>>Hey everyone, welcome to this Cube's special program series Women of the Cloud, brought to you by aws. I'm your host for the series, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Patty Jordan, the VP of enabling processes and technology at Optimus. My next guest, Patty, welcome to the program. >>Hi Lisa. Thank you for having me. >>Tell me a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your role so the audience gets that understanding of exactly who you are. >>Sure thing. Hi, my name is Patty Jordan. As we mentioned, I am originally from Cameroon, Central Africa, but I was raised in the DC area. I'm called and what you call a bank brat. My father worked for an international organization, the the World Bank. Lived in, like I said, grew up in dc, moved to Austin, Texas about seven years ago. Been with Optum for the last nine years of my working career. And I've had multiple roles, but currently my role as is with the enabling technologies and processes, which means that I manage teams that support the platform of a lot of analytics products in Optum. >>Got it. All right. Bank Brett, that's a new one to me. I hadn't heard that. I love that you're a bank, Brit and proud of it. I can tell. Talk to me a little bit about your, the career path that you have navigated and what are some of your sort of tactical and also strategic recommendations for the audiences looking to grow their career in tech? >>So the interesting thing is, I did not start in tech. My background is as an economist. I have a bachelor's of economics from the women, from the College of Women, Mary. I also have a financial master's in public policy from American University. However, I did take some IT classes and as a kid I'm probably dating myself a little bit, but I programmed in dos, so I, I was always excited by it and I had internships as a programmer that helped me pay for my master's degree in when I graduated. I just felt like I was having fun and I was getting paid very well and I was able to pay off my graduate schools. So I just stayed with tech. >>Love that. But it sounds like you had that interest from when you were quite young and as a lot of us and end up in tech, we didn't start there originally. There's a lot of zigzaggy paths to get there. Sounds like you had that as well. What are some of your recommendations for people, either those that are in tech now or aren't who want to get into it and really expand and climb that ladder? >>So definitely, so one of the things to understand is tech could be many different things. Like one of the things could be programming, which I started doing and now dislike intensely. And then another thing could be like being in the business analyst in tech, getting the business requirements versus product management or even, you know, management. And what I would encourage people to do is really focus on what you feel happy doing, which for me is problem solving and collaborating and getting the right people together to solve very complex problems. And if you focus on that then you'll find your, your the role for you even in tech. >>I love that problem solving is such an important skill to be able to have and to cultivate regardless of the industry that you're in. But I'd love to know a little bit more about some of the successes that you've had helping organizations really navigate their cloud journeys, their migration to cloud as we've seen the last couple of years, a massive acceleration to the cloud that was really born outta the pandemic. Talk to me about some of the successes that you've been able to achieve. >>So the first, I guess most obvious thing is understanding the technology. What do you have at your disposal? What do you need for your team to succeed in the cloud or even OnPrem? But what I've learned most in the last four to five years with the projects that I work on, whether it was migrating from a host data center to one that we owned ourselves or migrating from that data center to AWS recently was you really need to get the business organization engaged. And that's not just getting the sponsorship and getting them this to write that check, but really helping them understand how this journey to the cloud is a combined journey between both organizations, right? And they will be able to be more successful as well with us going to the cloud with improved processing with revenue protection because we, there's more tools available with revenue expansion because now we can now expand faster address client needs faster. And you know, so there's various different aspects of going to cloud that are more than just we're using the coolest technology. >>You're a problem solver, has there. And one of the challenges with organizations and from a cloud migration standpoint that we often talk about is it's a cultural migration as well, which is really challenging to do for any type of organization regardless of industry. Do you have a favorite example where as a, as the problem solver, you came in and really helped the organization, the business side understand, be able to transform their cultural direction, understand why cloud migration can be such a facilitator of the business from the top line in a bottom line perspective. >>So from a bottom line perspective, I think the hardest thing for them to understand or what does not compute for them is you can't give them a set. This is what you're gonna cost in the cloud, right? Because the benefit of being in the cloud is being able to scale shrink, et cetera. So that's one hurdle that we're still fighting to be a hundred percent candid. But from a a top line perspective, what's what's been great is we've been able to ramp up more clients with the same, right? So we haven't had to go out and procure more servers, more storage, hire more staff because we're in the cloud and we've actually been able to scale our teams as well because we incorporated the DevOps functions and we do not need a team to manage a data center anymore. So that they absolutely understood, you know, savings ratified, but really just how do we get to market faster? How do we get to revenue faster and how do we get more revenue with the same pool of resources is something that they've really, really resonated with. >>Well, you're starting to speak their language so that to your point that resonates well, but there's so much productivity improvements, efficiencies to be gained by leveraging cloud computing that that really hit the bottom line of an organization that businesses, if you put it in the right way. And it sounds like as the problem solver you have, they understand the immense value and competitive advantage that cloud can bring to their organization and become sort of a ah, the blinders are off. I get it. >>Exactly. Exactly. You're just not trying to, to play with the latest toys, you are actually solving a business problem even before it happens. >>And that's the key solving business problems before they happen. Being able to predict and forecast is huge for businesses, especially as we've seen the last couple of years. Everybody racing to digital, to to pivot, to survive Now to be competitive. If they don't do that and embrace that emerging technology suite, there's a competitor that's right back here that if they're more culturally willing and able to, to be more agile, they're gonna take the place of a competing organization. So yeah, so it absolutely is a huge differentiator for organizations. And it sounds like you've had some great successes there in helping organizations really navigate the challenges, the cultural challenges, but the benefits of cloud computing. Yes. I do wanna talk to you a little bit about in your expertise, diversity is something that is talked about in every industry. We talk about it in tech all the time, there's still challenges there. What are, what's, what are your thoughts on diversity? What are you seeing and what are some of those challenges that are still sitting on the table? >>So I guess the first thing I would say is there's multiple facets to diversity, right? The first one we always lean to is gender and race, but there's also diversity of thought. And being in the healthcare industry is very important for us to have a diversity of thought and experiences so that we can target a lot of these health equity issues that are, you know, that, that are ongoing. So that's one thing that we've, we've been trying to do is making sure that I don't just have people that think like me on the team. And typically that also means not having people that look like me. So making sure that we have the right pipelines to hire for partnering with our, with some of our vendors. AWS for example, is a good one where they had avenues and they had non-profits that they worked with and they connected us with some of our staff augmentation people also did the same thing, really just expanding the scope of where we're looking for talent and, and that helps also bring that diversity of thought and the diversity of gender race into the, into the full >>It is. And it and, and there's also, there's so much data if we follow the data and of course in tech we're all about data. Every company these days, regardless of industry needs to be a data company. If we follow the data, we can see that organizations with, for example, females within the C-suite are far more profitable than those organizations that don't have that even that element of diversity. So the data is demonstrating there's tremendous business value, tremendous competitive advantage, faster time to market, more products and services that can be delivered if there is thought diversity among the entire organization, not just the C-suite. >>Exactly. And and since we have an impact on what is being delivered as an engineering organization, we also need that in engineering, right? One of the things that's very keen right now is machine language and ai. If we don't have the right models for example, then we either introduced bias or perpetuate by it. So we definitely need people on our teams as well that understand how these technologies work, how we can leverage 'em on our data sets so that we could run counter to this bias >>And countering that bias is incredibly important. Machine learning ai, so driven by data, the volumes of data, but the data needs to be as clean and and non-biased as possible. And that's a big challenge for organizations to undertake. Is there advice that you have for those folks watching who might be, I, I don't see me in this organization, I don't feel represented. How can I change that? >>Well, one would be to speak up, right? Even if you don't see you apply for the job, right? And one of the things that we're trying to address even in the DEI space is making sure that our job descriptions are not introducing any biases so that people will eliminate themselves immediately, right? But really just if you have the skill set and you feel like you can ramp up to the talent, then just apply for the job. Talk to somebody. You do have a network whether you realize it or not. So leverage that network. But really like there's this expression that my kid taught me saying, you miss a hundred percent of the shots you don't take, right? So if you don't try, you're not gonna make it by default. If you do try, there's a chance to make it right. At the very least, you build a connection with someone who can potentially help you down the line. >>That is one of my absolute favorite sayings. You miss a hundred percent of the shots that you don't take. So encouraging people to raise their hand there, there are stats, data, speaking of data we've been talking about that, that demonstrate that women are far less likely to apply for jobs like on LinkedIn for example, unless they need 100% of the job requirements, which we all know are quite stringent and not necessary in a lot of cases. So I love your advice of just try raise your hand, ask the question. All the can say is no. And at the end of the day, what is that? It's a word but can also be directional and and really guiding for people on their journey to wherever that, if it's an engineering, cloud, engineering, DevOps, whatever happen that happens to be, raise your hand the question. And to your point, you have a network, it is there, open that up. There's so much potential for people that just raise, I think that's to raise their hand and ask the question. >>And the corollary to that though is I would also encourage people who are in leader leadership roles to be strong allies, right? Like we need to be aware of what biases we might be introducing or candidates that we might be leaving on the table because we're being too stringent because we're not expanding our, our our search, right? So definitely that's something that I've started doing about five, six years old shortly after I moved to Austin, which I kind of beat myself up about not having done before, is really contributing to that community, helping out, being a mentor, being a coach, being a guide. Sometimes it's just reviewing somebody's resume. Other times it's talking to 'em about a role that I have and helping them map their current state to that role. But really just being an ally to everyone and anyone who wants to come into this space. >>I love that. I, and I have a feeling, Patty, that you're a great mentor and ally for those in your organization across organizations and those out there that may not know yet. Patty can be an ally for me. I'd love to get your take in our final minutes on a couple things. One, the, what's next in cloud from your perspective, the things that you've seen, what you've been able to achieve, and how do you see your role evolving in the industry at Optum? >>So what's next in cloud, and we've talked about that a lot, is data. How do we manage all this data? How do we catalog this data, how to reuse this data, how to reshift this data? We have data in various different environments. We're a multi-cloud company. So how do we make sure that we don't have the same data everywhere? Or even if we do, how do we reconcile that? So data, data, data, right? And from data, get to information so that we can monetize it and we can share it. So that's the, that's for me is really next step. I mean we, we know the applications that we can build, we know the analytics that we can build, but if we don't have the right data, we're limiting ourselves. So that's definitely one aspect that I know that we wanna drive. And as far as my role, I was fortunate enough to be provided with the leadership of development of a platform for analytics, which yes, involves data. >>So I'm very excited about this, right? Cuz that's, that's next level for me. I've been typically in roles that protect revenue in the DevOps and operations role. And now I'm in a revenue generating role and it has a shift in mindset. But I, I really appreciate it and I'm really taking everything I've learned up to now as a DevOps team. I knew when the bad things came. So now I'm trying to prevent, prevent my team from pushing bad things down the pipe, right? So I'm just really excited about what's, what's, what's to come because there's so many opportunities for improving the products that we build. And I'm so excited to be part of this platform. >>There are the, the horizon of opportunities is really endless, which is exciting. And to your point about data, like I mentioned, for every company, whether it's your grocery store, a retailer, the postal service has to become a data driven company. Cuz as consumers we expect that we bring that into our business lives and we expect to be able to transact in business as easily as we do on the consumer side. And that all requires organizations to not just have access to data, but to be able to build the right data infrastructure, toing insights to act on that, to feed the AI and ML models so that products services can get better, more personalized and meet the demands of the ever demanding consumer, which I know I, one of them. I wanna ask you one more final question and that is, what do you think some of the biggest challenges have been with, with respect to tech innovation in the workforce over the past five years? What are some of those things that, that you've seen that you think we're on the right track moving forward to eliminate some of these? >>That is a good question. I think one of the biggest challenges for me has been not to remain in the status quo, right? Like not to do something because it's what we've been doing, but being in the cloud allows us with so many opportunities where we can fail fast. That let's give it a shot, let's do a quick sprint, let's figure out whether it is a possibility or not. Eliminate it if it's not, and then keep moving, right? Like we don't have the same development methodology before that we had to do three months, five months, six months. You can iterate in two week chunks, get it done, confirm your, your statement or not, or negate it, but at the very least have an answer, right? So that for me is the biggest challenge. We're aware of the thinking we're just not doing. So it'd be very exciting when we, when we pivot from that and really start innovating because we have the time >>Innovating because we have the time, as I mentioned, you know, with the demand of consumers, whether it's consumer in, in on the personal side, business side, those demands are there. But the, the exciting thing is to your point, the innovations are there. The capabilities are there, the data is there. We have a lot of what we need to be able to take advantage of that. So it's gonna be exciting to see what happens over the next few years. Patty, it's been such a pleasure having you on the cube today. Thank you so much for joining. You are clearly a, a leader in terms of women in the cloud. We appreciate what you're doing, your insights, your recommendations, and your insights as to what you see in the future. You've been a great guest. Thank you so much for joining me today. >>Thank you for having me Lisa. >>My pleasure For Patty Jordan, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cubes coverage of Women of the Cloud, brought to you by aws, a special program series. We thank you so much for watching. Take care.

>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin of the cube here, HPE and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment. And I'm here with four guests. Please. Welcome Charlie Mulrooney global presales engineering manager at Athi John saws also of Shi joins this global pre-sales technical consultant. And back with me are Terry Richardson, north American channel chief and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Welcome gang. Great to have you all here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thanks. You good to be here? >>All right, Charlie, let's go ahead and start with you. Keeping the earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses, right? Everywhere. Globally. Can you talk Charlie about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable? It? >>Sure. So starting about a year and a half, two years ago, we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports, their chairman's letters, their sec filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral or carbon zero goals starting with 2050 dates. And then since then we've seen 20, 40, and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and RFPs, RFIs that we're fielding. Certainly all now contain elements of that. So this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers, our fortune two 50 and fortune 500 customers. For sure. We're, we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this. We get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand, you know, here's what we have today. What can we do better? What can we do different to help make an impact on those goals? >>So making an impact top of mind, pretty much for everyone, as you mentioned, John SAS, let's bring you into the conversation. Now, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the things that you talk about with respect tohis approach to sustainability, sustainable it, are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space? >>Well, so Charlie touched on something really important that, you know, the, the wake up moment for us was receiving, you know, proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability. And it was really around two years ago, I suppose, for the first time. And those requests started coming from European based companies, cuz they had a bit of a head start over the us based global companies even. And what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to use renewable energy for data centers utilize the, they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance cost and other factors that you typically have at the top. So as we started working with them, I guess at beginning it was more tactical cuz we really had to find a way to respond. >>We were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability, we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second headquarters in Austin, Texas, those are lead gold certified. We've been installing solar panels, reducing waste across the company, recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles, all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in, in, in our offices and in our headquarters. But it's a lot more than that. And what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of, of customers and partners. We have over 30,000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers. And we wanted to find best practices and technologies and services that we could talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a, as a really large global reseller and integrator. We can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple partners that we work with to help solve customer problems. And so over time it's become more strategic and we've been as a company building the, the, the, the, the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that, and then also reporting for CDP Ecova and so forth. And it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years. And we take it very seriously. >>It sounds like, and it also sounds like from the customer's perspective, they're shifting from that tactical, maybe early initial approach to being more strategic, to really enabling sustainable it across their organization. And I imagine from a business driver's perspective, John saws and Charlie, are you hearing customers? You talked about it being part of RFPs, but also where are customers in terms of, we need to have a sustainable it strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers. Charlie, John, what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, that's top of mind with, with all the folks that we're talking to, I would say there's probably a three way tie for the importance of attracting and retaining investors. As you said, plus customers, customers are shopping, their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities and sustainable priorities with their own and who is gonna help them with their own reporting of, you know, scope two and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining talent. It's another element now of when you're bringing on new talent to your organization, they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align. So we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with, with the customers we're talking to. And it was a little surprising, cuz it, we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors, but it really has become quite a bit more than that. And it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization >>More comprehensive across the organization. Let's bring Dr. John Fry into the conversation and Terry your next. So stay tuned. Dr. Fry, can you talk about HPE and S H I partnering together? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them. No one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our collective customers the same way. From an HPE perspective, we bring the expertise on our products. We bring in sustainable it point of view, where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies implement a sustainable it program. But our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers. And in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table. So they extend the reach, they bring their own expertise. Their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just enterprise products. So by working together, we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs, give them the right technology solutions and enhance that customer experience because they get more value from us collectively. >>It really is better together, which is in a very appropriate name for our segment here. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about AMD. How is it helping customers to create that sustainable it strategy? And what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that, that are able to be delivered through partners like Shi? >>Well, Lisa, you used the word enabling just a short while ago. And fundamentally AMD enables HPE and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers. So in the data center space, we began our journey in 2017 with some fundamental design elements for our processor technology that were really keenly focused on improving performance, but also efficiency. So now the, the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about is really that measure of performance per wat. And you'll continue to see AMD enabled customers to, to try to find ways to, to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing, whether it's availability of power data center space, or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals. So we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to HPE and two Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers. >>Sounds like to me, Terry, that it's, that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler, but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability. >>You you're right about that. And, and we actually have tools, greenhouse gas, TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the, the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals. So we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like HPE and Shi >>Better together. As we said at the beginning in just a minute ago, Charlie, let's bring you back in, talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable it and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives. >>So for quite a while, we've had some offerings to help customers, especially in the end user compute side. A lot of customers were interested in, I've got assets for, you know, let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and, you know, those need to be refreshed. What do I do with those? How do I responsibly retire or recycle those? And we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time. It's within the last year or two, when we started offering for them guarantees and assurances assurances of how they can, if that equipment is reusable by somebody else, how can we issue them? You know, credits for carbon credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else. So it's not necessarily going to be e-waste, it's something that can be recycled and reused. We have other programs with helping extend the life of, of some systems where they look at well, I have a awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the, the, the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically. We can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment. So we've been able to come up with some creative solutions specifically around end user compute in the past, but we are looking to new ways now to really help extend that into data center infrastructure and beyond to really help with what are the needs, what are the, the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them. >>That's a great point that you bring up. Charlie and security kind of popped into my head here, John Saul's question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about, or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling, where are you having those customer conversations? Cause I know sustainability is a board level, it's a C level discussion, but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization? >>Well, so it's a, it's a combination of organizations within the customer. These are these global organizations. Typically when we're talking about asset life cycle management, asset recovery, how do you do that in a sustainable green way and securely the customers we're dealing with? I mean, security is top sustainability is right up there too. O obviously, but Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are global rollouts, tens of thousands of employees typically to, to have mobile devices, laptops, and phones, and so forth. And they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to, to the employees. And how do you do that in a sustainably? You need to think about that. Does it all go to a central location or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way? >>And I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that, well for, for example, one European pharmaceutical that states in their reports that they're already in scope one in scope two they're fully net zero at this point. And, and they say, but that only solves 3% of our overall sustainability goals. 97% is scope three, it's travel, it's shipping. It's, it's, it's all the, the, all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times, but they're coming to us now as a, as a supplier and as, and, and we're filling out, you know, forms and RFPs and so forth to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal >>Sustain sustainable supply chain. Absolutely. Yes. Dr. John Fry and Terry, I want to kind of get your perspectives. Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective, customers coming through RFP saying, Hey, we've gotta work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway, HPE and AMD hearing the same thing Dr. Fry will start with you. And then Terry >>Sure, absolutely. We receive about 2,500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year. And that's come up from a few hundred. So yeah, absolutely accelerating. Then the conversations turn deeper. Can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption? Then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can HPE offer net zero or carbon neutral technology solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those solutions in their own carbon footprint. So the questions are getting more sophisticated, the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing. And as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions, I think this trend is just gonna continue up. >>Yeah. And we see the same thing. We get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals. But the surveying that survey work that we've done with customers has led us to, you know, understand that, you know, approximately 75% of customers are gonna make sustainability goals, a key component of their RFIs in 2023, which is right around the corner. And, and, you know, 60% of those same customers really expect to have business level KPIs in the new year that are really related to sustainability. So this is not just a, a kind of a buzzword topic. This is, this is kind of business imperatives that, you know, the company, the companies like HPE and AMD and the partners like I, that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really gonna be ahead of the game. >>That's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't, we're not talking about a buzzword here. We're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all industries and Dr. Far, you mentioned regulations. And something that we just noticed is that the S E C recently said, it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions. If they were, if that were to, to come into play, I'm gonna pun back to Charlie and John saws. How would Shi and, and frankly at HPE and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of regulation were to be implemented. Charlie. >>Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that, with the reporting, we know reporting is a challenge. The scope two reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was gonna be a ways out now, all of a sudden, Hey, if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three targets, then you have to report on them. So that, that has become really important very quickly as word about this requirement is rumbling around there's concern. So we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose, but stay tuned, cuz we have something coming. That's interesting. >>Definitely PED my, my ears are, are, are perk here. Charlie, we'll stay tuned for that. Dr. Fry. Terry, can you talk about together with Shi HPE and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the da data obviously, which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it. We talked a little bit about security, but how are from a better together perspective, Dr. Fry will start with you, how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it? And at these days what it's real time requirements. >>Yeah. It's, it's an increasing challenge. In fact, we have changed the H HP story the way we talk about H HP's value proposition to talk about data first modernization. So how often do you collect data? Where do you store it? How do you avoid moving it? How do you make sure if you're going to collect data, you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value. And then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable it, because when I talk to technology executives, what they tell me again, and again, is there's this presumption within their user community, that storage is free. And so when, when they have needs for collecting data, for example, if, if once an hour would do okay, but the system would collect it once a minute, the default, the user asks for of course, once a minute. And then are you getting insights from that data? Or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge, because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network. There's huge power and carbon implications of doing that. So it's really making a better decision about what do we collect, why do we collect it, what we're gonna do with it when we collect and how we store it. >>And, and for years, customers have really talked about, you know, modernization and the need to modernize their data center. You know, I, I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that catalyst to really drive true modernization. And as they think forward, you know, when we work with, with HPE, you know, they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in, you know, specific customer workloads from the largest, super computers down to kind of general purpose servers. And when we work with partners like Shi, not only can they deliver the full suite of offerings for on premise deployments, they're also very well positioned to leverage the public cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there. And, and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end to end sustainability goal. >>That's a great point that, that it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be an end to end goal. We're just about out of time, but I wanted to give John saws the last word here, take us out, John, what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest, but what are some of the things that you are excited about as HPE AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives? >>Sure. Couple comments here. So Charlie, yeah, you touched on some upcoming capabilities that Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management. See, this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way. This is a train coming at everybody very quickly and they're not ready. Most customers aren't ready. And if we can help as, as a reseller integrator assessments, to be able to understand what they're currently running compare to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state, that seems valuable if we can help in that way. That's, those are things that we're looking into specifically, you know, greenhouse gas, emissions, relevant assessments, and, and, and within the comments of, of, of Terry and, and John around the, the power per wat and the vast portfolio of, of technologies that they, that they had to address various workloads is, is fantastic. >>We'd be able to help point to technologies like that and move customers in that direction. I think as a, as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers, I saw an article on BBC this morning that I, I, I think if, if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems. The BBC article mentioned this was Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, and they have a big project called merge. And today was a go live date. And BBC us news outlets have been reporting on it. They basically changed the model from a model called power of work, which takes a, a lot of compute and graphic, GPU power and so forth around the world. And it's now called power of stake, which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct. >>They have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency. And if they're wrong, it's taken from them. This new model reduces the emissions of their environment by 99 plus percent. The June emissions from Ethereum were, it was 120 telos per, per year, a Terra terat hours per year. And they reduced it actually, that's the equivalent of what the net Netherlands needed for energy, so comparable to a medium sized country. So if you can think differently about how to solve problems, it may be on-prem, it may be GreenLake. It may be, it may be the public cloud in some cases or other, you know, interesting, innovative technologies that, that AMD HPE, other partners that we can bring in along, along with them as well, we can solve problems differently. There is a lot going on >>The opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting. We thank you so much for talking together about how HPE AMD and SSHA are really working in partnership in synergy to help your customers across every organization, really become much more focused, much more collaborative about sustainable it. Guys. We so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My >>Pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

