>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>We continue our coverage here in the cube of AWS reinvent 2020, and we're now joined by guru Vasudeva, who was the chief technology officer at nationwide insurance and a good route. Good afternoon to you. Thanks for joining us here on the cube. Good news. Um, big announcement for you folks in terms of AWS and, uh, making that connection that you have even deeper and even broader going with AWS now is your preferred cloud provider. Um, let's just talk about, about making that kind of a commitment first off on your end. What were some of those key factors, those drivers that led you to say, okay, this is where we really want to sink our resources. >>Yeah. You know, uh, our journey with this that started almost, uh, two years ago, uh, and, uh, what we, uh, were looking for, uh, was a partner, uh, who is leading edge in the cloud capabilities, as well as the ones that are creating new services. Uh, and obviously AWS is definitely, uh, a great partner to do that. And then, uh, we also found that, uh, they have this, uh, AWS next program enterprise next program. So we, uh, found that to be pretty attractive as well, because it's not just about migrating the applications, but also modernizing them, uh, in a waiting. So they are, we're going to really give us not only the technical capability, but also access to talent and best practices. So we really entered into this partnership, uh, with AWS, uh, to do achieve all of the above. >>You know, there's, there's this, um, as you know, it's very popular or, or, um, uh, in Vogue, obviously it's talk about digital transformations, right? There are, women's going undergoing that is complete metamorphosis, uh, of your, uh, your VIT structure. But, but this is where you are. Uh, and you were already kind of in the, in the throws of this or in the midst of this, in terms of accelerating that process and refining that process, uh, what is AWS now bringing to your table and what did you want, what did you need from them to, to get you going a little bit quicker, maybe in the direction you were already going? >>Yeah. You know, one of the, um, like I will give you two answers. One on the technology side, they have got a huge array of services available in AI machine learning, data and analytics. So they're constantly, you know, weighting those things. So it makes it easier for us to really stitch together solutions that, uh, gives a better experience for our customers or for agents or our financial advisors, right. On the process side. Uh, what they really brought to about brought to bear is their own internal methodology for innovation. Uh, so they, uh, we've been able to really partner with our business partners and AWS to apply that methodology, uh, to really see, can we really do those kinds of things in an insurance company, right. And we have found that methodology to be of equal value. Hmm. >>You know, um, I mean, the fact is your portfolio is so broad or, or, or, you know, your arsenal, if you will, 2000 plus applications right here, are you guys up and running and you're moving a little less than half of them to AWS. I mean, this is a huge undertaking and the idea, obviously that to, to maintain business operations as usual. So tell us about that tight rope act. I mean, how, how do you manage that and keep business going, keep operations still humming. And in fact, you're already looking for new kind of efficiencies and new processes that make even a little sharper, a little leaner. Yeah. >>You know, uh, the approach that we took is it's a methodology that I've used with many of our, uh, transformations that I've had the opportunity to lead here at nationwide, uh, where we use a very methodical, repeatable process and we call it, we started with diagnostics. And then once you look at the diagnostics, you build a plan and then you execute the plan and then you go back and see, did it really give you the results and tweak the loop? Right. So our diagnostics methodology starts with looking at an existing application for us, for example, our claims system, uh, or our policy admin system, right. These are very critical systems for a company like us, and you can adjust, you know, migrate them and hope that it'll work out. Right. So instead we did a very methodical approach of diagnosing and saying, technologically architecture wise, what needs to change? >>What are the opportunities for optimizing them instead of just migrate them likewise, as it can really optimize it and migrated at the same time, how about security? What are the different things that we need to do on security wise? Right. And then last but not least is money, right. What does it cost for us on prime and can it cost cheaper? Uh, and if we really apply all of these different lovers, can we make it cheaper in the cloud? So we did all of those four different elements, and we found that methodology to be instrumental in our success story. This year, we migrated our claim system. We migrated our commercial lines policy, uh, admin system, or a personalized policy admin system, our nationwide.com and all of our financial services front ends. So it's a huge, like it's like the heart and soul of the company, uh, and they have, uh, gone extremely well. And we really attribute that to the methodical. I'm looking at all these dimensions. I don't know how you slept. >>I mean, th that, that is a, that's a full slate. Um, and to go back to the four points you were talking about earlier about, you know, the, the, the, the gains you got the last one that caught my eye or one that caught my attention, there was about the, the, uh, bottom line, the fact that you reduced costs that, that you did save money. So it is possible, uh, that this cloud migration, again, this is, uh, on a, uh, Archie overarching level. You can make this migration and go through this enormous transformation and, and still, >>So, yeah, add to the bottom line. Yeah. So the, uh, um, you know, many people these days, you read in the articles, Oh, well, cloud migration not necessarily saves you money, or that's not the real reason to do it. I didn't really want to accept that as an answer. Instead, what we really said is we want it to be better, faster, cheaper, all of the above, right. So we have challenged ourselves to say, um, what would it cost if we were to really keep it on prem and can, what changes we need to make in order to get the efficiency? For example, our claim system, if we were to migrate it like for lying, it would have cost us 25% more to run in the cloud. We said, no, we're going to tweak how we have architected, uh, how many, uh, how much storage we need, what kind of things we provision? Uh, so we changed the architecture and the underpinning and the engineering, and we were able to find that our 20% savings, right. So if you think about it, that's like a 45% swing. Uh, if we had not done the diagnostics after the migration, I would've been like, Oh my God, it actually costs us more money. And that we couldn't really do what what's been the >>Th the big gain in terms of, you talked about claims. So obviously it heart and soul of your company, insurance policies, both on the commercial and the residential side, or the, you know, the personal user. Um, >>I mean, what, what's been the biggest, >>Uh, impact, if you will, in terms of your core business, and then introducing these new technologies and these new efficiencies into the process, >>You know, uh, this year, uh, for us, uh, if you take a look at property and casualty companies like, uh, you know, insurance companies has been a very eventful year, not only with COVID, but also with all the other events that happened with the fires and the various tornadoes and so on. So when, uh, we have more claim volume, we can actually take our, uh, environment up and down seamlessly, right? We can add more capacity, very seamlessly. So that's a beast, uh, premise, if you will, off of the cloud is that you can actually consume more and you don't have to really wait for adding additional capacity. That part has actually worked out really well. And the reverse is true as well. We've been able to actually reduce capacity when we don't need it right on the base level. And on the more innovation level, we've been able to tap into AI machine learning kind of capabilities and stitch together, new experiences in our commercial line space, uh, to deliver, uh, new types of insights, new types of, uh, um, uh, solutions for our business partners. So we have been very pleased with how we've been able to stitch together solutions by kind of tapping into the various services that AWS bonds. >>Yeah, you were, you've been talking about, uh, all these, uh, tremendous innovations in terms of how you go about your business and how you do your business. And certainly you're realizing great benefit and gain from that. What about the other side, the, the, your customers, you know, millions of customers that you have, and as you said, experiencing a number of challenges this year to say the least, but at the end of the day, what has been the bottom line or what is going to be the bottom line for them, >>For them? Um, uh, our, uh, kind of, uh, kind of vision is completely transforming the customer experience that we provide them, uh, by digital capabilities, right? So they should be able to get to any answer that they want, whether it's beyond their cell phone or their computer, and to do that, uh, to provide that kind of service. Uh, I think these kinds of technologies actually enables us to really deliver that kind of a digital transformation. >>What about the security side of all this? Uh, I know that's part of your, of your concern too. I mean, it's certainly an area that that is receiving, uh, and understandably a lot of attention these days in terms of, uh, providing more secure solutions and, and, uh, making sure that there's customer data, which is so precious is protected. Um, in terms of all this activity that you're doing, you've got to put in that layer of security on top of that, right. Which is paramount to your success these days as a company, what kind of focus have you maybe reconfigured in that respect now with regard to security and your customers and, and your operational security too? >>Yeah. So, you know, in the diagnostics methodology that I talked about, security is one of those dimensions that we looked at, how do we secure the information on prem versus in the cloud? Uh, they're not like for, like, we need to apply different techniques, sometimes different technology. Uh, so we built that in from the beginning. And then, uh, the great thing is, you know, we have also learned a lot by working with Amazon, uh, about, uh, how do they do it? In-house right. I mean, they obviously run the biggest if you will, online, um, shopping capability out there and how did they do it? So that's the other kind of access to talent. That's been really helpful. Uh, and we look at this constantly, it says something, it's something that's evolving as new threat actors come on, board or new techniques of attack comes on board with constantly evaluating and making sure that we are fine tuning that security, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. >>What of your headlights hit it now, when you look down the road, uh, I know you're, you're not done with this by any means. Uh, uh, I certainly understand that, but in terms of the next 12 to 18 months, uh, what kind of progress do you want to make and where do you think that you're gonna, you're going to have to where you want to make it the most? >>So on the, uh, on the efficiency side, uh, we've got a pretty big goal, uh, to reduce our expenses, uh, by hundreds of millions of dollars, we spent well over a billion dollars on technology every year, uh, and our cloud migration and optimization is definitely a key lever that we are, you know, uh, pulling. And so for me, uh, B have a target of, um, uh, applications that we wanted to, uh, one of migrate to the cloud and we will be done with 32% of them by the end of this year. And now they're 30 to 32% next year. So we've got ways to go, but in the next couple of years, we would be well on our way to really migrating what we want to migrate to the cloud. So that's definitely a big focus area while delivering savings on the innovation. Go ahead, please go ahead. Yeah. On the innovation side, uh, I think there is so much more to be done, whether it be internet of things or providing new, uh, offerings for our customer, for our agents, for financial advisors. Uh, so there are so many new things that we can do. And now that we've got a repeatable pattern for migration, our energy is going to really shift towards those more innovation, more new and additional experiences. That's where our energy is going to really shift. >>Well, you took a big step today, certainly with the announcement. I know the AWS partnership is one that you put a lot of value on. It certainly has been successful for you, and we wish you all the continued success as well as you, uh, head on into 2021. Thank you for joining us here today. Thanks John.

