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Sanjay Poonen, VMware | VMworld 2020


 

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host of the Cube, our 11th year covering V emeralds. Not in person. It's virtual. I'm with my coast, Dave. A lot, of course. Ah, guest has been on every year since the cubes existed. Sanjay Putin, who is now the chief operating officer for VM Ware Sanjay, Great to see you. It's our 11th years. Virtual. We're not in person. Usually high five are going around. But hey, virtual fist pump, >>virtual pissed bump to you, John and Dave, always a pleasure to talk to you. I give you more than a virtual pistol. Here's a virtual hug. >>Well, so >>great. Back at great. >>Great to have you on. First of all, a lot more people attending the emerald this year because it's virtual again, it doesn't have the face to face. It is a community and technical events, so people do value that face to face. Um, but it is virtually a ton of content, great guests. You guys have a great program here, Very customer centric. Kind of. The theme is, you know, unpredictable future eyes is really what it's all about. We've talked about covert you've been on before. What's going on in your perspective? What's the theme of your main talks? >>Ah, yeah. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you folks. We we felt as we thought, about how we could make this content dynamic. We always want to make it fresh. You know, a virtual show of this kind and program of this kind. We all are becoming experts at many Ted talks or ESPN. Whatever your favorite program is 60 minutes on becoming digital producers of content. So it has to be crisp, and everybody I think was doing this has found ways by which you reduce the content. You know, Pat and I would have normally given 90 minute keynotes on day one and then 90 minutes again on day two. So 180 minutes worth of content were reduced that now into something that is that entire 180 minutes in something that is but 60 minutes. You you get a chance to use as you've seen from the keynote an incredible, incredible, you know, packed array of both announcements from Pat myself. So we really thought about how we could organize this in a way where the content was clear, crisp and compelling. Thekla's piece of it needed also be concise, but then supplemented with hundreds of sessions that were as often as possible, made it a goal that if you're gonna do a break out session that has to be incorporate or lead with the customer, so you'll see not just that we have some incredible sea level speakers from customers that have featured in in our pattern, Mikey notes like John Donahoe, CEO of Nike or Lorry beer C I, a global sea of JPMorgan Chase partner Baba, who is CEO of Zuma Jensen Wang, who is CEO of video. Incredible people. Then we also had some luminaries. We're gonna be talking in our vision track people like in the annuity. I mean, one of the most powerful women the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, chairman, CEO Pepsi or Bryan Stevenson, the person who start in just mercy. If you watch that movie, he's a really key fighter for social justice and criminal. You know, reform and jails and the incarceration systems. And Malala made an appearance. Do I asked her personally, I got to know her and her dad's and she spoke two years ago. I asked her toe making appearance with us. So it's a really, really exciting until we get to do some creative stuff in terms of digital content this year. >>So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. We covered that with Pat Gelsinger, but the business performance has been very strong with VM. Where, uh, props to you guys, Where does this all tie together for in your mind? Because you have the transformation going on in a highly accelerated rate. You know, cov were not in person, but Cove in 19 has proven, uh, customers that they have to move faster. It's a highly accelerated world, a lot. Lots changing. Multi cloud has been on the radar. You got security. All the things you guys are doing, you got the AI announcements that have been pumping. Thean video thing was pretty solid. That project Monterey. What does the customer walk away from this year and and with VM where? What is the main theme? What what's their call to action? What's what do they need to be doing? >>I think there's sort of three things we would encourage customers to really think about. Number one is, as they think about everything in infrastructure, serves APS as they think about their APS. We want them to really push the frontier of how they modernize their athletic applications. And we think that whole initiative off how you modernized applications driven by containers. You know, 20 years ago when I was a developer coming out of college C, C plus, plus Java and then emerge, these companies have worked on J two ee frameworks. Web Logic, Be Aware logic and IBM Web Street. It made the development off. Whatever is e commerce applications of portals? Whatever was in the late nineties, early two thousands much, much easier. That entire world has gotten even easier and much more Micro service based now with containers. We've been talking about kubernetes for a while, but now we've become the leading enterprise, contain a platform making some incredible investments, but we want to not just broaden this platform. We simplified. It is You've heard everything in the end. What works in threes, right? It's sort of like almost t shirt sizing small, medium, large. So we now have tens Ooh, in the standard. The advanced the enterprise editions with lots of packaging behind that. That makes it a very broad and deep platform. We also have a basic version of it. So in some sense it's sort of like an extra small. In addition to the small medium large so tends to and everything around at modernization, I think would be message number one number two alongside modernization. You're also thinking about migration of your workloads and the breadth and depth of, um, er Cloud Foundation now of being able to really solve, not just use cases, you are traditionally done, but also new ai use cases. Was the reason Jensen and us kind of partner that, and I mean what a great company and video has become. You know, the king maker of these ai driven applications? Why not run those AI applications on the best infrastructure on the planet? Remember, that's a coming together of both of our platforms to help customers. You know automotive banking fraud detection is a number of AI use cases that now get our best and we want it. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, which takes the B c f e m A Cloud Foundation proposition to smart Knicks on Dell, HP Lenovo are embracing the in video Intel's and Pen Sandoz in that smart make architectural, however, that so that entire world of multi cloud being operative Phobia Macleod Foundation on Prem and all of its extended use cases like AI or Smart Knicks or Edge, but then also into the AWS Azure, Google Multi Cloud world. We obviously had a preferred relationship with Amazon that's going incredibly well, but you also saw some announcements last week from, uh, Microsoft Azure about azure BMR solutions at their conference ignite. So we feel very good about the migration opportunity alongside of modernization on the third priority, gentlemen would be security. It's obviously a topic that I most recently taken uninterested in my day job is CEO of the company running the front office customer facing revenue functions by night job by Joe Coffin has been driving. The security strategy for the company has been incredibly enlightening to talk, to see SOS and drive this intrinsic security or zero trust from the network to end point and workload and cloud security. And we made some exciting announcements there around bringing together MAWR capabilities with NSX and Z scaler and a problem black and workload security. And of course, Lassiter wouldn't cover all of this. But I would say if I was a attendee of the conference those the three things I want them to take away what BMR is doing in the future of APS what you're doing, the future of a multi cloud world and how we're making security relevant for distributed workforce. >>I know David >>so much to talk about here, Sanjay. So, uh, talk about modern APS? That's one of the five franchise platforms VM Ware has a history of going from, you know, Challenger toe dominant player. You saw that with end user computing, and there's many, many other examples, so you are clearly one of the top, you know. Let's call it five or six platforms out there. We know what those are, uh, and but critical to that modern APS. Focus is developers, and I think it's fair to say that that's not your wheelhouse today, but you're making moves there. You agree that that is, that is a critical part of modern APS, and you update us on what you're doing for that community to really take a leadership position there. >>Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point, David. We way seek to constantly say humble and hungry. There's never any assumption from us that VM Ware is completely earned anyplace off rightful leadership until we get thousands, tens of thousands. You know, we have a half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years 70 million virtual machines. But we have toe earn that right and containers, and I think there will be probably 10 times as many containers is their virtual machines. So if it took us 20 years to not just become the leader in in virtual machines but have 70 million virtual machines, I don't think it will be 20 years before there's a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform. Now, why, Why VM Where and why do you think we can win in their long term. What are we doing with developers Number one? We do think there is a container capability independent of virtual machine. And that's what you know, this entire world of what hefty on pivotal brought to us on. You know, many of the hundreds of customers that are using what was formerly pivotal and FDR now what's called Tan Xue have I mean the the case. Studies of what those customers are doing are absolutely incredible. When I listen to them, you take Dick's sporting goods. I mean, they are building curbside, pick up a lot of the world. Now the pandemic is doing e commerce and curbside pick up people are going to the store, That's all based on Tan Xue. We've had companies within this sort of world of pandemic working on contact, tracing app. Some of the diagnostic tools built without they were the lab services and on the 10 zoo platform banks. Large banks are increasingly standardizing on a lot of their consumer facing or wealth management type of applications, anything that they're building rapidly on this container platform. So it's incredible the use cases I'm hearing public sector. The U. S. Air Force was talking about how they've done this. Many of them are not public about how they're modernizing dams, and I tend to learn the best from these vertical use case studies. I mean, I spend a significant part of my life is you know, it s a P and increasingly I want to help the company become a lot more vertical. Use case in banking, public sector, telco manufacturing, CPG retail top four or five where we're seeing a lot of recurrence of these. The Tan Xue portfolio actually brings us closest to almost that s a P type of dialogue because we're having an apse dialogue in the in the speak of an industry as opposed to bits and bytes Notice I haven't talked at all about kubernetes or containers. I'm talking about the business problem being solved in a retailer or a bank or public sector or whatever have you now from a developer audience, which was the second part of your question? Dave, you know, we talked about this, I think a year or two ago. We have five million developers today that we've been able to, you know, as bringing these acquisitions earn some audience with about two or three million from from the spring community and two or three million from the economic community. So think of those five million people who don't know us because of two acquisitions we don't. Obviously spring was inside Vienna where went out of pivotal and then came back. So we really have spent a lot of time with that community. A few weeks ago, we had spring one. You guys are aware of that? That conference record number of attendees okay, Registered, I think of all 40 or 50,000, which is, you know, much bigger than the physical event. And then a substantial number of them attended live physical. So we saw a great momentum out of spring one, and we're really going to take care of that, That that community base of developers as they care about Java Manami also doing really, really well. But then I think the rial audience it now has to come from us becoming part of the conversation. That coupon at AWS re invent at ignite not just the world, I mean via world is not gonna be the only place where infrastructure and developers come to. We're gonna have to be at other events which are very prominent and then have a developer marketplace. So it's gonna be a multiyear effort. We're okay with that. To grow that group of about five million developers that we today Kate or two on then I think there will be three or four other companies that also play very prominently to developers AWS, Microsoft and Google. And if we're one among those three or four companies and remembers including that list, we feel very good about our ability to be in a place where this is a shared community, takes a village to approach and an appeal to those developers. I think there will be one of those four companies that's doing this for many years to >>come. Santa, I got to get your take on. I love your reference to the Web days and how the development environment change and how the simplicity came along very relevant to how we're seeing this digital transformation. But I want to get your thoughts on how you guys were doing pre and now during and Post Cove it. You already had a complicated thing coming on. You had multi cloud. You guys were expanding your into end you had acquisitions, you mentioned a few of them. And then cove it hit. Okay, so now you have Everything is changing you got. He's got more complex city. You have more solutions, and then the customer psychology is change. You got to spectrums of customers, people trying to save their business because it's changed, their customer behavior has changed. And you have other customers that are doubling down because they have a tailwind from Cove it, whether it's a modern app, you know, coming like Zoom and others are doing well because of the environment. So you got your customers air in this in this in this, in this storm, you know, they're trying to save down, modernized or or or go faster. How are you guys changing? Because it's impacted how you sell. People are selling differently, how you implement and how you support customers, because you already had kind of the whole multi cloud going on with the modern APS. I get that, but Cove, it has changed things. How are you guys adopting and changing to meet the customer needs who are just trying to save their business on re factor or double down and continue >>John. Great question. I think I also talked about some of this in one of your previous digital events that you and I talked about. I mean, you go back to the last week of February 1st week of March, actually back up, even in January, my last trip on a plane. Ah, major trip outside this country was the World Economic Forum in Davos. And, you know, there were thousands of us packed into the small digits in Switzerland. I was sitting having dinner with Andy Jassy in a restaurant one night that day. Little did we know. A month later, everything would change on DWhite. We began to do in late February. Early March was first. Take care of employees. You always wanna have the pulse, check employees and be in touch with them. Because the health and safety of employees is much more important than the profits of, um, where you know. So we took care of that. Make sure that folks were taking care of older parents were in good place. We fortunately not lost anyone to death. Covert. We had some covert cases, but they've recovered on. This is an incredible pandemic that connects all of us in the human fabric. It has no separation off skin color or ethnicity or gender, a little bit of difference in people who are older, who might be more affected or prone to it. But we just have to, and it's taught me to be a significantly more empathetic. I began to do certain things that I didn't do before, but I felt was the right thing to do. For example, I've begun to do 25 30 minute calls with every one of my key countries. You know, as I know you, I run customer operations, all of the go to market field teams reporting to me on. I felt it was important for me to be showing up, not just in the big company meetings. We do that and big town halls where you know, some fractions. 30,000 people of VM ware attend, but, you know, go on, do a town hall for everybody in a virtual zoom session in Japan. But in their time zone. So 10 o'clock my time in the night, uh, then do one in China and Australia kind of almost travel around the world virtually, and it's not long calls 25 30 minutes, where 1st 10 or 15 minutes I'm sharing with them what I'm seeing across other countries, the world encouraging them to focus on a few priorities, which I'll talk about in a second and then listening to them for 10 15 minutes and be, uh and then the call on time or maybe even a little earlier, because every one of us is going to resume button going from call to call the call. We're tired of T. There's also mental, you know, fatigue that we've gotta worry about. Mental well, being long term. So that's one that I personally began to change. I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia. You know, 40 50%. My life has travel. It takes a day out of your life on either end, your jet lag. And then even when you get to a Tokyo or Beijing or to Bangalore or the London, getting between sites of these customers is like a 45 minute, sometimes in our commute. Now I'm able to do many of these 25 30 minute call, so I set myself a goal to talk to 1000 chief security officers. I know a lot of CEOs and CFOs from my times at S A P and VM ware, but I didn't know many security officers who often either work for a CEO or report directly to the legal counsel on accountable to the audit committee of the board. And I got a list of these 1,002,000 people we called email them. Man, I gotta tell you, people willing to talk to me just coming, you know, into this I'm about 500 into that. And it was role modeling to my teams that the top of the company is willing to spend as much time as possible. And I have probably gotten a lot more productive in customer conversations now than ever before. And then the final piece of your question, which is what do we tell the customer in terms about portfolio? So these were just more the practices that I was able to adapt during this time that have given me energy on dial, kind of get scared of two things from the portfolio perspective. I think we began to don't notice two things. One is Theo entire move of migration and modernization around the cloud. I describe that as you know, for example, moving to Amazon is a migration opportunity to azure modernization. Is that whole Tan Xue Eminem? Migration of modernization is highly relevant right now. In fact, taking more speed data center spending might be on hold on freeze as people kind of holding till depend, emmick or the GDP recovers. But migration of modernization is accelerating, so we wanna accelerate that part of our portfolio. One of the products we have a cloud on Amazon or Cloud Health or Tan Xue and maybe the other offerings for the other public dog. The second part about portfolio that we're seeing acceleration around is distributed workforce security work from home work from anywhere. And that's that combination off workspace, one for both endpoint management, virtual desktops, common black envelope loud and the announcements we've now made with Z scaler for, uh, distributed work for security or what the analysts called secure access. So message. That's beautiful because everyone working from home, even if they come back to the office, needs a very different model of security and were now becoming a leader in that area. of security. So these two parts of the portfolio you take the five franchise pillars and put them into these two buckets. We began to see momentum. And the final thing, I would say, Guys, just on a soft note. You know, I've had to just think about ways in which I balance work and