foreign [Music] Lisa Martin of the cube here hpe and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment and I'm here with four guests please welcome Charlie mulrooney Global pre-sales engineering manager at SHI John saw is also of shi joins us Global pre-sales Technical consultant and back with me are Terry Richardson North American Channel Chief and Dr John Fry Chief technologist of sustainable transformation at hpe welcome gang great to have you here all here Thank you Lisa thank you good to be here all right Charlie let's go ahead and start with you keeping the Earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses right everywhere globally can you talk truly about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable I.T sure so starting about a year and a half two years ago we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest Enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports their Chairman's letters their SEC filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral uh or carbon zero goals starting with 20 50 dates and then since then we've seen 20 40 and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and rfps rfis that we're Fielding certainly all now contain elements of that so this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers our Fortune 250 and Fortune 500 customers for sure where we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this we get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand you know here's what we have today what can we do better what can we do different to help make it an impact on those goals so making an impact top of Mind pretty much for everyone as you mentioned John Sal's let's bring you into the conversation now when you're in customer conversations what are some of the things that you talk about with respect to shi's approach to sustainability sustainable I.T are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space well so Charlie touched on something really important that you know the the wake-up moment for us was receiving you know proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability and it was really around two years ago I suppose for the first time and those requests started coming from european-based companies because they had a bit of a head start uh over the U.S based global companies even um and what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to uh use renewable energy for data centers uh utilized they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance costs and other factors that you typically had at the top so as we started working with them uh I guess that beginning was more tactical because we really had to find a way to respond uh we were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second Headquarters in Austin Texas um those are the gold certified we've been installing solar panels producing waste across the company recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in in uh in our offices and in our headquarters um but it's a lot more than that and what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of supply of customers and partners we have over 30 000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers and we wanted to find best practices and Technologies and services that we could uh talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a as a really large Global uh reseller and integrator we can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple uh partners that we work with to help solve customer problems and so over time it's become more strategic and we've been uh as a company building the uh the the the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that um and then also reporting for CDP echovatus and so forth and it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years and we take it very seriously it sounds like it also sounds like from the customer's perspective they're shifting from that tactical maybe early initial approach to being more strategic to really enabling sustainable I.T across their organization and I imagine from a business driver's perspective John saws and Charlie are you hearing customers you talked about it being part of rfps but also where are customers in terms of we need to have a sustainable I.T strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers Charlie John what are your thoughts on that yeah that's top of mind with uh with all the folks that we're talking to uh I would say there's probably a three-way tie for the importance of uh attracting and retaining investors as you said plus customers customers are shopping their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities in sustainable priorities uh with their own and who is going to help them with their own reporting of you know spoke to and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining Talent uh it's another element now of when you're bringing on a new talent to your organization they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align so we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with with the customers we're talking to it was a little surprising because we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors but it really has become quite a bit more than that and it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization more comprehensive across the organization let's bring Dr John Fry into the conversation and Terry your neck so stay tuned Dr Frey can you talk about hpe and Shia partnering together what are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned yeah it's a great question and one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them no one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our Collective customers the same way from an hpe perspective we bring the expertise on our products we bring in a sustainable I.T point of view where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies Implement a sustainable I.T program but our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers and in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table so they extend the reach they bring their own expertise their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just Enterprise Products so by working together we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs give them the right Technology Solutions and enhance that customer experience it's because they get more value from us collectively it really is better together which is a very appropriate name for our segment here Terry let's bring you into the conversation talk to us about AMD how is it helping customers to create that sustainable I.T strategy and what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that that are able to be delivered through Partners like Shi well Lisa you use the word enabling um just a short while ago and fundamentally AMD enables hpe and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers so in the data center space We Begin our journey in 2017 with some fundamental Design Elements for our processor technology that we're really keenly focused on improving performance but also efficiency so now the the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about was really that measure of performance per watt and you'll continue to see AMD enable um customers to to try to find ways to to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing whether it's availability of power data center space or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals so we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to hpe and to Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers sounds like to me Terry that it's that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability you're right about that and and we actually have tools greenhouse gas TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals so we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like hpe and Shi Better Together as we've said at the beginning and just a minute ago Charlie let's bring you back in talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable I.T and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives so for quite a while we've had uh some offerings to help customers especially in the end user compute side a lot of customers were interested in I've got assets for you know let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and you know those need to be refreshed what do I do with those how do I responsibly retire or recycle those and we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time it's within the last year or two when we started offering for them guarantees and Assurance assurances of how they can if that equipment is reusable by somebody else how can we issue them you know credits for uh carving credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else so it's not necessarily going to be E-Waste it's uh something that can be recycled and reused we have other programs with helping extend the life of of some systems where they look at boy I have an awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically we can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment so we've been able to accomplish some Creative Solutions specifically around end user compute in the past but we are looking to new ways now to to really help extend that into Data Center infrastructure and Beyond to really help with what are the needs what are the the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them [Music] that's a great point that you bring up Charlie and the security kind of popped into my head here John saw his question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling where are you having those customer conversations I know sustainability is a board level it's a c-level discussion but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization well so it's a it's a combination of um organizations within the customer these are these Global organizations typically when we're talking about asset like cycle management asset recovery how do you do that in a sustainable Green Way and securely the customers we're dealing with I mean security is top sustainability is right up there too obviously but uh um Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are Global rollouts tens of thousands of employees typically to to have mobile devices laptops and phones and so forth um and they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to to the employees and how do you do that in a sustainable way you need to think about that does it all go to a central location um or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that well for for example one European pharmaceutical that the states and their reports that they are already in scope one in scope two they're fully uh Net Zero at this point and and they say but that only solves three percent of our overall sustainability goals uh 97 is scope three it's travel it's shipping it's it's uh it's all the all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times but they're coming to us now as a as a supplier and ask and and we're filling out forms and rfps and so forth uh to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal so sustainable supply chain absolutely Dr John Fry and Terry I want to kind of get your perspectives Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective customers coming through RFP saying hey we've got to work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway hpe and AMD hearing the same thing Dr Fry will start with you and then Terry sure absolutely we receive about 2500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year and that's come up from a few hundred so yeah absolutely accelerating then the conversations turn deeper can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can hpe offer Net Zero or carbon neutral Technology Solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those Solutions in their own carbon footprint so the questions are getting more sophisticated the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing and as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions I think this trend is just going to continue up yeah and we see the same thing uh we get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals but the surveying that the survey work that we've done with customers has led us to you know understand that you know approximately 75 percent of customers are going to make sustainability goals a key component of their rfis in 2023 which is right around the corner and you know 60 of those same customers really expect to have business level kpis uh in the new year that are really related to sustainability so this is not just a a kind of a buzzword topic this is this is kind of business imperatives that you know the company the companies like hpe and AMD and the partners like Shi that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really going to be ahead of the game that's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't we're not talking about a buzzword here we're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all Industries and Dr Farr you mentioned regulations and something that we just noticed is that the SEC recently said it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions um if they were if that were to to come into play I'm going to come back to Charlie and John saws how would Shi and frankly at hpe and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of Regulation were to be implemented Charlie yeah so we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that with the reporting we know reporting is a challenge uh the scope 2 reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was going to be a ways out now all of a sudden hey if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three uh targets and you have to report on them so that that has become really important very quickly uh as word about this requirement is rumbling around uh there's concern so we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose but stay tuned because we have something coming that's interesting definitely peaked my ears are are parked here Charlie well stay tuned for that Dr Brian Terry can you talk about together with Shi hpe and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the data obviously which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it we talked a little bit about security but how are from a Better Together perspective Dr Fry will start with you how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it and these days what is real-time requirements yeah it's an increasing challenge in fact we have changed the HP Story the way we talk about hpe's value proposition to talk about data first modernization so how often do you collect data where do you store it how do you avoid moving it how do you make sure if you're going to collect data you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value and then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable I.T because when I talk to technology Executives what they tell me again and again is there's this presumption within their user community that storage is free and so when when they have needs for collecting data for example if if once an hour would do okay but the system would collect it once a minute the default the user asks for of course is once a minute and then are you getting insights from that data or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network there's huge power and carbon implications of doing that so it's really making a better decision about what do we collect why do we collect it what we're going to do with it when we collect and how we store it and for years customers have really talked about you know modernization and the need to modernize their data center you know I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that Catalyst to really Drive true modernization and as they think forward um you know when we work with with hpe you know they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in you know specific customer workloads from the larger supercomputers down to kind of general purpose servers and when we work with Partners like Shi not only can they deliver the full Suite of um offerings for on-premise deployments they're also very well positioned to leverage the public Cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end-to-end sustainability goal that's a great point that that it needs to be strategic but it also needs to be an end-to-end goal we're just about out of time but I wanted to give John saws the last word here take us out John what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest but what are some of the things that you're excited about as hpe AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives sure um a couple of comments here um so Charlie yeah you touched on some upcoming capabilities uh that uh Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management see this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way this is a train coming at everybody very quickly and um they're not ready most customers aren't ready and if we can help um as as a reseller integrator assessments to be able to understand what they're currently running compared to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state that seems valuable if we can help in that way that's those are things that we're looking into specifically uh you know greenhouse gas emissions relevant assessments and and um and what in the comments uh of Terry and John around the power per watt and um the vast um uh portfolio of technologies that they that they had to address various workloads is uh is fantastic we'd be able to help point to Technologies like that and move customers in that direction I think as a as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers I saw an article on BBC this morning that I I think if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems um the BBC article mentioned this was ethereum a cryptocurrency and they have a big project called merge and today was a go live date and BBC US news outlets have been reporting on it they basically changed the model from a model called The Power of work which takes a a lot of compute and graphic GPU power and so forth around the world and it's now called a power of stake which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct they have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency and if they're wrong it's taken from them this new model reduces the emissions of their um uh environment by 99 plus percent the June emissions from ethereum were it was 120 uh terawatts per per year terawatt hours per year and they reduced it um actually that's the equivalent of what the Netherlands needed for energy so the comparable to a medium-sized country so if you can think differently about how to solve problems it may be on-prem it may be extremely it may be that may be the public cloud in some cases or other you know interesting Innovative Technologies that the AMD hpe other partners that we can bring in along along with them as well we can solve problems differently there is a lot going on the opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting we thank you so much for talking together about how hpe AMD and sha are really working in partnership in Synergy to help your customers across every organization really become much more focused much more collaborative about sustainable I.T guys we so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights Thank you Lisa thank you my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin in a moment Dan Molina is going to join me he's the co-president and chief technology officer of nth generation you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music]

(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

>>The cube presents. Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante. The cube is live at Dell technologies world 2022. Dave, hope you say live, live <laugh>. We are live. We are in person. We are three-D. We are also here on the first day of our coverage with an eight time, right? Eight time cube alum, GA Norris joins us the senior vice president of edge portfolio solutions at Dell technologies. Welcome back our friend. >>Thank you. It's great to be here in this forum with live people, you know, and 3d, >>Isn't it. We're amazing. We're not, we're not via a screen. This is actually real. So Gill a a lot, a lot of buzz, great attendance at this first event, since 20, lot's been going on since then, we're talking a lot about edge. It's not new, but there's a lot changing what's going on there. >>Well, you know, edge has been around for a while. Um, actually since, you know, the beginning of time people were doing, you know, compute and, and applications, they in the, um, in the physical space where data it, but more and more, um, data is based on sensors in cameras and machine vision. And if you wanna make real time decisions, there's a few reasons why you can't just send everything back to a data center or a cloud. Maybe you don't have the right latency, maybe, um, you it's too costly. Maybe you don't have the right end with maybe you have security challenges, maybe have compliance challenges. So the world's moving more and more resources towards where the data is created and to make real time decisions and to generate new business values, things are changing and they're becoming much more, um, um, involved than before, much more. Um, so basically that that's, what's changing. You know, we need to deal with distributed architectures much more than we needed before. >>I think one of the things we've learned in the last very dynamic two years is that access to realtime data is no longer a nice to have it's table stakes for whether we're talking about retail, healthcare, et cetera. So that the, the realtime data access is critical for everybody to these days. >>Right? And it, it could be a real time decision, or it could even be data collection either way. You need to place some device, some comput next to the source. And then, you know, you have a lot of them and you just multiply by multiple use cases and you be, you basically, you have a very complex problem to solve. And if you ask me what's new is that complexity is big coming more and more, um, critical to solve >>Critical. >>Oh, go ahead, please. >>I was just gonna say, talk to me about some of the, from a, from a complexity resolution perspective, what are some of the things that Dell is doing to help organizations as they spread out to the edge more to meet that consumer demand, but reduce that complexity from an infrastructure standpoint. >>So we focus on simplifying. I think that's what people need right now. So there are two things we do. We, we optimize our products, um, whether they need regularization or different temperature envelopes or, uh, management capability, remote management capability, and we create solutions. And so we develop, um, solutions that look at specific, um, outcomes and we size it and we create deployment guides. Um, we do everything we can, um, to simplify the, uh, the edge uses for our customers. >>You know, you guys is talking about, it's not new. I, and I know you do a lot in retail. I think of like the NCR cash register as the, the original edge, you know, but there's other use cases. Uh there's you Gil, you and I have talked about AI inferencing in, in real time, there was a question today in the analyst forum, uh, I think it went to Jeff or nobody wanted to take it. No, maybe it was Michael, but the metaverse, but that there's edge space is the edge industrial I OT. So how do you, I mean, the Tam is enormous. How do you think about the use cases? Are there ones that, that aren't necessarily sort of horizontal for you that you don't go after, like EVs and TA the cars? Or how are you thinking about >>It? Depends. I agree that the, uh, edge business is very verticalized. Um, at the same time, there are very, uh, there is, there are themes that emerge across every industry. Um, so we're trying to solve things horizontally being Dell, we need to solve for, um, repeatability and scale, but we do package, you know, vertical solutions on top of them because that's what people need. Um, so for example, you know, you said, um, NCR being the, uh, the original edge. If I asked you today, name how many applications are, are running in a retail store to enable your experience? You'd say, well, there's self checkout. Maybe there is a, um, fraud detection, >>Let's say a handful >>It's handful. The fact is it's not, it's about 30 different applications, 30 that are running. So you have, you know, digital labels and you have, you know, a curbside delivery and you have inventory management and you have crowd management and you have safety and security. And what happens today is that every one of those solar is purchased separately and deployed separately and connected to the network separately and secured separately. Hence you see the problem, right? And so I know what we do, and we create a solution. For example, we see, okay, infrastructure, what can we consolidate onto an infrastructure that could scale over time? And then we look at it in the context of a solution. So, you know, the solution we're announcing, or we announced last week does just that on the left side, it looks at a consolidated infrastructure based on VxRail and VMware stack. So you can run multiple applications on the right side, it working with a company called deep north for Inso analytics and actually people that, um, and the show they can go and see this in action, um, in our, um, you know, fake retail store, uh, back at the edge booth. Um, but the point is those elements of siloed applications and the need to consolidate their true for every industry. And that's what we're trying to solve for. >>I was just wondering, you said they're true for every industry. Every industry is facing the same challenges there. What, what makes retail so prime for transformation right now? >>That's a great question. So, you know, using my example from before, if you are faced with this set, have a shopper that buys online and they now are coming back to the stores and they need to, they want the same experience. They want the stuff that they search for. They want it available to them. Um, and in fact, we research that 80% of people say, if they have a bad experience will not come back to a retail store. So you've got all of those use cases that you need to put to, you've got this savvy shopping that comes in, you've got heightened labor costs. You've got a supply chain problem in most of those markets, labor >>Shortages as >>Well. It's a perfect storm. And you wanna give an experience, right? So CIOs are looking at this and they go, how do I do all of that? Um, and they, they, as I said before, the key management, the key problem is management of all of those things is why they can innovate faster. And so retail is in this perfect storm where they need to innovate and they want to innovate. And now they're looking for options and we're here to help them. >>You know, a lot of times we talk about the in industrial IOT, we talk about the it and the OT schism. Is there a similar sort of dissonance between it, your peeps, Dell's traditional market, and what's happening, you know, at the near edge, the retail infrastructure sort of different requirements. How are you thinking about that and managing that >>About, um, 50% of edge projects today are, are somehow involving it. Um, usually every project will involve it for networking and security, so they have to manage it either way. And today there's a lot of what we used to call shadow it. When we talked about cloud, this has happens at the edge as well. Now this happened for a good reason because the expertise are the OT people expertise on the, the specific use case. It's true for manufacturing. It's also for true for, for retail. Um, our traditional audience is the it audience and, and we will never be able to merger two worlds unless it was better able to service the OT buyers. And even in the show, I I've had multiple conversations today. We, with people to talk about the divide, how to bring it together, it will come together when it can deliver a better service to the OT, um, constituents. And that's definitely a job for Dell, right? This is what we do. If we enable our it buyer to do a better job in servicing the OT crowd or their business crowd in retail, um, more innovation will happen, you know, across the, those different dimensions. So I'm happy you asked that because that's actually part of the mission we're taking on. >>Where is one of the things I think about when you, you talk about that consumer experience and we're very demanding as consumers. We wanna ha as you described, we wanna have the same experience we expect to have that regardless of where we are. And if that doesn't happen, you, you mentioned that number of 80% of people's survey said, if I have a bad experience with a merchant, I'm out, I'm going somewhere else. Right. So where is the rest of the Csuite in the conversation? I can think of, um, a COO the chief marketing officer from brand value, brand reputation perspective. Are you talking with those folks as well to help make the connective so reality? >>Um, I, I, I don't know that we're having those conversation with those business owners. We we're a, um, a system, an infrastructure company. So, you know, we get involved once they understand, you know, what they want to do. We just look at it in. And so if you solve it one way, it's gonna be one outcome. Maybe there is a better way to look at it. Maybe there's an architecture, maybe there's a more, you know, thoughtful way to think about, you know, the problems before they happen. And, um, but the fact that they're all looking shows you, that their business owners are very, very concerned with, with this reality, their >>Key stakeholders. Can >>We come back to your announcement? Can you, can we unpack that a little bit, uh, for those who might not be familiar with it? What, what, what is it called again? And give us a peel, the onion a little bit Gil. Yeah. >>So, so we call it a Dell technologies validated design. Um, it is essentially reference architecture. Um, we take a use case, we size it. So we, you know, we, um, we save customers, the effort of, of testing and sizing. We document the deployment step by step. We just make it simpler. And as says, before we look for consolidation, so we took a VXL, which is our leading ACI product based on VMware technology with a VMware application management stack with Tansu. Um, and then we, we, we look at that as the infrastructure, and then we test it with a company called deep north and deep north, um, are, um, store analytics. So through machine vision, they can tell you where people are queuing up. If there is somebody in the store that needs help and nobody's approaching, if there is a water spill and somebody might, you know, slip and hurt themselves, if a fridge is open and something may get spot. >>And so all of those things together through machine vision and realtime decisions can have this much better experience. So we put all of this together, we created a design and now it's out there in the market for our partners to use for our customers to use. Um, this is an extension of our manufacturing solutions, where we did the same thing. We partner with a company called PTC. I know of obviously in a company called Litmos, um, to create, um, industrial and the leading solution. So this whole word of solutioning is supposed to look at the infrastructure and a use case and bring them together and document in a way that simplifies things for >>Customers. Do you ever see that becoming a Aku at some point in time or, >>Um, personal, if you ask me? I don't think so. And the reason is there's still a lot of variability in those and skewing, but that's a very formal, you know, internal discussion. Yeah. Um, the point is we are, we want people to buy as much of it as they need to, and, and we really want to help them if Aku could help them, we will get there, but we need to see repeatability before creating skews. >>Can you give us an example of a, of a retail or a manufacturing customer that's using this Dell validated design, this DVD, and that really has reduced or eliminated that complexity that was there before. >>So this solution is new. I mean, it's brand new, we just announced it. So, no, but, um, I don't know what names I can call out, cuz referenceability is probably examples though about generic, but I will tell you that most of the large retailers in the us are based in their stores on Dell technologies. Um, a lot of the trail is in, in those stores and you're talking about thousands of locations with remote management. Um, what we're doing here is we're taking it to the next step by looking at new use cases that they have not been implementing before and saying, look, same infrastructure is valid. You know, scalable is it's scalable. And here are the new use cases with machine vision and other things that here is how you do that. But we're seeing a lot of success in retail in the last few years. >>So what should we expect looking forward, you know, any gaps that customers are asking for trying to fill? What, what two to three years out, what should we expect? >>Um, I think we're gonna stay very true to our simplification message. We want to help people simplify. So if it's simplifying, um, maintenance, if it's simplifying management, if it's simplifying through solutioning, you're gonna see us more and more and more, um, investing in simplification of edge. Um, and that's through our own IP, through our partnerships. Um, there, there is a lot more coming if, if I may say it myself, but, but it's, it's a little too early to, uh, to talk about it. >>So for those folks that are here at the show that get to see it and play with it and touch it and feel it, what would you say some of the biggest impacts are that this technology can deliver tomorrow? >>Well, first of all, it's enabling to do what they want. See, we don't have to go and, and tell people, oh, you probably really need to move things through the edge. They know they need to do it. Our job is to tell them how to do it in a secure way, in a simplified way. So that's, that's a nice thing about this, this market it's happening, whether we want it or not. Um, people in this show can go see some things in action. They can see the solution in action. They can see the manufacturing solution in action and even more so. And I forgot to say part of our announcement was a set of solution centers in Limerick island and in Singapore, that was just open. And soon enough in Austin, Texas saw that, and we will have people come in and have the full experience of IOT OT and edge device devices in action. So AR and VR, I T IEN technology and scanning technology. So they could be, um, thinking about the art of the possible, right? Thinking about this immersive experience that will help them invent with us. And so we're expecting a lot of innovation to come out of those conversations for us and for them. >>So doing a lot of testing before deployment and really gleaning that testing >>Before deployment solution architecture, just ideation, if they're not there yet. So, and I've just been to Singapore in one of those, um, they asked me to, um, pretend I was a, um, retail ski enter in a distribution center and I didn't do so well, but I was still impressed with the technology. So, >>Well, eight time Q alumni. Now you have a career to fall back on if you need to. Exactly. >><laugh> >>GA it's been great to have you. Thank you so much for coming back, talking to us about what's new on day one of Dell technologies world 22. Thank >>You for having me again, >>Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, coming to you live from the Venetian in Las Vegas at Dell technologies world 2022. This is day one of our coverage stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

>>Everyone. Welcome to the cube here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. We're live we're back with events. Also we're a virtual, we got hybrid all kinds of events this year, of course, summit in New York city happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John, again, John host of the queue. Got a great guest here, Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so elevator pitch is we are, are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. Now. We have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And yeah, it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demand coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, it's a small to midsize business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most cut customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spent a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off it's happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more, I O T devices, what's that like right now from a channel engine problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I tell, yeah, they're like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? >>It does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time in the cloud. If you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing forward. >>Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own >>It. Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy Jessey announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are what's >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we, the market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the out, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all of those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our manage services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost them a fortune. If >>The training alone would be insane, a risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 28 team. When, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. >>It's amazing. But I'll tell >>You what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small and large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were a provisioning top of rack switches. Right? First of all. And so if you're a business is also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are like >>Critical issues. This is >>Just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this. So >>That's, that's what at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. No. And then remind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that. Exactly. An it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's right, >>Right. Our old vendor. I like it. >><laugh> but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around the, at is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Business. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things a good tell your, your story. What's your journey. >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportu with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got a long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> well, so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be had built this company to this point? Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and that a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew interest structure was around the corner. Yeah. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app? Modernization is the data. What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migration. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance classic in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their >>Journey. And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. Okay. >>This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit tour 22. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break.

