(soft music) >> Welcome back to Sin City, guys and girls we're glad you're with us. You've been watching theCUBE all week, we know that. This is theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22, from the Venetian Expo Center where there are tens of thousands of people, and this event if you know it, covers the entire strip. There are over 55,000 people here, hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been a fantastic show. It is clear everyone's back. We're hearing phenomenal stories from AWS and it's ecosystem. We got a great customer story coming up next, featured on the main stage. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, post pandemic, you start to think about, okay, how are things changing? And one of the things that we heard from Adam Selipsky, was, we're going beyond digital transformation into business transformation. Okay. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I have a sense of what it means. And I think this next interview really talks to business transformation beyond digital transformation, beyond the IT. >> Excellent. We've got two guests. One of them is an alumni, Scott Mullins joins us, GM, AWS Worldwide Financial Services, and Brad Peterson is here, the EVP, CIO and CTO of NASDAQ. Welcome guys. Great to have you. >> Hey guys. >> Hey guys. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah >> Brad, talk a little bit, there was an announcement with NASDAQ and AWS last year, a year ago, about how they're partnering to transform capital markets. It was a highlight of last year. Remind us what you talked about and what's gone on since then. >> Yeah, so, we are very excited. I work with Adena Friedman, she's my boss, CEO of NASDAQ, and she was on stage with Adam for his first Keynote as CEO of AWS. And we made the commitment that we were going to move our markets to the Cloud. And we've been a long time customer of AWS and everyone said, you know the last piece, the last frontier to be moved was the actual matching where all the messages, the quotes get matched together to become confirmed orders. So that was what we committed to less than a year ago. And we said we were going to move one of our options markets. In the US, we have six of them. And options markets are the most challenging, they're the most high volume and high performance. So we said, let's start with something really challenging and prove we can do it together with AWS. So we committed to that. >> And? Results so far? >> So, I can sit here and say that November 7th so we are live, we're in production and the MRX Exchange is called Mercury, so we shorten it for MRX, we like acronyms in technology. And so, we started with a phased launch of symbols, so you kind of allow yourself to make sure you have all the functionality working then you add some volume on it, and we are going to complete the conversion on Monday. So we are all good so far. And I have some results I can share, but maybe Scott, if you want to talk about why we did that together. >> Yeah. >> And what we've done together over many years. >> Right. You know, Brian, I think it's a natural extension of our relationship, right? You know, you look at the 12 year relationship that AWS and NASDAQ have had together, it's just the next step, in the way that we're going to help the industry transform itself. And so not just NASDAQ's business transformation for itself, but really a blueprint and a template for the entire capital markets industry. And so many times people will ask me, who's using Cloud well? Who's doing well in the Cloud? And NASDAQ is an easy example to point to, of somebody who's truly taking advantage of these capabilities because the Cloud isn't a place, it's a set of capabilities. And so, this is a shining example of how to use these capabilities to actually deliver real business benefit, not just to to your organization, but I think the really exciting part is the market technology piece of how you're serving other exchanges. >> So last year before re:Invent, we said, and it's obvious within the tech ecosystem, that technology companies are building on top of the Cloud. We said, the big trend that we see in the 2020s is that, you know, consumers of IT, historically, your customers are going to start taking their stacks, their software, their data, their services and sassifying, putting it on the Cloud and delivering new services to customers. So when we saw Adena on stage last year, we called it by the way, we called it Super Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Okay. Some people liked the term but I love it. And so yeah, Super Cloud. So when we saw Adena on stage, we said that's a great example. We've seen Capital One doing some similar things, we've had some conversations with US West, it's happening, right? So talk about how you actually do that. I mean, because you've got a lot, you've got a big on-premises stay, are you connecting to that? Is it all in the Cloud? Paint a picture of what the architecture looks like? >> Yeah. And there's, so you started with the business transformation, so I like that. >> Yeah. >> And the Super Cloud designation, what we are is, we own and operate exchanges in the United States and in Europe and in Canada. So we have our own markets that we're looking at modernizing. So we look at this, as a modernization of the capital market infrastructure, but we happen to be the leading technology provider for other markets around the world. So you either build your own or you source from us. And we're by far the leading provider. So a lot of our customers said, how about if you go first? It's kind of like Mikey, you know, give it to Mikey, let him try it. >> See if Mikey likes it. >> Yeah. >> Penguin off the iceberg thing. >> Yeah. And so what we did is we said, to make this easy for our customers, so you want to ask your customers, you want to figure out how you can do it so that you don't disrupt their business. So we took the Edge Compute that was announced a few years ago, Amazon Outposts, and we were one of their early customers. So we started immediately to innovate with, jointly innovate with Amazon. And we said, this looks interesting for us. So we extended the region into our Carteret data center in Northern New Jersey, which gave us all the services that we know and love from Amazon. So our technical operations team has the same tools and services but then, we're able to connect because in the markets what we're doing is we need to connect fairly. So we need to ensure that you still have that fairness element. So by bringing it into our building and extending the Edge Compute platform, the AWS Outpost into Carteret, that allowed us to also talk very succinctly with our regulators. It's a familiar territory, it's all buttoned up. And that simplified the conversion conversation with the regulators. It simplified it with our customers. And then it was up to us to then deliver time and performance >> Because you had alternatives. You could have taken a more mature kind of on-prem legacy stack, figured out how to bolt that in, you know, less cloudy. So why did you choose Outposts? I am curious. >> Well, Outposts looked like when it was announced, that it was really about extending territory, so we had our customers in mind, our global customers, and they don't always have an AWS region in country. So a lot of you think about a regulator, they're going to say, well where is this region located? So finally we saw this ability to grow the Cloud geographically. And of course we're in Sweden, so we we work with the AWS region in Stockholm, but not every country has a region yet. >> And we're working as fast as we can. - Yes, you are. >> Building in every single location around the planet. >> You're doing a good job. >> So, we saw it as an investment that Amazon had to grow the geographic footprint and we have customers in many smaller countries that don't have a region today. So maybe talk a little bit about what you guys had in mind and it's a multi-industry trend that the Edge Compute has four or five industries that you can say, this really makes a lot of sense to extend the Cloud. >> And David, you said it earlier, there's a trend of ecosystems that are coming onto the Cloud. This is our opportunity to bring the Cloud to an ecosystem, to an existing ecosystem. And if you think about NASDAQ's data center in Carteret, there's an ecosystem of NASDAQ's clients there that are there to be with NASDAQ. And so, it was actually much easier for us as we worked together over a really a four year period, thinking about this and how to make this technological transition, to actually bring the capabilities to that ecosystem, rather than trying to bring the ecosystem to AWS in one of our public regions. And so, that's been our philosophy with Outpost all along. It's actually extending our capabilities that our customers know and love into any environment that they need to be able to use that in. And so to Brad's point about servicing other markets in different countries around the world, it actually gives us that ability to do that very quickly, very nimbly and very succinctly and successfully. >> Did you guys write a working backwards document for this initiative? >> We did. >> Yeah, we actually did. So to be, this is one of the fully exercised. We have a couple of... So by the way, Scott used to work at NASDAQ and we have a number of people who have gone from NASDAQ data to AWS, and from AWS to NASDAQ. So we have adopted, that's one of the things that we think is an effective way to really clarify what you're trying to accomplish with a project. So I know you're a little bit kidding on that, but we did. >> No, I was close. Because I want to go to the like, where are we in the milestone? And take us through kind of what we can expect going forward now that we've worked backwards. >> Yep, we did. >> We did. And look, I think from a milestone perspective, as you heard Brad say, we're very excited that we've stood up MRX in production. Having worked at NASDAQ myself, when you make a change and when you stand up a market that's always a moment where you're working with your community, with your clients and you've got a market-wide call that you're working and you're wanting to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And so, when that call went smoothly and that transition went smoothly I know you were very happy, and in AWS, we were also very happy as well that we hit that milestone within the timeframe that Adena set. And that was very important I know to you. >> Yeah. >> And for us as well. >> Yeah. And our commitment, so the time base of this one was by the end of 2022. So November 7th, checked. We got that one done. >> That's awesome. >> The other one is we said, we wanted the performance to be as good or better than our current platform that we have. And we were putting a new version of our derivative or options software onto this platform. We had confidence because we already rolled it to one market in the US then we rolled it earlier this year and that was last year. And we rolled it to our nordic derivatives market. And we saw really good customer feedback. So we had confidence in our software was going to run. Now we had to marry that up with the Outpost platform and we said we really want to achieve as good or better performance and we achieved better performance, so that's noticeable by our customers. And that one was the biggest question. I think our customers understand when we set a date, we test them with them. We have our national test facility that they can test in. But really the big question was how is it going to perform? And that was, I think one of the biggest proof points that we're really proud about, jointly together. And it took both, it took both of us to really innovate and get the platform right, and we did a number of iterations. We're never done. >> Right. >> But we have a final result that says it is better. >> Well, congratulations. - Thank you. >> It sounds like you guys have done a tremendous job. What can we expect in 2023? From NASDAQ and AWS? Any little nuggets you can share? >> Well, we just came from the partner, the partner Keynote with Adam and Ruba and we had another colleague on stage, so Nick Ciubotariu, so he is actually someone who brought digital assets and cryptocurrencies onto the Venmo, PayPal platform. He joined NASDAQ about a year ago and we announced that in our marketplace, the Amazon marketplace, we are going to offer digital custody, digital assets custody solution. So that is certainly going to be something we're excited about in 2023. >> I know we got to go, but I love this story because it fits so great at the Super cloud but we've learned so much from Amazon over the years. Two pieces of teams, we talked about working backwards, customer obsession, but this is a story of NASDAQ pointing its internal capabilities externally. We're already on that journey and then, bringing that to the Cloud. Very powerful story. I wonder what's next in this, because we learn a lot and we, it's like the NFL, we copy it. I think about product market fit. You think about scientific, you know, go to market and seeing that applied to the financial services industry and obviously other industries, it's really exciting to see. So congratulations. >> No, thank you. And look, I think it's an example of Invent and Simplify, that's another Amazon principle. And this is, I think a great example of inventing on behalf of an industry and then continually working to simplify the way that the industry works with all of us. >> Last question and we've got only 30 seconds left. Brad, I'm going to direct it to you. If you had the opportunity to take over the NASDAQ sign in Times Square and say a phrase that summarizes what NASDAQ and AWS are doing together, what would it say? >> Oh, and I think I'm going to put that up on Monday. So we're going to close the market together and it's going to say, "Modernizing the capital market's infrastructure together." >> Very cool. >> Excellent. Drop the mic. Guys, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate you joining us on the show, sharing your insights and what NASDAQ and AWS are doing. We're going to have to keep watching this. You're going to have to come back next year. >> All right. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft music)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to HPE. Discover 2022. My name is Dave Lanta. I'm here with my co-host John fur. John we've been watching the evolution of H HP to HPE. We've seen GreenLake when Antonio Neri, I called it. I called it burn the boats. He goes, no, no, no, it wasn't burn the boats. I said, well, okay, burn the bridges. But it was all in on as a service on, on GreenLake. And we're gonna talk about that. Brad Shapiro is here. He's the vice president and managing director of the enterprise business at HPE financial services. Brad. Good to see him. Good to see >>You as well. >>Yeah, you guys got it all started. When, when Antonio kinda laid down, the gauntlet said, this is where we're going. Let's make it happen now. Cause the first place he turned I would imagine is the financial services said, okay, how do we start this today? Can you help us? And they take us back to that >>And yeah, sure. So, you know, uh, yeah, HP financial services, um, it's kind of a foundational element cuz when you think about it, asset management is really what we're doing here. And I know asset management's a, a big word, right? And it can mean lots of things to, to different people. Um, in this context, uh, we started looking at how do customers manage assets over the life cycle and a lot of customers while they were interested in a consumption model and looking at GreenLake for their private cloud, they were certainly looking at public cloud for certain workloads and then maybe even traditional data center for other activities that, that they're running. So it's really that hybrid environment. Uh, but they were stuck going well, Hey, I'm in a CapEx model today. How do I get out of CapEx and really get into this hybrid model? >>And that's where asset management comes in. So one of the, the biggest initial focus is, and we continue to have that focus. We call it our accelerated migration offer and it's really us going in and acquiring the customer assets, moving it on the HPE balance sheet and then figuring out what are we gonna do with those assets, which are gonna stay in use under a consumption model, which are excess. And we can put through our, uh, asset up cycling process, we monetize the majority of that, put that back into reuse and then maybe a small amount gets recycled. So, so really focused on the assets and accelerating customers transition to GreenLake. Did you >>See, or are you seeing a difference between like Le traditional leasing customers who already have kind of on that model versus like what you just described as sort of the, the CapEx was more complicated, you gotta get, I presume procurement involved the legal issues and was there a lot less, was it less friction with the, the leasing customers? Well, >>You know, I, I look at leasing and financing, very similar to CapEx. It's, it's a much more traditional model versus this new as a service experience. Um, so if, if they were in a leasing model, we could convert those leases into GreenLake. I wouldn't say one was any more difficult than the other. Yeah. Um, they were both really traditional mindset, um, and not really looking at a consumption model. So I think we had our fair share of both. And I think we, we have and are able to address both customers moving in into a consumption >>Mode. Right. How does this tie into sustainability? Because you know, we have on one end of the spectrum, the, the high end sustainability, you know, the, the science and sure. And the behind it, tactically speaking companies still now want to operate in this kind of, there's a sustainable angle here. Yeah. Talk about that piece of it. How does that tie in obviously consumption versus CapEx you're building, you're not building, what, what does that thread through the sustainability angle? >>Yeah. So, so first let me just say sustainability is really important to our customers. Um, and, and we're seeing it all over and it is real. Um, the good thing is that you can get business value out of the solutions and have a more sustainable model. So when I think about, and I talk to customers about sustainability, uh, there's a number of fronts they're focused on one, their customers believe it's important, right? So, so they're focused on making sure they're driving sustainable models. Uh, I've seen an increasing number of customers, both commercial and public sector have sustainability requirements in their tenders, in their RFPs. And you have to be able to, to comply with those. Um, second, uh, they, they look at it and go, how do I attract talent? It's increasingly important for them to attract talent. And then really if you, because >>They wanna work for a mission driven company that's >>Sustainable. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and the third area is investors. You know, the investment community is now looking at ESG and whole and you know, certainly environmental impacts, um, in where they're making an investment. So quick personal story, I was talking, uh, to a friend of mine who works for a hedge fund and he was telling me over the last year, they've hired a whole team. That's focused on just doing analysis of companies, ESG initiatives, determining where they're gonna invest their money. So it's, it's a wall street thing now. So this is real from a number of angles where, where sustainability has an impact. Now, how we play in that. Um, clearly when you go to a GreenLake consumption model, the idea is improving utilization of the asset. So driving higher utilization means you need less assets. You know, over time, the, the secret is we're gonna sell you less, right? >>You're gonna have less assets, but you're gonna have higher utilization. That's good for the environment where HPE Fs comes in is when those assets are done. We put those assets back into reuse. So we have a remark, we have remarketing facilities, one in, in Andover, mass, one in kin Scotland. And then we have 80 different facilities. We have partnerships around the world and our focus is how do we drive more reuse, 85% of the assets we get back, go into reuse. And when you look at servers and PCs and things like that, it's over 95% go into reuse. So a real focus on reuse is good for the environment as well. And then needless to say, the new technology that goes into a GreenLake deal, we're seeing like 30% energy savings coming, coming out of those environments. So all really good stuff related to it's >>Interesting. I mean, a couple points there is one is, you know, Benoff kind of got it all started pre pandemic. He was out talking about, you know, sustainability and ESG. And a lot of people were like, no way. It's all about bottom line profits. And so he was ahead of that. And I guess, you know, back to at least you were, oh, you were always in the residual value game, but now it's a little different, isn't it? Absolutely. It's, it's it's yes. You gotta figure out what the value of that asset's gonna be, but also there's a sustainability aspect of it as >>Well. Yeah, absolutely. And the, the pretty cool thing here is while you drive sustainability, we're also seeing customers that, that go into GreenLake. Um, we had a good example with Kern county, a 42% savings over their CapEx environment when they moved to GreenLake. So it was better for the environment and significant savings. So you can have kind of like have your cake and eat it too. You, you get better environmental, uh, impacts and you're getting better bottom line, uh, performance. >>It's a business case there too do. Now we kind of, I was talking upfront about the, the early days of GreenLake where, you know, they were, it was a financial model. Yeah. And now it's evolving to actually a technology model. We heard Alma with the platform. How has that, or has that changed the way that financial services your >>Group >>Yeah. Approaches the, the, the market. >>Yeah. So, um, yeah, that's a great point. You know, when people talk about GreenLake, they think about the old days. And, and look, I've been around a while. I remember the flex capacity, right? Yeah, of course this isn't flex capacity. I mean, the platform's amazing and it really starts to bring to life the whole thought, when we talk about hybrid, right, there are workloads sure. They might belong best in the public cloud. Right. There, there are workloads that belong best in the private cloud, under the HPE GreenLake model. And there are still workloads that customers may say, Hey, look, I've got legacy applications. I'm gonna continue to run them in a traditional data center. And so from an H P E Fs perspective, you know, we look at this, not as a leasing and financing company, we're looking at this on how do we leverage the customer's existing assets? >>How do we create incremental budget using those existing assets? And then what kind of model best serves that workload? And then how do you optimize the capacity and the spend on that? So, you know, an interesting note in the past year, we put 500 million back into customer budgets by just leveraging their existing it estate. And, and it does, it's not all HPE product, you know, we're, we're, we're monetizing third party products in the data center, in the network, in the workplace. So we can really look at, we call it any tech any time, anywhere we look at all the technology and really assess what's the best way to leverage that investment. Yeah. And, and get the most out of >>It. Yeah. I mean, it's really evolved from just recycling assets for profit, but integrating the business model into the value proposition, the core value proposition in GreenLake. That's great innovation. Um, and, and congratulations on that. Sure. My, my question for you is more kind of zooming out at the market. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, from your perspective in financial services at HPE, what has the pandemic proven to you guys? How has it changed? How you guys work and how has it changed the customer environment? Cuz you mentioned assets. I think real estate. Oh no. One's going back to work. Yeah, no one's been in the office. How has the market changed with hybrids as a steady state now coming outta the pandemic? What are customers doing with the assets? What are some of the trends that you're seeing in the customer base? >>Yeah. So, so look, I'll give you my personal perspective of what I think about as a business leader. And when I talk to customers, I think we're all thinking about the same thing. So I start with experience, what experience do I wanna create for my customers and very closely linked to that, my colleagues, right? So it, the, the people working in our organization, what experience am I creating for them? So they can in turn, create that experience for partners and customers externally. So experience is one thing. The second is innovation, right? We spend a lot of time thinking about what's next? Where do we want to go? What's the innovation and more and more that innovation is all digital, right? So digital transformation is huge within my organization. And it's huge within all of our customers. Dave, I think the last time we talked, I was in my living room on a little laptop screen and zoom and, and I think I use the analogy E every business is now a digital business, even my pizza shop in jerseys. >>Yeah. Right. I mean, everything was online curbside pickup. So what I'm finding is the, the trends in terms of how to leverage technology is how do you create that customer experience? And then how does digital now blend as we're coming out of the pandemic? And, and you're, you know, now able to go into restaurants and stores, how do you blend digital with that in person experience and maybe leverage the best of both. Right. And, and how do you do that in a seamless way to really give customers choice and give them that smooth, seamless experience. So that, that's what I see happening. And you know, what we are trying to do with our asset management plays with the financial modeling we do is how do we get more of that spend going to innovation versus maintenance. And, and that's a big key because, you know, you have to be fast. So I talk about innovation. I talk about customer experience, speed to market. I mean, you know, and the bar keeps getting higher, right? It's like, as soon as you think you're fast, you're slow. We, because you have to keep, it all keeps rolling. >>We heard yesterday on the cube from, uh, one of the HP point, next executives said, you gotta perform and transform >>At the >>Same time at the same time. And you gotta know where the people are gonna land. Absolutely. And how the assets are gonna be distributed. >>And to your point, Brad, you know, from our virtual interview, you're so right. I mean, every business has to be a digital business. And you know, my, my personal story, John, you know, my brother Richie was the executive chef at legal seafood. Right. Pandemic. So then that was a, a place you wanted to go to that restaurant, famous restaurant in Boston when they reopened, they weren't ready. Right. They didn't have the digital story together. They ended up having to, we were just at Smith and Linsky, they ended up selling to Smith and Wilensky's oh, and you, you drive around, you see a lot of these retail businesses is shut down. Yeah. Right. And so, okay. So we're, they weren't able to get through that, you know, cross that chasm in digital transformation. Yeah. A lot of businesses were able to and make it a tailwind. >>Yeah. And, and look, the other thing I think all businesses are focused on right now, uh, with the labor market is talent. And, and so when you think about all of these things tying together, you want to drive, uh, you know, innovation. You want to drive your digital transformation. You wanna make that environmentally sustainable. And, and I think all of that, if you start putting all that together, those are the companies that are gonna attract the talent in the marketplace. And, and really there there's a battle for talent and >>You wanna make it profitable. Uh, Brad bureau. Thanks so much for you. Great to see you face to face. >>Yeah. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks. >>All right. Keep it right there, John. And I will be back. We're wrapping up day three of HPE, discover 2022. You're watching the cube.