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>We continue our coverage here in the cube of AWS reinvent 2020, and we're now joined by guru Vasudeva, who was the chief technology officer at nationwide insurance and a good route. Good afternoon to you. Thanks for joining us here on the cube. Good news. Um, big announcement for you folks in terms of AWS and, uh, making that connection that you have even deeper and even broader going with AWS now is your preferred cloud provider. Um, let's just talk about, about making that kind of a commitment first off on your end. What were some of those key factors, those drivers that led you to say, okay, this is where we really want to sink our resources. >>Yeah. You know, uh, our journey with this that started almost, uh, two years ago, uh, and, uh, what we, uh, were looking for, uh, was a partner, uh, who is leading edge in the cloud capabilities, as well as the ones that are creating new services. Uh, and obviously AWS is definitely, uh, a great partner to do that. And then, uh, we also found that, uh, they have this, uh, AWS next program enterprise next program. So we, uh, found that to be pretty attractive as well, because it's not just about migrating the applications, but also modernizing them, uh, in a waiting. So they are, we're going to really give us not only the technical capability, but also access to talent and best practices. So we really entered into this partnership, uh, with AWS, uh, to do achieve all of the above. >>You know, there's, there's this, um, as you know, it's very popular or, or, um, uh, in Vogue, obviously it's talk about digital transformations, right? There are, women's going undergoing that is complete metamorphosis, uh, of your, uh, your VIT structure. But, but this is where you are. Uh, and you were already kind of in the, in the throws of this or in the midst of this, in terms of accelerating that process and refining that process, uh, what is AWS now bringing to your table and what did you want, what did you need from them to, to get you going a little bit quicker, maybe in the direction you were already going? >>Yeah. You know, one of the, um, like I will give you two answers. One on the technology side, they have got a huge array of services available in AI machine learning, data and analytics. So they're constantly, you know, weighting those things. So it makes it easier for us to really stitch together solutions that, uh, gives a better experience for our customers or for agents or our financial advisors, right. On the process side. Uh, what they really brought to about brought to bear is their own internal methodology for innovation. Uh, so they, uh, we've been able to really partner with our business partners and AWS to apply that methodology, uh, to really see, can we really do those kinds of things in an insurance company, right. And we have found that methodology to be of equal value. Hmm. >>You know, um, I mean, the fact is your portfolio is so broad or, or, or, you know, your arsenal, if you will, 2000 plus applications right here, are you guys up and running and you're moving a little less than half of them to AWS. I mean, this is a huge undertaking and the idea, obviously that to, to maintain business operations as usual. So tell us about that tight rope act. I mean, how, how do you manage that and keep business going, keep operations still humming. And in fact, you're already looking for new kind of efficiencies and new processes that make even a little sharper, a little leaner. Yeah. >>You know, uh, the approach that we took is it's a methodology that I've used with many of our, uh, transformations that I've had the opportunity to lead here at nationwide, uh, where we use a very methodical, repeatable process and we call it, we started with diagnostics. And then once you look at the diagnostics, you build a plan and then you execute the plan and then you go back and see, did it really give you the results and tweak the loop? Right. So our diagnostics methodology starts with looking at an existing application for us, for example, our claims system, uh, or our policy admin system, right. These are very critical systems for a company like us, and you can adjust, you know, migrate them and hope that it'll work out. Right. So instead we did a very methodical approach of diagnosing and saying, technologically architecture wise, what needs to change? >>What are the opportunities for optimizing them instead of just migrate them likewise, as it can really optimize it and migrated at the same time, how about security? What are the different things that we need to do on security wise? Right. And then last but not least is money, right. What does it cost for us on prime and can it cost cheaper? Uh, and if we really apply all of these different lovers, can we make it cheaper in the cloud? So we did all of those four different elements, and we found that methodology to be instrumental in our success story. This year, we migrated our claim system. We migrated our commercial lines policy, uh, admin system, or a personalized policy admin system, our nationwide.com and all of our financial services front ends. So it's a huge, like it's like the heart and soul of the company, uh, and they have, uh, gone extremely well. And we really attribute that to the methodical. I'm looking at all these dimensions. I don't know how you slept. >>I mean, th that, that is a, that's a full slate. Um, and to go back to the four points you were talking about earlier about, you know, the, the, the, the gains you got the last one that caught my eye or one that caught my attention, there was about the, the, uh, bottom line, the fact that you reduced costs that, that you did save money. So it is possible, uh, that this cloud migration, again, this is, uh, on a, uh, Archie overarching level. You can make this migration and go through this enormous transformation and, and still, >>So, yeah, add to the bottom line. Yeah. So the, uh, um, you know, many people these days, you read in the articles, Oh, well, cloud migration not necessarily saves you money, or that's not the real reason to do it. I didn't really want to accept that as an answer. Instead, what we really said is we want it to be better, faster, cheaper, all of the above, right. So we have challenged ourselves to say, um, what would it cost if we were to really keep it on prem and can, what changes we need to make in order to get the efficiency? For example, our claim system, if we were to migrate it like for lying, it would have cost us 25% more to run in the cloud. We said, no, we're going to tweak how we have architected, uh, how many, uh, how much storage we need, what kind of things we provision? Uh, so we changed the architecture and the underpinning and the engineering, and we were able to find that our 20% savings, right. So if you think about it, that's like a 45% swing. Uh, if we had not done the diagnostics after the migration, I would've been like, Oh my God, it actually costs us more money. And that we couldn't really do what what's been the >>Th the big gain in terms of, you talked about claims. So obviously it heart and soul of your company, insurance policies, both on the commercial and the residential side, or the, you know, the personal user. Um, >>I mean, what, what's been the biggest, >>Uh, impact, if you will, in terms of your core business, and then introducing these new technologies and these new efficiencies into the process, >>You know, uh, this year, uh, for us, uh, if you take a look at property and casualty companies like, uh, you know, insurance companies has been a very eventful year, not only with COVID, but also with all the other events that happened with the fires and the various tornadoes and so on. So when, uh, we have more claim volume, we can actually take our, uh, environment up and down seamlessly, right? We can add more capacity, very seamlessly. So that's a beast, uh, premise, if you will, off of the cloud is that you can actually consume more and you don't have to really wait for adding additional capacity. That part has actually worked out really well. And the reverse is true as well. We've been able to actually reduce capacity when we don't need it right on the base level. And on the more innovation level, we've been able to tap into AI machine learning kind of capabilities and stitch together, new experiences in our commercial line space, uh, to deliver, uh, new types of insights, new types of, uh, um, uh, solutions for our business partners. So we have been very pleased with how we've been able to stitch together solutions by kind of tapping into the various services that AWS bonds. >>Yeah, you were, you've been talking about, uh, all these, uh, tremendous innovations in terms of how you go about your business and how you do your business. And certainly you're realizing great benefit and gain from that. What about the other side, the, the, your customers, you know, millions of customers that you have, and as you said, experiencing a number of challenges this year to say the least, but at the end of the day, what has been the bottom line or what is going to be the bottom line for them, >>For them? Um, uh, our, uh, kind of, uh, kind of vision is completely transforming the customer experience that we provide them, uh, by digital capabilities, right? So they should be able to get to any answer that they want, whether it's beyond their cell phone or their computer, and to do that, uh, to provide that kind of service. Uh, I think these kinds of technologies actually enables us to really deliver that kind of a digital transformation. >>What about the security side of all this? Uh, I know that's part of your, of your concern too. I mean, it's certainly an area that that is receiving, uh, and understandably a lot of attention these days in terms of, uh, providing more secure solutions and, and, uh, making sure that there's customer data, which is so precious is protected. Um, in terms of all this activity that you're doing, you've got to put in that layer of security on top of that, right. Which is paramount to your success these days as a company, what kind of focus have you maybe reconfigured in that respect now with regard to security and your customers and, and your operational security too? >>Yeah. So, you know, in the diagnostics methodology that I talked about, security is one of those dimensions that we looked at, how do we secure the information on prem versus in the cloud? Uh, they're not like for, like, we need to apply different techniques, sometimes different technology. Uh, so we built that in from the beginning. And then, uh, the great thing is, you know, we have also learned a lot by working with Amazon, uh, about, uh, how do they do it? In-house right. I mean, they obviously run the biggest if you will, online, um, shopping capability out there and how did they do it? So that's the other kind of access to talent. That's been really helpful. Uh, and we look at this constantly, it says something, it's something that's evolving as new threat actors come on, board or new techniques of attack comes on board with constantly evaluating and making sure that we are fine tuning that security, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. >>What of your headlights hit it now, when you look down the road, uh, I know you're, you're not done with this by any means. Uh, uh, I certainly understand that, but in terms of the next 12 to 18 months, uh, what kind of progress do you want to make and where do you think that you're gonna, you're going to have to where you want to make it the most? >>So on the, uh, on the efficiency side, uh, we've got a pretty big goal, uh, to reduce our expenses, uh, by hundreds of millions of dollars, we spent well over a billion dollars on technology every year, uh, and our cloud migration and optimization is definitely a key lever that we are, you know, uh, pulling. And so for me, uh, B have a target of, um, uh, applications that we wanted to, uh, one of migrate to the cloud and we will be done with 32% of them by the end of this year. And now they're 30 to 32% next year. So we've got ways to go, but in the next couple of years, we would be well on our way to really migrating what we want to migrate to the cloud. So that's definitely a big focus area while delivering savings on the innovation. Go ahead, please go ahead. Yeah. On the innovation side, uh, I think there is so much more to be done, whether it be internet of things or providing new, uh, offerings for our customer, for our agents, for financial advisors. Uh, so there are so many new things that we can do. And now that we've got a repeatable pattern for migration, our energy is going to really shift towards those more innovation, more new and additional experiences. That's where our energy is going to really shift. >>Well, you took a big step today, certainly with the announcement. I know the AWS partnership is one that you put a lot of value on. It certainly has been successful for you, and we wish you all the continued success as well as you, uh, head on into 2021. Thank you for joining us here today. Thanks John.

