>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from "theCUBE" in ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Chief Information Security Officer's site trust, is the number one value attribute, they can deliver to their organizations. And when it comes to security, identity is the new attack surface. As such identity and access management, continue to be the top priority among technology decision makers. It also happens to be one of the most challenging and complicated areas of the cybersecurity landscape. Okta, a leader in the identity space has announced its intent to converge privileged access and Identity Governance in an effort to simplify the landscape and re-imagine identity. Our research shows that interest in this type of consolidation is very high, but organizations believe technical debt, compatibility issues, expense and lack of talent are barriers to reaching cyber nirvana, with their evolving Zero-Trust networks. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we'll explore the complex and evolving world of identity access and privileged account management, with an assessment of Okta's market expansion aspirations and fresh data from ETR, and input from my colleague Eric Bradley. Let's start by exploring identity and why it's fundamental to digital transformations. Look the pandemic accelerated digital and digital raises the stakes in cybersecurity. We've covered this extensively, but today we're going to drill into identity, which is one of the hardest nuts to crack in security. If hackers can steal someone's identity, they can penetrate networks. If that someone has privileged access to databases, financial information, HR systems, transaction systems, the backup corpus, well. You get the point. There are many bespoke tools to support a comprehensive identity access management and privilege access system. Single sign-on, identity aggregation, de-duplication of identities, identity creation, the governance of those identities, group management. Many of these tools are open source. So you have lots of vendors, lots of different systems, and often many dashboards. Practitioners tell us that it's the paper cuts that kill them, patches that aren't applied, open ports, orphan profiles that aren't disabled. They'd love to have a single dashboard, but it's often not practical for large organizations because of the bespoke nature of the tooling and the skills required to manage them. Now, adding to this complexity, many organizations have different identity systems for privileged accounts, the general employee population and customer identity. For example, around 50 percent of ETR respondents in a recent survey use different systems for workforce identity and consumer identity. Now this is often done because the consumer identity is a totally different journey. The consumer is out in the wild and takes an unknown, nonlinear path and then enters the known space inside a brand's domain. The employee identity journey is known throughout. You go onboarding, to increasing responsibilities and more access to off-boarding. Privileged access may even have different attributes, does usually like no email and, or no shared credentials. And we haven't even touched on the other identity consumers in the ecosystem like selling partners, suppliers, machines, etcetera. Like I said, it's complicated and meeting the needs of auditors is stressful and expensive for CSOs. Open chest wounds, such as sloppy histories of privileged access approvals, obvious role conflicts, missing data, inconsistent application of policy and the list goes on. The expense of securing digital operations goes well beyond the software and hardware acquisition costs. So there's a real need and often desire, to converge these systems. But technical debt makes it difficult. Companies have spent a lot of time, effort and money on their identity systems and they can't just rip and replace. So they often build by integrating piece parts or they add on to their Quasi-integrated monolithic systems. And then there's the whole Zero-Trust concept. It means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but folks are asking if I have Zero-Trust, does it eliminate the need for identity? And what does that mean for my architecture, going forward. So, let's take a snapshot of some of the key players in identity and PAM, Privileged Access Management. This is an X-Y graph that we always like to show. It shows the net score or spending velocity, spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share or presence in the ETR dataset on the horizontal axis. It's not like revenue market share. It's just, it's mentioned market share if you will. So it's really presence in the dataset. Now, note the chart insert, the table, which shows the actual data for Net Score and Shared In, which informs the position of the dot. The red dotted line there, it indicates an elevated level. Anything over 40 percent that mark, we consider the strongest spending velocity. Now within this subset of vendors that we've chosen, where we've tried to identify some, most of them are pure plays, in this identity space. You can see there are six above that 40 percent mark including Zscaler, which tops the charts, Okta, which has been at or near the top for several quarters. There's an argument by the way, to be made that Okta and Zscaler are on a collision course as Okta expands it's TAM, but let's just park that thought for a moment. You can see Microsoft with a highly elevated spending score and a massive presence on the horizontal axis, CyberArk and SailPoint, which Okta is now aiming to disrupt and Auth zero, which Okta officially acquired in may of this year, more on that later now. Now, below that 40 percent mark you can see Cisco, which is largely acquired companies in order to build its security portfolio. For example, Duo