>> SiliconANGLE Media presents... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angle's theCUBE here on the ground, in Hangzhou, China. We're here at the Intel Booth as part of our coverage, exclusive coverage of Alibaba Cloud Conference here in the cloud city. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE. And I'm here with CJ Bruno, who is the Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Global Accounts of the sales and marketing group at Intel. That's a mouthful but basically you run a lot of the major accounts, you bring a lot of value to Intel Supplier to these big clouds. >> I do, John. We look after our top 20 or so largest partners and customers around the world. Amazing like Alibaba, edge to cloud enterprises, deep rich engagements, just an exciting, exciting time to be in the business with these big customers. >> And there's no borders to the cloud so its not as easy as saying PC, like people might think of Intel in the old days. You guys have these major cloud providers, there's a lot of intel inside so to speak but that value is enabling a new kind of functionality. We're hearing it here at the show. >> You are. We work together with partners like Ali, in the area of such big artificial intelligence development, big data analytics and of course, the cloud. We've been working with them for over 12 years now and you can see the advancements and the services that they're providing to their customers, not only domestically, here in China but on a global stage as well. >> Its interesting, Intel, you've been working with these guys for 12 years, what a journey, from an entrepreneurial 12 guys in a dorm room, or an apartment for Jackie Ma, that he talks about all the time, to now the powerhouse. What's it like, because these guys have an interesting formula going on here. They're bringing culture and art, with science, kind of sounds like Steve Jobs, technology meets liberal arts, bringing a cultural aspect. How far have they come? Give us some insight into where they've come from and where you think they're going. >> Its amazing, Jack Ma, yesterday in his keynote, talked about this event eight years ago. 120 people, John, we're standing amongst 60,000 or so, in this event today, just eight short years later. Its amazing what they've been able to do. They're driving innovation, this is not a copy economy, it's an innovation economy. They invest, very high-degree of technical acumen. Willingness to break barriers, try things people have not. Fail fast and correct. Take risks. They're entrepreneurs at heart, they're technologists in their bloodstream and they really invest to win. >> You guys are supplying. We talked to people who talk about Photonics, Deeraj Malik, who's really going deep on these pathways around. Some of the Intel innovations, some of it's like wow, mind-blowing. The other end is just practical stuff, making it easier, faster, simpler to run things. IoT, their big use case, I mean you can't get any more sexier than looking at a city cloud that's actually running the city with traffic and all those IoT devices, so what is the big thing that you guys do for Alibaba? Talk about that journey because its not one thing, what is it? What is the magical formula? >> Sure, of course, first off we deliver, we think, world-class ingredients to their world-class cloud. And enable them to deliver amazing services to their customer, at the base level. But we really work together to solve societal problems. Look at the precision medical cloud that we announced last April together, John. Genome sequencing, solving people's cancer problems, in a matter of days, instead of months. Just one example of the real use case that we bring these technologies to bear on and have an amazing influence. We work on them with the Tenatchi Medical Imaging Competition. 3,000 entrants competing to see who can identify lung cancer quickest, and we have some winners selected, just this week. So these things are real, taking this technology, solving real life problems, and business problems, around the globe. >> And its not just the big, heaving lifting technology that moves the needle, like you were mentioning but its also the micro technologies, like FPGA, you guys have got lot of things. This is like the new Intel, so I'd love to get your thoughts, if you can just take a moment to share the journey that Intel is on right now because you gave a talk yesterday, a kind of a keynote, onstage. What is the Intel journey right now look like? >> We're transforming ourselves from a PC centric company to a company that runs the cloud and powers countless numbers, billions and billions of smart-connected devices. That's a big journey we're on. We've diversified our business significantly in a five year period, John. Driving our data-center business, our IoT business, our programmable logic business as you said, our friends from former Alterra are now two years inside Intel. Our memory business, our NSG technologies, 3D NAND Optane, driving breakthroughs in SSDs and of course new technologies that we're exploring, like drones and neuromorphic computing, making sure we never miss the next big thing. >> I've been following Intel for 30 years of my career and life, as an initial user-developer and now in the media. It's interesting, Intel has never done it alone, it's always been part of the ecosystem. You have brought a lot of goods to the party, so to speak, in technology, Moore's law and the list is endless. Now is an end to end game but you look at 5G for instance, you kind of connect the dots, put a radio frequency cloud over a city and you got to run the IoT devices like a city brain, they're showing here. You got to tie it together with programmable arrays, it's a hardware thing but now the software guys are doing it. You've got cloud native with the Linux Foundation, that's DevOps. You've got