>> Announcer: From Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE, covering Super Computing 17. Brought to you by Intel. (soft electronic music) Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're gettin' towards the end of the day here at Super Computing 2017 in Denver, Colorado. 12,000 people talkin' really about the outer limits of what you can do with compute power and lookin' out into the universe and black holes and all kinds of exciting stuff. We're kind of bringin' it back, right? We're all about democratization of technology for people to solve real problems. We're really excited to have our last guest of the day, bringin' the energy, Armughan Ahmad. He's SVP and GM, Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions for Dell EMC, and a many-time CUBE alumni. Armughan, great to see you. >> Yeah, good to see you, Jeff. So, first off, just impressions of the show. 12,000 people, we had no idea. We've never been to this show before. This is great. >> This is a show that has been around. If you know the history of the show, this was an IEEE engineering show, that actually turned into high-performance computing around research-based analytics and other things that came out of it. But, it's just grown. We're seeing now, yesterday the super computing top petaflops were released here. So, it's fascinating. You have some of the brightest minds in the world that actually come to this event. 12,000 of them. >> Yeah, and Dell EMC is here in force, so a lot of announcements, a lot of excitement. What are you guys excited about participating in this type of show? >> Yeah, Jeff, so when we come to an event like this, HBC-- We know that HBC is also evolved from your traditional HBC, which was around modeling and simulation, and how it started from engineering to then clusters. It's now evolving more towards machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. So, what we announced here-- Yesterday, our press release went out. It was really related to how our strategy of advancing HBC, but also democratizing HBC's working. So, on the advancing, on the HBC side, the top 500 super computing list came out. We're powering some of the top 500 of those. One big one is TAC, which is Texas Institute out of UT, University of Texas. They now have, I believe, the number 12 spot in the top 500 super computers in the world, running an 8.2 petaflops off computing. >> So, a lot of zeros. I have no idea what a petaflop is. >> It's very, very big. It's very big. It's available for machine learning, but also eventually going to be available for deep learning. But, more importantly, we're also moving towards democratizing HBC because we feel that democratizing is also very important, where HBC should not only be for the research and the academia, but it should also be focused towards the manufacturing customers, the financial customers, our commercial customers, so that they can actually take the complexity of HBC out, and that's where our-- We call it our HBC 2.0 strategy, off learning from the advancements that we continue to drive, to then also democratizing it for our customers. >> It's interesting, I think, back to the old days of Intel microprocessors getting better and better and better, and you had Spark and you had Silicon Graphics, and these things that were way better. This huge differentiation. But, the Intel I32 just kept pluggin' along and it really begs the question, where is the distinction now? You have huge clusters of computers you can put together with virtualization. Where is the difference between just a really big cluster and HBC and super computing? >> So, I think, if you look at HBC, HBC is also evolving, so let's look at the customer view, right? So, the other part of our announcement here was artificial intelligence, which is really, what is artificial intelligence? It's, if you look at a customer retailer, a retailer has-- They start with data, for example. You buy beer and chips at J's Retailer, for example. You come in and do that, you usually used to run a SEQUEL database or you used to run a RDBMS database, and then that would basically tell you, these are the people who can purchase from me. You know their purchase history. But, then you evolved into BI, and then if that data got really, very large, you then had an HBC cluster, would which basically analyze a lot of that data for you, and show you trends and things. That would then tell you, you know what, these are my customers, this is how many times they are frequent. But, now it's moving more towards machine learning and deep learning as well. So, as the data gets larger and larger, we're seeing datas becoming larger, not just by social media, but your traditional computational frameworks, your traditional applications and others. We're finding that data is also growing at the edge, so by 2020, about 20 billion devices are going to wake up at the edge and start generating data. So, now, Internet data is going to look very small over the next three, four years, as the edge data comes up. So, you actually need to now start thinking of machine learning and deep learning a lot more. So, you asked the question, how do you see that evolving? So, you see an RDBMS traditional SQL evolving to BI. BI then evolves into either an HBC or hadoop. Then, from HBC and hadoop, what do you do next? What you do next is you start to now feed predictive analytics into machine learning kind of solutions, and then once those predictive analytics are there, then you really, truly start thinking about the full deep learning frameworks. >> Right, well and clearly like the data in motion. I think it's funny, we used to make decisions on a sample of data in the past. Now, we have the opportunity to take all the data in real time and make those decisions with Kafka and Spark and Flink and all these crazy systems that are comin' to play. Makes Hadoop look ancient, tired, and yesterday, right? But, it's still valid, right? >> A