>>LA Las Vegas. It's the cube covering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and don't along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 19 from Las Vegas. This is our third day of covering the event. Lots of conversations, two cube sets, as John would say, a Canon of cube content. Lisa Martin here with my esteemed colleague Justin. Um, and Justin, I have a couple of guests joining us. We've got to my left jus bhandarkar had a product for FreshWorks inc and Broughton Sahar VP and GM of machine learning services from Amazon. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. You still have voices, which is very impressive after three days. A lot of practice it does or hiding out in quiet areas. Right? So Tay, Jess FreshWorks inc I souping on the website. Justin and I were talking before we went live, you guys have 150,000 of businesses using your technologies. I hadn't heard of FreshWorks, but it looks like it's about customer relationship management and customer experience. Tell our audience a little bit about what FreshWorks is and the technologies that you deliver. >>Okay. So we were founded in, uh, back in 2010. We were born in the cloud in the AWS cloud. Uh, and we started off as a, uh, customer support, uh, application. And we have grown on to now deliver a suite of customer engagement applications that include marketing and automation capabilities, CRM, uh, customer support and customer success. And so what we really are looking after is, is to deliver a value across the entire customer journey. Uh, you know, >>so there's been some big legacy CRMs around for a long time. What was the market opportunity back in 2010? The FreshWorks folks saw there's a gap here. We need to fill it. >>Yeah. We, well, we, uh, like any other startup, we decided to focus in one place and our focus, uh, was really around SMBs. We felt like SMBs were underserved and, uh, we felt like as rich as the technology is and the experiences have become, uh, we felt like we needed to democratize access to that. And because SMBs tended to have fewer resources and maybe, uh, in some cases weren't as tech savvy. Uh, we felt like they were kind of getting left behind. And so we wanted to step in there and make them whole and kind of offer them the same set of richness that you would expect, you know, for a large enterprise customer to have. And for that actually working in conjunction with AWS has been super important for us cause we have really been able to deliver on that promise. >>Maybe you can tell us a bit about the relationship between yourselves and FreshWorks. I believe the fresh works is built completely on AWS and always has been. >>Yeah. So how did that relationship begin and how has that grown as, as FreshWorks has grown into, into this massive company that you've become? >>Yeah, so, um, FreshWorks got off on AWS and then when we launched Sage maker and as you know, we have 700 tens of thousands of customers today doing the machine learning on AWS and on Sage maker. What customers have seen is that they get significant benefits in terms of features and developer productivity. And lower cost of ownership and FreshWorks saw that they could reduce that time to getting the models out by an order of magnitude. And their house was saying for example, that they used to take couple of days to get the models out to production. And by using Sage maker they were able to get it down to a couple of hours. And we have seen this happen with many other customers into it. For example, got down from six months to about a week. And just because of the productivity, performance and cost benefits that Sage makeup provides, you have seen the house FreshWorks and then many other companies, many of the customers more to AWS for the machine learning. >>Are they what are you using this machine learning to do? So you have all of these different models and we were talking a little bit before we went live about how you, how you use different models for different customers. But what are those models actually used to do? What service do they provide? >>Okay. So as you know, we have a set of these applications which are built around functional use cases. And so if you take a given customer, they might have multiple products from us and they might be doing multiple different use cases on us. And so you can quickly think of this as being, you know, maybe three to five specific use cases that require, you know, machine learning, you know, assistance. Uh, and so as a result, as we scale this up to the our entire, uh, set of customers, we now literally have thousands and thousands of these ML models that we have built, addressed, uh, geared to, uh, addressing specific pain points of that particular customer. Right? So it's all about catering the ML model for a specific use in a specific context. And then it's not only just about building it, uh, which, you know, obviously Sage Merker does a great job of helping us do that, but it's also about maintaining it over time and making sure that it stays relevant and fresh and so on. >>And again, working with AWS has been instrumental in for us to kind of stay ahead of that curve and make sure that we're continuing to drive accuracy and scale and simplicity into, uh, into, you know, into those particular use cases for customers. Then, you know, we released many features this year that makes this important. So one of the things that we have as part of Sage maker studio is a Sage make a model monitor that automatically monitors predictions and allows a customer to say, when are those predictions not being of the appropriate quality? And then we can send an allowance. So we are really building Sage maker out as a machine learning platform that they get all of the undifferentiated heavy lifting so that customers can really focus on what they need to do to build a model, train the model, and deploy the model. >>So in terms of your users, you mentioned too just the, the, the gap in the market back in 2010 was the small, the SMB space that probably something like a Salesforce or an Oracle was possibly too complex for an SMB. But now we're talking about emerging technologies, machine learning, AI. What is the appetite for the smaller, are you dealing with, I guess my question is a lot of SMBs that are born in the cloud companies, so smaller and more agile and more willing to understand and embrace technology versus legacy SMBs that might be, I don't want to say technology averse but not born within it. >>Yeah. So, so we, uh, we run through the entire gamut. So we obviously have, uh, you know, Silicon Valley based startups. We have more traditional companies around travel and hospitality and real estate and other, other verticals. Uh, and what we have really, really seen the commonality has been is that, uh, as good as the technology has become for AI and ML, uh, there is still some disparity in how people are able to consume it. Right. And if you have a lot of resources, a lot of skilled engineers, it is very easy for you to do that, thanks to all of the capabilities that are delivered by AWS. But in the other cases, uh, they do require more handholding specifically for those use cases that really impact them. Like how do I reduce my churn amongst customers? How do I maximize the chances of closing a deal? How do I make sure that the marketing campaign I run delivers on all of the, the objectives that I have? Right? So all of those things they re they need help. And so we are in there to kind of simplify that for them and leveraging all of the underlying technologies from AWS. We're able to deliver that together >>and going in from the beginning all in on AWS when AWS was only about four years old or so, right? Back in 2010. Um, talk to me about the opportunities that that is opened up for FreshWorks to evolve, you know, offer a suite of different solutions. Talk to us about Amazon and AWS is evolution and how quickly that they're evolving and developing new products and services as like fuel for FreshWorks business. >>Yeah. So really the big focus that we have always had is to deliver the right experiences that really impact end users. For those particular functional use cases around marketing, sales support and customer success, right? So as part of that, while we are focusing on on that experience, we also need to be focusing on delivering all of these services at scale, right? And with all the right security built in and all the right, uh, other, you know, tool set that that's built in. And so, so the synergy that we have found with between us and AWS is that we're able to rely on all of the right things for AWS to deliver upon. So they are also all about offering simple API APIs about making things scalable right from the get go about being extremely cost effective about uh, continuing to drive innovation. And these are all the things that drive us as well for our customers. And so it's been a very complimentary partnership from that respect is, you know, we kind of like go on this journey together and in our customer obsession is a key leadership principle. And so everything we do at AWS is really working back from the customer and making sure that we are really addressing all of the pain points. And making them successful? >>Well, because customer experience is a D it can be a deal breaker for companies, right? You think of you have a problem with your ISP and you call in or you go through social media or um, a chat bot and you can't get that problem resolved. As a consumer, you have so much choice to go to another vendor who might be able to better meet your needs or have the use the data to make sure they already know what's the problem. It's the same thing in the CRM space, right? If businesses don't have the right technologies to use the data to really know their customers, this customer's churn. And so it's really, we see CX as a driving force in any industry that if you can't get that right, customers are going to go, I'm going to go somewhere else because I have that choice. >>Yes. I mean customer expectations that you said have risen customer inpatients with bad experiences gone down. And one of the things that we have really focused on is as we go through this entire journey, we collect the data of that customer's journey. And we learn from it and we're able to visualize that for the sales person or the tech support person who's actually working with that customer. So they can actually see the journey of that customer. They visited the pricing page a couple of times, maybe they're interested to make a purchase or they visited the cancellation policy page. Okay, maybe I need to do something about that. Right. And so that is really been instrumental kind of in success success. And you know, what we are doing at AWS and Sage maker is making sure that all our customers get access to this technology. And that is where we start with how do we make machine learning accessible to all developers so that all of the experiences that we have gained at Amazon from investing in machine learning for the last 20 years, we take all of those learnings and make it available to our customers so they can apply machine learning for transforming their businesses. >>Yup. >>And that's exactly what it can be as transformational. Well gentlemen, thank you very much for joining Justin and me on the program talking to us about FreshWorks. What you guys are doing with Amazon and the opportunity to really dial up that CX experience with machine learning. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you very much. >>All right. For my car is Justin Warren. I'm Lisa Martin and your Archie, the cube from AWS. Reinvent 19 from Vegas. Thanks.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the cubes Live coverage of Del World Technologies Here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have two guests on the seven, both both Cube veterans. So we have Varun Cabra. He is the VP product Marketing Cloud Delhi Emcee and Moeneeb unit. Minute Soudan VP Solutions Product marketing at VM. Where. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having >> thanks for having us. So we just had the keynote address we heard from Michael Dell Satya Nadella Pack Girl Singer It's a real who's who of this of this ecosystem. Break it down for us. What? What did we hear? What is what is sort of the most exciting thing from your perspective? >> So, Rebecca, what? What we hear from customers again and again is it's a multi cloud world, right? Everybody has multiple cloud deployments, but we saw that mentioned five on average cloud architectures in customer environments and what we keep hearing from them is they There are operational silos that developed as part of the to set the fellas that are different. The machine formats. All of these things just lied a lot of lead to a lot of operational silos in complexity, and the customers are overwhelming or willingly asking William C. As well as being Where is that? How do we reduce this complexity? How do we we'll be able to move, were close together? How do we manage all of this in a common framework and reduce some of the complexity? So there's really they could take advantage off the promise of Monte Club. >> Yeah, so many. The Cube goes to all the big industry shows. I feel like everywhere I go used to be, you know, it's like intel and in video, up on stage for the next generation. Well, for the last year, it felt like, you know, patent Sanjay, or, you know, somebody like that, you know, up on stage with Google Cloud of a couple of years ago, there was Sanjay up on St Come here. They're searching Adela up on stage. So let's talk about that public cloud piece China. We know you know the relationship with a wsbn were clad in a ws sent ripples through the industry on you know, the guru cloud piece. So tell us what's new and different peace when it comes to come up to public clouded. How does that fit with in relation to all the other clouds? >> Sure, no, I'll amplify. You know what Aaron said, Right? We think about customer choice first. Andrea Lee, customer choice. As you know, you got multiple cloud providers. We've seen customers make this choice off. I need to make this, you know, a multi cloud world. Why're they going towards the multi clothing world? It's because applications air going there on really well, where strategy has bean to say, How do we empower customers without choice? Are you know, eight of us partnership is as strong as ever, but we continue to eat away there, and that was their first going to choice a platform. And Patty alluded to this on the stage. We have four thousand cloud provider partners right on the four thousand block provider partners we've built over the years, and that includes, you know, not small names. They include IBM. They, like, you know, they've got in Iraq space. Some of the biggest cloud providers. So our strategy is always being. How do we take our stack and and lighted and as many public laws? It's possible. So we took the first step off IBM. Then you know, about four thousand. You know, other plot providers being Rackspace, Fujitsu, it's Archie. Then came Amazon. I'm is on being the choice of destination for a lot of public clouds. Today we kind of further extend that with Microsoft and, you know, a few weeks ago with Google, right? So there's really about customer choice and customers when they want the hybrid multi Claude fees his abdomen right. You got two worlds, you couldn't existing application and you're looking Just get some scale out of that existing application and you're building a lot of, you know, native cloud native applications. They want this, you know, in multiple places. >> All right, so if I could just drilled down one level deep, you know? So if I'm in as your customer today, my understanding it's Veum or STD. Sea Stack. What does that mean? You know what I use, You know? How is that? You can feel compare? Do I use the Microsoft? You know System Center. Am I using V Center? You know, >> shark now, and this is really again in an abdomen. Calm conversation, right where they were multiple announcements in here just to unpack them there. It's like, Hey, we had the Del Technologies Cloud platform. The Del Technologies clock platform is powered by, you know, Delhi emcee infrastructure and be aware Cloud Foundation on top, where slicing your full computer network storage with the sphere of visa and a sex and management. Right. And the second part was really We've got being where cloud on a deli emcee. The system brings a lot of the workloads which stood in public clouds. We're seeing this repatriation off workloads back on. You know, on the data center are the edge. This is really driven by a lot of customers and who have built native I pee in the public cloud beyond Amazon beat ashore who want to now bring some of those workloads closer to the, you know, data center or the edge. Now this comes to how do I take my azure workloads and bring it closer to the edge or my data center? Why's that? I need you know, we have large customers, you know. You know, large customers multinational. They have, you know, five hundred thousand employees, ninety locations will wide. Who built to I p or when I say I p applications natively in cloud suddenly for five thousand employees and ninety locations, they're going ingress egress. Traffic to the cloud public cloud is huge. How do I bring it closer to my data centers? Right. And this is where taking us your workloads. Bringing them, you know, on prime closer salts. That big problem for them. Now, how do I take that workloads and bring them closer? Is that where we landed in the Veum wear on Del, you know AMC Infrastructure? Because this big sea closer to the data center gives me either Lowell agency data governance and you know, control as well as flexibility to bring these work clothes back on. Right? So the two tangent that you're driving both your cloud growth and back to the edge The second tangent of growth or explosion is cloud native workloads. We're able to bring them closer. Your data center is freely though the value proposition, right? >> Well, we heard so much about that on the main stage this morning about just how differently with modern workforce works in terms of the number of devices that used the different locations they are when they are doing the tasks of their job. >> You talk a little bit about the >> specifics in terms of customers you're working with. You don't need a name names. But just how you are enabling the >> way get feedback from customers in all industries, right? So you don't even share a few as well Way have large banks that are, you know, they're standardized their workloads on VM where today, right as as have many Morgan is ations, and they're looking for the flexibility to be able to move stuff to the cloud or moving back on premises and not have to reformat, not have to change that machine formats and just make it a little easy. They want the flexibility to be able to run applications in their bank branches right in the cloud, right? But then they don't they don't necessarily want adopt a new machine format for a new standardized platform. That's really what Thie azure announcement helps them do, Just like with eight of us, can now move workloads seamlessly to azure USVI center. Use your other you know, tools that you're familiar with today. Already to be ableto provision in your work clothes. All >> right, so for and what? Wonder if we could drill into the stack a little bit here? You know, I went to the Microsoft show last year, and it was like, Oh, WSSD is very different than Azure Stack even if you look at the box and it's very much the same underneath the covers, there was a lot of discussion of the ex rail. We know how fast that's been growing. Can you believe there's two pieces? This there's the VCF on Vieques rail and then, you know, just help. Help explain >> s o for the Del Technologies Cloud Platform announcement, which is, as you said, VX rail in first hcea infrastructure with Mia McLeod foundations tightly integrated, right, so that the storage compute and networking capabilities of off the immortal foundation are all incorporated and taken advantage off it. In the end structure. This is all about making things easier to consume, right, producing the complexity for customers. When they get the X trail, they overwhelmingly tell us they want to use the metal foundations to be able to manage and automate those workloads. So we're packaging this up out of the box. So when customers get it, they have That's cloud experience on premises without the complexity of having to deploy it because it's already integrated, cited the engineering teams have actually worked together. And then you can then, as we mentioned, extend those workloads to public loud, using the same tools, the same, the MSR foundation tools. >> And, you know, uh, we built on Cloud Foundation for a while, and I'm sure you followed us on the Cloud Foundation. And that has bean when you know yes, we talk about consistent infrastructure, consistent operations, this hybrid cloud world and what we really mean. Is that really where? Cloud foundation stack, right? So when we talk about the emcee on eight of us, is that Cloud foundation stack running inside of Amazon? When we talk about you know, our partnership with the shore, he's not being where Cloud Foundation stack running on a shore. We talk about this four thousand partners. Cloud certified IBM. It is the Cloud Foundation stack and the key components being pulled. Stack the Sphere v. Santana Sex and there's a critical part in Cloud Foundation called lifecycle management. It's, you know, it's missed quite easily, right? The benefit of running a public cloud. The key through the attributes you get is you know, you get everything as a service, you get all your infrastructure of software. And the third part is you don't spend any time maintaining the interoperability between you compete network storage. And that is a huge deal for customers. They spent a lot of time just maintaining this interrupt and, you know, view Marie Claude Foundation has this life cycle manager which solves that problem. Not not just Kee. >> Thank you for bringing it up because, right, one of the big differences you talk about Public Cloud, go talk to your customer and say, Hey, what version of Microsoft Azure are you running and the laughter you and say like, Well, Microsoft takes care of that. Well, when I differentiate and I say Okay, well, I want to run the the same stack in my environment. How do I keep that up today? We know the VM where you know customers like there's lots of incentives to get them there, but oftentimes they're n minus one two or something like that. So how do we manage and make sure that it's more cloud like enough today? >> Yeah, absolutely. So. So there's two ways to do that to one of them is because the V m. A and L E M C team during working on engineering closely together, we're going to have the latest word in supported right right out the gate. So you have an update, you know that it's gonna work on your your hardware or vice versa. So that's one level and then with via MacLeod and L E M C. We're also providing the ability to basically have hands off management and have that infrastructure running your data center or your eyes locations, but at the same time not have to manage it. You leave that management to tell technologies into somewhere. To be able to manage that solution for you is really, as Moody said, bringing that public loud experience to your own premise. Locations is long, >> and I think that's one of the big, different trainers that's going to come right. People want to get that consumption model, and they're trying to say, Hey, how do I build my own