if you think about the cloud computing market growing you know 50 60 % a year and the number one challenge for people who are both moving to the cloud or moving to a multi cloud strategy was having enough skilled workers to to do that effectively there really wasn't a better intersection of two you know two who value propositions than what a CG offered which was serving the cloud computing market and skilling up workers in that market fast forward to February you know was interesting I actually went out to Australia offices in mid-february as this was starting to heat up came back just in time I think to not go into quarantine but we very quickly saw the impact and you know this isn't easy for anybody in in any situation but what we are hearing from our customers and from the market is that that move to the cloud is even more important now I think the latest that I saw from the the 2028 odd report said 65 percent of companies are planning a cloud migration 95 percent are of companies are employing a multi cloud strategy so that is accelerating and then of course we're all sitting at home right now and you're getting me in my in my dining room and we have the both learn online versus in person there's no longer in-person training there's no longer events for us to go to lives we're doing that online we also are seeing that you know the way that we use our time is changing so we're not spending hours anymore muting we have a lot of customers who are saying let's use that time instead of muting to learn improve ourselves improve our skills so you know everything is very unpredictable in this environment but we do feel like at ACG our fundamental mission is to help customers get through this to give them the skills that they need so that hopefully as everybody emerges from this later this year they're better positioned to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them ya know you hit on a lot of topics you know so much right now you know remote learning remote work or you know a big discussion the developer world has been looking at that for a long time and you know when I see you know the the the elementary and high school children as well as you know colleges and how they're handling distant learning I was well come on the Cronenberg's brothers you know built something in you know two or three week from your mother's basement Amazon and serverless and they framed millions of people now yeah you know good absolutely translate but it's challenging so I'm curious yes you know and you're working with the team is there anything you're doing to connect to some of the broader audience you know lessons that can be learned as I said you're you know highly scalable you know large scale and you know you have nowhere near the budget of you know these municipalities and colleges yet you do reach you know a very broad audience with some very important skill yes I mean if I think about the actual products itself and why it worked worked so well previously right why the Cronenberg brothers brought to market something that was so beloved but but more importantly why I think it's working so well now is that there was a recognition that we learn these days in bite-sized chunks right most of us don't have four hours a day or three days a week just to sit leave our job and go learn something and so from the very beginning their concept was let's break every single lesson up into these 20 minutes chunks so whether you know I'm on my commute in a previous world or whether I'm you know using some time that I used to spend on the road learning something new I can do it in very digestible forms and in a way that's really engaging to me so I think that model that they've employed from day one is even more valuable now in today's environment I think the other thing is that there was a recognition that we all have different learning styles right we all learn a little bit differently and so whether it's learning in 20 minute chunks so that's learning through video and PowerPoint or whether it's learning hands-on testing things breaking things building things the platform has evolved in a way to enable people no matter where they are in that cloud learning journey whether they're novice that's just getting started and wanting to learn kind of you know the PowerPoint basics like me when I first came on board right of the or a seasoned architect who's trying to get in and build new applications so I think those things are the things that allowed the platform to really resonate with the developer audience for so long and now as we have you know added out of the platform specifically for enterprises where previously you know is for individual developers we now have both I think that's the other thing that is really attractive to large enterprises is the fact that they now right are trying to train thousands of workers at the same time realizing again that every single one of them has a different learning style yeah Katie is as you said before there is you know a broad need or the skill set of cloud computing I'm curious have you seen anything in kind of your customer base either from the enterprise side or individuals is there are there any skill sets that are bubbling up right now that are a critical need or anything that is grown and you know we're curious we're always you know there's some people it's like oh I'm gonna come out of this you know whole experience and you know I love you know work in my home gym and you know learn new languages and become a master baker of sourdough you know me personally I've been really busy so you know I wish I had more spare time travel has definitely reduced thing but it's also given up the time that normally I was gonna you know read a book or you know catch up on raining yeah the sourdough bread is definitely not in my wheelhouse so we well we have seen some really interesting trends actually over the last few months the first one is that we've seen the percentage of our users that are logging in on a daily basis go up about 30 percent so people are taking advantage I think of a little bit of extra time to accelerate their learning the other thing that we are seeing and I was just looking at these stats last week is the kinds of courses and content that are being consumed are changing some of this was happening free covert and some of this was happening post covitz all split those up freako but what we've seen over the last order two 2/4 actually is a pretty significant increase in consumption across multi-cloud