which focuses on access and multi-factor authentication. Now, word of caution, Cisco and Microsoft in particular are overstated because, this includes their entire portfolio of security products, whereas the others are more closely aligned as pure plays in identity and privileged access. ThycotyicCentrify is pretty close to that 40 percent mark and came about as a result of the two companies merging in April of this year. More evidence of consolidation in this space, BeyondTrust is close to the red line as well, which is really interesting because this is a company whose roots go back to the VAX VMS days, which many of you don't even know what a VAX VMS is in the mid 1980s. It was the mini computer standard and the company has evolved to provide more modern PAM solutions. Ping Identity is also notable in that, it essentially emerged after the dot com bust in the early 2000s as an identity solution provider for single sign-on, SSO and multifactor authentication, MFA solutions. In IPO'd in the second half of 2019, just prior to the pandemic. It's got a $2 billion market cap-down from its highs of around $3 billion earlier this year and last summer. And like many of the remote work stocks, they bounced around, as the reopening trade and lofty valuations have weighed on many of these names, including Okta and SailPoint. Although CyberArk, actually acted well after its August 12th earnings call as its revenue growth about doubled year on year. So hot space and a big theme this year is around Okta's acquisition of Auth zero and its announcement at Oktane 2021, where it entered the PAM market and announced its thrust to converge its platform around PAM and Identity Governance and administration. Now I spoke earlier this week with Diya Jolly, who's the Chief Product Officer at Okta and I'll share some of her thoughts later in this segment. But first let's look at some of the ETR data from a recent drill down study that our friends over there conducted. This data is from a drill down that was conducted early this summer, asking organizations how important it is to have a single dashboard for access management, Identity Governance and privileged access. This goes directly to Okta strategy that it announced this year at it's Oktane user conference. Basically 80 percent of the respondents want this. So this is no surprise. Now let's stay on this theme of convergence. ETR asks security pros if they thought convergence between access management and Identity Governance would occur within the next three years. And as you can see, 89% believe this is going to happen. They either strongly agree, agree, or somewhat agree. I mean, it's almost as though the CSOs are willing this to occur. And this seemingly bodes well for Okta, which in April announced its intent to converge PAM and IGA. Okta's Diya jolly stressed to me that this move was in response to customer demand. And this chart confirms that, but there's a deeper analysis worth exploring. Traditional tools of identity, single sign-on SSO and multi-factor authentication MFA, they're being commoditized. And the most obvious example of this is OAuth or Open Authorization. You know, log in with Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook. Now Okta currently has around a $35 billion market cap as of today, off from its highs, which were well over 40 billion earlier this year. Okta stated, previously stated, total addressable market was around 55 billion. So CEO, Todd McKinnon had to initiate a TAM expansion play, which is the job of any CEO, right? Now, this move does that. It increases the company's TAM by probably around $20 to $30 billion in our view. Moreover, the number one criticism of Okta is, "Your price is too high." That's a good problem to have I say. Regardless, Okta has to think about adding more value to its customers and prospects, and this move both expands its TAM and supports its longer-term vision to enable a secure user-controlled ubiquitous, digital identity, supporting federated users and data within a centralized system. Now, the other thing Jolly stressed to me is that Okta is heavily focused on the user experience, making it simple and consumer grade easy. At Oktane 21, she gave a keynote laying out the company's vision. It was a compelling presentation designed to show how complex the problem is and how Okta plans to simplify the experience for end users, service providers, brands, and the overall technical community across the ecosystem. But look, there are a lot of challenges, the company faces to pull this off. So let's dig into that a little bit. Zero-Trust has been the buzz word and it's a direction, the industry is moving towards, although there are skeptics. Zero-Trust today is aspirational. It essentially says you don't trust any user or device. And the system can ensure the right people or machines, have the proper level of access to the resources they need all the time, with a fantastic user experience. So you can see why I call this nirvana earlier. In previous breaking analysis segments, we've laid out a map for protecting your digital identity, your passwords, your crypto wallets, how to create Air Gaps. It's a bloody mess. So ETR asked security pros if they thought a hybrid of access management and Zero-Trust network could replace their PAM systems, because if you can achieve Zero-Trust in a world with no shared credentials and real-time access, a direction which Diya jolly clearly told me Okta is headed, then in theory, you can eliminate the need for Privileged Access Management. Another way of looking at this is, you do for every user what you do for PAM users. And that's how you achieve Zero-Trust. But you can see from this picture that there's more uncertainty here with nearly 50 percent of the sample, not in agreement that this is achievable. Practitioners in Eric Bradley's round tables tell us that you'll still need the PAM system to do things, like session auditing and credential checkouts and other things. But much of the PAM functionality could be handled by this Zero-Trust environment we believe. ETR then asks the security pros, how difficult it would be to replace their PAM systems. And this is where it gets interesting. You can see by this picture. The enthusiasm wanes quite a bit when the practitioners have to think about the challenges associated with replacing Privileged Access Management Systems with a new hybrid. Only 20 percent of the respondents see this as, something that is easy to do, likely because they are smaller and don't have a ton of technical debt. So the question and the obvious question is why? What are the difficulties and challenges of replacing these systems? Here's a diagram that shows the blockers. 