family. It's just really easy. You know what, 67 months into this pandemic to burn out? Ah, now I've encouraged my team. We've got to think about this as a marathon, not a sprint. Do the personal things that you wanna do that will make your life better through this pandemic. That in practice is that you keep after it. I'll give you one example. I began biking with my kids and during the summer months were able to bike later. Even now in the fall, we're able to do that often, and I hope that's a practice I'm able to do much more often, even after the pandemic. So develop some activities with your family or with the people that you love the most that are seeing you a lot more and hopefully enjoying that time with them that you will keep even after this pandemic ends. >>So, Sanjay, I love that you're spending all this time with CSOs. I mean, I have a Well, maybe not not 1000 but dozens. And they're such smart people. They're really, you know, in the thick of things you mentioned, you know, your partnership with the scale ahead. Scott Stricklin on who is the C. C so of Wyndham? He was talking about the security club. But since the pandemic, there's really three waves. There's the cloud security, the identity, access management and endpoint security. And one of the things that CSOs will tell you is the lack of talent is their biggest challenge. And they're drowning in all these products. And so how should we think about your approach to security and potentially simplifying their lives? >>Yeah. You know, Dave, we talked about this, I think last year, maybe the year before, and what we were trying to do in security was really simplified because the security industry is like 5000 vendors, and it's like, you know, going to a doctor and she tells you to stay healthy. You gotta have 5000 tablets. You just cannot eat that many tablets you take you days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. So ah, grand simplification has to happen where that health becomes part of your diet. You eat your proteins and vegetables, you drink your water, do your exercise. And the analogy and security is we cannot deploy dozens of agents and hundreds of alerts and many, many consoles. Uh, infrastructure players like us that have control points. We have 70 million virtual machines. We have 75 million virtual switches. We have, you know, tens of million's off workspace, one of carbon black endpoints that we manage and secure its incumbent enough to take security and making a lot more part of the infrastructure. Reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. And with that comes a grand simplification of both the labor involved in learning all these tools. Andi, eventually also the cost of ownership off those particular tool. So that's one other thing we're seeking to do is increasingly be apart off that education off security professionals were both investing in ah, lot of off, you know, kind of threat protection research on many of our folks you know who are in a threat. Behavioral analytics, you know, kind of thread research. And people have come out of deep hacking experience with the government and others give back to the community and teaching classes. Um, in universities, there are a couple of non profits that are really investing in security, transfer education off CSOs and their teams were contributing to that from the standpoint off the ways in which we can give back both in time talent and also a treasure. So I think is we think about this. You're going to see us making this a long term play. We have a billion dollar security business today. There's not many companies that have, you know, a billion dollar plus of security is probably just two or three, and some of them have hit a wall in terms of their progress sport. We want to be one of the leaders in cybersecurity, and we think we need to do this both in building great product satisfying customers. But then also investing in the learning, the training enable remember, one of the things of B M worlds bright is thes hands on labs and all the training enable that happened at this event. So we will use both our platform. We in world in a variety of about the virtual environments to ensure that we get the best education of security to professional. >>So >>that's gonna be exciting, Because if you look at some of the evaluations of some of the pure plays I mean, you're a cloud security business growing a triple digits and, you know, you see some of these guys with, you know, $30 billion valuations, But I wanted to ask you about the market, E v m. Where used to be so simple Right now, you guys have expanded your tam dramatically. How are you thinking about, you know, the market opportunity? You've got your five franchise platforms. I know you're very disciplined about identifying markets, and then, you know, saying, Okay, now we're gonna go compete. But how do you look at the market and the market data? Give us the update there. >>Yeah, I think. Dave, listen, you know, I like davinci statement. You know, simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication, and I think you've touched on something that which is cos we get bigger. You know, I've had the great privilege of working for two great companies. s a P and B M where the bulk of my last 15 plus years And if something I've learned, you know, it's very easy. Both companies was to throw these TLS three letter acronyms, okay? And I use an acronym and describing the three letter acronyms like er or s ex. I mean, they're all acronyms and a new employee who comes to this company. You know, Carol Property, for example. We just hired her from Google. Is our CMO her first comments like, My goodness, there is a lot of off acronyms here. I've gotta you need a glossary? I had the same reaction when I joined B. M or seven years ago and had the same reaction when I joined the S A. P 15 years ago. Now, of course, two or three years into it, you learn everything and it becomes part of your speed. We have toe constantly. It's like an accordion like you expanded by making it mawr of luminous and deep. But as you do that it gets complex, you then have to simplify it. And that's the job of all of us leaders and I this year, just exemplifying that I don't have it perfect. One of the gifts I do have this communication being able to simplify things. I recorded a five minute video off our five franchise pill. It's just so that the casual person didn't know VM where it could understand on. Then, when I'm on your shore and when on with Jim Cramer and CNBC, I try to simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify because the more you can talk and analogies and pictures, the more the casual user. I mean, of course, and some other audiences. I'm talking to investors. Get it on. Then, Of course, as you go deeper, it should be like progressive layers or feeling of an onion. You can get deeper. It's not like the entire discussion with Sanjay Putin on my team is like, you know, empty suit. It's a superficial discussion. We could go deeper, but you don't have to begin the discussion in the bowels off that, and that's really what we don't do. And then the other part of your question was, how do we think about new markets? You know, we always start with Listen, you sort of core in contact our borough come sort of Jeffrey Moore, Andi in the Jeffrey more context. You think about things that you do really well and then ask yourself outside of that what the Jason sees that are closest to you, that your customers are asking you to advance into on that, either organically to partnerships or through acquisitions. I think John and I talked about in the previous dialogue about the framework of build partner and by, and we always think about it in that order. Where do we advance and any of the moves we've made six years ago, seven years ago and I joined the I felt VM are needed to make a move into mobile to really cement opposition in end user computing. And it took me some time to convince my peers and then the board that we should by Air One, which at that time was the biggest acquisition we've ever done. Okay. Similarly, I'm sure prior to me about Joe Tucci, Pat Nelson. We're thinking about nice here, and I'm moving to networking. Those were too big, inorganic moves. +78 years of Raghu was very involved in that. The decisions we moved to the make the move in the public cloud myself. Rgu pack very involved in the decision. Their toe partner with Amazon, the change and divest be cloud air and then invested in organic effort around what's become the Claudia. That's an organic effort that was an acquisition fast forward to last year. It took me a while to really Are you internally convinced people and then make the move off the second biggest acquisition we made in carbon black and endpoint security cement the security story that we're talking about? Rgu did a similar piece of good work around ad monetization to justify that pivotal needed to come back in. So but you could see all these pieces being adjacent to the core, right? And then you ask yourself, Is that context meaning we could leave it to a partner like you don't see us get into the hardware game we're partnering with. Obviously, the players like Dell and HP, Lenovo and the smart Knick players like Intel in video. In Pensando, you see that as part of the Project Monterey announcement. But the adjacent seas, for example, last year into app modernization up the stack and into security, which I'd say Maura's adjacent horizontal to us. We're now made a lot more logical. And as we then convince ourselves that we could do it, convince our board, make the move, We then have to go and tell our customers. Right? And this entire effort of talking to CSOs What am I doing is doing the same thing that I did to my board last year, simplified to 15 minutes and get thousands of them to understand it. Received feedback, improve it, invest further. And actually, some of the moves were now making this year around our partnership in distributed Workforce Security and Cloud Security and Z scaler. What we're announcing an XDR and Security Analytics. All of the big announcements of security of this conference came from what we heard last year between the last 12 months of my last year. Well, you know, keynote around security, and now, and I predict next year it'll be even further. That's how you advance the puck every year. >>Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts. So now we have a couple minutes left. But we did pull the audience and the community to get some questions for you, since it's virtually wanted to get some representation there. So I got three questions for you. First question, what comes after Cloud and number two is VM Ware security company. And three. What company had you wish you had acquired? >>Oh, my goodness. Okay, the third one eyes gonna be the turkey is one, I think. Listen, because I'm gonna give you my personal opinion, and some of it was probably predates me, so I could probably safely So do that. And maybe put the blame on Joe Tucci or somebody else is no longer here. But let me kind of give you the first two. What comes after cloud? I think clouds gonna be with us for a long time. First off this multi cloud world, you just look at the moment, um, that AWS and azure and the other clouds all have. It's incredible on I think this that multi cloud from phenomenon. But if there's an adapt ation of it, it's gonna be three forms of cloud. People are really only focus today in private public cloud. You have to remember the edge and Telco Cloud and this pendulum off the right balance of workloads between the data center called it a private cloud. The public cloud on one end and the telco edge on the other end. I think we're in a really good position for workloads to really swing between all three of those locations. Three other part that I think comes as a sequel to Cloud is cloud native. All of the capabilities a serverless functions but also containers that you know. Obviously the one could think of that a sister topics to cloud but the entire world of containers. The other seat, uh, then cloud a cloud native will also be topics, but these were all fairly connected. That's how I'd answer the first question. A security company? Absolutely. We you know, we aspire to be one of the leading companies in cyber security. I don't think they will be only one. We have to show this by the wealth on breath of our customers. The revenue momentum we have Gartner ranking us or the analysts ranking us in top rights of magic quadrants being viewed as an innovator simplifying the stack. But listen, we weren't even on the radar. We weren't speaking of the security conferences years ago. Now we are. We have a billion dollar security business, 20,000 plus customers, really strong presences and network endpoint and workload and Cloud Security. The three Coppola's a lot more coming in Security analytics, Cloud Security distributed workforce Security. So we're here to stay. And if anything, BMR persist through this, we're planning for multi your five or 10 year timeframe. And in that course I mean, the competition is smaller. Companies that don't have the breadth and depth of the n words are Andy muscle and are going market. We just have to keep building great products and serving customer on the third man. There's so many. But I mean, I think Listen, when I was looking back, I always wondered this is before I joined so I could say the summit speculatively on. Don't you know, make this This is BMR. Sorry. This is Sanjay one's opinion. Not VM. I gotta make very, very clear. Well, listen, I would have if I was at BMO in 2012 or 2013. I would love to about service now then service. It was a great company. I don't even know maybe the company's talk, but then talk about a very successful company at that time now. Maybe their priorities were different. I wasn't at the company at the time, but I can speculate if that had happened, that would have been an interesting Now I think that was during the time of Paul Maritz here and and so on. So for them, maybe there were other priorities the company need to get done. But at that time, of course, today s so it's not as big of a even slightly bigger market cap than us. So that's not happening. But that's a great example of a good company that I think would have at that time fit very well with VM Ware. And then there's probably we don't look back and regret we move forward. I mean, I think about the acquisitions we have made the big ones. Okay, Nice era air watch pop in black. Pivotal. The big moves we've made in terms of partnership. Amazon. What? We're announcing this This, you know, this week within video and Z scaler. So you never look back and regret. You always look for >>follow up on that To follow up on that from a developer, entrepreneurial or partner Perspective. Can you share where the white spaces for people to innovate around vm Where where where can people partner and play. Whether I'm an entrepreneur in a garage or venture back, funded or say a partner pivoting and or resetting with Govind, where's the white spaces with them? >>I think that, you know, there's gonna be a number off places where the Tan Xue platform develops, as it kind of makes it relevant to developers. I mean, there's, I think the first way we think about this is to make ourselves relevant toe all of that ecosystem around the C I. C. D type apply platform. They're really good partners of ours. They're like, get lab, You know, all of the ways in which open source communities, you know will play alongside that Hash E Corp. Jay frog there number of these companies that are partnering with us and we're excited about all of their relevancy to tend to, and it's our job to go and make that marketplace better and better. You're going to hear more about that coming up from us on. Then there's the set of data companies, you know, con fluent. You know, of course, you've seen a big I p o of a snowflake. All of those data companies, we'll need a very natural synergy. If you think about the old days of middleware, middleware is always sort of separate from the database. I think that's starting to kind of coalesce. And Data and analytics placed on top of the modern day middleware, which is containers I think it's gonna be now does VM or play physically is a data company. We don't know today we're gonna partner very heavily. But picking the right set of partners been fluent is a good example of one on. There's many of the next generation database companies that you're going to see us partner with that will become part of that marketplace influence. And I think, as you see us certainly produce out the VM Ware marketplace for developers. I think this is gonna be a game changing opportunity for us to really take those five million developers and work with the leading companies. You know, I use the example of get Lab is an example get help there. Others that appeal to developers tie them into our developer framework. The one thing you learn about developers, you can't have a mindset. With that, you all come to just us. It's a very mingled village off multiple ecosystems and Venn diagrams that are coalescing. If you try to take over the world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, which is why I described. It's like, Listen, we want our developers to come to our conferences and reinvent and ignite and get the best experience of all those provide tools that coincide with everybody. You have to take a holistic view of this on if you do that over many years, just like the security topic. This is a multi year pursuit for us to be relevant. Developers. We feel good about the future being bright. >>David got five minutes e. >>I thought you were gonna say Zoom, Sanjay, that was That was my wildcard. >>Well, listen, you know, I think it was more recently and very fast catapult Thio success, and I don't know that that's clearly in the complete, you know, sweet spot of the anywhere. I mean, you know, unified collaboration would have probably put us in much more competition with teams and, well, back someone you always have to think about what's in the in the bailiwick of what's closest to us, but zooms a great partner. Uh, I mean, obviously you love to acquire anybody that's hot, but Eric's doing really well. I mean, Erica, I'm sure he had many people try to come to buy him. I'm just so proud of him as a friend of all that he was named to Time magazine Top 100. But what he's done is phenomenon. I think he could build a company that's just his important, his Facebook. So, you know, I encourage him. Don't sell, keep building the company and you'll build a company that's going to be, you know, the enterprise version of Facebook. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity to do this better than anybody else is doing. And you know, I'm as an immigrant. He's, you know, China. Born now American, I'm Indian born, American, assim immigrants. We both have a similar story. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from him, from on speed on speed and how to move fast, he tells me he learns a thing to do for me on scale. We teach each other. It's a beautiful friendship. >>We'll make sure you put in a good word for the Kiwi. One more zoom integration >>for a final word or the zoom that is the future Facebook of the enterprise. Whatever, Sanjay, Thank >>you for connecting with us. Virtually. It is a digital foundation. It is an unpredictable world. Um, it's gonna change. It could be software to find the operating models or changing you guys. We're changing how you serve customers with new chief up commercial customer officer you have in place, which is a new hire. Congratulations. And you guys were flexing with the market and you got a tailwind. So congratulations, >>John and Dave. Always a pleasure. We couldn't do this without the partnership. Also with you. Congratulations of Successful Cube. And in its new digital format, Thank you for being with us With VM world here on. Do you know all that you're doing to get the story out? The guests that you have on the show, they look forward, including the nonviable people like, Hey, can I get on the Cuban like, Absolutely. Because they look at your platform is away. I'm telling this story. Thanks for all you're doing. I wish you health and safety. >>I'm gonna bring more community. And Dave is, you know, and Sanjay, and it's easier without the travel. Get more interviews, tell more stories and tell the most important stories. And thank you for telling your story and VM World story here of the emerald 2020. Sanjay Poon in the chief operating officer here on the Cube I'm John for a day Volonte. Thanks for watching Cube Virtual. Thanks for watching.