skills as you're in particular is seeing about a three times higher increase in consumption than the other two large CCS these although they're all three increasing rapidly so as we think about like the curriculum and our instructors that we're bringing on and what we're building up know historically ACG specifically had grown up in the AWS world but we are responding to that change very very late and in investing in you know a juror GCP and some of the other cloud adjacent courses so that we had been seeing happening over the last couple of quarters most recently what we're seeing is an increase in what i call our beginner or fundamental courses they think that is a direct reflection of people who are looking at this as an opportunity to rescale to set themselves up for a new career i'm so you know our introduction to AWS or introduction to Azure fundamentals or the introduction to DCP those are actually the courses that are increasing the fastest in ranking and anecdotally one of my favorite things to do is to go on LinkedIn or Twitter each day and look at you know what people are saying about ACG and over the last week especially I can't even count the number of folks who've said I'm using my lock down I'm for you know learning or I'm putting my my time and Quarantine to the best use by you know getting trained on ECG and so I think that what we are seeing there is a direct reflection of that alright yeah Katie maybe you can give us a little bit of the update on you know a cloud guru there was the Linux Academy acquisition and if you can share a little bit about this kind of the the the numbers of how many people have gone through your programmed you attract how many people actually get certifications afterwards which I know they need to go to the providers you know pay a fee for that kind of thing yeah we do yeah there's only been a few things happening over here in the last six months right I've got a small acquisition and then you know we're dealing with this now so we acquire Linux Academy in December so actually I came on board about the same time that we acquired the business one of my favorite stories is when I first started talking to Sam and team back in June a cg had about a hundred employees total by the time I was actually accepting an offer in October I think it was 200 employees in total so in a four month span the company had actually doubled we acquired Lenox Academy which was of equivalent size the ACG and so by the end of December we were a 400 person company a company that had been a hundred people know in in the middle of 2019 so 400 people now we are our biggest office is here in Austin we do have a large office in Melbourne Australia which was where the company was originally founded and where Sam is we have an office in London where Ryan is and Linux Academy was actually headquartered right outside of Fort Worth Texas so we've got an office there in Fort Worth as well so it's been amazing to see this company essentially quadruple in size over the last six months everything that goes into scaling a business like that bringing two competitors together integrating the business you know we are in the process of integrating the products and the content and the course dialogues right now so we're excited to bring that market later this year all in the midst of everyone also getting used to this very new and unprecedented environment yeah you know congratulations you know that you know always good to see great growth you know the thing I've noticed is you know ACG just as really goodwill in the community I see the orange shirts at many of the shows I you know right many of the other teams yeah we'll definitely have to get back to you about being on brain feed I was trying to coordinate with my background um one of the other things you know is some of my favorite content over the last few years that we've done the cube has been the serverless cough event so you know any discussion about you know will there be smokers to that or are we just going to need the weight or you know the physical events return before we see those so we actually have just started a new virtual event calendar actually our very first one was yesterday we had almost 3,000 people registering to attend and so it will be a series it's a series of virtual events and webinars that are done in partnership with other leading influencers and practitioners in the industry so expects if anyone's interested you can go online and register for one of the ACG webinars but we'll be having those every two week through the course of this year awesome love that and I guess the last thing Katie there's some other things you've been doing help unity in this need of the pandemic tell us a little bit about that yeah so two things in particular that we've really focused on the first one is across both the Linux Academy and the ACG platforms we have lowered permanently the price of our individual memberships so for individuals from 449 down to 379 we've seen that that has helped enable more people to be able to afford it who otherwise couldn't afford it so that's now in in market the other thing that we're really excited about that we launched this week is a free educational assistance program so we are offering 1,000 subscriptions to ACG for the year so annual subscriptions for people who have been most impacted by kovat so we have a couple of different specific criteria but if you've lost your job due to Ovid and you're in one of the the most heavily impacted industries whether that you know retail or hospitality or travel and are looking to really change careers get into the tech field get your initial certification we do now have a program for that so you go online to our website you're able to apply to that program we launched it yesterday maybe two days ago and I know we already have hundreds of applications so we're really excited to offer that all right well we'll make sure to get this out to the community is build out of that all right Katie thanks so much really pleasure to act up with you and I'm glad Congrats on all the progress thank you so much - thanks for having me alright serverless absolutely one of the topics I've been personally enjoying digging into the last couple years hope you've enjoyed I'm an attorney I'm sue minimun and as always thank you for watching thank you [Music]