data center, maintain it, but the same time I want to rely on, you know, dull and beyond Where to come and help us build it together. Right? And the second part of announcement was really heavy and wear dull on the d l E M C. Is that Manager's offered the demo you saw from June. Yang was being able to have a consumption interface where you could connect click of a button, roll it back into a data center as well. It's an edge because you have real Italy. Very little skill sets where night in the edge environment and as EJ Compute needs become more prolific with five g i ot devices, you need that same kind of data governance model and data center model. There is well and not really the beauty off, you know, coming to be aware. And Delta, you know Del DMC del. Technology's power is to maintain that everywhere, right? I >> won't ask you about >> innovation. One of the things that's really striking during American executive, Even though I obviously have my own customers, >> I think it really comes down to listening to customers. Write as as Del Technologies is Liam, where we have the advantage of working with so many customers, hundreds of thousand customers around the world we get to hear and listen and understand what are the cutting edge things that customers are looking for? And then we can not take that back to customers like Bank of America who may have taught about certain scenarios right that we will learn from. But they may not have thought about other industries where things could be applicable to their street, so that drives a lot of our innovation. Very. We are very proud about the fact that we're customer focused. Our invasion is really driven by listening to customers on. And, you know, having smart people just work on this one to work on this problems. And, >> you know, customer wise is a big deal customer choice. That's why we're doing what we're doing with multiple cloud providers, right? And I think this is really a key, too. If you just look at being where's innovation were already talking about this multi claude world where it was like, Hey, you've got workloads natively. So we How do you manage? Those were already ahead and thinking about, you know come in eighties with acquisition of Hip Tio and you if you think about it, you know, we've done this innovation in the cloud space established this hybrid credibility on we've launched with Del Technology. Now we're already ahead in this multi cloud operational model. We're already ahead in this coop in eighties. Evolution will bring it back with the family and listen to the customers for choice. Because of the end of the day, we're here to South customer problems. I >> think that's another dimension of choice that we offer, which is both traditional applications as well as applications of the future that will increasingly, because container based, >> yeah, I just wonder if you could spend on a little bit. You know what? One of the things I said via Moore is great. It really simplified and by environment, I go back. Fifteen years ago, one of things that did is let me take my old application that was probably long in the tooth. Begin with my heart was out of date, my operating system at eight, sticking in of'em and leave it for another five years, and the users that are like, Oh my gosh, I'd need an update. How do we get beyond that and allow this joint solution to be an accelerant for applications? >> Yeah, and I think you know the application is probably the crux of the business, right? >> We'Ll call in the tent from >> change applications of Evolve. This is actually the evolution journey of itself is where they used to be, like support systems. Now they become actually translate to business dollars because, you know, the first thing that your customer awful customer touches is an application and you can drive business value from it. And customers are thinking about this old applications and new applications. And they have to start thinking about where do I take my applications? Where do they need to line and then make a choice off? What infrastructures? The best black mom for it. So really can't flip the thing on. Don't think infrastructure first and then retrospect APS to it. I think at first and then make a charge on infrastructure based on the application need and and really look like you said being where kind of took the abstraction layer away from infrastructure and make sure that you'll be EMS could run everywhere. We're taking the same for applications to say. Doesn't matter if it's of'Em based. It's a cloud native will give you the same, you know, inconsistent infrastructure in operations. >> Okay, we're in that last thing. Could you just tell us of the announcements that were made? What's available today? What's coming later this year? >> Absolutely So Del Technologies Cloud Platform that's based on the X Trail and via MacLeod Foundation is available now as an integrated solution via MacLeod and Daddy and see the fully managed offer is available in >> the second half of this >> year. It's invader right now. And as you saw, we have really good feedback >> from our customers. And then I think >> the, uh, the Azure BMR Solutions offer will be available soon as well. >> All right, well, Varun and many Congratulations on the progress. We look forward to talking to the customers as they roll this out, and Rebecca and I will be back with lots more coverage here. Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. Little coverage to sets three days, tenth year, The Cube at M. C and L World. I'm still many men. And thanks so much for watching

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Stu minimun with wiki bond and welcome to another wiki bond the cube digital community event this one sponsored by Dell EMC of course it's a big week in the industry VMware is having their big European show in Barcelona VMworld and while we are not there in person we have some news that we want to dig into with Dell EMC so like all of our digital community events we're gonna have about 25 minutes of video and then afterwards we're going to have a crowd chat we're gonna have a panel where you have the opportunity to dig in ask your questions give us your viewpoint and talk about everything that's going on so it's important to pay attention think about what questions participate in the crowd chat afterward and thanks so much for joining us talk about the business issues of the day to help us frame this discussion I'm happy to welcome back to the program Pete manka who's the senior vice president with converged infrastructure and solutions engineering at Dell MC Pete great to see you great see you Tuesday all right so Pete converged infrastructures come a long way you and I have a lot of history in this space you know more than a decade now we've been in here so but from a customer standpoint you know this has matured a lot I wouldn't want you to start out give us the customer perspective you know what was convergent restrictor designed to do how is it living up to that and you know what's the state of it today sure well as you said we've got a long history in this and ten years ago we started this business to really simplify IT operations for our customers and we tried to remove the silos between storage compute and networking management and we're doing that we created this market called converged infrastructure by converging the management of those three siloed operations in doing so we added a tremendous amount of value for our customers fast forward now over the years earlier this year we come up with a product that the BX block 1000 that allows us to scale considerably greater within a single environment adding more value to our customer we're very customer driven at Dell EMC as you know and so we talked to our customers again and said what else do you want what else do you want and they pushed us for more automation in more monitoring support for the product and that's really what we're here to talk about today is how we get from simplifying IT operations for customers through allowing scale architectures to eventually automating the customers environment for them yeah when you talk about simplification that the the industry has really been really galvanized gotten really excited at hyper-converged infrastructure and I hear simple that's kind of what HCI is gonna do Dell of course has both converged and hyper-converged we've talked a lot as to how they both fit maybe now you know give give us the update as to you know the relevance of CI today while HCI is still continuing to grow really that sure yeah HDI is a hot market obviously and it is growing fast and customers should be excited about HDI because it's a great solution right it enables the customers get an application up and running very quickly and it's great for scale out architectures you want to add symmetric type nodes and skill oh you're at your application your architecture it's great for that but like all architectures it doesn't fit all solutions or all problems for the customers and there's a place for CI and there's a place for HCI the end you think about HCI versus CI CI is great for asymmetrically scaling architectures you want to have more storage more networking more memory inside your servers more compute you can do that through a CI portfolio and for customers who need that asymmetrical scaling for customers who need high availability very efficient scale type storage environments scale of compute environments you can do that through a CI platform much more efficiently than you can through other platforms in the market alright Pete you mentioned that there was announcement earlier in the year that the VX block 1000 so for those that don't have hauled of history like us that followed from the V block of the BX block and now the 1000 helped remind us what was different about this from things in the past sure when we first started out in the conversion structure business we had blocks that were specific to storage configurations if you wanted a unity or v-max you had to buy a specific model of our of our VX block product line that's great but we realize customers and customers told us they wanted a mix environment they wanted to have a multi-use environment in their block so we created the VX block 1000 announced in February and it allows you to mix and match your storage sand bar along with your compute environment and scales out at a much greater capacity than we could through the original block design so and we're providing the customer a much larger footprint managed by within a single block but also a choice allowing them to have multiple application configurations within the same block all right so people now what what's Del DMC doing to bring converged infrastructure for it even more how are we expanding you know what it's gonna do for customers and the problems they're looking to solve yeah right so again we went back to our customers that said ok tell us your experience with block you tell us what you like tell us what you don't like and they love the product it's been a very successful product they said we want more automation we want more monitoring you want the ability to see what's happening as well as automate workflows and procedures that we have to do to get our workloads up and running quicker and more automated fashion so what we're gonna talk about today is how we're going to do that we're going to provide more automation capabilities and the ability to monitor through our VM work you realize suite toolset alright great Pete I appreciate you helping kind of lay the groundwork we're gonna be back in a quick second one of your peers from Dell MC to dig into the product so stay with us we'll be back right after this this quick break [Music] vx block system 1000 simplifies IT accelerates the pace of innovation and reduces operating costs storage compute networking and virtualization