>>Que presents HP Discover 2022. Brought to You by HP >>Good morning, everyone. It's the Cube live in Las Vegas. Day two of our coverage of HP Discover 2022 from the Venetian Expo Centre. Lisa Martin and David want a what a day we had yesterday and today. Unbelievable >>for today. Big Big day today, >>Big day Today we've got a lot. We got some big heavy hitters on talking with HP customers. Partners, leadership. We've a couple of guests up with us next. Going to be talking more about the ecosystem. He's welcome. Corey Dire, the chief revenue officer, Digital Realty and Cliff Evans, senior director. H P E Green like partner ecosystem Guys. Great to have you on the >>programme. Thank you. Great to be here. >>Thank you for having us excited to be here >>with. So that's so that's harness that excitement. Cory, talk to us about the partnership. The announcement? What's going on there with Digital Realty and Green like? >>Yeah, we're crazy excited about it. You know, we've got customers dealing with data, gravity and the opportunity around that and how they could make use of it. And then they're thinking through digital transformation. How how you doing? Multi cloud and they need a partnership. To do that in this partnership with Green Leg and digital is perfect solution for them. So I'm crazy excited to be here with Cliff absolute with all of you to talk about it and hopefully build out a great partnership in relationship with HP. >>Talk to us. Sure, you're crazy Excitement >>club? Absolutely no. I think it is absolutely fantastic Partnership. I think the term is coming together as organisations. Bringing the two platforms together isn't it is an amazing thing that we have for customers, customers we know they want. They want a cloud experience. But really, they want to do that without really the DC footprint that had previously. So how did they do that in a way that really works for them in a secure client secure, sustainable way. But with the cloud experience. Really, the combination of the two pieces coming together really makes that happen, and that is what that's exciting. So we >>dig in to the two things that you mentioned Cory digital transformation and multiply. When I go back to the early days of cloud, it was that girl, you know, nobody's going to do anything you know ever again in the data centre. You know Charles Phillips, the the CEO of in four, famously said, Friends don't let friends, Bill Data centres, right? Everything's going in the cloud. So a lot of people predicted, You know, guys like you were going to be in trouble. The exact opposite happened. The market took off. So you mentioned digital transformation of multi cloud. Can we peel the onion on that? What? What is it about those two items? Are there other trends? They're driving your business, >>you know, You tied right on to to where it started. All enterprises started going to the club and then they got to the cloud and there was more that they needed to make that rial. I talk about multi cloud. You're going to use different cloud providers for different opportunities and different applications. And so you have to start thinking about how does this work in a world where you're gonna go to multiple clouds, multiple locations and what it really drove? It is the need for Cole location to make this because you've got a distributed architecture in order to enable all of this and then having to have us help you out with it. And partners like HP. That's part of where it comes from. But if you think through going to the cloud, can you stay there? Is that the full solution? You need to secure sustainable solution for that. One of the opportunities for us around that is that if you're building data centres for yourself on Prem, you don't have all the cloud access we do. We've got more cloud access points than anybody. So that helps in this digital transformation. >>How How much home? I'm sorry, Didn't mean to you how much homogeneity is there are our clients or customers saying, Hey, I kind of want the same experience in the same infrastructure. Same same. Or they saying, Hey, I want to do stuff in Digital Realty that I can't get from, you know, a cloud provider, Oracle Rack. You know, something like that, >>I would tell you that they come to us from all the partners. So we are partner community. We are not going up the stack anywhere on that. We do are we do our part. We're really good at doing the data centres really good at building data. They descended sustainable. Our position in the market is sustainability around it. We were the first to sign up on the science based initiatives for zero kind of carbon neutrality and in the future in 2030. And so yeah, so I think there's the partner aspect that they need help with on it to drive that Yeah. >>And I think from that from the HP Green Lake perspective, I think customers they very much want that that cloud experience. But I want to do on their own terms. The partnership allows that to happen on Gapen simply the cloud experiencing with the green light cloud platform to really go and deliver that genuine cloud experience and then building cloud services. On top of that, they get all the benefits that they would have from a public cloud experience, but done in the way that they would prefer to do it. So it's bringing those pieces together on >>I think the other side of you asked if it was it was the same across the board and ubiquitous. It's very bespoke. Solutions weaken D'oh! Every customer we have has a different footprint. Most from the multinationals. So we think through where their data is, where it needs to be accessed where their customers are, where their employees are, what makes the most sense. And then the partnership we have with HP into a whole lot for making very bespoke solution for that customer and help them be successful. Journey >>s O on. That s o. So what we've done with destroy lt is we have a specific offer around how we go to market with this really going how customers So we call it Green Light with co location. It's all about really positioning on offer to customers that says, Look, we can go and do this with you and do it simply and really make it happen very quickly and efficiently. So the customer ends up with a single contract in a single invoice for Green Lake Cloud Services on the co location piece, all in one single contracts. That just makes it a lot easier in terms of organising on a really big part of that as well is that our involvement is also spans right from the design to the implementation to support. So we do the whole thing to really help organisations golf and do this. So that's the big for me. The big differentiator. So rather than just having Green Lake in Cloud Services, were saying, Look, we can now do the Coehlo piece and they can really take the whole thing to a whole new level in terms of that public cloud experience >>in the sari and that that that invoice comes from HPD or Digital Realty is bundled into that >>correct? Yes, directly through the channel. We can sell that in a number of different ways. Customers get that that single invoice on a big part of that as well, just going a little bit deeper on that. So what we do is we We use a part of the company called Data Centre Technology Services, which are a great kind of consulting organisation with tremendous experience and something like 3000 projects across 40 countries from the very smallest of the very largest of data centre implementation. So all of that really makes the whole thing a lot easier from a customer's perspective in terms of designing, implementing and then supporting. So you pull all of that together. It's fantastic >>and I think it's really changed to add on to that partner in prison. So customers, now we're thinking about it differently and data centres differently, and they see us as a strategic partner along with HP. To go after this used to be space, power and calling. Now it's How much connectivity do you have? What your sustainability profile? What's your security profile? How do you secure this data? Date is the lifeblood of all these companies and you have to have a really secure, sustainable solution for them, >>right? That's absolutely critical for every industry. Talk about the specific value prop at a bespoke co location solution delivers to customers. Maybe you got a favourite customer example that you think really articulates the value of this partnership. >>So I think a combination. So so I think we touched on a lot of it, actually. So there's obviously the data centre aspect itself in terms of with the footprint that realty have across the world, you can pick and choose the data centre in the class of data centre that you want in terms of your Leighton see and connectivity that you want. Then really, it's the green make peace in terms of the flexibility that you get with that really is that value. And as I touched on the Green Lake with Cole Oh, I think for me is from our perspective, I think the biggest piece of value that we provide there to really go make it happen. Yeah, >>there's about 70 applications right now that are part of Green Lake Polo that you can bespoke for what you need to. You can think around your specific solutions that you need, and we've got it all right there with HP Green like and follow for us. And because we have a 290 data centre footprint across 50 markets, it gives us the opportunity really be the data centre provider in the Partner for H P, pretty much anywhere but with connective ity everywhere. >>When you say 70 applications, these the 70 services are you talking about talking >>about? Okay, Category 70 services. There's a lot of stuff. >>Cory, when you talked about sustainability a couple of times, is a really important ingredient of the customer decision. Why is it because they're indirectly paying the power bill or is because that's the right thing to do? And they care. There's increased. People care about it more because you go back a while ago. People way always talked about green it, but it was all lip service. Is that changing or is that there? Is there an economics >>changing in a really big way? Almost every conversation I have with customers is how are you doing Sustainability. So if they're doing an on Prem, that's not their core capabilities. They don't know how to do that. On our end, I mentioned our SP R science based initiatives that we signed up for. But how do we enable that? Enable it for how do we build in designer data centres? How do we actually work them and operate them? And then how do we go after all the green sources of sustainable energy including, I think since 2015, we've issued six billion in green bonds around that same support of it. So yeah, >>and your customer can then I presume, report that on their sustainability report a >>good way to think about it. You no longer have your data centre at its sometimes less efficient way than way are we're really good at building sustainable data centres, and then you can actually get some credits back and forth, >>just from agreement. Perspective. So Green Lake. So there's a specific Forrester Impact report that looks a green lake on how it how it performs from sustainability. Perspective on Greenlee really is giving you their 30% reduction in your energy consumption. So there's a big kind of win there as well, I think. Which is then, >>why? Where does that come from? >>So it Zim part that kind of the avoidance of over provisioning such that you going right size things, Then you have you have you have a certain amount of reserve capacity that you're using them just using the extra consumption piece when you need it. So rather than having everything running at full speed, it really is kind of struggling as to how that work. So you get a combination of effects >>with consulting and the thoughtfulness around this bespoke solution that you have. You end up needing fewer servers, pure technology that drives less power consumption and therefore you get a lot of this same really base it down. You >>talked about the savings you talked about the simplification delivery perspective. Talk about the implementation. What's the time to value that Organisations can glean from this partnership >>superfast So So yeah this This does accelerate the whole process from from initial kind of opportunity if you like and customer inquiry through to actual implementation So previously this would take considerable amount of time in terms of to ing and froing between multiple organisations on Now what we do is coordinate that do it efficiently and effectively So D. C. T s Data Sentinel services team very closely. Just have those connections often do those things incredibly quickly and it does accelerate the whole time >>and they're tied in with our team is well around. Where's the leighton? See where the solutions Because we're really thinking about what is your stack looked like from an HP perspective, but then where you need to deploy it so that you have access to the clouds You have the right proper Leighton see across your environment and you really haven't distributed architecture that works the best for you and your company. >>So this is probably answer those questions Probably both, but I'm asking anyway, I've always been a repatriation sceptic, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. You guys have other data. And maybe this is part of what one of my blind spots question is, is what's driving your business in terms of the EU's case? Is it organisations saying Hey, we want to get out of the data centre business way Don't want to put everything into the cloud but we're going to go on a digital realty and being green leg and we're gonna move into that cola Or is it? People say, You know, while we over rotated into the cloud, you were going to come back. So it's >>both. It's both, >>Yeah, in the empire. The credit. >>I think there are a lot of customers with good intentions on going to the cloud, and then there's some cost with it that maybe they didn't fully factor in it at that time. And now you've got the ability around these bespoke solutions to really right size every bit of this. And when they originally did it, they didn't think through a distributor architecture. They thought my own prim, and then I'm just gonna burst everything that a cloud that's no longer the case, and it's not really the most efficient way to your point about repatriation. They start pulling their storage back in. Well, where do you want your data? Where do you want your storage? You wanted as close as you can to the clouds for that capability and in a solution that's wrapped around it makes it very simple for you. >>I think the repatriation is very real and is increasing, eh? So we're seeing a lot of it in terms of activity and customers really trying to understand the cost that they're incurring now from a public cloud perspective. And how can they do that differently? In fact, with combined offer that we have it, it makes it a lot easier to compare. So, yeah, that really is accelerating because you don't >>see it in the macro numbers. I mean, just to be honest, you see the cloud guys combined growing 35%. And is that because your business is in transition from traditional on prime model, too, and as a service model, and so you've got that imbalance and it gets hidden in >>all that, and I think it's I think it's a new wave of things that are happening. Yeah. I mean, there's a there's a lot of things, obviously, that makes complete sense to me in Public Cloud, but I do think there's been an over rotation towards it, so I think now that realisation and it's going to take time to kind of pick that. But it's absolutely happening. There are a lot of opportunities that we've gotten some very big ones I'd love to talk about. Can't quite talk about them just get but really, where there's big, big savings in terms of what they're paying from a public cloud perspective, Really, what they want is that full management cloud service to go make it happen. So the combination of the data centre piece to Green Lake piece and then some management services, whether they're from ourselves or from party community, from manage service providers that we also work with, that gives them the complete package. >>So I have another premise. A lot of it, of course, is traditionally been focused on internal, and I feel like there's a new era coming. It's talks of the ecosystem. Are you seeing customers not only running there it in digital realty and connecting to the cloud in a hybrid fashion, but also actually building new value and building businesses that are customer facing on that that air monetize herbal. Are you seeing that? Is that happening and having examples, even generic? >>Well, basic from our perspective, our partner community, that's what they do. We have a tonne of enterprise customers, but I'll need to connect and integrate the data that you have doesn't do anything for you, Fitz on its own. And it's not interacting with other data points. And it's not around interacting with other customers, other solutions in one night. So it does help build out a partner community, a solution community for our customers in our data centres and across the >>are their industry patterns emerging. In other words, is that data ecosystems emerging by industry or is a sort of or horizontal? >>There's a mix. So I think there's a lot of lot of financial sector stuff. Yes, certainly. And then certainly manufacturing s O. I think it's interesting that you're getting a bit of a combination, but not a lot of financial sector. >>Of course, the big bags early on that they could build their own cloud. Yeah, now they're probably rethinking that. Yeah, well, maybe >>they're also service providers. When you're that large a za bank on their end. They're doing a lot of work. E. I would also say the other part that a lot of people see as an opportunity is around all the HPC and AI applications as well, in addition to manufacturing distribution. So there's a lot of use cases, a lot of reasons, like us from sort of doing this >>wrap us up with value, perhaps that you're talking Torto Financial Services Organisation or a manufacturing company. What is that 32nd elevator pitch value problem? Why they should go HP Making Digital Realty together. >>So I would say green, like Rico location gives you a single contract. Singling voice, easy to go and design, implement support and go make happen. Sorry, that's very simple way say, very just make it easy >>on. And I would just say thank you on that. It's been great to speak with you guys. And yeah, when you think through that part of it also is a bespoke opportunity to put your data where it needs to be closer to your customers. Closer to the action you were thinking through the rape reiteration of it. A lot of it's being built out there on phones and whatnot. So you've got to think through where your data is and how you managed to >>write and enable every every company in every industry to be a data company. Because that's what, of course, the demanding consumers demanding that demand isn't it is not going to turn down right now. Absolutely. Just thanks so much for David. Very much. Thank you. Together in the ecosystem, there are guests. And Dave l want a I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the key of live from the Venetian Expo Centre in Vegas, Baby. David, I will be back there next guest in a minute.

>>Mm. Welcome back to the seaports in Boston City is abuzz. Bruins tonight, Celtics Tomorrow night. We're all excited. We're talking open source, which is a very exciting topic. Every company is using open source. I mean, it is the mainspring of innovation. I'm Dave along with my co host, Paul Dillon. And you're watching the cubes. Coverage of Red Hat. Summer 2022. Raj Raj Masinga is here. He's hybrid and emerging Platforms lead at Accenture and Ghetto Greber. Who's red hats? Business group lead eccentric. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming >>on. Thank you. >>Thank you, Raj. We saw in the keynote up there today with Stephanie. She's coming on tomorrow. Rockstar Stephanie. Cheers. Also a Boston sports fan, and I have to work at it, but you can talk about the history with red hat. How long have you guys been at this? And give us a journey update. >>Well, first of all, thanks for having us here. Um, yes, we are big fans of Red Hat and especially Stephanie. I get to I had the pleasure of working with a very closely, um, our relationship with Red Hat goes many, many years, decades I think. And but Paul, come here will tell you that. You know, we've been focused a lot with the formation of our new business unit in Cloud. First around, migrating to the public cloud. But now, as we focus more and more around how our clients begin to operate in the public cloud in the cloud ecosystem hybrid is coming much more into focus. And Red Hat is very much a key client of a key partner of us. So we go way back. But this is all about us doubling down and increasing our partnership and deepening it with them. >>So, uh, you talked today about hybrid Cloud is everything. And it seems like a couple of years ago there was focuses more on moving to the public cloud and getting off of private infrastructure. Has there been a change in the ways in which customers are thinking, are they gonna be hanging onto their private infrastructure longer, perhaps, than was expected a couple of years ago? >>I think the first of all, it's a very different industry by industry. If you look at retail or consumer goods, I think there's a big movement in terms of percentages of workloads that are getting moved onto public cloud. If you look at industries like banking or utilities or government, more regular financial services, more regulated industries. I think we are finding a much larger percentage of their workloads because of regulatory reasons and security reasons, etcetera. Our need to remain either on premise or in private cloud. So I think it very much depends on the industry. But regardless the hype, you know, especially with the movement to edge now hybrid is going to be, you know, permeating everything. So I think by industry depends. But but the edges driving a whole new flywheel. >>You know, we started the Cuban 2010, so the cloud was, you know, modern cloud. Anyway, it was like, say, four years in into it and at the time, to your point Raj Financial Services, there was an evil word. No way we're ever going to the cloud. No, that's changed, obviously. But then, when the financial crisis hit, >>you >>had so initially it was a lot of tyre kicking experimentation. When the financial crisis hit, you had a lot of CFO saying, Okay, let's shift Capex to Apex and so that was sort of a bridge. And then after we came out, it was like this spate of innovation. And then we saw that during the pandemic, where cloud migration was a high priority and or it was the lifeline. And now it sounds like customers are kind of rethinking to your earlier conversation. What is cloud? It's that operating model. So I wonder if you could sort of Can you confirm that's kind of the journey that customers are taking? Where are they today? What does it mean? There? You know the the operating model. What do they consider cloud? >>Um, you actually, you see it? It's like it's really try forward to the cloud. Uh, but where it was in the beginning, If it doesn't hype about Public Cloud, they become more and more aware that it's hybrid because they have to bring the legacy system and process into the cloud as well. And it takes more time that actually they have fought before. So it's like there was a process of learning and also like in the steps moving forward to the operating model because they also understand I cannot operate a cloud like I was operating in the classical way like my old data centre and everything. It needs all the capabilities it needs, all the skills and especially if you go in a hybrid world. And it's a hybrid operation between the classic traditional but also the new ways of how you operate into a cloud. And you really see also the financial services. Now, uh, we had, uh I mean watch presented at keynote. We had a client in Germany. He made a decision, a very traditional financial services clients providing the service to chairman saving banks. And they did this decision and I would say, if you have spoken to them 10 years ago, they will not go into the cloud. But now they went to the cloud via private cloud, and now they got the confidence about how to operate in it. And now they move forward into a public cloud. But from a private cloud into the public cloud. Today, after security, they have up Skilling on skills and people and they understand the process and what's really required and needed in order to have such an environment. >>Generally, what's the strategy with regard to modernisation organisations? More building like an abstraction layer? Uh, with microservices and then connecting to the cloud. Or are they actually rewriting applications to make them cloud native? What are you What are you advising clients from a strategy standpoint, and I know it depends, but, you know, it's >>a It's a great question. I think the genesis to that strategy is how they view infrastructure, Right? So you know, everyone is, has this kind of, I don't know that this is almost mythical opinion out there with cloud. You don't need to worry about your infrastructure. All the providers will worry about it, and you just need to move it there. But the opposite is true. It's really critical what your infrastructure strategy is as you move to the cloud, because depending on what workload you have, you know it can be on any one of the continuum that you described. So the first thing is, where do you want to house your workload? Is the question and that will drive. How what do you want to do with your application? Whether you want to just maintain it the way it is, Do you want to simply modernise it, keeping where it is, or do you want to completely risk in it or even eliminated. So so I think the entire basically the answer to your question around. Do we? What do we do with the application? Is fundamentally driven by what is your infrastructure strategy and what that workload needs to do for you. >>So I know you want to jump in, but I got to follow up. You're saying hardware matters because we heard Paul Corvino today talking about this hardware renaissance. I'm actually I just ran a power panel called. Does hardware still matter? You're saying it matters? >>Yeah. And and it doesn't. And infrastructure doesn't always. I mean, now that you can do infrastructure as code, right? I mean, I was at the Del summit last time and read That is a huge partner of Dell now, right? Which, you know, uh, was much more, uh, partnered with VM ware. But I think the whole ecosystem is opening up, and even the hardware providers are looking at this in a much more nimble way. But yes, it's very much part of the conversation. They haven't gone away. >>During your keynote. You outlined sort of your strategy. Going forward is called cloud first. Yes. What does cloud first mean? >>Well, um, we we want to make sure that when we talk about transformation of business with our clients, So extension always goes with the idea of an industry lens of solving a specific problem for a client. What is the business problem we solve? And increasingly, what we want to message and drive to our clients is if you're thinking about, regardless of what the business is technologies absolutely critical to whatever transformation you're doing and when. When you look at technology, you have to think cloud first because that's where all the innovation is happening. That's where all the, um um, investments are being driven. Whether it's an I mean, it's a software vendor, but it's a hardware vendor with its uh, so you have to think cloud first when you think about transforming your business. >>Uh, what is How does modernisation play into that? You know, a lot of vendors are throwing a lot of resources that the modernisation market VM ware, Tanzania and IBM and such, uh, how interesting our customers really a Modernising legacy applications >>hugely right, because fundamentally, I think everything