Published Date : Sep 30 2020

SUMMARY :

World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. I give you more than a virtual pistol. Back at great. Great to have you on. I mean, one of the most powerful women the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, chairman, CEO Pepsi or So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, many other examples, so you are clearly one of the top, you know. And that's what you know, this entire world of what hefty on pivotal brought to us on. So you got your customers air in this in this in this, in this storm, I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia. They're really, you know, in the thick of things you mentioned, you know, your partnership with the scale ahead. You just cannot eat that many tablets you take you days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. you know, the market opportunity? You know, we always start with Listen, you sort of core in contact our What company had you But let me kind of give you the first two. Can you share where the white spaces for people to innovate around vm You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, success, and I don't know that that's clearly in the complete, you know, We'll make sure you put in a good word for the Kiwi. is the future Facebook of the enterprise. It could be software to find the operating models or changing you guys. The guests that you have on the show, And Dave is, you know, and Sanjay, and it's easier without the travel.

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5 Things We Are Thinking About for the Future AIOps and Other Things to Watch For


 

>>Well, welcome everybody to our last session of the day. I want to introduce you to Sean O'Meara. Orfield Cto. Hey, Sean. >>Hey, Nick. Good afternoon. It's been a crazy day. It has. It's been a busy run up to today in a busy day with a lot of great things going on. You know, we've heard from Adrian on his strategy this morning. The great way the Marantz is moving forward. We announced our new product line. You know, we spoke about the new doctor Enterprise Container Cloud line, New future for Mirant. Us. We had a great lineup of customers share their story. We introduced lanes following on the lanes launch a couple of weeks ago. Andi, we're introducing new great projects like our mosque project. New way to deliver open stack going into the future on then in parallel sel. This We ran a great tutorial tracker teachers you all about how to use these new products, and hopefully you'll go and everyone had opportunity to go and look through guys. Yeah. What's next? What is next? Yeah, lots going on. A lot of new things that we're thinking about for the future. Obviously, a lot of work to do on what we have right now. A lot of great things coming. But, you know, we've had this opportunity to talk about all these cool things that are coming down the road. And everybody these days seems to be talking about topics like edge computing or hybrid cloud. Or, you know, hyper scale data centers, even things like disaster recovery is a service. Andi, you know, we talk a lot about things like hyper converged, but frankly, it's boring. It's one thing a little. Good morning. Uh, you know, you and I have been talking about these topics for a while now, and I think it's about time when we spoke about some of the cool things that we're thinking about for the future, not necessarily looking out for the road map, but ideas for the future. Things that may could have an impact on the way we do business going to. So today we're gonna talk a little bit about things like pervasive computing. A nick, what is pervasive computing. >>Well, basically pervasive computing is when everything that you interact with, for the most part, is computerized. So in some ways, we're already there in that You know your phone is a computer. Your refrigerator may have a computer in it. Um, your smart watch your car has a computer in it. And the the most obvious sign of that is this whole Internet of things where, you know your vacuum is, uh is connected to your phone and all of that. And so pervasive computing is this, uh is this sense of you don't even really think about it. You just kind of assume that everything is computerized. >>So how is that different from ubiquitous computing? >>Oh, God. You hit, You hit my hot button. Okay, so if you look, there are a lot of places that will say that pervasive computing and ubiquitous computing are the same thing, but not the same thing. Don't use them interchangeably. They're not the same thing. You big. What is computing is where you can do your computing virtually anywhere. So, for example, you know, I've got, uh I've got a document. I started it on my laptop. I can then go and finish it sitting on the beach on my phone. Or, you know, I can go and do it in a coffee shop or a library. or wherever. So the idea of ubiquitous computing is similar in that, yes, there's computing everywhere, but it's more about your data being universally accessible. So essentially it is cloud computing. That is what this whole ubiquitous computing thing is about. >>Okay on that then differs from pervasive computing in the fact that pervasive is the devices that we have all around us versus the access to those devices. >>Exactly. It's it's really it's more about the data. So ubiquitous computing is more about My data is stored in some central place, and I could hit it from anywhere. There is a device, whereas pervasive computing is there is a device almost everywhere. Okay, so yeah, >>So why Why do we as Moran takes care about the vice of computing? >>Well, pervasive computing brings up a whole lot of new issues, and it's coming up really fast. I mean, you last night I was watching, you know, commercial where you know, somebody a woman's coming out and starting her car with her phone. Um, which sounds really cool. Um, but you know what they say Anything that you can access, you know, with your computer is hackable. So, you know, there are security issues that need to be considered when it comes to all of this, but that's that's the downside. But there's just this huge upside on pervasive computing that it's so exciting when you think about this. I mean, think about a world where remember I said your refrigerator might be attached to the network. Well, what if you could rent out space on your refrigerator to somebody someplace else in a secure way? Of course. You know what? If you could define your personal network as all of these devices that you own and it doesn't matter where your workloads run or, you know, you could define all of this stuff in such a way that the connectivity between objects is really huge. Um, so you know, I mean, you look at things like, you know, I f t t you know, it's like get a notification when the International space station passes over your house. Okay? I don't know why I would need that. Um, but it's the kind of thing that people >>would have a nine year old. You can run him outside and show Z. Oh, >>there you go. There you go. So I mean, that kind of level of connectivity between objects is really really it gives us this new level off. Uh, this new level of functionality that we would never even considered even 10 years ago. Um, it also extends the life of objects that we already have. So, you know, maybe you've got that, uh, that computerized vacuum cleaner, and you don't like the way that it you don't like the pattern that uses in your house. So you re program it or, uh Or I watched. I watched a guy decide that he didn't want to buy multiple vacuums for his house. So he programmed his programa will act Hume to fly between floors. It was actually pretty funny. Um, I it's some people just have too much time. >>It's driving the whole world of programmable at all levels. Really? Like the projects coming out of the car industry of creating a programmable car would fit into that category. Then, I >>suppose absolutely, absolutely needs developer tool kits. Um, that make it possible for anybody to re program these devices that you never would have thought of reprogramming before. So it's important. So do >>we want to talk about the questions. We would love people to give us some feedback on at this stage. >>I would love to talk about these questions. So what we did is we put together, uh, we put together a place for you to answer questions. If you're not watching this live. If you're watching this live, please go ahead. Drop your ideas in the chat. We would love to discuss them, you know. Do you want to see more of this? Or does it? Conversely, Does it scare you, Sean? You What? >>What do you >>think about these questions? >>Well, I mean, for me, the idea of the connected world at one level, the engineering me loves the idea. Another level. It comes to these questions of privacy. Vegas questions off. How do I control this going into the future? What prevents somebody from taking over my flying vacuum cleaner? I'm using it, you know? So it's an interesting question. I think there's a lot of cool, cool ideas. Yeah, and a lot of work to be done. I really want to hear other people's ideas as well and see how we can take this into the future. >>Definitely, definitely. I mean, look I mean, we're joking about it, but, you know, when somebody hacks into your grandmother's insulin pump, maybe not so funny. >>Yeah, a very real risk. >>A very real risk. A very real risk. But yeah, I mean, we'd love Thio. We'd love to hear how you'd like to see this used. So that's that's my That's kind of what I've been thinking about thes days. Um, but, you know, Sean, uh, now, you I know you are really concerned about this whole issue of developers and how they feel about infrastructure. So I would love to hear what you've got to say on that. >>Yeah, I'd like to sex, but a bit about that. You know, we we've done a lot of work over the last few years looking at how developing our history has been very focused on operations, but without big drive towards supporting developers providing better infrastructure for developers. One of the interesting things that keeps coming up to the four on Do you know, the way the world is changing is that big question is, do developers actually give a damn about infrastructure in any way, shape or form? Um, you know, ultimately more and more development languages and tools abstract that underlying infrastructure. What communities does is basically abstract. The infrastructure away, Um, mawr and more options. They're coming to market, which you can quite literally creating application without out of a writing a line of code. Um, so this morning, way Dio, we're doing it all the time, sometimes without even realizing it on. I think the definition of what a developer is is also changing to a certain extent. So you know the big question, which I have on which I'd like to understand Maureen, from talking to low developers is due. Developers care about infra What is it that you expect from infrastructure? What do they want going into the future? How are they going to interact with that infrastructure? I My personal opinion is that they don't really care about infrastructure, that they're going to find more ways to completely abstract away from that. And they just want to focus on delivering applications faster and getting value to market. But I might be wrong, and I'd really like to hear people's impact ideas and thoughts on that >>on. And that's exactly and that's why we're asking this question. Developers out there. Do you care? Or do you just want the whole thing completely abstracted away from you >>on? If you do care why, If you don't, what would you like to see? Another. It's a couple of questions to ask, but really like to hear those opinions on bond. You know, Do you just want the operations guys to live with it? You never want to hear about it again, just fine. It's actually good to say that we'll work it out. >>Yes, and that there's nothing. There's nothing wrong with pushing that up stack >>pretty much what we're trying to do here. >>Well, it is what we're trying to do. But at the same time, we want to do what's good for developers. And if you developers or like No, don't don't do that. Well, we want to know because, you know, we don't wanna work away here and some ivory tower and wind up with something that's not good for >>you after school. So cool. So, yeah, there are some other interesting things we're talking about. >>I know, I know. This is This is one of my favorites. This is one of my favorites. >>Zoo this? Yes. While >>we're on the subject of not getting involved with the infrastructure. Go ahead, Sean. Tell us about it. >>Thing is a pet topic of mine and something that that we've spoken about a lot. And thanks something that we we have spent many nights talking about. The idea is AI ops using artificial intelligence to drive operations within our infrastructure. And so a lot of people ask me, You know why? Um, essentially, What the hell is a I out on? I have answered this question many times, and it does often seem that we all take this AI ops thing for granted or look at it in a different way. To me, it is essentially, it's it's automation on steroids. That's what it boils down Thio. It's using intelligence systems that to replace the human cerebellum. I mean, let's just be blunt about this. We're trying to replace humans. Onda reason for that is we humans less meat sacks are airplane. We make mistakes all the time and compared to computers were incredibly slow. Um, you know, that's really the simplest point with the scale of modern infrastructure that we're dealing with the sheer volume. I mean, we've gone from, you know, thousands to tens of thousands of the EMS to now hundreds and thousands of containers spread across multiple time zones. Multiple places. We need to come up with better ways of managing this on the old fashioned stick through mechanism of automation. It's just too limited for that. Right >>when we say we want to replace meat sacks, we mean in a good way. >>We mean in a good way. I know it's a bit of a harsh way of putting it. Um, ultimately, humans have ability for creativity that machines just don't have. But machines can do other things, and they could do analysis of data a lot faster than we can. Quite often, we have to present that data to humans to have invalidate that information. But, you know, one of the options for us is to use artificial intelligence, quantified data, um, correlated, you know, look for root cause and then provide that information to us in such a way that we can make valid decisions based on that information a lot faster than we could otherwise, >>right? So what are the what are the implications? What are the practical implications of doing this so >>practically we can analyze massive amounts of data a lot faster than a single human. Could we even just a normal type system that's searching? We We have the tools to learn by looking at data and have machines do it a lot faster than we can. We can take action faster based on that data, because we get the data foster. We can take action and much more complex action that involves maybe many different layers of tasking much, much faster. Um, on we could start to do maintenance operations and maintenance tasks without having to wait for human beings to wake up or get to an office. But more importantly, we could start making tasks happen very complex tasks in a very specific orders, with much less potential for error. And those are the kinds of areas we're looking at. >>That's that's true. So how do you kind of see this moving forward? I mean, obviously, we're not gonna go from nothing to Skynet, and hopefully we never get to Skynet. Well, >>depends if you are in control of Skynet or not. Ultimately, Dionysus little computer. Um, practically speaking, we have a few things Thio hoops to jump through our suppose before we can look at where else is going to be really effective on the first one is a trust issue. We have to learn to trust it. And to do that, we have to put in a position where it can learn and start providing us that data analysis on that inference and then having humans validated. That's practically the very first step. No, it's a trust issue. You know, we've seen been watching sci fi for the last 30 years. Class on. Do you know the computers take over? Well, ultimately, is that real or not? Um, if we look at how we gonna get there? Probably midterm. Adaptive maintenance, maybe infrastructure orchestration. Smart allocation of resource is across cloud services. Well, >>we can talk for a minute About what that would would actually look like. So, I mean, we could talk about, you know, abs, midterms. I mean, in a practical sense, how would that actually work? >>Yeah, Okay. It's a great question. So, practically speaking, the first thing we're gonna do is we're going to start to collect all this data. We're gonna find all this data. I mean, the modern computer systems that we have infrastructure systems. We are producing many hundreds of gigabytes, sometimes terabytes of logging data every day. The majority of it gives far 13. I mean, we throw the majority of their logging information away or if it's not thrown away, it's stored some way for security purposes and never analyzed. So let's start by taking their data and actually analyzing it. To do that, we have laid and correlated, >>so we >>gotta put it all together. We've got a match it and we've got to start building patents. We're going to start looking for the patterns. This is where I is particularly good at starting to help us. Bold patterns start to look for those patterns. Initially, humans will have to do some training. Um, once we have that patent, once we've got that working, we can now start having the AI systems start to do some affairs. E, here's the recalls. So we the system can tell us based on the data based on the patterns we've been learning. We know from the past debt. If those three network links get full bad example, we're gonna have a failure in Region X, right. So start telling us while those network links of filling up tell us before they fall rather than after their full always they're falling up as we see trending information now seems like a simple I could do trending information with just normal monitoring systems. But if I can start to correlate that with greater users in, you know, Beijing Office versus Users in California office filling up those links and different times of the day, I can now start to make much more clever decisions, which is a human on its own, to try and correlate that information, which is be insane once you've done that way to go to the next stage, which is not to have the system act do actions for us. Based on that information right now, we're starting to get close to the scan it. Speaking of this doesn't have to be a big, complex pile of change. Smart ai solution. I have data on that AI solution is talking to my existing automation solutions to action. That change. That's how I see this moving forward, >>right? So essentially you, instead of saying, you know, deploy this too. Uh, this workload to AWS, you would say deploy this. Yeah, And then the system would look and go. Okay, It's this kind of workload. At this time of day at this size, it's gonna interact with this and this and this. And so it's gonna be best off in this region of this cloud provider on then. Uh, you know, two days from now, when the prices drop, we're gonna put it over there, >>even taking a different different. Spoken exactly that it could be. The Beijing office is coming online. Let's move the majority of the workload to a cloud that's closer to them. Reducing the network bandwidth. Yeah, and inference. Andi Also reducing the impact on international lines as Beijing winds down for the day, I can just move the majority of the workload into California on board Europe. In between, it's very simple examples, but have humans do that would be very complex and very time consuming >>exactly. And end. Just having humans notice those patterns would be difficult. But once you have the system noticing those patterns, then the humans could start to think, How can I take advantage of this, you know, So as you are talking about much longer term in the actual applicant patients themselves. So you know, everything can be optimized that way so >>everybody may optimized way can optimize down to the way we even potentially write applications in the future. Humans were still deciding the base logic. Humans were still deciding the creative components of that. Right as we as we build things, we can start to optimize them, breaking down into smaller and smaller units that are much more specific. But the complexity goes up. When we do that right. I want to use AI and AI solutions to start to manage that complexity across multiple spaces. Multiple time zones, etcetera. >>Exactly. Exactly. So. So that's the question, you know. What do you guys think? You know, we really want to know >>on Dhere again. You know, we mentioned this around the beginning, but do you think you could trust in a iob sedition? What would it take for you to trust in our absolution? And where do you practically see it being used in the short term? >>Yeah, that's that's the big question is where do you see it being used? Where would you like it to be used, you know? Is there something that you don't think would be possible, but you would like to see it, you know. But the main thing is, on a practical matter, what would you like to see? >>Let me ask. The question is like a different way. Do you have a problem that we could solve within a isolation today? E, They're really well >>right. A re a world problem. And And assuming that, you know, we are not gonna, you know, take over the world. >>Yeah. Important. My evil plan is to take over the world with >>man. I'm so sorry. First >>had to let that draw. >>I did. I did. I'm so sorry. Okay, Alright. So that's so That's a I ops. And we like I said, if you're watching this live, throw in the chat. We want to hear your ideas. If your, um if you're doing this, if you're watching this on the replay, go to the survey because we way, we really want to hear your ideas and your opinions. All right, So moving right along. All right. What the heck are you know, kernels? >>Uh, lovely questions. So, you know, the whole world is talking about containers today way we're talking about containers today. But containers like VMS or just one way to handle compute Andi. They're more and more ideas that are out there today, and people have been trying different ways off, shrinking the size of the compute environment. COMPUTER Paxil Another cool way of looking at this and saying That's been around for a little while. But it's getting your attraction to learn to sing called unique kernels, and what they are is they're basically highly optimized. Execute a bles that include the operating system, Um, there on OS settle libraries, um, and some very simplified application code all mixed into a very, very tiny package. Easiest way to describe them. They're super simplified. And I were talking about in the eye ops discussion this idea off taking everything into smaller and smaller individual functions but creating a certain level of complexity. Well, if we look at uni kernels, those are those smaller and smaller bundles and functions. They interact directly with the hardware or through a hyper visor. Um, so actually, no overhead. I mean the overhead If you just look at what a modern you clinics operating system is made up of these days, there are so many different parts and components. Even just the colonel has got anything from, you know, 5 to 7 different parts to it. Plus, of course, drivers and a boot loader. Then we look at the system libraries that set on top of that, you know? And then they're demons and utilities and shells and scream components and, you know, additional colonel stacks that go on top of that for hyper visors. What we're trying to say is, what, This text of space, I'm >>getting tired. Just listening, >>Thio. I'm tired talking about it. You know that the unique colonel, really, it just takes over their complexity. It puts the application the OS on the basic libraries necessary. That application in tow, one really tiny package. Um, yeah. Give you an idea what we're talking about here. We're talking about memory footprints or time package footprints in the kilobytes. You know, a small container is considered 100 make plus, we're talking kilobytes. We're talking memory utilization in the kilobyte two megabytes space because there's no no fact, no fluff, no unnecessary components. And then only the CPU that it needs. >>So Bill Gates was right 6. 40 k is all anybody will ever need >>Potentially. Yeah, right. E, there was there was an IBM CEO who said even less at some point. So we'll see >>how that go. What goes around comes around. >>But one of the really interesting things about this small size, which is really critical, is how fast they can boot. Yeah, we're talking boot times measured in 30 seconds. Wow, We're talking the ability to spin up specific functions only when you need them. Now, if we look at the knock on effect of that, we're looking at power saving. Who knew? Run the app when I need it because there's no Leighton. See to start it up. The app is tiny so I can pack a lot mawr into a lot less space game power seconds. But when I start looking at where you were talking about earlier, which the basic compute idea in the world all of a sudden that tiny little arm chips it in my raspberry pi that's running my fridge, My raspberry pi equivalent that's running my fridge no longer has a fact operating system around it. I can run tens thousands, potentially off these very tiny specific devices when I need them. Wow, I'm kind of excited about it. I'm excited by the idea. You >>can hear that >>I'm a hardware geek from from many, many moons ago on DSO. I kind of like the idea of being able to better utilize along this very low powered hardware that we have lying around and really take it into the future. Well, that's good. Yeah. So I'm not going to kill, not going to kill containers. But it is a parallel technology that I'm very interested in >>that that is true. Now what does it I mean in terms of, like, attack surface. That means it's got a much smaller attack surface, though, right? >>Yeah. Great. Great point. I mean, there's no there's no fluff. There's no extra components in the system. Therefore, the attack surface is very, very small. Um, you know, and because they're so small and can be distributed much, much faster and much more easily updating and upgrading them as much easier way can we can upgrade a 60 k b file across a GPRS connection on which I certainly can't do with 600 make, uh, four gig VM 600 made container. You know, just unrealistic. Um, e >>I was just going to say so. So now these. You know, kernels, they're they're so small. And they have on Lee what they absolutely need. Now, how do you access the hardware? >>So the hardware is accessed via hyper visor. So you have to have some kind of hyper visor running on top of the hard way. But because Because we need very little from their type adviser, we don't actually need to interact with that very much. It could be a very cut down operating system. Very, very simplified operating system. We're also not trying to run another layer on top of that. We're not We're not ending up with multiple potential VMS or something underneath it were completely removed. That layer, um, the the drivers, the necessary drivers are built into that particular colonel device. >>Oh, okay. That makes sense. >>Tiny footprint easily distributed, um, and once again, very specialized, >>right? Right. Well, that makes sense. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, I guess so. These these individual stacks, you know, comparing virtual machines to containers to unit colonels, there just a completely different architecture. But I can see how that would How That would work where you have the hi perverse. A little hyper buys are on top of rented teeth. OK, so moving right along certain. Where do we see these being used? >>Um, it's early days, although there are some very good practical applications out there. There's a big, big ecosystem of people trying different ways for this I o ts off the obvious immediate place. I i o t s a quick, easy place for something very specialized. Um, what's interesting to me? And you mentioned this earlier. You know, we're talking about medical devices. We're talking about potentially disposable medical devices. Now, if I can keep those devices to run on really low power very, very cheap, um, CPUs and all of a sudden I've got a device that is available to a lot more people. I don't need a massive, powerful CPU. I just need saying that runs a very specific function really fast, A very small scale. I could do well disposable devices. I can build medical devices that are so small we can potentially swallow them and other areas which are really interesting. And I spoke a little bit about it, but it's energy efficiency. Where We need to be very, very energy efficient. No. And that can also impact on massively scalable systems where I want to deal with tens of thousands of potential transactions from users going into a system. I can spin them up only when I need them. I don't need to keep them running all the time again. It comes back to that low latency on then. Anyway, that an incredibly fast food time is valuable. Um, a car, you know, Think about it. If if my if my electric car is constantly draining that battery when it's parked in the garage and I'm traveling or if it takes 20 minutes from my car to boot up its clinics. Colonel, when I wanted, I'm going to get very irritated. Well, >>that and if you have a specific function, you know, like, identify that thing, Yeah, it would be good if you haven't smashed into it before. Identified it as a baby carriage e dark today. Yes. >>So, Nick, you know, these is all really interesting topics. Um, yeah. We spoke about air ops. We spoke about the impact is gonna have on humans. Um, all of these changes to the world that we're living in from computer systems, the impact it's having on our lives biggest. An interesting question about the ethics of all of this >>ethics of all of this. Yes, because let's be let's be realistic. There are actual riel concerns when it comes to privacy, when it comes to how corporations operate, when it comes to how governments operate. Um, there are areas of the world's where, how all of this has has moved, it's absolutely I'll be honest, absolutely terrifying the economic disparity. Um, but when you really come right down to it, um, it's all about the human control over the technology because all of these ethical issues are are in our hands. Okay, we could joke about Sky Net. We can joke about things like that, but this is one place that technology can't help us. We have to do this. We have to be aware of what's going on. We have to be aware. Are they using facial recognition? Uh, you know, when you go to X y Z, are they using recidivism algorithms in sentencing? And how is that? How is that going? Is it? Are those algorithms fair? Certain groups get longer sentences because historical data, uh, is skewed. Be educated. Know how this works? Don't be afraid of any of this. None of this is, uh, none of this is rocket science. Really? Come right down to it. I mean, it's it's not simple, but you can learn this. You can do it. >>Ask good questions. Be interested to be part of the part of the discussion. Not just a passive bystander. >>Exactly. Don't just complain about what you think is going on. Learn about what is actually going on and be active, where you see something that needs to be fixed. So that's what that's what we can do about it. We need to be aware that there's an issue or potential issues, and we need to step in and fix it. So that z myself box, I'll step down zone >>important topic. And it's one that we all can have influence on on bits one. Those who are us who are actually involved in building these systems for the future. We can help make sure that the rules are there. That's right. Systems are built correctly on that. We have open dialogues and discussions around these points and topics and on going away, was she? I think we're coming to the end of the time on hopefully we've kept everybody interested in some of the things that we think are cool for the future. And we're putting our efforts into E O. But I think we need to wrap this up now. So, Nick, great chatting to you is always >>always, always a pleasure, Sean. >>It's been an amazing week. Um, been amazing. Couple of weeks, everybody leading up to this event on bond. No, thank you, everybody for listening to us. Please go and download and try. Dr. Enterprise, Uh, the container card is available. Will post the links here to better understand what we've been doing. Go and have a look through the tutorial track. You'll hear my voice. I'm sure you'll hear next voice and make other people's voices through those tutorials. Hopefully, we keep you all interested and then going download and try lens, Please. Finally, we want your feedback. We're interested to hear what you think would be the great ideas. Good, Bad. Otherwise let us know what you think about products. We are striving to make them better all the time. >>Absolutely. And we want your involvement. Was it all right? Thank you all. Bye bye. Yeah,