53 percent say gaps in capabilities. 26 percent say there's no clear ROI. IE too expensive and 11 percent interestingly said, they want to stay with best of breed solutions. Presumably handling much of the integration of the bespoke capabilities on their own. Now speaking with our Eric Bradley, he shared that there's concern about "rip and replace" and the ability to justify that internally. There's also a significant buildup in technical debt, as we talked about earlier. One CSO on an Eric Bradley ETR insights panel explained that the big challenge Okta will face here, is the inertia of entrenched systems from the likes of SailPoint, Thycotic and others. Specifically, these companies have more mature stacks and have built in connectors to legacy systems over many years and processes are wired to these systems and would be very difficult to change with skill sets aligned as well. One practitioner told us that he went with SailPoint almost exclusively because of their ability to interface with SAP. Further, he said that he believed, Okta would be great at connecting to other cloud API enabled systems. There's a large market of legacy systems for which Okta would have to build custom integrations and that would be expensive and would require a lot of engineering. Another practitioner said, "We're not implementing Okta, but we strongly considered it." The reason they didn't go with was the company had a lot of on-prem legacy apps and so they went with Microsoft Identity Manager, but that didn't meet the grade because the user experience was subpar. So they're still searching for a solution that can be good at both cloud and on-prem. Now, a third CSO said, quote, " I've spent a lot of money, writing custom connectors to SailPoint", and he's stressed a lot of money, he said that several times. "So, who was going to write those custom connectors for me? Will Okta do it for free? I just don't see that happening", end quote. Further, this individual said, quote, "It's just not going to be an easy switch. And to be clear, SailPoint is not our PAM solution. That's why we're looking at CyberArk." So the complexity that, unquote. So the complexity and fragmentation continues. And personally I see this as a positive trend for Okta, if it can converge these capabilities. Now I pressed Okta's Diya Jolly on these challenges and the difficulties of replacing them over to our stacks of the competitors. She fully admitted, this was a real issue But her answer was that Okta is betting on the future of microservices and cloud disruption. Her premise is that Okta's platform is better suited for this new application environment, and they're essentially betting on organizations modernizing their application portfolios and Okta believes that it will be ultimately a tailwind for the company. Now let's look at the age old question of best of breed versus incumbent slash integrated suite. ETR and it's drilled down study ask customers, when thinking about identity and access management solutions, do you prefer best of breed and incumbent that you're already using or the most cost efficient solution? The respondents were asked to force rank one, two and three, and you can see, incumbent just edged out best in breed with a 2.2 score versus a 2.1, with the most cost-effective choice at 1.7. Now, overall, I would say, this is good news for Okta. Yes, they faced the issues that we brought up earlier but as digital transformations lead to modernizing much of the application portfolio with container and microservices, Okta will be in a position, assuming it continues to innovate, to pick up much of this business. And to the point earlier, where the CSO told us they're going to use both SailPoint and CyberArk. When ETR asked practitioners which vendors are in the best position to benefit from Zero-Trust, the Zero-Trust trend, the answers were not surprisingly all over the place. Lots of Okta came up. Zscaler came up a lot too, hmm. There's that collision course. But plenty of SailPoint, Palo Alto, Microsoft, Netskope, Dichotic, Centrify, Cisco, all over the map. So now let's look specifically at how practitioners are thinking about Okta's latest announcements. This chart shows the results of the question. Are you planning to evaluate Okta's recently announced Identity Governance and PAM offerings? 