(techno music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier at the Cube for a special presentation with Riverbed and the Cube called getting started with SD-WAN, with two CTOs, Hansang Bae CTO, and Frank Layonnet, Deputy CTO with Riverbed, thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, obviously you guys are the CTOs, chief technology officers, deputy and the chief here. What's going on under the hood? Because when you talk about the SD-WAN in action, really the number one thing comes in, it's networking, and everyone wants networking to go faster, and they want it automated. Now you're hearing about all this great programmatic stuff, what's happening? >> Yeah, I think, the difference between previous generation, which SDN, right? SDN was very hot for a while, didn't really go too far. The difference here is that we're solving tactical problems for the business, so that's very different than solving the problem for the IT folks, right? So, I'll give you an example. IP sec, turns out, kind of a pain to do. Very laborious, prone to errors, et cetera. Well, SD-WAN, as a first step takes care of that. It eliminates it completely. Out of the box, you have a secure transport. No thought involved. So that solves the IT problem, sure, but, step ahead of that, get ahead of that, you can now seamlessly service your business because the thorny problem of difficult IT goes away, right? So this is about frictionless IT, that allows your business to have a competitive edge. >> Frank, talk about the use cases involved in SD-WAN, because there's everything from I need bandwidth, better bandwidth, cost perspective. To full transformation of the organization. So networking is, you got to move the packets around, but at the same time it's strategic in that it's now an asset to the organization. >> Yes, definitely there multiple definitions out there for SD-WAN, and we must not be mistaken, it cannot be only about savings on bandwidth costs. This is something we have been doing for 10 years or more. So now SD-WAN is really connected to a business driver. This is digital transformation by the way, that is the first thing that is the source of everything we have been seeing, in terms of SD, including SD-WAN. So we have been seeing customers starting with saving on bandwidth costs, but then we discovered that there's more. There's definitely something that pertains to optimizing the way they are doing operations, agility, so the pressure from the business is coming there. But it's also about, according the fact that as a bunch of their applications are in the cloud, they cannot do networking just like they were doing before. So with this addition of the cloud, that is the first real movement toward SD-WAN. How do you connect your SAS applications back to your user, and things? so this is a real question and there's multiple options out there. There's also a bunch of challenges that need to be solved. So this is the first of those instances. >> Yeah and I think one of the good ways to kind of sum that up, is to say, you know, what if you could live in a world, as an IT guy, where when the business says, hey I need to roll out, and oh, by the way, give me 10 times the capacity, done, right? Push of a button, that's what automation brings to you. What if business says, by the way, Frank, I'm rolling it out in Australia, can we make sure we have enough bandwidth there, oh and by the way, I need it next week. Now for the first time with SD-WAN, infrastructure people can say, next week? Don't you want it tomorrow? 'Cause I'm ready to hit the button, right? So SD-WAN, is that revolutionary. It's not an incremental a better routing, easier this, it's a revolutionary way of thinking about how IT can make businesses be more competitive. >> The software piece is interesting, because you look at networking. There's an operational aspect of it, you mentioned the bandwidth. That's basic, you got to have basic needs. (laughing) >> [Frank] Of course. >> Got to move the packets around the network, you know, do all that stuff, check. You're getting at something different here, which is, I want to tune into the business speed. So the speed of the business really becomes the next table stakes, which is what the cloud's doing. >> [Hansang] That's right. >> So now, how does that change networking? Because we've seen with cloud, no perimeter, different kind of provisioning capabilities, automatic provisioning, now you have multi cloud. You guys can do that kind of multi cloud stuff right now. This is not obvious to many people. >> That's right. >> What's the magic behind it? >> See I guess, if we take SD-WAN as something that is an evolution that we are forced to go into, this can be the same part of some of the customers. Yes, okay, we need to move to SD-WAN, because we need automation. But if you flip that around, what you want to achieve is unleash the capacity of the business to innovate. So we have organization, interestingly enough, that completely took that into account, and are already finding the way they are organized. It's not something very common, but we have the first occurrence of customers that are interested to still connect, well their title is not networking head, but more like Dev Ops head. So this is the starting point of a lot of organization that want to fully embrace the full power of the cloud. >> That's a full wholesale change, you're talking about a new scenario, the third one, which is, I want to completely transform my business. But in the spirit of getting started with SD-WAN, I want to ask you guys a question. >> [Frank] Absolutely. >> See how you guys can come with this one. IT people come in two flavors, I'm freaking out, or I'm jumping for joy. Because that's really kind of what's happening here, you have Ops guys, hey lock down the network, you know, we're going to check all the boxes. Then you have other people who say, oh, we're liberated with Dev Ops, it's going to be freedom. Automatic provisioning. So, where's the balance, and describe your reaction to that, that phrase, freaking out, versus jumping for joy. >> I think I can answer this this way. So, I'm sure everybody can relate to this, is that every outage I've ever been involved in, and some, spectacularly big, has always been, the root cause has always been, we had a template, we had a standard, we just didn't have time to roll it out. Or, I had a template, but I made a mistake. Human latency, right? People are very very bad at doing mundane tasks at 2:00 a.m. When network changes happen, no surprise. So SD-WAN takes care of that drudgery, of the very important work, which is IT. So SD-WAN says, you know what, make your decisions, and go from whiteboard concept with your business, to implementation in less than a week. It can be shorter than that. But let's not bring too much shock to the system. So the whole idea of SD-WAN is, don't freak out about your job, because we're enabling the IT people to meet he business demand at their speed. >> So speed's a double edged sword, on one side, the fear of going too fast, and breaking stuff, or making something go down, also there's the other side of the coin, which is you can bring it back as fast. >> That's correct. >> Talk about that dynamic because I think that's interesting conversation. >> So I think the biggest difference is yes, so let's put it out there, right? Failure at the speed of automation, is fantastic, fantastically terrible. But at the same time, the big difference is that the recovery from that is automatic as well. Because in the world of SD-WAN, it's enable, disable, it's not about touching every single end device, to fix the problem that you might have caused. Because let's face it, today, if you roll out, and I know some of you are thinking, I have an automated way of pushing out a template. And that's great, that's a start. But to recover from that, means you have to touch every device, yet again. Where as with automation, from an SD-WAN perspective, it's all centralized. You push it from a central location, you withdraw it from a central location. So it's a different recovery-- >> On those outages you mentioned earlier, you've been involved in the past, where they've had a bit of human error, or a template issue, what was the recovery like? Probably just as bad, right? So the slowness is on both sides, right? >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, the biggest problem too is, and this is something that not too many SD-WAN vendors talk about, is visibility. If I had a dollar for every time there was an outage, and someone said "Who's impacted?" And it would be at least 45 minutes to an hour before anybody can say definitively, these groups of business, or this location is impacted. So we have the luxury of having a BU, who's sole purpose in life is to bring visibility from application user, and network level. So we're bringing that to bear, and marrying that with Software Defined win. So like Frank said, we don't stop at just making it easy for the IT folks, right? IP sec example that I gave you. What we're talking about is allowing the business to be just as agile, just as flexible, and including multicloud, what if you could, as an IT person, forget about, is it Azure? Amazon? Google? Soflare? Whatever cloud vendor you're