data centers that are 10 to one silicon to the edge, this is a wide opportunity, how do you guys make sense of it to customers? Because its a complex story. >> It is John, look, we're the ultimate ingredient supplier. We're bringing forward technologies in artificial intelligence, in 5G, in VR and AR, areas that are just autonomous everything. Autonomous driving in particular. These are big investment areas we're driving into that require an enormous amount to compute, storage, networking, connectivity and we're making the investments to make sure we're critical partners with our customers, in all those huge growth areas. Making us a big growth company now. >> I had a great conversation with Dr. Wong, who's the founder of Alibaba Cloud, he's on the Technology Steering Committee for Alibaba Group and yesterday they just announced a 15 billion dollar investment over three years for FinTech, across the board IoT, AI, collaborate with scientists as well as artisans. This is a big deal. >> It is John, this is exactly an example of what I mentioned earlier. These guys invest to win and they have a will to win. And they want to pioneer and they want to innovate and they put their money where their mouth is, in that announcement, its pretty exciting. >> So the cloud serves quite a market, doing really well. Your global accounts are doing well, certainly in Asia and People's Republic of China, PRC, as you guys call it, extremely well but now there's a Renaissance in cloud in general, so we're expecting to see a lot more cloud service providers, maybe not as big as Alibaba but Alibaba is going to start getting customers that become SaaS companies, that's technically a cloud service provider if you think about it, if they have an application, how do you look at that mark? >> We see what is known as the super seven in the industry, the large folks, both US based and China based but then we've identified the next 60-70 next wave CSPs that are growing vibrantly around the globe and there's a long tail of another 120 that we're interacting with. You're absolutely on point, an exploding area. Significant double-digit growth for years to come and just solving, big, big life and business problems. >> So at SiliconANGLE also silicon is in the name and Wikibon Research is really big in China, here, interesting dynamic that's happening here with the data and the software and was brought up with Dr. Wong about the IoTs, kind of a nuanced point but I want to get it out for the folks watching that you're going to start to see new compute at the edge because data is now the currency of the future. It needs to flow, it's like water but at the edge it can be expensive, low latency that table stakes that everyone wants to get to. You're going to see a lot more compute or silicon at the edge of network. Internet of things coming, your view on that? >> There's no question John, that's exactly the way we see it. The time to get the data back to the long-haul data center, is very expensive and very challenging and requires an absolute redo of the network. We're moving to compute closer and closer to the data, of course, the cloud remains a vital, vital part of that but we move that compute capability closer to where the data is sensed, you can analyze it quicker, you can make faster decisions and you can implement those decisions at the edge. >> CJ, final question for you, obviously Alibaba, big part of their growth strategy is going outside mainland China, obviously doing very well here, not to knock them there but great opportunity to go into the global marketplace, specifically North America. That's going to put more competition, competition was good but it's also going to require more growth. How are you helping Alibaba and how does your relationship at Intel expand with Alibaba? >> We work with Alibaba, not only on the technical front of course but on their go-to-market plans, on ecosystem development plans and even some business models. We do that across our entire customer and partner base, John. We're seeing this explosive growth in cloud and being able to work with our partners on all four of those fronts; technology development, ecosystem development, business model development, are obviously a benefit to both of us. >> Alibaba is going to need some help because you know its competitive, Amazon had a nice run for a while, Microsoft nibbling at the heels, Google and now Alibaba coming in. Competition is good. >> We're proud to call all those innovators our customers and we work hard everyday to earn their business. >> Final, final question, this one just popped in my head. What should folks in America know about this PRC market or China market that they may not know about? Obviously they read what they read in the paper. They see the security hacks, they see the crypto-currency temporarily on hold but blockchain certainly has a lot of promise, but it's a dynamic market here. A lot of of opportunities. What should that audience know about the China market? >> I think the first thing they should know is that if they haven't come to experience it themselves they should. The scale of the opportunity, the scale of the country is like nothing people have ever seen before. As I said, the investments they're making-to innovate, to drive an innovation economy is breakthrough. You take that scale and that investment and this is a market to be reckoned with. >> Congratulations on the 12 year run with Alibaba, and now Alibaba Cloud. Looking really, really, strong, love the culture, got to unique twist; artistry and scientific cultures coming together, looking good. >> Absolutely John, thanks for letting us tell our story. >> CJ Bruno, Group Vice President, General Manager Global Accounts for Intel. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering mobile world congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're here live in Palo Alto for day two of two days of Mobile World Congress special coverage here in Palo Alto, where we're bringing all the folks in Silicon Valley here in the studio to analyze all the news and commentary of which we've been watching heavily on the ground in Barcelona. We have reporters, we have analysts, and we have friends there, of course, Intel is there as well as SAP, and a variety of other companies we've been talking to on the phone and all those interviews are on YouTube.com/siliconANGLE. And we're here with Chuck Tato, who's the marketing director of the data center of communications with Intel around the FPGA, which is the programmable chips, formerly with the Alterra Group, now a part of Intel, welcome to theCUBE, and thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. So, actually all the rage Mobile World Congress Intel, big splash, and you guys have been, I mean, Intel has always bene the bellweather. I was saying this earlier, Intel plays the long game. You have to in the chips games. You got to build the factories, build fabs. Most of all, have been the heartbeat of the industry, but now doing more of less chips, Most of all, making them smaller, faster, cheaper, or less expensive and just more power. The cloud does that. So you're in the cloud data center group. Take a second to talk about what you guys do within Intel, and why that's important for folks to understand. >> Sure. I'm part of the programmable solutions group. So the programmable solutions group primarily focuses on field programmable gate array technology that was acquired through the Alterra acquisition at Intel. So our focus in my particular group is around data center and Coms infrastructure. So there, what we're doing is we're taking the FPGAs and we're applying them to the data center as well as carrier infrastructure to accelerate things, make them faster, make them more repeatable, or more terministic in nature. >> And so, that how it works, as you were explaining beforehand, kind of, you can set stream of bits at it and it changes the functionality of the chip. >> Yes. So essentially, an FPGA, think of it as a malleable set of resources. When I say that, you know, you can create, it's basically a fabric with many resources in an array. So through the use of a bit stream, you can actually program that fabric to interconnect the different elements of the chip to create any function that you would like, for the most part. So think of it as you can create a switch, you can create a classification engine, and things like that. >> Any why would someone want that functionality versus just a purpose-built chip. >> Perfect question. So if you look at, there's two areas. So in the data center, as well as in carrier infrastructure, the workloads are changing constantly. And there's two problems. Number one you could create infrastructure that becomes stranded. You know, you think you're going to have so much traffic of a certain type and you don't. So you end up buying a lot of purpose-built equipment that's just wrong for what you need going forward. So by building infrastructure that is common, so it kind of COTS, you know, on servers, but adding FPGAs to the mix allows you to reconfigure the networking within the cloud, to allow you to address workloads that you care about at any given time. >> Adaptability seems to be the key thing. You know kind of trends based upon certain things, and certainly the first time you see things, you've got to figure it out. But this gives a lot of flexibility, it sounds like. >> Exactly. Adaptability is the key, as well as bandwidth, and determinism, right? So when you get a high bandwidth coming into the network, and you want to something very rapidly and consistently to provide a certain service level agreement you need to have circuits that are actually very, very deterministic in nature. >> Chuck, I want to get your thoughts on one of the key things. I talked with Sandra Reddy, Sandra Rivera, sorry, she was, I interviewed her this morning, as well as Dan Rodriguez, and Caroline Chan, Lyn Comp as well. Lot of different perspectives. I see 5G as big on one hand, have the devices out there announcing on Sunday. But what was missing, and I think Fortune was the really, the only one I saw pick up on this besides SiliconANGLE, on terms of the coverage was, there's a real end-to-end discussion here around not just the 5G as the connectivity piece that the carriers care about, but there's the under-the-hood work that's changing in the Data Center. And the car's a data center now, right? >> Yeah. >> So you have all these new things happening, IOT, people with sensors on them, and devices, and then you've got the cloud-ready compute available, right? And we love what's happening with cloud. Infinite compute is there and makes data work much better. How does the end-to-end story with Intel, and the group that you're in, impact that and what are some of the use cases that seem to be popping up in that area. >> Okay, so that's a great question, and I guess some of the examples that I could give of where we're creating end-to-end solutions would be in wireless infrastructure, as you just mentioned. As you move on to 5G infrastructure, the goal is to increase the bandwidth by 100X and reduce the latency by orders of magnitude. It's a very, very significant challenge. To do that is quite difficult, to do it just in software. FPGA is a perfect complement to a software-based solution to achieve these goals. For example, virtual switching. It's a significant load on the processors. By offloading virtual switching in an FPGA, you an create the virtual switch that you need for the particular workload that you need. Workloads change, depending on what type of services you're offering in a given area. So you can tailor it to exactly what you need. You may or may not need6 high levels