45 to nearly 50 percent of the respondents either were already using or plan to evaluate, with just around 40 percent saying they had no plans to evaluate. So again, this is positive news for Okta in our view. The huge portion of the market is going to take a look at what Okta's doing. Combined with the underlying trends that we shared earlier related to the need for convergence, this is good news for the company. Now, even if the blockers are too severe to overcome, Okta will be on the radar and is on the radar as you can see from this data. And as with the Microsoft MIM example, the company will be seen as increasingly strategic, Okta that is, and could get another bite at the apple. Moreover, Okta's acquisition of Auth zero is strategically important. One of the other things Jolly told me is they see initiative starting both from devs and then hand it over to IT to implement, and then the reverse where IT may be the starting point and then go to devs to productize the effort. The Auth zero acquisition gives Okta plays in both games, because as we've reported earlier, Okta wasn't strong with the devs, Auth zero that was their wheelhouse. Now Okta has both. Now on the one hand, when you talk to practitioners, they're excited about the joint capabilities and the gaps that Auth zero fills. On the other hand, it takes out one of Okta's main competitors and customers like competition. So I guess I look at it this way. Many enterprises will spend more money to save time. And that's where Okta has traditionally been strong. Premium pricing but there's clear value, in that it's easier, less resources required, skillsets are scarce. So boom, good fit. Other enterprises look at the price tag of an Okta and, they actually have internal development capabilities. So they prefer to spend engineering time to save money. That's where Auth zero has seen its momentum. Now Todd McKinnon and company, they can have it both ways because of that acquisition. If the price of Okta classic is too high, here's a lower cost solution with Auth zero that can save you money if you have the developer talent and the time. It's a compelling advantage, that's unique. Okay, let's wrap. The road to Zero-Trust networks is long and arduous. The goal is to understand, support and enable access for different roles, safely and securely, across an ecosystem of consumers, employees, partners, suppliers, all the consumers, (laughs softly) of your touch points to your security system. You've got to simplify the user experience. Today's kluge of password, password management, security exposures, just not going to cut it in the digital future. Supporting users in a decentralized, no-moat world, the queen has left her castle, as I often say is compulsory. But you must have federated governance. And there's always going to be room for specialists in this space. Especially for industry specific solutions for instance, within healthcare, education, government, etcetera. Hybrids are the reality for companies that have any on-prem legacy apps. Now Okta has put itself in a leadership position, but it's not alone. Complexity and fragmentation will likely remain. This is a highly competitive market with lots of barriers to entry, which is both good and bad for Okta. On the one hand, unseating incumbents will not be easy. On the other hand, Okta is both scaling and growing rapidly, revenues are growing almost 50% per annum and with it's convergence agenda and Auth zero, it can build a nice moat to its business and keep others out. Okay, that's it for now. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search braking analysis podcast, and please subscribe. Thanks to my colleague, Eric Bradley, and our friends over at ETR. Check out ETR website at "etr.plus" for all the data and all the survey action. We also publish a full report every week on "wikibon.com" and "siliconangle.com". So make sure you check that out and browse the breaking analysis collection. There are nearly a hundred of these episodes on a variety of topics, all available free of charge. Get in touch with me. You can email me at "david.vellante@siliconangle.com" or "@dvellante" on Twitter. Comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE" insights powered by ETR. Have a great week everybody. Stay safe, be well And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(digital music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Kay, welcome back everyone. Live Cube coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technology World 2019. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of Global Partner Marketing in Dell Technologies joining us. We just reminiscing about the old days of how computing was going on, cloud computing, Sun Microsystems to now, Dell Technologies is doing extremely well. Congratulations. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. It's a fantastic time. Thanks for being here and having me. >> And what a time to be in tech. Michael is on stage. This is just a pre-game show of what's coming. Kind of teasing out like best is yet to come. A lot of things are going on in tech. Certainly the business performance for Dell is strong but you guys have a huge partner ecosystem, huge global channel. That's changing and transforming. That's your wheelhouse. Tell us what's going on in the channel because you have partners that are making money with you. How's that going? What's happening? >> Thank you. Actually, we are thrilled with the momentum we've seen in the partner community and thanks to a lot of their engagement and support and solutions that they're developing around Dell Technologies. I mean our channel business has just hit fifty billion dollars in orders this year, growing faster than the market, growing faster than our competition and I honestly think it's an expression and a reflection of just the opportunity they see in the family of companies and just the assets of the technology that we have. >> One of the things that's happening with cloud and data is that these trends are kind of rising tides. There's no zero sum game anymore, this verses that, it's like a whole new shift. What are some of the trends going on that's impacting the channel specifically, that allows the partners to take advantage of the trends and either serve customers, have happy customers, and ultimately make more profit. Cash. >> Absolutely. You know, I kind of call it the art of the and. I think there Is a lot of traditional consumption that's still happening right now, while at the same