talking about, what if that didn't matter, right? Because with the right SD-WAN philosophy, there is no difference between a branch, a laptop at a hotel, a datacenter, Azure, or Google, or Amazon. It's just a connectivity point from beginning to end, all you have are publishers of application, and subscribers of that application. Everything else goes behind it, don't get me wrong, it takes design, and like you said, packets have to go somewhere, but the complex design goes away with SD-WAN. >> So I, go ahead Frank. >> Yeah, so, I want to relate that to one of the use case that we have been seeing, which is isolation of some of the traffic, let's take the example of IOT, that we understand, I mean it's a recommendation that is everywhere, we want to isolate IOT, derive it from the rest of the traffic. How do you do that without SD-WAN? Okay, I put some DNS there, I put some VRF there. What do I do in the cloud? So there's really that notion of slows on which you provide some manual type of processes to implement that segmentation. Source VFR, and you defeat the purpose of segmentation. >> It's a bandaid, you're throwing pre existing stuff at a problem. >> And it's a complex thing to do, and we know that there will be errors, therefore holes, right? Suddenly defeat the purpose of your protection. So SD-WAN, especially in the context of steel connect, is allowing to have one single policy that is, you know, define wherever the workloads are, wherever the users or things are. So this is the kind of top level benefit that we can bring, and only SD-WAN can bring. >> I like that example, SD-WAN is growing up, and your use case of internet of things, IOT, is really spot on because that highlights the growing up, and that's happening very very fast. IOT is really becoming a tactical, strategic, board agenda item, and going down to the technical folks. Because IOT is now blending the physical world, and a lot of digital. >> Yeah. >> And so people are connecting, that's a network issue, put on the network, it's now an IOT device. You mentioned that's anything. But cloud also highlights this, 'cause now with compute, and analytics, the cloud really makes that connect well. So you guys have this multi cloud thing. Take me through that, because I'm a customer of yours, if I'm a CIO, or I'm running an IT department, you got my attention, 'cause I've heard everyone talk multi cloud all day long, I don't believe it. I don't think it could work, I've looked at latency between clouds, I got my office 365 and Azure, I run some stuff on Red Shift, I do some stuff with Google. Those apps are down beside me on those clouds. >> And to prove that point, just for kicks, 'cause it's easy, I connected every instance of Amazon in the world as part of my routing infrastructure. I had access, I could ping, bring up servers to every instance of Amazon, and by the way, I can do that with Azure as well. To me, there is no difference between a server running in a datacenter, running in Amazon, running in Azure, right? What that means, again from a tactical, so what what does it mean to me as a business person? Well, what if you can enforce your active directory log in services to Amazon? Because it's not Amazon Azure anymore, it's your VPC. The fact that it runs on a different cloud system, doesn't matter, because we automatically connect those two together. So as a business person, and as an infrastructure person, don't worry about what cloud it's in. Because we'll seamlessly connect it together, and the perfect example is Azure active directory service, being presented to Amazon. You can do that, because it's your VPC. Do with it as you will, and by the way, when you're done, turn it off. >> So this is interesting, so the sequence of operations here are relative to getting started with SD-WAN, is take care of the bandwidth costs, no problem, check. But it's the hybrid, it's the SAS applications, now when you get into multi cloud, you now take that through. So take me through the impact, what does it mean to the customer to have that multi cloud capability? What's the benefit? What's in if for them? >> So I think I'll start first, and then we'll go into some of the more used cases, is that the bigger challenge, which, by the way, it sounds awesome, is that infrastructure people tend to think of and solve problems from the tools that they know how to use today. SD-WAN is very different. So the first advice that I have, is stop thinking though the lens of the tools that you have today, right? And this is that whole Dev Ops, versus infrastructure argument that's raging these days, and the bottom line is it's either IT keep pace, or perish, right? And that sounds ominous, but guess what, the other side of that coin is, you get to join the party, you're no longer a call center, you're no longer, at worst case, a necessary evil, right? >> [John] So be open to new tooling? >> That's right, be open to new tooling. The power that the new tooling brings, right? This is something that DevOps folks have had and enjoyed, so why is it that infrastructure people are laggards in this? And I'll tell you why, and I had this conversation, because one of the application guys said, "You IT guys, man, I got 8,000 servers, what's the big deal?" And my point was, you have 8,000 servers for you app? I have two backbones for my company. That's it, so slow and steady wins the race, it's in our DNA. And SD-WAN says now you can have both. You can have that agility, but that stability, right? So when you have agility and stability, the cost savings automatically happen. >> I think that's the big deal, because again, a lot of my friends are networking guys, and a lot of dogma in networking, but it's for the right reasons. Networks can't go down. (laughing) When networks go down, you know what hits the fan. So take us through that scaling, 'cause agility and stability is really a good message. What does that mean, how does a customer do that? How do they get there? >> Yes, you have to put some trust onto vendors like us to take care of stability and just get the benefit of agility, which is that extra thing that you really can leverage to support a business. So I think that it's important to send a message there, that SD-WAN will not take over the job of anybody. It's just changing the way people will operate, the way people will think, and it's amazing to see some customers that I know for 10 years, 15 years. And yes, walls where CCIEs, you know, network specialists, and when I'm coming back to them with steel connect, I mean they are really evolved, just like we have evolved. (laughing) We know all together, that's it's about changing the overall, be if you're moving to Dev Ops, and discerning what's going on with the cloud. We are techies, so it's good stuff in fact, for everybody to understand that. And those customers that went through different steps of evolving, maturing that idea, they are really taking us into, use cases again, where it's really about, okay, now I've got a request for my business, which is to deploy that new work load, and by the way, on both sides that exist over there, but I need to add that to some of our sides. We tell, pop up stores, right? I want to do some digital marketing on pop up stores. Okay, what do I do? And I had a customer doing me a demo, we have a script provisioning back end, you know the blue in front in, and in a few clicks, provisioning connectivity. >> [John] Yeah. >> To that workload on the pop up store, right? With just an internet connection, this is amazing. >> IOT and all that stuff is great. IOT all these new paired ups is essentially networking. (laughing) I mean edge of the network, you just talked about provisioning. Think about how hard that was. That was a campus a couple years ago. >> That's right. >> That's an office. Remote office, the notion of a retail space that pops up, is just another remote edge point. So this is not new concepts, but the software makes it a difference. So, I think that's where I see the connection. So I'd ask you this question, when you walk around with steel connect, which we saw the demos on the last episode, really impressive. What are customers saying? I mean for folks that have never seen it before, what's their reaction, and for folks that work with you guys, what is their reaction for steel connect? >> I think I can give you some customer quotes, without mentioning their names. I had one customer who, after sitting through their presentation, said, "If this stuff works, we need to rethink our strategy." This is coming from a head of architecture, that reported to the CIO, right? Think about that statement and break it down. Yes there has to be trust, about it's a nascent field, new field, I get that. But when you truly embrace SD-WAN, not just from a cost perspective. That's a great catalyst, everybody wants that, because it's an feather in their cap. Once you go beyond that, and you start to think about the possibilities that SD-WAN, in our version of SD-WAN, which we call steel connect, can bring to you, it's a different conversation with a business, you're not talking about give me time. Imagine that pop up store, or you say, you know what, give me two weeks and I might have something for you. In this world of SnapChat, kids are changing their