is now driven by our experiences. What we now are used to in terms of, uh, interfacing with applications are interfacing with function sets or interfacing with technology. So there is a lot of inherent, um, legacy technology that doesn't have that experience. So when you think about transforming, you have to come at it from an experience point of view. And when you think in those terms modernisation or even rebuilding the same, even if it's the same function set, uh, re skinning it and modernisation is critical for the purposes of engagement. >>What's the number one challenge that customers that you're working with face in terms of modernisation? Is it trying to figure out like Rogers sort of laying out the portfolio? What do I do with it? Do I modernise it? Do I retire it? Do I let it just die on the vine? What's their number one challenge? >>Uh, mainly it depends also on the industry, but it's, uh, I would say, for the highly regulated, certainly regulations. They always have an own interpretation of the regulations. Regulation means for them, but normally it's not really what they understand. But I think this is more and more coming to Annie's and more people understand what it really means, but it's also what we see a lot. They think first about technology, but not what kind of business problem they want, Uh, and they want to solve. So it's like, instead of having a technology neutral discussion is really do want to achieve, um, to have really start on this side and then having this discussion away, which, obviously it's one of the key, even because they start to the cloud even without having a strategy without having a vision. If you have a clear vision, if you have a clear strategy, you know where you want to go, and then you can make your business case. You can make you architecture and then you decide on technology. And then, of course, on this journey, all the things about security compliance coming to the plane, Yeah, and I think I think that's the easiest approach. But clients struggle to understand. Of course, I mean, the technology is changing rapidly. Even new products and release cycle new life cycles, the complexity of all the tools hardware we mentioned before network is changing new working coming up. It's really hard to keep pace or keep up with the base of the technology and what's happening even for us. And then you understand the complexity and bring this complexity back to simplicity, but not without losing. We have this also keynote the efficiency and, uh, flexibility for an engineer, because that's what he needs >>to your clients. Have the skill sets to do all that such a self serving question to you guys. But but no, do they? I mean, there's a skills shortage. There's a a battle for talent. So how are they >>dealing? I mean, it's obvious the battle for talent is here. I mean, everybody is looking for the best talent, and if we need, if you need a full stack. Engineer, for example, is very hard to get a full stack engineer on your ground. You call really cloud native. So you have to up skill people to re skilled people. There's also a change coming into it and the changes not to forget. So it's what we say most time. The technology is an easy part, but the change change the organisation, change up skilled organisation. That's the hard part because you need to change from from one mindset to another, and we know from the from the past. What change? People are not open to change in general, so we need to change the mindset. >>I wanna go back to Hybrid Cloud because we have Dani from Red Hat was on earlier and he said, Edges really redefining the definition of hybrid cloud. It's it's more complex architecture, and it's changing the nature of how we think about hybrid Cloud. Are you seeing that with your customers? Are they changing their thinking about what hybrid means in that context? >>Yeah, completely. You know, I was I was We did a bunch of, uh, research recently, and I had I just wanted to make sure I called this. I mean, there's a flexible report that came out that says 80% of all enterprises now are on hybrid 89% multi cloud redheaded. A report that said 80% of our businesses are expected to, um, uh, increase their use of open source. Right, So So, yes, hybrid is everywhere. Edge is driving it, but there's a There's another critical element to that movement. The complexity of our clients. Estates are increasing because whether it's hybrid or whether it's edge or whatever, they are now. You know, given if you're a C i or a C T o. Your estate is really complex now. So one of the things that we now need to do is how do we simplify that? So, you know, we think and we've been talking with red hat about this. We need to come up with a clean, you know, we keep calling it, you know, single pane of glass for a enterprise that allows them to look at their estate in a way that allows them to then simply make some innovative decisions across the entire state. So, yes, edges driving hybrid. But the key thing that we now need to overcome is how do we manage that complexity? >>We have new term. Uh, I call it Super Cloud, but the session is a better word. Medic cloud. That's gonna what I think of that century. I think of deep industry expertise. Of course, we have that, but with the partnership from redhead, it's a very it's horizontal in the sense that it can go anywhere. So how do you guys work in in terms of within Accenture plugging into your deep industry expertise? And how does that horizontal redhead >>fit. That's a really good question. So, you know, one of the things, you know. First of all, we came out with a announcement today about our expanded relationship with Red Hat. One of the key elements in that announcement is how we are looking and bringing in red Hat into our industry business motions. So we actually have decided to pick a certain number of industries. You know, financial services is one. Telco is another. We are thinking about utilities in Europe. Public health is a is another one that we are looking at. And as we come up with our offerings, you heard me and Stephanie talk about joint offerings earlier on the keynote. Um, these offerings are industry offerings, but in those offerings we have embedded and we are, they're powered by redhead technology. Um, that allows these industry solutions to drive innovation through their technology. Um, yes. Red hat can be, for the most part, a horizontal cross industry, you know, technology. But you have to really bring them into specific industrial solutions because of the way we go to market. And I think Red hat brings innovation, uh, in a way that these industries haven't seen before. >>So I mean, how do you stay out of their way? Because they have a services operation that they're trying to grow. And that's your business as well. So where the lines of demarcation >>back to your question? I I don't I don't think there is a limiting opportunity. Read? Had, you know Stephanie Me, Paul, we're all talking about How do we collectively increase both our armies? You know, I I Yes, there might be occasional overlaps in the trenches, but when you look at the bigger picture, it is not a problem at all. >>I wouldn't think so. I mean, the way you're describing Rogers exactly the way it should work. You lead with the business, figure out the business problem, how you're gonna solve that. The technology will take care of itself. Technologies come and they go. And you want to use modern technologies, obviously. But if you don't get the business piece right, forget no technology is gonna save you >>exactly, right. And and the complexities of what the businesses today are facing is getting more and more difficult. And I think actually, technologies like red hat, you know, they're the whole concept of open source, I think is very creative around driving innovations from the market. I >>want to ask you that because Paul Kermie is you know, the storey was sort of an homage to open source. How much do customers really care about open source >>customers care about innovation and and anything that drives innovation to their business, whether it's whether it comes from technology, whether it comes from crowdsourcing, whether it comes from, you know, uh, marketing doesn't matter. I think when you look at the key hunger for innovation and how open source drives innovation, it becomes part of the business conversation. And, uh and I think that's been one of the mantras that Paul has had from day one about how this is such a great platform for innovation. And I think that's >>something customers asked for. They say we must develop this using open source platforms and tool sets. >>Um, it depends. I think I think there are some technology CEO s R c T O s that are much more religious about what? Their technologies that needs to be there are others that are that are much more business oriented. Um, so yes, there are. You know, if it's more in telecom field, I think telecom or some of the more, uh, technology driven fields, they will ask for open source. In others, they we bring, bring it through as part of offering. >>Here's the nuance that I see and you mentioned Paul Cormier. Accenture, especially. I mean, you look at your ascendancy as a company, you for years would take known processes and codify them in software. And you made, you know, a lot of great innovations doing that. And people who made a lot of >>money >>today, this new normal, he calls it. I call it the new abnormal. You don't know what's around the corner. You have to build flexibility into your business, and that is something that open source enables. Uh, so that's sort of this, Really Not really. We don't want to speak about it too much. Business resiliency and flexibility is that that is the new normal. I don't see how you can do it without without open sources expertise. >>I completely agree that I and I think, um, it's actually an asset. So you know, in some ways, selfishly, by having open source in a solution stack some of the innovation gets them much more democratised, right? So? So it can come from a much broader sweet. So the load is not only an extension to come up with all the innovation we can, we can actually come up with a more democratised way of bringing that innovation in. So I think that's that's >>great. And it doesn't always go back to the community. I mean, Amazon built a $70 billion business on open source, but not all right, guys. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you very much for having a pleasure. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for Paul Dillon. The Cubes. Continuous coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 from the seaport in Boston. We'll be right back. >>Mm mm.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin and Dave Vale are live in Las Vegas. We are covering our third day of covering Dell technologies world 2022. The first live in-person event since 2019. It's been great to be here. We've had a lot of great conversations about all the announcements that Dell has made in the last couple of days. And we're gonna unpack a little bit more of that. Now. One of our alumni is back with us. Shannon champion joins us again, vice president product marketing at Dell technologies, and she's a company by Pete Robinson, the director of infrastructure engineering at Salesforce. Welcome. Thank >>You. >>So Shannon, you had a big announcement yesterday. I run a lot of new software innovations. Did >>You hear about that? I heard a little something >>About that. Unpack that for us. >>Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, it's so exciting to be here in person and have such a big moment across our storage portfolio, to see that on the big stage, the boom to announce major updates across power store, PowerMax and power flex all together, just a ton of innovation across the storage portfolio. And you probably also heard a ton of focus on our software driven innovation across those products, because our goal is really to deliver a continuously modern storage experience. That's what our customers are asking us for that cloud experience. Let's take the most Val get the most value from data no matter where it lives. That's on premises in the public clouds or at the edge. And that's what we, uh, unveil. That's what we're releasing. And that's what we're excited to talk about. >>Now, Pete, you, Salesforce is a long time Dell customer, but you're also its largest PowerMax customer. The biggest in the world. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing with PowerMax and your experience. >>Yeah, so, um, for Salesforce, trust is our number one value and that carries over into the infrastructure that we develop, we test and, and we roll out and Parex has been a key part of that. Um, we really like the, um, the technology in terms of availability, reliability, um, performance. And it, it has allowed us to, you know, continue to grow our customers, uh, continue needs for more and more data. >>So what was kind of eye popping to me was the emphasis on security. Not that you've not always emphasized security, but maybe Shannon, you could do a rundown of, yeah. Maybe not all the features, but give us the high level. And at Pete, I, I wonder how I, if you could comment on how, how you think about that as a practitioner, but please give us that. >>Sure. Yeah. So, you know, PowerMax has been leading for, uh, a long time in its space and we're continuing to lean into that and continue to lead in that space. And we're proud to say PowerMax is the world's most secure mission, critical storage platform. And the reason we can say that is because it really is designed for comprehensive cyber resiliency. It's designed with a zero trust security architecture. And in this particular release, there's 19 different security features really embedded in there. So I'm not gonna unpack all 19, but a couple, um, examples, right? So multifactor authentication also continuous ransomware anomaly detection, a leveraging cloud IQ, which is, uh, huge. Um, and last but not least, um, we have the industry's most granular cyber recovery at scale PowerMax can do up to 65 million imutable snapshots per array. So just, uh, and that's 30 times more than our next nearest competitor. So, you know, really when you're talking about recovery point objectives, power max can't be beat. >>So what does that mean to you, Pete? >>Uh, well, it's it's same thing that I was mentioning earlier about that's a trust factor. Uh, security is a big, a big part of that. You know, Salesforce invests heavily into the securing our customer data because it really is the, the core foundation of our success and our customers trust us with their data. And if we, if we were to fail at that, you know, we would lose that trust. And that's simply not, it's not an option. >>Let's talk about that trust for a minute. We know we've heard a lot about trust this week from Michael Dell. Talk to us about trust, your trust, Salesforce's trust and Dell technologies. You've been using them a long time, but cultural alignment yeah. Seems to be pretty spot on. >>I, I would agree. Um, you know, both companies have a customer first mentality, uh, you know, we, we succeed if the customer succeeds and we see that going back and forth in that partnership. So Dell is successful when Salesforce is successful and vice versa. So, um, when we've it's and it goes beyond just the initial, you know, the initial purchase of, of hardware or software, you know, how you operate it, how you manage it, um, how you continue to develop together. You know, our, you know, we work closely with the Dell engineering teams and we've, we've worked closely in development of the new, new PowerMax lines to where it's actually able to help us build our, our business. And, and again, you know, continue to help Dell in the process. So you've >>Got visibility on the new, a lot of these new features you're playing around with them. What I, I, I obviously started with security cuz that's on top of everybody's mind, but what are the things are important to you as a customer? And how do these features the new features kind of map into that? Maybe you could talk about your experience with the, I think you're in beta, maybe with these features. Maybe you could talk about that. >>Yeah. Um, probably the, the biggest thing that we're seeing right now, other than OB the obvious enhancements in hardware, which, which we love, uh, you know, better performance, better scalability, better, and a better density. Um, but also the, some of the software functionality that Dells starting to roll out, you know, we've, we've, we've uh, implemented cloud IQ for all of our PowerMax systems and it's the same thing. We continue to, um, find features that we would like. And we've actually, you know, worked closely with the cloud IQ team. And within a matter of weeks or months, those features are popping up in cloud IQ that we can then continue to, to develop and, and use. >>Yeah. I think trust goes both ways in our partnership, right? So, you know, Salesforce can trust Dell to deliver the, you know, the products they need to deliver their business outcomes, but we also have a relationship to where we can trust that Salesforce is gonna really help us develop the next generation product that's gonna, you know, really deliver the most value. Yeah. >>Can you share some business outcomes that you've achieved so far leveraging power max and how it's really enabled, maybe it's your organization's productivity perspective, but what are some of those outcomes that you've achieved so far? >>Um, there there's so many to, to, to choose from, but I would say the, probably the biggest thing that we've seen is a as we roll out new infrastructure, we have various generations that we deploy. Um, when we went to the new PowerMax, um, initially we were concerned about whether our storage infrastructure could keep up with the new compute, uh, systems that we were rolling out. And when we went through and began testing it, we came to realize that the, the performance improvements alone, that we were seeing were able to keep up with the compute demand, making that transition from the older VMAX platforms to the PMAX practically seamless and able to just deploy the new SKUs as, as they came out. >>Talk about the portfolio that you apply to PowerMax. I mean, it's the highest of the highest end mission critical the toughest workloads in the planet. Salesforce has made a lot of acquisitions. Yeah. Um, do you throw everything at PowerMax? Are you, are you selective? What's your strategy there? So >>It's, it's selective. In other words that there's no square peg that meets every need, um, you know, acquisitions take some time to, to ingest, um, you know, some run into cloud, some run in first, in, in first party. Um, but so we, we try to take a very, very intentional approach to where we deploy that technology. >>So 10 years ago, someone in your position, or maybe someone who works for you was probably do spent a lot of time managing lawns and tuning performance. And how has that changed? >>We don't do that. <laugh> we? >>We can, right. So what do you do with right. Talk, talk more double click on that. So how talk about how that transition occurred from really non-productive activities, managing storage boxes. Yeah. And, and where you are today, what are you doing with those resources? >>It, it, it all comes outta automation. Like, you know, the, you know, hardware is hardware to a point, um, but you reach a point where the, the manageability scale just goes exponential and, and we're way, well past that. And the only way we've been able to meet that, meet that need is to, to automate and really develop our operations, to be able to not just manage at a lung level or even at the system level, but manage at the data center level at the geographical, you know, location level and then being able to, to manage from there. >>Okay. Really stupid question. But I'm gonna ask it cause I wanna hear your answer. True. Why can't you just take a software defined storage platform and just run everything on that? Why do you need all these different platforms and why do you gotta spend all this money on PowerMax? Why, why can't you just do >>That? That's the million dollar question. Uh, I, I ask that all the time. <laugh>, um, I think software defined is it's on its way. Um, it's come a long way just in the last decade. Yeah. Um, but in terms of supporting what I consider mission critical, large scale, uh, applications, it's, it's not, it's just simply not on par just yet with what we do with PowerMax, for example. >>And that's exactly how we position it in our portfolio. Right? So PowerMax runs on 95% of the fortune 100 companies, top 20 healthcare companies, top 10 financial services companies in the world. So it's really mission critical high end has all of the enterprise level features and capabilities to really have that availability. That's so important to a lot of companies like Salesforce and, and Pete's right, you know, software define is on its way and it provides a lot of agility there. But at the end of the day for mission critical storage, it's all about PowerMax. >>I wonder if we're ever gonna get to, I mean, you, you, you, it was interesting answer cuz you kind of, I inferred from your that you're hopeful and even optimistic that someday will get to parody. But I wonder because you can't be just close enough. It's almost, you have to be. >>I think, I think the key answer to that is it's it's the software flying gets you halfway there. The other side of the coin is the application ecosystem has to change to be able to solve that other, other side of it. Cuz if you simply simply take an application that runs on a PowerMax and try to run it, just forklift it over to a software defined. You're not gonna have very much luck. >>Recovery has to be moved up to stack >>Operations recovery, the whole, whole whole works. >>Jenny, can you comment on how customers like Salesforce? Like what's your process for involving them in testing in roadmap and in that direction, strategic direction that you guys are going? Great >>Question. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, customer feedback is huge. You've heard it. I'm sure this is not new right product development and engineering. We love to hear from our customers. And there's multiple ways you heard about beta testing, which we're really fortunate that Salesforce can help us provide that feedback for our new releases. But we have user groups, we have forums. We, we hear directly from our sales teams, our, you know, our customers, aren't shy, they're willing to give us their feedback. And at the end of the day, we take that feedback and make sure that we're prioritizing the right things in our product management and engineering teams so that we're delivering the things that matter. Most first, >>We've heard a lot of that this week. So I would agree guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Salesforce. What you doing with PowerMax? All the stuff that you announced yesterday, alone. Hopefully you get to go home and get a little bit of rest. >>Yes. >>I'm sure that there's, there's never a dull moment. Never. Can't wait guys. Great to have you. >>Thank you. You guys, >>For our guests on Dave Volante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the queue. We are live day three of our coverage of Dell technologies world 2022, Dave and I will be right back with our final guest of the show.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Dell tech world 2022. This is the cube alive. My name is Dave Volante. We're here with our wall to wall coverage. This is day two. We actually started last night. Uh, the, the cube after dark John furry is here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson. We're gonna talk about apex. The business value of apex flex on demand. Darren fedora is here. He's the senior vice president of Dell financial services, and we're joined by a customer and a partner Jud Barron is R and D infrastructure architect at Silicon labs. And Steve end is the regional VP of copy center comp computer center. I say that like I'm from Boston guys. Welcome to the queue. >>Thank you, >>Darren, take us through what's going on with, with apex, you got custom solutions, you know, people are gonna ask, is this just a financial gimick? What is this? >>No gimmicks, no gimmicks, Dave. So I think when we think about technology, historically customers purchased, they bought and they owned and they may have financed it and paid over time, but it was really an ownership model, especially in infrastructure and apex is about subscription. So think about Dell apex, as you can either buy, or you can subscribe to your technology and under apex subscription, we have options for custom based solutions or an outcome base. And I know today we're gonna talk about flex on demand and, and custom based solutions. So it's a high level pay for what you use when you use it with a high level of choice and flexibility. All >>Right, Steve, I'm gonna ask you to play little >>Co-host all right. I like >>This. Okay. So add some color color commentary, Jud, tell us a little bit about, uh, Silicon labs. I'm really interested in what your requirements were, your challenges and kinda why you landed on, on apex. Sure. >>Uh, Silicon labs is a semiconductor company were headquartered in Austin, 10 Xs, uh, just under a billion dollars a year right now. And, uh, at any ed shop or, uh, that, that people who are doing electronic design automation, that's not just in the semiconductor industry, but we have these HPC farms who are running, you know, millions of jobs a day. And the, a balance that you have to strike when you're doing capacity planning in one of these environments is we have these things called tape outs, and that's where we're finishing a project and there's a much higher volume of jobs that we have to run and you have to decide, do we buy for peak or do we, you know, come under that some amount and say, oh, we're gonna buy 80% of what we think >>As an over, over, over under, right. Do we over buy for peak normally, right, correct. Right >>Hard. One is geo Overy the under buy. It's always a hard decision. >>There's a tradeoff. Right? And, and so the, the challenge there is that you'll end up kind of linking the time and potentially miss a tape out window. And there's costs associated with that because you work with the Foundry and you kind of schedule based off that tape out when you're gonna deliver the photo mask to them. So anyway, the point is we in the past using a traditional like camp X, we're gonna buy a bunch of servers. We, we tend to undershoot whatever our peaks are. Cause we may have a peak every couple of months during, you know, these tape outs. Uh, but you know, sometimes tape outs, slip. And so one slips two months, another one comes in a little bit early and now you have multiple tape outs in the same months. And what was gonna be a, a small, uh, difference in from peak to what you actually purchased ends up being a big peak. And, uh, the thing that was interesting to us about flex on demand is the ability to have a commit rate that, you know, the customer can work with Dell financial services to figure out is that 80% is at 60% whatever. And they give us additional servers that we pay just when we're using them. Now I'm somewhat oversimplifying the process. Um, but we're, we gotta talk about that, >>But, but the point is, if I understand it correctly, that infrastructure was dominoing the, the time to tape out in a negative way, and you you've been able to address that more cost effectively. >>It, it can, it, it has on occasion. And so this, this basically gives us a way to lever to pull, to say, well, we can spend some additional OPEX this month and open up this additional capacity. So it's not like bursting to the cloud. Exactly. Uh, because I mean, you have to have the equipment in your data center already for you to be able to use it. But, um, it's under a traditional acquisition model. It's, it's just not a, a, a thing that was available to us before and looking at leasing or other types of, uh, you know, financing