lot of customers are still paying. Customers are using it, and that's where we feel we need to simplify the complex for our customers. That's why we announced our Machine Learning Ready Bundle and our Deep Learning Ready Bundle. We announced it with Intel and Nvidia together, because we feel like our customers either go to the GPU route, which is your accelerator's route. We announced-- You were talking to Ravi, from our server team, earlier, where he talked about the C4140, which has the quad GPU power, and it's perfect for deep learning. But, with Intel, we've also worked on the same, where we worked on the AI software with Intel. Why are we doing all of this? We're saying that if you thought that RDBMS was difficult, and if you thought that building a hadoop cluster or HBC was a little challenging and time consuming, as the customers move to machine learning and deep learning, you now have to think about the whole stack. So, let me explain the stack to you. You think of a compute storage and network stack, then you think of-- The whole eternity. Yeah, that's right, the whole eternity of our data center. Then you talk about our-- These frameworks, like Theano, Caffe, TensorFlow, right? These are new frameworks. They are machine learning and deep learning frameworks. They're open source and others. Then you go to libraries. Then you go to accelerators, which accelerators you choose, then you go to your operating systems. Now, you haven't even talked about your use case. Retail use case or genomic sequencing use case. All you're trying to do is now figure out TensorFlow works with this accelerator or does not work with this accelerator. Or, does Caffe and Theano work with this operating system or not? And, that is a complexity that is way more complex. So, that's where we felt that we really needed to launch these new solutions, and we prelaunched them here at Super Computing, because we feel the evolution of HBC towards AI is happening. We're going to start shipping these Ready Bundles for machine learning and deep learning in first half of 2018. >> So, that's what the Ready Solutions are? You're basically putting the solution together for the client, then they can start-- You work together to build the application to fix whatever it is they're trying to do. >> That's exactly it. But, not just fix it. It's an outcome. So, I'm going to go back to the retailer. So, if you are the CEO of the biggest retailer and you are saying, hey, I just don't want to know who buys from me, I want to now do predictive analytics, which is who buys chips and beer, but who can I sell more things to, right? So, you now start thinking about demographic data. You start thinking about payroll data and other datas that surround-- You start feeding that data into it, so your machine now starts to learn a lot more of those frameworks, and then can actually give you predictive analytics. But, imagine a day where you actually-- The machine or the deep learning AI actually tells you that it's not just who you want to sell chips and beer to, it's who's going to buy the 4k TV? You're makin' a lot of presumptions. Well, there you go, and the 4k-- But, I'm glad you're doin' the 4k TV. So, that's important, right? That is where our customers need to understand how predictive analytics are going to move towards cognitive analytics. So, this is complex but we're trying to make that complex simple with these Ready Solutions from machine learning and deep learning. >> So, I want to just get your take on-- You've kind of talked about these three things a couple times, how you delineate between AI, machine learning, and deep learning. >> So, as I said, there is an evolution. I don't think a customer can achieve artificial intelligence unless they go through the whole crawl walk around space. There's no shortcuts there, right? What do you do? So, if you think about, Mastercard is a great customer of ours. They do an incredible amount of transactions per day, (laughs) as you can think, right? In millions. They want to do facial recognitions at kiosks, or they're looking at different policies based on your buying behavior-- That, hey, Jeff doesn't buy $20,000 Rolexes every year. Maybe once every week, you know, (laughs) it just depends how your mood is. I was in the Emirates. Exactly, you were in Dubai (laughs). Then, you think about his credit card is being used where? And, based on your behaviors that's important. Now, think about, even for Mastercard, they have traditional RDBMS databases. They went to BI. They have high-performance computing clusters. Then, they developed the hadoop cluster. So, what we did with them, we said okay. All that is good. That data that has been generated for you through customers and through internal IT organizations, those things are all very important. But, at the same time, now you need to start going through this data and start analyzing this data for predictive analytics. So, they had 1.2 million policies, for example, that they had to crunch. Now, think about 1.2 million policies that they had to say-- In which they had to take decisions on. That they had to take decisions on. One of the policies could be, hey, does Jeff go to Dubai to buy a Rolex or not? Or, does Jeff do these other patterns, or is Armughan taking his card and having a field day with it? So, those are policies that they feed into machine learning frameworks, and then machine learning actually gives you patterns that they can now see what your behavior is. Then, based on that, eventually deep learning is when they move to next. Deep learning now not only you actually talk about your behavior patterns on the credit card, but your entire other life data starts to-- Starts to also come into that. Then, now, you're actually talking about something before, that's for catching a fraud, you can actually be a lot more predictive about it and cognitive about it. So, that's where we feel that our Ready Solutions around