minds on a day by day basis, nevermind two weeks. >> It could delay the opening of the retail outlet, and all kinds of interesting business side effects. >> Absolutely, that's correct. And again, I keep going back to the business agility. It's high time that IT people keep up with the business, and in fact, surpass it using cloud of cloud for example. >> Hansang and Frank, we were talking before we came on the segment here, about video conferencing, and having kind of town hall meetings, and you know we were kind of joking, when something goes down in a business, you can see how fast something can move the mob, now that we're all connected on SnapChat, things go viral instantly. Like the United Airlines comment, we were talking about United Airlines, okay they have this big viral thing. Took them like three days to respond, next thing you know their brand suffered. I mean, imagine the impact of their business. They could have had a town hall meeting, let's take through that use case. Hey let's set up a network. We're going to have all these people dial in, and perusing it up, well that's going to take two weeks. Every day the stock is getting the hammer. I think they lost $1,000,000,000 in market cap in the first day. So there they need the provision of video network. Okay, take us through that, what would you guys do with SD-WAN? >> So, for me it's easy. With the right SD-WAN, I'll compare and contrast, okay? Today, you have to go and touch every edge device, and you have to change your quality of service. Because video, AF class, AF 41 for example, has a certain amount of quality of service that it can use. So you have to go and touch every device, every infrastructure device, at every location, to give it that bandwidth that's required, okay? So now, that takes maybe a week, maybe two weeks, depending on the size of your network. But that time, how much did they lose? $1,000,000,000 overnight? You can do the math, versus the new world of SD-WAN, where I say, you know what, between 2:00 p.m., and 4:00 p.m. eastern, video is going to have top quality of service marking. And then when I'm done, I'm going to turn it off. That's the actual difference between today's workflow, and the brave new world of SD-WAN. >> And by the way, video, just to point out, not in that one use case. Video is becoming the number one app for users, whether you want to accentuate it, in this case highlight it, or in some cases, not let everyone watch Game of Thrones Monday morning from their desk. Or those kinds of things are going on. You guys have that policy based capability. >> That's right. >> Yeah, so I'd like to pick up on the change management. Let's be honest in fact, us people in the networking space, we're a bit of laggards, when it comes to providing that capability. Because on the other aspects of IT, it's no brainer of course, we can do that. We can do that adaptation in a breeze. But what about the later, we're stuck into a solution, where yes, change management was something that was nightmare, and everybody talks about QS being a nightmare for so long, right? Now obviously we have steel connect with SD-WAN, we can fix that. >> My final question for you guys we we wrap up this segment is competition. For folks out there looking to get started and evaluate SD-WAN, because right now software define everything is happening. We're seeing it across the board, it's software and data. You guys from a networking angle, SD-WAN. How should your customers, and potential customers evaluate you, vis-a-vis the competition. Riverbed versus the competition. What should they look for, and how should they evaluate it for them? >> I'll give a couple of different quick books to successful proof of concept, if you will. It does start with that IP sect, that secure tunnel that can separate and differentiate traffic and quality of service. It does involve making sure that the right important applications get preferential treatment, and oh, by the way, move over to a different lane. Creating HOV lanes on demand is what SD-WAN is about, right? It can be time based, it can be user based. So it's not just a static configuration, it's very very fluid. As an HOV lane, think of it this way. It's an HOV lane, from your house, to your work, because you have an important job that day, right? SD-WAN says you can do that, I can get quality of service down to a user level, with a few click of a button. So, from a competitive landscape, IP sec is important. But differentiating application and user by name, not IP addresses, in the world of SAS, IP addresses doesn't mean anything, is also important. And then the other one is, the cloud, right? Think of the cloud as your datacenter. So whatever you do, in the world of SD-WAN, should be just as easy at branch, datacenter, cloud, and cloud of clouds, right? And if it encompasses all of that, then you've found the right SD-WAN vendor. >> I think that's exactly right. We need to help customers to understand that it's not about replicating what we have been doing with the new cool technology, that is slightly more automated. This is about rethinking the way you are connecting that work. And this is something we've been hearing from analysts that I've been personally seeing over the past couple years. It's now down to not only networking people, but also the cloud people, but also the security people to sit together and look at all the use cases around the one, and obviously this has evolved to our SAS, to our yes, to a lot of things that pertains to automation. So this is really the advice that I would give to customers, don't fall into the trap of comparing SD-WAN with win, it has to be something more. It has to include the cloud. >> And I'll give you the secret sauce that I've been dying to get out there. It was the biggest differentiator for us. We removed the pain of latency for applications. We've been doing it for over 10 years. So, yes bandwidth is plentiful. I have a gigabyte service at home, it's wonderful. But it still doesn't take away the latency when I have to interact with folks in Sydney, or in Singapore, and we take that pain of latency away, have been doing that for over 10 years. It's a perfect marriage made in heaven. As the network grows to include cloud, where theoretically it shouldn't matter if your instance is in Ireland, if it's in Singapore, if it's in Korea, if it's in Germany, or San Jose, or in Virginia. But because of latency, it matters. What if you could have a vendor that makes that pain go away as well? And that's our secret sauce. >> What's interesting is that the world's changing, so the network used to dictate what applications could do, now applications are dictating what the networks are doing. >> Absolutely. >> Which means it has to be programmable. >> That's right. >> And that is interesting because that flips it upside down. >> That's correct, and that's that business agility that we've been harping on this whole time. >> Talking about marriage, let me add a third to the problem, we have also visibility, right in the portfolio, and it's amazingly important. Because you know, in one click, I can deploy policy. I mean, one click I can kill. (laughing) Through my wrongly configured policy, a bunch of our closed, so it's super important to be in a position to provide new tools, new ways of verifying what's going on. I have an intent, I want the network to be like this. I need to verify immediately whether or not I'm going the right direction, right? (laughing) To just like, you drive, you have your super powerful wheel that brings you everywhere. You need to know where all that will go there. >> And that's that trust but verify motto, right? I trust that it's doing the right thing, but I want to be able to verify it. And with SD-WAN, it's build in. >> Riverbend you guys have been doing some great work, I was joking with my friend over the weekend, we were just talking about SD-WAN in general, just as we do on the weekends. >> [Hansang] Who doesn't? >> I said, I mean it's interesting, the world is a win now, the network is global. That's essentially a wide area network, it's called the internet. >> That's right. >> And you treat it a win, and there it is, end points, you have remotes. >> That's right, and sun computer, unfortunately was right, they were just decades early, right? The computer, or the network is the computer. And with the SD-WAN and cloud movement, it really can be anywhere. >> I got a funny anecdote, at the table interview, and I interviewed Scott McNealy, and he was like, "I just should have called the cloud." >> [Hansang] There you go, that's all you needed. >> Guys thanks so much for spending the time here inside the Cube studios, I'm John Furrier with Riverbed, on getting started with SD-WAN. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (light airy music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is in the house. John Furrier is pounding the news from our Palo Alto studio. We are super excited to be talking about cloud at the edge, what that means. Charles Tsai is here. He's the Senior Director of product management at Dell Technologies and Peter Fetterolf is the Chief Technology Officer at ACG Business Analytics, a firm that goes deep into the TCO and the telco space, among other things. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> So I've been in search all week of the elusive next wave of monetization for the telcos. We know they make great money on connectivity, they're really good at that. But they're all talking about how they can't let this happen again. Meaning we can't let the over the top vendors yet again, basically steal our cookies. So we're going to not mess it up this time. We're going to win in the monetization. Charles, where are those monetization opportunities? Obviously at the edge, the telco cloud at the edge. What is that all about and where's the money? >> Well, Dave, I think from a Dell's perspective, what we want to be able to enable operators is a solution that enable them to roll out services much quicker, right? We know there's a lot of innovation around IoT, MEG and so on and so forth, but they continue to rely on traditional technology and way of operations is going to take them years to enable new services. So what Dell is doing is now, creating the entire vertical stack from the hardware through CAST and automation that enable them, not only to push out services very quickly, but operating them using cloud principles. >> So it's when you say the entire vertical stack, it's the integrated hardware components with like, for example, Red Hat on top- >> Right. >> Or a Wind River? >> That's correct. >> Okay, and then open API, so the developers can create workloads, I presume data companies. We just had a data conversation 'cause that was part of the original stack- >> That's correct. >> So through an open ecosystem, you can actually sort of recreate that value, correct? >> That's correct. >> Okay. >> So one thing Dell is doing, is we are offering an infrastructure block where we are taking over the overhead of certifying every release coming from the Red Hat or the Wind River of the world, right? We want telcos to spend their resources on what is going to generate them revenue. Not the overhead of creating this cloud stack. >> Dave, I remember when we went through this in the enterprise and you had companies like, you know, IBM with the AS400 and the mainframe saying it's easier to manage, which it was, but it's still, you know, it was subsumed by the open systems trend. >> Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important thing to probe on, is this idea of what is, what exactly does it mean to be cloud at the edge in the telecom space? Because it's a much used term. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about cloud and edge, in sort of generalized IT, but what specifically does it mean? >> Yeah, so when we talk about telco cloud, first of all it's kind of different from what you're thinking about public cloud today. And there's a couple differences. One, if you look at the big hyperscaler public cloud today, they tend to be centralized in huge data centers. Okay, telco cloud, there are big data centers, but then there's also regional data centers. There are edge data centers, which are your typical like access central offices that have turned data centers, and then now even cell sites are becoming mini data centers. So it's distributed. I mean like you could have like, even in a country like say Germany, you'd have 30,000 soul sites, each one of them being a data center. So it's a very different model. Now the other thing I want to go back to the question of monetization, okay? So how do you do monetization? The only way to do that, is to be able to offer new services, like Charles said. How do you offer new services? You have to have an open ecosystem that's going to be very, very flexible. And if we look at where telcos are coming from today, they tend to be very inflexible 'cause they're all kind of single vendor solutions. And even as we've moved to virtualization, you know, if you look at packet core for instance, a lot of them are these vertical stacks of say a Nokia or Ericson or Huawei where you know, you can't really put any other vendors or any other solutions into that. So basically the idea is this kind of horizontal architecture, right? Where now across, not just my central data centers, but across my edge data centers, which would be traditionally my access COs, as well as my cell sites. I have an open environment. And we're kind of starting with, you know, packet core obviously with, and UPFs being distributed, but now open ran or virtual ran, where I can have CUs and DUs and I can split CUs, they could be at the soul site, they could be in edge data centers. But then moving forward, we're going to have like MEG, which are, you know, which are new kinds of services, you know, could be, you know, remote cars it could be gaming, it could be the Metaverse. And these are going to be a multi-vendor environment. So one of the things you need to do is you need to have you know, this cloud layer, and that's what Charles was talking about with the infrastructure blocks is helping the service providers do that, but they still own their infrastructure. >> Yeah, so it's still not clear to me how the service providers win that game but we can maybe come back to that because I want to dig into TCO a little bit. >> Sure. >> Because I have a lot of friends at Dell. I don't have a lot of friends at HPE. I've always been critical when they take an X86 server put a name on it that implies edge and they throw it over the fence to the edge, that's not going to work, okay? We're now seeing, you know we were just at the Dell booth yesterday, you did the booth crawl, which was awesome. Purpose-built servers for this environment. >> Charles: That's right. >> So there's two factors here that I want to explore in TCO. One is, how those next gen servers compare to the previous gen, especially in terms of power consumption but other factors and then how these sort of open ran, open ecosystem stacks compared to proprietary stacks. Peter, can you help us understand those? >> Yeah, sure. And Charles can comment on this as well. But I mean there, there's a couple areas. One is just moving the next generation. So especially on the Intel side, moving from Ice Lake to the Sapphire Rapids is a big deal, especially when it comes to the DU. And you know, with the radios, right? There's the radio unit, the RU, and then there's the DU the distributed unit, and the CU. The DU is really like part of the radio, but it's virtualized. When we moved from Ice lake to Sapphire Rapids, which is third generation intel to fourth generation intel, we're literally almost doubling the performance in the DU. And that's really important 'cause it means like almost half the number of servers and we're talking like 30, 40, 50,000 servers in some cases. So, you know, being able to divide that by two, that's really big, right? In terms of not only the the cost but all the TCO and the OpEx. Now another area that's really important, when I was talking moving from these vertical silos to the horizontal, the issue with the vertical silos is, you can't place any other workloads into those silos. So it's kind of inefficient, right? Whereas when we have the horizontal architecture, now you can place workloads wherever you want, which basically also means less servers but also more flexibility, more service agility. And then, you know, I think Charles can comment more, specifically on the XR8000, some things Dell's doing, 'cause it's really exciting relative to- >> Sure. >> What's happening in there. >> So, you know, when we start looking at putting compute at the edge, right? We recognize the first thing we have to do is understand the environment we are going into. So we spend with a lot of time with telcos going to the south side, going to the edge data center, looking at operation, how do the engineer today deal with maintenance replacement at those locations? Then based on understanding the operation constraints at those sites, we create innovation and take a traditional server, remodel it to make sure that we minimize the disruption to the operations, right? Just because we are helping them going from appliances to open compute, we do not want to disrupt what is have been a very efficient operation on the remote sites. So we created a lot of new ideas and develop them on general compute, where we believe we can save a lot of headache and disruptions and still provide the same level of availability, resiliency, and redundancy on an open compute platform. >> So when we talk about open, we don't mean generic? Fair? See what I mean? >> Open is more from the software workload perspective, right? A Dell server can run any type of workload that customer intend. >> But it's engineered for this? >> Environment. >> Environment. >> That's correct. >> And so what are some of the environmental issues that are dealt with in the telecom space that are different than the average data center? >> The most basic one, is in most of the traditional cell tower, they are deployed within cabinets instead of racks. So they are depth constraints that you just have no access to the rear of the chassis. So that means on a server, is everything you need to access, need to be in the front, nothing should be in the back. Then you need to consider how labor union come into play, right? There's a lot of constraint on who can go to a cell tower and touch power, who can go there and touch