components are all unified in a single system transforming operations and delivering better business outcomes faster this is achieved by five foundational pillars that set Dell EMC apart as the leading data center solutions provider each VX blocks system 1000 is engineered manufactured managed sustained and supported as one welcome back joining me to dig into this announcement is Dan Mita who's the vice president of converged infrastructure engineering at Dell EMC damn thanks for joining us thanks for having me all right so Pete kind of teased out of what we're doing here talked about what we've been building on for the last ten years in the converging infrastructure industry please elaborate you know what this is and shuttle from there yeah absolutely so to your point we know customers have been buying VX blocks and V blocks for the last ten years and there's lots of good reasons behind all of that we also know that customers been asking us for better monitoring better reporting and more orchestration capabilities we this announcement we think we're meeting those challenges so there's three things that I'd like to talk about one is we're gonna help customers raise the bar around awareness of what's going on within the environment we'll do that through health checks and dashboards performance dashboarding real-time alerting for the first time the second thing we'll talk about is we talked about a different level of automation than we've ever had before when it comes to orchestration we'll be introducing the ability to set up the services necessary to run orchestrated workflows and then our intention is to bring to market those engineered workflows and lastly would be you know analytics deeper analytics for customers that want to go even further into why their system is drifted from a known good state we're gonna give them the capabilities to see that great so Dan I think back from the earliest days that you know Vblock was always architected to you know transform the way operations are done what really differentiates this you know how important is there are things like the analytics of you're doing yeah sure so you're right today our customers use element managers to do most of that what this tool will allow them to do is kind of abstract a lot of the complexity folk in the element managers themselves if you think about an example where our customer wants to provision an ESXi host add it to a cluster and you say a Power Max bulan we know there's about a dozen manual steps to do that it cuts across four element managers and that also means you're going to be touching your administrators across compute network storage and virtualization with this single tool that will guide you first by checking the environment taking you through an orderly set of questions or inputs and then lastly validating the environment we know that we're going to help customers eliminate any undue harm that might do to an environment but we're also gonna save them time effort and money by getting it done quicker ok so Dan it sounds like there's a new suite of software explain it exactly what is it and how do all these pieces fit together yeah so there's three pieces in this week foundational is what we call the X blocks central so the X Box central is going to go out mandatory with all new VX blocks we're also going to make it available to our customers running older 300 500 and 700 family the X blocks and we'll provide a migration path for customers that are using vision today that's the tool that's going to allow them to do that performance health and RCM compliance dashboarding as well as do metrics based in real-time alerting one loved one step up from that one layer up from that is what we call the X block orchestration so this this product is being built underneath the V realize operations or excuse me orchestration tool and it's essentially like I said it's going to provide those all of those tools for setting up the services to run the workflows and then we'll provide those workflows so that example that I gave just a minute ago about provisioning that host will have a workflow from that right out of the gate ok so you mentioned the the vir ops thing you know VMware has always been a you know a very important piece of the whole stack there's yeah be in front of everything in the product line while you're announcing it this week at you know vmworld your and you know explain a little bit more that integration between the VMware pieces so you mentioned V Rob's and that's the third piece in this suite right so that is that it's going to provide us the dashboarding to provide all of that detailed analytics so if you think about it we're using V realized opera orchestra ssin as a workflow engine we're using V ROPS for that intelligent insight into the operations as a framework for the things that we're doing but essentially what we've given customers at this point is a framework for a cloud management or a cloud operations model sitting on top of a converged infrastructure alright Dan thanks for explaining all that now we're gonna throw it over to a customer to really hear what they think of this announcement when we started to talk about the needs to innovate within business technology and move forward with the business we knew we had to advance our technology offerings standardize our data center and help bring all our technology to current date vs block allowed us to do that in one purchase and also allowed us to basically bring our entire data center ten years forward with one step the benefits we've seen from the X block from my side of the house I now have that sleep at night capability because I have full high availability I have industry-leading technology the performance is there their applications are now more available we now have a platform where we can modernize our entire system we can add blades we can add storage we can add networking as we need it out of the box all knowing that it's been engineered and architected to work together it has literally set it and forget it for us we go about our daily business and now we've transitioned from a maintenance time set and a maintenance mindset to now we can participate in meetings to help drive business innovation help drive digital transformation within our company and really be that true IT strategic partner the business is looking for with the implementation of VX blocks central upcoming we should be able to get a better idea of what's going on in our VX block through one dashboard we're very sensitive about the number of dashboards we try to view do the whole death bi dashboard situation especially for a small team we really believe yes block central is going to be beneficial for us to have a quick health overview of our entire unit encompassing all components as we discussed additional features coming out for the VX block one of the more interesting ones for me was to see the integration of VMware's be realized product into the VX block most importantly focused around orchestration and analytics that's something that we don't do a lot of right now but as our company continues to grow and we continue to expand our VX block into additional offerings I can see that being beneficial especially for our small team being able to you know or orchestrate and automate kind of daily tasks that we do now may benefit our team in the future and then the analytics piece as we continue to be a almost a service provider for our business partners having that analytic information available to us could be very beneficial from a from a cost revenue standpoint for us to show kind of the return on investment for our company one of the things that we kind of look forward to that the opportunities of VX block is going to give us given the feature set that's coming out is the ability to use automation for some of our daily business tasks that maybe is something as simple as moving a virtual machine from one host to another that seems pretty mundane at this point but as our company grows and workloads get more complex having the automation availability to be able to do that and have VMware do that on its own it's going to benefit our team always love hearing from customers I'm Peter Burris here in our Palo Alto studios let's also hear from a very important partner in this overall announcement that's VMware we've got OJ Singh who's a senior vice president and general manager the cloud management business unit at VMware with us AJ welcome to the cube thank you Peter of that to be here so Archie we've been hearing a lot of great new technology about you know converged infrastructure and how you do better automation and how you do better you know discovery and whatnot associated with it but these technologies been for around for a while and VMware has been a crucial partner of this journey for quite some time give us a little bit about the history absolutely you know this is a as you rightly pointed a long history with a VMware and Dell EMC goes back over a decade ago I started with Vblock in those days and we literally defined the converged infrastructure market at that point and and this partnership has continued to evolve and so this announcement we are really excited to be here you know to continue to announce our joint solutions to our common customers you know in this whole VX blocks 1000 along with the vitalife suite well the VX block Hardware foundation with VMware software foundation was one of the first places where customers actually started building what we now call private clouds tell us a little bit about how that technology came together and how that vision came together and how your customers have been responding to this combinations partnership for a while absolutely if you think about it from a customer standpoint they love the fact that it is a pre engineered solution and you know they have to put less effort and doing the lifecycle management maintenance of the solution so as part of kind of making it a pre engineered solution what we've done is you know made it such that the integrations between the VX block and visualize are out of the box so we put some critical components you know are of course the vSphere and NSX in there but in addition to that for the virial I set we have vro Orchestrator already built in there we have a special management pack that gets into detail dashboards that are related to the hardware associated with the X block also pre integrated in there so that if via ops runs in there it'll automatically kind of figure that as a dashboard out and can configure them and then finally we have VRA or you know an industry-leading automation platform that allows you self-service and literally build a private cloud on top of the X block so the VX central software has been letting or is now allows a customer to make better use of VMware yes similarly some of the new advancements that you're making within VMware are going to help VX bar customers get more out of their devices as well tell us a little bit about some of the recent announcements you've made that are very complimentary absolutely you know to some extent you know the V realized journey has been a journey about at the end of the day in enabling our customers to set up a self-managed private cloud and do large extent we're heading in the direction of what we say self-driving operations using machine learning technologies and all of that so in that kind of direction in that vision if you may we've actually now released with a great integration between VRA and via ops that for the first time closes the loop between the two solutions so that you can start to do intelligent workload placement right depending upon if I'm trying to optimize for cost I'm trying to optimize for tier of service you know whether it's bronze silver gold tier service I'm trying to optimize for software license management you know Oracle license is only