was wasn't really attractive previously, but the flex on demand model, when we first heard about it, we're like, that's very interesting. Tell me more. And we ended up using it in, in Austin, and then we built a whole data center in Asia and did the whole thing on flex on demand and >>Got it. Okay, Steve, uh, talk a little bit about your role what's going on at, at computer center and you know, why apex give us the background? Yeah. >>Um, computer center is a, one of the largest global VAs on the planet, right? Um, we, we have a lot of global and international reach, but at the end of the day, it's about one on one customer of relationships. Um, talking to them, understanding what their challenges are. And we've had a multiyear relationship with Jud. I've known you for a long time. And, and, um, typically that relationship, or initially that relationship was about collaborating, working hand in hand, kind of figure out what the solutions were that best fit their environment to solve their issues they need. And it was typically a procurement, a, a purchase based relationship and, and it worked well for a long time, but it, when Jud posed the challenge to us about kind of more pay as you go, uh, uh, subscription based modeling for, for how he want to do acquire in the future. >>Um, we just, we huddle with the Dell team collectively, um, and, and talked about what we could offer and how we could solve the problem. Uh, apex is a really nice brand today, but this was two and a half years ago, Uhhuh. Okay. So it was a little, we were a little early on on putting it together. I feel good that we were able to, to put that type of solution together for Jud and it's, and it's working today, working wonderful today. And it was good for it's good for the whenever it's good for the customer, the manufacturer and the partner altogether. It's a wonderful solution. >>So you took a little risk, but it worked out and you helped. >>Yeah, that was probably the infancy as we were growing our, as a service, think of this, you know, there's a, a lot of big words out there, Dave, right? As a service utility cloud, it doesn't matter what it is super cloud it's super cloud. It doesn't really matter. Super. This is really Jud was talking about a really important element, which is around flexibility choice. There's uncertainty oftentimes in a, in an environment, but they want to control. They still want have a level of control and leveraging partnerships, being able to deliver flexibility and choice. Don't worry about the words. Don't worry about cloud utility as a service we end up solving the customer need, right? And when we talk about flex on demand, I'll give you a little bit deeper into flex on demand. So when we think about flex on demand, it really is about understanding the customer needs and our capability and Jed reference this, determining what a baseline is. So if you think about your own utility bill, right, you, you go home and even if you're on vacation for a month, I'm sure you went on vacation for a month right. Month at a time. If I ever. >>Yeah, >>I know, but if you leave you your utility bill, even if you don't turn on a light, you still get a utility bill, it's your baseline. So we, we determine a baseline with our customers, with computer center, to understand in your environment, you're gonna use this minimum amount and that becomes your baseline. And that baseline can go as low as 25%. And up to 80% in a environment, it usually is typically in this 70, 80%. And then we determine what is gonna be optimal based on that 25 or above we charge based on the usage on a day to day basis, average by a month. And if you go up one month during your peak, you get charged at that peak. If you then a couple months are lower, then you're gonna pay only for the usage. And so for a customer that's growing has variability or seasonality. >>Um, this is a great model cuz they can still control their environment either within their own domain or um, in a colo. They also have the capability to pick anything within the Dell ISG catalog, any product, configure it to meet their environment, be able to work with a trusted partner like computer center. That it's a solution based on a partner relationship and delivers choice and flexibility on the catalog of anything Dell sells within your control of how you can configure it. So it gives this ability to say, instead of buying and instead of paying a predictable payment, a I E a financing I'm gonna pay for use. Yeah. If I turn on my light switch more or if it's during the summer in Texas where I am the ACS a lot higher. So your utilities go up and if you are a much lower because you're on vacation in Hawaii, maybe you've been in vacation in Hawaii for a month, you're gonna have a much lower and you're gonna hit your baseline. Right. So it gives flexibility choice and it gives the control back to the customer. >>Okay. So the whole ISD portfolio. So you're like the tip of the spear for future apex, right? >>We, we, we absolutely are the tip and that's why, you know, Steve referenced a couple years ago as we were still in our infancy, growing, listening to our customers, listening to our partners, we've evolved to become a more robust program, um, 35 countries today. So we can cover 35 countries over the globe, all ISG you products that are sold with a high level of flexibility and it, and it's Jud and feedback over time that we've continued to evolve this program. Mm-hmm >>So Jud you, if I understood correctly, the business impact to you was gonna better predict predictability. You didn't have to over buy or undery and take all that risk. Is that right? You maybe could quantify. Did you ever quantify that? What can you tell us about the, the business impact? Yeah, >>Sure. So, I mean, traditionally we will, uh, base our capacity demands on, uh, complex calculation that effectively just boils down to number of engineers, like head count, uh, and you know, kind of personas within that. And we figure out, okay, well how many compute do we need? And then we say, okay, well how many tape outs are we doing? And when are those tape outs gonna land? And try to figure out which months are gonna be the hot months and the design teams have to kind of vary their tape out schedules so that they don't pile up all into like July or something. And then there's not enough compute capacity. So with, with something like flex on and where I can turn additional capacity on in our HBC farm, it, you know, we just go in and make some changes to the LSF configuration and say, Hey, you know, now you've got these extra nodes available. >>We don't really have to worry about that as much. Uh, in fact, last year we, we ended up with one month where for us, it was unusual. We had five tape outs, uh, at all land within two weeks of one and a other. And they all finished, which in previous years before we had deployed that that would not have been the outcome things we would've had multiple, uh, tape outs delayed. And you know, that that's a seven figure impact for each one of those commits that we miss with the foundries. So it it's a big deal. >>Yeah. That's real dollars. And >>It is. And you know what else, this, as, as Joe's going through this, we all know their supply chain chain constraints, right? And this solves a lot of supply constraints because Joe, if you would be purchasing today, you'd be buying, you're looking at had, and you're actually having to purchase today where if you go into an apex flex on demand, you don't have that full commitment of having to purchase, but you can get ahead of the supply chain. So you can be looking six months in advance, you can be doing capacity planning and I'm Jed. I'm sure you're doing that leveraging. Like what's my future and not be worried about, I have this huge burden upfront. >>Yeah. And I mean, we have two levers right now. One is we have this extra capacity there. I can, you know, pick up the phone and, and call our Dell rep and say, Hey, I'm gonna modify my commit rate. And so now that's, you know, the new baseline I can use all day every day. Uh, and, and, you know, we still have some burstability and then separately, we can say, we want to expand the contract or, or, or, you know, basically acquire more hardware for additional burst or additional commit. Both of those things are, are options. We only had the, we had to go buy it and we need to know when we have to have it available. So you kind of back into this ordering schedule for, uh, you know, like a traditional CapEx purchase. >>So Steve, obviously Silicon labs is, is leaning again. Are you seeing any other patterns in your customer base, uh, where this is being applied? What can you share >>With us there? Yeah, it's it, I believe this is a fairly horizontal solution. Any customer can really utilize it. I mean, traditionally people would buy for two and three years worth of capacity and slowly consume it over time, but you paid up front. Right. That's how it, that's kind of how it worked. Cause I didn't want to go back to the well year after year after year. Right. So, um, you know, and I, and I think, I think if anything, the, the, the cloud, the hyperscalers has, uh, taught the world, some things taught the industry. Some things, you know, in a, in a perfect world customers like to consume and pay for what they use, you know, and in the increments that they use it as much as possible as closely aligned to that as they could get. And what I see, what I see in this, you know, cuz I, I kind of put solu in my role, I'm putting solutions and customers and bringing those together other right. And, and complimenting that with services of our own. Right. But, but what I see over time that, that almost all the manufacturers and Dells does a wonderful job, but almost all the manufacturers will be delivering technology on a subscription basis. So the more I learn, the more I know, the more I understand about how to deliver those and provide those to customers is better off we are >>Because it aligns with business value. And that's what you're seeing Jud correct. >>Steve made an interesting comment in there. Uh, you know, he was talking about the cloud and for us, there's always pressure to say, Hey, you know, can we burst in the cloud? And for Edda workloads, every time we look at this, it's a data problem. It, it, it's not a computing problem for us. EA workloads tend to generate a lot of data and you know, there's a, there are a lot of tools, uh, you know, there's just a bunch of stuff that you have to have available to run those jobs. And so you have to look at that very carefully. The company that I work for Silicon labs has been around for a long time and we have a lot of development effort. That's been put into automating and simplifying things for our design engineering and trying to, you know, manipulate that and make it to where we can burst just certain jobs out to the cloud efficiently and cost effectively. Hasn't really resonated for us. But the flex on demand thing gave a us the ability to kind of achieve some of that burst ability. I mean, not to the same level of scale of course, but you know, we, we can do that at, you know, our own speed in our own data centers with our own data. And we don't have to worry about trying to, you know, peel an onion and put something new together, make it cloud friendly. It's >>Substantially similar. We gotta go. But to Aaron bring us home. >>Yeah. Hey, I think when we think about Dell, it's about listening to our customers and our partners. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, which we continue to do. We continue to evolve our products and, and apex is around choice and flexibility in delivering to customers an option to pay for what they use. It's a great solution. Appreciate the time guys. >>Great conversation. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. All right. Thank you. Good luck. All right. And thank you for watching. This is Dave VoLTE for the cube. We've been back with more wall to wall coverage. John furry, you'll be back Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. You're watching the queue >>And.

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> High profile cyber attacks like the SolarWinds hack, the JBS meat and the Florida municipality breach, have heightened awareness of how exposed, critical infrastructure has become. Because the pandemic has shifted employees to remote modes of work, hackers now have a much easier target to fish for credentials and exploit less secure home networks. Take the recent Log4j vulnerability, that's yet another example, of how hackers can take advantage of weak links in the chain. Now data storage companies have an important role to play in fighting cyber crime. Ultimately, they provide the equivalent of a bank vault if you will, and are responsible for storing and protecting the data that cyber criminals are targeting to steal or encrypt, in an effort to hold companies hostage, in a ransomware attack. Now in an effort to help customers understand how to protect themselves from such vulnerabilities, and how one storage company is addressing these challenges, the Cube is hosting this special presentation InfiniGuard Cyber Resilience: New Cybercrime Solutions. And we're going to speak with Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of Infinidat, and then we'll bring in Stan Wysocki who is the president of Mark III Systems who is either an expert in IT infrastructure and artificial intelligence. First, let me welcome Eric Herzog back to the Cube, hello, Eric. >> Great, Dave, thank you very much, always love talking to you and the Cube, about leading edge technology solutions for end users. >> Alright let's do it. So, first we want to address the transformation and big business progress of Infinidat. New CEO, he's injected new management, new head of marketing obviously, Phil Bullinger is really been focused on accelerating the company's original vision, and doing so, Eric, in the typically unconventional style of Infinidat, you just put out a press release, capping 2021, can you set the stage for us, and give us the business update? >> Sure, so of course we summarized our 2021 results. What a very, very strong year. What a very, very strong year. We increased our bookings over 40% year to year. Even in Q4, we increased our bookings over 68%. And over 25% of the fortune 50 use an Infinidat solution, either our InfiniBox, or InfiniBox SSA, all flash array, or our Infiniguard, which is the focus of the launch we're doing today, on February 9th. >> Yeah, so I always said that Infinidat is one of the best kept secrets in the storage business. So let's talk about that hard news, what you launched on February 9th, and why it's important. >> Well, what we've done is we've got a high end enterprise purpose-built backup appliance, the InfiniGuard. We made some substantial advances in that. The key is focused on cyber resilience with what we call our infinisafe technology. Infinisafe incorporates a number of subsets, of cyber resilience from immutable snapshots, to logical air gapping, to fenced isolated networks, to almost instantaneous recovery for your backup data sets. In addition, we also dramatically improved the performance of the backup and recovery, which means, for example, if a backup window was taking three hours, now the backup window on that primary backup dataset could take only an hour and a half, which of course, as we all know backup dramatically impacts the performance of your primary applications, your primary servers, and your primary storage. So we've done both the cyber resilience aspect and then, on modern data protection, making sure that the backup and recovery are faster, for a traditional backup workload. >> So tell us a little bit more about Infinisafe, and specifically, Eric I'm interested in how it's different from other solutions, don't make me a liar, I had said, you guys always kind of take nonconventional approaches so tell us, add a little color to Infinisafe and how is it really unique from competitors? >> Sure, well Infinisafe incorporates as I mentioned, several different aspects. First of all, the immutable snapshots. So immutable snapshots can not be deleted, they cannot be altered, you cannot accelerate the rate, you can set the rate of immutable stuff, do I want to do it once a day? Do I want to do it twice a day? And obviously if a hacker could get in, you could accelerate that. Our immutable snaps are physically separated from the management schema. So the inside of an Infiniguard, we have what we call a data dedupe appliance, and that data dedupe engine, it goes ahead and it applies data reduction technology, to that back up data set. But we've divorced the immutable snapshots from the management of what we now call a DDE. So the DDE has kind of access of giving you that gap, that logical gap between the management schema of a DDE, and of course the immutable snapshot. We also combine that with this air gap technology, you've got the immutability and the air gap, which is local in that instance, but we also can do it remotely. So we can replicate from one Infiniguard in data center A, to a different Infiniguard in data center B. You then can configure that backup data set with the same immutable snapshot, and the same length, one day, half a day, six hours, whatever you choose, and then of course it'll have that same capability. The third thing we've done is very unique. We have a fenced isolated network to perform forensics. So, if the Cube has a cyber or malware attack, you need to make sure that once you've cleaned it up, off the primary storage, the primary servers, that you recover, a known good data set. So we set up this isolated fence network in which to perform that forensic analysis, to give you the appropriate good recover point. However, unlike many of our competitors, we can do it with a single InfiniBox. Some of our competitors, right on their websites say, you need two of their purpose-built backup appliances, to do cyber resilience. Meaning, twice the CapEx and twice the OpEx, which we can do with a single Infiniguard solution. And then lastly is our near instantaneous recovery. As you know, we're recovering backup data sets. We can make between 15 and 30 minutes time, the backup data set fully accessible to the backup admin or the storage admin to use their Commvault, their Veeam, their Veritas, their IBM Spectrum Protect, or whatever their backup software is, to do recovery from the InfiniGuard box, back to the primary storage using of course the backup software that they created the original dataset with. That is very unique. When you look out in the industry and look at, whether it be purpose-built backup competitors, or whether you look at primary storage competitors, almost no one talks about the speed of their recovery, and the one or two that do, talk about recovering the data set. We recover the entire environment. We are ready to go, and the backup admin, if they were, for example, Commvault, Veeam or Veritas, they could immediately start the backup, as soon as we did our recovery, which again, takes between 15 and 30 minutes, independent of the data set size. That could be 50 terabytes, it could be a petabyte, it could be two petabytes. And even two petabytes of data can be available in 15 to 30 minutes. And then of course, the backup admin can restore from that backup dataset. Very powerful and very unique in those aspects. >> Whilst the reason why this is so important is like I said, it's like the bank vault, because hackers are going to go after that backup corpus that's where the gold is, that's where all the data is. So this all really sounds good. But there's more than Infinisafe in this launch. What else should we know? >> Well, the other thing we've done is dramatically improved the performance of the purpose-built backup plants at the core. So for example, the last time we publicly announced our numbers, we were at 74 terabytes an hour, now we're 180 terabytes an hour. So of course, as we all know, when you do a backup, it impacts the performance of the primary applications, the primary servers and the primary storage. So if that backup window was taking three hours, now that we've more than doubled the performance, you could be up to 50% better. So a three hour backup window, if that's what the dataset took to be backed up, now we can get that down to an hour and a half or even faster. So that of course minimizes the impact on primary storage, primary applications, and of course your primary storage, making it much, much more efficient, from a backup perspective, and of course less impact on the primary applications, the primary servers, and primary storage. >> So I've talked to a number of Infinidat customers, they're very loyal and kind of passionate. So I wonder if you could kind of put that perspective on this discussion. The impact that InfiniGuard, this announcement, that's going to have for your customers, paint a picture as to how it's going to change their business. >> Sure, so let me give you an example. One of our customers is a cloud service buyer, in North America, they focus only on healthcare. So here's a couple of key benefits that they got. First of all, they use our integration with two different backup vendors. They don't have one, they have two. So we're tightly integrated with our backup software partners. They got a 40% cost savings on CapEX, compared to the previous vendor that they had. And, they used to be able to do 30,000 backup per day, now they can do 90,000 backup a day. And by the way, that's all with the previous version of InfiniGuard, not the version we just announced on the 9th. One of our other customers, which is in AMEA and they happened to be an energy company, they were using purpose-built backup from the other vendor, and they had 14 of them, seven in data center one, and seven in data center two. With InfiniGuard, they've got one in data center one, and one in data center two. So 14 purpose-built backup appliances consolidated down into two. And on top of that, those purpose-built backup appliances from the other vendor actually had a couple recovery failures, where they were not able to recover the data. They've been installed for a year now, they've had zero recovers, zero recovery failures, whereas the previous vendor had some. And lastly, let's talk about a large global fortune financial services. So, one of the biggest in the industry, their cost savings from their previous vendor was 46%. In addition, when you look at their cyber resilience design, they were using one of those vendors that probably talks about needing two system products to do their cyber resiliency. They again were able to take those two systems out, and use one InfiniGuard solution. Again, reducing both their capital expenditure, two going to one. And then the operational expenditure, they only have to manage one InfiniGuard versus two of the other guys appliances. Those are just three examples all over the world. One in cloud service providing, one in the energy space, and one a global fortune 500 financial services company. Just some real world examples. And all those by the way, Dave, were before the enhancements of Infinisafe, and before the additional performance we've added in the launch of InfiniGuard on February 9th. >> So like I'm just kind of sketching out the business case, you know, put my CFO hat on. So you're lowering costs cause you're consolidating, so that means I need less hardware and software. But also there's probably labor costs associated with that. If I could do it faster with less resources, I got less stuff to manage. You're accelerating the backup time, so that frees up resources that I can apply elsewhere, recovery, you know, is really important. So I'm inferring faster recovery, all this lowers my risk, and then I can sort of calculate the probability of having data loss, and then what that means to my business. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, yeah. And in fact, the other impact is on your primary service and your primary storage. If the backup window shrinks, then you're not slowing down that SAP app, that Oracle app, you know, that SQL app, whatever you're running, whether that be the financials, whether that be your logistics, whether it be your manufacturing system, every time you turn on that backup, to do that backup, that backup window slows you down. So cutting that in half has an impact on the real-world application side, which obviously most storage guys, you know, it's hard for us to quantify. But you are taking the impact of backup, and basically reducing it, if you will shrinking the backup window, so their primary applications don't get hammered as much by the backup while they're still trying to run that SAP, that Oracle or that SQL workload. >> And you're not a backup software vendor, so I have optionality there. I can pretty much choose all the popular, you know. >> Absolutely, so Veeam, Veritas, Commvault, IBM Spectrum Protect, all the majors. And in fact, one of the players I mentioned, as you were talking about the end-users, they use two different backup packages, two of 'em. So, two of the major vendors that I named, we work with them just within one account. So, we're very flexible, the user picks what they want from a backup software perspective, and we can work with anything. So, whatever they want to use, is fine with us. We integrate with all of them, we have integration, for example, also with VMware, for vVols and other aspects in container integration, so you know, whether it be our purpose-built backup appliance, InfiniGuard, or what we do with the InfiniBox, we always make sure we integrate with the surrounding environment. 'Cause storage is not an island, storage needs to exist in your data center, or your hybrid cloud data center, or what you're doing for containers. So we make sure we have integration with our InfiniBox, our InfiniBox SSA, all flash. And of course the product we're enhancing today, the InfiniGuard. >> Yeah, integration is super important in the enterprise. Enterprises want solutions, they're busy. (laughs) They don't have unlimited budget to go, you know, plugging stuff together. So, okay Eric, we got to leave it there. Thank you so much. >> Great, thank you very much Dave. Always love talking to the Cube. >> Okay, in a moment Stan Wysocki is coming in. He's the president of Mark III Systems. He's going to join us for a drill down on how InfiniGuard is impacting customers. You're watching the Cube, your global leader, in enterprise tech coverage. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson, and this is part of our continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next 2021. We have a very interesting subject to discuss. I have two special guests from Google to join me in a conversation about the financial services space. I'm joined by Yolande Piazza, vice president of financial services sales for Google Cloud and Zac Mauf, managing director for global financial services solutions for Google Cloud. Yolande and Zac, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you for having us. Looking forward to it. >> Well it's great to have you here. You know, financial services is really an interesting area when you talk about cloud because I'm sure you both remember a time, not that long ago, when we could ask a financial services organization, what their plans for cloud or what their cloud strategy was, and they would give a one word answer and that answer was, never. (laughing) So Zac, let's start out with you, what has changed? Are you and Yolande going to tell us that in fact, financial services organizations are leveraging cloud now? >> Yeah, it's a very exciting time to be in the cloud space, in financial services, because you're exactly right David. People are starting to make the transition to cloud in a real way. And a lot has gone into that, as you know, it's a highly regulated space and so there were a lot of legitimate reasons around getting kind of the regulatory frameworks in place and making sure that the risk and compliance pieces were addressed. But then there was also, as you know, technology is a major backbone for financial services. And so there's also this question of, how do we transition? And a lot of work and time has gone into moving workloads, thinking about like, what is the sort of the right migration strategy for you to get from the current situation to a more cloud native world. And to your point, we're really early, we're really early, but we're very excited and we've been investing heavily on our side to get those foundational pieces in place. But we also realized that we have to think about what are the business cases, that we want to build on top of cloud. It's not just a kind of IT modernization, which is a big part of the story, but the other part of the story is once you get all of this, technology onto the cloud platform, there are things that you can do that you couldn't do in on-prem situations. And a lot of that for us is around the data, AI and ML space. And we really see that being the way to really unlock huge amounts of value. Both of them require massive amounts of compute and breaking down all of these silos that have really developed over time within financial institutions. And really moving to the cloud is the way to unlock a lot of that. So we're really excited about a lot of those use cases that are starting to come to life now. >> Yeah. So I want to dig a little deeper on some of that Zac, but before we do, Yolande make this real for us. Give me some examples of actual real-life financial services organizations and what they're doing with Google Cloud now. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're really proud to be able to announce, a number of new partnerships across the industry. You think about Wells Fargo, you think about Scotia Bank, you think about what we're doing with HSBC. They really are starting to bring to life and recognized that it's not just internally, you have to look at that transformation to cloud, it's really, how do you use this platform to help you go on the journey with your customers? I think a move to a multi-cloud common approach for our customers and our clients, is exactly what we need to be focused on. And the other- >> Hold on, hold on, Yolande. I'm sorry. Did the Google person just say multi-cloud? Because multi- cloud doesn't sound like, only Google Cloud to me. Can you- >> No, and I think Wells, absolutely, and I think Wells announced it's taking a multi-cloud approach to its digital infrastructure strategy, leveraging both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. And the reason being is they've openly communicated that a locked in and preparatory systems, isn't the way to go for them. They want that open flexibility. They want the ability to be able to move workloads across the different industries. And I think it's well known that this aligns completely with our principles and at Google we've always said that we support open multi and hybrid cloud strategies because we believe our customers should be able to run what they want, where they want it. And that was exactly the philosophy that that Wells took. So, and if you look at what they were trying to do is they're looking to be able to serve their customers in a different way. I think that it's true now that customers are looking for personalized services, instant gratification, the ability to interact, where they want and when they want. So we're walking with the Wells teams to really bring to life through AI, our complex AI and data solutions to really enable them to move at speed and serve their customers in a rapidly changing world. >> So Yolande, part of the move to cloud includes the fact that we're all human beings and perception can become reality. Issues like security, which are always at the forefront of someone's mind in financial services space, there is the perception, and then there is the reality. Walk us through today where perception is in the financial services space. And then Zac, I'm going to go back to you to tell us what's the reality. And is there a disconnect? Because often technology in this space has been ahead of people's comfort level for rational reasons. So Yolande, can you talk about from a perception perspective where people are. >> So I have to tell you, we are having conversations with both the incumbents and traditional organizations, as well as, the uprising, the fintechs, and the neobanks around how does technology really unlock and unleash a new business model. So we're talking about things like how does technology and help them grow that organization. How does it take out costs in that organization? How do you use all cloud platform to think about managing risks, whether that's operational, whether it's reputational, industry or regulatory type risk? And then how do we enable our partners and our customers to be able to move at speed? So all of those conversations are now on the table. And I think a big shift from when Zac and I both were sitting on the other side of the table in those financial services industries is a recognition that this couldn't and shouldn't be done alone, that it's going to require a partnership, it's going to require, really shifting to put technology at the forefront. And I think when you talk about perception, I would say a couple of years ago, I think it was more of a perception that they were really technology companies. And I think now we're really starting to see the shifts that these are technology companies serving their customers in a banking environment. >> So Zac, can you give us some- Yeah. Yeah. Zac, can you give us some examples of how that plays out from a solutions perspective? What are some of the things that you and Yolande are having conversations with these folks in? >> Yeah. - I mean, absolutely. I think there's three major trends that we're seeing, where I think we can bring the power of sort of the Google ecosystem to really change business models and change how things are done. The first is really this massive change that's been happening for like over 10 years now, but it's really this change in customers, expecting financial institutions to meet them where they are. And that started with information being delivered to them through mobile devices and online banking. And then it went to payments, and now it's going into lending and it's going into insurance. But it changes the way that financial services companies need to operate because now they need to figure out how to deliver everything digitally, embedded into the experience that their customers are having in all of these digital ecosystems. So there's lot that we're doing in that space. The second is really around modernizing the technology environment. There is still a massive amount of paper in these organizations. Most of it has been transferred to digital paper, but the workflows and the processes that are still needing to be streamlined. And there's a lot that we can do with our AI model and technology to be able to basically take unstructured data and create structured data. Thank Google Photos, you can now search for your photo library and find, pictures of you on bridges. The same thing we can now do with documents and routine interactions with chat bot. People are expecting 24/7 service. And a lot of people want to be able to interact through chat versus through voice. And the final part of this that we're seeing a lot of use cases in is in the kind of risk and regulatory space. Coming out of the financial crisis, there was this need to massively upgrade everybody's data capabilities and control and risk environments, because so much it was very manual, and a lot of the data to do a lot of the risk and control work was kind of glued together. So everybody went off and built data lakes and figured out that that was actually a really difficult challenge and they quickly became data swamps. And so really how do you unlock the value of those things? Those three use cases, and there's lots of things underneath those, are areas that we're working with customers on. And it's, like you said, it's really exciting because the perception has changed. The perception has changed that now cloud is the sort of future, and everybody is kind of now realized they have to figure out how to engage. And I think a lot of the partnership things that Yolande was talking about is absolutely true. They're looking for a strategic relationship versus a vendor relationship, and those are really exciting changes for us. >> So I just imagined a scenario where a Dave, Zac, and Yolande are at the cloud pub talking after hours over a few pints, and Dave says, "Wow, you know, 75%, 80% of IT is still on-premises." And Yolande looks at me and says, "On-premises? We're dealing with on-paper still." Such as the life of a financial services expert in this space. So Yolande, what would you consider sort of the final frontier or at least the next frontier in cloud meets financial services? What are the challenges that we have yet to overcome? I just mentioned, the large amount of stuff that's still on premises, the friction associated with legacy applications and infrastructure. That's one whole thing. But is there one thing that in a calendar year, 2022, if you guys could solve this for the financial services industry, what would it be? And if I'm putting you on the spot, so be it. >> No, no. I'm not going to hold it to just one thing. I think the shift, I think the shift to personalization and how does the power of, you know, AI and machine learning really start to change and get into way more predictive technologies. As I mentioned, customers want to be a segmentation of one. They don't want to be forced fit into the traditional banking ecosystems. There's a reason that customers have on average 14 different financial services apps on their phones. Yep. Less than three to 5% of their screen time is actually spent on them. It's because something is missing in that environment. There's a reason that you could go to any social media site and in no time at all, be able to pull up over 200 different communities of people trying to find out financial services information in layman's terms that is relevant to them. So the ability and where we're really doubling down is on this personalization. Being way more predictive, understanding where a customer is on their journey and being able to meet them at that point, whether that's the bright offers, whether that's recognizing, to Zac's point, that they've come in on one channel but they now want to switch to another channel. And how do they not have to start again every time? So these are some of the basics things, so we really doubled down on how do we start to solve in those areas. I think also the shift, I think in many cases, especially in the risk space, it's been very much what I would call, a people process technology approach, start to imagine what happens if you turn that around and think about how technology can help you be more predictive internally in your business and create better outcomes. So I think there's so many areas of opportunities, and what's really exciting is we're not restricted, we're having conversations that are titled, the art of the possible, or the future of, or help us come in and reinvent. So I think you're going to see a lot of shift probably in the next 12 to 18 months, I would say, and the capabilities and the ability to service the customer differently and meet them on their journey. >> Well, it sounds like the life of a cloud financial services person is much more pleasurable than back when it consisted of primarily running into brick walls constantly. This conversation five or 10 years ago would have been more like, please trust us, please. Just give us a shot. >> I think Zac and I both reminisce that we couldn't have joined at a more exciting time. It's the locker or whatever you want to call it, but it is a completely different world and the conversations are fun and refreshing, and you can really start to see how we have the ability to partner to change the landscape, across all of the different financial services industries. And I think that's what keeps Zac and I going every day. >> And you said earlier that you alluded to the idea that you used to be on the other side of the table, in other words, in the financial services industry on the customer side. So you pick the right time to come across. >> Without a doubt, without a doubt. Yes. >> Well, with that, I want to thank both of you for joining me today. This is really fascinating. Financial services is something that touches all of us individually in our daily lives. It's something that everyone can relate to at some level. And it also represents, that tip of the spear, the cutting edge of cloud. So very interesting. Thank you both again, pleasure to meet you both. Next time, hopefully it will be in-person and we can compare our steps that we've taken during the conference. With that I'll sign off. This has been a fantastic Cube conversation, part of our continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson, Thanks again for joining us. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to the customer. Obsession begins with data session. Uh, thank you for, for attending. Um, at Cloudera, we believe that a custom session begins with, uh, with, with data. Um, and, uh, you know, financial services is Cloudera is largest industry vertical. We have approximately 425 global financial services customers, uh, which consists of 82 out of a hundred of the largest global banks of which we have 27 that are globally systemic banks, uh, four out of the five, uh, top stock exchanges, eight out of the 10 top wealth management firms and all four of the top credit card networks. Uh, so as you can see most financial services institutions utilize Cloudera for data analytics and machine learning. Uh, we also have over 20 central banks and it doesn't or so financial regulators. So it's an incredible footprint, which glimpse Cloudera, lots of insight into the many innovations that our customers are coming in up >>With >>Customers have grown more independent and demanding. Uh, they want the ability to perform many functions on their own and, uh, be able to do it. Uh, he do them on their mobile devices, uh, in a recent Accenture study, more than 50% of customers, uh, are focused on, uh, improving their customer experience through more personalized, uh, offers in advice. The study found that 75% of people are actually willing to share their data for better personalized offers and more efficient and intuitive of services >>Together. And >>A better understanding of your customers use all the data available to develop a complete view of your customer and, uh, and better serve them. Uh, this also breaks down, uh, costly silos, uh, shares data in, in accordance with privacy laws and assists with regulatory adherence. So different and organizations are going to be at different points in their data analytics and AI journey. Uh, there are several degrees of streaming and batch data, both structured and unstructured. Uh, you need a platform that can handle both, uh, with common, with a common governance layer, um, near real time and real real-time sources help make data more relevant. So if you look at this graphic, looking at it from left to right, uh, normal streaming and batch data comes from core banking and, uh, and lending operations data in pretty much a structured format as financial institutions start to evolve. >>Uh, they start to ingest near real-time streaming that comes not only from customers, but also from, from newsfeeds for example, and they start to capture more behavioral data that they can use to evolve their models, uh, and customer experience. Uh, ultimately they start to ingest more real-time streaming data, not only, um, standard, uh, sources like market and transaction data, but also alternative sources such as social media and connected sources, such as wearable devices, uh, giving them more, more data, better data, uh, to extract intelligence and drive personalized actions based on data in real time at the right time, um, and use machine learning and AI, uh, to drive anomaly detection and protect and predict, uh, present potential outcomes. >>So this >>Is another way to look at it. Um, this slide shows the progression of the big data journey as it relates to a customer experience example, um, the dark blue represents, um, visibility or understanding your customer. So we have a data warehouse and are starting to develop some analytics, uh, to know your customer and start to provide a better customer 360 experience. Uh, the medium blue area, uh, is, uh, customer centric or where we learn, uh, the customer's behavior. Uh, at this point we're improving our analytics, uh, gathering more customer centric information to perform, uh, some more exploratory, uh, data sciences. And we can start to do things like cross sell or upsell based on the customer's behavior, which should improve, uh, customer retention. The light blue area is, uh, is proactive customer inter interactions or where we now have the ability, uh, to predict customers needs and wants and improve our interaction with the customer, uh, using applied machine learning and, and AI, uh, clap the Cloudera data platform. >>Um, you know, business use cases require enabling, uh, the end-to-end journey, which we referred to as the data life cycle, uh, what the data life cycle, what is the data life cycle that our customers want to take their data through to enable the end-to-end data journey. If you ask our customers, they want different types of analytics, uh, for their diverse user bases to, to help them implement their, their, their use cases while managed by a centralized security and governance later layer. Uh, in other words, um, the data life cycle to them provides multifunction analytics, uh, at each stage within the data journey, uh, that, uh, integrated and centralized, uh, security, uh, and governance, for example, uh, enterprise data consists of real-time and transactional type type data. Examples include, uh, clickstream data, web logs, um, machine generated, data chatbots, um, call center interactions, uh, transactions, uh, within legacy applications, market data, et cetera. >>We need to manage, uh, that data life cycle, uh, to provide real enterprise data insights, uh, for use cases around enhance them personalized customer experience, um, customer journey analytics, next best action, uh, sentiment and churn analytics market, uh, campaign optimization, uh, mortgage, uh, processing optimization and so on. Um, we bring a diverse set of data then, um, and then enrich it with other data about our customers and products, uh, provide reports and dashboards such as customer 360 and use predictions from machine learning models to provide, uh, business decisions and, and offers of, uh, different products and services to customers and maintain customer satisfaction, um, by using, um, sentiment and turn analytics. These examples show that, um, the whole data life cycle is involved, um, and, uh, is in continuous fashion in order to meet these types of use cases, uh, using a single cohesive platform that can be, uh, that can be served by CDP, uh, the data, the Cloudera data platform. >>Okay. Let's, uh, let's talk about, uh, some of the experiences, uh, from our customers. Uh, first we'll talk about Bunco, something there. Um, Banco Santander is a major global bank headquartered in Spain, uh, with, uh, major operations and subsidiaries all over Europe and north and, and south America. Uh, one of its subsidiary, something there UK wanted to revolutionize the customer experience with the use of real-time data and, uh, in app analytics, uh, for mobile users, however, like many financial institutions send them there had a, he had a, had a large number of legacy data warehouses spread across many business use, and it's within consistent data and different ways of calculating the same metrics, uh, leading to different results. As a result, the company couldn't get the comprehensive customer insights it needed. And, uh, and business staff often worked on multiple versions of the truth. Sometimes there worked with Cloudera to improve a single data platform that could support all its workloads, including self-service analytics, uh, operational analytics and data science processes in processing 10 million transactions, daily or 30,000 transactions per second at peak times. >>And, uh, bringing together really, uh, nearly two to two petabytes of data. The platform provides unprecedented, uh, customer insight and business value across the organization, uh, over 80 cents. And Dera has realized impressive, uh, benefits spanning, uh, new revenues, cost savings and risk reductions, including creating analytics for, for corporate customers with near real-time shopping behavior, um, and, and helping identify 7,000 new corporate, uh, customer prospects, uh, reducing capital expenditures by, uh, 3.2 million annually and decreasing operating expenses by, uh, 650,000, um, enabling marketing to realize, uh, 2.4 million in annual savings on, on cash back on commercial transactions, um, and protecting 3.7 million customers from financial crime impacts through 95, new proactive control alerts, improving risk and capital calculations to reduce the amount of money. It must set aside, uh, as part of a, as part of risk mandates. Uh, for example, in one instance, the risk team was able to release a $5.2 million that it had withheld for non-performing credit card loans by properly identifying healthy accounts miscategorized as high risk next, uh, let's uh, talk about, uh, Rabo bank. >>Um, Rabobank is one of the largest banks in the Netherlands, uh, with approximately 8.3 million customers. Uh, it was founded by farmers in the late 19th century and specializes in agricultural financing and sustainability oriented banking, uh, in order to help its customers become more self-sufficient and, uh, improve their financial situations such as debt settlement, uh, rebel bank needed to access, uh, to a varied mix of high quality, accurate, and timely customer data, the talent, uh, to provide this insight, however, was the ability to execute sophisticated and timely data analytics at scale Rabobank was also faced with the challenge of, uh, shortening time to market. Uh, it needed easier access to customer data sets to ensure that they were using and receiving the right financial support at the right time with, with, uh, data quality and speed of processing. Um, highlighted as two vital areas of improvement. Robert bank was looking to incorporate, um, or create new data in an environment that would not only allow the organization to create a centralized repository of high quality data, but also allow them to stream and, uh, conduct data analytics on the fly, uh, to create actionable insights and deliver a strong customer service experience. >>Rabobank >>Leverage Cloudera due to its ability to cope with heavy pressures on data processing and its capability of ingesting large quantities of real-time streaming data. They were able to quickly create a new data lake that allowed for faster queries of both historical and real-time data to analyze customer loan repayment patterns, uh, to up to the minute transaction records, um, Robert bank and, and its customers could now immediately access, uh, the valuable data needed to help them understand, um, the status of their financial situation, this enabled, uh, rebel bank to spot financial disasters before they happened, enabling them to gain deep and timely insights into which customers were at risk of defaulting on loans. Um, having established the foundation of a modern data architecture Rabobank is now able to run sophisticated machine learning algorithms and, uh, financial models, uh, to help customers manage, um, financial, uh, obligations, um, including, uh, loan repayments, and are able to generate accurate, uh, current liquidity overviews, uh, no next, uh, let's, uh, speak about, um, uh, OVO. >>Uh, so OVO is the leading digital payment rewards and financial services platform in Indonesia, and is present in 115 million devices across the company across the country. Excuse me. Um, as the volume of, of products, uh, within Obos ecosystem increases, the ability to ensure marketing effectiveness is critical to avoid unnecessary waste of time and resources, unlike competitors, uh, banks, w which use traditional mass marketing, uh, to reach customers over, oh, decided to embark on a, on a bold new approach to connect with customers via a ultra personalized marketing, uh, using the stack, the team at OVO were able to implement a change point detection algorithm, uh, to discover customer life stage changes. This allowed OVO, uh, to, uh, build a segmentation model of one, uh, the contextual offer engine Bill's recommendation algorithms on top of the product, uh, including collaborative and context-based filters, uh, to detect changes in consumer consumption >>Patterns. >>As a result, OVO has achieved a 15% increase in revenue, thanks to this, to this project, um, significant time savings through automation and eliminating the chance of human error and have reduced engineers workloads by, by 30%. Uh, next let's talk about, uh, bank Bri, uh, bank Bri is one of the largest and oldest, uh, banks in Indonesia, um, engaging in, in general banking services, uh, for its customers. Uh, they are headquartered in, in Jakarta Indonesia, uh, BR is a well-known, uh, for its, uh, focused on financing initiative initiatives and serves over 75 million customers through its more than 11,000 offices and rural outposts, >>Um, Bri >>Needed to gain better understanding of their customers and market, uh, to improve the efficiency of its operations, uh, reduce losses from non-performing loans and address the rising concern around data security from regulators and consumers, uh, through enhanced fraud detection. This would require the ability to analyze vast amounts of, uh, historical financial data and use those insights, uh, to enhance operations and, uh, deliver better service. Um, Bri used Cloudera's enterprise data platform to build an agile and reliable, uh, predictive augmented intelligence solution. Uh, Bri was now able to analyze 124 years worth of historical financial data and use those insights to enhance its operations and deliver better services. Um, they were able to, uh, enhance their credit scoring system, um, the solution analyzes customer transaction data, and predicts the probability of a customer defaulting on, on payments. Um, the following month, it also alerts Bri's loan officers, um, to at-risk customers, prompting them to take the necessary action to reduce the likelihood of a Vanette profit lost. Uh, this resulted in improved credits in, in improved, uh, credit scoring system, uh, that cut down the approval of micro financing loans, uh, from two weeks to two days to two minutes and, uh, enhanced, uh, fraud detector. >>All right. Uh, this example shows a tabular representation, uh, the evolution of a customer retention use case, um, the evolution of data and analytics, uh, journey that, uh, that for that use case, uh, from aware, uh, text flirtation, uh, to optimization, to being transformative, uh, with every level, uh, data sources increase. And, uh, for the most part, uh, are, are less, less standard, more dynamic and less structured, but always adding more value, more insights into the customer, uh, allowing us to continuously improve our analytics, increase the velocity of the data we ingest, uh, from, from batch, uh, to, uh, near real time, uh, to real-time streaming, uh, the volume of data we ingest continually increases and we progress, uh, the value of the data on our customers, uh, is continuously improving, allowing us to interact more proactively and more efficiently. And, and with that, um, I would, uh, you know, ask you to consider an assess if you are using all the, uh, the data available to understand, uh, and service your customers, and to learn more about, about this, um, you know, visit cloudera.com and schedule a meeting with Cloudera to learn more. And with that, thank you for your time. And thank you for listening.

(upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Joe Rodriguez, Managing Director of Financial Services at Cloudera. Welcome to the Fight Fraud with Data session. At Cloudera we believe that fighting fraud begins with data. So financial services is Cloudera's largest industry vertical. We have approximately 425 global financial services customers, which consists of 82 out of a hundred of the largest global banks of which we have 27 that are globally systemic banks. Four out of the five top stock exchanges, eight out of the top 10 wealth management firms and all four of the top credit card networks. So as you can see, most financial services institutions utilize Cloudera for data analytics and machine learning. We also have over 20 central banks and a dozen or so financial regulators. So it's an incredible footprint which gives Cloudera lots of insight into the many innovations that our customers are coming up with. Criminals can steal thousands of dollars before a fraudulent transaction is detected. So the cost to purchase your account data is well worth the price to fraudsters. According to Experian, credit and a debit card account information sells on the dark web for a mere $5 with the CVV number and up to $110 if it comes with all the bank information, including your name, social security number, date of birth, complete account numbers, and other personal data. Our customers have several key data and analytics challenges when it comes to fighting financial crime. The volume of data that they need to deal with is huge and growing exponentially. All this data needs to be evaluated in real time. There are new sources of streaming data that need to be integrated with existing legacy data sources. This includes biometrics data and enhanced authentication video surveillance, call center data, and of course all that needs to be integrated with existing legacy data sources. There is an analytics Arms Race between the banks and the criminals, and the criminal networks never stop innovating. They also have to deal with disjointed security and governance. Security and governance policies are often set per data source or application requiring redundant work across workloads. And they have to deal with siloed environments. The specialized nature of platforms and people results in disparate data sources and data management processes. This duplicates efforts and divides the business risk and crime teams, limiting collaboration opportunities between them. CDP enhances financial crime solutions to be holistic by eliminating data gaps between siloed solutions, with an enterprise data approach, advanced data analytics and machine learning. By deploying an enterprise wide data platform, you reduce siloed divisions between business risk and crime teams and enable better collaboration through industrialized machine learning, you tighten up the loop between detection and new fraud patterns. Cloudera provides the data platform on which a best of breed applications can run and leverage integrated machine learning. Cloudera stands rather than replaces your existing fraud modeling applications. So Oracle, SAS, Actimize, to name a few, integrate with an enterprise data hub to scale the data, increase speed and flexibility and improve efficacy of your entire fraud system. It also centralizes the fraud workload on data that can be used for other use cases in applications like Enhanced KYC and Customer 360 for example. I just wanted to highlight a couple of our partners in financial crime prevention, Simudyne and Quantexa. So Simudyne provides fraud simulation using agent-based modeling machine learning techniques to generate synthetic transaction data. This data simulates potential fraud scenarios in a cost-effective GDPR-compliant virtual environment to significantly improve financial crime detection systems. Simudyne identifies future fraud topologies for millions of simulations that can be used to dynamically train new machine learning algorithms for enhanced identification. And Quantexa connects the dots within your data using dynamic entity resolution, and advanced network analytics to create context around your customers. This enables you to see the bigger picture and automatically assesses potential criminal behavior. Now let's go over some of our customers and how they're using Cloudera. First, we'll talk about United Overseas Bank or UOB. UOB is a leading full service bank in Asia with a network of more than 500 offices in 19 countries and territories, in Asia Pacific, Western Europe and North America. UOB built a modern data platform on Cloudera that gives it the flexibility and speed to develop new AI and machine learning solutions and to create a data-driven enterprise. UOB set up it's big data analytics center in 2017. It was Singapore's first centralized big data unit within a bank to deepen the bank's data analytic capabilities and to use data insights to enhance the bank's performance. Essential to this work was implementing a platform that could cost efficiently bring together data from dozens of separate systems and incorporate a range of unstructured data, including voice and text. Using Cloudera CDP and machine learning, UOB gained a richer understanding of its customer preferences to help make their banking experience simpler, safer, and more reliable. Working with Cloudera, UOB has a big data platform that gives business staff and data scientists, faster access to relevant and quality data for self-service analytics, machine learning and emerging artificial intelligence solutions. With new self-service analytics and machine learning driven insights, UOB has realized improvements in digital banking, asset management, compliance, AML, and more. Advanced AML detection capabilities, help analysts detect suspicious transactions either based on hidden relationships of shell companies and high risk individuals with Cloudera and machine learning technologies, UOB was able to enhance AML detection and reduce the time to identify new links from months to three weeks. Next, let's speak about MasterCard. So MasterCard's principle business is to process payments between banks and merchants and the credit issuing banks and credit unions of the purchasers who use the MasterCard brand debit and credit cards to make purchases. MasterCard chose Cloudera Enterprise for fraud detection and to optimize their DW infrastructure, delivering deep insights and best practices and big data security and compliance. Next, let's speak about Bank Rakyat in Indonesia or BRI. BRI is one of the largest and oldest banks in Indonesia and engages in the provision of general banking services. It's headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia. BRI is well-known for its focus on microfinancing initiatives and serves over 75 million customers through its more than 11,000 offices and rural service outposts. BRI required better insight to understand customer activity and identify fraudulent transactions. The bank needed a solid foundation that allowed it to leverage the power of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to gain better understanding of customers and the market. BRI used Cloudera Enterprise data platform to build an agile and reliable, predictive augmented intelligence solution to enhance its credit scoring system. And to address the rising concern around data security from regulators and customers, BRI developed a real-time fraud detection service powered by Cloudera and Kafka, BRI's data scientists developed a machine learning model for fraud detection by creating a behavioral scoring model based on customer savings, loan transactions, deposits, payroll and other financial real-time data. This led to improvements in its fraud detection and credit scoring capabilities, as well as the development of a new digital microfinancing product. With the enablement of real-time fraud detection, BRI was able to reduce the rate of fraud by 40%. It improved relationship manager productivity by two and a half fold. It improved the credit scoring system to cut down on micro-financing loan processing times from two weeks to two days to now two minutes. So fraud prevention is a good area to start with data focus if you haven't already. It offers a quick return on investment and it's a focused area that's not too entrenched across the company. To learn more about fraud prevention, go to www.cloudera.com, and you should schedule a meeting with Cloudera to learn even more. And with that, thank you for listening and thank you for your time. (upbeat music)

>>Uh, hi, I'm Joe Rodriguez, managing director of financial services at Cloudera. Uh, welcome to the fight fraud with a data session, uh, at Cloudera, we believe that fighting fraud with, uh, uh, begins with data. Um, so financial services is Cloudera's largest industry vertical. We have approximately 425 global financial services customers, uh, which consists of 82 out of a hundred of the largest global banks of which we have 27 that are globally systemic banks, uh, four out of the five top, uh, stock exchanges, uh, eight out of the top 10 wealth management firms and all four of the top credit card networks. So as you can see most financial services institutions, uh, utilize Cloudera for data analytics and machine learning, uh, we also have over 20 central banks and a dozen or so financial regulators. So it's an incredible footprint which gives Cloudera lots of insight into the many innovations, uh, that our customers are coming up with. Uh, criminals can steal thousands of dollars before a fraudulent transaction is detected. So the cost of, uh, to purchase a, your account data is well worth the price to fraudsters. Uh, according to Experian credit and debit card account information sells on the dark web for a mere $5 with the CVV number and up to $110. If it comes with all the bank information, including your name, social security number, date of birth, uh, complete account numbers and, and other personal data. >>Um, our customers have several key data and analytics challenges when it comes to fighting financial crime. The volume of data that they need to deal with is, is huge and growing exponentially. Uh, all this data needs to be evaluated in real time. Uh, there is, uh, there are new sources of, of streaming data that need to be integrated with existing, uh, legacy data sources. This includes, um, biometrics data and enhanced, uh, authentication, uh, video surveillance call center data. And of course all that needs to be integrated with existing legacy data sources. Um, there is an analytics arms race between the banks and the criminals and the criminal networks never stop innovating. They also we'll have to deal with, uh, disjointed security and governance, security and governance policies are often set per data source, uh, or application requiring redundant work, work across workloads. And, and they have to deal with siloed environments, um, the specialized nature of platforms and people results in disparate data sources and data management processes, uh, this duplicates efforts and, uh, divides the, the business risk and crime teams, limiting collaboration opportunities between CDP enhances financial crime solutions, uh, to be holistic by eliminating data gaps between siloed solutions with, uh, an enterprise data approach, uh, advanced, uh, data analytics and machine learning, uh, by deploying an enterprise wide data platform, you reduce siloed divisions between business risk and crime teams and enable better collaboration through industrialized machine learning. >>Uh, you tighten up the loop between, uh, detection and new fraud patterns. Cloudera provides the data platform on which a best of breed applications can run and leverage integrated machine learning cloud Derrick stands rather than replaces your existing fraud modeling applications. So Oracle SAS Actimize to, to name a few, uh, integrate with an enterprise data hub to scale the data increased speed and flexibility and improve efficacy of your entire fraud system. It also centralizes the fraud workload on data that can be used for other use cases in applications like enhanced KYC and a customer 360 4 example. >>I just, I wanted to highlight a couple of our partners in financial crime prevention, uh, semi dine, and Quintex, uh, uh, so send me nine provides fraud simulation using agent-based modeling, uh, machine learning techniques, uh, to generate synthetic transaction data. This data simulates potential fraud scenarios in a cost-effective, uh, GDPR compliant, virtual environment, significantly improved financial crime detection systems, semi dine identifies future fraud topologies, uh, from millions of, of simulations that can be used to dynamically train, uh, new machine learning algorithms for enhanced fraud identification and context, um, uh, connects the dots within your data, using dynamic entity resolution, and advanced network analytics to create context around your customers. Um, this enables you to see the bigger picture and automatically assesses potential criminal beads behavior. >>Now let's go some of our, uh, customers, uh, and how they're using cloud caldera. Uh, first we'll talk about, uh, United overseas bank, or you will be, um, you'll be, is a leading full service bank in, uh, in Asia. It, uh, with, uh, a network of more than 500 offices in, in 19 countries and territories in Asia, Pacific, Western Europe and north America UA, um, UOB built a modern data platform on Cloudera that gives it the flexibility and speed to develop new AI and machine learning solutions and to create a data-driven enterprise. Um, you'll be set up, uh, set up it's big data analytics center in 2017. Uh, it was Singapore's first centralized big data unit, uh, within a bank to deepen the bank's data analytic capabilities and to use data insights to enhance, uh, the banks, uh, uh, performance essential to this work was implementing a platform that could cost efficiently, bring together data from dozens of separate systems and incorporate a range of unstructured data, including, uh, voice and text, um, using Cloudera CDP and machine learning. >>UOB gained a richer understanding of its customer preferences, uh, to help make their, their banking experience simpler, safer, and more reliable. Working with Cloudera UOB has a big data platform that gives business staff and data scientists faster access to relevant and quality data for, for self-service analytics, machine learning and, uh, emerging artificial intelligence solutions. Um, with new self-service analytics and machine learning driven insights, you'll be, uh, has realized improvements in, in digital banking, asset management, compliance, AML, and more, uh, advanced AML detection capabilities, help analysts detect suspicious transactions either based on hidden relationships of shell companies and, uh, high risk individuals, uh, with, uh, Cloudera and machine learning, uh, technologies. You you'll be, uh, was able to enhance AML detection and reduce the time to identify new links from months 2, 3, 3 weeks. >>Excellent mass let's speak about MasterCard. So MasterCard's principle businesses to process payments between banks and merchants and the credit issuing banks and credit unions of the purchasers who use the MasterCard brand debit and credit cards to make purchases MasterCard chose Cloudera enterprise for fraud detection, and to optimize their DW infrastructure, delivering deepens insights and best practices in big data security and compliance. Uh, next let's speak about, uh, bank Rakka yet, uh, in Indonesia or Bri. Um, it, VRI is one of the largest and oldest banks in Indonesia and engages in the provision of general banking services. Uh, it's headquartered in Jakarta Indonesia. Uh, Bri is well known for its focus on financing initiatives and serves over 75 million customers through it's more than 11,000 offices and rural service outposts. Uh, Bri required better insight to understand customer activity and identify fraudulent transactions. Uh, the bank needed a solid foundation that allowed it to leverage the power of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to gain better understanding of customers and the market. >>Uh, Bri used, uh, Cloudera enterprise data platform to build an agile and reliable, predictive augmented intelligence solution, uh, to enhance its credit scoring system and to address the rising concern around data security from regulators, uh, and customers, uh, Bri developed a real-time fraud detection service, uh, powered by Cloudera and Kafka. Uh, Bri's data scientists developed a machine learning model for fraud detection by creating a behavioral scoring model based on customer savings, uh, loan transactions, deposits, payroll and other financial, um, uh, real-time time data. Uh, this led to improvements in its fraud detection and credit scoring capabilities, as well as the development of a, of a new digital microfinancing product, uh, with the enablement of real-time fraud detection, VRI was able to reduce the rate of fraud by 40%. Uh, it improved, uh, relationship manager productivity by two and a half fold. Uh, it improved the credit score scoring system to cut down on micro-financing loan processing times from two weeks to two days to now two minutes. So fraud prevention is a good area to start with a data focus. If you haven't already, it offers a quick return on investment, uh, and it's a focused area. That's not too entrenched across the company, uh, to learn more about fraud prevention, uh, go to kroger.com and to schedule, and you should schedule a meeting with Cloudera, uh, to learn even more. Uh, and with that, thank you for listening and thank you for your time. >>Welcome to the customer. Obsession begins with data session. Uh, thank you for, for attending. Um, at Cloudera, we believe that a custom session begins with, uh, with, with data, um, and, uh, you know, financial services is Cloudera is largest industry vertical. We have approximately 425 global financial services customers, uh, which consists of 82 out of a hundred of the largest global banks of which we have 27 that are globally systemic banks, uh, four out of the five top stock exchanges, eight out of the 10 top wealth management firms and all four of the top credit card networks. Uh, so as you can see most financial services institutions utilize Cloudera for data analytics and machine learning. Uh, we also have over 20 central banks and it doesn't or so financial regulators. So it's an incredible footprint, which glimpse Cloudera, lots of insight into the many innovations that our customers are coming up with. >>Customers have grown more independent and demanding. Uh, they want the ability to perform many functions on their own and, uh, be able to do it. Uh, he do them on their mobile devices, uh, in a recent Accenture study, more than 50% of customers, uh, are focused on, uh, improving their customer experience through more personalized offers and advice. The study found that 75% of people are actually willing to share their data for better personalized offers and more efficient and intuitive services to get it better, better understanding of your customers, use all the data available to develop a complete view of your customer and, uh, and better serve them. Uh, this also breaks down, uh, costly silos, uh, shares data in, in accordance with privacy laws and assists with regulatory advice. It's so different organizations are going to be at different points in their data analytics and AI journey. >>Uh, there are several degrees of streaming and batch data, both structured and unstructured. Uh, you need a platform that can handle both, uh, with common, with a common governance layer, um, near real time. And, uh, real-time sources help make data more relevant. So if you look at this graphic, looking at it from left to right, uh, normal streaming and batch data comes from core banking and, uh, and lending operations data in pretty much a structured format as financial institutions start to evolve. Uh, they start to ingest near real-time streaming data that comes not only from customers, but also from, from newsfeeds for example, and they start to capture more behavioral data that they can use to evolve their models, uh, and customer experience. Uh, ultimately they start to ingest more real time streaming data, not only, um, standard, uh, sources like market and transaction data, but also alternative sources such as social media and connected sources, such as wearable devices, uh, giving them more, more data, better data, uh, to extract intelligence and drive personalized actions based on data in real time at the right time, um, and use machine learning and AI, uh, to drive anomaly detection and protect and predict, uh, present potential outcomes. >>So this is another way to look at it. Um, this slide shows the progression of the big data journey as it relates to a customer experience example, um, the dark blue represents, um, visibility or understanding your customer. So we have a data warehouse and are starting to develop some analytics, uh, to know your customer and start to provide a better customer 360 experience. Uh, the medium blue area, uh, is a customer centric or where we learn, uh, the customer's behavior. Uh, at this point we're improving our analytics, uh, gathering more customer centric information to perform, uh, some more exploratory, uh, data sciences. And we can start to do things like cross sell or upsell based on the customer's behavior, which should improve, uh, customer retention. The light blue area is, uh, is proactive customer inter interactions, or where we now have the ability, uh, to predict customers needs and wants and improve our interaction with the customer, uh, using applied machine learning and, and AI, uh, the Cloudera data platform, um, you know, business use cases require enabling, uh, the end-to-end journey, which we referred to as the data life cycle, uh, what the data life cycle, what is the data life cycle that our customers want, uh, to take their data through, to enable the end to end data journey. >>If you ask our customers, they want different types of analytics, uh, for their diverse user bases to help them implement their, their, their use cases while managed by a centralized security and governance later layer. Uh, in other words, um, the data life cycle to them provides multifunction analytics, uh, at each stage, uh, within the data journey, uh, that, uh, integrated and centralized, uh, security, uh, and governance, for example, uh, enterprise data consists of real time and transactional type type data. Examples include, uh, click stream data, web logs, um, machine generated, data chat bots, um, call center interactions, uh, transactions, uh, within legacy applications, market data, et cetera. We need to manage, uh, that data life cycle, uh, to provide real enterprise data insights, uh, for use cases around enhanced them, personalized customer experience, um, customer journey analytics next best action, uh, sentiment and churn analytics market, uh, campaign optimization, uh, mortgage, uh, processing optimization and so on. >>Um, we bring a diverse set of data then, um, and then enrich it with other data about our customers and products, uh, provide reports and dashboards such as customer 360 and use predictions from machine models to provide, uh, business decisions and, and offers of, uh, different products and services to customers and maintain customer satisfaction, um, by using, um, sentiment and churn analytics. These examples show that, um, the whole data life cycle is involved, um, and, uh, is in continuous fashion in order to meet these types of use cases, uh, using a single cohesive platform that can be, uh, that can be served by CDP, uh, the data, the Cloudera data platform. >>Okay. Uh, let's talk about, uh, some of the experiences, uh, from our customers. Uh, first we'll talk about Bunco suntan there. Um, is a major global bank headquartered in Spain, uh, with, uh, major operations and subsidiaries all over Europe and north and, and south America. Uh, one of its subsidiaries, something there UK wanted to revolutionize the customer experience with the use of real time data and, uh, in app analytics, uh, for mobile users, however, like many financial institutions send them there had a, he had a, had a large number of legacy data warehouses spread across many business use, and it's within consistent data and different ways of calculating the same metrics, uh, leading to different results. As a result, the company couldn't get the comprehensive customer insights it needed. And, uh, and business staff often worked on multiple versions of the truth. Sometime there worked with Cloudera to improve a single data platform that could support all its workloads, including self-service analytics, uh, operational analytics and data science processes, processing processing, 10 million transactions daily or 30,000 transactions per second at peak times. >>And, uh, bringing together really, uh, nearly two to two petabytes of data. The platform provides unprecedented, uh, customer insight and business value across the organization, uh, over 80 cents. And there has realized impressive, uh, benefits spanning, uh, new revenues, cost savings and risk reductions, including creating analytics for, for corporate customers with near real-time shopping behavior, um, and, and helping identify 7,000 new corporate, uh, customer prospects, uh, reducing capital expenditures by, uh, 3.2 million annually and decreasing operating expenses by, uh, 650,000, um, enabling marketing to realize, uh, 2.4 million in annual savings on, on cash, on commercial transactions, um, and protecting 3.7 million customers from financial crime impacts through 95, new proactive control alerts, improving risk and capital calculations to reduce the amount of money. It must set aside, uh, as part of a, as part of risk mandates. Uh, for example, in one instance, the risk team was able to release a $5.2 million that it had withheld for non-performing credit card loans by properly identifying healthy accounts miscategorized as high risk next, uh, let's uh, talk about, uh, Rabobank. >>Um, Rabobank is one of the largest banks in the Netherlands, uh, with approximately 8.3 million customers. Uh, it was founded by farmers in the late 19th century and specializes in agricultural financing and sustainability oriented banking, uh, in order to help its customers become more self-sufficient and, uh, improve their financial situations such as debt settlement, uh, rebel bank needed to access, uh, to a varied mix of high quality, accurate, and timely customer data, the talent, uh, to provide this insight, however, was the ability to execute sophisticated and timely data analytics at scale Rabobank was also faced with the challenge of, uh, shortening time to market. Uh, it needed easier access to customer data sets to ensure that they were using and receiving the right financial support at the right time with, with, uh, data quality and speed of processing. Um, highlighted as two vital areas of improvement, Rabobank was looking to incorporate, um, or create new data in an environment that would not only allow the organization to create a centralized repository of high quality data, but also allow them to stream and, uh, conduct data analytics on the fly, uh, to create actionable insights and deliver a strong customer experience bank level Cloudera due to its ability to cope with heavy pressures on data processing and its capability of ingesting large quantities of real time streaming data. >>They were able to quickly create a new data lake that allowed for faster queries of both historical and real time data to analyze customer loan repayment patterns, uh, to up to the minute transaction records, um, Robert bank and, and its customers could now immediately access, uh, the valuable data needed to help them understand, um, the status of their financial situation in this enabled, uh, rebel bank to spot financial disasters before they happened, enabling them to gain deep and timely insights into which customers were at risk of defaulting on loans. Um, having established the foundation of a modern data architecture Rabobank is now able to run sophisticated machine learning algorithms and, uh, financial models, uh, to help customers manage, um, financial, uh, obligations, um, including, uh, long repayments and are able to generate accurate, uh, current real liquidity. I refuse, uh, next, uh, let's uh, speak about, um, uh, OVO. >>Uh, so OVO is the leading digital payment rewards and financial services platform in Indonesia, and is present in 115 million devices across the company across the country. Excuse me. Um, as the volume of, of products within Obos ecosystem increases, the ability to ensure marketing effectiveness is critical to avoid unnecessary waste of time and resources, unlike competitors, uh, banks, w which use traditional mass marketing, uh, to reach customers over, oh, decided to embark on a, on a bold new approach to connect with customers via, uh, ultra personalized marketing, uh, using the Cloudera stack. The team at OVO were able to implement a change point detection algorithm, uh, to discover customer life stage changes. This allowed OVO, uh, to, uh, build a segmentation model of one, uh, the contextual offer engine Bill's recommendation algorithms on top of the product, uh, including collaborative and context-based filters, uh, to detect changes in consumer consumption patterns. >>As a result, OVO has achieved a 15% increase in revenue, thanks to this, to this project, um, significant time savings through automation and eliminating the chance of human error and have reduced engineers workloads by, by 30%. Uh, next let's talk about, uh, bank Bri, uh, bank Bri is one of the largest and oldest, uh, banks in Indonesia, um, engaging in, in general banking services, uh, for its customers. Uh, they are headquartered in, in Jakarta Indonesia, uh, PR is a well-known, uh, for its, uh, focused on micro-financing initiative initiatives and serves over 75 million customers through more than 11,000 offices and rural outposts, um, Bri needed to gain better understanding of their customers and market, uh, to improve the efficiency of its operations, uh, reduce losses from non-performing loans and address the rising concern around data security from regulators and consumers, uh, through enhanced fraud detection. This would require the ability to analyze the vast amounts of, uh, historical financial data and use those insights, uh, to enhance operations and, uh, deliver better service. >>Um, Bri used Cloudera's enterprise data platform to build an agile and reliable, uh, predictive augmented intelligence solution. Uh, Bri was now able to analyze 124 years worth of historical financial data and use those insights to enhance its operations and deliver better services. Um, they were able to, uh, enhance their credit scoring system, um, the solution analyzes customer transaction data, and predicts the probability of a customer defaulting on, on payments. Um, the following month, it also alerts Bri's loan officers, um, to at-risk customers, prompting them to take the necessary action to reduce the likelihood of the net profit lost, uh, this resulted in improved credit, improved credit scoring system, uh, that cut down the approval of micro financing loans, uh, from two weeks to two days to, to two minutes and, uh, enhanced fraud detection. >>All right. Uh, this example shows a tabular representation, uh, the evolution of a customer retention use case, um, the evolution of data and analytics, uh, journey that, uh, that for that use case, uh, from aware, uh, text flirtation, uh, to optimization, to being transformative, uh, with every level, uh, data sources increase. And, uh, for the most part, uh, are, are less, less standard, more dynamic and less structured, but always adding more value, more insights into the customer, uh, allowing us to continuously improve our analytics, increase the velocity of the data we ingest, uh, from, from batch, uh, to, uh, near real time, uh, to real-time streaming, uh, the volume of data we ingest continually increases and we progress, uh, the value of the data on our customers, uh, is continuously improving, allowing us to interact more proactively and more efficiently. And, and with that, um, I would, uh, you know, ask you to consider and assess if you are using all the, uh, the data available to understand, uh, and service your customers, and to learn more about, about this, um, you know, visit cloudera.com and schedule a meeting with Cloudera to learn more. And with that, thank you for your time. And thank you for listening.