compute, right? So we minimize all that disruption through a modular design and make it very efficient. >> So when we took a look at XR8000, literally right here, sitting on the desk. >> Uh-huh. >> Took it apart, don't panic, just pulled out some sleds and things. >> Right, right. >> One of the interesting demonstrations was how it compared to the size of a shoe. Now apparently you hired someone at Dell specifically because they wear a size 14 shoe, (Charles laughs) so it was even more dramatic. >> That's right. >> But when you see it, and I would suggest that viewers go back and take a look at that segment, specifically on the hardware. You can see exactly what you just referenced. This idea that everything is accessible from the front. Yeah. >> So I want to dig in a couple things. So I want to push back a little bit on what you were saying about the horizontal 'cause there's the benefit, if you've got the horizontal infrastructure, you can run a lot more workloads. But I compare it to the enterprise 'cause I, that was the argument, I've made that argument with converged infrastructure versus say an Oracle vertical stack, but it turned out that actually Oracle ran Oracle better, okay? Is there an analog in telco or is this new open architecture going to be able to not only service the wide range of emerging apps but also be as resilient as the proprietary infrastructure? >> Yeah and you know, before I answer that, I also want to say that we've been writing a number of white papers. So we have actually three white papers we've just done with Dell looking at infrastructure blocks and looking at vertical versus horizontal and also looking at moving from the previous generation hardware to the next generation hardware. So all those details, you can find the white papers, and you can find them either in the Dell website or at the ACG research website >> ACGresearch.com? >> ACG research. Yeah, if you just search ACG research, you'll find- >> Yeah. >> Lots of white papers on TCO. So you know, what I want to say, relative to the vertical versus horizontal. Yeah, obviously in the vertical side, some of those things will run well, I mean it won't have issues. However, that being said, as we move to cloud native, you know, it's very high performance, okay? In terms of the stack, whether it be a Red Hat or a VMware or other cloud layers, that's really become much more mature. It now it's all CNF base, which is really containerized, very high performance. And so I don't think really performance is an issue. However, my feeling is that, if you want to offer new services and generate new revenue, you're not going to do it in vertical stacks, period. You're going to be able to do a packet core, you'll be able to do a ran over here. But now what if I want to offer a gaming service? What if I want to do metaverse? What if I want to do, you have to have an environment that's a multi-vendor environment that supports an ecosystem. Even in the RAN, when we look at the RIC, and the xApps and the rApps, these are multi-vendor environments that's going to create a lot of flexibility and you can't do that if you're restricted to, I can only have one vendor running on this hardware. >> Yeah, we're seeing these vendors work together and create RICs. That's obviously a key point, but what I'm hearing is that there may be trade offs, but the incremental value is going to overwhelm that. Second question I have, Peter is, TCO, I've been hearing a lot about 30%, you know, where's that 30% come from? Is it Op, is it from an OpEx standpoint? Is it labor, is it power? Is it, you mentioned, you know, cutting the number of servers in half. If I can unpack the granularity of that TCO, where's the benefit coming from? >> Yeah, the answer is yes. (Peter and Charles laugh) >> Okay, we'll do. >> Yeah, so- >> One side that, in terms of, where is the big bang for the bucks? >> So I mean, so you really need to look at the white paper to see details, but definitely power, definitely labor, definitely reducing the number of servers, you know, reducing the CapEx. The other thing is, is as you move to this really next generation horizontal telco cloud, there's the whole automation and orchestration, that is a key component as well. And it's enabled by what Dell is doing. It's enabled by the, because the thing is you're not going to have end-to-end automation if you have all this legacy stuff there or if you have these vertical stacks where you can't integrate. I mean you can automate that part and then you have separate automation here, you separate. you need to have integrated automation and orchestration across the whole thing. >> One other point I would add also, right, on the hardware perspective, right? With the customized hardware, what we allow operator to do is, take out the existing appliance and push a edge optimized server without reworking the entire infrastructure. There is a significant saving where you don't have to rethink about what is my power infrastructure, right? What is my security infrastructure? The server is designed to leverage the existing, what is already there. >> How should telco, Charles, plan for this transformation? Are there specific best practices that you would recommend in terms of the operational model? >> Great question. I think first thing is do an inventory of what you have. Understand what your constraints are and then come to Dell, we will love to consult with you, based on our experience on the best practices. We know how to minimize additional changes. We know how to help your support engineer, understand how to shift appliance based operation to a cloud-based operation. >> Is that a service you offer? Is that a pre-sales freebie? What is maybe both? >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> Guys- >> Just really quickly. >> We're going to wrap. >> The, yeah. Dave loves the TCO discussion. I'm always thinking in terms of, well how do you measure TCO when you're comparing something where you can't do something to an environment where you're going to be able to do something new? And I know that that's always the challenge in any kind of emerging market where things are changing, any? >> Well, I mean we also look at, not only TCO, but we look at overall business case. So there's basically service at GLD and revenue and then there's faster time to revenues. Well, and actually ACG, we actually have a platform called the BAE or Business Analytics Engine that's a very sophisticated simulation cloud-based platform, where we can actually look at revenue month by month. And we look at what's the impact of accelerating revenue by three months. By four months. >> So you're looking into- >> By six months- >> So you're forward looking. You're just not consistently- >> So we're not just looking at TCO, we're looking at the overall business case benefit. >> Yeah, exactly right. There's the TCO, which is the hard dollars. >> Right. >> CFO wants to see that, he or she needs to see that. But you got to, you can convince that individual, that there's a business case around it. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And then you're going to sign up for that number. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And they're going to be held to it. That's the story the world wants. >> At the end of the day, telcos have to be offered new services 'cause look at all the money that's been spent. >> Dave: Yeah, that's right. >> On investment on 5G and everything else. >> 0.5 trillion over the next seven years. All right, guys, we got to go. Sorry to cut you off. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> But we're wall to wall here. All right, thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave: Fantastic. >> All right, Dave Vellante, for Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin's in the house. John Furrier in Palo Alto Studios. Keep it right there. MWC 23 live from the Fira in Barcelona. (light airy music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, friends, and welcome to another edition of this special program series from theCUBE highlighting the brilliant women of the cloud. I am absolutely thrilled to be joined today by a transformative visionary, accelerating the route to market for many of North Americans' top businesses. Please welcome Tia Wiggins of AWS. Tia, thank you so much for being here. >> Hello. Hello everyone. Thank you for having me. >> I know there's a lot that we're going to talk about tech and innovation and the very exciting parts of your role, both at AWS as well as on the philanthropy side. Excuse me. But before we get there, I want to know how you got to where you're sitting right now. >> Yes, yes. Well, I'm proud to say my entire family is STEM born and bred. You know, I think I have a more traditional American upbringing of parents that did not have college degrees, but they've always had us in programs. So, you know, like I say, proud today. I have two sisters who are doctors and I was on a path to be a pharmacist. And, you know, I had got sponsored by a leader that took me on through the business journey and allowed me to connect the STEM side of my life to helping businesses grow. I'm also, I'm proud to share that I'm a philanthropist. I do believe in building communities and removing barriers to help