going on Oracle tier etcetera this closed-loop with policy ensures you do that and that's the first step in this direction of self-driving that's a very important direction because customers are gonna try to build more complex systems based on or support more complex applications without at the same time seeing that complexity show up in the administration side now that leaves the last question I have because ultimately the two of you are working to make together to make customers successful so tell us a little bit about how your track record your history and your direction of working together in support in service to customers is going and where you think it's gonna go absolutely so we continue to work very closely in partnership and as partners we are committed to support our customers through thick and thin you know to make sure that they can have these engineered pre-engineered clouds set up so they can get the benefits of these clouds lower cost to serve you know in terms of highly efficient workload the fact as much as possible in the you know let me tell about of hardware that's available and at the same time the automation and the self-service that enables the agility so the development teams can build software quickly I think provision software really fast so those are the kind of benefits lower cost agility but in partnership jointly serving our customers RJ Singh senior vice president general manager of the VMware cloud management business unit thanks again for beyond the cube thank you Peter glad to be here Stu back to you all right thanks Peter for sharing that VMware perspective to help understand a little bit more some of the customer implications we're back with Dan and Pete Pete we talked about there's new management there's a few different software packages is this exclusively for the new generation of VX block 1000 or you know who the existing customers will be able to use this sure I mean obviously advanced management features are important to all of our customers so we specifically designed the Xbox central to run both on existing VX block customers and of course in our new VX blocks that were a lot of the factor as well alright so Dan we've talked about the progress we've made the the you know great maturation in these solutions set what's next what customers expect and what should we be looking for from Dellums in the future so this the thing with us is always data center operations simplification if you think about it what we're introducing today is all about simplifying and provisioning and management of the existing system within the system we've heard also from customers what they look for us next to do is to try to improve the upgrade process simplify that as well so we've already got some development efforts working on that we'll be excited and news for later this year or early next year janna follow-up went dance that we always talked to our customers about what they're looking for in addition to more automation and we're monitoring support they want to go to consume their resources in a more agile environment cloud like a farm and even on-premises so that combined with the be realized suite of products we're going to be providing more cloud live experience to our customers for their yeah walks in the future alright Pete and Dan thank you so much for sharing this news we're gonna now turn it over to the community so you've heard about the announcement we've been talking for quite a long time at wiki bond about how automation and tools are gonna hopefully help make your job easier so want you to dig in ask the questions what do you like what do you want to see more of and so everybody let's growl chat great

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, everyone. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here, this is Day Two of of HPE Discover 2017. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week Peter Burris. Ana Pinczuk is here, she's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Pointnext Group. >> That's right, that's right. >> Welcome back to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> Many time Cube alum. >> That's right, that's right. >> Pre-HPE and second time since, when did you start, in February? >> Yes, I know it's been nine months, I'm a veteran. >> You're a vet, right. (laughs) How's the gig going, you hitting your groove swing? >> Yes. >> Dave: Looked great up on stage yesterday. >> Thank you so much, yeah I appreciate it. Yeah I think we are, I came on board in February and it's been a run ever since. We launched a brand in February, so that's when I think when we sort of talked last. And then since then, we've just launched another brand which is HPE GreenLake for flexible consumption model stuff. And we've been doing a lot of great things, we've been doing partnerships with folks, I've been going out to each one of the regions talking to different customers, it's been going really well. >> Well so Pointnext has become a linchpin of HPE strategy. After the spin-merges, things became more clear when you talk about making hybrid IT simple, getting to the intelligent edge, services is now front and center. Meg talks about it, Antonio talks about it. >> That's right. >> Why is services so important and how do you see that scaling in the organization? >> So first of all, I definitely believe the world is turning to be a services-led world and I tell folks that it's really two things, it's services-led and then advisory-led, really advisory. And particularly because our customers want to really undergo these new digital journeys. I was just on stage talking to one of our customers, the Tottenham Hotspurs, and they're redoing their whole stadium and they're trying to increase the interaction and the engagement that they have with fans. So that's where services come in, and so we're really services-led that way and the second thing that's a phenomenon is really the cloud has really helped us learn to want everything instantaneously and to want things when we need them and when we think we need them. And so a lot of services is really about enabling those experiences in a consumption model. So that's the transformation I think that HPE is going through right now, just being a product company, but really moving to being services-led to deliver these digital experiences. >> Well one of the things that we've observed over the years, as folks who work with customers in thinking about their technology, is that there's a co-mingling, a bringing together of the idea of invention. And one of the things that's most attractive to me about a services-led, or acknowledging the role of services, is it really, innovation, is a two-part process. There's an invention, which is the engineering element, and enters the innovation, which is the social, the change. And one of the beauties of taking a services as opposed to a product approach, is that you end up focusing on the social change. >> That's right. >> You end up focusing on what does it mean to use this, apply it, make it happen, and it accelerates the innovation process. I'm wondering if by having a more services-approach, HP's able to look at this significant new range of problems you're going to try to address, but address them as a social innovation challenge as opposed to just getting product into market. >> Yeah, no and that's absolutely right. I'll give you another cool example, we have a customer Yoox Net-A-Porter, and they're a digital sort of online experience provider. They support brands like all of the expensive luxury brands that we know and love. And they're trying to help stores innovate, so let's say you're Prada or Marni or Louis Vuitton, they're helping provide a social experience to their luxury brand consumer. And being able to do that, not just mirroring what you would get in a store, but really innovating in how do you engage with that kind of a consumer online. And so for example, they allow you to shop online but then they'll bring the product to you, it'll be all wrapped really nice, they wait for you to try it on to make sure it's okay. So that's an example of social innovation, not just thinking about how to provide product to enable a website, but how do you actually then help a customer innovate in that whole engagement model? >> It's innovation that is made possible by a whole lot of technology combined with simple ways of introduce change, not just to consumers, but also the people who are ultimately responsible for providing that service. >> Ana: That's right, that's right, that's exactly right. >> Peter: Is that one of the basis then for thinking about Pointnext? >> It is, yeah, it is because people ask me, you know we've always done services and a lot of our services were product-attached services, you do support services, operational services, data center care, those sorts of things. And then we decided to sort of launch Pointnext, and the idea is that this is more than just what we've traditionally done as product-attached. This is really coming at it from a completely different angle, which is recognizing that there is an element of social and management of change that comes through digital. And that's why we talk about advisory-led. Part of that advisory-led is really helping companies figure out what is that new phenomenon, how do I actually shift the experience that I want to enable and how do I bring social innovation with a set of partners, too, because experiences really require us to work not just with our own products, but with software providers, with inside and others. >> Peter: And your customer's partners too. >> And our customer's partners as well, I mean who the customer is is shifting as we put this together. I'll give you an example, when we work with automotive companies, we've gotta think not just about, let's say, the car company and their connected car, but we also have to think about how the consumer of the car is going to interact with the IT environment in the car. >> How the dealers are going to sell it, >> Ana: And how the dealers are gonna sell it. >> how they're gonna make money, the whole thing. >> How they're gonna do predictive maintenance on it >> Exactly. >> So you start to think not just about one experience, but all the elements that come from that single experience. >> Well we just had Deloitte on talking about retail experiences and transforming brick and mortar stores, so that's a key part of it. So partnerships is also something critical, 'cause you can't do everything. >> Ana: That's right. >> So I want to come back to some of the invention piece. When you were up on stage talking about flexible consumption models, you know, cloud, when we went into the downturn it was kinda a tap on the shoulder. Coming out of the downturn it became a kick in the butt to a lot of tradtional IT players. So you've had to respond to that. And you have, flexible consumption models, pay-as-you-go models. So I started to make a list because we've been talking all week about two ends of the spectrum. We've got here at HPE Discover, AWS re:Invent's going on this week, completely different philosophies about what customers want and how to serve those customers. And so you've got to a great degree mimic the cloud experience. And you can't do it 100%. At the same time, the cloud can't mimic what you guys can do. So I kinda wanted to go through a list and think about where have you closed those gaps, where do you still have advantages for customers. So things like pay-as-you-go, flexible capacity, you've done a lot of work there. Can you give us the update on that and how big is that gap when you talk to customers? >> So first of all, it's interesting because when some of our competitors talk about pay-as-you-go, they start by talking about just a leasing arrangement. They say "Okay, it's a lease." And this is far beyond a lease. I think I can eliminate