Published Date : Sep 15 2020

SUMMARY :

I want to introduce you to Uh, you know, you and I have been talking about these topics for a while now, of that is this whole Internet of things where, you know your vacuum What is computing is where you can do your computing virtually that we have all around us versus the access to those devices. It's it's really it's more about the data. on pervasive computing that it's so exciting when you think about this. You can run him outside and show Z. Um, it also extends the life of objects that we already have. Like the projects coming out of the car industry of creating a programmable car would to re program these devices that you never would have thought of reprogramming we want to talk about the questions. put together, uh, we put together a place for you to answer questions. I'm using it, you know? you know, when somebody hacks into your grandmother's insulin pump, maybe not so funny. Um, but, you know, Sean, uh, now, you I know you are really the four on Do you know, the way the world is changing is that big question is, Or do you just want the whole thing completely abstracted what would you like to see? Yes, and that there's nothing. Well, we want to know because, you know, we don't wanna work away here and some you after school. I know, I know. we're on the subject of not getting involved with the infrastructure. I mean, we've gone from, you know, thousands to you know, look for root cause and then provide that information to us in such a way that we can make valid We can take action faster based on that data, because we get the data foster. So how do you kind of see this moving And to do that, we have to put in a position where it can learn and start providing So, I mean, we could talk about, you know, abs, midterms. the modern computer systems that we have infrastructure systems. I have data on that AI solution is talking to my existing Uh, you know, two days from now, Let's move the majority of the workload to a cloud that's closer to them. you know, So as you are talking about much longer term in the actual applicant patients But the complexity goes up. What do you guys think? You know, we mentioned this around the beginning, but do you think you could Yeah, that's that's the big question is where do you see it being used? Do you have a problem that we could solve And And assuming that, you know, we are not My evil plan is to take over the world with I'm so sorry. What the heck are you know, kernels? Even just the colonel has got anything from, you know, 5 to 7 getting tired. that the unique colonel, really, it just takes over their complexity. So we'll see how that go. to spin up specific functions only when you need them. I kind of like the idea of being able to better utilize along this very low powered hardware that we have lying around and that that is true. you know, and because they're so small and can be distributed much, much faster and much more easily updating and upgrading Now, how do you access the So you have to have some kind That makes sense. But I can see how that would How That would work where you have I can build medical devices that are so small we can potentially swallow them and like, identify that thing, Yeah, it would be good if you So, Nick, you know, these is all really interesting topics. Um, but when you really come right down to it, um, it's all about Be interested to be part of the part of the Don't just complain about what you think is going on. Nick, great chatting to you is always We're interested to hear what you think would be the great ideas. Thank you all.