(upbeat music) >> There are many constants in the storage business, relentlessly declining costs per bit. Innovations that perpetually battle the laws of physics, a seemingly endless flow of venture capital, very intense competition. And there's one other constant in the storage industry, Eric Herzog. And he joins us today in this CUBE video exclusive to talk about IBM's recent storage announcements. Eric, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you, my friend. >> Great Dave, thank you very much. Of course, IBM always loves to participate with theCUBE and everything you guys do. Thank you very much for inviting us to come today. >> Really our pleasure. So we're going to cover a lot of ground. IBM Storage made a number of announcements this month around data resilience. You've got a new as a service model. You've got performance enhancements. Eric, can you give us, give us the top line summary of the hard news? >> Yeah. Top line. IBM is enhancing data and cyber resiliency across all non mainframe platforms. We already have it on the mainframe of course, and we're changing CapEx to OpEx with our storage as a service. Those are the key takeaways and the hot ticket items from an end user perspective. >> So maybe we could start with sort of the cyber piece. I mean, wow. I mean the last 18 months have been incredible and you're just seeing, you know, new levels of threats. The work from home pivot has created greater exposure. Organizations are kind of rethinking hybrid. You're seeing the ascendancy of some of the sort of hot cyber startups, but, but you're also seeing the, not only of the attack vectors winded, but the, the techniques are different. You know, threat hunting has become much more important. Your responses to threats. You have to be really careful the whole ransomware thing. So what are some of the big trends that you guys are seeing that are kind of informing how you approach the market? >> Well, first of all, it's gotten a lot worse. In fact, Fortune magazine just released the Fortune 500 a couple of weeks ago, and they had a survey that's public of CEOs, and they said, "What's the number one threat to your business? With no list just what's the number one threat?" Cyber security was number one 66% of the Fortune 500 Chief Executive Officers. Not CIOs not CTOs, but literally the CEOs of the biggest companies in the world. However, it's not just big companies. It hits the mid size, the small companies, everyone is open now to cyber threats and cyber attacks. >> Yeah. So for sure. And it's (chuckles) across the board. Let's talk about your solution, the announcement that you made here. Safeguard Copy, I think is what the branding is. >> Yeah. So what we've done is we've got a number of different technologies within our storage portfolio. For example, with our Spectrum Protect product, we can see anomalous pattern detection and backup data sets. Why would that matter? If I am going to hold theCUBE for ransom, if I don't get control of your secondary storage, snaps, replicas, and backups, you can just essentially say, I'm not paying you. You could just do a recovery, right? So we have anomalous protection there. We see encryption, we encrypt at rest with no performance penalty with our FlashSystem's family. We do air gapping. And in case of safeguarded copy, it's a form of air gapping. So we see physical air gapping with tape. logical air gapping, but to a remote location with snaps or replicas to your Cloud provider, and then local logical on-prem, which is what safeguarded copy does. We've had this technology for many years now on the mainframe platform. And we brought it down to the non mainframe environments, Linux, UNIX, and the Windows Server world by putting safeguarded copy on our FlashSystem's portfolio. >> So, okay. So part of the strategy is air gapping. So you're taking a copy, your air gapping it. You probably, you probably take those snaps, you know, at different intervals, you mix that up, et cetera. How do you manage the copies? How do you ensure if I have to do a recovery that you've got kind of a consistent data set? >> Yeah. So a couple things, first of all, we can create on a single FlashSystem array the full array up to 15,000 immutable copies, essentially they're weren't, you can't delete them, you can't change them. On a per volume basis, you can have 255. This is all managed with our storage copy manager, which can automate the entire process. Creation, deletion, frequency, and even recovery mode. So for example, I could have volume one and volume one perhaps I need to make immutable copies every four hours, while at 255 divided by four a day, I can go for many months and still be making those immutable copies. But with our Copy Services Manager, you can set up to be only 30 days, 60 days, you can set the frequency and once you set it up, it's all automated. And you can even integrate with IBM's QRadar, which is a threat detection and breach software from the security division of IBM. And when certain threats hit, it can actually automatically kick off a safeguarded copy. So what we do is make sure you've got that incredibly rapid recovery. And in fact, you can get air gapping, remotely. We have this on the main frame and a number of large global Fortune 500's actually do double air gapping, local logical, right? So they can do recovery in just a couple hours if they have an attack. And then they take that local logical and either go remote logical. Okay. Which gives them a second level of protection, or they'll go out to tape. So you can use this in a myriad of ways. You can have multiple protection. We even, by the way Dave, have three separate different admin levels. So you can have three different types of admins. One admin can't delete, one admin can. So that way you're also safe from what I'll call industrial espionage. So you can never know if someone's going to be stealing stuff from inside with multiple administrative capabilities, it makes it more difficult for someone to steal your data and then sell it to somebody. >> So, okay. Yeah, right. Because immutable is sort of, well, you're saying that you can set it up so that only one admin has control over that, is that right? If you want it... >> There's three, there's three admins with different levels of control. >> Right. >> And the whole point of having a three admins with different levels of control, is you have that extra security from an internal IT perspective versus one person, again, think of the old war movies, you know, nuclear war movies. Thank God it's never happened. Where two guys turn the key. So you've got some protection, we've got multiple admin level to do that as well. So it's a great solution with the air gapping. It's rapid recovery because it's local, but it is fully logically air gapped separated from the host. It's immutable, it's WORM, Write Once, Read Many can't delete can't change. Can't do anything. And you can automate all the management with our Copy Services Manager software that will work with safeguard copy. >> You, you talked about earlier, you could detect anomalous behavior. So, so presumably this can help with, with detecting threats, is that? >> Well, that's what our spectrum protect product does. My key point was we have all levels of data resiliency across the whole portfolio, whether it be encrypting data at rest, with our VTLs, we can encrypt in-flight. We have safeguarded copy on the mainframe, safeguarded copy on FlashSystems, any type of storage, including our competitor storage. You could air gap it to tape, right? With our spectrum virtualized software in our SAN Volume Controller, you could actually air gap out to a Cloud for 500 arrays that aren't even ours. So what we've done is put in a huge set of data and cyber resiliency across the portfolio. One thing that I've noticed, Dave, that's really strange. Storage is intrinsic to every data center, whether you're big, medium, or small. And when most people think about a cybersecurity strategy from a corporate perspective, they usually don't even think about storage. I've been shocked, but I've been in meetings with CEOs and VPs and they said, "oh, you're right, storage is, is a risk." I don't know why they don't think of it. And clearly many of the security channel partners, right? You have channel that are very focused on security and security consultants, they often don't think about the storage gaps. So we're trying to make sure, A, we've got broad coverage, primary storage, secondary storage, backup, you know, all kinds of things that we can do. And we make sure that we're talking to the end users, as well as the channel to realize that if you don't have data resilience storage, you do not have a corporate cybersecurity strategy because you just left out the storage part. >> Right on. Eric, are you seeing any use case patterns emerge in the customer base? >> Well, the main use case is prioritizing workloads. Obviously, as you do the immutable copies, you chew up capacity. Right now there's a good reason to do that. So you've got these immutable copies, but what they're doing is prioritizing workloads. What are the workloads? I absolutely have to have up and going rapidly. What are other workloads that are super important, but I could do maybe remote logical air gapping? What ones can I put out to tape? Where I have a logical, where I have a true physical air gap. But of course tape can take a long recovery time. So they're prioritizing their applications, workloads and use case to figure out what they need to have a safeguarded copy with what they could do. And by the way, they're trying to do that as well. You know, with our FlashSystem products, we could encrypt data at rest with no performance penalty. So if you were getting, you know, 30,000 database records and they were taken, you know, 10 seconds for sake of argument, when you encrypt, normally you slow that down. Well, guess what, when you encrypt with our FlashSystem product. So in fact, you know, it's interesting Dave, we have a comprehensive and free cyber resiliency assessment, no charge to the end-user, no charge to a business partner if they want to engage with us. And we will look at based on the NIST framework, any gaps. So for example, if theCUBE said, these five databases are most critical databases, then part of our cyber resilience assess and say, "ah, well, we noticed that you're not encrypting those. Why are you not encrypting those?" And by the way, that cyber resilience assessment works not only for IBM storage, but any storage estate they've got. So if they're homogenous, we can evaluate that if they're heterogeneous in their storage estate would evaluate that, and it is vendor agnostic and conforms to the NIST framework, which of course is adopted all over the world. And it's a great thing for people to get free, no obligation. You don't have to buy a single thing from IBM. It's just a free assessment of their storage and what cyber security exposure they have in their storage estate. And that's a free thing that we offer that includes safeguarded copy, encryption, air gapping, all the various functionality. And we'll say, "why are you not encrypting? Why are you not air gapping?" That if it's that important, "what, why are you leaving these things exposed?" So that's what our free cyber resilience assessment does. >> Got to love those freebies take advantage of those for sure. A lot of, a lot of organizations will charge big bucks for those. You know, maybe not ridiculously huge bucks, but you're talking tens of thousands. Sometimes you'll get up to hundreds of thousands of dollars for that type of type of assessment. So that's, you've got to take advantage of that if you're a customer out there. You know, I, I wanted to ask you about just kind of shift topics here and get into the, as a service piece of it. So you guys announced your, your as a service for storage, a lot of people have also done that. What do we need to know about the IBM Solution? And what's different from the others, maybe two part question, but what's the first part. What do we need to know? >> A couple of thing is, from an overall strategy perspective, you don't buy storage. It's a full OpEx model. IBM retains legal title. We own it. We'll do the software upgrades as needed. We may even go ahead and swap the physical system out. You buy an SLA, a tier if you will. You buy capacity, performance, we own it. So let's take an easy one. Our tier two, we give you our worst case performance at 2,250 IOPS per terabyte. Our competitors by the way, when you look at their contracts and look what they're putting out there, they will give you their best case number. So if they're two is 2,250, that's the best case. With us it's our worst case, which means if your applications or workloads get 4,000 IOPS per terabyte, it's free. We don't charge you for that. We give you the worst case scenario and our numbers are higher than our competition. So we make sure that we're differentiated true OpEx model. It's not a modified Lease model. So it's truly converts CapEx into operational expense. We have a base as everybody does, but we have a variable. And guess what? There's the base price and the variable price are the same. So if you don't use the variable, we don't charge you. We bill you for 1/4 in arrears, every feature function that's on our FlashSystem technology such as safeguarded copy, which we just talked about. AI based tiering, data at rest encryption with no performance penalty, data in compression with no performance, all those features you get, all of them, all we're doing is giving you an option. We still let you buy CapEx. We will let you lease with IBM Global Financial Services. And guess what? You could do a full OpEx model. The technology though, our flash core modules, our spectrum virtualized software is all the same. So it's all the same feature function. It's not some sort of stripped down model. We even offer Dave, 100% availability option. We give Six Nines of availability as a default, several of the competitor, which is only five minutes and 26 seconds of downtime, several of our competitors, guess what they give? Fournines. If you want five or six, you got to pay for it. We just give you six as a default differentiator, but then we're the only vendor to offer 100% availability guarantee. Now that is an option. It's the one option. But since we're already at Six Nines, when our competitors are at Four or Five Nines, we already have better availability with our storage as a service than the competition does. >> So let me just make this, make sure I'm clear on this. So you got Six Nines as part of the service. That's >> Absolutely >> Fundamental. And I get, I can pay up for 100% availability option. And, >> Yes you can. >> So what does that, what does that mean? Practically? You're putting in redundancies and, >> Right, right. So we have a technology known as HyperSwap. We have several public references by the way, at ibm.com. We've been shipping HyperSwap on both the mainframe, probably eight or nine years now. We brought it to our FlashSystem product probably five years ago. As I mentioned, we've got public references. You don't pay for the software by the way, you do have to have a dual node cluster. And HyperSwap allows you to do that. But you can do that as a service. You can buy it. You can do as CapEx, right? When you need the additional FlashSystem to go with it again, the software is free. So you're not to pay for the software. You just have to pay for the additional system level componentry, but you can do that as a service and have it completely be an OpEx model as well. We even assign a technical account manager to every account. Every account gets a technical account manager. If you will, concierge service comes with every OpEx version of our storage as a service. >> So what does that mean? What does that concierge do? Just paying attention to (indistinct) >> Concierge service will do a quarterly, a quarterly review with you. So let's say theCUBE bought 10,000 other analyst firms in the industry. You're now the behemoth. And you at theCUBE are using IBM storage as a service. You call up your technical account manager to say, "Guess what? We just bought these companies. We're going to convert them all to storage as a service, A, we need a higher tier, you could upgrade the tier B, we have a one-year contract, but you know what we'd like to extend it to two, C, we think we need more capacity." You tell your technical account manager, they'll take care of all of that for you, as well as giving you best practices. For example, if you decide you want to do safeguarded copy, which you can do, because it's built into our spectrum virtualized software, which is part of our storage as a service, we can give you best practices on that he would tell you, or she would tell you about our integration with our security visions, QRadar. So those are various best practices. So the technical account manager makes sure the software is always up to date, right? All the little things that you would have to do yourself if you own it, we take care of, because we legally own it, which is allow you to buy it as a service. So it is a true OpEx model from a financial perspective. >> In the term of the contracts are what? One, two and three years. >> One to five. >> Yeah. Okay. >> If you don't renew and you don't cancel, we'll automatically re up you at the exact tier you're at, at the exact same price. Several of our competitors, by the way, if you do that, they actually charge you a premium until you sign a contract. We do not. So if you have a contract based on tier two, right? We go buy SLA tier one, tier two, tier three. So if I have a tier two contract at theCUBE, and you forgot to get the contract done at the end of two years, but you still want it, you can go for the next 2/4. I mean, well our business partner as I should say, "Dave, don't you want to sign a contract, you said you like it." Obviously you would, but we will let you stay. You just say, now I want to keep it without a contract. And we don't charge your premium. Our competitors if you don't have a contract, they charge your premium. If you keep it installed without putting a contract in place. So little things like that clearly differentiate what we do. We don't charge a premium. If you go above the base. One of the competitors, in fact, when you go into the variable space, okay? And by the way, we provide 50% extra capacity. We over-provision. The other competitors usually do 25%. We do 50%. No charge, is just part of the service. So the other vendors, if you go into the variable space, they raised the price. So if it's $5, you know, for X capacity and you go into the, which is your base, and then you go above that, they charge you $7 and 50 cents. We don't. It's $5 at the base and $5 at the variable. Now obviously your variable can be very big or very small, but whatever the variable is, we charge you. But we do not charge you an a bigger price. Couple of competitors when you go into the variable world, they charge you more. Guess what it gets you to do, raise your base capacity. (Eric laughs) >> Yeah. I mean, that's, that should, the math should be the opposite of that, in my view. If you make a commitment to a vendor, say, okay, I'm going to commit to X. You have a nice chart on this, actually in your, in your deck. If I'm going to commit to X, and then I'm going to add on, I would think the add on price per bit should be at the same or lower. It shouldn't be higher. Right? And I get, I get what you're saying there. They're forcing you to jack up the base, but then you're taking all the risk. That's not a shared risk model. I get... >> And that's why we made sure that we don't do that. In fact, Dave, you can, you know, the fact that we don't charge you a premium if you go beyond your contract period and say, "I still wanted to do it, but I haven't done the contract yet." The other guys charge you a premium, if you go beyond your contract period. We don't do that either. So we try to be end-user friendly, customer friendly, and we've also factored in our business partners can participate in this program. At least one of our competitors came out with a program and guess what? Partners could not participate. It was all direct. And that company by happens to have about 80% of their business through the channel and their partners were basically cut out of the model, which by the way, is what a lot of Cloud providers had done in the past as well. So it was not a channel friendly model, we're channel friendly, we're end user-friendly, it's all about ease of use. In fact, when you need more capacity, it takes about 10 minutes to get the new capacity up and going, that's it? >> How long does it take to set up? How long does it take to set up initially? And how long does it take to get new capacity? >> So, first of all, we deploy either in a Colo facility that you've contracted with, including Equinix, Equinix, is part of our press release, or we install on your site. So the technical account managers is assigned, he would call up theCUBE and say, "When is it okay for us to come install the storage?" We install it. You don't install anything. You just say, here's your space. Go ahead and install. We do the installation. You then of course do the normal rationing of the capacity to this goes to this Oracle, this goes to SAP. This goes to Mongo or Cassandra, right? You do that part, but we install it. We get it up and going. We get it turned on. We hook it up to your switching infrastructure. If you've got switching infrastructure, we do all of that. And then when you need more capacity, we use our storage insights pro which automatically monitors capacity, performance, and potential tech support problems. So we give you 50% extra, right? If you drop that to 25%, so you now don't have 50% extra anymore, you only have 25% extra, we'll, the technical account manager would call you and say, "Dave, do you know that we'd like to come install extra capacity at no charge to get you back up to that 50% margin?" So we always call because it's on your site or in your Colo facility, right? We own the asset, but we set it up and you know, it takes a week or two, whatever it takes to ship to whatever location. Now by the way, our storage as a service for 2021 will be in North America and Europe only, we are really expanding our storage as a service outside into Asia and into Latin America, et cetera, but not until 2022. So we'll start out with North America and Europe first. >> So I presume part of that is figuring out just the compensation models right? And so how, how did you solve that? I mean, you can't, you know, you don't seem to be struggling with that. Like some do. I think there's some people dipping their toes in the water. Was that because, you know, IBM's got experience with like SAS pricing or how were you thinking about that and how did you deal with kind of the internal (indistinct) >> Sure. So, first of all, we've had for several years, our storage utility model. >> Right? >> Our storage utility model has been sort of a hybrid part CapEx and part OpEx. So first of all, we were already halfway there to an OpEx model with our storage utility model that's item, number one. It also gave us the experience of the billing. So for example, we bill you for a full quarter. We don't send you a monthly bill. We send you a quarterly bill. And guess what, we always bill you in arrears. So for example, since theCUBE is going to be a customer this quarter, we will send you a bill for this quarter in October for the October quarter, we'll send you a bill for that quarter in January. Okay. And if it goes up, it goes up. If it goes down, it goes down. And if you don't use any variable, there's no bill. Because what we do is the base you pay for once a year, the variable you pay for by on a quarterly basis. So if you, if you are within the base, we don't send you a bill at all because there's no bill. You didn't go into the variable capacity area at all. >> I love that. >> When you have a variable It can go up and down. >> Is that unique to some, do some competitors try to charge you up front? Like if it's a one-year term. (Dave laughs) >> Everbody charges, everybody builds yearly on the base capacity. Pretty much everyone does that. >> Okay, so upfront you pay for the base? Okay. >> Right. And the variable can be zero. If you really only use the base, then there is no variable. We only bill for it's a pay for what you use model. So if you don't use any of the variable, we never charge you for variable. Now, you know, because you guys have written about it, storage grows exponentially. So the odds of them ending up needing some of the variable is moderately high. The other thing we've done is we didn't just look at what we've done with our storage utility model, but we actually looked at Cloud providers. And in fact, not only IBM storage, but almost every of our competitors does a comparison to Cloud pricing. And when you do apples to apples, Cloud vendors are more expensive than storage as a services, not just from us, but pretty much for a moment. So let's take an example. We're Six Nines by default. Okay. So as you know, most Cloud providers provide three or Fournines as the default. They'll let you get five or Six Nines, but guess what? They charge you extra. So item number one. Second thing, performance, as you know, the performance of Cloud storage is usually very weak, but you can make it faster if you want to. They charge extra for that. We're sitting at 2,250 terabytes per IOPS, excuse me, per terabytes. That's incredible performance If you've got 100 terabytes, okay. And if your applications and workloads and that's the worst case, by the way, which differentiates from our competitors who usually quote the best case, we quote you the worst case and our worst case by the way, is almost always higher than their best cases in each of the tiers. So at their middle tier, our worst case is usually better than their best case. But the point is, if you get 4,000 IOPS per terabyte and you're on a tier two contract, it's a two-tier contract. And in fact, let's say that theCUBE has a five-year deal. And we base this on our FlashSystem technology. And so let's say for tier two, for sake of argument, FlashSystem, 7,200. We come out two years after theCUBE has it installed with the FlashSystem, 7,400. And let's say the FlashSystem, 7,400, won't deliver a 2,250 IOPS per terabyte, but 5,000, if we choose to replace it, 'cause remember it's our physical property. We own it. If we choose to replace that 7,200 with a 7,400, and now you get 5,000 IOPS per terabyte, it's free. You signed a tier two contract for five years. So two years later, if we decide to put a different physical system there and it's faster, or has four more software features, we don't charge you for any of that. You signed an SLA for tier two. >> You haven't Paid for capacity, right? All right. >> You are paying for the capacity (indistinct) performance, you don't pay for that. If we swap it out and the, the array is physically faster, and has got five new software features. You pay nothing, you pay what your original contract was based on the capacity. >> What I'm saying is you're learning from the Cloud providers 'cause you are a Cloud provider. But you know, a lot of the Cloud providers always sort of talk about how they lower prices. They lower prices, but you know, well, you worked at storage companies your whole life and they, they lower prices on a regular basis because they 'cause the cost of the curve. And so. >> Right. The cost of storage to Cloud, I mean, the average price decline in the storage industry is between 15 and 25%, depending on the year, every single year. >> Right. >> As, you know, you used to be with one of those analysts firms that used to track it by the numbers. So you've seen the numbers. >> For sure. Absolutely. >> On average it drops 15 to 25% every year. >> So, what's driving this then? If it's, it's not necessarily, is it the shift from, from CapEx to OPEX? Is it just a more convenient model than on a Cloud like model? How do you see that? >> So what's happened in IT overall is of course it started with people like salesforce.com. Well, over 10 years ago, and of course it's swept the software industry software as a service. So once that happened, then you now see infrastructure