machine learning and deep learning are really geared towards, so taking HBC to then democratizing it, advancing it, and then now helping our customers move towards machine learning and deep learning, 'cause these buzzwords of AIs are out there. If you're a financial institution and you're trying to figure out, who is that customer who's going to buy the next mortgage from you? Or, who are you going to lend to next? You want the machine and others to tell you this, not to take over your life, but to actually help you make these decisions so that your bottom line can go up along with your top line. Revenue and margins are important to every customer. >> It's amazing on the credit card example, because people get so pissed if there's a false positive. With the amount of effort that they've put into keep you from making fraudulent transactions, and if your credit card ever gets denied, people go bananas, right? The behavior just is amazing. But, I want to ask you-- We're comin' to the end of 2017, which is hard to believe. Things are rolling at Dell EMC. Michael Dell, ever since he took that thing private, you could see the sparkle in his eye. We got him on a CUBE interview a few years back. A year from now, 2018. What are we going to talk about? What are your top priorities for 2018? >> So, number one, Michael continues to talk about that our vision is advancing human progress through technology, right? That's our vision. We want to get there. But, at the same time we know that we have to drive IT transformation, we have to drive workforce transformation, we have to drive digital transformation, and we have to drive security transformation. All those things are important because lots of customers-- I mean, Jeff, do you know like 75% of the S&P 500 companies will not exist by 2027 because they're either not going to be able to make that shift from Blockbuster to Netflix, or Uber taxi-- It's happened to our friends at GE over the last little while. >> You can think about any customer-- That's what Michael did. Michael actually disrupted Dell with Dell technologies and the acquisition of EMC and Pivotal and VMWare. In a year from now, our strategy is really about edge to core to the cloud. We think the world is going to be all three, because the rise of 20 billion devices at the edge is going to require new computational frameworks. But, at the same time, people are going to bring them into the core, and then cloud will still exist. But, a lot of times-- Let me ask you, if you were driving an autonomous vehicle, do you want that data-- I'm an Edge guy. I know where you're going with this. It's not going to go, right? You want it at the edge, because data gravity is important. That's where we're going, so it's going to be huge. We feel data gravity is going to be big. We think core is going to be big. We think cloud's going to be big. And we really want to play in all three of those areas. >> That's when the speed of light is just too damn slow, in the car example. You don't want to send it to the data center and back. You don't want to send it to the data center, you want those decisions to be made at the edge. Your manufacturing floor needs to make the decision at the edge as well. You don't want a lot of that data going back to the cloud. All right, Armughan, thanks for bringing the energy to wrap up our day, and it's great to see you as always. Always good to see you guys, thank you. >> All right, this is Armughan, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Super Computing Summit 2017. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> And the band played on. You might be able to hear the guitar player off in the distance. It's that time of day here at Dell EMC World 2017, along with John Furrier. I'm John Walls. Glad to have you here on The Cube. We are officially, John and I now, Node-O-Ramas. (laughing) We have joined the blue button club. We'll explain that in just a little bit. Tell you what it's all about. Here with me to do that is Armughan Ahmad, who is the SVP of Blueprint Solutions and Alliances of Dell EMC. Just had a launch. >> Yeah. Had to be one of the two. And Brian Payne who is the VP of Product Management in the server division at Dell EMC. Brian, thank you for being with us. >> Absolutely. Thanks for having me >> All right, so first off, let's talk 14G. Big server news, you guys make. I'm sure that's really had a lot of your attention this week. A lot of people want to know, Brian, what's up? Tell me about the excitement you generate with that announcement. >> Absolutely, it's generated a ton of excitement and it's not just been this week. It's been a lot of build up for driving a new generation of servers into the market. We start with what our customers are telling us that they're interested in, and with this generation we focused on the typical things you would expect, like how can we run workloads more effectively than the current generation of technology. However, as we look into the landscape as people drive digital transformation, the workloads are changing, right? There are a lot of new workloads. There's a lot of new technology that our customers need to sort out and figure out, where do I apply where in order to run things more effectively? And so we're focused on that in terms of delivering portfolio breadth so that our customers will have the capability when they need it to run their applications well. So that's one thing that is exciting and new. But aside from that, which is running our customers' applications, we're also focused on how can we make our customers more agile and effective through the automation tools that we've designed into this generation of servers? And then, lastly, security has been a big focus. And it's not bolted on security; it's integrated security built into the server throughout the supply chain and throughout the life cycle of the server. Those are the big things that have resonated with our customers as we've