>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. (electronic music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the ACGSV, it's a mouthful. Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley Awards, the 14th annual. We've been coming here for about three years. We're really excited to have tonight's keynote speaker on, many time CUBE alum, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Pat, great to see you. >> Great to be here, Jeff, thank you so much. It's always great to be on theCUBE, and so many good friends from theCUBE and great interviews. I really enjoy you guys, thank you. >> We're excited for VMworld later this year, we've got Dell Technology World coming up next week, so... >> Just working on my keynote this morning, so almost ready to go, so. >> But you're going to keynote tonight, so what's your keynote tonight on? >> Well, tonight, it's about tech as a force for good. And I'm going to talk about what I call the four superpowers today. You know in the past, we thought of superpower, like, USSR and the USA. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Today I believe superpowers are far more powerful, and they're technology superpowers. And the four I talk about are mobile, unlimited reach, cloud, unlimited scale, A.I., unlimited intelligence, an IOT bridging from the digital to the physical world, and how those four superpowers are reinforcing each other today, and literally it's our opportunity to improve the quality of lives for every human on the planet as a result of those superpowers. And really how it's our responsibility as a tech community to shape those superpowers for good. >> It's so good to talk about the "for good" because there's so much bad in the news lately about some of the stuff that's going on, and you know, it's two sides of the same coin always. You can use it for good or you can use it for bad. And unfortunately, the bad has been in the news more than the good, but there's so many exciting things going on in medicine, healthcare, agriculture, energy. The opportunities are almost endless. >> Yeah, it really is, and as I say, technology is neutral. It can be used for good or bad. The Gutenberg Press. The Bible or Playboy, it works for both, and it really is our responsibility as a society, and I'll say even more so today as tech leaders, to be that force shaping those technological superpowers for good. You know, one of the statistics offside of my keynote, is in the last fifty years, we've taken the extreme poverty rate from over forty percent, to less than ten percent on the planet. It's stunning that we've lifted two and a half billion people out of extreme poverty. Healthcare reach, we've increased the length of life by almost twenty years on the planet, over the last fifty years. I mean, these are stunning things, and largely the result of the technological breakthroughs that we're doing, and as I say, today is the fastest day of tech evolution of your life. It's also the slowest day of tech evolution of the rest of your life. >> Of the rest of your life, pretty interesting. And with 5G coming just around the corner, kind of thinking of a world of infinite bandwidth, infinite compute, infinite store. How do you start to design applications and distribution when you can have all that power? And as you said, with cloud really at your disposal. You don't have to build it all yourself, you leverage companies like you guys to put it in place and I as an entrepreneur don't have to build all that stuff anymore. >> That's right, this really is impressive that way, 'cause today we've crossed over half the population of the planet has a persistent connection to the internet over some form of mobile or PC device. Half the population, you can now reach over the internet. I mean, it's just stunning that way. >> Jeff: Yeah. >> You can rent the world's largest super computer for a few thousand bucks. The scale that we're able to now conduct business to be able to develop software to reach customers, and truly to change people's lives. >> Right. You do a lot of work. I follow you on Twitter and you're out in the community, you do a lot of stuff with your faith and outside of work to help people. You see the power that you can bring to this technology. What are some of the inspiring stories that get you up everyday, when you do some of this stuff outside of your day job? >> It really is exciting and one of the charities that my wife and I are very involved in is called Missions of Hope International. They work in the slums of Nairobi primarily, and we help to start schools there that literally today have over fifteen thousand kids in the schools that we helped start. Over the summer, I'm climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, in July, as a fundraise to build the next girls high school for those schools. As the girls get younger, they get pulled back into tribalism. For five camels, they get married off at young ages, and keeping them in school so that they can really advance and become proper members of society versus drug into tribalism, so that's one of my summer projects is doing that. Particularly in Kenya, we've been thrilled, things like M-Pesa, and we work with a company called Node Africa, to deliver farming and agricultural services. You know, the most basic things that give people market access, give people cropped information, and literally are lifting people out of poverty in the country of Kenya today. >> That's great work and like I said, follow Pat on Twitter. You're pretty active on there doing good work. >> Thank you. >> We look forward to your keynote tonight and we'll see you next week in Las Vegas. >> Look forward to it. Thank you so much, Jeff. >> Alright, he's Pat Gelsinger, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from the ACGSV Awards. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From the computer museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE. Covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in Mountain View, California at the ACGSV awards, the grow awards, 14th annual. We've been coming for a couple of years, about 300 people celebrating, really, there's a lot of networking, it's an interesting organization. Check it out, we're excited to have our next guest, he's Nick O'Keefe, partner of Arnold and Porter. Nick, great to see you. >> Likewise, great seeing you, great to talk to you. >> So we were talking a little bit off camera, you came to Silicon Valley in 2000, and were saying you seen a lot of changes in those 18 years. >> Yeah it's phenomenal, it's epitomized by the great gathering that we have here today. As I was saying earlier, when I came, I worked in Silicon Alley. Silicon Valley was sort of a bigger version of Silicon Alley and it's just kept growing. You know, the practice between East Coast and West Coast is converged. I mean, there's some of the biggest most successful companies in the world are based here now, and some of the biggest deals. It's just incredible in a short period of time how that's happened. As I was saying earlier, you know, one of the things that really opened my mind, opened my eyes to how successful Silicon Valley is, is I opened up the Middle East offices to another law firm right around the time of the Great Recession. And it's seems like every country is trying to emulate Silicon Valley. We advised on how they can replicate it, what kind of laws they'd have to put in place, what kind of ecosystem they'd have to build. And there's just something really unique here that's really difficult to emulate in different countries-- >> Right because it's all industries. Right, all industries tend to aggregate and congregate around a usually a specific location, or one or two. You think of financial services in New York and London. Because you get the people, and those people leave and start new companies. You have the schools that drive people in their associates. It's tough, it's tough to replicate a whole ecosystem if you don't have all those components, and then, as it gels for a awhile, I think the barriers to entry become even higher. So, you get different versions of it, but really not the same. >> Yeah that's right, I mean, we have all the ingredients here, we have the great educational institutions, you know, Berkeley, Stanford. You have the financial institutions or the venture money. Very sophisticated population, it's just wonderful living here. Just so many smart people around, you can't just lift them up and put them somewhere else, they all have ties in the community. It's just very tough. What's interesting about financial services you mentioned, typically that's a New York-based practice, but with Fintech, you're seeing some of that migrate over here. Cryptocurrencies, a lot of that technology is being developed here, and that's really a convergence of financial services and tech, and Silicon Valley is the hub of that. >> Yeah, I really think that Stanford and Cal don't get enough credit. And Santa Clara and some of the other schools, but those two particularly, because they attract really great talent. They come, their weather's great, they've got a culture of innovation, they've got very nice connections with the local business community, so people don't leave. So you got this constant influx of smart people, and they stay, where a lot of other places, even great academic institutions don't necessarily have the business climate, the weather climate, or kind of the ecosystem to keep their brightest, it's there locally. So I think that's just a huge driver. >> Yeah absolutely, I completely agree. And there's, even if they don't stay, they still maintain their ties here. You know, people all over the world come to study here, as you're indicating. You know, I'm doing a deal currently with some Chinese people who did graduate research locally, and they formed a very successful start-up in China, where currently, we're doing a deal with. And the fact that Stanford, they couldn't be where they were if they hadn't gone through Stanford, and they develop ties with the region, and with the companies in the regions, so they're very much, sort of a diaspora of Silicon Valley, the way they've operated it. >> Right, what is your take on China? 'Cause to me, China's the big competitor. That's the one, I think, where there's the potential because they got a huge internal market, they're really good at fast following, and you look at Alibaba Cloud, and some of the big, big players over there. I think that's really where the biggest threat to the current US incumbents is going to come. >> It's very interesting, it's sort of two, two faceted. On the one hand, obviously, a huge population, and as the country develops, I mean, ultimately within the fairly near future, the Gross National Product is expected to overtake the US. But you have sort of a different culture, and they have the same challenges as everyone else does, this sort of replicating Silicon Valley, I don't think they'll ever take Silicon Valley, you know, take the crown away from them. And I think, what I'm seeing now in a couple of deals is, so the current administration is obviously trying to defend the US trade position, but it's having deleterious effects in that it's preventing Silicon Valley companies from growing and from doing deals. You know, a lot of the Chinese funds they're lucky to invest in the US, where there's currently some regulations that are expected to be proposed next month that could inhibit Chinese investment in the US. Now that's not good for Silicon Valley, so the attempt is to, sort of, protect the US economy, but, you know, I can see certain effects that are happening that are not helpful. It's interesting, there's sort of a symbiotic relationship between development here in the US, and development in other countries, and it's difficult to fight it 'cause you're going to have weird effects. You know, I think the US, it's just a unique country. You know, I think it'll always be unique, and I personally, I don't have a fear that China is going to somehow usurp the position the US occupies, or India, or other huge country, I'm just very polished on Silicon Valley, and the US generally. >> Yeah it is amazing 'cause I've been here a little longer than you, and it just, it just keeps reinventing, right? It's just wave after wave after wave, it was originally silicon and microprocessors, and then it's software, and then it's IOT. And now, you see all the automotive people have innovation centers here. So wave after wave after wave, just continues to come, and then we're going to have, you know, 5G, and it's this whole move to asymptomatically approaching zero cost of store, compute, and networking, and infinite, basically, amounts of those on tap. It really opens up a huge opportunity. >> It really does, yeah, and it's, a lot of it's going to come from here. >> Alright Nick, well thanks for taking a few minutes of your time, and stopping by. >> You bet, my pleasure. >> Alright he's Nick O'Keefe, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, from the ACGSV awards, Grow Awards in Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching. (digital music)