people grow. Also, you know, as a child of two military parents, you know, my mother leaned on programs, right? I went through local hospital programs that taught me about medicine, that taught me about math, school that taught me about physics, right? That were free and funded, that allowed me to, you know, explore and get exposure. So, with that, you know, I've always had a knack to figure out how do I, in my own capacity, not being a billionaire, not being, you know, a trust fund child, but how do I create resourcing to help others come along on this pathway, leveraging and bringing bridging the two of STEM and community together. So, yeah, that's a little bit about my background. >> Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's a lifelong commitment not just a career long commitment to the industry and you're very clearly a curious person. You mentioned the role that resources and community have played in your journey. How would you recommend others who may be interested in a similar career path or exploring technology and business take actionable steps to do some of the similar things to you've done? >> Absolutely. So, as I believe that I have everyone watching this from from early career before actually in college. So I would tell for the entry level for you to focus on first finding programs, you know, AWS we have programs that help you come into the cloud computing. We will help you get your cloud certification. We have great internship programs but then also too, you know, there's diverse programs like National Society of Black Engineers, Society of Women Engineers, Society of Hispanic Engineers. There's so many programs, right, that can help you gain those actual training will actually provide you a job and exposure so they can help you actually figure out what the path you want to take when it comes to STEM. What I would share for mid-level something that I do personally for myself is, after you're in the industry, is to write a vision. So my superpowers or is transformation and a vision and every year I start off with like a love letter to myself and it includes something related to my career; a bold move. And as I get crisp on to saying something dangerous that I want to go do, I share that with my sponsors. I share that with my network, what I call my tribe, and those individuals help me gain the experiences that actually make the moves to get there, right? And it might not be exact, right? I might not actually hit that move that year. But if I look backwards, I actually looked I actually took some of the steps that were needed and essential for me to thrive when I actually get there. So definitely I would say, you know, one, in terms of exposure with programs. Two, for if you're actually in your career, write your vision, right? Get real crisp what you want to go do about it and then share it with your team. And then the last point that I think is essential that we don't really talk about a lot is feedback, right? It sounds it's easy, but feedback is communication and how you perceive yourself is not how others always perceive you, right? And I do believe in having pride. I do believe you need a certain level of ego for yourself, right, to thrive. However, there is nuggets in there that can help you accelerate on your journey, right? So I take time and I actually go on listening circles and I ask about what are my blind spots? Like, just be honest, right? Something about the AWS culture I love is that we use this principle of being vocally self-critical, right? That creates a level of transparency and honesty for others to be honest with us about something that we might not see, right? Or we might have failed, right? Or we might need to improve. So I would say, again, programs, write your vision, right? You know I call it a love letter to make it more personalized. And then three, get your, get feedback. It's essential. >> I like that, there's almost like an id, an ego and an external to that, as well as a qualitative and a quantitative component to that which I think is really interesting. You know, I went to five different classes, or I try, I looked at six different YouTube videos to learn about these skills, versus I took the time to think about what that would actually mean to me and to myself. And I think a lot of folks at any stage in their career journey don't necessarily give themselves the time to have that type of reflection. So it's wonderful to see someone who's been as successful as you talk about both your process as well as that level of transparency and communication. Taking feedback is a skillset that you'll have to use in many aspects of your life moving forward. >> Yeah. It's just communication. That's all it is. Just communication. >> Absolutely. Yes, and working on that is a certainly a lifelong journey. You've had a lot of success in your 15 years of being in the cloud. Can you give us some examples of your favorite moments? >> Yeah, you know, I'm proud. Like I took some, I took very... I got along with that vision, right? I took some very critical steps to ensure that I was taking roles that created mobility, right? You know, going back to starting at BAE systems, working with a aerospace and defense contractor where I had to move different states and get exposure to different platforms and lines of business, IT, manufacturing, down to actually stepping into an international nonprofit firm where I worked the redesign of that company, right? You know, understanding different levels of contracts how do we go to route in the market with other foreign countries, right? And then coming back into my previous- >> Not simple problems there. >> Not simple at all! But pretty amazing. >> To give you a shout out on complexity, yeah. >> Complexity, right? And it constantly be moving. And also, side note to everyone, you know obtaining my additional degrees. So, you know, if you look at my background, you know you'll see a lot of HR former roles. But if you look at the components of those jobs, it was business building, project management agile management, change management, right? So when I, I will say two of my major success moves, well one would be I was chair at Northrop Grumman. It actually allowed me to crack my teeth when it comes to new business acquisition, business proposals, right? So take all that idea of programs but actually being a part of a team to go after some of our most sacred nation contracts and programs that protects our country, right? Building, coming up with a solution and strategy, using technology, using data modernization, pulling together cloud components and then actually going out there and actually identifying the talent across the world that will be aligned to this. And making that and being a part of that team and actually signing off and saying, "Alright, this is what we believe is the best program for our solutions, for our employees for our world, for our nation," right? Had several multiple multi-billion dollar contracts that I worked on that we actually won with the Northrop Grumman that really also, from a side note, helped me build my confidence to say, "Hey, I can do more." Like, "Hey, I don't have 50 years in this industry but you know what I know is I have exposure, I have experience, I have, hey, I have an idea," right? And I know about technology and tools and how this links together into a story to say, "Hey, how does this bring value?" So I would say we had several, again national security programs that I was a part of, and then here at Amazon to speak more for our partners, right? Our partner experience. Just this year, you know, coming into my role within two quarters, we actually delivered, we actually confirmed that we actually identify Amazon opportunities for our partners, right? We believe Amazon opportunities helping our partners route to market helps them actually identify better partner opportunities so we can actually help them attach them to an actual customer. With that, within two quarters we were able to deliver over- >> Just to insert number for scale for folks listening. >> Yes. >> You have over a hundred thousand partners, correct? >> That's right, we have over a hundred thousand partners. >> So echoing on the complexity, it's not just like you're matchmaking, you know, two different people from two different sides of the fence here. >> No. >> The matrix is massive in the flywheel. That's wild. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, with that, we took a subset to start with a subset of partners to say, "Hey how do we just pilot an experiment," right? If we did an exercise where we actually you know, do, you know use tools to identify opportunities that better aligned to partners, and how do we deliver that to them, right? Versus us reacting to just waiting for them to provide something to us. Within- >> What's the biggest challenges for you there? >> Oh gosh. Complexity, right? >> Yeah. >> Complexity partner types. You know, we deal with, you know, system integrators, we deal with independent software vendors, resellers - everyone has their own additional needs. They have their own complexity, they have their own in terms of their makeup, right? In terms of resourcing. So, you know, we have to, on top of that, we have to work with the partner to make sure they're actually ready and equipped to actually receive opportunities from us. And then also how do we help work with them to build a sales plan to go after those opportunities. So it's, it's all of the if you think about the flywheel, yeah we could throw something over the line, but we also have to work with them as one team to say, okay how do we help make this help you launch this opportunity with the customer, with us? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And so what do you hope to see coming in the next five years? Where do you hope your role takes you at the next... >> Oh gosh. You know, I don't actually go off five years because if I look back at the last 15, I didn't imagine all those different opportunities, by the way. Right? >> Love that. So true. >> So, yeah. So I don't, again, it goes back to like I hate putting boxes over myself and but vision-wise, you know, just to say thank you to my mentors, to my sponsors, you know, I see myself C-suite, right? I see myself over an organization helping again connecting the dots with business growth and opportunities. Now, is it Amazon, I hope? Be wonderful, right? But if it's another large Fortune 500 company, absolutely. But in far, in terms of the cloud computing industry I mean, we're the unimaginable, right? You already, you talk about, you know AI we've talked about in the past, we talk about this meta, you know, this digital transformative world where we're living virtually. That scares me, right? By the way, just to be honest, everyone. But, I do believe that as a company, we are going to be moving to be more digital, you know, I do believe our customers will be more digital. I do think in more virtual engagement, right? And I see myself building those programs to help ensure that our workforce is there, that our sellers are there, that we can actually continue to drive growth and that they're actually equipped to actually align to those opportunities to help our customers grow their business. >> Yeah. The acceleration and the evolution of the modern workforce is a challenge that so many businesses are facing right now. I'm sure tens of thousands, if not all of the six-figure plus partners in your program are experiencing a dynamic range of challenges as a result. And they are all very lucky to have you there to support them. Hopefully everyone at AWS is listening to that nice plug and opportunity to promote you to the C-suite where I'm sure you belong, as time goes on. Switching from digital to diversity just a little bit, it's clear that you have had people in your community who have mentored you and taught and been a part of the education side of your journey. And I'm curious to see, or curious to ask you rather, what are the challenges that you still see in diversity in general today? >> Yeah. Well, you know, it unfortunately is still here. You know, we still have unconscious bias, right? In senior level career advancement. I think that's embedded in our culture and that's something that we constantly have to combat. You know, I was also trained under the mindset and had this belief that say, "Hey let your work speak for yourself." And in reality, it's not about your work, it's also about who knows you and who actually wants to know about you, right? And that equals unconscious bias, right? Someone that actually, you know, for people to see you for who you are and see what you actually contribute versus they just liking you. So, you know, and also too, you know we've run into the issue of being taught in our culture to lean in, right? For a moment there, I believe that, but at some point when you look around and you're like, "Oh gosh, you know I worked all last year, but my pay was only this." Or, "Hey, that person got promoted and they only worked on this one thing." And then you, and then it pinches like, oh, it's still there, right? So I just believe as leaders and including myself as my commitment is like any organization of my part like how do I advocate for others? How do I create opportunities? How do I address it? I'm very blessed to have a leader that also sees what's possible in me and creates those opportunities and, you know, removes those roadblocks and those barriers. But I, you know, I can't lie is that, you know, I've also personally been through that. But then again, I look around my family and my community and I have, you know family that's also civil servants, public servants. This is nothing new, right? And, you know, and I go around them and I get empowered to say, "Hey, you know you can actually do this and this is how you can overcome this." But then also with your commitment as a leader my commitment is how do I create those pathways for others and remove those barriers. And when I see that, how do I address it? >> And how to really be what you're touching on there so much is allyship. >> Yes! >> I think there's, it takes, being an ally takes many forms across workplaces and functions and genders and demographics and anything quite frankly. And not everyone can advocate for themselves as loudly as someone else can. And that's particularly if whatever that demographic is sees itself a lot on the leadership side of things. But it's really easy to compliment a friend or a teammate, and I think it's actually pretty easy to say nice things about them in the room when they're not in there. And that's one of the easiest ways to be an ally. And I love that you just brought that up. I think that, yeah, we just, we forget that someone else is still fighting to be noticed. And when I was looking at your, you let the work speak for itself. One of the lines that I've always referenced is "be so good they can't ignore you" which kind of combines exactly what you just mentioned is the being noticed piece. And I think it's all of our jobs to help other people and the right people and projects get noticed. So, I really love that. >> Yeah. >> Final question for you- >> So actually, just another quick line about that, you know. >> Yeah. >> And also, you know, and this is another reality about this is knowing when to walk away, right? Cause some people can chew and, you know, I do believe in closed doors are a blessing. You know, when you face rejection, you know it's redirection to where you need to go. But I also do believe like I was at this conference years ago and this woman made this analogy. There's, you know, she said, "There's a million men out there, you know, if it doesn't work for you, go get another one." And that's the idea is that your one company is not your only company. There's other companies that might be better aligned to you. Believe in yourself that you're worth it to go find another opportunity that's better aligned where people can actually celebrate you versus where they say this concept of tolerates you. So I just put that out there, is that bold belief that you have to know that about yourself to know that, hey, you're worth it, and there is another company that you can thrive and you're going to be okay. And when you do it, you'll be happy that you actually took that leap of faith. And that's something that I've taken. And when I know that, hey, my time's up, if I sense that if I see that, then I just will move on it. And I'm okay. >> I've been back here behind the curtain just snapping as you've been talking. I couldn't agree more. The only brand you're ever going to represent your whole life is you. >> Yeah. >> And I think you just nailed it. I was going to ask you for some closing inspiration, but I think you you just nailed it with that statement to be quite honest. So I don't want to poison the well. Tia Wiggins, thank you so much for joining us. It is very clear why you are a go-to market leader and AWS is very lucky to have you. And thank you to our audience for joining us for this a special program series here on theCUBE where we are featuring women of the cloud. My name's Savannah Peterson, and may the skies be clear and blue and with beautiful clouds in your universe today. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Good morning. Welcome to day two of the cube at Dell technologies world live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with John farrier, Dave Nicholson guys, a lot of momentum yesterday. The vibe was amazing. We're think there's about 8,000 people here and spends yesterday a lot going on with multi-cloud with partners, with customers, John, we got Michael Dell coming on in just about 15, 20 minutes. >>Yep. The keynotes getting out, people are starting to come in. You can see them, uh, flowing through the hallway. Michael Dell will be on about 15 minutes and we're gonna ask him every year when they have the cube here, we're gonna have room with questions around digital transformation. Security is the hot thing. Obviously here, data and what's up with Dell. So we'll see what, what he is gonna say. >>We had some really good interviews yesterday. We, we had customers on, we had partners and the, the overall sentiment was people are very excited about, I mean, the momentum that Dell is coming off of from F Y 22 of first time hitting north of a, of a hundred billion or in the company's history, the partner ecosystem expanding what their acknowledgement multi-cloud is here. Yeah. The, the vibe was good. The, the partners are excited. Lot of opportunity. Yeah. >>I mean, I think the big thing story here this year is that, you know, VMware's not part of Dell technologies world, although there is some stuff kind of connecting together in terms of ownership, but it's still now on its own. So that's, that's a key, um, development that's happened since we were last here in person, but the digital transformation train continues to go down the tracks and it's getting better and better and better. And for, in terms of what is happening, but there's still more complexity at the edge. That's something that's important and security more than ever is important on a global stage. But also the cyber attacks are going up. Ransomware is, has essentially I'm so standard. Everyone needs a, a solution. So everyone's pivoting to endpoint protection, zero, zero trust. And, um, ransomware has been, you see the storage vendors go that way. So that's a big trend. Uh, a lot of people go in there and they need it too. Cuz ransomware is very dangerous. So, and then obviously cyber all over the world is, is a huge, so, you know, Dell plays a role in that. They have a lot of gear and, and I think the edge is developing nicely. >>Yeah. You talk about ransomware. I was reading some stats recently that there's one attack, every 11 seconds that organizations now it's not a matter of, are we gonna get hit it's when yeah. And I think I wrote a stat the other day that said 75% of organizations will be hit by at least one cyber attack by 2025, which is around the corner. So security is that board level, front and center conversation. Yeah. And we saw a lot of that with what they were announcing just yesterday alone. >>Yeah. And to me, the cybersecurity issue is just also a political one. Uh, the adversaries can play with open source and the threats are real. The threat vectors are increasing and there's no perimeter as everyone knows that in security and you start to see data being protected. So now you've got data protection is that's big for Dell. You know, they have a huge footprint of disaster recovery and data protection. And so that becomes a really key point for protecting the data in flight, uh, data. Engineering's a hot trend. So data as code has become huge. You're seeing that in, in all the digital applications, the role of data is becoming more and more. >>Absolutely. We talked a lot Dave about edge yesterday and especially, particularly in retail and a lot of the massive transformation and the pressure that retail is under, you know, us consumers, we bring this, we want the online experience in the connected store. And so they talked a lot about what they're doing with respect to edge at the retail yesterday and in financial services. Really interesting. What are some of your thoughts on the direction that Dell's going? >>So I've been, I've been taking a little bit of a different angle on this since I've been here prowling around looking under the covers to get an understanding of the advances in hardware that are driving the top line value per opposition. So here it's appropriate to talk about things like retail at the edge and the experience that that delivers to an end user customer Dell is still doing, however, the really hard work of optimizing systems on the back end, the stuff that a lot of people would say they don't care about. The idea is Dell makes sure that this development that happens so people at the edge don't have to care about it. So, so that's the thing that I find fascinating being a kind of an old school hardware guy myself, is that all these really cool things aren't getting talked about because we don't need to talk about them because Dell has it handled. So whether it's whether it's retail, uh, whether it's, uh, uh, advances insecurity, uh, they're all driven by highly optimized and tuned hardware. You mentioned partners, um, partnerships that Dell has behind the scenes are critical to all of that. >>I mean, I think the big thing about Dell too, is they have a co here. Um, they have Chuck Whitten, a co chief operating officer, uh, Jeff Clark, uh, Chuck Whitten's new, uh, came from BAE and you got two do Cocos. Right? Right. So you got a fledging company Dell's growing. And, and the big question is M and a right. Dave and I were talking about that last night with a bunch of folks in the, in the hallway about who does Dell buy? Do they need to buy anyone? Right? And again, uh, hardware is back. I mean, you look at what we talked about yesterday. And our wrap up day one was essentially, hardware's becoming more important. And even at Amazon reinvent, when we recovering that show role of Silicon plays a huge role. Now they run hardware in the cloud. So, um, we all know hardware, just servers, somewhere in the cloud there. So I think hardware is gonna be huge David, because, you know, edge needs more smaller, faster, cheaper Bob access to colo, uh, Equinox was on yesterday. Um, you're seeing like 5g edges deploying. So I think hardware is gonna matter. I think you'll see the home become much more device centric, smarter devices. So smart city, smart homes, hardware matters more than ever. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and from an acquisition perspective who, who knows maybe Dell would acquire VMware <laugh> crazier things have happened >>Or VMware could acquire Dell >>Or yeah. Crazier things have happened. >>They would argue that one. <laugh> >>So, so the hardware hardware's back back again. It makes me think of that M and M song slim, shady. You think we need to do some sort of parody on that <laugh> together, but what does that mean for, for the partner community? There are over 200,000 partners. We talk about Barun GSI data center, the hyperscalers, that partner. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, the partner story is I think more important than ever. And you seeing more ecosystems develop around companies that you wouldn't think have ecosystems that's because with cloud and now the cloud operating model, which is on-premise and edge, you can do piece parts of solutions and, and the glue layers, the abstraction layers in software at scale are now available. So it's easier for customers to buy point solutions or platforms and put them together. Bet it more than every the headless retail, as an example, uh, a trend that's happening. You're seeing, look at, look at, uh, in the, in the, uh, consumer market, ghost kitchens, ghost retail. So you're starting to see delivery. And so at the consumerization of it is happening. You're gonna see more and more customs applications that are taking advantage of stacks that are configured either on the fly or, you know, most multiple partners. So I think you're gonna see, you know, the big players like AWS, uh, uh, Microsoft, Dell have real big ecosystem players and that's gonna be a huge trend continuing. >>So today Michael Dell is coming on in just minutes. Chuck Whitten is also on Jeff Clark. What are some of the things that you really want to dig into with these guys, John? Well, >>The big thing I want to ask him is how they're stress, energy, and operations fit into how their customers are consuming. Uh, Dell's got a huge customer base. I wanna find out how their, how their solutions are being operationalized by the customers. And that's gonna be coming, poking at the cloud a little bit and see how real that's going. Apex has been very popular. The security story. I also wanna ask about the changing workforce because the it departments of the old those folks are aging out. So a new generation of it is coming together. And I think those folks want things easy, push button, easy button dashboards. They've never, maybe not even racked the server before. So completely different new generation. When I see how that impacts the, uh, how they make products, >>Good point. We saw some of that in, you know, this morning they were showing some of the gaming, um, opportunities, Dave and I were in there this morning and what they're doing for that, and the gamers are all very excited about that. But the connected home was something that they were talking about. >>Yeah. Yeah. Who knew you could make a, uh, you know, a track pad on a laptop, more exciting. <laugh> it's, I mean, it's brilliant, right? They, you know, controls for, uh, you know, for, uh, home video conferencing built in, um, it, it just shows that again, kind of at that hardware level where people think, ah, it doesn't matter. No, there's a lot of room for innovation there. And back to the discussion of around partners, um, much like the big cloud players depend upon systems integrators out in the marketplace in order to deliver these solutions to end user kind customers. The channel's gonna be incredibly important. And I know that Dell is putting a lot of effort behind that right now. That's pretty clear. Yep. >>Yeah. We've seen lot of that. So exciting stuff today. I mentioned the three guys, three only of the many folks that are coming on the show today. We've got Allison Dew tomorrow, some other happy hitters guys looking forward to great day two full coverage. Stay with us. We've got a lot of content coming at you from the cube live from the show floor of Dell technologies, world 2022 from the Venetian in Las Vegas, stick around Michael Dell will be up next with John and Dave.