announced the next generation of servers. >> I was kind of kidding on the top there talking about the Node-O-Rama buttons. Both of you are wearing yours. So tell us what is that all about? What's Node-O-Rama going on there? >> So Janet Moore, who's actually in our product marketing group, came up with Node-O-Rama because as we were getting ready to launch 14G, awesome servers, Poweredge 14 Generation, we wanted to be ready for VSAN ready nodes 'cause customers really wanted to take storage and take that software-defined storage and ensuring when you take software-defined storage you want to really run it on a server platform to drive the next generation of IT transformation and digital transformation eventually. But we also wanted to the same thing with Microsoft Spaces Direct. We also wanted to do the same thing with our ScaleIO, software-defined scale out storage capability. But then not just stop there. We also have SAP HANA ready node, which is our SAP HANA for commercial and midsize customers. So that's where Node-O-Rama really came in. We've got a lot of nodes. So right now we're launching our Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node that got launched on Monday. So we're totally excited. We have the most ready nodes in the industry right now. >> So we were talking in our intro this morning on our other set, David Floyer, analyst at Wikibon, and Keith Townsend, another analyst. We were kind of looking at this announcement here. The big takeaways were really, really strong hyper-converged ACI message. Seeing that across the board. VMware is the glue layer between all this. And then finally, reality of hybrid cloud. So we were just talking about the ready systems. How does this all work? Because now, those are three nice areas developing. How does Node-O-Rama fit in that? How should they think about ready nodes, the context of that scene? >> Well, one thing that I mentioned a moment ago is just this idea of complexity that customers are dealing with. We still have, through our ready systems, we're able to offer simplicity for customers that want to buy a full system-level solution, but not everyone is, for a variety of reason, is ready to do that. However, they're left with saying, "Okay, I can buy servers from Dell, Poweredge Servers "and go run my workload, "but what do I pick? "I want to move to a software-defined storage. "I want to run something like SAP HANA. "Can somebody simplify that process for me?" And that's where ready nodes come in. It really streamlines the selection of technology where we've done the testing. We've done the validation to figure out what's going to run well and then we can point customers in that direction. And we can also streamline the services, the service offering around that. So it's really about making it simpler for out customers throughout the lifecycle of picking the technology and then deploying and managing. >> What about operational support? Efficiency, ease of use there? What's your position on that? >> Absolutely, operational support is streamlined and then if you have an issue with a ready node and you call up Dell services, they're going to immediately recognize what you have and be able to get you back up and running and working more effectively, more quickly. >> So where's the Nexus here, alliances and then what you're doing there? How's that coming together? >> Yes, so I lead our solutions business unit that is powered by our technology alliance partners, so VMware VSAN ready node, Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node. ScaleIO happens to be our own IP, so that's a ready node, and then SAP. So those are the alliance partnerships. And then what my group does is we work very close with Brian Payne and Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, whose at GM, for our server division, and Robbie Penaganti. That server division, it's all about the server right in the center of it so if you are going to drive a software-defined data center, you have to get a server right in the middle and make sure that server's not only scalable, it's intelligent, but it's also secure. So what we do is we actually take that server that's ready from their side and they certify it. We then take that in my group. We validate it, we make sure that the firmware that needs to be changed, the buyout that needs to be changed. The service capability, the sales enablement that we have to put out there. So it becomes a ready node, right? >> So tell me about the old days. I'm just kind of going, "Wow! "That sounds really easy" but it's not. They, in essence, have to build a server that's going to be ready for whatever composed solution you put together, whether it's VMware, Edge, or whatever. >> Armughan: Yeah. >> They have to then make the enablement happen. >> Armughan: Yeah. >> So in the old days, what was it like? Compare and contrast what it was in the old days. Go to the server guy and say, "I need these servers to support this, this and this" and then they go do it. >> Brian: Yeah. >> And months later. Take us through why is this different for the customer? >> It actually starts very early in the process as we look at the technology landscape, working with Armughan's team to figure out what technologies are going to change and transform the efficiency of how we run applications. It starts with defining the servers arm-in-arm with the team that's responsible for delivering those applications, figuring out what's going to work, develop it, and then bring it to market. And then it's really about streamlining that selection process for our customers. How can we make it easy for them to pick the right things and then quickly procure that and deploy that in their environment and start getting the business results that they're after? >> So time to market for the solution is optimized in that scenario? >> Brian: Oh yeah. >> You call in for the server, 14G. (finger snap) You have it all prepared, ready for you to