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Fabio Gori & Eugene Kim, Cisco | Cisco Live EU Barcelona 2020


 

>>Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the Cube covering Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here at Cisco Live 2020 in Barcelona, Spain. I'm jumpers student of cube coverage. We've got a lot of stuff going on in Cisco Multi cloud and cloud technology. Quantification of Cisco's happening in real time is happening right now. Cloud is here here to stay. We got two great guests unpack what's going on in cloud native and networking and applications as the modern infrastructure and software evolves. We got you. Gene Kim, global product marketing. Compute Storage at Cisco Global marketing manager and Rob Gori, senior director. Cloud Solution Marketing Guys come back. Thanks for coming back. Appreciate it. Great to see you Barcelona guys. So, Bobby, we've had multiple conversations and you see that from the sales force given kind of the the discussion in the motivation Cloud is big. It's here. It's here to stay. It's changing. Cisco AP I first week here in all the products, it's changing everything. What's the story now? What's going on? >>I would say you know the reason why we're so excited about the launch here in Barcelona is because this time it's all about the application of spirits. I mean, the last two years we've being announcing some really exciting stuff in the cloud space where I think about all the announcements with AWS is the Googles the azure, so the world. But this time it really boils down to making sure that is incredibly hyper distributive world. There is an application explosion. Ultimately, we will help for the right operation stools and infrastructure management tools to ensure that the right application experience will be guaranteed for the end customer. And that's incredibly important because at the end, what really really matters is that you will ensure the best possible digital experience to your customer. Otherwise, ultimately nothing's gonna work. And, of course, you're gonna lose your brand and your customers. >>One of the main stories that we're covering is the transformation of the industry. Also, Cisco and one of the highlights to me was the opening keynote. You had APP dynamics first, not networking. Normally it's like what's in the hood? Routers and the gear. No, it was about the applications. This is the story we're seeing. It's kind of a quiet unveiling. Its not get a launch, but it's evolving very quickly. Can you share what's going on behind this? All this? >>Absolutely. It's exactly along the lines of what I was saying a second ago, in the end that the reason why we're driving the announcement, if you want from the application experience side of the House, is because with Appdynamics, we already have very, very powerful application performance management, which it's evolving extremely rapidly. First of all, Appdynamics can correlate not just the application for four months to some technology, maybe eyes, but through actual business KP eyes. So app dynamics can give you, for instance, serial time visibility off, say, a marketing funnel conversion rates transactions that you're having in your in your business operation. Now we're introducing an incredibly powerful new capability that takes the bar to a whole new level. And that's the Appdynamics experience. Journey maps. What are those? It's actually the ability off, focusing not so much on front ends and back ends and the business performances, but really focusing on what the user is seen in front of his or her screen. And so what really matters is capturing the journey that given user of your application is being and understanding whether the experience is the one that you want to deliver or you have, like, a sudden drop off somewhere. And you know why this is important because in the end we've been talking about is the problem of the application, performance issues or performance. It could be a badly designed page. How do you know? And so this is a very precious information they were giving to application developers know, just through the idea. Ops, guys, that is incredibly gracious. >>Okay, you want to get this in. So you just brought up that journey. So that's part of the news. Just break down real quick. One minute what the news is. >>Yeah, so we have three components. The 1st 1 as you as you correctly pointed out, is really the introduction of the application. The journey maps, right. The experience journey maps. That's very, very important. The second he's way are actually integrating Appdynamics with the inter site. Actually, inter site the optimization manager, the workload optimization, workload, optimizer. And so because there is exchange of data between the two now, you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem. We have a worker problem for structure problem, which is after me, where you really need to do as quickly as you can. And thirdly, way have introduced a new version of our hyper flex platform, which is hyper converge flagship platform for Cisco with a fully containerized version, the tax free if you want as well, that is a great platform for containerized applications. >>So you do and what I've been talking to customers last few years. When they go through their transformational journey, there's the modernization they need to do. The pattern I've seen most successful is first, modernize the platform often HD I is, you know, an option for that. It really simplifies the environment, reduces the silos on, has more of that operational model that looks closer to what the cloud experience is. And then, if I've got a good platform, then I can modernize the applications on top of it. But often those two have been a little bit disconnected. It feels like the announcements now that they are coming together. What are you seeing? What're you hearing? How your solutions at solving this issue >>exactly. I mean, as we've been talking to our customers, a lot of them are going through a different application. Modernizations and kubernetes and containers is extremely important to them. And to build a container cloud on Prem is extremely one of their needs. And so there's three distinctive requirements that they've kind of talk to us about. A lot of it has to be ableto it's got to be very simple, very turnkey, fully integrated, ready to turn on the other. One is something that's very agile, right? Very Dev Ops friendly and the third being a very economic container cloud on prim. So as you mentioned, High Flex Application Platform takes our hyper converge system and build on top of it a integrated kubernetes platform to deliver a container as a service type capability. And it provides a full stack, fully supported element platform for our customers, and one of the best great aspects of it is it's all managed from inter site, from the physical infrastructure to the hyper converge layer to all the way to the container management. So it's very exciting to have that full stack management and inter site as well. >>It's great to see you, John and I have been following this kubernetes wave since the early early days. Fabio mentioned integrations with the Amazons and Googles of the world because, you know, a few years ago you talk to customers and they're like, Oh, well, I'm just going to build my own community. Nobody ever said that is easy now. Just delivering as a service seems to be the way most people want it. So if I'm doing it on Amazon or Google, they've got their manage service that I could do that or that there partners we're working with. So explain what you're doing to make it simpler in the data center environment. Because on Prem absolutely is a piece of that hybrid equation that customers need. >>Yes, so, essentially from the customer experience perspective, as I mentioned, very fairly turnkey right from the hyper flex application platform we're taking are happening for software were integrating a application virtualization layer on top of it analytics k VM based. And then on top of that, we're integrating the kubernetes stack on top of as well. And so, in essence, right? It's a fully curated kubernetes stack that has all the different elements from the networking from the storage elements and provide that in a very turnkey way. And as I mentioned, the inter site management is really providing that simplicity that customers need for that management. >>Fabio This is the previous announcements you've made with the public clouds. This just ties into those hybrid environments. That's exactly a few years ago. People like, Oh, is there going to be a distribution that wins in kubernetes? We don't think that's the answer, but still, I can't just move between kubernetes. You know seamlessly yet. But this is moving toward that >>direct. Absolutely. A lot of customers want to have a very simple implementation. At the same time, they weren't off course a multi cloud approach and I really care about marking the difference between multi cloud hybrid Cloud has been a lot of confusion. But if you think about a multi cloud is re routed into the business need or harnessing innovation from wherever it comes from, you know the different clouds capability from things, and you know what they do today. Tomorrow it could even change, so people want optionality, so they want a very simple implementation that's integrated with public cloud providers that simplifies their life in terms of networking, security and application of workload management. And we've been executing towards that goal so fundamentally simplify the operations of these pretty complex kind of hybrid apartments. >>And once you nail that operations on hybrid, that's where multi cloud comes in. That's really just a connection point. >>Absolutely, you know, you might know is an issue. So in order to fulfill your business, your line of business needs you. Then you have a hybrid problem, and you want to really kind of have a consistent production grade environment between things on Prem that you own and control versus things that you use and you want to control better. Now, of course, they're different school thoughts. But most of the customers who are speaking with really want to expand their governance and technology model right to the cloud, as opposed to absorb in different ways of doing things from each and every time. >>I want to unpack a little bit of what you said earlier about the knowing where the problem is, because a lot of times it's a point, the finger at the other first, it's the application promising the problem, so I want to get into that. But first I want to understand the hyper flex application platform. Eugene, if you could just share the main problem that you guys solve, what are some of the pain points that customers had? What problem does the AP solved? >>Yeah, as I mentioned, it's really the platform for our customers to modernize the applications on right, and it addresses those things that they're looking for as far as the economics right, really? The ability to provide a full stack container experience without having to, you know, but bringing any third party hyper visor licenses as well support costs that's well integrated. There you have your integrated, hyper converged storage capability. You have the cloud based management, and that's really developing. You provide that developer dev ops simplicity from that agility that they're looking for internally as well as for their production environments. And then the other aspect is the simplicity to manage all this right and the entire life cycle management >>as well. So it's the operational side of the hole in under the covers hobby on the application side where the problem is because this is where I'm a bit skeptical, Normal rightfully so. But I can see a problem where it's like Whose fault is it? Applications, problem or the network? I mean, it runs on where? Sears Workloads, Banking app. It's having trouble. How do you know where the problem is? And how do you solve that problem with what's going on for that specific issue? >>Absolutely. And you know, the name of the game here is breaking down this operational side, right? And I love what are appdynamics VP? GM Any? Whitaker said. You know, he has this terminology. Beast develops, which it may sound like an interesting acrobatics, but it's absolutely too. The business has to be part of this operational kind of innovation because, as you said, you know, developer just drops their containers and their code to the I T. Ops team, but you don't really know whether the problem a certain point is going to be in the code or in the application is actually deployed. Or maybe a server that doesn't have enough CPU. So in the end, it boils down to one very important thing. You have to have visibility, insights and take action at every layer of the stack. Instrumentation. Absolutely. There are players that only do it in their software overlay domain. The problem is, very often these kind of players assume they're underneath. Things are fine, and very often they're not. So in the end, this visibility inside in action is the loop that everybody's going after these days, too, Really get to the next. If you want a generational operation, where you gotta have a constant feedback loop and making it more faster and faster because in the end you can only win in the marketplace, right? So your I T ops, if you're faster than your competitors, >>will still still questioning the GM of APP Dynamics. Run, observe, ability. And he's like, No, it's not a feature, it's everywhere. So he's comment was observe. Abilities don't really talk about it because it's a big in. You agree with that? >>Absolutely. It has to be at every layer of the stack, and only if you have visibility inside an action through the entire stock, from the software all the way to the infrastructure level that you can solve the problems. Otherwise, the finger pointing quote unquote will continue, and you will not be able to gain the speed you need. >>Okay, so The question on my mind I want to get both of you guys could weigh in on this is that if you look at Cisco as a company, you got a lot going on. You guys huge customer base core routers to know applications. There's a lot going on a lot of a lot of complexity. You got I o. T. Security members talking about that. You got the WebEx rooms totally popular. It's got a lot of glam, too, and having the WebEx kind of, I guess, what virtual presence was telepresence kind of model. And then you get cloud. Is there a mind share within the company around how cloud is baked into everything? Because you can't do I ot edge without having some sort of cloud operational things. Stuff we're talking about is not just a division. It's kind of it's kind of threads everywhere across Cisco. What's the what's the mind share right now within the Cisco teams and also customers around cloud ification? >>Well, I would say it's it's a couple of dimensions. The 1st 1 is the cloud is one of the critical domains of this multi domain architecture. That, of course, is the cornerstone of Cisco's. The knowledge is strategy, right? If you think about it, it's all about connecting users to applications wherever they are and not just the users to the applications themselves. Like if you look at the latest US from I. D. C. 58% of workloads is heading to a public cloud, and the edge is like the data center is exploding many different directions. So you have this highly distributed kind of fabric. Guess what sits in between. All these applications and micro services is a secure network, and that's exactly what we're executing upon. Now that's the first kind of consideration. The second is if you look at the other civil line. Most of the Cisco technology innovation is also going a direction of absorbing cloud as a simplified way of managing all the components or the infrastructure. You look at the hyper flex. AP is actually managed by Inter site, which is a SAS kind of component. This journey started long time ago with Cisco Iraqi on then, of course, we have sass properties like WebEx. Everything else absolutely migrate borders. >>We've been reporting Eugene that five years ago we saw the movement where AP, eyes were starting to come in when you go back five years ago. Not a lot of the gear and stuff that Cisco had AP eyes. Now you got AP eyes building in all the new products that you see the software shift with you intent based networking to APP dynamics. It's interesting. It's you're seeing kind of the agile mindset. This is something you and I talk all the time. But agile now is the new model. Is it ready for customers? I mean, the normal enterprises still have the infrastructure and separated, and they're like, Okay, how do I bring it together? What do you guys see in the customer base? What's going on with that early adopters, Heavy duty hardcore pioneers out there. But you know, the general mainstream enterprise. Are they there yet? Have they had that moment of awakening? >>Yeah, I mean, I think they they are there because fundamentally, it's all about ensuring that application experience. And you could only ensure the application experience right by having your application teams and infrastructure teams work together. And that's what's exciting. You mentioned Ap eyes and what we've done. They were with APP dynamics, integrating with inner sight workload. Optimizer as you mentioned all the visibility inside in action and what APP Dynamics has provides. Provide that business and end user application performance experience. Visibility Inter site. It's giving you visibility on the underlining workload, and the resource is whether it's on prim in your private data center environment or in a different type of cloud providers. So you get that full stack visibility right from the application all the way down to the bottom and then inter site local optimizer is then also optimizing the resource is to proactively ensure that application experience. So before you know, if we talk about someone at a check out and they're about there's of abandonment because the function is not working, we're able to proactively prevent that and take a look at all that. So, you know, in the end, I think it's all about ensuring that application experience and what we're providing with APP Dynamics is for the application team is kind of that horizontal visibility of how that application performing and at the same time, if there's an issue, the infrastructure team could see exactly within the workload topology, where the issue is and entertain safely, whether it be manual intervention or even automatically our ops capability. Go ahead and provide that action so the action could be, you know, scaling out the VM that's on Prem or looking at new, different type of easy to template in the cloud. That's a very exciting about this. It's really the application experience is now driving and optimize the infrastructure in real >>time. And let me flip your question like, Do you even have a choice, John, when you think about in the next two years 50% more applications? If you're a large enterprise here, 5 to 7000 apps you have another 2 3000 applications just coming into into the and then 50% of the existing ones that are going to be re factor lifted and shifted the replace or retired by SAS application. It's just like a tsunami that's that's coming on you and oh, by the way, because again the micro services kind of effect the number of dependencies between all these applications is growing incredibly rapidly, Like last year, we were eight average interdependencies for applications. Now we have 20 so in Beijing imaginable happens as you are literally flooded with this can really you have to ensure that your application infrastructure fundamentally will get tied up as quickly as you can >>see. You and I have been talking for at least five years now, if not longer. Networking has been the key kind of last change over clarification. I would agree with you guys. I think last question because I wanted to get your perspective. But think about it. It's 13 years since the iPhone so mobile has shown people that mobile app can change business. But now you get the pressure of the networks. Bringing that pressure on the network or the pressure of the network to be better than programmable is the rise of video and data. I mean, you got mobile check now you got it. Video. I mean more people doing video now than ever before. Videos of consumer. Well, it's streaming. You got data? These two things absolutely forced customers to deal with it. >>But what really tipped the balance? John is actually the SAS effect is the cloud effect because, as you know, it's an I t. So the inflection points. Nothing gets a linear right. So once you reach a certain critical mass of cloud apps, and we're absolutely they're already all of a sudden your traffic pattern on your network changes dramatically. So why in the world are you continuing? Kind of, you know, concentrating all of your traffic in your data center and then going to the Internet. You have to absolutely open the floodgates at the branch level and as close to the users this possible, and that it implies a radical change of the >>way I would even add to that. And I think you guys are right on where you guys are going. It may be hard to kind of tease out with all the complexity with Cisco, but in the keynote, the business model shifts come from SAS. So you got all this technical stuff going on. You have the sass ification, or cloud changes the business models so new entrants can come in and existing players get better. So I think that whole business model conversation never was discussed at Cisco Live before in depth. Okay, run your business, connect your hubs campus move packets around Dallas applications in business model, >>but also the fact that there is increasing number off software capabilities and so fundamental. You want to simplify the life of your customers through subscription models that help the customer buying a using what they really need the right at any given point in time, all the way to having enterprise agreements. >>I also think that's about delivering these application experiences free for small, different experience. That's really what's differentiating you from your competitors, right? And so that's a different type of >>shift as well. Well, you guys have got a good That's a good angle on this cloud. I love it. I got to ask the question. What can we expect next from Cisco? More progression along cloud ification? What's next? >>Well, I would say we've been incredibly consistent, I believe in the last few years in executing on our cloud strategy, which again is sent around helping customers really gluing this mix, set off data centers and clouds to make it work as one right as much as possible. And so what we really deliver is networking security and application performance management, and we're integrating this more and more on the two sides of the equation, right? The data center side and the public cloud side and more more integrated in between all of these layers again, to fundamentally give you this operational capability to get faster and faster. We'll continue doing so and >>we'll get you set up before we came on camera that you were talking to sales teams. What are they? What's the vibe with sales team? They get excited by this. What's the >>oh yeah, feedback. And absolutely, from the inter site work optimizer and the app Dynamics side. It's very exciting for them. Switch the conversation they're having with their customers, really from that application experience and proactively ensuring it. And on the hyper flex application platform side, this is extreme exciting with providing a container cloud to our customers. And you know what's coming down is more and more capabilities for our customers to modernize the applications on hyper >>flex. You guys are riding a pretty big waves here at Cisco in a cloud way to get the i o t. Security wave. Great stuff. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for sharing the insights. Appreciate it. >>Thank you for having >>coverage here in Barcelona. I'm John. First, Minutemen back with more coverage. Fourth day of four days of cube coverage. Be right back after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Published Date : Jan 30 2020