of security, so things like IPsec, yo6u know, at full line rate, are the kind of things that FPGAs allow you to add ad hoc. You can add them where you need them, when you need them, and change them as the services change. >> It sounds like, I'd never thought about that, but it sounds like this is a real architectural advantage, because I'd never thought about offloading the processor, and we all know we all open up or build our PCs know that the heat syncs only get bigger and bigger, so that people want that horsepower for very processor-intensive things. >> Absolutely. So we do two things. One is we do create this flexible infrastructure, the second thing is we offload the processor for things that you know, free up cores to do more value-added things. >> Like gaming for, my kids love to see that gaming. >> Yes. There's gaming, virtual reality, augmented virtual reality, all of those things are very CPU intensive, but there's also a compute-intensive aspect. >> Okay, so I've got to get your take on this. This is kind of a cool conversation because that's, the virtual reality and augmented reality really are relevant. That is a key part of Mobile World Congress, beside the IOT, which I think is the biggest story this year, is IOT, and all the security aspects of it around, and all that good stuff. And that's really where the meat is, but the real sex appeal is the virtual reality and augmented reality. That's an example of the new things that have popped out of the woodwork, so the question for you is for all these new-use cases that I have found that emerge, there will be new things that pop out of the woodwork. "Oh, my God, I don't have to write software for that, There's an app for that now." So the new apps are going to start coming in, whether it's something new and cool on a car, Something new and cool on a sensor, something new and cool in the data center. How adaptive are you guys and how do you guys kind of fit into that kind of preparing for this unknown future. >> Well, that's a great question, too. I like to think about new services coming forward as being a unique blend of storage, compute, and networking, and depending on the application and the moment in that application, you may have to change that mix in a very flexible way. So again, the FPGA provides you the ability to change all of those to match the application needs. I'm surprised as we dig into applications, you know, how many different sets of needs there are. So each time you do that, you can envision, reprogramming your FPGA. So just like a processor, it's completely reprogrammable. You're not going to reprogram it in the same instantaneous way that you do in software, but you can reprogram it on the fly, whatever you would like. >> So, I'm kind of a neophyte here, so I want to ask some dumb questions, probably be dumb to you, but common to me, but would be like, okay, who writes bits? Is it the coders or is it someone on the firmware side, I'm trying to understand where the line is between that hardened top of kind of Intel goodness that goes on algorithmically or automatically, or what programmers do. So think full-stack developer, or a composer, a more artisan type who's maybe writing an app. Are there both access points to the coding, or is it, where's the coding come from? >> So there's multiple ways that this is happening. The traditional way of programming FPGA is the same way that you would design any ASIC in the industry, right? Somebody sits down and they write RTL, they're very specialized programmers However, going forward, there's multiple ways you an access it. For one, we're creating libraries of solutions that you can access through APIs that are built into DPDK, for example on Xeon. So you can very easily access accelerated applications and inline applications that are being developed by ourselves as well as third parties. So there's a rich eco system. >> So you guys are writing hooks that go beyond being the ASIC special type, specialist programming. >> Absolutely. So this makes it very accessible to programmers. The acceleration that's there from a library and purpose-built. >> Give me an example, if you can. >> Sure, virtual switch. So in our platform for NFE, we're building in a virtual switch solution, and you can program that just like you know, totally in software through DPDK. >> One of the things that coming up with NFE that's interesting, I don't know if this y6our wheelhouse or not, but I want to throw it out there because it's come up in multiple interviews and in the industry. You're seeing very cool ideas and solutions roll out, and I'll give, you know, I'll make one up off the top of my head, Openstack. Openstack is a great, great vision, but it's a lot of fumbling in the execution of it and the cost of ownership goes through the roof because there's a lot of operation, I'm overgeneralizing certain use-case, not all Openstack, but in generally speaking, I do have the same problem with big data where, great solution-- >> Uh-huh. >> But when you lay out the architect and then deploy it there's a lot of cost of ownership overhead in terms of resources. So is this kind of an area that you guys can help simplify, 'cause that seems to be a sticking point for people who want to stand up some infrastructure and do dev ops and then get into this API-like framework. >> Yes, from a hardware perspective, we're actually creating a platform, which includes a lot of software to tie into Openstack. So that's all preintegrated for you, if you will. So at least from a hardware interface perspective, I can say that that part of the equation gets neutralized. In terms of the rest of the ownership part, I'm not really qualified to answer that question. >> That's good media training, right there. Chuck just came back from Intel media training, which is good. We got you fresh. Network transformation, and at