go. >> So John, in the past, let's go back a few years, right? Our 13G servers at that time, or any other servers in the industry, were really developed for multi-workloads. They weren't developed for specific workloads. What we have now done at Dell EMC, and this is the synergy that Marius was talking about earlier that you were mentioning, which is we take our server group, we work hand-in-hand in our server group right up front, so that's 14G, as our 14th generation of Poweredge servers were being designed, Brian Payne and I, and our teams work very close together to say, "Okay, what are the top workload orientations "that we want to go after?" So software-defined storage, definitely top priority. Now, who should we be working with? VMware VSAN, of course. Microsoft Hyper-v Spaces Direct. Our ScaleIO business, because we know a lot of the customers want to do that. But then, in addition to that, we said, "Okay, ready nodes is good. "That's fantastic." But we know customers go from build to buy continue. So they'll be customers who would want SAP workload orientation, they would want Oracle workload orientation. They want Sequel workload orientation. But then those are your traditional apps. But now you're moving into the next generation apps of machine learning, AI, which is starting with high-due clusters and analytics clusters. So our partnership between server product group and our solutions product group. My product group does not exist without server product group. We have to ensure, and by the way, same thing goes for storage product group, our data protection product group, and our networking product group, as well as our CI and ACI product group. What we do is we, essentially, work right up front and make sure that that workload orientation is start through right in the beginning. >> John: What's the customer reaction? >> You want to take that. >> Yeah, sure, I was just going to add one piece and I'll address that. Conversely, the server isn't going to do anything without the application running on top of it. So that's where we go hand-in-glove here. Customers are very pleased with it. The adoption rates have been very strong of what's been in the market and then as we're bringing a breath of fresh air with the next generation technology, customers are very eager to begin adopting. >> John: What's the reaction to this announcement because the 14G had the fanfare yesterday when it was talked about, but what is the reaction to the 14G and the ready server nodes now? >> I'll give you an example, first of all, on our revenue growth. So we actually picked some major workload so VSAN ready node. We'd announced that about six months ago and our VSAN ready node business is through the roof right now on 13G. 14G launches as soon as the summer. Ashley Gorakhpurwalla mentioned on stage sometime this summer. As soon as that launches, we will be ready with 14G. But right now we have ready nodes already in the market on our 13th generation platforms. And as soon as we started launching these solutions we're finding that our customers, more importantly our channel partners as well, because they find that it's much easier, John, for them to deploy that. We're also seeing that same 13G to now 14G migration related to high-performance computing. A lot of customers are taking that on and the growth has been really fabulous. >> Yeah, I think if you rewind the clock before ready nodes and say, "What was the world like?" We had customers that were deploying and trying to deploy things like VSAN or other software-defined storage, and they were running into problems and us, VMware, we're trying to help customers navigate that, but what we found was there were dependencies in that stack in the underlying infrastructure, and so the ready nodes really came out of that how can we improve that customer experience and make sure that what we deliver is going to be trusted and reliable. >> And shipping around the summer, which is right around the corner. >> That is 14G is going to ship but right at the same time, our ready nodes for VSAN ready node and Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node and ScaleIO ready node will ship at the exact same time 14G Poweredge servers ship, right? But keep in mind, we're already selling all of the 13G-based platforms for ready nodes, ready bundles, and ready systems. >> John: I tell you, just knowing the channel partners, they're going to love this. >> Oh yeah. >> Because it's so peaked and not a lot of training involved and they can pick up the training and services (finger snap) right out of the gate, target workloads, good engagement of customers. Makes a lot of sense. Hangs together in my mind. Congratulations. >> Brian: Thank you. >> All right, so Node-O-Rama, this is the button here. >> Armughan: It's right here. >> Check out the ready nodes. It just sounds great. Ready, alert, fire jets go. (laughter) Take off in the aircraft carrier. >> There is nothing like being an honorary Node-O-Rama. So thank you very much for the pleasure. >> Getting ready to Rama. >> Always good seeing you guys. >> Thanks for being with us. >> Armughan: Thank you. >> Back with more coming up here. Dell EMC World 2017 Live from Las Vegas. You're watching The Cube. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering Red Hat summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat summit here in Boston, Massaachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Armughan Ahmad, he is the senior vice president and general manager solutions and alliances at Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> It's my pleasure, good to see you, Rebecca. >> So we've had you on the program before, but your role has changed a bit at Dell EMC since then. Tell us what you're doing now. >> Sure, I have the pleasure to now lead our solutions business unit that we have under infrastructure solutions group. What we drive is focus areas of customer outcomes. Work load orientation around high performance computing. Driving data analytics, business critical applications, software defined solutions, and then also hybrid cloud. So those are our five big priorities. >> It's a big mandate. >> It is a big mandate, right? And as you know, Dell EMC is Number one in everything. That's all we talk about. You'll hear this at Dell EMC World next week. But you know, at Red Hat summit, we're really having this discussion, right, Red Hat open stack summit, which is really around our differentiation, how we're driving human progress forward, social innovation forward. So that's exciting. So as we take our applications and partner with our alliance partners, that's the differentiation we're excited to share with customers and partners here at Red Hat summit as well. >> So Dell EMC, as you said, is uniquely suited to do these things and lead in this way. But how do you make deployment easier? I mean, that's the big question that customers and partners need to know. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you as you know, being number One in everything, when I joked about this, not joking about this, if you really think about our market share in compute or servers, if you look at our market share in storage, external storage, internal storage, you look at our market share in converge infrastructure, hyperconverge infrastructure, if you see our market share in data protection, or our market share in open networking, right, so we're all the way to the far top right of the Gartner magic quadrants, number one in market shares and revenue. That's all interesting, but what's fascinating for the customers is really more about how do you make all of this real? If you envision like a pyramid almost, and you think that the bottom is all of these infrastructure layers, the next one above that is virtualization, the next one above that is orchestration, but really on the top, is a platform, top of the pyramid, that's where the business sits. Business wants a platform, and what we're doing is trying to make all of that easy. We know that customers will build and they would want to do a DIY solution. And we obviously have that, we've been doing it for decades. But we're really trying to move to that top end of the pyramid with our hybrid could solutions, our converge solutions, but more the solutions that my organization leads is the blueprint solutions. And the whole idea about blueprint solutions is that how can we offer ready offerings to customers so that they don't have to really worry about the bottom of the pyramid, but the top of a platform so that's it's easy to deploy. >> And customized for their business. >> Absolutely. >> Armughan, in the keynote on day one, we heard that one of the top priorities for customers is figuring out their cloud strategy. Now, at Dell EMC, you have a number of offerings, can you bring us up to date, where does open stack fit into that, and of course, we're going to want to talk about the Red Hat joint solution that you're after. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, open stack, let me take it even a step back, you know Michael, 31 years ago, since he founded Dell, has always stood for choice for customers, open ecosystems for customers. And even though we have Dell technologies now, the acquisition of so many of the other assets that are under Dell technologies, we're really delighted to partner and ensure that we have the right kind of choice that we're offering to our customers. So open stack, Stu, puts a very big differentiation forward. You know, I'm here with our Dell EMC team at Red Hat open stack summit and our customers are telling us in a very, very clear way, and the channel partners who are here, is that they're looking for Dell EMC to really provide open source based solutions in telecom markets, in, you know, when you take a look at telecom and it's moving from 3G to 4G to now 5G coming on, it's really going to be the applications and how those applications become scaled out versus just infrastructure becoming scaled out. So now the evolution of open stack and how Dell EMC contributes to it, we never really wanted to build our own ecosystem of open stack like some of our other competitors have done. We've always stood by Red Hat open stack based solutions to say hey, if they're number one in open stack markets and they're already tuning that, why can't we tune our infrastructure solutions the exact same way so that one plus one equals five for the customers, and it becomes much easier for them to deploy that. >> Great, so absolutely, you mentioned some of the telecoms. NFV was probably the most talked about use case for open stack at last year's summit. We've got the open stack summit here in Boston next week, we'll be covering it. Is that a top use case for your solution with Red Hat, what are the real business drivers for people doing open stack, is it just private cloud solutions that they offer that you said mentioned the open source, people are still trying to figure out where this open stack fits compared to some of the other options that they have. >> Stu, what I'm finding, and you and I have had these discussions several times across the stack of server storage networking and others, the largest cost associated with deploying or consuming IT is really your OPEX cost. So if you envision for a second a pie chart and you look at a customer spend, a capital spend, about 25% of that is CAPEX oriented, which is how much you pay for infrastructure or software. About 75% of that is OPEX oriented, which is your human cost of managing it, your serviceability and others. The whole idea about us talking about this Dell EMC ready bundle solution that we're taking to market, so we announced yesterday our opportunity to really go out and simplify all of this for customers, for cloud solutions, or for their NFV or NFVI solutions, as we're seeing NFVI-- >> And for our audience that doesn't know NFVI, what's the