SUMMARY :

Cisco Live 2020 right to you by Cisco and its ecosystem Great to see you Barcelona guys. And that's incredibly important because at the end, what really really of the highlights to me was the opening keynote. driving the announcement, if you want from the application experience side of the House, is because with Appdynamics, So that's part of the news. of data between the two now, you are in a position to immediately understand whether you have an application problem. modernize the platform often HD I is, you know, an option for that. from inter site, from the physical infrastructure to the hyper converge layer to all the way to the container you know, a few years ago you talk to customers and they're like, Oh, well, I'm just going to build my own community. And as I mentioned, the inter site management is really providing that simplicity Fabio This is the previous announcements you've made with the public clouds. into the business need or harnessing innovation from wherever it comes from, you know the different clouds capability And once you nail that operations on hybrid, that's where multi cloud comes in. But most of the customers who are speaking with really want to expand their governance and I want to unpack a little bit of what you said earlier about the knowing where the problem is, because a lot of times it's a Yeah, as I mentioned, it's really the platform for our customers to modernize So it's the operational side of the hole in under the covers hobby on the application side where and faster because in the end you can only win in the marketplace, right? And he's like, No, it's not a feature, it's everywhere. the entire stock, from the software all the way to the infrastructure level that you can solve the problems. Okay, so The question on my mind I want to get both of you guys could weigh in on this is that if you look at Cisco as a company, The 1st 1 is the cloud is one of the critical domains Not a lot of the gear and stuff that Cisco had AP eyes. Go ahead and provide that action so the action could be, you know, scaling out the VM apps you have another 2 3000 applications just coming into into the and or the pressure of the network to be better than programmable is the rise of video and data. as you know, it's an I t. So the inflection points. And I think you guys are right on where you guys are going. but also the fact that there is increasing number off software capabilities and so fundamental. That's really what's differentiating you from your competitors, right? Well, you guys have got a good That's a good angle on this cloud. all of these layers again, to fundamentally give you this operational capability to get faster and What's the vibe with sales team? And absolutely, from the inter site work optimizer and the app Dynamics Thanks for sharing the insights. Fourth day of

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Archana Kesavan, ThousandEyes | CUBEConversation, September 2019


 

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Narrator: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto offices for a CUBE Conversation today. We're going to talk about an interesting topic. You know as all these applications get more complex and they're all Internet based. I'm sure you know that feeling when you're at home and you lose your Internet power you pretty much can't do much of anything. So what can we do about that? Who are some of the companies that are working on this problem? We're real excited to have an innovator in this space from ThousandEyes. She's Archana Kesavan, Director of Product Marketing for ThousandEyes, welcome. >> Archana: Thank you Jeff, it's good to be here. >> Absolutely, so this is crazy. Give us kind of the run-down on ThousandEyes and what you do and then we'll jump into it. >> Sure, so ThousandEyes is a company that provides and enables enterprises. Gives them visibility into how the Internet is impacting end-user experience, right? When you think of it, of what users are, what this user experience is, it could be twofold. One is if you're an enterprise providing a digital service then they're your customers, right? So that customer experience we provide visibility into that. Then also if you're an enterprise moving towards using cloud applications or SaaS applications, employees using those applications, we provide visibility into that space as well. Really the thought and the idea behind ThousandEyes and the reason we are here is as enterprises are moving to the cloud and relying on this Internet-based delivery infrastructure, they're are starting to lose visibility into their critical customer-facing and employee-facing applications. What ThousandEyes does is it gives them back that control by giving them that visibility into that environment. >> Okay so then just to be clear because there's a ton of kind of monitoring applications, we use the Sumo Logic, we do Splunk. So there's a lot of things around operations where they're monitoring these apps, and they're super complex apps. But your guys main focus if I understand, is the network. The network piece and the transportation of that app across the wire. >> Right, let me unpack that and explain with an example, right. Let's think you're an enterprise that's moving towards Office 365 and you have a global workforce, right? Your users are connecting report and your VP of sales happens to connect from a Starbucks or a Philz because we're in Palo Alto. Can't download emails, can't get to emails. What's the first step this person or this employee's going to take is call corporate IT and say hey, I can't get to my emails. Now it's up the the corporate IT team to go and troubleshoot that scenario, right? Because if you can't get to your emails or you can't get to these collaboration apps today it's productivity down the hill. The IT team now starts troubleshooting it and where do they start? Is it the WiFi at the Philz that's a problem? Is it Microsoft that's a problem because which I can't get to my email. Or is it that access in between which is the Internet, right? How do you get from a Philz all the way to Office 365 is through that Internet transport. So where we come in is irrespective of the application or even the network, right, we've very agnostic to it. And we combine application performance all the way to the network performance. We take it one step further and we see how the Internet is impacting the services throughout. Because what we see is our customers be that in enterprises consuming SaaS, or enterprises delivering these SaaS services, the production teams and the corporate IT teams they feel the brunt of this every day. They have people calling and say hey, I can't get to this, I can't get to that application. They have their own customers complaining that something's wrong. Unfortunately in this world of the Internet and the cloud, while it's enabled convenience and flexibility they've traded in that for control and visibility. So if you again go back to this Office 365 example that I was just talking about, the enterprise does not own the WiFi in force. It does not own the Internet. Not one entity owns the Internet. It doesn't own Office 365. So monitoring tools that have existed and that have been in place to understand issues within the four walls of an enterprise flatline when it comes to Internet-based delivery and connectivity, which is where we come in. >> What about VPNs, because isn't kind of the purpose of a VPN on one hand is to be secure 'cause Lord knows who's sniffing on the Philz WiFi. But does that not put you into kind of a higher grade Internet line back to the server to get to my email? >> Archana: Is anybody using VPN these days? >> I hear the ads all the time on the radio. (laughing) I don't know, that's a good question. You guys are sitting on there, are people not using VPN? Does VPN solve their problem? Or is it something that's in the backside that regardless of whether you're using VPN or not these are kind of back hall issues that have to get worked out? >> So VPN, if you think about it, it's kind of an encapsulation over the underlying network. You still have to move packets through this network. So you might be connecting through a VPN, but it's the underlying, if you're going through the Internet than that can result in performance degradation, too. So irrespective of these techniques that enable, or so-called enable, performance and make performance better, you still need to know how the transport's behaving and how it's influencing performance just because you don't control it. >> And as I understand, the way you guys are doing this is you have a lot, a lot, a lot of monitoring points all over the place, hence ThousandEyes. Tell us a little bit about kind of how that works, what's the network? How has that been growing over time? >> We've been growing our infrastructure, monitoring infrastructure, over the last few years. The way ThousandEyes gathers its data which you know all the way from the application layer to the network, kind of then looking at Internet performance is our fleet of agents are distributed, are pre-deployed in about 185 cities around the world. We call them Cloud Agents. Now these agents are actively monitoring the services that might be of interest to an enterprise. You can also take a form of these agents and enterprises can deploy them within their own branch offices and their data centers. You can also use them in cloud providers. We actually have agents pre-deployed in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Alibaba too, which we recently announced. You can use these agents to monitor applications. You can use these agents to monitor your API endpoints which is another growing area that we see. So, fleet of our agents distributed. You can use that, a combination of agents that we own and pre-deployed along with agents that enterprises would like to put in their own infrastructure. >> Right, so you've got the ones already out there, you've got the ones in the clouds and then I can put some additional ones into my remote offices or places that are of interest to me. So if there's an issue because you said for tech support when the person can't get into email there's a whole host of potential things it could be, right? Office 365 could be down, there's all kinds of things. How does your application communicate to this poor person on the end of this service call that hey, it's a network issue between these two points? Or maybe it's a big exchange that's getting attacked like happened on the East Coast a couple of years ago. How did they work that into their triage so they know hey, we've been able to kind of identify that this is the issue not one of the other 47 things that's impacting that application? >> Right so we are a SaaS-based product. Our uniqueness and our secret sauce is how we look at all of these different layers that affect performance and we correlate them, visually correlate them in a time sequence. We present it to the corporate IT person or a production IT person who is actually triaging this issue. We help them very quickly pinpoint. It's very visual there. You can see how application performance ebbs and flows. You can look at what does a network pack look like? If I'm seeing an outage of the Internet service provider we're going to call that out. Obviously all of this is tied in with an alerting system which the platform enables as well. I think one of the most interesting changes that's happening in the industry is in the past when you found an issue, you could fix an issue because the chances are you owned that entire environment, right? It was a router that failed or a switch was dropping packets. You owned that switch, you owned that router. You could go and make changes to it. But in today's Internet-dependent and cloud-heavy environment, it's more about having the right evidence so you can escalate it to the right person. So knowing which neck to choke is absolutely critical in this distributed environment that enterprises are losing control over slowly. >> So the people start to make active changes in the way they route their traffic based on what they find? Is there either consistent good or consistent bad behavior in certain networks or certain public clouds that you can get a better latency performance by switching that? >> Sure, we've seen cases where usually enterprises have, let's take an example of an Internet service provider having an outage. Usually enterprises for redundancy they have two upstream providers, for instance, and they're probably load balancing traffic equally across these providers. Once ThousandEyes detects that one provider is completely down, could be a routing issue, could be a router failed within their environment. Once we alert them it's up to the enterprise to make that decision saying hey, we want to bypass this route, right? And we've seen that happen in a lot of cases. They do bypass routes if it's possible. It also depends on the severity of the issue, how long the issue lasts and things like that. But that definitely happens. >> You guys talk about a concept called Internet-aware Synthetic. What does that mean? >> Synthetics, it's interesting as a term. What it really means is trying to mimic something that's natural. Just the term synthetics in layman's language, right? Synthetic monitoring is really just that. While you're trying to understand application performance or how a website performs, synthetic monitoring replicates how a user would interact with that application. You replicate those steps and you periodically repeat them over time. Let's take an example. You're shopping online, you're going to Amazon.com. You're searching for whatever it is you're searching for. You get a list of results. You are interested in one item, you look at a review, you seem happy, you move it to your checkout, pay and move on, right? Those sequence of steps is what synthetic monitoring can actually craft. We keep executing those steps periodically so you can understand if there's any degradation of performance, has it slipped from baseline? So IT operations team can use that to understand if there's any change that's happening or if there is a particular area in the world where users are starting to see degradation and so on. The nice thing about synthetics is it's proactive. There's a lot of monitoring techniques out there that looks at real user interaction with the website. And to typically do that you need to insert a piece of code within the application itself that tracks that user's activity. That's great information. You want to see what your users are really doing and engaging with your website. That's very useful but it fundamentally doesn't tell you if performance is completely degraded or the checkout button's not working, for instance. That's where synthetic comes in. >> So is that the primary way that you maintain kind of this testing of the health of the network? Or are you using more of a passive, waiting for something to be slow and then running something like the synthetics to try to figure out where it is? >> The recommendation is to keep synthetics running constantly because you don't want something to slow down and then react. That's a very reactive approach. Really in today's digital economy you don't want an outage to last too long because customer loyalty is fleeting. You don't want even 10 seconds of wait time, right? The way I see it is every time I try to find a cab through Uber, if Uber makes me wait 30 seconds I'm moving on to Lyft. I don't have the patience to wait that long. You don't want outages to prolong so you definitely don't want to understand performance after they have degraded, right? So synthetics recommendation is to continuously monitor so you can find out what's happening and if there's any drift from required baselines. >> Okay and then are you running that concurrently across a number of geographies for the same customer? Because if this same shopper's sitting in Seattle versus if that same shopper is sitting in Mexico City or they're sitting in London are you running that concurrently to make sure that you're checking all the different potential hiccups? >> Our agents, because they are so pervasive across the globe you can pick an agent in one of those 185 cities and you can execute those same sequence of steps over time to actually run that. Now synthetics as a technology is not new. It really predates the cloud. The action of mimicking a user journey through a website, that really predates the cloud which is why it's fundamentally broken when it comes to these cloud and Internet-heavy environments. What we introduce, ThousandEyes Internet-aware Synthetics tries to take this age-old technique and tie that together with how the network and how the underlying Internet performs. So when you're looking at performance you're not looking at it in a silo. Because that's the other thing we hear all the time from our customers. Like the application team has blinders on. They're wanting to see if anything's gone wrong at the application. The network team has its own blinders on wanting to see if anything's gone wrong with the network, right? And usually what's happening is if they figure out it's not an application issue then they punt it over to the network team. The network team says ah, not my problem, you take care of it. So there's this constant finger-pointing that happens in today's environment. This pain has really gotten worse in the era of the cloud and Internet-based deliveries because guess what? Your application is first of all split into these microservices. The number of API calls that you are making has gone up, right? And all of these components don't sit in the same place. You're probably running into a hybrid infrastructure environment where some pieces of your code resides in your data center, the other may be in the cloud. Or you're making API calls which is resulting in a multi-cloud scenario. And what is it that's connecting all of these different environments is the actual network and the Internet. So understanding just hey, my app is down, is not good enough any more. You need to know my app is down, it's down because the Internet is causing problems for instance, right? So what ThousandEyes Internet-aware or network-aware Synthetics does is we look at performance right from the application stage, look at all those transactions see if they are run correctly or not. We tie them into how the underlying network is performing. And hey, if the Internet is causing issues we tie that into in a single correlated pin. So you're looking at one single platform and you're able to pinpoint quickly. You gather the evidence to escalate it to the right person. And at the same time you are bringing the application and the network teams together so it's more collaboration. It's not finger-pointing. Then that's what we really want to enable and what most of our customers actually do with ThousandEyes. >> Before I let you know I want to dig into the Alibaba announcement a little bit more. China is a special challenge on the Internet space. We've done some work over there and none of the Google services work and we use a lot of Google services. How did that come about? Is this a new growing area for you? I would presume there's all kinds of demand from the customers to try to get a little bit deeper penetration into that marketplace. >> China definitely is an interesting space. I mean because of the great firewall and all of the techniques China implements, performance is known to be relatively suboptimal in that region. Fortunately or unfortunately it's the fastest growing market, too. So enterprises want to invest in China. We're seeing a trend where they are moving their services to Ali Cloud. What does that mean for enterprises? You need to monitor that environment, too. Which means you want to understand how performances from Ali Cloud to Ali Cloud and so on. What we did recently is we increase our vantage points within Ali Cloud. Now you can look at user experience for users connecting from all around the world into Ali Cloud. You can look at API performance going from Ali Cloud to GCP or AWS, right? I think the key point to remember is that not just in China, but across the world not all cloud providers are created equal. We found some very interesting data for traffic between Beijing and Singapore, Ali Cloud performed relatively better, no surprises there. But AWS has relatively high performance. Same user from Beijing to AWS's data center in Singapore, they had a very circuitous route to get to Singapore. They were going from China to Tokyo to Singapore. During peak times, eight a.m. to eight p.m. Beijing time there was a lot of fluctuation showing some kind of congestion in the network, right? Ali Cloud we didn't see that. Understanding cloud provider performance is absolutely critical. What we do is our vantage points enable enterprises to do that. One of the initiatives that ThousandEyes we've been doing for a couple of years now is do a comparison of all these providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and Ali Cloud now. Last year we had our first report, it's called a Public Cloud Performance Benchmark report that compared AWS, GCP, and Azure. This year we're expanding it to Ali Cloud as well. So that's launching in November so it's going to be interesting to see. >> Jeff: A lot of people will want to see that one. >> Yes, it's going to be interesting to see who performed better and where. It's always good information. >> Jeff: I was going to ask you if you could share, but I didn't want you to give away any secrets. But I guess we'll have to wait 'til the report comes out. >> Yes, mid-November it's going to be there. >> All right Archana, we'll look forward to that. I'm sure it will be more variable than what most people expect. >> Archana: We'll see. Thanks for having me, Jeff. >> Thanks you very much. All right, she's Archana, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat instrumental music)