>>And welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS summit public sector here live in Washington, DC, where we're actually having a physical event, but also broadcasting to a hybrid audience digitally. I'm John, your hosted, like you've got a great panel here. Martin Rieger's chief solutions, officer stack armor, the thin poli who's with Splunk group vice president of partner go to market Americas and public sector, and Troy Bertram, vice president sales, a telos. Good to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. It's great to be. So you guys stuck on them to have a great solution on AWS called faster. Okay. Which is nice name what's what's it all about? >>So faster is about getting cloud service providers to an authorization, to operate with the federal government, uh, basically as fast as possible. It is the collection of threat alert, which is a fed ramp designed solution and boundary solution. That includes all those key security stack components. Uh, primarily our partners over at Splunk and telos. Uh, those products are scripted, streamlined, and designed to get customers there as fast as possible in a compliant manner. >>I love the acronym fast tr faster on AWS. Uh, how did you guys come up with the threat alerts concept? What did, what's this all about? How did it all come together? >>Uh, threat alert was, was born out of one of our primary services, which is migration and, uh, for roughly about a five-year stretch migrating federal agency systems, um, to Amazon, both east, west and gov cloud, uh, we recognized quickly that there was a need to include a security stack of common components, such as vulnerability scanning, uh, security incident event monitoring, uh, as well as a number of other key components designed around the continuous monitoring aspect of it. And so we quickly realized that, you know, the packaging of this solution and putting together a dashboard that allows us to tie everything in, uh, deploy very, very quickly through infrastructure as a code, um, was a vehicle that could help, uh, our customers and CSPs as well as agencies get through the FedRAMP ATO process. Um, quickly >>Talk about the relationship with Splunk and telos. How's this all connecting with? Just what's your role? >>Yeah, so really with the support of NIST and the new Oscar standard, which I'm going to make sure I get the acronym right. Open securities controls, assessment language, or asked gal, um, with our release of Exacta and automation of the compliance standards working with, and the framework, we've been able to look at best of breed partners in the industry, and it is all around acceleration of how can we move faster to deliver the end customer, the controls they need and want in a secure compliant manner. Um, and as someone that served in the government, right, it's, it's passion for the mission. And that's really what brought the three companies together >>And my opinion, by the way, congratulations on Telus going public. You guys do a lot of great cyber work. Congratulations. Now that data is the heart of this. I mean, Splunk that's all you guys do is think about data. How do you guys connect into, into the product? >>Well, it's exactly that really providing that data platform, then they analytics capability to enable the subject matter experts to bring the data to life. Right. And that's what we, that's why these partnerships are so important to Splunk because, uh, they have the subject matter expertise and can really leverage the power of the data platform to provide services to customers. >>Yeah. One of the big trends that's kind of underreported, in my opinion, is that partnerships required to kind of get the cyber security equation, right? This is a huge trend. People are sharing, but also working together. How, how do you guys see that evolving? Because you know, there has to be an openness around the data. There has to be more open solutions. How do you guys see that evolving? Um, >>Well you kind of hit the hammer on the heads. Splunk is, is essentially the heart and soul of our auditing logging and continuous monitoring piece. Um, in terms of, of the relationships and how we all work together. We we've evolved now to a point where we are able to pre-stage customers well in advance. Um, and in working with our partners, uh, tell us on Splunk. By the time we get started with a customer, we, we reduced the amount of time this takes, uh, on average by 40%, um, and even faster with the exact piece because, uh, as, as Troy kind of mentioned, the OSC gal component, um, is the future of accreditation. And it's certainly not limited to fed ramp, but that machine language, that XML Yammel Jason code, we've got things to the point where not only are we deploying Splunk in a, in a scripted pre-configured manner to work with our technology, we're also doing the same thing with Exacta. >>So the controls are three documented for everything that we provide, which means we don't have to spend the time going through the process of saying, okay, tell me what you're doing. We already have that down. The other best of breed type components that were mentioned by Troy. Um, it's the same thing, right? So customers, when they show up, they have a security stack that's ready to go. They already have FIPs compliance for encryption. They already have hardening in place so that when, when they approach us, all they've really got to do is deploy their application and close a very small gap in documentation, which we do with Exacta and then auditors can come in, hit the, they can jump, get what they need out of Exacta. And eventually once everyone else catches up to OSC gal, we'll be connecting systems to other systems and just pushing the package, the days of PDFs. And those are almost gone >>As someone that went through, um, achieving an ATO, the paper process and the Excel spreadsheets. It's a nightmare. And you've got sales engineers, you've got solution architects that are spending their time, not focused on delivering mission outcomes or new products and services to our public sector customers, but on the process and the paperwork, >>Can you share order of magnitude the old way, time wasting versus this solution? What's, what's gained cause that's key. This needs a resources when people are >>Every CFO ad in ISV wants to do two things, right? They want to support the sales efforts to move into the federal or state environment, right? We're talking about fed ramp, but state ramp is upon us now. So they want two things. How do I do this at the lowest cost possible limit my resources that are really expensive on the engineering side and how do I shrink the amount of time? So 40% is a very conservative estimate. I believe that we can continue with implementations of Bosco and other ingestation points, especially across government. We can shrink that time, which reduces the cost immensely >>The time savings day. What about the stack? >>But if you want to put it in perspective, right? I've been doing this since the beginning in 2012, and I've stood up three different three pills. I've audited over 200 companies. I've been doing this a long time. And in the beginning it was an average of 12 months just to get someone ready, just to get ready. That didn't include the audit time. So we've evolved to a point now where on average, that's down to 12 weeks. And that was before the inclusion of the exact piece. We were able to shave off four more weeks with that, to the point where we're down to eight weeks and the government is pushing to try to get towards a 30 day ATO. And I think Oscar was the answer for that. And so to give you an idea of where we were to where we are now, we went from 12 months to 12 weeks. >>That's huge. So the data is the key in here. And then you got faster on AWS. Love the name wa how does that compare to other ATO solutions? How do you guys see that comparing a wonder place? >>I think in terms of the other solutions that are available out there, there, there's a couple key things that, that I think the rest of the market is trying to do to catch up. And one of those is the dashboard technology that we have in place integrates directly with Splunk and with Exacta, it pulls in from all the AWS sources that are available in terms of security and information and centralizes it in one spot. And so nobody else is doing that and we've been doing it for years. And this, this to me, OSS gal, and the addition of the exact component was the next evolution. >>Um, on the partnership side, how do you guys see it evolving? What's next >>More continuous monitoring, I think, right. It's not just about a FedRAMP authorization, but continuous monitoring in general for, for all of our public sector. >>That's day two operations continues ongoing AI operations. There's gotta be some machine learning in here somewhere. Is there? >>Yeah. I'll speak to the partnerships a little bit. And I think even back to AWS, right? Why we're here and it's great to be in person is it's around us working together as an industry and companies, right? The authority to operate on AWS, the ATO and AWS was started to bring like-minded companies together to help solve these problems. Yeah. >>I mean, it's a real benefit. It really shows that you can put a stack together, right. And then save time like that 12 months to 12 weeks. That's what cloud's about right now. Then the question is security. Think you should get that right. That is going to be an evolution. What's the vision of the product? >>Um, well, there's two things around that we, we, we talked about, yes, it's, it's planned prepare authorized, right? That is the current fed ramp mantra and post ATO. The continuous monitoring piece is really a core element. But in terms of the future three PAOs, the third-party assessment organizations that, that audit our customers, that, that we're all preparing together. Eventually they're systems, they're all developing audit systems around. And so where we're going is the auditor will connect to Exacta and they will simply over API or whatever calls they make. They will pull all of that audit information control information, which is only going to accelerate this even more. >>Yeah. I mean, the observability, the data, the automation all plays into more speed, more agility, faster, >>And, and meeting all of the standards, right? Whether it's smart Z or it's HIPAA state Ram home in Austin, Texas Tex ramp is, is a thing, right? How do we help each one of these customers with their own compliance or super smart, >>You know, the business model of reduce the steps it takes to do something, make it easier and faster is a good business model. Wow. >>It's not, it's becoming an ecosystem right. In the sense that, um, you know, Oscar has been under development for three years and, and, and stack armor, we've been supporting some components at NIST, but to the point where, uh, once we eliminate the, the traditional paper, you know, word doc XL PDF, um, and get to a point where everything is tied together. But one there's one important aspect to this is that it's all in boundary. So the authorization boundary is that invisible red line. We draw around everything in scope for an audit. And so that, by the way, is another critical component. The Splunk servers are in boundary. The exact servers are in boundary, which is a huge, huge element to this. >>Yeah. Good. Great. To see the spunk partnership, adding value here with telos, good, your cybersecurity expertise, pulling it all together. It's a great solution. >>It is, and great partners to work with, right? And I know that we will have additional solutions and product offerings in the future. >>Martin treadmill, Bethann. Thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the show. As we wind down day two of cube live coverage in-person event, AWS public sector summit in Washington, DC. This is the cube. We right back after this short break,

>>Hello everyone. Thank you, add appreciating the studio. We're here at the cube here in cloud city telco DRS Cloud city. I'm Jeffrey Day Volonte. We're here for the next three days. Wall to wall live coverage. It's a physical event with a virtual program. It's hybrid. We're here with Daniel Royston, the Ceo of telco D. R. And the acting Ceo Toby, which is announced today. Great >>to see you. It's awesome to see you guys. >>Awesome to see how you doing, how you >>Feeling? I'm feeling congratulations. Right. 101 days ago, I didn't even think this doesn't exist. Right. And we got in contact with you guys and we said we knew there was always going to be a big virtual component and we invited you guys and here we are together. It's insane. >>Well we did the preview videos, but we're kind of walking through and document in the early stages. It all came together beautifully spectacular For the folks watching behind us is the most spectacular build out clouds. It's an ecosystem open concept. It feels like the Apple store meets paradise. Of course. We got the cube here in the set and we got the studio with all the command and control of adam there. So I gotta ask you with the connected keynotes going on right now. The connected world. Yeah. It's connected. We all know that everyone knows that what's, what's different now real quick before we get into the program, what's going on? >>Yeah. I think a big part of my messages and advocating it's more than just the network, Right? And I think telcos forever have relied on. That's all it is. That's what it's about. And I'm like, nope, you guys got to start focusing on your subscribers, right? And so the over the top players keep coming in and siphoning away their revenue and it's time for them to start focusing on us, right and making experience great. And I think that's what this is all about. >>So we're gonna get the news but I want to toss it to Katie. The roving reporter is going to give it a detail on how it all came together. So Katie take it away. >>Mhm We're here in Barcelona and so excited to be back in this beautiful city over at the convention center. The team is working hard putting the finishing touches to tell Cody are amazing cloud city booth at MwC Barcelona 2021. I'm sure you know the story of how this all came together as one of the biggest vendors Erickson pulled out of M. W. C. With just over 100 days until the start of the event. When this happened last year, it kicked off a tidal wave of departures and MwC was called off this year. We all wondered if MWC was going to be cancelled again and that's when Daniel Royston Ceo of Telco D. R. And Tito G swooped in and took over the booth all 6000 square meters of it. The plan turn the booth into cloud city, the epicenter of public cloud innovation at MWC crews have been working around the clock. Over 100 and 50 people have been on this construction site for over three weeks with covid testing every day to prevent outbreaks during the build and in 100 days, it's become just that Cloud city has over 30 vendors presenting over 70 demos with 24 private meeting areas. Cloud City Live is a virtual showcase and live broadcast studio featuring 50 guests from cloud Thought leaders around the world. They have telepresence robots for a more personalized experience and the Cloud city quest game with a chance to win more than $100,000 to gain access to live streams of our nightly concerts with rosario flores and rock legend Jon bon Jovi. And don't forget to visit cloud city dot telco D R dot com to join in on the fun Daniel Royston and Nacho Gomez, founder and Ceo of one of the key vendors in the construction of the booth gave us a behind the scenes tour of the booth. >>Nacho. We did it. Yeah, we did. It can't even touch because of Covid. Yeah, but look what we did. But right, 100 days ago I called and I said I'm taking over the Ericsson booth. What did you think? I know you were crazy but just a little bit crazy, realized that you were mortgages than I thought. So at the very, at the very beginning I thought, yeah, she's crazy. But then I couldn't sleep that night. But the next uh then I realized that it was a very good it's a great idea. Yeah super smart. So yeah we're gonna show everyone toward the booth. Yeah let's go. Let's go. Okay So how do we build such an amazing, beautiful building now? So this is we've made building inside a book. So it was very hard to find a glassful of facade. The roof is around 24 tones. Yeah so it's crazy crazy but we made it work and it's totally amazing. Yeah. Do you want to go to tragedy life? Do let's go. Okay so here we are Cloud city live. I know we're producing a whole live streaming tv show. We always knew because of covid that not everyone will be able to come to Mwc as we wanted to make sure that people can learn about the public cloud. So over here we have the keynote stage, we're gonna have awesome speakers talking all throughout M. W. C. People from AWS Microsoft, google vendors companies. So really really great content. And then over there we have the cube interviewing people again 15 minute segments, live streaming but also available on demand. And you can find all of this content on cloud city. Tell Cody are calm and it's available for anyone to you. Well, a lot of content. And what about the roberts? I never get them out. Come on. We remember 100 days ago we were locked down. So we came up with the idea of having robots for the people who cannot attend in person. I know right. We always knew that there was gonna be a big virtual component to MWC this year. So we bought 100 telepresence robots. It's a great way to have a more personal experience inside the boot. Just sign up for one on cloud city dot telco D r dot com and you can control it yourself. Right? So today we have Nikki with us, who's dialing in from the Philippines in Manila? Hello, Nicky. Hi there, how are you? I were great. Can you show us a twirl all gaining on us? Super cool. Yeah, it is. What an experience. So Nikki robots are not the only cool thing we have in cloud city. We also have super awesome concert. We have rosario flores on monday. Who's a latin grammy award winner. We have Jon bon Jovi, Jon bon Jovi on Tuesday, can't be changing telephone that a little bit of rock n roll and that's Tuesday. And on Wednesday we have DJ official, it's going to be a super party. Now if you play our cloud city quest on cloud city telco D R dot com you can participate in a live streaming concert and so I know a lot of people out there have been a lockdown. Haven't been able to be going to concerts. Things from austin texas, which is the live music capital of the world, How to have music. It would be so exciting is gonna be great. I'm getting hungry. Why don't we go to the restaurant? Let's go eat. Let's go. Yeah, Here is our awesome restaurant. I know it's called Cloud nine. Right? It's a place to come and sit down and relax now. Barcelona is known for its great food and I'm a foodie. So we had to have a restaurant. Should we go check out my secret bar? Let's go. Mhm. Yeah, here >>thanks to a R. And thank you Nacho if you're watching this at home, I'm so sorry you can't join us in person. However, let's not forget this is a hybrid event meaning we're bringing all the public cloud action right to you wherever in the world you might be. This includes the Pact cloud city live program. We've partnered with the cube Silicon angle Media's live streaming video studio to make sure that all of the keynotes, panel discussions, demos, case studies interviews and way more are available on demand so you can watch them whenever and wherever you want or you can live stream and enjoy all things cloud city as and when they happen. So for those of you not able to join us in, Barcelona, be sure to log in to cloud city live and catch all the action and don't miss the awesome concert Tuesday night with Jon bon Jovi available for free. If you participate in our cloud city quest game, I'll be here throughout MWc bringing you reports and updates. Stay >>tuned. Yeah. >>Mhm. Okay, we're back here on the cube on the floor at mobile world congress in cloud city telco DRS clouds. They were here with D. R. Of telco, D R. Danielle Rice and great to see you back, we're back. So the keynotes going on connected world, the big news here, I'll see the open shift that's happening is going open. Open ran, it's been a big thing. Open ran alliance. You're starting to see the industry come together around this clear mandate that applications are gonna be cloud native and the public cloud is just coming in like a big wave and people are gonna be driftwood or they'll be surfing the wave. Yeah, this is what's happening. >>Yeah, I think public cloud is an unstoppable megatrend. It's hit every other industry regulated industries like banking, right? Top secret industries like government. They all use the public cloud tells us the last, you know, standing old school industry and it's coming and I don't think we could have had an MWc without talking about open man. That's the other major shift. And so we're bringing both of those ideas here together in cloud city. So >>the big theme is telco transformation. Maybe we could start with the basics like paint a picture of what the telco infrastructure looks like, particularly the data center stuff because they all have big data centers >>because that's >>those are the candidates to go into the cloud explained to the audience. >>Well, do you have a time machine? I think if any of us were in tech in the late 90s and early 2000s, that's what telcos like today. Right. So for people outside of the industry don't know right there mostly still managing their own data centers, they're just sort of adopting virtualization. Some of the more advanced telcos are mostly virtualized public cloud. Is this idea that like this advanced thought and so yeah, I mean things are on premise, things are in silom, things don't use a P. I. S there all integrated with custom code. And so the transformation, we can all see it because we've lived it in other industries. And I'm bringing that to telco and say come along for the ride. It totally works and it's gonna be amazing. >>So it's hardened purpose built infrastructure. Okay. That ultimately parts of that need to go to the public cloud. Right. What parts do you see going first? >>I think all of it. Really. Yeah. And I think when you look at like dish in the W. S. Which was an announcement that came out about two months ago. Right. I mean dish was doing all these are FPs. Everyone knew about it. They were looking for a cloud native software and no one knew what they were. They knew a big part was open man. But their coupling open ran with AWS and deploying their parts of their network onto the public cloud and the whole industry is like wait we thought this was years away, right? Or number two, you're crazy. And I'm saying this is what I've been talking about guys. This is exactly what you can do, leverage the Capex over. Let's see. I think Amazon did $100 billion 2020 right, leverage that Capex for yourself. Get that infinite scalability right? It's going to, well we >>have, we have a saying here in the queue, we just made this up called D. R. That's your initial tucker. The digital revolution and the three Rs reset re platform and re factor. I think the observation we're seeing is that you're coming in with the narrative what everyone's kind of like they're waking up because they have to reset and then re platform with the cloud. But the opportunity is gonna be the re factoring, You're seeing the public cloud, do that already with the Enterprise Enterprises. Already re factoring has done that. Already done that now. Telcos the last area to be innovated by the cloud. >>Yeah, I think there's old school big, we're kind of on a hollowed ground here in the Ericsson booth that I took over, right? They bailed and I kind of made fun of them. I was like, they don't have anything to say, right, They're not going to go to the show. I'm like, this is this is a revolution that's happening in telco and I don't think the big guys are really interested in rewriting their software that frankly makes them billions and billions of dollars of revenue. And I'm like to use the public cloud. All of the software needs to be rewritten needs to be re factored and you've got to start training your teams on how to use it. They don't have any capability. The telcos, in terms of those skills hire the right people, retrain your teams, move your applications, rewrite them. And I think that's what we're talking, this is not a short journey, this is a 10 year journey. So >>let's fast forward to the future a little bit because when I look around cloud city, I see ecosystem everywhere. So as you well know, the telcos have generally done a poor job of attacking adjacent seas. So my question is can they go beyond should they go beyond connectivity or is that going to be the role of the ecosystem? >>Yeah, I think it's time that the telco starts to focus on their subscriber, right? It's been really easy for them to rely on the oligopoly of the network, Right? The network, we live in the United States, we see the 18 T Verizon T mobile five G network, five G network. Like what about us? Right. And it's really easy for the over the top players right, that come in and they're always, telcos are always complaining about being coming dumb pipes and I'm like, you don't focus on the customer, we would rather buy from an Apple and amazon if they provided a mobile service because the customer experience will be better. Right? They need to start focusing on us. They have great businesses but they want to make them better. They need to start focusing on the subscriber, so >>it's a partnership with the ecosystem then for them to go beyond just straight connectivity because you're right, those are the brands that we want to do business >>with. You know, there was a great survey, Peter Atherton who will be talking as a speaker I think um I can't remember when he's talking but he was talking about how there was a survey done, where would you rather get your mobile service from? And it had a couple of big names in telco and then of course the obvious, you know, consumer brands, the ones that we all know and it was like overwhelmingly would rather buy from an amazon or an apple. And I'm like, this is like if you guys don't change, right, if telco doesn't change they keep rolling out 60 and blah blah blah. It's about the network and I don't start making about the subscriber right? Those revenues are going to continue to erode and they just sit there and complain about the O. T. T. Players. Like it's time to fight back. Yeah, I own the subscriber >>relationship. It's a digital revolution and I think This event really encapsulates in my mind this hybrid world here because it's physical events back. It's been since 2019 winter that this event actually happened. >>Well no it was even longer than, well I guess winter it was February of 19, right? And so like you look at ericsson and some of the big names that dropped out of the show, the time they come back, three years will have passed three years, right? This is how you feel your sales funnel is how you connect with your customers right? Tokyo is a very global, you know experience and so you gotta, you gotta get in front of people and you got to talk a >>lot of change to its happened, look at just what public clouds done in 2.5 years. You imagine three years being just >>gone, right? And I think a lot of people back to edition A. W. S. I think the industry was a little bit surprised by that announcement. So I've been telling executives if you were surprised by that, if you think that's, you know, if you don't know how that's gonna work, you need to come to cloud cities, you start meeting all the vendors are here. We have over 30 vendors, 70 demos, right? People who are pushing the technology forward, you need to learn what's going on here. We have several dish vendors here. Come learn about open rand, come learn about public cloud. So >>we're tight on time today, but we're going to have you back and we want to get into the tech, Get it to open, ran a little bit, get into what 5G and beyond and how we're going to take advantage of that and monetize it and what that all means. >>And also we want to hear what's going on the hallways. I know you got a lot of your key noting, you're gonna be a lot of events, the yacht. You've got a lot of briefings, >>yep. Yeah, I've already had two meetings this morning. I shot a video. Um, I met with one of the world's largest groups and I met with a tiny little super app company. Right? So running the gamut, doing everything reporter >>now, we could be like our roaming >>reporter. You know, I love, I love talking to execs and telco getting their perspective on what is public cloud and where are they going, what are they thinking about? And you talked to people who really, really get it and you get people who are just nascent and everywhere in between and I love mwc it's going great. >>Daniel Rose and you are a digital revolution telco DDR. There's amazing. Davis has been fantastic. Again for the folks watching, this is a hybrid events, there's an online component and we're reaching out with our remote interviews to get people brought in and we're shipping this content out to the masses all over the world. It's gonna be really amazing cube coverages here. It's gonna be rocking you guys are doing great. I just want to give you a compliment that you guys just did an amazing job. And of course we've got adam in the studio with the team. So adam, I'm gonna pass it off back to you in the studio