differentiation there? >> Our opportunity to take network function virtualization, then taking VNF capabilities, and then also making sure that we're virtualizing a lot of those aspects on NFVI so that our customers are driving service provider opportunities to then containerize these opportunities as part of open shift and others. And we feel that our differentiation at Dell EMC really, then, ends up becoming our tested validated offerings so that customers don't really have to worry about the infrastructure layer, or even the software layer for that matter, and we can just give them a platform that I was referring to earlier. So that ready bundle for open stack that we have offered, and I will be taking about it in my keynote today, that whole ready bundle at Dell EMC solution has been validated, tested. It's got not just reference architectures, but deployment guides, run books. But we've also taken it one step forward, we actually internally called it jetstream. And the whole idea of jetstream internal codename was, if you guys are familiar with jetstreams around the world, and you catch one of those jetstreams, they usually go from west to east. And if you go from Boston to London, you can get there pretty quickly if you hit one of those because it's 160 miles an hour. That's why we selected the name jetstream. And the whole idea is if you actually imagine if you put a concord in that jetstream, you can actually do that trip now in three hours, or you could've done it in concords around at the time. So if we can actually create that concord-like style of a ready bundle solution that is running open stack platform, we can not only get the customers to deploy much faster and reduce their OPEX, but there's a tooling that's required. So for example, the customer wants to deploy an open stack solution. We actually created a jetpack, jetstream, jetpack, and the whole idea of a jetpack is very quickly us providing sizing tools and deployment tools for customers so that they can get to their destination very, very fast. >> And how fast are we talking here? >> So we're talking, I'll actually have a customer, East Carolina University, on stage with me. Something that would take three weeks, they've got it done in three days using this jetpack solution. So us creating these ready bundles and deploying open stack much faster, either for cloud environments or environments for NFV and eventually for NFVI. And then we're also working with our Dell EMC code group, which is now looking at containerization solutions as well. So that's sort of the differentiations that we're talking about. >> And Armughan, I know, we're really good usually at quantifying that kind of deployment, that shrinking months to days or days to hours, that operational efficiency though, once it's in there, do you have any metrics or cost savings that your customers in general are seeing of rolling this out versus the old kind of putting it together themselves. >> Great question, Stu, so we all measured, Rebecca, you know this, you've written for HBR, which is really about ROI, TCOs for customers, what is your return on investment and your total cost of ownership. And really, what we're finding is that we can do this about 30% more effective. I'd love to say it's 80% more effective where we can take your OPEX down and others. But realistically, if you really look at East Carolina University or many of the other customers who are deploying this, they're seeing on average about 30% improvement in their operating costs. Now, it's not just related to cloud or it's not just related to NFV and NFVI. We're also seeing a huge use case of open stack now as part of high performance computing. So as high performance computing is evolving from traditional research and moving more into machine learning and AI frameworks, we're also seeing customers leverage open stack in that environment as well. >> and I wonder also, I mean, just talking about the difficulties with calculating ROI, but talking about how it's having this big impact on high performance computing, what about high performance teams, the people who are actually doing the work? >> Absolutely, and so talking about high performance team, right, the web tech, it started in Silicon Valley, now it's in Dublin, Ireland, or it's in China or all of these other places, they've really figured out, right, how do you drive efficiency. I mean, at Facebook, I think one server admin manages 50,000 physical servers or something like that. That's a scale out ways. >> And the thing we always say, it's that person's job is varied, it's not just that their doing three orders of magnitude more than the poor guy running around the data center, they've changed really how they focus on the application, and that job is very different. So they don't really even have server admins, they just have the number of head count that they need. >> The number of head count that's required. >> Hyperscale model, very different from what we have in the enterprise world. >> Absolutely, absolutely. But there are lessons to be learned from the hyperscale model. And if you can drive, I mean, according to IDC, one server admin manages about 40 physical servers, somewhere between 30 to 40 physical servers versus the number that I just shared with you, right, from these big web tech providers. So if we can even improve that to 100 or 1,000 to one admin. I think sys admins still should continue to exist even though this whole public cloud is coming in. But the rise of edge computing for us is also a big, big phenomenon. And we want to ensure that the rise of edge computing, Dell EMC is at the forefront of ensuring that we're providing analytic solutions to our customers. And a lot of the analytics are really happening at the edge 'cause you need to make those analytics decisions very quick 'cant really have a lot of latency back to public cloud for that. So our hybrid cloud solutions, working very closely with