time they're increasingly being asked by customers for as a service business model. So I think our partners are realizing that opportunity and meeting that demand right now. That's why you see the growth figures we have, frankly, in the channel in our traditional server and storage business, but also in our Dell Financial Services and really meeting these dynamic consumption model request as a cloud, as a service, manage services opportunities. We actually think some of the announcements we've made here this week, it's going to allow our partners to really enable and build services capabilities for their businesses that are highly lucrative, high margin service capabilities around these cloud offerings, these integrated solutions, really leaning in and leveraging their expertise across Dell, EMC, VMware and the rest of the family of businesses. >> Take a minute to explain some of the notable announcements here at Dell Technology World and what'll be the impact to the partners? >> Well, I think one of the most exciting things is we've been on an evolution as a company and we unveiled the new name of our partner program. We're now the Dell Technologies Partner Program. In many ways just simplifying the ability for the partners to lean in and realize the advantage of the offers, solutions, and capabilities of the family of companies. So all of the requirements for their tier attainment and tier status go unchanged. The strategically aligned businesses, such as VMware, will continue to have their own independent programs but the opportunity for the partners is it really empowers them to now be able to get access to these integrated offers, more access to the strategically aligned businesses, and go build out services that, as I said, that allow them to really bring those customer solutions at the level of expertise, either in a verticle or an industry, that their customers are struggling with their own transformations. >> How are they transforming, specifically? What are partners doing? I mean I always, you know we love selling boxes but if you're a box seller you just can't keep doing that. So you've got to change your business model. What are some of the things that they're doing? >> What I've seen, actually in the community, is I've seen certainly M & A. There's been some mergers and acquisitions where you'll see traditional integrators or solution providers investing and augmenting their capabilities with application development expertise. So they understand that not only do we have to modernize infrastructure, but it's about the work load. And we have to modernize the application. So, we've seen those kind of mergers happen. We've seen alliances form, where you have different partners that may not possess security capabilities, for example, they team and they partner. So I think the community in the ecosystem is evolving and they're leaning on their strengths and really trying to best position themselves to realize the opportunity. >> So you think about trends like converged infrastructure, hyperconverged, some of the stuff you guys announced. Ten years ago I remember when the modern CI first came on the scene. A lot of the channel partners didn't like that. They were like, no we want to screw the bolts in, we make money doing that. That has completely changed, hasn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think it's less about, how do I integrate the bag of parts and the piece parts of the infrastructure, and it's much more about the work load and the outcome. So, I think where partners are really savvy and where they're uniquely advantaged and positioned well to help customers is in those complex work loads, in those inventory and assessment services of which work load is best served in a public cloud, which is best served in a private cloud, and helping their customers navigate that journey. It's richer services but they have to monetize their Value-Ad in those type services than traditional system integration-type services. >> How to secure it, how to manage it... >> Absolutely. How to migrate it, how to modernize it. Absolutely. >> So those services used to be reserved for a unique qualification of partner. Highly technical solution architect. Now someone says, I need to multicloud architecture, if you go back a couple years in DevOps you'd be like, okay got to get a alpha geek and we got to lay out architecture, you know, usually a higher priced person, but kind of what we're seeing now is almost a democratization or an increase aperture of opportunity capture for partners because the tools and technologies are, I won't say totally turn-key, but they're composable so as you don't need to have an advanced computer scientist degree to be a solution architect. You can be more of a composer of solutions, not the tech lead. So this is a trend we're seeing. Do you agree with that and if so how's that increasing your capabilities? >> Well I do and I think, frankly, we at Dell Technologies are uniquely positioned and one of our aims is to simplify the access to that type technology. So when you look at the announcements around our Dell Technologies cloud platform and the integration with VMware, it really is to provide that seamless, simple, common management layer, operational and orchestration layer, to be able to migrate and move your work loads to public, on-premise so the skills in our partners are really leverageable, so their VMware expertise, it really is about the work load, less about the infrastructure and how to go standup a virtualized environment. >> Cheryl, talk about the impact it's had on your job because I can only imagine the complexity involved in soft dollar programs, incentive programs, compensation programs, how to get more training, skill gaps closed down, and now that's hard in and of itself so I'm sure there's a lot going on there that