Published Date : Sep 12 2019

SUMMARY :

Narrator: From our studios in the heart and you lose your Internet power you pretty much and what you do and then we'll jump into it. and the reason we are here is as enterprises are moving The network piece and the transportation of that app and that have been in place to understand issues What about VPNs, because isn't kind of the purpose Or is it something that's in the backside but it's the underlying, if you're going through all over the place, hence ThousandEyes. that might be of interest to an enterprise. or places that are of interest to me. because the chances are you owned It also depends on the severity of the issue, What does that mean? And to typically do that you need to insert a piece of code I don't have the patience to wait that long. You gather the evidence to escalate it to the right person. from the customers to try to get a little bit I mean because of the great firewall and all Yes, it's going to be interesting to see who performed but I didn't want you to give away any secrets. All right Archana, we'll look forward to that. Thanks for having me, Jeff. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.

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Glenn Rifkin | CUBEConversation, March 2019


 

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)

Published Date : Mar 6 2019

SUMMARY :

many that I did know, and the author of that book, back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, you know, the elite of tech really sort of He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, and Pat was coming around and he was gonna and still don't do that, you were lucky, This was the kind of view he had of how you carousel, and then, you know, Yeah, yeah. And then there was the IDG update, you know, Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to he did a little bit of, you know, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know he kind of left you alone. but at the same time he was frugal, you know, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look you know, editorial versus advertising. created a little friction, that was really off the center. But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, of the company that he got people to, you know, from the book, and you said this, the different cycles, you know, things in tech 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, I know that the US government required IDC to everyone knew that the company was never gonna Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, One of the things you didn't have latitude on was (laughs) meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a backed editorial on that issue because, you know, you know, brand, the license for that. IDG the license. was to give the license to Pat to, you know, As an observer of the markets, what do you think's to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, out of, you know, a lot of the business models he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, the impact of that is something you can't you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. you know, the human brain, he and Lore, He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, And I think that's very true Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, Thank you for having me, we'll see you next time.

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Nutanix .NEXT London 2018 Preview | CUBE Conversation, October 2018


 

(news theme music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCube's preview of Nutanix.next London 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program two friends of the program, Julie O'Brien who's the Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Sunil Potti who's the Chief Product and Development Officer, both of Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, it's great to be here again. >> Alright, so, we've been there since day one. I was actually, just recently down at the Fontainebleau in Miami reliving one of my favorite sets that we did. It was beautiful Miami colors, which match the bright green and blue of Nutanix with theCube. I've been to every single one of em. You have. The European version, which is the third year. We did Vienna. We did Nice. And now London. So Julie, start us in as what we can expect this year. >> Sure, we actually just finished our .next tour in APJ in the Americas. We were from Beijing to Boston. Over 20,000 registrants and 44 cities. So, now we're coming off of that and heading into the conference, which is our multi-day event. First time being in London for the multi-day conference. We have a great lineup of speakers. From a main stage perspective, Bear Grylls. Who you may be familiar with. "Man vs. Wild" He's a well known survivalist. I'm sure he'll have tips to connect what we survive every day in technology with what he survives in the wilderness. We're going to have Jane Goodall joining us. Renowned anthropologist. She's giving back to conservation. A phenomenal woman who's going to be on stage with me in a fireside chat. Cannot wait for that. Anna Alex from a startup in Berlin, called Outfittery. We always like to bring in some fun, interesting companies from the region. They're actually using a mashup of AI with their clothing business, to figure out how to dress elegant professionals, such as yourselves, with all of the right clothing items. So she should be a lot of fun. And then I did want to share something really special today. There's breaking news that we haven't shared anywhere else yet on one of our new main stage speakers. For those of you who are football fans, this gentleman was one of the top performing German national football team members, when he played. And his name is Michael Ballack. So, he'll be joining us and we're really excited about that. For all the Germans out there, hopefully they'll be thrilled. >> We'll do some light juggling on the keynote. (Julie laughs) >> One of the things I always love about this show is customers always want to expand their horizons, learn new products, get to know what they have even better, help their job, but also expand your mind some. You've had some great thought leaders on the program. I've had the opportunity of interviewing some of them on theCUBE, which is great. Authors I've read. Professors that you read their research. Thought leaders in the space. It's always fun. But, the main reason most people go to Sunil is to learn about the solutions that they have, learn about some of the cool new stuff, and you're always well dressed on stage, and helping the customers understand where things are today and where they're goin. So what can they expect from you? >> I think this time around, just like prior times, is going to be a bit of the continuation of the journey, which is what is practical about the company, is that the vision continues to be consistently evolving. In a sense that we've embarked on this two-part re-architecture of the enterprise cloud. And in the first act it was all about converging various silos of infrastructure. We called it the Invisible Infrastructure Era. And then we believe, and you'll see a lot of this in .next London, is that a little more light around the reality that we are on the cusp of the world of many clouds. From going from the world of many silos of infrastructure to the world of many clouds. And a lot more depth of products, beyond what we've done in the first act around invisible infrastructure transforming to invisible clouds, is what's going to be the underpinning of the keynote. >> You bring up something we've been watching at a lot of the shows and in our research, cloud was supposed to be, many people thought it's going to be simple and and it's going to be inexpensive, and what we've found is that it's often neither of those. We live in a multi-cloud world. Absolutely. The question I have for many users is, how did you get there? Was it by choice? Do you have a good plan and who's going to help you get your arms around things or have we recreated, through multiple clouds and applications everywhere, the silos that we were trying to collapse in our data centers before? >> And I think some of this is also going to be, just like in any problem-solving, define the problem well is 50% of the solution. So in some cases, in the world of multi-cloud, one of the things that we've had to give some time and it's right of passage, is to really characterize, when we say multi-cloud, most people think it's just public and private. So it's to really characterize the problem of the multiple clouds, or the multi-cloud era, actually is a construct of many public clouds, but the "private cloud" is becoming increasingly more dispersed or distributed. All the way into the remote office branch offices. But also all the way into what we are calling the edge. Part of what we're going to be talking about is a pretty reasonable understanding of how we've seen some of our early customers templatize their different kinds of clouds and then overlay the solution, to say it's not one size fits all, but you need, from an operational perspective, at least, something that can be a single control play. >> You're absolutely right. If you follow the applications and you follow the data, it's becoming even more dispersed. I remember the early days when I first spoke to Dheeraj, it was, oh are we taking a bunch of boxes and collapsing it? And what it came down to is the premise is the challenge of our time is software for distributed architectures. Five years ago we weren't talking about edge computing and IOT and all those things, but that's following along those trends. >> And I think one of the core technical themes you're going to see is that the last ten years of cloud has been about the era of scaling out. And that's proven now and there's more to be done. I think to really fulfill this next ten years, you're going to see this thematic view of scaling in. Especially when you scale small, which is a different art than scaling out, to some extent. Especially if you want to solve problems at the edge, you want to do it consistently, so that you can actually follow the app, as the apps transform. Some of these newer architectural paradigms have to be understood. So that's going to be an underlying theme there. >> And edge computing, we know, is a really hot topic amongst our customers and this year we're going to have an API accelerator lab. So in New Orleans we had a hackathon, now we're going to do it a little bit differently. This is going to be really focused on giving people an opportunity to get their hands involved in our IOT product, along with some nooks as well. So it should be a lot of fun for people. This is a great area and it is a great application for that multi-cloud, distributed edge kind of environment. >> Great, so November 27th through 29th, in London. We're going to have two days of theCUBE, of course go to thecube.net and watch the program. Nextconf has always been the hashtag. I want to give you both the final takeaways, what people should tune into, other than, of course, watching your keynotes and theCUBE coverage. >> I think you'll see a lot on social media, hopefully to stay involved with all of the innovation that we're going to be announcing. You're going to hear a lot from the breakout sessions. People will be tweeting from those sessions. We have more than 60 breakout sessions across a range of topics, for people that are in different phases of their journey with us. Whether it's just hyperconverged infrastructure, whether it's blockchain, whether it's IOT and they're starting to think about the multi-cloud hybrid environment too. So there's going to be a lot of great information coming out of the events. Sunil? >> I think you covered it all, but in general there's going to be a lot of cool stuff, both people-wise, as well as technology-wise. But I think, hopefully, the common theme that every body will participate in is this construct of this whole Nutanix-vibe of dreaming big, acting fast, and having fun. >> Okay, good. Julie and Sunil, thank you so much. And also breaking news, we're actually going to have a first on the program. We've got my first European cohost for a multi-day event, Joep Piscaer, who's cube alumn, been on a couple of times. And what I'm actually looking for our audience, I'd like to do my first non-english interview on theCUBE. Joep is fluent in Dutch. He's going to be taking the train into London. I would love to be able to do a short segment, preferably a user, but would welcome a thought leader, a partner, or somebody in there to be able to. As we've expanded our coverage, we did our first Chinese event last year. We've done many in Europe. We did our first Middle East show in Bahrain just a couple of weeks ago. So look for that. Like Nutanix, we're all over the globe with what we've done. Julie and Sunil, thank you so much. For Stu Miniman, once again, thank you for watching theCUBE. (news theme music)

Published Date : Oct 25 2018

SUMMARY :

Happy to welcome back to the program I've been to every single one of em. I'm sure he'll have tips to connect what we survive every We'll do some light juggling on the keynote. But, the main reason most people go to Sunil is is going to be a bit of the continuation of the journey, and it's going to be inexpensive, And I think some of this is also going to be, I remember the early days when I first spoke to Dheeraj, And that's proven now and there's more to be done. This is going to be really focused on giving people an of course go to thecube.net and watch the program. So there's going to be a lot of great information but in general there's going to be a lot of cool stuff, He's going to be taking the train into London.

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Tongtong Gong, Amberdata.io | CUBEConversation, October 2018


 