open stack to drop OPEX costs down, all of that really matters to customer right now. >> Armughan, I want to go back to something you talked about in the very beginning, which is this element of human progress. It's a professional and personal passion of yours to use technology for good, to solve some of the world's most complex problems, educating young women, working in developing countries, curing cancer. Talk a little bit about what you're doing. >> You know, Rebecca, that's a huge passion of not just mine, but Michael, and all of our executive leadership team at Dell EMC. We were talking earlier before this interview started, it's a passion of yours and Stu's. We all love to, as human beings, contribute to society. And human progress is really technologies impacting human progress in different ways. Right, if you talk about manufacturing jobs versus what automation is. But at the same time, technology is also helping in many different areas. So if you look at developing countries, now I'm personally involved in girls' education in third world countries where they're not prioritized, and what can technology do at schools to really get them to learn coding and get a differentiation out very, very quickly. But at the same time, our Dell initiatives, we call it the legacy for good. The Dell initiatives are really, not just about diversity and inclusion, it's also about improving the human progress. I'll give you an example. We have a great customer, T-Gen. And T-Gen is in the healthcare field and they drive genome sequencing solutions, so they have scientists who drive genome sequencing. Now, if you think about genome sequencing before technology, how long it would take somebody to sequence certain genomes for the purpose of cancer research, that would take you years. Now, if you can get that done in minutes, and that technology will learn, and then next time you do it, it would be even seconds for the same platform. So we actually developed a life sciences genome sequencing high performance computing cluster for this customer. And now they're able to very quickly help young girls and young kids improve their longevity with their cancer treatment that they're going through. So those are the things that really matter to our teams. And I know it matters to our customers and our partners. Because now we're not talking about just open stack or Dell EMC and our great number one in everything solutions we have. Those are fantastic, but how do you relate that social innovation, how do you relate that to human progress. To me, that is really the differentiation that we all collectively need to continue to drive and talk about this a little bit more. But we do need to find more connection points that we know that technology can help, but it's really those medical professionals and those researchers, they're really the brainiacs who use our technology, our opportunity as tech geeks, or I call myself a geek, at least, is how do we take that and then take that out to them and then real researchers can build their platforms on top of it to cure cancer. Or to go drive manufacturing jobs for social innovation purposes in middle America or around the world. That's the difference and those are the solutions that my team, along with many others at Dell EMC, along with our partners with Red Hat, we're focused on, we talk about that a lot. And Jim Witers talked about social innovation and how Red Hat is also making that a priority this morning in his keynote. >> Armughan, it sounds like your team is quite busy. And I know you've got your big event coming up next week, so you finish the keynote here, you'll be jetting our to Las Vegas. Rebecca, a big set of our Cube team will all be out in Vegas to cover the show. So give our audience a little bit of a preview of what you can about what we should expect for the new Dell EMC world as kind of taking together what EMC world has been doing for many years and Dell world in the past. >> You know, we're really excited, Stu, about Dell EMC world because this is the first time Dell world and EMC world comes together in Vegas. So we'll look forward to having you guys there. We have great speakers lined up, it's really focused for customers and technical audiences. We've got lots of partners there. But more importantly, we're showcasing all the solutions and the culmination of Dell EMC merger that has happened along with our Dell technologies group of companies like Pivotal along with VMWare along with Secureworks along with Virtustream. And how do we differentiate not just the Dell brand, which is our client computing group that we have, but also our Dell EMC, that's server storage networking, and then with VMWare and Pivotal and others. What you'll see is not just great keynotes, but some great speakers, great entertainment. I don't know if that's been released, I think it's been released. Gwen Stefani, I think she's-- >> Andy Grammar, and yeah, Gwen Stefani. >> Gwen Stefani, yeah, so that's going to be pretty cool, so we're excited about that. But the speakers that we have lined up on main stage along with, I'm more excited, I geek out, I'm a nerd, I love going into these technical breakouts where we've got lab equipment set up where people can actually get to enjoy and, I call it enjoyment, which is really geek out with understanding what are all of those solutions that we have, kind of, you know, put together. And those blueprint solutions, what are they. We have obviously, our server storage networking and data protection. But then how do you get into those labs and run some demos and proof of concepts, that makes it easy for the customers. So we're excited about that as you can see. >> Well, we're looking forward to it, we'll see you there. >> Yeah, we look forward to hosting you there. >> Armughan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> This has been Rebecca Knight and Stu Miniman, we will return with more from Red Hat summit after this.