as a service, servers, switches, storage, and an IBM with our storage as a service, we're providing that storage capability. So that as a service model, getting off of the traditional licensing in the software world, which still is out there, but it's mostly now is mostly software as a service has now moved into the infrastructure space. From our perspective, we are giving our business partners and our customers, the choice. You still want to buy it. No problem. You want to lease it? No problem. You want a full OpEx model. No problem. So for us, we're able to offer any of the three options. The, as a service model that started in software has moved now into the systems world. So people want to change often that CapEx into OpEx, we can even see Global Fortune 500s where one division is doing something and a different division might do something else, or they might do it different by geography. In a certain geography, they buy our FlashSystem products and other geographies they lease them. And in other geographies it's, as a service. We are delivering the same feature, function, benefit from a performance availability software function. We just give them a different way to procure. Do you want CapEx you want leasing or OpEx you pick what you want, we'll deliver the right solution for you. >> So, you got the optionality. And that's great. You've thought that out, but, but the reason I'm asking Eric, is I'm trying to figure out this is not just for you for everybody. Is this a check-off item or is this going to be the prevailing way in which storage is consumed? So if you had, if you had a guess, let's go far out. So we're not making any near-term forecast, but end of the decade, is this going to be the dominant model or is it going to be, you know, one of the few. >> It will be one of a few, but it'll be a big few. It'll be the big, one of the biggest. So for sake of argument, there we'll still be CapEx, they'll still be OpEx they'll still be, or there will be OpEx and they're still be leasing, but I will bet you, you know, at the end of this decade, it'll be 40 to 50% will be on the OpEx model. And the other two will have the other 50%. I don't think it's going to move to everything 'cause remember, it's a little easier during the software world. In the system world, you've got to put the storage, the servers, or the networking on the prem, right? Otherwise you're not truly, you know, you got to make it a true OpEx model. There's legal restrictions. You have to make it OpEx, if not, then, you know, based on the a country's practice, depending on the country, you're in, they could say, "Well, no, you really bought that. It's not really a service model." So there's legal constraints that the software worldwise easier to get through and easier to get to bypass. Right? So, and remember, now everything is software as a service, but go back when salesforce.com was started, everyone in the enterprise was doing ELAs and all the small companies were buying some sort of contract, right, or buying by the (indistinct) basis. It took a while for that to change. Now, obviously the predominant model is software as a service, but I would argue given when salesforce.com started, which was, you know, 2007 or so, it took a good 10 years for software as a service to become the dominant level. So I think A, it won't take 10 full years because the software world has blazed a trail now for the systems world. But I do think you'll see, right. We're sitting here know halfway through 2021, that you're going to have a huge percentage. Like I said, the dominant percentage will be OpEx, but the other two will still be there as well. >> Right. >> By the way, you know in software, almost, no one's doing ELAs these days, right? A few people still do, but it's very rare, right? It's all software as a service. So we see that over time doing the same thing in the, in the infrastructure side, but we do think it will be slower. And we'll, we'll offer all three as, as long as customers want it. >> I think you're right. I think it's going to be mixed. Like, do I care more about my income statement or my balance sheet and the different companies or individual different divisions are going to have different requirements. Eric, you got to leave it there. Thanks much for your time and taking us through this announcement. Always great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. We really appreciate our time with theCUBE. >> All right. Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMB customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought it home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. As the saying goes, follow the money. And with me to talk about HPE Financial Services and the value that it can bring to customers are two great guests, Brad, Shapiro's VP and managing director of the Enterprise Business at HPE Financial Services. And Paul Sheeran is Managing Director of Worldwide Channel and SMB for HPE Financial Services. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Come on in. >> Thanks Dave, we really appreciate you having us. >> Hi, Dave. >> So Brad, why don't you start us off? Give us the rundown on HPE Financial Services. What's the scope of your services? Should we think of you as a bank? And maybe you could talk about some of the things that you do beyond financing. >> Yeah, that sounds great. So look, we are so much more than banking. Our mission is to create investment capacity to help customers accelerate their transformation. And maybe you could think of us as kind of like a two-in-one partner. We're part-CIO, part-CFO. We kind of refer to ourselves as the CIFO, if you will. And we've got an expertise in a number of different areas. Of course, we'll start with financial. And yes, we offer financial services, and we do an awful lot of financial solutioning. In our portfolio, it's over 13 billion of assets that have been financed. So that is a core competency for us. But we're more than that. We focus also on the technology side of things. And we have expertise in asset management. And we deal with multiple generations of technologies and all major manufacturers as well, not just HPE, but we understand technology and all different types, all different ages of technology. And lastly, we play a pretty big role around sustainability. HPE takes a leadership position when it comes to sustainability. And a lot of our capabilities around the circular economy and putting assets back into reuse play an important role in not only helping customers financially, but helping them meet their sustainability goals. >> I want to come back and ask you more about that, but Paul, I wonder... First of all, I like the CIFO. That's a great, little nomenclature. But Paul, if you're a small business, the CEO is also sometimes the CIO, is sometimes the CFO, a lot of hats. So maybe you could talk about the role that you guys play for SMBs and also channel partners. Channel's a whole different ball game. They want to make margin, they want to grow their business. So maybe you could discuss some of the differences in that channel. >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. Well, starting with the SMB customer is really critical part of our portfolio. As you said, they cover all the roles, so the CIO, CFO. And their budgets can be tight. And especially given the last 18 months, if you read some of the data out there, the budgets are really constrained, especially for the SMBs customer. So we try and do, and what our mission is, is what we call creating investment capacity, giving budgets a boost, bringing that vitality to the SMB customer base, to all our customers, but especially SMB customers to help them be able to invest in their digital transformations going forward. So crucial now that all our customers are able to continue to invest in technology. And the pandemic clearly brought at home how important having a digital capability it is. So SMB budgets are tight, and what we try and do is give them that boost, give them that vitality to actually continue to advance ahead and make the right investments for the future. And then from the partners, we actually do a four and a half thousand partners around the world. As you said, partners, they're also not only looking for financial solutions, but how do we differentiate ourselves is to try and help that partner move to a digital platform. We have invested heavily in our digital tools over the last couple of years. So in terms of offering solutions, it can be literally zero touch, low touch so the partner community can plug into our platforms. We also help them on that journey as a service. So technology is moving to as a service. People want to consume technology as a service like they do in the rest of their lives. It's all about subscription. And partners need help to be able to move to another service way. Hopefully GreenLake is the answer. So we support HPE GreenLake's offering. But there's different parts along the way for partners that we look to help them. And last but not least is helping them about asset management. As Brad said, it's all about the assets and understanding how those assets are managed. And helping the partners, having a relevant conversation with their customers as to how best to put in an asset management strategy for their customers. So three areas that we look to differentiate ourselves, Dave. >> We got a lot to talk about. So I want to come back and talk about as a service as well. But Brad, I want to go back to sustainability. So is it just the right thing to do? What's the financial case? Is it good business as well, and where do you fit? >> Yeah, so we believe that sustainability is good for the environment, obviously, but it's also good for business. And when you think about what we bring to the table and those assets back into reuse. So we handle between three and four million assets a year, and over 90% of those, we put back into reuse, with about 10% going into recycling. Putting those back into reuse, the customer that has those assets, we can monetize those assets and help accelerate transformation. So we monetize the asset, and we fund that transition in that transformation so we can really help customers get more budget than they were expecting by leveraging what they would deem to be end-of-life assets, but we find another home for those assets. So it definitely helps customers accelerate the transformation, while being good for the world, good for the environment. >> And that's true, Paul, for SMBs, just maybe on a smaller scale, and definitely makes sense for the channel, right? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. Sustainability now is key. Certainly key for our channel partners is moving from a nice-to-have to a must-have. So absolutely, totally agree. >> Yeah. And it's almost like gain sharing. I mean, sometimes we sell used equipment on eBay. It helps fund future business or future transformation. So let's get into the transformations. Everybody talks about digital transformation. Coming into the pandemic, everybody talked about it, but there was a lot of complacency. We've all seen the wrecking ball and the acceleration we talk about all the time, but what role does HPE Financial Services, and do you have any specific solutions that support digital transformations? Any examples there? Maybe Brad, you could start it off. >> Yeah. Yeah. So I'll start off, and then Paul, feel free to jump in. Look Dave, what I would say is the pandemic taught us that every company is a technology company. And where HPFS comes in is we're looking to provide the investment capacity, which is the lifeblood of a company's digital roadmap. So if you don't have the investment capacity, there is no transformation. So when something like the pandemic comes up, and you can't budget for a pandemic, and revenues are down and budgets are getting squeezed, you really need a partner to help you with that. How do you uncover that investment capacity? So we we've talked to lots of customers. We've also done some research, and the ESG group and analysts basically found that 73% of organizations, not surprisingly, either delayed or canceled projects around IT transformation because of all the uncertainty. So what we're looking to do is leverage all of our capabilities in a timely fashion. Last year, we announced the idea of payment holidays and deferred payments so you could keep your transformation going and not have to pay for it for a full year. And now we look at it as we're coming out of the pandemic. And what we're looking to help customers with is one, help them transition their existing infrastructure into a modernized consumption model like GreenLake. Also looking to accelerate the velocity of the transformation programs by leveraging our capabilities around asset upcycling, as well as our accelerated migration program. And last, looking at our existing customers really doing some financial engineering with them, so they can stretch their budgets more and expand the budget to be able to handle new projects. >> Yeah, I mean, Paul, I think Brad nailed it. You're right, their transformations are strategic. They had to fund VDI initiatives or endpoint security or find some cash to buy laptops to support people at home. People were pulling out their servers and sticking them in their trunk and driving to their home because they couldn't get laptops for awhile. And so what are you seeing now, Paul, particularly in the channel. And of course, again, SMBs were squeezed. Maybe they don't have the liquidity that some of these large public companies have. A lot of people just shored up their balance sheets during the pandemic. Maybe the SMB doesn't have as much advantage to do that. But what are you seeing in regard to the sort of bounce back of spend in more strategic areas like transformation? >> Well, I think what we're seeing right now and what we're hearing, especially for SMB customer, is cash is king. It's all about cash preservation. It's about making sure that... You'll hear some studies where some SMB customers only have three or four months left of cash in their kitty to keep their businesses running. So that is really top of mind now. Would they have to invest? If they don't want invest, they're going to be dead in the water to stay ahead of the competition. So what we're looking to do is really help those customers preserve that cash and reach and look for different ways about how to boost their budget. There's actually nothing better than an example. Brad laid out very nicely in terms of what we can do. Bringing it to life, not so much an SMB customer, but there is UNAD. And UNAD is a university in Columbia based in Bogota. And their mission is very simple, it's all about excellence and learning. But as they went into the pandemic, they needed to invest in their distance learning platforms to really help their students. And like most businesses, cash and budget was being squeezed. Revenues were tight. So it would've been very easy to postpone that investment. Well, what we did with UNAD and working with UNAD under IT team was firstly to understand their existing IT estate and really see what assets are being utilized, what are not being utilized, what assets have reached or ended their useful life. And you'd be amazed. And it's not just the data center, we can work right across their whole estate. So as well as the data center, we look at the PCs. To your point, David, we look at even their print estate. And we identified many, many assets that were being underutilized and other assets that were end of life. So we were able to take those assets back and actually release value and boosts UNAD's budget. And some of those assets could not. They had no value. And sustainability was top of their agenda as well. As you'd imagine, the university wanted to lead and show their students that sustainability is key. So we were able to take those assets back and actually recycle them in a very environmentally sound way. So that was the first step to actually inject some cash into their budgets. The next step then was to look at their existing financial contracts that they had in place where maybe some of their banks and actually restructured those contracts to actually give them additional capacity to invest right now in technology. And I'm delighted to say they partnered with the HPE team, I mean, Aruba, to actually continue their five-year roadmap and actually improved their distance learning platforms. So I just thought that was a really good example right now and in the current climate as to show when we work together with our customers, what's actually possible. >> So let's talk a little bit more about GreenLake. I mean, for decades, I mean, even if I go back to the '80s, I saw financial instruments to sort of rent essentially, but it's different. GreenLake, HPE, has pivoted its entire company to as a service. And I want to understand better what role HPE Financial Services plays in making that transition. It's obviously a crucial part of the financing piece, but Brad, maybe you could tell us a little bit more there. >> Yeah, sure. And I think the great thing about GreenLake is it's more than just a consumption model, it's really providing that cloud experience, on-prem, and being able for customers to really manage a hybrid cloud experience. But where HPEFS plays a role, again, it's around our knowledge and ability around assets. So we are underneath GreenLake, doing financial engineering, managing the assets. But the biggest thing, when you think about how does a customer transition? If they're in a traditional cash purchase paradigm, the cost of change and figuring out how to move into a new type of paradigm and new consumption model can be daunting. So HPFS works closely with our GreenLake team and the customer, and we can take those existing assets and look to accelerate the migration into a GreenLake. A great example of that, a public sector customer, Kern County, they were in that cash paradigm, they had lots of assets. Like most entities, they were under pressure from a budget perspective. Tax revenues were down for a couple years in a row. So not only did moving to a GreenLake model provide some cost savings, and cost savings are important, but it also allowed them to deliver the services they needed to their constituents because they had that pay for use type of flexibility. They didn't have a long delay in procuring and provisioning equipment when they needed to roll something out. And again, once again, HPFS was able to monetize their existing assets, roll those into a GreenLake solution and help self-fund that transformation and really accelerate it to get from that cash paradigm model to a new GreenLake consumption model. >> Paul, what about the channel? I mean, on the one hand, I could see the channels loving GreenLake because there's a lot of services involved, and it's sort of an ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the sort of big hit. But on the other hand, it's the ongoing drip of cash as opposed to the big hit. What's the conversations like with the channel? How is that going? I mean, clearly it's the future, but how do they see it? >> I wouldn't say a drip of cash. We would call it an in-use revenue where it's very predictable, which is actually also a good thing, rather than a sort of a one-and-done solution. So clearly, GreenLake is very important to our channel partners, and we're seeing some really good adoption across the world. Again, we underpin that. The other thing to say is a lot of channel partners, as you likely say, want as sell services and become service providers. And what we also do is support not just the data center, but also workplace and print. And what you'll see on the printing side for many, many years, the print partners have been selling a contractual type of model. But a lot of partners now are moving all of their core portfolio into as a service. And there's different parts. It's nearly a cash to as a service journey, and there's different parts of that ladder on the way. And we will look to help our partners get along that ladder and hopefully position GreenLake. But there's also more simpler solutions like subscription that we can position on that journey. So it's really helping that partner get the confidence and the financial wherewithal and the infrastructure to get on the as a service journey. >> How about solutions? I mean, you guys have had some recent announcements. Maybe Brad, you can take us through sort of what the highlights of those were. >> Sure. So yeah, the first announcement was really the example I just provided, which was how do we transition customers to GreenLake? So again, that's a really important step for many customers, and something that we can help them with is moving from that existing paradigm to GreenLake. The second is really helping customers create velocity to move their transformation programs faster. And we do that in a number of ways, but again, all around the asset in our asset management expertise, whether we look to put those assets back into reuse in their facility, or if we look to monetize those assets and put them into reuse with a different customer. Really, it's all around how do we accelerate the customers transformation as we come out of a pandemic. And then lastly, the offering is really focused on how can we help the customer look at existing budget and really financially engineer where they're spending their money to create new pools of budget and cash so they can fund new projects. So it's interesting because when I look at the customers that we're doing these things with, it really spans every industry. So we're dealing with financial services and insurance companies, communications and broadcasting, travel and hospitality, you name it, manufacturing. So the interesting thing is, while sometimes you come out with solutions that are very industry-specific, I think our circumstances today really span lots of industries, both in the commercial and the public sector. And we're finding that these offers are really relevant right now for customers. >> Let's zoom out for a bit. And Brad, let's start with you, and then Paul, I want to get your unique perspectives from the standpoint of SMB in the channel. Summarize your overall strategy in that context. And then I'm interested in, how important do you feel the HPE Financial Services is with regards... And of course, you guys are biased, but that's okay, I want to hear your bias view. How important is it in the grand scheme of actually doing business with HPE. And I'm interested in in why HPE and how much of a competitive advantage you bring relative to some of your major competitors. >> Yeah, sure. So look, the strategy, in my mind, I'll start with HPFS, it's really making sure that we're working closely with our customers, understanding their needs from a business perspective and what business outcomes they're trying to achieve and then marrying both the financial planning and the technology planning to help those customers deliver and achieve those business outcomes. Doing that, also in a way that is sustainable and is good for the environment and helps customers achieve their sustainability initiatives. So kind of marrying that financial technology and sustainability portion of it. From my perspective, I think HPE is a fantastic partner. One, we've been at GreenLake for quite a while, and it continues to evolve. The experiences that we can provide customers now are significantly advanced from when flex capacity came out years and years and years ago. So I really think if a customer took a look at GreenLake a few years ago, you need to keep looking at it because it really has evolved, really creates a unique experience. But I think it's the combination of our technology. We have great technology in our portfolio. We have a fantastic model in GreenLake, and then we have all of the financial engineering expertise around assets and lifecycles and how to get the most out of your IT investment. And we are a partner. If you have sustainability initiatives, I mean, HPE talks the talk, we walk the walk. We do all of this for ourselves, and then we bring those practices out and share best practices with customers. So I really think it's a great time to partner with HP if you're a customer. >> Right, thank you for that, Brad. Paul, what would you add for your constituents? >> Brad, said it beautifully. So just a couple of points I'd add in. From a partner perspective, we are actually in every corner of the world. So we have that global footprint. And then as you see, consolidation in the market, that's very important, not only for our customers, but also for our partners, more and more solutions are going cross border and involve different regions. And we look to make sure that we're globally consistent in how we work with our partners and work with our customers. And the final thing I'd say is we get very excited about supporting our HPE colleagues. But from a channel perspective, we actually also support HPI, HP Inc. You will recall, before separation, that the companies did. So we also support the workplace and print environments, plus third party vendors, which again, is important for the channel community. Why do you need a one-stop shell? And where you'll often have a mixed technology and the solution. So we're there for that as well and always have been. And I think the partner community love our consistency there >> It's a nice arrow when you quiver. And of course we've seen laptop demand explode. And it looks like it's going to sustain for a while here. It's hard to predict, but Paul, still with you, tell us, thinking about the future, what's getting you jazzed up? >> Well, I said we have a global footprint, and every country is in a different place right now. As we sort of come out of the pandemic, some countries are still in the midst of it. But what gets me jazzed up and what gets me excited is the sense of optimism. I think we're sort of figured out how to navigate our way out of this pandemic and the current environment. And customers all recognize the need to invest in technology. Technology is the way forward. So that means having the capacity, investment capacity, the investment vitality, to make that investment. So what gets me excited is what we do is important and we're there to help. >> Great. Thank you. And then Brad, two-part question for you to bring us home. So what are you excited about, and what do you got going at Discover? >> So in terms of my excitement, I think Paul said it well, every company is a technology company. And when we see that everybody is going through a digital transformation, quite frankly, we at HPEFS are going through our own digital transformation. Paul mentioned earlier about Technomics. We have omni-channel ways of engaging with us that are consistent. We're looking at our customer and partner experience and continuing to improve those. So we're not resting on our laurels in what we've done in the past, we continue to change, to modernize, to create new and better ways of doing business with our customer base. So the exciting part, for me, is that change that comes with innovation and technology. And I just think HPE is a great place to be right now with all of that innovation going on. So you asked about Discover. So we're really excited. We've got a spotlight with Irv Rothman focused on investment agility and key to growth and regeneration. So that's really exciting. We have a few breakouts, making technology a force for good, getting back on track that create the investment vitality to take on the world and investment strategies to accelerate innovation in a disruptive world. So really excited about that. And then last, we've got some demos. We have a live interactive demo on our technology renewal center, as well as some on-demand demos of those renewal centers as well. So we've got a lot going on at Discover, and we're really excited about it. >> Great. Gentlemen, thank you for that. So I mean, look, cost of capital is low, but to have a technology partner with you that's also has financial expertise, that, to me, is a killer combination. Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate your time. >> Dave, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of HPE Discover 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more great content. (upbeat music)