you're spending and working on but when you start overlaying, oh VMware's got a program, I got this program, it's like, are you wiring up a bunch of programs or is it just first... Take us through the stages of your evolution because you now have to be agile with how you market globally. >> Absolutely. And we're trying to be as thoughtful as possible with an outside in perspective to be fair. So across the family of companies we're actively engaged with my peers at VMware and Pivotal and we're really looking at, how do we take the investment that our partners are making into their capabilities and make that leverageable and protect that investment across the offers. So we, for example, are offering reciprocal recognition within the credentials, for like credentials so the VMware capabilities they earn with VMware we'll recognize in our Dell Tech cloud competency. We want to try and offer an easier path for them to engage across the companies and to be honest, incentives, capabilities, they're on their own evolution and we're trying to help just to ensure that we can externalize a lot of the training that we create internally for our people. How can we leverage the strategically aligned companies, jointly, for what we're doing in the program, so that it at least holistically can be common and make sense for the partners to engage. >> So training's important to you? >> Sure, absolutely. >> Partners now account for over half the revenue of the company. You've said that you're growing faster than the competition. That's something that we've heard a lot this week. (Cheryl laughs) A two-part question. One is, how is it that you guys, it's almost like you're being set up by a great coach to win and everybody seems to be growing faster than the competition. That's what we're hearing as a theme. So, how does that happen? Why is that? And then the second is, do you set targets for how much of your business you want to be through the channel, or is it just, let the business go as it may? >> Well, first of all, I would say we are really clear inside the company on what the strategy and vision is of the company and as we take that to market, both on the direct side and through the partner community, we try and listen to the partners and gain feedback from them on what they need to be most successful, but then again, we are really ruthless in aligning our strategies, our goals, our metrics, our measures, our rewards, to ensure that we can go deliver those results and the outcome and I think frankly, the success we've been seeing and enjoying is, I think it's resonating. Our partners are responding with the strategy and the enablement that we're bringing to market and it's combination of good strategy, good vision, relentless execution, and commitment. And we listen. Right? There's always more to do. We know we're not perfect. We have a lot of advisory capacities with our partner community, our distributors, our system integrators, for them to tell us how they can monetize and realize the maximum value out of what we're bringing to market and we adapt, we adapt, we adapt. >> Cheryl, final question for you. Over the past three years it's been an interesting journey. EMC comes in, you guys went public, got the VMware relationship clicking, you've got the things going on. So you got the end-to-end operational consistency as a big land grab. We see that as a big strategic opportunity for Dell, as well as specialism up to the top of the stack around vertical industries with data. Clean strategy, we've been saying that in The Cube for years. That's the killer form, you guys are doing it. But without learnings along the way, take us through personal observations that you've had inside Dell around just getting the ship tightened up to keep executing going. What's it been like? Share some stories. >> I'll have to say, a merger as large as we did and certainly as large as we are now, growing at the pace we are, is never easy, and I think we have an amazing culture in the company and I think it starts with Michael from the top down, and I think as we came together as teams and we started really decomposing and working on what we needed to strategize we quickly found ourselves very like-minded. Really like-minded. Very complimentary. So it allowed us to move faster. So I would say my learnings are you've got to be really authentic, you've got to have a lot of trust, you got to lean on the culture which is a bit of an intangible, and then there's all the obvious strategy and execution. But I would say one of the enjoyable learnings out of this has been, you have to just trust and we've been very like-minded. We've been very fortunate. Really good talent. Amazing talent. >> Now the plantation of brands has got some fruit coming off the tree, business performance is coming out, you're seeing some results. >> Yeah. Well, I think we're realizing the vision of the mutual R & D and I think we're so uniquely positioned for the level of R & D in innovation going forward, the expression of bringing those technologies together is now coming to market. You're really seeing the work of the joint innovation bear fruit. >> Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of the Global Partner Marketing in Dell Technologies, here in The Cube sharing her insight and observations and learnings over the past couple years and what's happening. They're doing great. This is The Cube bringing you all the content from Dell Technology World, three days of coverage, day two. We'll be right back with more after this short break. Stay with us. (digital music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's the Cube! Covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. (electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We're here at NAB 2017 in Las Vegas Convention Center, 100,000 people, place has got