>>Hey, welcome to the live panel. My name is Brett. I am your host, and indeed we are live. In fact, if you're curious about that, if you don't believe us, um, let's just show a little bit of the browser real quick to see. Yup. There you go. We're live. So, all right. So how this is going to work is I'm going to bring in some guests and, uh, in one second, and we're going to basically take your questions on the topic designer of the day, that continuous integration testing. Uh, thank you so much to my guests welcoming into the panel. I've got Carlos, Nico and Mandy. Hello everyone. >>Hello? All right, >>Let's go. Let's go around the room and all pretend we don't know each other and that the internet didn't read below the video who we are. Uh, hi, my name is Brett. I am a Docker captain, which means I'm supposed to know something about Docker. I'm coming from Virginia Beach. I'm streaming here from Virginia Beach, Virginia, and, uh, I make videos on the internet and courses on you to me, Carlos. Hey, >>Hey, what's up? I'm Carlos Nunez. I am a solutions architect, VMware. I do solution things with computers. It's fun. I live in Dallas when I'm moving to Houston in a month, which is where I'm currently streaming. I've been all over the Northeast this whole week. So, um, it's been fun and I'm excited to meet with all of you and talk about CIA and Docker. Sure. >>Yeah. Hey everyone. Uh, Nico, Khobar here. I'm a solution engineer at HashiCorp. Uh, I am streaming to you from, uh, the beautiful Austin, Texas. Uh, ignore, ignore the golden gate bridge here. This is from my old apartment in San Francisco. Uh, just, uh, you know, keeping that, to remember all the good days, um, that that lived at. But, uh, anyway, I work at Patrick Corp and I work on all things, automation, um, and cloud and dev ops. Um, and I'm excited to be here and Mandy, >>Hi. Yeah, Mandy Hubbard. I am streaming from Austin, Texas. I am, uh, currently a DX engineer at ship engine. Um, I've worked in QA and that's kind of where I got my, uh, my Docker experience and, um, uh, moving into DX to try and help developers better understand and use our products and be an advocate for them. >>Nice. Well, thank you all for joining me. Uh, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to be here. And so for those of you in chat, the reason we're doing this live, because it's always harder to do things live. The reason we're here is to answer a question. So we didn't come with a bunch of slides and demos or anything like that. We're here to talk amongst ourselves about ideas and really here for you. So we've, we obviously, this is about easy CII, so we're, we're going to try to keep the conversation around testing and continuous integration and all the things that that entails with containers. But we may, we may go down rabbit holes. We may go veer off and start talking about other things, and that's totally fine if it's in the realm of dev ops and containers and developer and ops workflows, like, Hey, it's, it's kinda game. >>And, uh, these people have a wide variety of expertise. They haven't done just testing, right? We, we live in a world where you all kind of have to wear many hats. So feel free to, um, ask what you think is on the top of your mind. And we'll do our best to answer. It may, might not be the best answer or the correct answer, but we're going to do our best. Um, well, let's get it start off. Uh, let's, let's get a couple of topics to start off with. Uh, th the, the easy CGI was my, one of my three ideas. Cause he's the, one of the things that I'm most excited about is the innovation we're seeing around easier testing, faster testing, automated testing, uh, because as much as we've all been doing this stuff for, you know, 15 years, since 20 years since the sort of Jenkins early days, um, it it's, it seems like it's still really hard and it's still a lot of work. >>So, um, let's go around the room real quick, and everybody can just kind of talk for a minute about like your experience with testing and maybe some of your pain points, like what you don't like about our testing world. Um, and we can talk about some pains, cause I think that will lead us to kind of talk about what, what are the things we're seeing now that might be better, uh, ideas about how to do this. I know for me, uh, testing, obviously there's the code part, but just getting it automated, but mostly getting it in the hands of developers so that they can control their own testing. And don't have to go talk to a person to run that test again, or the mysterious Jenkins platform somewhere. I keep mentioning Jenkins cause it's, it is still the dominant player out there. Um, so for me, I'm, I'm, I, I don't like it when I'm walking into a room and there's, there's only one or two people that know how the testing works or know how to make the new tests go into the testing platform and stuff like that. So I'm always trying to free those things so that any of the developers are enabled and empowered to do that stuff. So someone else, Carlos, anybody, um, >>Oh, I have a lot of opinions on that. Having been a QA engineer for most of my career. Um, the shift that we're saying is everyone is dev ops and everyone is QA. Th the issue I see is no one asked developers if they wanted to be QA. Um, and so being the former QA on the team, when there's a problem, even though I'm a developer and we're all running QA, they always tend to come to the one of the former QA engineers. And they're not really owning that responsibility and, um, and digging in. So that's kind of what I'm saying is that we're all expected to test now. And some people, well, some people don't know how it's, uh, for me it was kind of an intuitive skill. It just kind of fit with my personality, but not knowing what to look for, not knowing what to automate, not even understanding how your API end points are used by your front end to know what to test when a change is made. It's really overwhelming for developers. And, um, we're going to need to streamline that and, and hold their hands a little bit until they get their feet wet with also being QA. >>Right. Right. So, um, uh, Carlos, >>Yeah, uh, testing is like, Tesla is one of my favorite subjects to talk about when I'm baring with developers. And a lot of it is because of what Mandy said, right? Like a lot of developers now who used to write a test and say, Hey, QA, go. Um, I wrote my unit tests. Now write the rest of the test. Essentially. Now developers are expected to be able to understand how testing, uh, testing methodologies work, um, in their local environments, right? Like they're supposed to understand how to write an integration tasks federate into and tasks, a component test. And of course, how to write unit tests that aren't just, you know, assert true is true, right? Like more comprehensive, more comprehensive, um, more high touch unit tests, which include things like mocking and stubbing and spine and all that stuff. And, you know, it's not so much getting those tests. Well, I've had a lot of challenges with developers getting those tests to run in Docker because of usually because of dependency hell, but, um, getting developers to understand how to write tests that matter and mean something. Um, it's, it's, it can be difficult, but it's also where I find a lot of the enjoyment of my work comes into play. So yeah. I mean, that's the difficulty I've seen around testing. Um, big subject though. Lots to talk about there. >>Yeah. We've got, we've already got so many questions coming in. You already got an hour's worth of stuff. So, uh, Nico 81st thoughts on that? >>Yeah, I think I definitely agree with, with other folks here on the panel, I think from a, um, the shift from a skillset perspective that's needed to adopt the new technologies, but I think from even from, uh, aside from the organizational, um, and kind of key responsibilities that, that the new developers have to kinda adapt to and, and kind of inherit now, um, there's also from a technical perspective as there's, you know, um, more developers are owning the full stack, including the infrastructure piece. So that adds a lot more to the plate in Tim's oaf, also testing that component that they were not even, uh, responsible for before. Um, and, um, also the second challenge that, you know, I'm seeing is that on, you know, the long list of added, um, uh, tooling and, you know, there's new tool every other day. Um, and, um, that kind of requires more customization to the testing, uh, that each individual team, um, any individual developer Y by extension has to learn. Uh, so the customization, uh, as well as the, kind of the scope that had, uh, you know, now in conferences, the infrastructure piece, um, uh, both of act to the, to the challenges that we're seeing right now for, um, for CGI and overall testing, um, uh, the developers are saying, uh, in, in the market today. >>Yeah. We've got a lot of questions, um, about all the, all the different parts of this. So, uh, let me just go straight to them. Cause that's why we're here is for the people, uh, a lot of people asking about your favorite tools and in one of this is one of the challenges with integration, right? Is, um, there is no, there are dominant players, but there, there is such a variety. I mean, every one of my customers seems like they're using a different workflow and a different set of tools. So, and Hey, we're all here to just talk about what we're, what we're using, uh, you know, whether your favorite tools. So like a lot of the repeated questions are, what are your favorite tools? Like if you could create it from scratch, uh, what would you use? Pierre's asking, you know, GitHub actions sounds like they're a fan of GitHub actions, uh, w you know, mentioning, pushing the ECR and Docker hub and, uh, using vs code pipeline, I guess there may be talking about Azure pipelines. Um, what, what's your preferred way? So, does anyone have any, uh, thoughts on that anyone want to throw out there? Their preferred pipeline of tooling? >>Well, I have to throw out mine. I might as Jenkins, um, like kind of a honorary cloud be at this point, having spoken a couple of times there, um, all of the plugins just make the functionality. I don't love the UI, but I love that it's been around so long. It has so much community support, and there are so many plugins so that if you want to do something, you don't have to write the code it's already been tested. Um, unfortunately I haven't been able to use Jenkins in, uh, since I joined ship engine, we, most of our, um, our, our monolithic core application is, is team city. It's a dotnet application and TeamCity plays really well with.net. Um, didn't love it, uh, Ms. Jenkins. And I'm just, we're just starting some new initiatives that are using GitHub actions, and I'm really excited to learn, to learn those. I think they have a lot of the same functionality that you're looking for, but, um, much more simplified in is right there and get hubs. So, um, the integration is a lot more seamless, but I do have to go on record that my favorite CICT tools Jenkins. >>All right. You heard it here first people. All right. Anyone else? You're muted? I'm muted. Carlin says muted. Oh, Carla says, guest has muted themselves to Carlos. You got to unmute. >>Yes. I did mute myself because I was typing a lot, trying to, you know, try to answer stuff in the chat. And there's a lot of really dark stuff in there. That's okay. Two more times today. So yeah, it's fine. Yeah, no problem. So totally. And it's the best way to start a play more. So I'm just going to go ahead and light it up. Um, for enterprise environments, I actually am a huge fan of Jenkins. Um, it's a tool that people really understand. Um, it has stood the test of time, right? I mean, people were using Hudson, but 15 years ago, maybe longer. And, you know, the way it works, hasn't really changed very much. I mean, Jenkins X is a little different, but, um, the UI and the way it works internally is pretty familiar to a lot of enterprise environments, which is great. >>And also in me, the plugin ecosystem is amazing. There's so many plugins for everything, and you can make your own if you know, Java groovy. I'm sure there's a perfect Kotlin in there, but I haven't tried myself, but it's really great. It's also really easy to write, um, CIS code, which is something I'm a big fan of. So Jenkins files have been, have worked really well for me. I, I know that I can get a little bit more complex as you start to build your own models and such, but, you know, for enterprise enterprise CIO CD, if you want, especially if you want to roll your own or own it yourself, um, Jenkins is the bellwether and for very good reason now for my personal projects. And I see a lot on the chat here, I think y'all, y'all been agreed with me get hub actions 100%, my favorite tool right now. >>Um, I love GitHub actions. It's, it's customizable, it's modular. There's a lot of plugins already. I started using getting that back maybe a week after when GA and there was no documentation or anything. And I still, it was still my favorite CIA tool even then. Um, and you know, the API is really great. There's a lot to love about GitHub actions and, um, and I, and I use it as much as I can from my personal project. So I still have a soft spot for Travis CAI. Um, you know, they got acquired and they're a little different now trying to see, I, I can't, I can't let it go. I just love it. But, um, yeah, I mean, when it comes to Seattle, those are my tools. So light me up in the comments I will respond. Yeah. >>I mean, I, I feel with you on the Travis, the, I think, cause I think that was my first time experiencing, you know, early days get hub open source and like a free CIA tool that I could describe. I think it was the ammo back then. I don't actually remember, but yeah, it was kind of an exciting time from my experience. There was like, oh, this is, this is just there as a service. And I could just use it. It doesn't, it's like get hub it's free from my open source stuff. And so it does have a soft spot in my heart too. So yeah. >>All right. We've got questions around, um, cam, so I'm going to ask some questions. We don't have to have these answers because sometimes they're going to be specific, but I want to call them out because people in chat may have missed that question. And there's probably, you know, that we have smart people in chat too. So there's probably someone that knows the answer to these things. If, if it's not us, um, they're asking about building Docker images in Kubernetes, which to me is always a sore spot because it's Kubernetes does not build images by default. It's not meant for that out of the gate. And, uh, what is the best way to do this without having to use privileged containers, which privileged containers just implying that yeah, you, you, it probably has more privileges than by default as a container in Kubernetes. And that is a hard thing because, uh, I don't, I think Docker doesn't lie to do that out of the gate. So I don't know if anyone has an immediate answer to that. That's a pretty technical one, but if you, if you know the answer to that in chat, call it out. >>Um, >>I had done this, uh, but I'm pretty sure I had to use a privileged, um, container and install the Docker Damon on the Kubernetes cluster. And I CA I can't give you a better solution. Um, I've done the same. So, >>Yeah, uh, Chavonne asks, um, back to the Jenkins thing, what's the easiest way to integrate Docker into a Jenkins CICB pipeline. And that's one of the challenges I find with Jenkins because I don't claim to be the expert on Jenkins. Is there are so many plugins because of this, of this such a huge ecosystem. Um, when you go searching for Docker, there's a lot that comes back, right. So I, I don't actually have a preferred way because every team I find uses it differently. Um, I don't know, is there a, do you know if there's a Jenkins preferred, a default plugin? I don't even know for Docker. Oh, go ahead. Yeah. Sorry for Docker. And jacon sorry, Docker plugins for Jenkins. Uh, as someone's asking like the preferred or easy way to do that. Um, and I don't, I don't know the back into Jenkins that well, so, >>Well, th the new, the new way that they're doing, uh, Docker builds with the pipeline, which is more declarative versus the groovy. It's really simple, and their documentation is really good. They, um, they make it really easy to say, run this in this image. So you can pull down, you know, public images and add your own layers. Um, so I don't know the name of that plugin, uh, but I can certainly take a minute after this session and going and get that. Um, but if you really are overwhelmed by the plugins, you can just write your, you know, your shell command in Jenkins. You could just by, you know, doing everything in bash, calling the Docker, um, Damon directly, and then getting it working just to see that end to end, and then start browsing for plugins to see if you even want to use those. >>The plugins will allow more integration from end to end. Some of the things that you input might be available later on in the process for having to manage that yourself. But, you know, you don't have to use any of the plugins. You can literally just, you know, do a block where you write your shell command and get it working, and then decide if, for plugins for you. Um, I think it's always under important to understand what is going on under the hood before you, before you adopt the magic of a plugin, because, um, once you have a problem, if you're, if it's all a lockbox to you, it's going to be more difficult to troubleshoot. It's kind of like learning, get command line versus like get cracking or something. Once, once you get in a bind, if you don't understand the underlying steps, it's really hard to get yourself out of a bind, versus if you understand what the plugin or the app is doing, then, um, you can get out of situations a lot easier. That's a good place. That's, that's where I'd start. >>Yeah. Thank you. Um, Camden asks better to build test environment images, every commit in CII. So this is like one of those opinions of we're all gonna have some different, uh, or build on build images on every commit, leveraging the cash, or build them once outside the test pile pipeline. Um, what say you people? >>Uh, well, I I've seen both and generally speaking, my preference is, um, I guess the ant, the it's a consultant answer, right? I think it depends on what you're trying to do, right. So if you have a lot of small changes that are being made and you're creating images for each of those commits, you're going to have a lot of images in your, in your registry, right? And on top of that, if you're building those images, uh, through CAI frequently, if you're using Docker hub or something like that, you might run into rate limiting issues because of Docker's new rate, limiting, uh, rate limits that they put in place. Um, but that might be beneficial if the, if being able to roll back between those small changes while you're testing is important to you. Uh, however, if all you care about is being able to use Docker images, um, or being able to correlate versions to your Docker images, or if you're the type of team that doesn't even use him, uh, does he even use, uh, virgins in your image tags? Then I would think that that might be a little, much you might want to just have in your CIO. You might want to have a stage that builds your Docker images and Docker image and pushes it into your registry, being done first particular branches instead of having to be done on every commit regardless of branch. But again, it really depends on the team. It really depends on what you're building. It really depends on your workflow. It can depend on a number of things like a curse sometimes too. Yeah. Yeah. >>Once had two points here, you know, I've seen, you know, the pattern has been at every, with every, uh, uh, commit, assuming that you have the right set of tests that would kind of, uh, you would benefit from actually seeing, um, the, the, the, the testing workflow go through and can detect any issue within, within the build or whatever you're trying to test against. But if you're just a building without the appropriate set of tests, then you're just basically consuming almond, adding time, as well as all the, the image, uh, stories associated with it without treaty reaping the benefit of, of, of this pattern. Uh, and the second point is, again, I think if you're, if you're going to end up doing a per commit, uh, definitely recommend having some type of, uh, uh, image purging, um, uh, and, and, and garbage collection process to ensure that you're not just wasting, um, all the stories needed and also, um, uh, optimizing your, your bill process, because that will end up being the most time-consuming, um, um, you know, within, within your pipeline. So this is my 2 cents on this. >>Yeah, that's good stuff. I mean, those are both of those are conversations that could lead us into the rabbit hole for the rest of the day on storage management, uh, you know, CP CPU minutes for, uh, you know, your build stuff. I mean, if you're in any size team, more than one or two people, you immediately run into headaches with cost of CIA, because we have now the problem of tools, right? We have so many tools. We can have the CIS system burning CPU cycles all day, every day, if we really wanted to. And so you re very quickly, I think, especially if you're on every commit on every branch, like that gets you into a world of cost mitigation, and you probably are going to have to settle somewhere in the middle on, uh, between the budget, people that are saying you're spending way too much money on the CII platform, uh, because of all these CPU cycles, and then the developers who would love to have everything now, you know, as fast as possible and the biggest, biggest CPU's, and the biggest servers, and have the bills, because the bills can never go fast enough, right. >>There's no end to optimizing your build workflow. Um, we have another question on that. This is another topic that we'll all probably have different takes on is, uh, basically, uh, version tags, right? So on images, we, we have a very established workflow in get for how we make commits. We have commit shots. We have, uh, you know, we know get tags and there's all these things there. And then we go into images and it's just this whole new world that's opened up. Like there's no real consensus. Um, so what, what are your thoughts on the strategy for teams in their image tag? Again, another, another culture thing. Um, commander, >>I mean, I'm a fan of silver when we have no other option. Um, it's just clean and I like the timestamp, you know, exactly when it was built. Um, I don't really see any reason to use another, uh, there's just normal, incremental, um, you know, numbering, but I love the fact that you can pull any tag and know exactly when it was created. So I'm a big fan of bar, if you can make that work for your organization. >>Yep. People are mentioned that in chat, >>So I like as well. Uh, I'm a big fan of it. I think it's easy to be able to just be as easy to be able to signify what a major changes versus a minor change versus just a hot fix or, you know, some or some kind of a bad fix. The problem that I've found with having teams adopt San Bernardo becomes answering these questions and being able to really define what is a major change, what is a minor change? What is a patch, right? And this becomes a bit of an overhead or not so much of an overhead, but, uh, uh, uh, a large concern for teams who have never done versioning before, or they never been responsible for their own versioning. Um, in fact, you know, I'm running into that right now, uh, with, with a client that I'm working with, where a lot, I'm working with a lot of teams, helping them move their applications from a legacy production environment into a new one. >>And in doing so, uh, versioning comes up because Docker images, uh, have tags and usually the tax correlate to versions, but some teams over there, some teams that I'm working with are only maintaining a script and others are maintaining a fully fledged JAK, three tier application, you know, with lots of dependencies. So telling the script, telling the team that maintains a script, Hey, you know, you should use somber and you should start thinking about, you know, what's major, what's my number what's patch. That might be a lot for them. And for someone or a team like that, I might just suggest using commit shots as your versions until you figure that out, or maybe using, um, dates as your version, but for the more for the team, with the larger application, they probably already know the answers to those questions. In which case they're either already using Sember or they, um, or they may be using some other version of the strategy and might be in December, might suit them better. So, um, you're going to hear me say, it depends a lot, and I'm just going to say here, it depends. Cause it really does. Carlos. >>I think you hit on something interesting beyond just how to version, but, um, when to consider it a major release and who makes those decisions, and if you leave it to engineers to version, you're kind of pushing business decisions down the pipe. Um, I think when it's a minor or a major should be a business decision and someone else needs to make that call someone closer to the business should be making that call as to when we want to call it major. >>That's a really good point. And I add some, I actually agree. Um, I absolutely agree with that. And again, it really depends on the team that on the team and the scope of it, it depends on the scope that they're maintaining, right? And so it's a business application. Of course, you're going to have a product manager and you're going to have, you're going to have a product manager who's going to want to make that call because that version is going to be out in marketing. People are going to use it. They're going to refer to and support calls. They're going to need to make those decisions. Sember again, works really, really well for that. Um, but for a team that's maintaining the scripts, you know, I don't know, having them say, okay, you must tell me what a major version is. It's >>A lot, but >>If they want it to use some birds great too, which is why I think going back to what you originally said, Sember in the absence of other options. I think that's a good strategy. >>Yeah. There's a, there's a, um, catching up on chat. I'm not sure if I'm ever going to catch up, but there's a lot of people commenting on their favorite CII systems and it's, and it, it just goes to show for the, the testing and deployment community. Like how many tools there are out there, how many tools there are to support the tools that you're using. Like, uh, it can be a crazy wilderness. And I think that's, that's part of the art of it, uh, is that these things are allowing us to build our workflows to the team's culture. Um, and, uh, but I do think that, you know, getting into like maybe what we hope to be at what's next is I do hope that we get to, to try to figure out some of these harder problems of consistency. Uh, one of the things that led me to Docker at the beginning to begin with was the fact that it wa it created a consistent packaging solution for me to get my code, you know, off of, off of my site of my local system, really, and into the server. >>And that whole workflow would at least the thing that I was making at each step was going to be the same thing used. Right. And that, that was huge. Uh, it was also, it also took us a long time to get there. Right. We all had to, like Docker was one of those ones that decade kind of ideas of let's solidify the, enter, get the consensus of the community around this idea. And we, and it's not perfect. Uh, you know, the Docker Docker file is not the most perfect way to describe how to make your app, but it is there and we're all using it. And now I'm looking for that next piece, right. Then hopefully the next step in that, um, that where we can all arrive at a consensus so that once you hop teams, you know, okay. We all knew Docker. We now, now we're all starting to get to know the manifests, but then there's this big gap in the middle where it's like, it might be one of a dozen things. Um, you know, so >>Yeah, yeah. To that, to that, Brett, um, you know, uh, just maybe more of a shameless plug here and wanting to kind of talk about one of the things that I'm on. So excited, but I work, I work at Tasha Corp. I don't know anyone, or I don't know if many people have heard of, um, you know, we tend to focus a lot on workflows versus technologies, right. Because, you know, as you can see, even just looking at the chat, there's, you know, ton of opinions on the different tooling, right. And, uh, imagine having, you know, I'm working with clients that have 10,000 developers. So imagine taking the folks in the chat and being partnered with one organization or one company and having to make decisions on how to build software. Um, but there's no way you can conversion one or, or one way or one tool, uh, and that's where we're facing in the industry. >>So one of the things that, uh, I'm pretty excited about, and I don't know if it's getting as much traction as you know, we've been focused on it. This is way point, which is a project, an open source project. I believe we got at least, uh, last year, um, which is, it's more of, uh, it's, it is aim to address that really, uh, uh, Brad set on, you know, to come to tool to, uh, make it extremely easy and simple. And, you know, to describe how you want to build, uh, deploy or release your application, uh, in, in a consistent way, regardless of the tools. So similar to how you can think of Terraform and having that pluggability to say Terraform apply or plan against any cloud infrastructure, uh, without really having to know exactly the details of how to do it, uh, this is what wave one is doing. Um, and it can be applied with, you know, for the CIA, uh, framework. So, you know, task plugability into, uh, you know, circle CEI tests to Docker helm, uh, Kubernetes. So that's the, you know, it's, it's a hard problem to solve, but, um, I'm hopeful that that's the path that we're, you know, we'll, we'll eventually get to. So, um, hope, you know, you can, you can, uh, see some of the, you know, information, data on it, on, on HashiCorp site, but I mean, I'm personally excited about it. >>Yeah. Uh I'm to gonna have to check that out. And, um, I told you on my live show, man, we'll talk about it, but talk about it for a whole hour. Uh, so there's another question here around, uh, this, this is actually a little bit more detailed, but it is one that I think a lot of people deal with and I deal with a lot too, is essentially the question is from Cameron, uh, D essentially, do you use compose in your CIO or not Docker compose? Uh, because yes I do. Yeah. Cause it, it, it, it solves so many problems am and not every CGI can, I don't know, there's some problems with a CIO is trying to do it for me. So there are pros and cons and I feel like I'm still on the fence about it because I use it all the time, but also it's not perfect. It's not always meant for CIA. And CIA sometimes tries to do things for you, like starting things up before you start other parts and having that whole order, uh, ordering problem of things anyway. W thoughts and when have thoughts. >>Yes. I love compose. It's one of my favorite tools of all time. Um, and the reason why it's, because what I often find I'm working with teams trying to actually let me walk that back, because Jack on the chat asked a really interesting question about what, what, what the hardest thing about CIS for a lot of teams. And in my experience, the hardest thing is getting teams to build an app that is the same app as what's built in production. A lot of CGI does things that are totally different than what you would do in your local, in your local dev. And as a result of that, you get, you got this application that either doesn't work locally, or it does work, but it's a completely different animal than what you would get in production. Right? So what I've found in trying to get teams to bridge that gap by basically taking their CGI, shifting the CII left, I hate the shift left turn, but I'll use it. >>I'm shifting the CIO left to your local development is trying to say, okay, how do we build an app? How do we, how do we build mot dependencies of that app so that we can build so that we can test our app? How do we run tests, right? How do we build, how do we get test data? And what I found is that trying to get teams to do all this in Docker, which is normally a first for a lot of teams that I'm working with, trying to get them all to do all of this. And Docker means you're running Docker, build a lot running Docker, run a lot. You're running Docker, RM a lot. You ran a lot of Docker, disparate Docker commands. And then on top of that, trying to bridge all of those containers together into a single network can be challenging without compose. >>So I like using a, to be able to really easily categorize and compartmentalize a lot of the things that are going to be done in CII, like building a Docker image, running tests, which is you're, you're going to do it in CII anyway. So running tests, building the image, pushing it to the registry. Well, I wouldn't say pushing it to the registry, but doing all the things that you would do in local dev, but in the same network that you might have a mock database or a mock S3 instance or some of something else. Um, so it's just easy to take all those Docker compose commands and move them into your Yammel file using the hub actions or your dankest Bob using Jenkins, or what have you. Right. It's really, it's really portable that way, but it doesn't work for every team. You know, for example, if you're just a team that, you know, going back to my script example, if it's a really simple script that does one thing on a somewhat routine basis, then that might be a lot of overhead. Um, in that case, you know, you can get away with just Docker commands. It's not a big deal, but the way I looked at it is if I'm, if I'm building, if I build something that's similar to a make bile or rate file, or what have you, then I'm probably gonna want to use Docker compose. If I'm working with Docker, that's, that's a philosophy of values, right? >>So I'm also a fan of Docker compose. And, um, you know, to your point, Carlos, the whole, I mean, I'm also a fan of shifting CEI lift and testing lift, but if you put all that logic in your CTI, um, it changes the L the local development experience from the CGI experience. Versus if you put everything in a compose file so that what you build locally is the same as what you build in CGI. Um, you're going to have a better experience because you're going to be testing something more, that's closer to what you're going to be releasing. And it's also very easy to look at a compose file and kind of, um, understand what the dependencies are and what's happening is very readable. And once you move that stuff to CGI, I think a lot of developers, you know, they're going to be intimidated by the CGI, um, whatever the scripting language is, it's going to be something they're going to have to wrap their head around. >>Um, but they're not gonna be able to use it locally. You're going to have to have another local solution. So I love the idea of a composed file use locally, um, especially if he can Mount the local workspace so that they can do real time development and see their changes in the exact same way as it's going to be built and tested in CGI. It gives developers a high level of confidence. And then, you know, you're less likely to have issues because of discrepancies between how it was built in your local test environment versus how it's built in NCI. And so Docker compose really lets you do all of that in a way that makes your solution more portable, portable between local dev and CGI and reduces the number of CGI cycles to get, you know, the test, the test data that you need. So that's why I like it for really, for local dev. >>It'll be interesting. Um, I don't know if you all were able to see the keynote, but there was a, there was a little bit, not a whole lot, but a little bit talk of the Docker, compose V two, which has now built into the Docker command line. And so now we're shifting from the Python built compose, which was a separate package. You could that one of the challenges was getting it into your CA solution because if you don't have PIP and you got down on the binary and the binary wasn't available for every platform and, uh, it was a PI installer. It gets a little nerdy into how that works, but, uh, and the team is now getting, be able to get unified with it. Now that it's in Golang and it's, and it's plugged right into the Docker command line, it hopefully will be easier to distribute, easier to, to use. >>And you won't have to necessarily have dependencies inside of where you're running it because there'll be a statically compiled binary. Um, so I've been playing with that, uh, this year. And so like training myself to do Docker going from Docker dash compose to Docker space, compose. It is a thing I I'm almost to the point of having to write a shell replacement. Yeah. Alias that thing. Um, but, um, I'm excited to see what that's going, cause there's already new features in it. And it, these built kit by default, like there's all these things. And I, I love build kit. We could make a whole session on build kit. Um, in fact there's actually, um, maybe going on right now, or right around this time, there is a session on, uh, from Solomon hikes, the seat, uh, co-founder of Docker, former CTO, uh, on build kit using, uh, using some other tool on top of build kit or whatever. >>So that, that would be interesting for those of you that are not watching that one. Cause you're here, uh, to do a check that one out later. Um, all right. So another good question was caching. So another one, another area where there is no wrong answers probably, and everyone has a different story. So the question is, what are your thoughts on CII build caching? There's often a debate between security. This is from Quentin. Thank you for this great question. There's often a debate between security reproducibility and build speeds. I haven't found a good answer so far. I will just throw my hat in the ring and say that the more times you want to build, like if you're trying to build every commit or every commit, if you're building many times a day, the more caching you need. So like the more times you're building, the more caching you're gonna likely want. And in most cases caching doesn't bite you in the butt, but that could be, yeah, we, can we get the bit about that? So, yeah. Yeah. >>I'm going to quote Carlos again and say, it depends on, on, you know, how you're talking, you know, what you're trying to build and I'm quoting your colors. Um, yeah, it's, it's got, it's gonna depend because, you know, there are some instances where you definitely want to use, you know, depends on the frequency that you're building and how you're building. Um, it's you would want to actually take advantage of cashing functionalities, um, for the build, uh, itself. Um, but if, um, you know, as you mentioned, there could be some instances where you would want to disable, um, any caching because you actually want to either pull a new packages or, um, you know, there could be some security, um, uh, disadvantages related to security aspects that would, you know, you know, using a cache version of, uh, image layer, for example, could be a problem. And you, you know, if you have a fleet of build, uh, engines, you don't have a good grasp of where they're being cashed. We would have to, um, disable caching in that, in that, um, in those instances. So it, it would depend. >>Yeah, it's, it's funny you have that problem on both sides of cashing. Like there are things that, especially in Docker world, they will cash automatically. And, and then, and then you maybe don't realize that some of that caching could be bad. It's, it's actually using old, uh, old assets, old artifacts, and then there's times where you would expect it to cash, that it doesn't cash. And then you have to do something extra to enable that caching, especially when you're dealing with that cluster of, of CIS servers. Right. And the cloud, the whole clustering problem with caching is even more complex, but yeah, >>But that's, that's when, >>Uh, you know, ever since I asked you to start using build kits and able to build kit, you know, between it's it's it's reader of Boston in, in detecting word, you know, where in, in the bill process needs to cash, as well as, uh, the, the, um, you know, the process. I don't think I've seen any other, uh, approach there that comes close to how efficient, uh, that process can become how much time it can actually save. Uh, but again, I think, I think that's, for me that had been my default approach, unless I actually need something that I would intentionally to disable caching for that purpose, but the benefits, at least for me, the benefits of, um, how bill kit actually been processing my bills, um, from the builds as well as, you know, using the cash up until, you know, how it detects the, the difference in, in, in the assets within the Docker file had been, um, you know, uh, pretty, you know, outweigh the disadvantages that it brings in. So it, you know, take it each case by case. And based on that, determine if you want to use it, but definitely recommend those enabling >>In the absence of a reason not to, um, I definitely think that it's a good approach in terms of speed. Um, yeah, I say you cash until you have a good reason not to personally >>Catch by default. There you go. I think you catch by default. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, the trick is, well, one, it's not always enabled by default, especially when you're talking about cross server. So that's a, that's a complexity for your SIS admins, or if you're on the cloud, you know, it's usually just an option. Um, I think it also is this, this veers into a little bit of, uh, the more you cash the in a lot of cases with Docker, like the, from like, if you're from images and checked every single time, if you're not pinning every single thing, if you're not painting your app version, you're at your MPN versions to the exact lock file definition. Like there's a lot of these things where I'm I get, I get sort of, I get very grouchy with teams that sort of let it, just let it all be like, yeah, we'll just build two images and they're totally going to have different dependencies because someone happened to update that thing and after whatever or MPM or, or, and so I get grouchy about that, cause I want to lock it all down, but I also know that that's going to create administrative burden. >>Like the team is now going to have to manage versions in a very much more granular way. Like, do we need to version two? Do we need to care about curl? You know, all that stuff. Um, so that's, that's kind of tricky, but when you get to, when you get to certain version problems, uh, sorry, uh, cashing problems, you, you, you don't want those set those caches to happen because it, if you're from image changes and you're not constantly checking for a new image, and if you're not pinning that V that version, then now you, you don't know whether you're getting the latest version of Davion or whatever. Um, so I think that there's, there's an art form to the more you pen, the less you have, the less, you have to be worried about things changing, but the more you pen, the, uh, all your versions of everything all the way down the stack, the more administrative stuff, because you're gonna have to manually change every one of those. >>So I think it's a balancing act for teams. And as you mature, I to find teams, they tend to pin more until they get to a point of being more comfortable with their testing. So the other side of this argument is if you trust your testing, then you, and you have better testing to me, the less likely to the subtle little differences in versions have to be penned because you can get away with those minor or patch level version changes. If you're thoroughly testing your app, because you're trusting your testing. And this gets us into a whole nother rant, but, uh, yeah, but talking >>About penny versions, if you've got a lot of dependencies isn't that when you would want to use the cash the most and not have to rebuild all those layers. Yeah. >>But if you're not, but if you're not painting to the exact patch version and you are caching, then you're not technically getting the latest versions because it's not checking for all the time. It's a weird, there's a lot of this subtle nuance that people don't realize until it's a problem. And that's part of the, the tricky part of allow this stuff, is it, sometimes the Docker can be almost so much magic out of the box that you, you, you get this all and it all works. And then day two happens and you built it a second time and you've got a new version of open SSL in there and suddenly it doesn't work. Um, so anyway, uh, that was a great question. I've done the question on this, on, uh, from heavy. What do you put, where do you put testing in your pipeline? Like, so testing the code cause there's lots of types of testing, uh, because this pipeline gets longer and longer and Docker building images as part of it. And so he says, um, before staging or after staging, but before production, where do you put it? >>Oh man. Okay. So, um, my, my main thought on this is, and of course this is kind of religious flame bait, so sure. You know, people are going to go into the compensation wrong. Carlos, the boy is how I like to think about it. So pretty much in every stage or every environment that you're going to be deploying your app into, or that your application is going to touch. My idea is that there should be a build of a Docker image that has all your applications coded in, along with its dependencies, there's testing that tests your application, and then there's a deployment that happens into whatever infrastructure there is. Right. So the testing, they can get tricky though. And the type of testing you do, I think depends on the environment that you're in. So if you're, let's say for example, your team and you have, you have a main branch and then you have feature branches that merged into the main branch. >>You don't have like a pre-production branch or anything like that. So in those feature branches, whenever I'm doing CGI that way, I know when I freak, when I cut my poll request, that I'm going to merge into main and everything's going to work in my feature branches, I'm going to want to probably just run unit tests and maybe some component tests, which really, which are just, you know, testing that your app can talk to another component or another part, another dependency, like maybe a database doing tests like that, that don't take a lot of time that are fascinating and right. A lot of would be done at the beach branch level and in my opinion, but when you're going to merge that beach branch into main, as part of a release in that activity, you're going to want to be able to do an integration tasks, to make sure that your app can actually talk to all the other dependencies that it talked to. >>You're going to want to do an end to end test or a smoke test, just to make sure that, you know, someone that actually touches the application, if it's like a website can actually use the website as intended and it meets the business cases and all that, and you might even have testing like performance testing, low performance load testing, or security testing, compliance testing that would want to happen in my opinion, when you're about to go into production with a release, because those are gonna take a long time. Those are very expensive. You're going to have to cut new infrastructure, run those tests, and it can become quite arduous. And you're not going to want to run those all the time. You'll have the resources, uh, builds will be slower. Uh, release will be slower. It will just become a mess. So I would want to save those for when I'm about to go into production. Instead of doing those every time I make a commit or every time I'm merging a feature ranch into a non main branch, that's the way I look at it, but everything does a different, um, there's other philosophies around it. Yeah. >>Well, I don't disagree with your build test deploy. I think if you're going to deploy the code, it needs to be tested. Um, at some level, I mean less the same. You've got, I hate the term smoke tests, cause it gives a false sense of security, but you have some mental minimum minimal amount of tests. And I would expect the developer on the feature branch to add new tests that tested that feature. And that would be part of the PR why those tests would need to pass before you can merge it, merge it to master. So I agree that there are tests that you, you want to run at different stages, but the earlier you can run the test before going to production. Um, the fewer issues you have, the easier it is to troubleshoot it. And I kind of agree with what you said, Carlos, about the longer running tests like performance tests and things like that, waiting to the end. >>The only problem is when you wait until the end to run those performance tests, you kind of end up deploying with whatever performance you have. It's, it's almost just an information gathering. So if you don't run your performance test early on, um, and I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but performance tests can be really useless if you don't have a goal where it's just information gap, uh, this is, this is the performance. Well, what did you expect it to be? Is it good? Is it bad? They can get really nebulous. So if performance is really important, um, you you're gonna need to come up with some expectations, preferably, you know, set up the business level, like what our SLA is, what our response times and have something to shoot for. And then before you're getting to production. If you have targets, you can test before staging and you can tweak the code before staging and move that performance initiative. Sorry, Carlos, a little to the left. Um, but if you don't have a performance targets, then it's just a check box. So those are my thoughts. I like to test before every deployment. Right? >>Yeah. And you know what, I'm glad that you, I'm glad that you brought, I'm glad that you brought up Escalades and performance because, and you know, the definition of performance says to me, because one of the things that I've seen when I work with teams is that oftentimes another team runs a P and L tests and they ended, and the development team doesn't really have too much insight into what's going on there. And usually when I go to the performance team and say, Hey, how do you run your performance test? It's usually just a generic solution for every single application that they support, which may or may not be applicable to the application team that I'm working with specifically. So I think it's a good, I'm not going to dig into it. I'm not going to dig into the rabbit hole SRE, but it is a good bridge into SRE when you start trying to define what does reliability mean, right? >>Because the reason why you test performance, it's test reliability to make sure that when you cut that release, that customers would go to your site or use your application. Aren't going to see regressions in performance and are not going to either go to another website or, you know, lodge in SLA violation or something like that. Um, it does, it does bridge really well with defining reliability and what SRE means. And when you have, when you start talking about that, that's when you started talking about how often do I run? How often do I test my reliability, the reliability of my application, right? Like, do I have nightly tasks in CGI that ensure that my main branch or, you know, some important branch I does not mean is meeting SLA is meeting SLR. So service level objectives, um, or, you know, do I run tasks that ensure that my SLA is being met in production? >>Like whenever, like do I use, do I do things like game days where I test, Hey, if I turn something off or, you know, if I deploy this small broken code to production and like what happens to my performance? What happens to my security and compliance? Um, you can, that you can go really deep into and take creating, um, into creating really robust tests that cover a lot of different domains. But I liked just using build test deploy is the overall answer to that because I find that you're going to have to build your application first. You're going to have to test it out there and build it, and then you're going to want to deploy it after you test it. And that order generally ensures that you're releasing software. That works. >>Right. Right. Um, I was going to ask one last question. Um, it's going to have to be like a sentence answer though, for each one of you. Uh, this is, uh, do you lint? And if you lint, do you lent all the things, if you do, do you fail the linters during your testing? Yes or no? I think it's going to depend on the culture. I really do. Sorry about it. If we >>Have a, you know, a hook, uh, you know, on the get commit, then theoretically the developer can't get code there without running Melinta anyway, >>So, right, right. True. Anyone else? Anyone thoughts on that? Linting >>Nice. I saw an additional question online thing. And in the chat, if you would introduce it in a multi-stage build, um, you know, I was wondering also what others think about that, like typically I've seen, you know, with multi-stage it's the most common use case is just to produce the final, like to minimize the, the, the, the, the, the image size and produce a final, you know, thin, uh, layout or thin, uh, image. Uh, so if it's not for that, like, I, I don't, I haven't seen a lot of, you know, um, teams or individuals who are actually within a multi-stage build. There's nothing really against that, but they think the number one purpose of doing multi-stage had been just producing the minimalist image. Um, so just wanted to kind of combine those two answers in one, uh, for sure. >>Yeah, yeah, sure. Um, and with that, um, thank you all for the great questions. We are going to have to wrap this up and we could go for another hour if we all had the time. And if Dr. Khan was a 24 hour long event and it didn't sadly, it's not. So we've got to make room for the next live panel, which will be Peter coming on and talking about security with some developer ex security experts. And I wanted to thank again, thank you all three of you for being here real quick, go around the room. Um, uh, where can people reach out to you? I am, uh, at Bret Fisher on Twitter. You can find me there. Carlos. >>I'm at dev Mandy with a Y D E N D Y that's me, um, >>Easiest name ever on Twitter, Carlos and DFW on LinkedIn. And I also have a LinkedIn learning course. So if you check me out on my LinkedIn learning, >>Yeah. I'm at Nicola Quebec. Um, one word, I'll put it in the chat as well on, on LinkedIn, as well as, uh, uh, as well as Twitter. Thanks for having us, Brett. Yeah. Thanks for being here. >>Um, and, and you all stay around. So if you're in the room with us chatting, you're gonna, you're gonna, if you want to go to see the next live panel, I've got to go back to the beginning and do that whole thing, uh, and find the next, because this one will end, but we'll still be in chat for a few minutes. I think the chat keeps going. I don't actually know. I haven't tried it yet. So we'll find out here in a minute. Um, but thanks you all for being here, I will be back a little bit later, but, uh, coming up next on the live stuff is Peter Wood security. Ciao. Bye.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of workplace next made possible by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >>Hello, everyone. We're here covering workplace next on the Cube For years, you know, we've talked about new ways to work, and it was great thought exercise. And then overnight the pandemic heightened the challenges of creating an effective work force. Most of the executives that we talked to in our survey say that productivity actually has improved since the work from Home Mandate was initiative. But, you know, we're talking not just about productivity, but the well being of our associates and managing the unknown. We're going to shift gears a little bit now. We've heard some interesting real world examples of how organizations are dealing with the rapid change in workplace, and we've heard about some lessons to take into the future. But now we're going to get more practical and look at some of the tools that are available to help you navigate. The changes that we've been discussing and with me to talk about these trends related to the future of work are are are Qadoura, who's the vice president of worldwide sales and go to market for Green Lake at HP Sadat Malik is the VP of I O t and Intelligent Edge at HP and Satish Yarra Valley is the global cloud and infrastructure practice Head at Whip Probe guys welcomes. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having us. >>You're very welcome. Let me start with Sadat. You're coming from Austin, Texas here. So thank you. Stay crazy. As they say in Austin, for the uninitiated, maybe you could talk a little bit about h p E point. Next. It's a strategic component of H p. E. And maybe tell us a little bit about those services. >>Thank you so much for taking the time today. Appreciate everybody's participation here. So absolutely so point Next is HP Services on. This is the 23,000 strong organization globally spread out, and we have a very strong ecosystem of partners that be leveraged to deliver services to our customers. Um, our organization differentiates itself in the market by focusing on digital digital transformation journeys for our customers. For customers looking toe move to a different way off, engaging with its customers, transforming the way its employees work, figuring out a different way off producing the products that it sells to. His customers are changing the way it operationalize these things. For example, moving to the cloud going to a hybrid model, we help them achieve any of these four transformation outcomes. So point next job is toe point. What is next in this digital transformation journey and then partner with our customers to make that happen? So that's what we do. >>Thank you for that. I mean, obviously, you're gonna be seeing a lot of activity around workplace with shift from work from home, changes in the network changes in security. I mean the whole deal. What are some of your top takeaways that you can share with our audience? >>Yeah, they're >>so a lot has been happening in the workplace arena lately. So this is not new, right? This is not something that all of a sudden side happening when Kobe 19 hit, uh, the digital workplace was already transforming before over 19 happened. What over 19 has done is that it has massively accelerated the pace at which this change was happening. So, for example, right remote work was already there before over 19. But now everybody is working remotely so, in many ways, the solution that we have for remote work. They have been strained to appoint, never seen before. Networks that support these remote work environments have been pushed to their limits. Security was already there, right? So security was a critical piece off any off the thinking, any of the frameworks that we had. But now security is pivotal and central. Any discussion that we're having about the workplace environment data is being generated all across the all across the environment that we operated, right? So it's no longer being generated. One place being stored. Another. It's all over the place now. So what Kobe, 19 has done is that the transformation that was already underway in the digital workplace, it has taken that and accelerated it massive. The key take away for me is right that we have to make sure that when we're working with our customers, our clients, we don't just look at the technology aspect of things. We have to look at all the other aspect as well the people in the process aspect off this environment. It is critical that we don't assume that just because the technology is there to address these challenges that I just mentioned. Our people and our processes would be able to handle that as well. We need to bring everybody along. Everybody has different needs, and we need to be able to cater to those needs effectively. So that's my biggest take away. Make sure that the process and the people aspect of things was hand in glove with the technology that we were able to bring to bear here. >>Got it. Thank you. So, ah, let's go to San Francisco, bringing our war to the conversation. You're one of your areas of focus is is HP Green Lake. You guys were early on with the as a service model. Clearly, we've seen Mawr interest in cloud and cloud like models. I wonder if you could just start by sharing. What's Green Lake all about? Where does it fit into this whole workplace? Next, Uh, conversation that we're having? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um HP Green lake effectively is the cloud that comes to your data center to your Coehlo or to your edge, right? We saw with Public Cloud. The public cloud brought a ton of innovations, um, into the sort of hyper scale model. Now, with HP. What we've done is we've said, Look, customers need this level of innovation and this level of, you know, pay as you go economics the, you know, management layer the automation layer not just in a public cloud environment, but also in our customers data center or to the other potential edges or Coehlo scenarios. And what we've done is we've brought together Asada just mentioned the best of our point next services our software management layer as well as H. P. E s rich portfolio of hardware to come together to create that cloud experience. Um, of course, we can't do this without the rich ecosystem around us as well. And so everything from you know, some of our big S I partners like we bro, who also have the virtual desktop expertise or virtual desk that then come together to start helping us launch some of these new workloads supported cloud services such as D. D i eso for my perspective, v. D. I is the most important topic for a lot of our customers right now, especially in sectors like financial services, um, advanced engineering scenarios and health care where they need access to those, uh to their data centers in a very secure way and in a highly cost optimized way as well. >>Well, okay. Thank you. And then let's let's bring in, uh, petition talk a little bit about the ecosystem. I mean, we're pro. That's really kind of your wheelhouse. We've been talking a lot on the cube about moving from an industry of point products to platforms and now ecosystem innovation, Uh, are are mentioned VD I we saw that exploding eso teach. Maybe you could weigh in here and and share with us what you're seeing in the market and specifically around ecosystem. >>As we all know, the pandemic has redefined the way we collaborate to support this collaboration. We have set up huge campuses and office infrastructure In summary, our industry has centralized approach. Now, the very premise of the centralization bringing people together for work has changed. This evolving workspace dynamics have triggered the agency to reimagine the workspace strategy. CEO, CEO S and C H R ose are all coming together to redefine the business process and find new ways off engaging with customers and employees as organizations embrace work from home for the foreseeable future. Customer need to create secure by design workspaces for remote working environments. With the pro virtual disk platform, we can help create such seamless distal workspaces and enable customers to connect, collaborate and communicate with ease from anywhere securely. They're consistent user experience. Through this platform led approach, we are able to utter the market demands which are focused on business outcomes. >>Okay, and this is the specifics of this hard news that you're talking about Video on demand and Citrix coming together with your ecosystem. H p E were pro and again, the many partners that you work with is that correct? >>Well, actually, Dave, we see a strong playoff ecosystem partners coming together to achieve transformative business outcomes. As Arbor said earlier, HP and Wipro have long standing partnership, and today's announcement around HP Green Lake is an extension off this collaboration, where we provide leverage HP Green Leg Andre Pro, which elders platform to offer video as a service in a paper user model. Our aim is to enable customers fast track there. It is still works based transformation efforts by eliminating the need to support upfront capital investments and old provisioning costs while allowing customers to enjoy the benefit off compromise, control, security and compliance. Together, we have implemented our solution across various industry segments and deliver exceptional customer experiences by helping customer businesses in their workspace. Transformation journeys by defining their workspace strategy with an intelligent, platform led approach that enables responsiveness, scalability and resilience. It's known that Wipro is recognized as a global leader in the distal workspace and video I, with HP being a technology leader, enabling us with high level of program ability on integration capabilities. We see tremendous potential to jointly address the industry challenges as we move forward. >>Excellent. Uh, sad. I wanna come back to you. We talk a lot about the digital business, the mandate for digital business, especially with the pandemic. Let's talk about data. Earlier this year, HP announced the number of solutions that used data to help organizations work more productively safely. You know, the gamut talk about data and the importance of data and what you guys were doing there specifically, >>Yeah, that's a great question. So that is fundamental to everything that we're doing in the workplace arena, right? So from a technology perspective that provides us with the wherewithal to be able to make all the changes that we want to make happen for the people in the process side of things. So the journey that we've been on this past year is a very interesting one. Let me share with the audience a little bit of what's been going on on the ground with our customers. Um, what's what's been happening in the field? So when the when Kobe 19 hit right, a lot of our customers were subjected to these shutdown, which were very pervasive, and they had to stop their operations. In many cases, they had to send their employees home. So at that point, HB stepped in the point. Next organization stepped in and helped these customers set up remote work out options, which allowed them to keep their businesses going while they handle these shutdowns. Fast forward. Six months and the shutdown. We're starting to get lifted and our customers were coming back to us and saying to us that Hey, we would now like to get a least a portion off our workforce back to the normal place of work. But we're concerned that if we do that, it's gonna jeopardize their safety because off the infection concerned that were there. So what we did was that we built a cities or five solutions using various types of video analytics and data analysis analysis technologies that allowed these customers to make that move. So these five solutions, uh, let me walk, walk our customers and our clients and audience through those. The first two of these solutions are touchless entry and fever detection. So this is the access control off your premise, right? So to make sure that whoever is entering the building that's in a safe manner and any infection concerned, we stop it at the very get go once the employees inside the workplace, the next thing that we have is a set of two solutions. What one is social distance tracing and tracking, and the other one is workplace alerting. What these two solutions do is that they use video analytics and data technology is to figure out if there is a concern with employees adhering to the various guidelines that are in place on alerting the employees and the employers if there is any infringement happening which could risk overall environment. Finally, we realized right that irrespective off how much technology and process we put in place. Not everybody will be able to come into the normal place of work. So what we have done is that the first solution that we have is augmented reality and visual remote guidance. This solution uses a our technologies allow. People were on site to take advantage of the expertise that resides offsite to undertake complex task task, which could be as complex as overhauling a machine on ah factory floor using augmented reality where somebody off site who's an expert in that machine is helping somebody on site data has become central to a lot of the things that we do. But as I said, technology is one aspect of things. So ultimately the people process technology continuum has to come together to make these solutions real for our customers. >>Thank you, Arwa. We just have just about 30 seconds left and I wonder if you could close on. We're talking about cloud hybrid. Uh, everybody's talking about hybrid. We're talking about the hybrid workplace. What do you see for the for the future over the next 2345 years? >>Absolutely. And I think you're right, Dave. It is, ah, hybrid world. It's a multi cloud world. Ultimately, what our customers want is the choice and the flexibility to bring in the capabilities that drive the business outcomes that they need to support. And that has multiple dimensions, right? It's making sure that they are minimizing their egress costs, right. And many of our on Prem solutions do give them that flexibility. It is the paper use economics that we talked about. It is about our collective capability as an ecosystem to come together. You know, with Citrix and NVIDIA with R s I partner we pro and the rich heritage of HP es services as well as hardware to bring together these solutions that are fully managed on behalf of our customers so that they can focus their staff their i t capabilities on the products and services they need to deliver to their customers. >>Awesome. Guys, I wish we had more time. We got to go day volonte for the cube. Keep it right there. Lots of great more content coming your way. >>Yeah,