quite a few of our competitors, (laughs) not cloud competitors, just by saying we've gone beyond that, right. And we provide a full service. So it's the hardware, the software, the data center care, the operational management. And then we turn that service into a pay-as-you-go model. So that's the first sort of innovation and differentiation. And we do that on-prem or in a hosted environment, that's the first thing. The second thing is that part of what we do is we help to manage that environment for the customer. So in a flexible capacity model, we over-provision in a sense and we have a buffer and we understand where the customer's going, how much their utilization is, and then we automatically sort of manage that whole thing for them, up or down depending on what happens. I think the third thing, which is part of the innovation, which is a little different, is we also do the integration of other technologies into the offer. So yesterday I was talking about private backup as a service. There we've got the hardware, the software, it could be Commvault let's say backup software, all the management associated with that, including the support that you need for that, offered in an outcome-based service. So what we're doing there is we're also innovating in the metering, what we're saying is we're going to really provide you an outcome, and that outcome is a successful backup. So you don't actually have to worry about the equipment, you don't have to worry about is it infrastructure-as-a-service? You know, AWS, whatever, we're actually providing a full solution in an outcome-based. And I think that's a little bit of what differentiates us from maybe some of the solutions that are out there, from others. That said, I view this as providing the right mix to our customers, so although, yes, you can say that we're competing with the public cloud, because customers have choice, at the same time part of what we're trying to do also is bring those two together, which I think is unique for us. >> Makes more same philosophy, different approaches. >> Different approaches, and by the way, if you're customer-centric, then what you wanna do is provide customer choice and do the right thing for the customer, and to say where does it make sense to be on the public cloud, or in a private environment, and optimize for the customer benefits that you're going after. >> Well I think it's fair to say that the world has learned a lot from what AWS has done, and said "Hey, we can take that "and we can apply it to our customers' businesses "on-prem or in a hybrid environment." >> And by the way, AWS, especially with our CTP acquisition, they've been a long-term AWS partner and we're having conversations with AWS that say okay, if we're going to really focus on customers, and we're really customer-centric, then how do we work together? Not just AWS, but Microsoft and Google and others, how do we work together and look at where we can optimize our solutions to be able to do the right thing for the customer. >> So our clients are sick and tired of hearing me say this, or us say this, but we believe that where we're going is the cloud experience for your data demands. >> That's right. >> So the way we think about it and I'm wondering if you would agree, is that the first conversation we have with a customer is what's the outcome, what data is required to serve that outcome, how're you gonna package it up as a workload, and where do you naturally need to run that based on latency, other types of issues. Is that kind of how Pointnext is working with customers as well? >> Yeah absolutely right, so we wanna come in, customer in, so you wanna be able to say "What is it that you're trying to do from an outcome?" I described a backup outcome, another outcome might be I'm trying to accelerate my ability to roll out new agile solutions, or microservices-based applications. So we have that conversation with a customer, we then say okay, for that kind of workload, what are you requirements? What are you trying to do? We might also come in and actually, 'cause sometimes what people think they do and what they actually do in their environment is different. So we can come in and say okay, let me actually measure what you're doing and see what you're doing and then bring that information back to them. And then have a conversation about what to do with your workload and what makes sense. So I think it's a very close engagement with the customer, it's based on real data about what the customer's trying to do. And frankly that was one of the reasons that we made the CTP acquisition, as well, because it started to complement our portfolio. A lot of the capabilities that we had were very robust, in particular around private cloud, but just having the public cloud angle there and sort of strengthening that piece was super important to be able to have that conversation and truly enable the right mix. >> Well now that brings up the topic of multi-cloud, which kinda, to use a sports analogy, it's jump ball. It's kind of a free-for-all, everybody wants that business. I guess with the exception of some of the big cloud guys aren't interested. But certainly, Hewlett-Packard >> Peter: Well don't believe it, want to avoid it. >> Yeah well, but that's the reality is there's gonna be multiple clouds, we know this. Particularly with SaaS. So a company like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, obviously has to play in that space. So I wonder if you could talk about the strategy there, why you feel confident that HPE is in a good position. >> Yeah well a couple things, first of all I think it's really good to be, we're somewhat independent, we're not totally independent because we've got a whole set of products, but we're somewhat independent in the sense that if we wanna be truly hybrid and enable other public and private solutions, we wanna be able to give customers choice in terms of the public domains that they can work with. And so we're sort of in a great position as a large provider and with the relations that we have in the enterprise in particular, with our customer base, to be a little bit of Switzerland and be able to say, okay, let's have that conversation about the right mix and enable these multi-cloud solutions, that's the first thing. The second thing is we have relationships and great partnerships with many of these providers. So take Microsoft, we've got an Azure relationship, an Azure stack opportunity, so we've got the ability and by the way, we do many of their applications as well. So we've got the ability to help have that conversation with our customers to say okay, do you wanna be on-prem or do you wanna be in the cloud? Even with one provider, and to do that, and so we have the opportunity to provide robust solutions even with one private and public provider. And on top of that, we've got a consultancy with our professional services. We wanna be responsive to our customers, we've got now HPE OneSphere. And with HPE OneSphere we can be data-driven and actually provide our customers a view of their environment and help to be a little bit of that Switzerland to say look, here's what would be best for you and help to have workload mobility together with OneSphere. So I think we're well-positioned, I tend to call it my stairway to Heaven. In a sense we start out at the bottom talking about infrastructure and support, and we've got great relationships there with our customers. If I launch the flexible capacity offers, we're starting to deliver outcome-based solutions. When I bring in CTP, we'd go up the stack and we now provide advisory and the consumption solutions. And with OneSphere now you go up the stacks just a little bit more and say not only are we gonna advise you and provide you those executables with consumption models, but we now have capabilities that allow you to sort of optimally choose what's the right thing for you. So I think we're well-positioned, by the way, with CTP we've got sort of a managed, sort of cloud sort of capability as well. We manage compliance and other elements. So we're able to have in our portfolio sort of value-added services above and beyond that help with multi-cloud and making sure that customers can be compliant, secure, and have the right experience on a multi-cloud environment. >> Yeah I think a lot of people that don't know CTP don't understand how deep their expertise is. They're only a few hundred people, if that. But they're rockstars. >> They're over 200 people. >> Serious thought leaders with real deep connections. I've gotta change subjects to the last topic area. As you know, The Cube from day one has always been a fan of having women on, and promoting women in tech. We first met you at the Anita Borg Institute of the Grace Hopper Conference. Meg Whitman is obviously a woman leader in tech and she's leaving HP. We've got Meg and we've got Ginni. And Ginni's coming to the end, I don't know, she's getting to the age where typically IBM retires its CEOs. You've got two prominent women in tech now leaving. Now maybe IMB will replace Ginni with a woman. HPE has chosen Antonio, great choice. But your thoughts on a leader like Meg, obviously has done some great work. But we're losing one. >> I know, and so >> How do you feel about that? >> I mean, you know, I'm very conflicted if I've gotta be honest. One one hand, as I joined HPE I had never worked for a female CEO so I've really enjoyed watching. You know it's always great to have mentors and to have people that are advocating for women, so I really enjoyed being part of Meg's organization, I'm really sorry to see her go. And she's an icon as well, so she does a lot, in fact this afternoon we're gonna be doing a session for women just here at the conference. So very sad to see her go, at the same time I think we as women, and men by the way, have a responsibility to build the next generation of leaders. And I think that's where I focus my energy and I know that I'm gonna be sort of a high profile female in the HPE environment so I feel that sense of responsibility, not just within HPE, but within the industry, to help to cultivate an environment that takes advantage of half of the population and enables innovation through them as well. So I think we've gotta get more women up there. I think part of it is really bringing up the next generation and frankly this next generation, they don't have tolerance for waiting for things, whatever, and they feel like they're super entitled to have the right and the choice >> Peter: They are. >> And they are, right. But that seems like an easy thing to say, but in some sense we come from a generation, many women as well, which have had challenges especially in the tech world, in terms of really breaking that glass ceiling. And I think we've got some amazing women and some amazing leaders as well. I'm part of the Anita Borg Board of Trustees as well, and we were at Grace Hopper and we had Debbie Sterling, some really great women that are coming up the ranks that are CEOs, that are CTOs, that are really leading the way and so I'm very hopeful that the conversation, by the way, about women in tech is really prominent right now. And that I think it'll open up opportunities for women to shine going forward and I think that should happen for HPE as well. In fact right now its me and then Archie Deskus is the CIO for HPE. So we're trying to do our part to sort of make sure that there's other women in leadership as well. >> Well you're a great example of a current and future leader. >> Thank you so much. >> Really appreciate you coming onto The Cube, Ana. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, great to see you, thank you so much. >> Alright keep it right there everyone. This is The Cube, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid, we'll be right back. 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