a buzz, last year was all about AR and VR, this year it's all about machine learning and AI, platforms and storage and cloud, kind of sounds familiar with most of the other events that we go to. So we're really excited to have industry veteran, Roger Sherwood, he is the global strategy media and entertainment lead at Cisco, welcome Roger. >> Thank you very much. >> So first off, you've been coming to this show for a little while, first impressions? >> This is my seventh year, we've been super relevant for the last two or three years, we used to be buried away in the hole, in a dirty corner. Yeah, what a fantastic show! I think it's bigger than ever. More exhibitors than ever. Which amazes me in this space, but it's pretty fascinating to see what's going on right now. >> Now, you guys are doing big things, you basically took over cisco.com. >> Yes, we have. We get to do that for two weeks a year. >> For two weeks, so tell us about what's going on with Cisco and media. >> Well, for the show itself, NAB has become one of our major events. We used to do INTX and SCT and very cable, you know, Telco, and all that shows. Strong recognition within the company that a lot is changing on the content side, the production side. And we've had these customers for many, many years, very much selling into the IT side of these places, and two years ago, we really took an approach of, we're really becoming quite relevant on the broadcast side. The technology has changed, the technology has moved frpm from very traditional SDI technology, to IP. And that's Cisco's wheelhouse. Virtualization, UCS, orchestration, security. For the first time, we're very, very relevant on the content acquisition, distribution, production side. So yeah, we get to take over the Cisco homepage, because for the next two weeks, a lot of people want to talk about media and entertainment. Brand new website, brand new customer testimonials and everything else. It's nice to get that recognition from the company that this is a big thing. >> Right. And there's a solution behind the takeover, right, it's not just for publicity. >> Oh, no, no, no. It's all real. We're absolutely doing things. The big thing for us is this transition to IP. We're an IP company, 30-35 years ago, the company was founded on the premise of IP. This industry is one of the last ones to go from a legacy protocol. I mean, broadcast has been broadcast, it's been the same for 30-35 years. >> It's your classic kind of opportunity meets capability. >> It is in transition. And Cisco loves to go into transition, and what Cisco also loves to do, is take out legacy network protocols. So, SDIs, are exactly that. IP is here, I will say that only in 12, 18 months however, have we actually had the compute capacity, the bandwidth capacity, to take what is essentially, you know, I'm being filmed in uncompressed video right now. >> Right. >> You know, the routers and switchers that we sell, have not been able to process that amount of information. The last 12, 18 months, Moore's Law on everything else, and some software optimizations. Uncompressed video is flowing at high speed, across data networks, that Cisco provides. That's a great place to be, as this industry recognizes. >> It's funny, the Moore's Law thing, because people like to poo-poo on it, you know, but no, Moore's Law is an attitude. >> Roger: It absolutely is. >> It's a way to attack problems, with just massive increases in capability, whether it's networking, storage, or compute, and the combination of the three together, it's crazy. >> And that's exactly where we found ourselves two years ago, and so, we have very good timing. But we are a company that likes to step into those, you know, and say, "We've got this!" We understand, we've seen so many transitions in other industries, from legacy to IP. And hey, this one is just high cashe for the company, I mean the brands, and the names, and the companies that we get to work with right now, from Disney to NBC, to the BBC, these are fabulous companies that have global recognition. Like Cisco. >> Right. And it's interesting with the UCS comparison, not so much that it's Apple's origins, but the fact that Cisco is taking more of a solutions approach, and not just for the routers and the switchers, you know, kind of the IP backbone, but an integrated solution, where you can pull and compute, and you can pull and store, and oh by the way, it also has the networking stuff, so now you're offering customers a really interesting package. A cloud-based application solution, if you will, and then, as you mentioned, still partnering with best of breed applications across the country. >> And that's been key. This industry demands, in some cases, immediate solutions, I have a problem, I need to solve it. And I'm not so interested in an architecture, in a road map, and tell me where you're going over the next 12, 18 months. I need something now. So yeah, we absolutely have been very focused on, I mean everything on our booth is available to buy. Sometimes we show up to shows, and it's all futuristic stuff that maybe we don't even develop at some point. It's all in our price list. The partner side of this, is absolutely key. So we would not be here without Grass Valley, without Everts, Sony, Evias, big, big, traditional broadcaster vendors that have validated our solution, and turned around to the industry and said, "These guys get it." >> The other interesting part is that you guys are doing so much in the space, you've got the solutions base, and that you are doing the partnering, and that it's a great move for Cisco, right? You've got so much better-- >> I mean, it's really very few companies that can do the IP side of things. When you add in security, compute, orchestration, professional services, training. Like, just training broadcast engineers that have been