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Altos studios with continuing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, The Digital Experience. We've been covering this for over 10 years. It's virtual this year, but still have a lot of great content, a lot of great announcements, and a lot of technology that's being released and talked about. So we're excited. We're going to dig a little deep with our next two guests. First of all we have Paul Perez. He is the SVP and CTO of infrastructure solutions group for Dell technologies. Paul's great to see you. Where are you coming in from today? >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin Texas Awesome. And joining him returning to theCUBE on many times, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of VMware cloud for VMware Kit great to see you as well. Where are you joining us from? >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. I'm here in San Francisco. >> Awesome. So let's jump into it and talk about project Monterrey. You know, it's funny I was at Intel back in the day and all of our passwords used to go out and they became like the product names. It's funny how these little internal project names get a life of their own and this is a big one. And, you know, we had Pat Gelsinger on a few weeks back at VM-ware talking about how significant this is and kind of this evolution within the VMware cloud development. And, you know, it's kind of past Kubernetes and past Tanzu and past project Pacific and now we're into project Monterey. So first off, let's start with Kit, give us kind of the basic overview of what is project Monterey. >> Yep. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. What we did last year, we announced project Pacific, which was really a fundamental rethinking of VMware cloud foundation with Kubernetes built in right. Kubernetes is still a core to core part of the architecture and the idea there was really to better support modern applications to enable developers and IT operations to come together to work collaboratively toward modernizing a company's application fleet. And as you look at companies starting to be successful, they're starting to run these modern applications. What you found is that the hardware architecture itself needed to evolve, needed to update, to support all the new requirements brought on by these modern apps. And so when you're looking at project Monterey, it's exactly that it's a rethinking of the VMware cloud foundation, underlying hardware architecture. And so you think about a project model or excuse me, product Pacific is really kind of the top half if you will, Kubernetes consumption experiences great for applications. Project Monterey comes along as the second step in that journey, really being the bottom half, fundamentally rethinking the hardware architecture and leveraging SmartNic technology to do that. >> It's pretty interesting, Paul, you know, there's a great shift in this whole move from, you know, infrastructure driving applications to applications driving infrastructure. And then we're seeing, you know, obviously the big move with big data. And again, I think as Pat talked about in his interview with NVIDIA being at the right time, at the right place with the right technology and this, you know, kind of groundswell of GPU, now DPU, you know, helping to move those workloads beyond just kind of where the CPU used to do all the work, this is even, you know, kind of taking it another level you guys are the hardware guys and the solutions guys, as you look at this kind of continuing evolution, both of workloads as well as their infrastructure, how does this fit in? >> Yeah, well, how all this fit it in is modern applications and modern workloads, require a modern infrastructure, right? And a Kit was talking about the infrastructure overlay. That VMware is awesome at that all being, I was coming at this from the emerging data centric workloads, and some of the implications for that, including Phillip and diversity has ever been used for computing. The need to this faculty could be able to combine maybe resources together, as opposed to trying to shoehorn something into a mechanical chassis. And, and if you do segregate, you have to be able to compose on demand. And when you start comparing those, we realized that we were humping it up on our conversion trajectory and we started to team up and partner. >> So it's interesting because part of the composable philosophy, if you will, is to, you know, just to break the components of compute store and networking down to a small pieces as possible, and then you can assemble the right amount when you need it to attack a particular problem. But when you're talking about it's a whole different level of, of bringing the right hardware to bear for the solution. When you talk about SmartNics and you talk about GPS in DPS data processing units, you're now starting to offload and even FPG is that some of these other things offload a lot of work from the core CPU to some of these more appropriate devices that said, how do people make sure that the right application ends up on the right infrastructure? This is that I'm, if it's appropriate using more of a, of a Monterey based solution versus more of a traditional one, depending on the workload, how is that going to get all kind of sorted out and, and routed within the actual cloud infrastructure itself? That was probably back to you a Kit? >> Yeah, sure. So I think it's important to understand kind of what a smart NIC is and how it works in order to answer that question, because what we're really doing is to kind of jump right to it. I guess it's, you know, giving an API into the infrastructure and this is how we're able to do all the things that you just mentioned, but what does a SmartNic? Well, SmartNic is essentially a NIC with a general purpose CPU on it, really a whole CPU complex, in fact, kind of a whole system on server right there on that, on that Nic. And so what that enables is a bunch of great things. So first of all, to your point, we can do a lot of offload. We can actually run ESX. >> SXI on that. Nic, we can take a lot of the functionality that we were doing before on the main server CPU, things like network virtualization, storage, virtualization, security functionality, we can move that all off on the Nic. And it makes a lot of sense because really what we're doing when we're doing all those things is really looking at different sort of IO data paths. You know, as, as the network traffic comes through looking at doing automatic load balancing firewall and for security, delivering storage, perhaps remotely. And so the NIC is actually a perfect place to place all of these functionalities, right? You can not only move it off the core server CPU, but you can get a lot better performance cause you're now right there on the data path. So I think that's the first really key point is that you can get that offload, but then once you have all of that functionality there, then you can start doing some really amazing things. And this ability to expose additional virtual devices onto the PCI bus, this is another great capability of a SmartNic. So when you plug it in physically into the motherboard, it's a Nic, right. You can see that. And when it starts up, it looks like a Nic to the motherboard, to the system, but then via software, you can have it expose additional devices. It could look like a storage controller, or it could look like an FPGA look really any sort of device. And you can do that. Not only for the local machine where it's plugged in, but potentially remote machines as well with the right sorts of interconnects. So what this creates is a whole new sort of cluster architecture. And that's why we're really so excited about it because you got all these great benefits in terms of offload performance improvement, security improvement, but then you get this great ability to get very dynamic, just aggregation. And composability. >> So Kit, how much of it is the routing of the workload to the right place, right? That's got the right amount of say, it's a super data intensive once a lot of GPU versus actually better executing the operation. Once it gets to the place where it's going to run. >> Yeah. It's a bit of a combination actually. So the powerful thing about it is that in a traditional world, where are you want an application? You know, the server that you run it, that app can really only use the local devices there. Yes, there is some newer stuff like NVMe over fabric where you can remote certain types of storage capabilities, but there's no real general purpose solution to that. Yet that generally speaking, that application is limited to the local hardware devices. Well, the great part about what we're doing with Monterey and with the SmartNic technology is that we can now dynamically remote or expose remote devices from other hosts. And so wherever that application runs matters a little bit less now, in a sense that we can give it the right sorts of hardware it needs in order to operate. You know, if you have, let's say a few machines with a FPGA is normally if you have needed that a Fiji had to run locally, but now can actually run remotely and you can better balance out things like compute requirements versus, you know, specialized Accella Requirements. And so I think what we're looking at is, especially in the context of VMware cloud foundation, is bringing that all together. We can look through the scheduling, figure out what the best host for it to let run on based on all these considerations. And that's it, we are missing, let's say a physical device that needs, well, we can remote that and sort of a deal at that, a missing gap there. >> Right, right. That's great. Paul, I want to go back to you. You just talked about, you know, kind of coming at this problem from a data centric point of view, and you're running infrastructure and you're the poor guy that's got to catch all the ASAM Todd i the giant exponential curves up into the right on the data flow and the data quantity. How is that impacting the way you think about infrastructure and designing infrastructure and changing infrastructure and kind of future proofing infrastructure when, you know, just around the corners, 5g and IOT and, Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the data flow. >> Yeah. So I come at this from two angles. One that we talked about briefly is the evolution of the workloads themselves. The other angle, which is just as important is the operating model that customers are wanting to evolve to. And in that context, we thought a lot about how cloud, if an operating model, not necessarily a destination, right? So what I, and when way we laid out, what Kit was talking about is that in data center computing, you have operational control and data plane. Where did data plane run from the optimized solution? GPU's, PGA's, offload engines? And the control plane can run on stuff like it could be safe and are then I'm thinking about SmartNic is back codes have arm boards, so you can implement some data plane and some control plane, and they can also be the gateway. Cause, you know, you've talked about composability, what has been done up until now is early for sprint, right? We're carving out software defined infrastructure out of predefined hardware blocks. What we're talking about is making, you know, a GPUs residents in our fabric consistent memory residence of a fabric NVME over fabric and being able to tile computing topologies on demand to realize and applications intent. And we call that intent based computer. >> Right. Well, just, and to follow up on that too, as the, you know, cloud is an attitude or as an operating model or whatever you want to say, you know, not necessarily a place or a thing has changed. I mean, how has that had to get you to shift your infrastructure approach? Cause you've got to support, you know, old school, good old data centers. We've got, you know, some stuff running on public clouds. And then now you've got hybrid clouds and you have multi clouds, right. So we know, you know, you're out in the field that people have workloads running all over the place. So, but they got to control it and they've got compliance issues and they got a whole bunch of other stuff. So from your point of view, as you see the desire for more flexibility, the desire for more infrastructure centric support for the workloads that I want to buy and the increasing amount of those that are more data centric, as we move to hopefully more data driven decisions, how's it changed your strategy. And what does it mean to partner and have a real nice formal relationship with the folks over at VMR or excuse me, VMware? >> Well, I think that regardless of how big a company is, it's always prudent. As I say, when I approached my job, right, architecture is about balance and efficiency and it's about reducing contention. And we like to leverage industry R and D, especially in cases where one plus one equals two, right? In the case of, project Monterey for example, one of the collaboration areas is in improving the security model and being able to provide more air gap isolation, especially when you consider that enterprise wants to behave as service providers is concerned or to their companies. And therefore this is important. And because of that, I think that there's a lot of things that we can do between VMware and Dell lending hardware, and for example, assets like NSX and a different way that will give customers higher scalability and performance and more control, you know, beyond VMware and Dell EMC i think that we're partnering with obviously the SmartNic vendors, cause they're smart interprets and the gateway to those that are clean. They're not really analysis, but also companies that are innovating in data center computing, for example, NVIDIA. >> Right. Right. >> And I think that what we're seeing is while, you know, ambivalent has done an awesome job of targeting their capability, AIML type of workloads, what we realized this applications today depend on platform services, right. And up until recently, those platform services have been debases messaging PI active directory, moving forward. I think that within five years, most applications will depend on some form of AIML service. So I can see an opportunity to go mainstream with this >> Right. Right. Well, it's great. You bring up in NVIDIA and I'm just going to quote one of Pat's lines from, from his interview. And he talked about Jensen from NVIDIA actually telling Pat, Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. I love it. You know, let's do the entire AI landscape together and make AI and enterprise class workloads from being more in TANZU, you know, first class citizens. So I, I love the fact, you know, Pat's been around a long time industry veteran, but still, kind of accepted the challenge from Jensen to really elevate AI and machine learning via GPS to first class citizen status. And the other piece, obviously this coming up is ed. So I, you know, it's a nice shot of a, of adrenaline and Kit I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that, you know, in kind of saying, Hey, let's take it up a notch, a significant notch by leveraging a whole another class of compute power within these solutions. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I'll, I'll go real quick. I mean, I, it's funny cause like not many people really ever challenged Pat to say he doesn't think big enough, cause usually he's always blown us away with what he wants to do next, but I think it's, I think it's a, you know, it's good though. It's good to keep us on our toes and push us a bit. Right. All of us within the industry. And so I think a couple of things you have to go back to your previous point around this is like cloud as a model. I think that's exactly what we're doing is trying to bring cloud as a model, even on prem. And it's a lot of these kinds of core hardware architecture capabilities that we do enable the biggest one in my mind, just being enabling an API into the hardware. So the applications can get what they need. And going back to Paul's point, this notion of these AI and ML services, you know, they have to be rooted in the hardware, right? We know that in order for them to be performing for them to run, to support what our customers want to do, we need to have that deeply integrated into the hardware all the way up. But that also becomes a software problem. Once we got the hardware solved, once we get that architecture locked in, how can we as easy as possible, as seamlessly as possible, deliver all those great capabilities, software capabilities. And so, you know, you look at what we've done with the NVIDIA partnership, things around the NVIDIA GPU cloud, and really bringing that to bear. And so then you start having this, this really great full stack integration all the way from the hardware, very powerful hardware architecture that, you know, again, driven by API, the infrastructure software on top of that. And then all these great AI tools, tool chains, capabilities with things like the NVIDIA NGC. So that's really, I think where the vision's going. And we got a lot of the basic parts there, but obviously a lot more work to do going forward. >> I would say that, you know, initially we had dream, we wanted this journey to happen very fast and initially we're baiting infrastructure services. So there's no contention with applications, customer full workload applications, and also in enabling how productive it is to get the data over time, have to have sufficient control over a wide area. there's an opportunity to do something like that to make sure that you think about the probation from bare metal vms (conversation fading) environments are way more dynamic and more spreadable. Right. And they expect hardware. It could be as dynamic and compostable to suit their needs. And I think that's where we're headed. >> Right. So let me, so let me throw a monkey wrench in, in terms of security, right? So now this thing is much more flexible. It's much more software defined. How is that changing the way you think about security and basic security and throughout the stack go to you first, Paul. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like it's actually enables a lot of really powerful things. So first of all, from an architecture and implementation standpoint, you have to understand that we're really running two copies of VXI on each physical server. Now we've got the one running on the X86 side, just like normal, and now we've got one running on the SmartNIC as well. And so, as I mentioned before, we can move a lot of that networking security, et cetera, capabilities off to the SmartNic. And so what does this going toward as what we call a zero trust security architecture, this notion of having really defense in depth at many different layers and many different areas while obviously the hypervisor and the virtualization layer provides a really strong level of security. even when we were doing it completely on the X86 side, now that we're running on a SmartNic that's additional defense in depth because the X86 ESX doesn't really know it doesn't have direct access to the ESX. I run it on the SmartNic So the ESXI running on the SmartNic, it can be this kind of more well defended position. Moreover, now that we're running the security functionality is directly on the data path. In the SmartNic. We can do a lot more with that. We can run a lot deeper analysis, can talk about AI and ML, bring a lot of those capabilities to bear here to actually improve the security profile. And so finally I'd say this notion of kind of distributed security as well, that you don't, that's what I want to have these individual points on the physical network, but I actually distribute the security policies and enforcement to everywhere where a server's running, I everywhere where a SmartNic is, and that's what we can do here. And so it really takes a lot of what we've been doing with things like NSX, but now connects it much more deeply into hardware, allowing for better performance and security. >> A common attack method is to intercept the boot of the server physical server. And, you know, I'm actually very proud of our team because the us national security agency recently published a white paper on best practices for secure group. And they take our implementation across and secure boot as the reference standard. >> Right? Moving forward, imagine an environment that even if you gain control of the server, that doesn't allow you to change bios or update it. So we're moving the root of trust to be in that air gap, domain that Kit talked about. And that gives us a way more capability for zero across the operations. Right. >> Right, right. Paul, I got to ask you, I had Sam bird on the other day, your peer who runs the P the PC group. >> I'm telling you, he is not a peer He's a little bit higher up. >> Higher than you. Okay. Well, I just promoted you so that's okay. But, but it's really interesting. Cause we were talking about, it was literally like 10 years ago, the death of the PC article that came out when, when Apple introduced the tablet and, you know, he's talked about what phenomenal devices that PCs continue to be and evolve. And then it's just funny how, now that dovetails with this whole edge conversation, when people don't necessarily think of a PC as a piece of the edge, but it is a great piece of the edge. So from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to have that kind of presence within the PCs and kind of potentially that intelligence and again, this kind of whole another layer of interaction with the users and an opportunity to define how they work with applications and prioritize applications. I just wonder if you can share how nice it is to have that kind of in your back pocket to know that you've got a whole another, you know, kind of layer of visibility and connection with the users beyond just simply the infrastructure. >> So I actually, within the company we've developed within a framework that we call four edge multicloud, right. Core data centers and enterprise edge IOP, and then off premise. it is a multicloud world. And, and within that framework, we consider our client solutions group products to be part of the yes. And we see a lot of benefit. I'll give an example about a healthcare company that wants to develop real time analytics, regardless of whether it's on a laptop or maybe move into a backend data center, right? Whether it's at a hospital clinic or a patient's home, it gives us a broader innovation surface and a little sooner to get actually the, a lot of people may not appreciate that the most important function within Centene, I considered to be the experienced design thing. So being able to design user flows and customer experience looked at all of use is a variable. >> That's great. That's great. So we're running out of time. I want to give you each the last word you both been in this business for a long time. This is brand new stuff, right? Container aren't new, Kubernetes is still relatively new and exciting. And project Pacific was relatively new and now project Monterrey, but you guys are, you know, you're, multi-decade veterans in this thing. as you look forward, what does this moment represent compared to some of the other shifts that we've seen in IT? You know, generally, but you know, kind of consumption of compute and you know, kind of this application centric world that just continues to grow. I mean, as a software is eating everything, we know it, you guys live it every day. What is, where are we now? And you know, what do you see? Maybe I don't want to go too far out, but the next couple of years within the Monterey framework. And then if you have something else, generally you can add as well. Paul, why don't we start with you? >> Well, I think on a personal level, ingenuity aside I have a long string of very successful endeavor in my career when I came back couple years ago, one of the things that I told Jeff, our vice chairman is a big canvas and I intend to paint my masterpiece and I think, you know, Monterey and what we're doing in support of Monterey is also part of that. I think that you will see, you will see our initial approach focus on, on coordinator. I can tell you that you know how to express it. And we know also how to express even in a multicloud world. So I'm very excited and I know that I'm going to be busy for the next few years. (giggling) >> A Kit to you. >> Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you talk to people about SmartNic and especially those folks that have been around for awhile. And what you hear is like, Hey, you know, people were talking about SmartNic 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that sort of thing. Then they kind of died off. So what's different now. And I think the big difference now is a few things, you know, first of all, it's the core technology of sworn and has dramatically improved. We now have a powerful software infrastructure layer that can take advantage of it. And, you know, finally, you know, applications have a really strong need for it, again, with all the things we've talked about, the need for offload. So I think there's some real sort of fundamental shifts that have happened over the past. Let's say decade that have driven the need for this. And so this is something that I believe strongly as here to last, you know, both ourselves at VMware, as well as Dell are making a huge bet on this, but not only that, and not only is it good for customers, it's actually good for all the operators as well. So whether this is part of VCF that we deliver to customers for them to operate themselves, just like they always have, or if it's part of our own cloud solutions, things like being more caught on Dell, this is going to be a core part about how we deliver our cloud services and infrastructure going forward. So we really do believe this is kind of a foundational transition that's taking place. And as we talked about, there is a ton of additional innovation that's going to come out of it. So I'm really, really excited for the next few years, because I think we're just at the start of a very long and very exciting journey. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for spending some time with us and sharing the story and congratulations. I'm sure a whole bunch of work for, from a whole bunch of people in, into getting to getting where you are now. And, and as you said, Paul, the work is barely just begun. So thanks again. All right. He's Paul's He's Kit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuing coverage of Dell tech world 2020, that digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back already, Jeffrey. Here with the Q. Come to you from our Palo Alto studio with our ongoing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. The digital experience Let's jump into a really excited to have our next guest CIA Sam Bird, the president of the Client Solutions Group for Dell. Sam, where you joining us from today? >>Hey, I am joining you live from Austin, Texas. Jeff looks beautiful. All weather? Yeah, its's turning really nice. Uh, nice time to be here in Austin, right? So, >>Sam, let's jump into it. I mean, you, you cover, you know, kind of the heart of what Dell started with which was which was PCs. And, you know, it's funny. A couple days ago, Michael tweeted because he likes to tweet, which is fun. An article that said that the PC officially died today. It's a reference back to an article I had to look at the January 26 2010. Officially, the PC officially died today. >>That >>is so bizarre, and that is not in fact, not true, you guys. We're seeing unprecedented demand, so I wonder if it is You Look back at that. And I'm sure you saw Michaels tweet. What kind of goes through your head? Because we're in a very different space than we were 10 years ago. >>Yeah, I think the world's changed a lot, Jeff from 10 years ago. I got to say, uh, the PC died 10 years ago. It feels pretty good being being dead for 10 years. So I think we actually saw a, you know, still alive and very vibrant. PC. So you think about everything that's happened with Cove it We have seen the PC and people using technology to stay connected, whether it's, you know, working in their business, learning from home, staying connected with other family members. So we'd like to talk about it Is the renaissance of the PC. It kind of this rebirth reemergence of this really good friend that you had has become really core toe how we're getting stuff done in the world today, and we've stayed bullish about the opportunity around the PC. Michaels had that view from, you know, when he started this company, and we've since expanded to many other areas beyond selling PCs. But we continue to be really committed to the value of that technology in people's hands, >>right? So just in defense of the of the article, it was written on the launch of the iPad right, which was a new a new form factor. And, you know, we've seen this proliferation of form factors both within PCs and mobile phones, and you know, the sizes of screens getting bigger and the size of green getting smaller and surface all kinds of different things. So I wonder if you could share, you know, kind of your perspective in, you know, kind of the opportunity that opens up when people are looking for different types of form factors. And then, more importantly, I think now it's horses for courses. So when I'm sitting at my desk, you know, I haven't a big giant XPS with all the ram and GPU and stuff Aiken stuff into it. If I'm going to the airport with a long flight, I want something small and light and easy to carry and what's interesting, I think, with cloud it enables you now to basically have the form factor that you need where you need it for the types of work that you're trying to get done. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, if you if you take that 10 years ago, article to today we have had an enormous amount of innovation in the industry that's made the device is exciting and appealing for how people wanna want to operate. So, you know, we've seen Jeff a shift towards more mobile form factors with cove in. So, um, a commercial space that used to be maybe half desktops, half notebooks is now in the 70% range. More mobile form factors which reflects how people want to use them. You know, they're sitting at home, they need that device to be portable. They wanna go between rooms and home. That's the other thing that we found in some of our, you know, research and work on the spaces. You know, people might want to sit at the kitchen table in the morning in the afternoon. Maybe they're outside. They might have their kids do in school from home and have to be around them part of the day, so they still need a mobile kind of form factor, but it's plugged in. I want full power to run my applications. And, like you said, we will get back to a world with travel and people being mobile. And then you need to dial in the right form factor that has maybe a smaller screen, more portable device. So one of the things that's kept this business vibrant, you know, for the past 10 years and right now is a bigger screen experience is really, really valuable. A keyboard and multiple ways of in putting into devices are valuable, so there's core. Things are great. And then we've got systems that are set up for how people want to use them. You know, we still have designers sitting at home using big desktop workstations because the most powerful thing there times really valuable. There's a right system for how you want to use technology, and I think that that's attendant, you know, an approach we take in our business, and that's what we see in the industry. I think that's what's helped keep it very vibrant and alive. >>I love it, I love it. It is truly that work from anywhere and anywhere as you just defined, could be a whole bunch of things, and it doesn't even mean just at home or just at the coffee shop. That's really interesting. Is you even change locations where you're working within within the home. That really supports that. So, >>you >>know, Cove, it hits light switch moment. Everybody's gotta work from home. So huge, huge pressure there. And now, as you said, you know, we're seven months into it. Still gonna be going on for a little bit while a little while before people go back. Huge, huge boost to your guys business. I'm curious if you can share some thoughts in terms of, you know, now, I I need to kind of project a little bit of that office back to the work from anywhere situation. And, you know, you guys are that you're kind of that edge device that ultimately connects back to the mother ship. >>Yeah, I think it's and that's where we've seen people realized. It's a really valuable device that helps keep them, you know, productive and connected. Um, we have seen it's very interesting of it used to be, you know, pre co vid for Most people work with the location, you know, Post Cove. It it's something you do, and suddenly it's very location agnostic, and we see the world operating that way in the future Jeff of these devices at the edge or need gonna be working in a world where sometimes it makes sense to be in an office. Maybe there's collaboration, other things you need to dio. But we're going to see people working from home working from a coffee shop, working from, you know, anywhere in the world, and we're gonna need to stay connected. In that way, it's enabling a great set of talent. It's enabling people to be where they want, you know, get done what they need to do in their personal lives and then be contributing in a great way, thio to a business. So I think technology plays a huge role in going and getting that done. And to me, the world doesn't just return back to a you know, pre cove in space. But we're now in this. We've learned we can operate in this kind of multi modality world where technology can help keep us connected, collaborating, getting stuff done in some cases more productive than ever before, and it's kind of unleashed this new wave of thinking. I think we will continue to see great creativity on stuff we're putting in our devices to enable that, you know, software applications approaches that are gonna enable that that will really take us forward as we look at the future. >>You know, I'm just curious if you could share, uh, you know, kind of Ah, general breakdown by kind of form factor. What do you see between kind of, you know, I don't know if you split high end desktops and low on desktops and then, you know, kind of laptops and Chromebooks, what's kind of the high level kind of breakdown, and how's that? Is it change significantly over the last several years? And you you just mentioned a boost. You know, during the time of Cove in >>Yeah, we've seen a shift towards notebooks. Now you know much Is the article you you pulled up from 10 years ago? I think the death, the death of the desktop has also been much exaggerated. So we're Maurin, a mode of 70% of the systems that were selling our notebooks 70 to 80% range. It's a little higher, and consumer Andi, that's, you know, 20 points up in the commercial space. So we're seeing, you know, people have valued that kind of portability of systems. You know that, said is we talk through some of the ways people use it. There are great uses for desktops, for people are in the same place where I need ultimate ultimate power and then a z your home. We've seen a little more shift Teoh a suddenly you know, portability. That was really valuable because you had Salesforce's engineers on the road all the time. And I really wanted something that, you know, lasted had great battery life and was really easy to carry around. Suddenly we're in a world plugged in at home like we look at our devices, we've gone. Now more than half of our laptops are basically on is we have intelligence built into our systems. That tunes how battery management is done. Empower Management's done. More than half those systems are now in a mode of all, basically, always on a C. So people are, you know, plugged in all the time. They would like a little more powerful system. So whether they're running, zoom or teams or some other app. Multitasking. It's like there's a, you know, different requirements there. I think that changes Azzawi go forward and we get back to, you know, the notebook. It's like the ultimate design people want is a great big screen. That's super light, and the battery lasts forever. And I'm like that keeps our engineers and designers working every day because that's a really hard, complex thing to