the, also points to some really cool exciting areas that are going on that are really important. The network layer you see, EDFE, and SDN, for instance, that's really important areas that people are innovating on, and they're super important because, again, this is where the action is. You have virtualization, you have new capabilities, you've got some security things going down lower in the stack. What's the impact there from an Intel perspective, helping this end-to-end architecture be seamless? >> Sure. So what we are doing right now is creating a layer on top of our FPGA-based SmartNIC solutions, which ties together all of that into a single platform, and it cuts across multiple Intel products. We have, you know, Xeon processors integrated with FPGAs, we have discreet FPGAs built onto cards that we are in the process of developing. So from a SmartNIC through to a fully-integrated FPGA plus Xeon processor is one common framework. One common way of programming the FPGA, so IP can move from one to the other. So there's a lot of very neat end-to-end and seamless capabilities. >> So the final question is the customer environment. I would say you guys have a lot of customers out there. The edge computing is a huge thing right now. We're seeing that as a big part of this, kind of, the clarity coming out of Mobile World Congress, at least from the telco standpoints, it's kind of not new in the data center area. The edge now is redefined. Certainly with IOT-- >> Yes. >> And IOTP, which we're calling IOTP app for people having devices. What are the customer challenges right now, that you are addressing. Specifically, what's the pain points and what's the current state-of-the-art relative to the customer's expectations now, that they're focused on that you guys are solving. >> Yeah, that's a great question, too. We have a lot of customers now that are taking transmission equipment, for example, mobile backhaul types of equipment, and they want to add mobile edge computing and NFE-type capabilities to that equipment. The beauty of what we're doing is that the same solution that we have for the cloud works just as well in that same piece of equipment. FPGAs come in all different sizes, so you can fit within your power envelope or processors come in all different sizes. So you can tailor your solution-- >> That's super important on the telco side. I mean, power is huge. >> Yes, yes, and FPGAs allow you to tailor the power equation as much as possible. >> So the question, I think is the next question is, does this make it cloud-ready, because that's term that we've been hearing a lot of. Cloud-ready. Cause that sounds like what you're offering is the ability to kind of tie into the same stuff that the cloud has, or the data center. >> Yes, exactly. In fact, you know, there's been very high profile press around the use of FPGAs in cloud infrastructure. So we're seeing a huge uptick there. So it is getting cloud-ready. I wouldn't say it's perfectly there, but we're getting very close. >> Well the thing that's exciting to me, I think, is the cloud native movement really talks about again, you know, these abstractions with micro services, and you mentioned the APIs, really fits well into some of the agilenesss that needs to happen at the network layer, to be more dynamic. I mean, just think about the provisioning of IOT. >> Chuck: Yeah. >> I mean, I'm a telco, I got to provision a phone, that's get a phone number, connect on the network, and then have sessions go to the base station, and then back to the cloud. Imagine having to provision up and down zillions of times those devices that may get provision once and go away in an hour. >> Right. >> That's still challenging, give you the network fabric. >> Yes. It is going to be a challenge, but I think as common as we can make the physical infrastructure, the better and the easier that's going to be, and as we create more common-- >> Chuck, final question, what's your take from Mobile World Congress? What are you hearing, what's your analysis, commentary, any kind of input you've heard? Obviously, Intel's got a big presence there, your thoughts on what's happening at Mobile World Congress. >> Well, see I'm not at Mobile World Congress, I'm here in Silicon Valley right now, but-- >> John: What have you heard? >> Things are very exciting. I'm mostly focused on the NFE world myself, and there's been just lots and lots of-- >> It's been high profile. >> Yes, and there's been lots of activity, and you know, we've been doing demos and really cool stuff in that area. We haven't announced much of that on the FPGA side, but I think you'll be seeing more-- >> But you're involved, so what's the coolest thing in NFE that you're seeing, because it seems to be crunch time for NFE right now. This is a catalyst point where at least, from my covering NFE, and looking at it, the iterations of it, it's primetime right now for NFE, true? >> Yeah, it's perfect timing, and it's actually perfect timing for FPGA. I'm not trying to just give it a plug. When you look at it, trials have gone on, very significant, lots of learnings from those trials. What we've done is we've identified the bottlenecks, and my group has been working very hard to resolve those bottlenecks, so we can scale and roll out in the next couple of years, and be ready for 5G when it comes. >> Software definer, Chuck Tato, here from Intel, inside theCUBE, breaking down the coverage from Mobile World Congress, as we wind down our day in California, the folks in Spain are just going out. It should be like at 12:00 o'clock at night there, and are going to bed, depending on how beat they are. Again, it's in Barcelona, Spain, it's where it's at. We're covering from here and also talking to folks in Barcelona. We'll have more commentary here in Silicon Valley on the Mobile World Congress after this short break. (techno music)