so steeped in high-quality video, and they've known SDI, and they're now coming to us and saying, "Help me get trained in IP, "I recognize this transition is coming, "but I've got a legacy skillset, help me transition." There aren't many companies that can offer that range of solutions and services. And we're doing this with-- >> Real security, over and over again. The last couple of days, I mean, it's a huge to-do. >> So I try to move that from the last thing we talk about, to the first thing that we talk about. You move to an IP network, you can add an IP network to a data center, that center is connected to the internet, and these guys would actually be free. >> But the other cool thing for you guys, is that the primary distribution method, the SDI, or some of these other old-school broadcast methods are now no longer an important piece of the puzzle. But there's now all this stuff that's going out on all different types of applications, and all that stuff's IP at the core, right? Those are all IP applications at the core. Whether it's Snapchat, Instagram, Youtube, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those were never going to broadcast medium. >> And you know, 2009, 2010, this industry was saying, "We're going to go IP," but it was always, "Well, you know, it's out there in the future." You're exactly right. The ability to now, the barrier to entry, to get this type of content onto an IP network, and down to every single device on the internet, It's never been so low. And so that's where you're seeing this high-value, premium content creation, acquisition, editing process. It's been recognized that they've got to move as well, they've got to move to a far more flexible infrastructure, automation, machine-learning of how things work, analytics, you know, the whole caboodle. And we're right there to support this industry to do that. >> And it's such an easy fit, right, because this industry is built on temporary projects, and the temporary assembly of a team, and they come, and they produce, and they create, and then there's a lot of derivative assets-- >> And tear the whole thing down. >> It's perfect for-- >> Absolutely. We've been talking about that with some of the Hollywood clients, and that's exactly what, they stand on a massive amount of infrastructure, for the latest Avatar movie, for instance. And then they tear it all down, and it's all written off, and then they go build a new one somewhere else. We think the industry can be a lot smarter about that. There is a way to truly repurpose. Hey, what you just built? You no longer need to throw it all away. >> So I want to shift gears a little bit, we have a lot of opensource shows, opensource is big, and you're part of the Alliance for IP Media Solutions, so there's always this question between now, the kind of opensource deriving standards in adoption, versus the old-school, standard's body. What role has AIMS played, give us a little bit more color, as to their role, and how that's kind of shaping things. >> So I say the old-school standards are absolutely alive and kicking. SIM, TVSF, Amwar, these guys have been around for years. What they are very focused on, however, is really making sure there is technical, inter-operability between ourselves, and all the vendors in this industry, as this move to IP takes place. So, we want a utopia where you can plug in a Cisco infrastructure, or a Reaster, or an Everts, and it's all going to work. That's what those standard bodies do for the industry. AIMS has basically said, "That's great, but it's a very, very technical thing." And there's some very, very technical people, that like to talk technical things To truly drive an industry forward, we've got to sort of go up the stack, and become much more relevant from a marketing perspective. And AIMS has basically said, "Look, we support all the adoption of IP, "but let's actually go push out news cases, "let's push out public references of customers "that are doing this today." We need to drive the industry forward at that level. So, very much rather the promotion of open standards, inter-operability, but really looking at how we market that, and foster the adoption of these standards. >> Okay, so last question before I let you go, priorities for 2017, it's hard to believe we're a third of the way through the year, but I'm still asking the question, because we still have a ways to go. What's kind of your top of mind awareness, what are you working on, obviously a big launch here for the next couple weeks, but looking down a little bit further down the road, what's your top of mind? >> Virtualization. We've been looking at virtualization, we've been telling the industry that they need to move to virtualization, that all these applications that are currently hardware, software, a lot today, that hardware piece is going to disappear, and we're all going to move into software. It's all going to move into VM ware, you need an IP foundation before you can do that, and that's what we're seeing take place right now. 12 months from now, the main headline for Cisco is going to be how we're helping every application vendor, and our customers move truly into a virtualized data center model. And then again, back to our little thing about Avatar and the tear down, that just becomes a thing of the past. Now it's about reusing all of that data center, over, and over, and over again. For all of the other Avatar sequels. >> It's so funny right, it's a recurring theme we see all over the place. It's just a little bit late here in the ME space. Alright, well Roger, thanks again for taking a few minutes of your day. And I'll see you around, and go Warriors. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, that's Roger Sherwood, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break, thanks for watching. (electronic music)