solve. And, you know, we're we continue to work and and and push that next forward. Now it's a little more biased to power. Sitting on a desk. We will be back in a world where it's gonna be, Yeah, I want power to sit on the desk, be on a video conference, get work done. But I also need to be able to take that on the road with >>Yeah, I just think, you know, because of the proliferation of online applications, right? And you know so much of our work day no pun intended, you know, is done in all these different cloud based applications, whether its sales force or slack or asana or whether we're, you know, working in in, uh, social media applications or even are you know kind of cloud enabled local applications. You know, a lot of times I find you don't have to carry your device right. E can lead the one device of one location, one of the other. I know it's almost like you pick up exactly where you were when you log back into chrome or you log back into whatever your browser is. If you've got it all configured, you know you don't even need to carry. A lot of times I find it's it's it's really nice. And if I have to check a message on the phone, No, it's a very different way of working, and, uh, I think it's really pretty slick. I do want to get into productivity, which you've talked about a lot. You know, I've always said the best productivity investment anybody could make is a second screen on the desktop. I mean, it's so much more productive to have a second screen the third screen. You go to places like Wall Street and the NASDAQ floor, where time matters and productivity matters, their screens all over the place and you guys are doing a ton of fun stuff with screens. Big giant curve things, and you made an interesting observation in other interviews that now people are consuming their entertainment content via those screens, whether it's an over the top service with Netflix or or whatever. So this this kind of shift to, you know, kind of mawr content consumption as this blend between kind of what you do in your personal life and what you do in your work life, both in terms of time and content, you know, continue to mix so lot of exciting stuff happening in big, beautiful screens. >>Yeah, totally agree, Jeff. And we see you know we've looked at productivity and see boosts with a bigger screen around your system. Same thing with exactly as you describe putting two screens around the system or go to a trading floor and their screens everywhere because it's about the you know, it's about the content that you can consume and the, um, you know, the work that you go get done, and it's a lot more efficient to be able to have multiple screens. Whether it's looking at a presentation and doing a call, you know, a video call for work on on one screen or either side of Ah, screen. And we're seeing people build out that, you know, their home office, their work office. I think that's to me. The, you know, the exciting piece of you think about how technology is arming people to get their job done. Like you can't imagine if you had all the technology taken away from you. You're like, Okay, what am I gonna What am I go do? Like if the internet goes down, I don't quite know how to get go. Be productive here. You know, I go try to find someone who has a landline phone on the block and call someone up. Andi have actually have a discussion, but, like, I'm not gonna build out a work, you know, a workspace. I've gotta build out a home space companies that are pretty progressive, the ones that are investing Maurin technology for their employees. We're seeing them be ah, lot more successful in this covert air, which equals go get on the right tools the screen around the system, You know, the extra devices. So it's like, Hey, my postures. Great. I can actually go get work done. And I'm in a nice space. Same thing back in the office. We've built stuff. We're building low blue light technology into our commercial PCs. We put that on our high end consumer PC. So you know, now you can walk into your home office early in the morning. You can goto late at night. It will have you all tune so your body is ready to go to sleep. You know, you don't even have toe. I don't have to talk to your family at all during the day. You could just work all the time from your home office. But I think little pieces like that are going. How do we put technology in this world where it's, like, very easy toe walk in and out of your you know, your office and being tuned on. But, hey, I need to go to sleep or I need to be chilling out after that and get the right technology and capabilities that let people be successful. So I think it's pretty exciting. Everything we've been able to dio, >>right? So I want to shift gears a little bit. Um, talk about user interface. What? One of the reason of this article that we keep referencing 10 years ago was the launch of the iPad, right? And in the launch pad or the iPad didn't have, Ah, traditional keyboard. Um, but I think people found out that not having a traditional keyboard, depending on the type of your work you're doing is a little bit of an inhibitor to your productivity. But it really begs the question as we enter this new world of different types of interaction with these devices and the increased use of voice, whether it's with Siri or or Okay, Google, um, >>we've >>had, you know, regulations on the A d a. In terms of access to websites and this and that. Aziz, you kind of look into the future of of human interaction with these devices as you get more and more horsepower toe work with on the GPU and the CPU and you know, can free up more. Resource is to this type of activity. I know you can't share anything too far down the road. But what? How do you see kind of the future evolving to get beyond this quality keyboard that was designed to slow people down because types were, too. I'm still waiting for the more efficient keyboard option to be to be available. But what's the future of human interaction with these things? To take the the degree of efficiency up another level? >>Hey, Jeff, we will do a custom keyboard for you. So you get me your you get me your high speed layout, we'll get you get you one of those. Um, you know, we do see it is pretty remarkable how long the keyboards been around and we still see it's It's also remarkable to me how powerful that is as a input device for, you know, for some tasks in the world. So what we see is it's not gonna be what replaces the keyboard. And there's one way of going and doing things. But all this compute the sensors that capability on the systems are just gonna allow people to operate the way that they want to operate. So you look at a PC today. It still has this great keyboard. It still has a laptop form factor that has, you know, been there for It's probably 25 years or so. It's actually pretty nice because it fits on your lap. It balances really well on the coffee table. Um, it's, you know, We've looked at so many different form factors, and it actually is a stayed around for a good reason because it it's pretty pretty functional. You know, you take on top of that, though we've built touch in tow, all our systems and screen. So a capability that's available to many of our customers and I go people are just starting. In the beginning, it was like Okay, Hey, how do I take this PC with touch on the screen and then you go? I don't want to do everything with touch, but gosh, it's like how maney you now touch it. If it's something's not touch, you know you have little marks on the screen. I went thio, I went. Thio was looking and working with someone here in a design, a design firm, and, uh, they had a product that was non touch, and it's like I reached in touch the screen to try to make it bigger because my eyes were not quite as good and they were like, Oh yeah, that's not a touch that's not a touch system and everyone touches the screen so it's like that becomes normal voice is going to become normal we have capability on the PC. Like you said, there's a bunch of voice ecosystems. Not everything is easiest to go do invoice. There are some things where you go ahead. I just want to go touch that, you know, gesture in the same way we look at intelligence on the system of also going There are things I wanna have just happen because I always I always do that and I shouldn't have to do voice. I shouldn't have to do gesture, touch everything else like, Hey, maybe I start the morning and I always pull up my calendar. Why doesn't that happen? Or I like to listen to her, You know, a song in the evening as I'm typing away on email on getting things buttoned up for the day. It's like your system can anticipate some of those things and it will just do that for you. So I think I think you're exactly right. We're going to see multiple ways of interacting with technology, and it needs to be natural and easy for us and then let the user pick pick the way that they want to go and do things right. >>Well, you just touched on a whole, you jumped ahead to questions on my list of things I want to talk about. And really, that's the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence, not in a generic way. That's an app that sits inside of the PC, but but in terms of using that intelligence as you just described based on my work flow based on my habit based on the applications I use based on you know what, you can observe and learn about me. Or maybe it SSM dictate down from from the corporate set up. You know how that PC operates for me? Because I think that's it is a really interesting thing, right? Everyone uses their machine differently, and whether they use, you know, shortcuts or not, How many tabs do they have open? You know, the the variability. You must have crazy studies on this in terms of the way people actually operate. These things is so, so high, so huge opportunity to, you know, again kind of remove the the get the signal from the noise and help people decide what they should do. Prioritize what they should do and add a layer of of simplicity to you. know it is a complex amount of notifications firing at me all day long. >>Yeah, I think that's a huge. You know, you talked about the potential you have in a world where more APS that we use our cloud cloud based of going How do I augment the capability in this client device at the edge To be intelligent and helped me go do mawr versus just being, you know, really dumb and serving up this other other content. And I think everything you describe is opportunity that we see We started Jeff about five years ago and have been very aggressive and putting intelligence and machine learning into the systems we started on our work stations, where there is an obvious application of, like, how do I tune a system to get the most performance out of an application? And we saw settings configurations making them different helped tune these very specific, you know, cad engineering programs that developers were running their times really valuable. They want the most performance. We used to have to have people sit down and we go. Okay, let's go run this application. Under this workload, we can put a table together. Here's a bunch of recommendations. We started going well, Hey, how do we have that happened? Automat like, let's try different settings. Figure out what works. The machines should should self tune itself then and figure out what's right and get based on exactly what I'm running. And people can be running different combinations so suddenly got a lot smarter than our great engineer sitting in the lab and figuring out those tables. And then, you know, from that time then we brought it to I think, what's just tip of the iceberg Now, where we start looking at, uh, performance across all our systems? What applications of my running go set things up so that it works? We talked a little bit about batteries and power management. Hey, how am I using this system if I am a really mobile person? Always, you know, taking my battery down to really low levels, hopping on a plane, I need to be quickly charged, like the system can figure out. Hey, I really need to tune things. Not for when, when you go through all the mechanics of a battery, it's like I am willing to sacrifice some on the longevity of the battery to enable really fast charging of that system because Jeffs always on the go Jeff runs his battery down. I need to make sure when he plugs in, he has maximum juice. Hey, here's Sam who's in a work from home mode, always plugged in. It's not great on any battery in the world to always be at, you know, maximum maximum charge every single minute of the day. And Sam has not unplugged his system in the past. You know, five days. Hey, we can run that at 95% and he will have a long life to that battery and be really happy with the system. And he's never gonna run out of power. You can start doing in that space. You can start doing it around sound and the environment that people are in, how we get smart. And I think there's an enormous amount you could do on top of that, like you described just how people have used the systems and it can sound a little eerie, but like it's what we you know, the machine suddenly knows how I'm going to go do stuff, but I'm like I would like that it to be anticipating what I'm doing, and then it starts taking that mundane stuff that we have to do that just eats up time and, you know, goes and gets that done for us. So we could be focused on the creative and the really pushing the boundaries, thinking >>I love it because it always goes back to kind of what do you optimizing for right? And there isn't necessarily one answer to that question, and there's a lot of factors that go into that in terms of the timing. As you said, the person their behavior you know happen to GPS is I'm at an airport. Probably need to plug in for you in the airplane. It's a good stuff. I want to. I want to shift gears a little bit, Sam, to talk about operating systems, Um, and and you know, chromebooks air out now. And you know, it was kind of this breakthrough to go beyond kind of Windows based systems. I think there's a lot of people that you know hope at >>some point >>will be, you know, have the option to run Lennox based systems. But it's just, you know, with a cloud based world and a multi, you know, kind of device interaction with all those different applications, whether it's it's my phone or my my desktop or my laptop or my my chromebook or my whatever. Um, Aziz, you start to think about kind of operating systems and opening up, you know, kind of a new level of innovation with because the expectation now for for like, a chromebook is that it's almost 100% Web based APS, right? That there's really not a lot of need for anything local. Maybe a quick download, a picture too attached to to an email or something. How do you kind of look at the future and kind of operating systems for PC? Specifically? >>Yeah. Well, I think is You describe Jeff, the applications and what you're doing on the system has become increasingly important over time, and it will only become more important as we go go forward. So, you know, from that point of view window, we dio work with windows. We do work with Google and chrome. I mean, Windows 10 is a really good based operating system. Chrome has a lot of nice capability in that operating system, you know, Obviously Apple, a competitor, has a different approach in that space. But I think we have a really good set of offerings that we can put on our our systems. And then we're focused on tuning that experience on top of the operating system. I I think it's still too complicated to go and put a, you know, get a new PC into a work or home environment, retire the old PC and manage that system. And what we look at is independent of that operating system. People want to go get their stuff done. We need to make that great. They wanna get their device, they want to turn it on and they want to go use it. And we want to build a world where, like, as I'm getting a new device, my device should know me well enough to go. Hey, Sam, this is this is the right time to get a device. This is the right kind of device that you should get based on what you're going and doing. Hey, I'm going to just keep you up to date. I am going to you think about any issues with the system. We still have too many things that flow through a traditional Hey, there's an I T. Help desk and then they figure that out and then I go toe level two or level three if they can't sort that out. Hey, how do we put that stuff to your point, Jeff before around intelligence, How do we automate those processes? So we're thinking through You know what needs to happen on that system, keeping it up to date and fixing and remediating that system. So I think there's a huge potential regardless of what operating system is beneath it, and we have very good choices there to go. We've got to make that experience the one that's great for the users and that that's where we're really focusing our, you know, our time and our energy, Right? >>So let me shift gears again a little bit and full disclosure I've bought, and I don't know how many XPS towers in a row. I think I'm on my third or fourth in a row. I love >>it. I >>mean, I'm a desktop. I like to just pack those things full of as much horsepower and GPU and CPU and memory as I possibly can because to me again, Back to an investment and productivity. I don't wanna be waiting for slow machines. I just to me it's a couple 100 bucks for this upgrade. That upgrade, it seems brain dead to me that people don't do that. But in terms of when you get these things now and it comes in the mail, it's basically a >>box and a machine, and >>you think back to the old days right when there was books and warranty cards and, you know, a whole plethora of stuff that kind of fell out of that box. I know you know. That's That's probably a leading indicator on the consumer side, about some of your efforts around sustainability and and being efficient and obviously taking advantage of things like the cloud in terms of activating these machines in this and that. But I wonder if you can share a little bit on what you guys have been doing about sustainability, because I know it's important. You know, there's a big focus around, you know, kind of environmental trash on old electron ICS, which is a riel, a real problem that people are dressing. So I wonder if you can. You know. Take a minute, Thio, to share your guys efforts in this area. >>Yeah, I think you're absolutely right, Jeff. It is. It is really important. And we see, you know, arming the world with technology so people can do better. Things really matters, but I love doing stuff outside, like I want the environment to be great. And we need to do that in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way. So a couple of places we, you know, pushed really aggressively. You touched on the packaging. So whether that's taking, um, content out of boxes, that doesn't that doesn't need to be there. We've made very aggressive commitments with a series of 2030 goals that we're marching towards is a company where we said, you know, 100% of our packaging will be from sustainable or recyclable sources. So we've already moved aggressively in that space. When you look at what ocean bound plastic we're putting in our boxes, how we think about the materials that were picking, you know, cardboard, and using that in ways that go through the you know, the mail and can be shipped effectively. So we have maximum content there that can be recycled. We've we've committed that we will take back a system for every system that we ship. So getting and building this circular economy for electron ICS, we think is is very important. So we take the stuff that we've got out there and we put that back into a recycle process where you know your old PC can become part of your new cutting edge technology PC and we've led the industry and doing that in plastics were taking plastics from cases and plastics from systems, getting that back into new systems. We've done that with precious metals from the from the, uh, PCB lay board designs inside the systems. We've done that with rare earth metals and magnets, and we think there's opportunity to go farther in that space and then the 3rd 3rd kind of thing that we've committed Jeff is by by 2030 to have half the content of our new systems, be from recycled or renewable content. And we do a good job today of having the content in the systems be recyclable. It's almost over 90% by weight, but what we want to do and the work we need to go do is go get that recycled content going into a cutting edge technology that we're putting out there, and it's not. That's not a simple problem of going. People want things a structurally strong as possible, a super thin as performance as possible. And then we need to you, you know, we gotta use, um, basically waste that comes through and gets turned into new products. So we have our engineers are material science people working on how we make that riel. And we set some aggressive goals with, you know, Michael and the company that will be leadership and that we don't quite exactly know how to get there, but put us on the right kind of edge of pushing and doing the things that we need. Thio. We can have great technology and, you know, be responsible in the way that, as you said, is very important. >>It's great, and it's good to write it down, right? If you don't write it down, then it's just it just disappears into the into the ether. So, Sam, I really enjoyed getting to catch up. I want to give you the final word with a little bit. Look to the path and a little bit look to the future, right? A lot of conversation about Moore's law, and we got to the end of Moore's law and blah, blah, blah. And and I think that, you know, there's obviously technology behind that, and there's some real conversations. But to me, the more interesting topic around Moore's law is really the idea of Moore's law and this continual advancement of technology that's better, faster, cheaper. You've been doing this for 20 years at Del. You've seen tons of, you know, kind of Moore's law impacts and operating in this world where, you know, compute, compute storage and networking just is on this exponential scale on whether you want to talk about GP use or whatever again to me, it's not about the number, of course, and the transistor. It's about the transition in the core. It's about really the concept of this working in a world where you know you're gonna have a lot more. Where is power work with How do you How do you kind of reflect on, you know, the stuff that you're shipping today versus what you were shipping five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago and then, more importantly, is you look forward. Um, you know what is what are you excited about? What gets you up in the morning? What puts a big smile on your face? Still come to work after 20 years of Dell? >>Yeah. You know, Jeff, it's a great question because the industry has changed so much over the last 10 20 years. So it's sometimes a fun thing. Toe. Look back at some of the products that we put out before. That seemed amazing at that point in time and you stack them against what we're doing now and then it could bring you down to Earth a little bit. So you see, the, uh, you see just the exponential improvements that we're able to make around the design of the product, the capability of the products. And I see that continuing the thing that gives me, you know, huge thought around this the device and the PC and the role is gonna play at the edge. We just did some research and we were looking at Millennials and Gen Z and looking around the world, and that is a huge and growing part of the population. It will be the the users of technology in the future with the world we're in today, 45% of them. So almost half of them said they would take their dollars and they want a premium, high end PC experience, and they would prioritize that versus other things they spend money on to go and have a great PC as a personal tool. Do you think about that translating to in a work environment they're gonna expect those same kind of great tools? And then to the question you asked, You know, I see a huge opportunity to continue to push forward the value and the way people use these devices, whether it's the intelligence we talked about. That to me is really exciting around building a machine that knows me and does things for me and how I want to use it, our ability to build immersive experiences so that you know, whether I'm gaming after work, collaborating with co workers like how do I put it so that we're together and it's a good Aziz that in person experience, we're gonna be able to do that with technology. You talked in a great questions around. Hey, the ways people interact with the systems, it will become natural. It will become whatever way they want to go and do that. And I think we can do that in a world where, yes, you can walk between all kinds of different devices. There will not be one device to end all. You'll be in a small screen device. You're gonna use a monitor. You're going to use a PC device. There will be technology across the home. But toe have that have that link together in the role that PC is gonna play in. That to me, is exciting. And we continue to, you know, invest aggressively. Michael saw that when he started the company. We continue to believe in the power of technology, and we're gonna figure out and drive those breakthroughs that will make the, you know, products exciting. And I love doing that every day of seeing the innovation we can put together and how that makes a difference for people. To me, that's really an exciting thing. >>Well, Sam, thank you. Thank you for the update. Again, the rumors of the PCs demise were greatly overstated. 10 years and glad to see that you're just kicking tail and doing exciting things. So thanks for for sharing your insight and your experience with us. >>Hey, thanks a lot for having me, Jeff. Great to talk to you. >>Absolutely. All right. He's Sam. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes. Continuing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020 The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World 2020 the virtual del tech world. Of course, the virtual queue with me is Alison Do. She's the CMO and a member of the executive leadership team at Dell Technologies. Hey there, Alison. Good to see you. >>Hi, David. Good to see you too. I'm gonna see you alive, but it's so good to see on the feed. >>Yeah, I miss you, too. You know, it's been it's been tough, but we're getting through it and, you know, it's a least with technology. We're able to meet this way and, you know, for us continue the cube for you to continue del Tech world, reaching out to your to your customers. But, you know, maybe we could start there. It's like I said the other day else into somebody. I feel like everybody I know in the technology industry has also become a covert expert in the last six months. But but, you know, it changed so much. But I'm interested in well, first of all, you're a great communicator. I have met many, many members of your team. They're really motivated group. How did you handle the pandemic? Your communications. Uh, did you increase that? Did you? Did you have to change anything? Or maybe not. Because like I say, you've always been a great communicator with a strong team. What was your first move? >>Eso There's obviously there's many audiences that we serve through communications, but in this instance, the two most important our customers and our team members. So I'll take the customers first. You have likely seen the spoof Real's Going Around the Internet of Here's How Not to Talk to Customers, Right? So you saw early in February and March in April, all of these communications that started with in these troubled times We are here to help you and, you know, we're already in a crisis every single day, all day long. I don't think people needed to be reminded that there was a crisis happening. So you've got this one end where it's over crisis mongering and the other side where it was just ignoring the crisis. And so what we did was we really looked at all of our communications a new So, for example, in our small business space, we were just about I mean days away from launching a campaign that was about celebrating the success of small businesses. It's a beautiful piece of creative. I love it, and we made the very tough decision to put that work on the shelf and not launch it. Why? Because it would have been incredibly tone deaf in a moment where small businesses were going out of business and under incredible struggle to have a campaign that was celebrating their success. It just wouldn't have worked. And what we did very quickly was a new piece of creative that had our own small business advisers, lower production values, them working from home and talking about how they were helping customers. But frankly, even that then has a shelf life, because ultimately you have to get back to your original story. So as we thought about our own communications, my own leadership team and I went through every single piece of creative toe. Look for what's appropriate now what's tone deaf, and that was a very heavy lift and something that we had to continue to do and I'm really proud of the work. We did pivot quickly, then on the employee side. If you'd asked me in January, was Team member Communications the most important thing I was doing? I would have said It's an important thing I'm doing and I care deeply about it, But it's not the most important thing I'm doing. Where there was a period from probably February to June where I would have said it became the most important thing that I was doing because we had 120,000 people pivot over a weekend toe. Working from home, you had all of the demands of home schooling, the chaos that stress whilst also were obviously trying to keep a business running. So this engagement with our employees and connecting the connecting with them through more informal means, like zoom meetings with Michael and his leadership team, where once upon a time we would have had a more high value production became a key piece of what we did. So it sounds so easy, but this increase of the frequency with our own employees, while also being really honest with ourselves about the tone of those communications, so that's what we did and continue to dio >>Well, you've done a good job and you struck a nice balance. I mean, you weren't did see some folks ambulance chasing and it was a real turn off. Or like you said, sometimes tone deaf. And we can all look back over history and see, you know, so many communications disasters like you say, people being tone deaf or ignoring something. It was sloughing it off, and then it really comes back to bite them. Sometimes security breaches air like that. So it seems like Dell has I don't know, there's a methodology. I don't know if you use data or it's just a lot of good good experience. How have you been able to sort of nail it? I guess I would say is it is. >>But there's some secret method that I'm cautiously optimistic. And the superstitious part of me is like, Don't say that, Okay, I'm not gonna would alright eso so that it's it's both it z experience, obviously. And then what? I What I talk a lot about is this intersection of data versus did data and creativity, and you spend a lot of time in marketing circles. Those two things can be sometimes pitched is competing with each other. Oh, it's all about the creativity, or it's all about the data. And I think that's a silly non argument. And it should be both things And this this time like this. This point that I make about ambulance chasing and not re traumatizing people every single day by talking about in these troubled times is actually from a piece of research that we did, if you believe it or not. In 2008 during the middle of the global financial crisis, when we started to research some of our creative, we found that some of the people who have seen our creative were actually less inclined to buy Dell and less positive about Dell. Why? Because we started with those really hackneyed lines of in these troubled times. And then we went on to talk about how we could take out I t costs and were targeted at I T makers, who basically we first played to their fear function and they said, and now we're going to put you out of a job, right? So there's this years of learning around where you get this sweet spot from a messaging perspective to talk about customer outcomes while also talking about what you do is a company, and keeping the institutional knowledge is knowledge of those lessons and building and refining over time. And so that's why I think we've been able to pivot as quickly as we have is because we've been data driven and had a creative voice for a very long time. The other piece that has helped us be fast is that we've spent the last 2.5 3 years working on bringing our own data, our own customer data internally after many, many years of having that with the third party agency. So all the work we had to do to retarget to re pivot based on which verticals were being successful in this time and which were not we were able to now due in a matter of hours, something that would have taken us weeks before. So there's places where it's about the voice of who we are as a brand, and that's a lot of that is creative judgment. And then there's places about institutional knowledge of the data, and then riel getting too real time data analysis where we're on the cusp of doing that. >>Yeah, so I like the way you phrase that it's not just looking at the data and going with some robotic fashion. It reminds me of, you know the book. Michael Lewis, Moneyball, the famous movie, You know, it's like for a while it was it was in baseball, like whoever had the best nerds they thought we were gonna win. But it really is a balance of art and science, and it seems like you're on this journey with your customers together. I mean, how much how much? I mean, I know there's a lot of interaction, but but it seems like you guys are all learning together and evolving together in that regard. >>Absolutely. David, One of the things that has been really interesting to watch is we have had a connected workplace program for 10 years, so we've had flexible work arrangements for a very long time, and one of the things that we have learned from that is a combination of three key factors. The technology, obviously, can you do it? The three culture, and then the process is right. So when you have a the ability to work from home doesn't mean you should work from home 22 out of 24 hours. And that's where culture comes in. And I frankly, that's where this moment of cumulative global stress is so important to realize as a leader and to bring out to the Open and to talk about it. I mean, Michael's talked a lot about this is a marathon. This is not a sprint. We've done a lot of things to support our employees. And so if you think about those three factors and what we've learned, one of the things that we found as we got into the pipe pandemic was on the technology side. Even customers who thought they had business continuity plans in place or thought that they had worked from home infrastructure in place found that they didn't really so there was actually a very quick move to help our customers get the technology that would enable them to keep their businesses running and then on the other two fronts around processes and culture and leadership. We've been ableto have smaller, more intimate conversations with our customers than we would have historically, because frankly, we can bring Michael, Jeff. Other parts of the leadership team me together to have a conversation and one of the benefits of the fact that those of us who've been road warriors for many, many, many years as I know you have a swell suddenly found yourself actually staying in one place. You have time to have that conversation so that we continue to obviously help our customers on the technology front, but also have been able to lean in in a different way on what we've learned over 10 years and what we've learned over this incredibly dramatic eight months, >>you know, and you guys actually have some work from Home Street cred? I think, Del, you're the percentage of folks that were working from home Pre Koven was higher than the norm, significantly higher than normal. Wasn't that long ago that there were a couple of really high profile companies that were mandating come into the office and clear that they were on the wrong side of history? I mean, that surprised me actually on. Do you know what also surprised me? I don't know. I'm just gonna say it is There were two companies run by women, and I would have thought there was more empathy there. Uh, but Dal has always had this culture of Yeah, we were, You know, we could work. We could be productive no matter where. Maybe that's because of the the heritage or your founders. Still still chairman and CEO. I don't know. >>You know those companies and obviously we know who they are. Even at the time, what I thought about them was You don't have a location problem. You have a culture problem and you have a productivity problem and you a trust problem with your employees. And so, yes, I think they are going to be proven to be on the wrong side of history. And I think in those instances they've been on the wrong side of history on many things, sadly, and I hope that will never be us. I don't wanna be mean about that, but but the truth of the matter is one of the other benefits of being more flexible about where and how you work is. It opens up access to different talent pools who may or may not want to live in Austin, Texas, as an example, and that gives you a different way to get a more diverse workforce to get a younger workforce. And I think lots of companies are starting to have that really ization. And, you know, as I said, we've been doing this for 10 years. Even with that context, this is a quantum leap in. Now we're all basically not 100% but mainly all working from home, and we're still learning. So there's an interesting, ongoing lifelong learning that I think is very, very court of the Dell culture. >>I want to ask you about the virtual events you had you had a choice to make. You could have done what many did and said, Okay, we're going to run the event as scheduled, and you would have got a covert Mulligan. I mean, we saw Cem some pretty bad productions, frankly, but that was okay because they had to move fast and they got it done. So in a way, you kind of put more pressure on your yourselves. Andi, I guess you know, we saw this with VM Ware. I guess Was, you know, just recently last >>few >>weeks. Yeah, and so but they kind of raise the bar had great, you know, action with John Legend. So that was really kind of interesting, but, you know, kind of what went into that decision? A Zeiss A. You put more pressure on yourself because now you But you also had compares what? Your thoughts on >>that. So there was a moment in about March where I felt like I was making a multimillion dollar decision every single day. And that was on a personal note, somewhat stressful to kind of wake up and think, What? What? Not just on the events front. But as I said on the creative front, What work that my team has been working on for the last two years? I am I going to destroy today was sort of. I mean, I'm kind of joking, but not entirely how that felt for me personally at the moment. And we had about we made the decision early on to cancel events. We also made the decision quite early on that when we call that, we said we're not going to do any in person events until the end of this calendar year. So I felt good about the definitiveness there. We had about a week where we were still planning to do the virtual world in May and what I did together with my head of communications and head of event is we really sat and looked at the trajectory in the United States, and we thought, this is not gonna be a great moment for the U. S. The week we were supposed to run in May, if you looked at the trajectory of diseases, you would have news be dominated by the fact that we had an increasing spike in number of cases and subsequent deaths. And we just thought that don't just gonna care about our launches. So we had to really, very quickly re pivot that and what I was trying to do was not turn my own organization. So make the decisions start to plan and move on. And at the same time, though, what that then meant is we still have to get product launches out the door. So we did nine virtual launches in nine weeks. That was a big learning learning her for my team. I feel really good about that, and hopefully it helps us. And what I think will be a hybrid future going forward. >>Yeah, so not to generalize, but I've been generalizing about the following. So I've been saying for a while now that a lot >>of the >>marketing people have always wanted to have a greater component of virtual. But, you know, sales guys love the belly. The belly closed the deals, you know? But so where do you land on that? How do you see? You know, the future of events we do, you expect to continue to have ah, strong virtual component. >>I think it's gonna be a hybrid. I think we will never go back to what we did before. I think the same time people do need that human connection. Honestly, I miss seeing the people that I work with face to face. I said at the beginning of this conversation, I would like to be having this discussion with you live and I hate Las Vegas. So I never thought I'd be that interested in, like, let's go to Las Vegas, you know, who knew? But but so I think you'll see a hybrid future going forward. And then we will figure out what those smaller, more direct personal relationship moments are that over the next couple of years you could do more safely and then also frankly give you the opportunity to have those conversations that are more meaningful. So I'm not entirely sure what that looks like. Obviously, we're gonna learn a lot this year with this event, and we're going to continue to build on it. But there's places in the world if you look at what we've done in China for many, many, many years, we have held on over abundance of digital events because of frankly, just the size of the population and the the geographic complexity. And so there are places that even early into this, we could say, Well, we've already done this in China. How do we take that and apply it to the rest of the world? So that's what we're working through now. That's actually really exciting, >>You know, when you look at startups, it's like two things matter the engineering and sales and that's all anything else is a waste of money in their minds when you and and all they talk about is Legion Legion Legion. You don't hear that from a company like Dell because you have so many other channels on ways Thio communicate with your customers and engage with your customers. But of course, legions important demand. Gen. Is important. Do you feel like virtual events can be a Z effective? Maybe it's a longer tail, but can they be as productive as the physical events? >>So one thing that I've always been a little bit cantankerous on within marketing circles is I refuse to talk about it in terms of Brand versus Li Jen, because I think that's a false argument. And the way I've talked about it with my own team is there are things that we do that yield short term business results, maybe even in corridor in half for a year. And there are things that we do that lead to long term business results. First one is demand, and the second one is more traditional brand. But we have to do both. We have to think about our legacy as a known primarily for many, many years as a PC maker. In order for us to be successful in the business businesses that we are in now, we love our PC heritage. I grew up in that business, but we also want to embrace the other parts of their business and educate people about the things that we do that they may not even know, right? So that's a little bit of context in terms of you got to do both. You got to tell your story. You've got to change perceptions and you got to drive demand in quarter. So the interesting things about digital events is we can actually reach more people than we ever could in an in person world. So I think that expands the pie for both the perceptions and long term and short term. And I hope what we are more able to do effectively because of that point that I made about our own internal marketing digital transformation is connect those opportunities to lead and pass them off to sales more effectively. We've done a lot of work on the plumbing on the back end of that for the last couple of years, and I feel really fortunate that we did that because I don't think we'd be able to do what we're doing now. If we hadn't invested there, >>Well, it's interesting. You're right. I mean, Del of course, renowned during the PC era and rode that wave. And then, of course, the AMC acquisition one of the most amazing transformations, if not the most amazing transformation in the history of the computer industry. But when you when you look to the future and of course, we're hearing this week about as a service and you new pricing models, just new mindsets I look at and I wonder if you could comment, I look at Dell's futures, you know, not really a product company. You're becoming a platform. Essentially, for for digital transformation is how I look atyou. Well, how do you see the brand message going forward? >>Absolutely. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about Dell is that we have proven our ability to constantly and consistently reinvent ourselves, and I won't go through the whole thing. But if you look at started as a direct to consumer company, then went into servers then and started to go into small business meeting business a little bit about when private acquired e. M. C. I mean, we are a company who is always moving forward and always thinking about what's next. Oftentimes, people don't even realize the breadth and depth of what we do and who we are now so as even with all of that context in place, the horizon that we're facing into now is, I believe, the most important transformation that we've done, which is, as you see, historical, I t models change and it becomes, yes, about customer choice. We know that many of our customers will continue to want to buy hardware the way they always have. But we also know that we're going to see a very significant change in consumption models. And the way we stay on top of our game going forward is we lean into that huge transformation. And that's what we're announcing this week with Project Apex, which is that commitment to the entire company's transformation around as a service. And that's super exciting for us. >>Well, I was saying Before, you're sort of in lockstep with your customers. Or maybe you could we could. We could close by talking a little bit about Dell's digital transformation and what you guys have going on internally, and maybe some of the cultural impacts that you've seen. >>So you, you you touched on it. It's so easy to make it about just the I t. Work, and in fact, you actually have to make it about the i t. The business process. Change in the culture change. So if you look at what we did with the AMC acquisition and the fact that you know that there's a lot of skepticism about that at the time, they're not gonna be able to absorb that. Keep the business running. And in fact, we have really shown huge strides forward in the business. One of the reasons we've been able to do that is because we've been so thoughtful about all of those things. The technology, the culture and the business process change, and you'll see us continue to do that. As I said in my own organization, just to use the data driven transformation of marketing. Historically, we would have hired a certain type of person who was more of a creative Brett bent. Well, now, increasingly, we're hiring quants who are going to come into a career in marketing, and they never would have seen themselves doing that a couple of years ago. And so my team has to think about okay, these don't look like our historical marketing profile. How do we hire them? How do we do performance evaluations for them. And how do we make sure that we're not putting the parameters of old on a very new type of talent? And so when we talk about diversity, it's not just age, gender, etcetera. It's also of skills. And that's where I think the future of digital transformation is so interesting. There has been so much hype on this topic, and I think now is when we're really starting to see those big leaps forward and peoples in companies. Riel transformation. That's the benefit of this cookie year we got here, Dave. >>Well, I think I do think the culture comes through, especially in conversations like this. I mean, you're obviously a very clear thinker and good communicator, but I think your executive team is in lockstep. It gets down, toe the middle management into the into the field and and, you know, congratulations on how far you've come. And, uh, and and also I'm really impressed that you guys have such a huge ambitions in so many ways. Changing society obviously focused on customers and building great companies. So, Alison, thanks so much for >>thank you, Dave. You virtually I'm very >>great to see it. Hopefully hopefully see Assumes. Hopefully next year we could be together. Until then, virtually you'll >>see virtual, >>huh? Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Keep it right there. Our coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break.

>>from the Cube Studios in >>Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi. I'm stupid, man. And welcome to a cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guest on the program. Francis Mattis. He is the vice president of engineering at Pensando. Francis. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Good to be here. All >>right. So, Frances, you and I actually overlapped. Ah, you know, some of the companies who work with, you know, if anybody familiar with Pensando, you have worked with some of the mpls team over the years through some of those spin ins, but for our audience, give us a little bit about your background. You know, what brought you to help and be part of the team that you started pensando? >>Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I started my career with Advanced Micro Devices in the mid nineties, got out of school, really wanted to build micro processors. And so, Andy, being in Austin, Texas, and be going to ls you for undergrad was perfect sort of alignment. And so I got to say M. D and Austin built K five worked on that team or kind of team with K seven. And, uh, when I came out to California to help with K, and that brought me to California. And then we got into the dot com era and and being a A and B fighting intel, so to speak, seemed like a hard battle. And so, with the dot com era coming, I just saw this perfect opportunity to jump into the Internet. And so that's how we got into building Internet and data communications equipment, went to the show on systems. We talked a little bit about that earlier, and that got me into storage. From there, I got into a company called on GMO, which was building fibre channel sand equipment. So built chips there, and I got to know the Mpls team there. I always say they hired me off the street. And from that point on, while we've been together since Jews 1001 So 19 years, yeah. Yeah, and I've been building silicon with them and systems for almost 20 years now. So we had quite a journey. Yeah, it's been fun. Great >>stuff. Yeah, you know it's going back, you know, niche on talking about ice scuzzy. You know, in the networking world, you know, it's a little bit of a dark arts in general for most people, you know, understanding the networking protocols and all the various pieces and three and four letter acronyms aren't something that most people are familiar with. Pensando, I'm curious. You know what? You know, networking In general, you're like, I work on Internet stuff and we're the tubes that, you know, Things go around. So when when you describe pensando, you know how to explain that to the people that maybe aren't deep into East, west, south, over on under underlay protocols? >>Yeah, absolutely. So for me, pensando was kind of the sort of the culmination of all the things I've done in my career processing, you know, being able to build compute engines that have programmable, starting with microprocessors, being able to do storage and storage networking with Andy on no, we build a computer with druva and the virtualization layers around the Ethernet interfaces in the adapter with what was really our first smart nick, Um, in 6 4007 timeframe and then with STN in CNI, all of these elements kind of came together. These multiple different layers in the infrastructure stack, if you will, and so pensando for me. What was interesting was the explosion of scale in both space and time with the advent of, let's say, 25 gig 50 gig 100 gig to the server, the notion of very dense computing on in each rack and the need for very high scale After doing all of these technologies and seeing where silicon kind of started to fall in place, I was 16 centimeter. It seemed that bringing this kind of technology to the edge very low power with sort of an end to end security architecture and to end policy engine architecture, distributed services as we're doing all seem to naturally fit into place. And the cloud was already proving this morning when I say the cloud, I mean, the hyper scaler is like Amazon and Microsoft. We are already building these platforms. And so yeah, it dawned on me that, uh I didn't think this was possible unless you built the entire platform. We built the entire system. If you build any one piece, the market transition would take a lot longer. And I think this is true. In technology, history tends to repeat itself, starting with mainframes. When IBM built an entire computer and that built the entire computer, HP built these people. So these kinds of things, um, are important if you want to really push a market transition. And so pensando became this opportunity to take all of these things that I've done in my past life and bring them together in a way that would give a complete stack for the purposes of what I call the new computer, which is basically the data center. And so, um, you know, when my mom asks me, you know, what is it that you're doing? I said, Well, it's just imagine the computer you have right now and multiplying by thousands and thousands stacking in Iraq, and anyone can use it at any one time. And we provide the infrastructure and the mechanisms to be able to Teoh, orchestrate and control that very, very high speed layers. So I don't know if that was a long answer. >>No, no, no. It's fascinating stuff, and you know, when I look at the industry, you know cloud. Of course. Is that just make a wave? That changed the way a lot of people look at this. The way we architect things, there was this belief for a number of years. Well, you know, I'm going to go from this complicated mess that I had in my own data centers and cloud was going to be, you know, inexpensive and easy. And I don't think anybody thinks about inexpensive and easy when they look at cloud computing these days, then add edge into these environments. So I guess what I'm asking is, you know, today's environment, you know, we know I t always is additive. So I have various pieces that I need to put together. You talked about building platforms, and how can it be a complete stack? So companies like Oracle, you know, for many years said we can do everything from the silicon all the way up through your application. Amazon in many ways does the same thing they can. You can build everything on Amazon, but they built out their ecosystem. So how does Pensando fit into this? You know, multi cloud, multi dimensional multi vendor. >>So yeah, so that's a good question. so So one of the things we wanted to do is to be able to bring a systematic management layer two header Genius, beauty. And what I mean by that is in any enterprise data center, modern data center, you're gonna have multiple types of computing. You're gonna have virtual machines, you're gonna have their metal, and you're gonna have containers, or at least in the last, say, three or four years. Chances are you'll have some containers and moving there. And so what we wanted to do was be able to Brighton Infrastructure a management mechanism where all of these head Virginia's types of computing could be managed the same way with respect to policy. What I mean by policy is sort of this declarative or intent based model of I have declared what I'd like to see, whether that the network policy or and and security with data in motion and be able to plot apply it in a distributed manner. Across these different types of hetero genius elements, the cloud has the advantage that it's homogenous for the most part. I mean, they own the entire infrastructure and they can control everything on their now our systems will obviously manage the marginal systems as well, and in many ways that's easier. But bringing together these this notion of heterogeneity these types of computing with one management plane one type of interface for the operator, specifically the networking services operator, was fundamental. That and then the second thing is being able to bring the scale and speed to the edge. So a top of rack switch or something in the in the middle of the network is obviously very dense in terms of this Iot capability. So the silicon area that you spend building a high speed switch is really spent for the most part on the Iot, unless typically, 30 to 40% of the area will be Iot and the rest will be very much hardwired control protocols. We know that as we go to STN services and we want, uh, let's say software defined mechanisms in terms of what the policy looks like, what the protocols look like. The ability to change over time in the lifespan of the computer, which is 3 to 5 years, are you want that to be programmable, very difficult to apply a very dense scale in the core of the network. And so it was an obvious move to bring that to the edge where we could plug it into the server effectively, just like we did. Really? In the UCS system. Uh, no system. >>Yeah, some some really tough engineering challenges. You know, for the longest time, it was very predictable in the networking world, You know, you go from one gig to 10 gig. You know, there was a little discussion how we went the next step, whether, you know, 25 50 40 and 100 gig now. But you talk about containerized architectures. You talk about distributed systems with edge. Things change at a much smaller granular level and change much more frequently. So what are some of the design principles and challenges that you make sure that you're ready for what's happening today but also knowing that, you know, technology changes there always coming, and you need to be able to handle, You know, that next thing. Yeah, >>that's right. Yes. So, uh, I think part of the biggest challenges we have are around power with respect to design power. And then what is the usefulness of each transistor? So, um, when you you have sort of a scale of flexibility. See, views are the most flexible, obviously, but have probably the least performance in them. PG A's are pretty useful in terms of its flexibility, but not very dense in terms of its logic capability. And then you have hardwired a six, which are extremely dense, very much purpose built logic, but completely inflexible. And so the design challenge it was put in front of us is how do we find that sweet spot of extremely programmable, extremely flexible, but still having a cost profile that didn't look like an F PGA And God knows the benefits of the CPU. And and that's where this sort of this notion of domain specific processing came in, which is okay, well, if we're going to solve a few problems, we're going to solve them well. And those few problems are going to be we're gonna bring PC services. We're going to bring networking services. We're going to bring stories, services. We're gonna bring security services around the edge of the computer so that we can offload or let's say, partition correctly the computing problem in a data center. And to do that, we knew a core of sea views wasn't going to do a job that's basically borrowing from this guy to pay this other guy. Right? So what we wanted to do was bring this notion of domain specific processing, and that's where our design challenges came in, which is okay, So now we build around this language called P four, What is the most optimal way to pack? The most amount of threads are processing elements into the silicon while managing the memory bandwidth, which is obviously, you know, packet processing is it has been said to be embarrassingly parallel, which is true. However, the memory bandwidth is insane. And so how do we build a system that insurance that memory is not the bottleneck? Obviously, we're producing a lot of data or, uh, computing a lot of data. And so So these were some of our design challenges. All of that within a power envelope where this part of this device could sit at the edge inside of a computer within a typical power profiling by PC, a attached card in a modern computer. So that was a huge design challenge for us. >>Yeah, I'd love to hear, you know, it was a multi year journey toe solution. And I think of the old World. It was very much a hardware centric 18 to 24 months for design and all the tape out you need to do on this. Sounds like obviously there is still hardware, but it is more software driven. Then it would have been, you know, 10 years ago. So give us some of the ups and downs in that journey. Love to hear any. Any stories that you can share their Well, yeah, I >>think you know, good question. It's always there's always ups and downs in anything you do, especially in the start up. And I think one of the biggest challenges we we've faced is, uh, the exact hardware software boundary. So what is it that you want in hardware? What is it that you want in software And, uh, you know, one of the greatest assets and our company depends on who are the people. We have amazing software and hardware architects who work extremely well together because most of us have been together for so long. So, um, so that always helps when you start to partition the problem. We spent the first year of Pensando, which was basically 2017. The company was founded really thinking through this problem, would it for for all the problems, we wanted to solve the goals that were given to us and and security. Okay, so I want to be able to terminate TCP and initiate TLS connections. What's the right architecture for that? I want to be able to do storage off load and be able to provide encryption of data at rest data in motion. I want to be able to do compression these kinds of things. What's the right part of our software boundary for that? What do we what do we hardwire in silicon versus what we make it programmable and silicon, obviously, but still through a computing engine. And so we spent the first year of the company really thinking through those different partitioning problems, and that was definitely a challenge. And we spent a lot of time and and, uh, you helped me conference rooms and white boards figuring that out. And then 2018. The challenge there was now taking this architecture, this sort of technology substrate, if you will that we built and then executing on it, making sure that it was actually going to yield what we hope that would that we would be able to provide the services. When we talk about El four firewall at line rate, that's completely programmable. Uh, we achieved that. Can we do load balancing? And we do all of it with this before processing engine and the innovations we brought before satisfy all of these requirements we put for us. And so 2018 was really about execution. And there you always have. The challenge is in execution. In terms of, you know, things are going to go wrong. It's not. It's not. If it's when and then how do you deal with it? And so again, um, I would say the biggest challenge and execution is, uh, containing the changes. You know, it's so easy for things to change, especially when you're trying to really build a software platform right, because it's always easy to sort of kick the can and say we'll deal with that later and software. But we know that given what we're trying to do, which is build a system that is highly performance, um, you can't get that. Can you have to deal with it when it comes in. So we spend a lot of time doing performance analysis, making sure that all these applications we were building we're going t yield the right performance. And so that was quite a challenge. And then 2019 was kind of the year of shaping the product. Really lots of product design. Okay, now that we have this technology and it does these, he says that we wanted to do these pieces meaning services. What are all the different ways we can shake this product after talking to customers for, you know, months and months and months. You know, Sony is very much custom, customer driven customer centric. So we we were fortunate enough that we got to spend a lot of time with customers and then that brings us out of challenges, right? Because every customer has a unique problems and so I don't know how to reform this product around a solution that solves quite a bit of problems that really brings value. And so that was the those are the challenges in 2019 which we overcame. Now, obviously we have several releases that we've come out with already. We've got a six and the chips and the It's all there now. So now, 2020. Unfortunately, covitz here, But this is this is a year of growth. This is the year that we really bring it out into the world with our partners and our customers and show how this technology has been developed and benefit will benefit customers over over the next years. Two years. >>Frances really appreciate the insight there. Yeah, that that discussion of the hardware versus software brings back memories for May. Lots of heated debates. A CIO What? One of lines you know we've used on the Cube many times is you know, you know, software will eventually work. Hardware will eventually break. So those trade rto >>taught me something over time ago. He said that uh huh, hardware is hard to change. Software is hard to stop changing. So >>that that's a great one to All right, So you gave us through the last three years journey. Give us a little bit. Look, you know, on the next three years and where you expect pensando to be going >>Sure. Where I see pensando in the next three years as we go through this market transition is uh, both a market leader in a thought leader in terms of the next wave of data center edge computing, whether the, uh in the service provider space, whether it be in the enterprise space or whether it be in the cloud space, the hyper hyper scale of space. As I was mentioning in the beginning, we had when we were talking about, uh, the journey. Market transitions of this major really require understanding the entire stack. If you provide a piece and someone else provides a piece, you will eventually get there. But it's a matter of when, and by the time you get there, there's probably something new. So, you know, uh, time in and of itself is an innovation in this area, especially when you're dealing with the market transition like this. And so we've been fortunate enough that we're building the entire system when we go from the transistors to the rest of the FBI's way, have the entire staff. And so where I see us in three years is not only being a market leader in this space, but also being a thought leader in terms of what does domain specific processing look like at the edge. Um, you know, what are the tools? What are the techniques for? Really a z save? Democratizing the cloud bringing, bringing this technology to everyone. >>Excellent. Well, hey, Frances, That has been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the journey so far and I can't wait to see you. How? Thanks for going >>forward. Yeah, we're excited, and I appreciate it. Thank you for your time to. All >>right, check out the cube dot net. We've got lots of back catalogue with pensando. Also, I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Q. Yeah, yeah, yeah.