(dramatic music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to the special CUBEConversations here in Palo Alto, CA theCUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We are here for some exclusive news around security audits, blockchain smart contracts, and a hot new startup Amber Data we have the Chief Operating Officer Tongtong Gong who's here, Chief Operating Officer of Amber Data, great to see you! You guys, I've interviewed Shawn Douglass, the CEO, founder, before and he was really getting the technology going. Amazing progress, we have some exclusive discoveries here, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, thank you, thanks for having me here. It's awesome, we've done so much in the past couple weeks, and really excited to announce that we have taken security audits, automated that to be able to provide automated at scale security audits for all the smart contracts, Ethereum, through our platform. >> This has been a huge problem, we've been covering it for the past year, with video but also in the blogs, Ethereum specifically has been the developer chain of choice, people are using Ethereum, programming on it, and that's where a lot of the DApps, decentralized apps, which we think there's going to be a tsunami of, we're a bit bullish on it, but the problem is that everyone went in and rushed with these ICO's, and they didn't think about, "Hey we better make sure our token generating event works" because they've got to do a smart contract on that, and then ultimately these marketplaces that will be emerging from these apps through the communities will be a lot of smart contracts, as the transaction of choice. This is what is the benefit of token economics. The problem is, security. The security audits have been a pain in the butt, they've been expensive, and there's been a time lag in getting it done. So you've got a time factor, too slow, too expensive, and it was last minute. >> Right. >> This has been a huge problem. Are you saying that you solved that problem? >> Yeah, kind of! So give you some stats. There are about 7.8 million to 8 million smart contracts on the chain today. On average, there's about 500-600 smart contracts get deployed every day into Mainnet Ethereum. What we've done, we talked to a lot of security teams that's in this space, and at the end of the day everybody use the same tools, set of tools, to preform security audits. What we have done, is we have programatically did that so we can run security audits on every smart contract on the chain. So we launched this feature last Friday, what we did is we picked the top 2000 smart contracts, based on transaction values-- >> On the Mainnet? >> On the Mainnet. And we preformed the audits on those, and last night, yeah three days later, we preformed all 8000 smart contracts that's been created and deployed in the past 90 days. So the top 2000 active ones, and the 8000 recently deployed ones, we preformed security audits on those. >> So this is pretty incredible, so I want to make sure I get this right. If this is the case, this is the first ever automation, or devOPS like approach to smart contract audits and security. So let me just kind of slow down if you don't mind. Today, most people will go in and manually look at code reviews or use some tooling to do that, and then they get a report. Businesses have been doing that, OSHO does that, many more do it, and they're bringing tools to the market, they are too, but I don't think anyone's actually automated at volume. So you're saying, you're automating, ingesting data from the chain-- >> Mhm. We analyze the bytecode as well as the source code to identify vulnerabilities and issues, things like integer overflow into the code, and we actually assign custom, we have our own scoring system to score basically the vulnerability exposure of the smart contract. >> Okay so I want to kind of push back on that because I'm skeptical. So, you do byte review-- >> Bytecode >> Bytecode and source code review, and then it's a black box and you type up a report, or you actually flag the code itself? Do you service it automatically? Does that happen automatically? Take me through what you do manually, and what happens with the computers. What is automated? >> Everything's automated. So we integrated the tools that every expert uses in this space today, to run the security audits on the smart contract and the bytecode and then we flag the particular source code and function calls that's flagged with the issue-- >> That's in the code itself? >> That's in the code itself, in that service, through our website, through our console, and you can actually see it. You can search on any smart contract and the console dashboard will show you the real time live streaming events of your smart contract function calls, as well as the vulnerability-- >> This is amazing. So this means that you can save a lot of time, love this feature, this is exciting. This is actually the first news I've ever hear of this, so I want to make sure I get it right. How many contracts can you do? How fast does it take? So you mentioned you've ingested last week, stuff off the chain, how many contracts was that? >> We did last week, 2000 and then up to last night, we finished 8000 smart contract scans. We're continuing to do that for every smart contract on the chain. >> How fast is this, because I remember back when I was learning how to code for the first time, back in the old days, you had to press a button, you'd have a compiler, and you'd get a bug in the line, syntax error, there it is. That's the normal kind of old school computer science. Syntax, compiler, interpreter, whatever you want to call it. It sounds like you're doing something similar, the same kind of speed. It's code review, analysis to the contracts, security through the tools... How fast is it? I mean, how long does it take to do a review of one smart contract, for instance? >> Actually, I don't know that. I would say minutes. >> Not days? >> Not days. No. Minutes. >> So it's not like it goes out, hourglass... Check your email it'll be there? It happens pretty much on the fly? >> It happens pretty much on the fly, real time. >> So how many contracts can you guys do in a day? >> We've done 8000 in three days, so... A lot! (both laughing) And we have ten machines running right now as we're speaking-- >> So you throw some clout at it, scale up-- >> Exactly, scale up. >> Scaling out is easy to do, you just go... >> Our goal is to basically make it very easy for developers to understand the state and health of their smart contract and then they can go find consultants, experts to fix those vulnerabilities and issues. >> Yeah, this is going to be a rising tide. I think, rising tide floats all boats when you have these emerging markets. You move to the next problem, and you do. Jeff Frick always says that in theCUBE and he's right! You take away security, you're now enabling this tool for these consultants to actually add more value. >> Exactly. >> Is that the focus? Do you guys even know who's going to use this tool yet? Obviously, this is a game changer. I mean, if I'm a data scientist I love this. Also I'm a trader, I might want the data, I'm a risk management, audit compliance person? I mean...you guys-- >> Yeah! At Amber Data our mission has always been providing, enabling infrastructure, enabling tool sets to allow developers, to allow operators, to allow the industry, to allow businesses to adopt blockchain, that's always been our mission and we have built the splunk, you know like search, a feature for blockchain, we have built APM, we have built dissimilar Mixpanel... It's all about providing access to data and to information, to allow everyone to have a better understanding, better transparency into the state and health of the blockchain, the state and health of their smart contracts. So that's you know, in line with-- >> So talk about the scoring thing, because okay, I love this automation I think that that's a game changer. So congratulations, this is the first I've heard of it, and I think this might be the first news in the industry out there. How does it work beyond that? What else do you guys do? Are you ingesting, are you adding overlays to it? What is the focus next? I mean, you're ingesting it, you're doing some security audits... Where does it go from there? >> So, we're actually working with the Web3 Data Foundation. So the Web3 Data Foundation is building a decentralized data marketplace to allow everyone in the ecosystem to list, subscribe, consume, distribute, monetize data assets that's generated by the blockchain and data that's on blockchain. >> So what's the URL for that? Web3... >> Web3data.org >> Three the number or three... >> Three the number, yeah. >> So web3 number data dot org? >> Yeah. >> Okay and is that an open community? Is it a foundation? >> Yes it's a nonprofit foundation, and I believe they're launching a token, Web3 Data token, and Amber Data's working with the Web3 Data foundation as a launch partner to utilize the data ingestion pipeline we have built and to serve up all the data for everyone to have access to it. >> Okay so what's your business model at Amber Data? Are you going to have your own token? Are you going to use the foundation as the token holding place? Can you just take us through the relationship of Amber Data with the foundation? I mean, I get the foundation but what you're doing here is essentially you're building IT operations into the blockchain and scaling things with automation, which certainly is only going to get better with more compute and A.I and other cool things, so I love that. How do you make money? Is it a token model? Is it just, classic, you get paid? What's the relationship? Is the foundation issuing tokens, do you have your own token? Take us through that. >> So the Web3 Data Foundation is the one issuing the token. We are the launch partner, so we are using the bulk diagnostic data ingestion pipeline that we can ingest all the data, and we're building together, building the data marketplace using smart contracts, to enable everyone to list, curate, consume, distribute, monetize the data. You think about it, right? Data on blockchain is just a fraction of the data out there. And as staff development, going on, as a trading application going on, there's a lot of data that's going to be generated by blockchain as well, and those datas aren't getting captured, analyzed, and utilized today. I think today, as a trader, investor, or as a developer, people don't have access to this data, to have data driven decisions, to help them continuously improve. Whether it's application or investment decisions. So the data marketplace will enable everyone to be able to have that access. >> And also it might enable more faster solution of decentralized applications-- >> Exactly. >> Which, Fred Kruger and I were talking on Twitter, I mean Facebook, about this, that we think that's the killer app, it's going to be the tsunami of apps coming. But all these chain problems are out there, so it's a little bit of a resetting going on in the industry. Obviously you see that with some of the pricing and funding and everything, but for the most part we see a big market coming. So I've got to ask you, the obvious question from there is, which chains are you supporting? You mentioned Mainnet which is great for Ethereum-- >> Yeah today we're supporting Ethereum Mainnet, and Rinkeby, the test net. We also support Aion's Mainnet and test net. We also support Stellar, we're working on EOS and TRON as well, so we have open sourced our data collector to allow community to contribute to that and we'll use Web3 Data Token to incentivize the community to contribute, to verify, to enrich the data. >> So I've got to ask you the security question, maybe this might be for more the nerds and the geeks, delving down in the product level, but maybe you can get it. Security is huge, so I'm skeptical. You're doing scoring, can you be hacked? What's the security answer to that? Like, whoa if she's controlling the score, I might want to spoof the code and take over and say it's okay, ya know? >> The code we get is actually on the chain, it's the code that you put on the chain, so good luck spoofing the data on the blockchain. >> That's the whole point of block chain, that's already answered. That's a dumb question, I got that. I always ask dumb questions. Alright, so what's next for you guys? How big are you guys, what's the story? I've been following you guys on Twitter and Telegram, you've been traveling a lot. What's the update on the company, what's the status? >> So we are, as a launch partner for Web3 Data Foundation, right now there's a token sale, we're in the middle of closing our presale. It's a soft offering, and we're building and expanding the team as we're speaking. >> How much are you raising on the staff, can you talk about that? >> No. >> No? Okay you don't have to say the number. Just be careful, it gets hard to raise too much. So the foundation, and you guys. Okay, I want to ask you a personal question, we love women in blockchain, I wear the "Satoshi is female" shirt as much as I can... How did you get into this? Because there's a lot of women coming into blockchain, more than people are advertising. I'm seeing a lot more women in tech, certainly a lot more women in crypto. Blockchain and crypto, you guys are doing almost a cloud devOPs serious venture here. How did you get into this, what's your story? >> I've always been a cloud girl. I started my career building Yatuzi computing, enterprise grid computing. I was 23 years old and working for Axiom in a data center in Arkansas, and I'm the only one that wears high heel6s in data center, and get stuck in a vent you know? That's my background, so it's not a far stretch to understand blockchain and the usefulness of it if you talk about distribute computing, distribute storage. So it's very natural for me, from a technology perspective, get into this space. On a personal note, I really believe in decentralization, and I believe the change it's going to make to our lives and to our offspring's lives in the future. >> It's real, you think? >> It's real. It's here to stay. >> So what's your vision of blockchain? What are people not getting? Obviously there's a lot of scams out there that have kind of tainted on the ICO side, but what are people missing? When you talk to people, you have kind of like, "Oh I get it" and people kind of of like "I don't really see that" ? What's the main thing that they're missing, what's missing? >> I think it's missing that killer Dapp to get people to realize "Oh it's actually easy to use". I don't have to think about the inner workings, and it just works. My mom still lives in Beijing, I talk to her on Skype all the time, she's not worrying about TCPIP, she's not worrying about, how is this phone call getting encrypted or not encrypted? What's my network bandwidth? She just use the phone and call me, like I'm right next to her. I think as we develop building the apps, people don't think about that they're using blockchain, they just use it. >> It's like explaining it to a parent or someone who's not technical.. "Hey how does the internet work? Can't I just "type a keyword in to the browser or a search engine?" Instead today, it's more like "Hey, you know how BGP works?" and "You know how packets move around?" It's so hard to explain, so it's got to be easier. >> Way easier, yeah. >> Totally agree, totally agree. Well Tongtong, thank you for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it, great update, exclusive news. Automation, bringing cloud computing and utility computing, real geeky stuff to the table here. This is theCUBE Conversation and I'm John Furrier. Amber Data COO, Tongtong Gong here, inside theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

Published Date : Oct 17 2018

SUMMARY :

the CEO, founder, before and he was and really excited to announce that we have taken for the past year, with video but also in the blogs, Are you saying that you solved that problem? on every smart contract on the chain. and the 8000 recently deployed ones, So let me just kind of slow down if you don't mind. exposure of the smart contract. So, you do byte review-- and then it's a black box and you type up on the smart contract and the bytecode and the console dashboard will show you So this means that you can save a lot of time, every smart contract on the chain. for the first time, back in the old days, Actually, I don't know that. Not days. It happens pretty much on the fly? And we have ten machines running Our goal is to basically make it very easy You move to the next problem, and you do. Is that the focus? and we have built the splunk, you know like search, So talk about the scoring thing, because okay, So the Web3 Data Foundation is building So what's the URL for that? the data ingestion pipeline we have built I mean, I get the foundation but what you're We are the launch partner, so we are using the killer app, it's going to be the tsunami of apps coming. the community to contribute, to verify, to enrich the data. delving down in the product level, but maybe you can get it. it's the code that you put on the chain, What's the update on the company, what's the status? and expanding the team as we're speaking. So the foundation, and you guys. and I believe the change it's going to make to our lives It's here to stay. all the time, she's not worrying about TCPIP, It's so hard to explain, so it's got to be easier. real geeky stuff to the table here.

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Bobby Patrick, UiPath | UiPath Forward 2018


 

>> Announcer: Live from Miami Beach, Florida It's theCUBE! Covering UiPathForward Americas. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to South Beach everybody. You are watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman is here. This is UiPathForward Americas. UiPath does these shows all around the world and they've done, I don't know how many. But they've reached 14,000 customers this year. But Bobby Patrick knows, he's the CMO of UiPath. Bobby, great to see you again. >> It's great to be on again. >> So, how many of these events have you done in the last 12 months? >> We've probably done a dozen, all major cities. We still have Beijing and Dubai coming up. Over 14,000 people at our events alone. We go to a lot of other industry events obviously, but yeah, at our own events, every single event we break our records. We're always undersizing our events, it drives everyone nuts. >> You're always riding the wave, Bobby. You hit Cloud, right as the wave was building. How did you find this company? >> Yeah, so I was the HP of Cloud, they were, split assets off and took a little time, got a call and robotic process automation. Of course, I thought of physical robots. I look online and say wow that's interesting. I did some search terms on it and I saw RPA kind of sky rocketing in search and my background is actually in integration, data integration before Cloud. And then I met Daniel and I fell in love with Daniel and this was a year ago. I was employee 270, right? We'll have 2,000 by the end of the year. So, it's been everything I expected which was a rocket ship, has completely, constantly I've underestimated, it's amazing. >> So, you're the one who turned me onto this whole space. You sent me the Forrester Wave, >> Bobby: Right >> Where it was last year's and you guys were third this year, you leapfrogged into first. >> Bobby: Right. >> And then we said wow that's kind of cool. Let's download this and play with it. And we tried to download the other ones but we couldn't. You, know it was kind of too complicated. They wanted us to talk to resellers and, it was like, no no no. you guys were, like, really open. >> Bobby: It's part of our culture. >> And we found it super simple to use. It was, one of our guys wasn't a coder. Smart dude, but it was low code, no code type of situation. You were explaining to me at Legal Seafoods last week that you actually have written some automations. So, it's pretty simple to get started but there's a spectrum, right, and it's pretty powerful too. >> Yeah, it's an epiphany that hits everybody. This is the part where I see it, even in myself, when I realized every morning I was getting up and going to Google Trends and I was looking at us versus Automation Anywhere versus Blue Prism and we're pulling away. It's great, I'll get happy in the morning and I'll screen shot it and then I'll go to Slack and send it to the comp team. Why am I doing this? So, in 20 minutes now I have a robot everyday, every morning that does it for me. And I get a text and I get an email. We have, in marketing, a dozen of these. I've got one that does our Google Ad Words around the world. I've got one that takes all of our 30,000 inbound new contacts a month, in different languages, translates, finds out what country they are in, and routes them to the right country. These are simpler examples, but once you realize that anything you do that's routine and mundane that a robot can do for you. It brings, it makes you happy first of all, right? And you realize the vision we have for a robot for every person, its a very realistic vision and its two, three years out. >> Bobby, one on the things that has really interested me today is talking about what this means for jobs and careers. Dave and I were at Splunk earlier this week, talking about Splunkers, data is at the center of what they do and everybody comes to them, how do I leverage my data? I did operations for a bunch of my career and I'd spend lots of time with my team saying, what do you hate doing, what are you manually doing? What can you get rid of and there's a collaboration between, I hear, that your customers. It's not just oh some consultancy comes in and they cut something away and they took it away from you. Oh no wait, you're actually involved with this, it seems like an ongoing process and you're making people's jobs better. Can you talk a little about that dynamics of how this transforms a company? The vision for, I hear from UiPath, is that you're going to change the world. >> Yeah, so you have to sit in, you're talking about the future of work, or digital, you have to sit in a conference room and watch a bunch of workers sit around and I'll give you an example. At DISA, big federal government agency, federal government has lifetime workers, right? In the room, where 30 workers, who everyday download assets and then they compile them and then they analyze them. They have their best, fastest kind of human go against the UiPath robot that they automated. In 15 minutes, the human downloaded two assets or archives and the robot did 17. The entire room of 30 cheered! Cheered. No longer do we have to do that crap ever again. And this is, we see this in every industry. It's so much fun because you see just, people just radiating with excitement, right? Because, I was out with a customer today that says they can't even fulfill today with the humans they have, the 25% of the work they got. So, your robots are creating capacity, they're filling the void. You probably heard about Japan, right, and the aging population? And RPA and UiPath addressing suicide rates. This about making society better. This is about robots doing the work that we hate, right? One of our great customers, Holly Uhl from State Auto, said on stage that, you know, robots do the work nobody misses. And, I think that's trivial. Now what about job impacts, right? So, we worry everyday about what this means, right? So, we spend a lot of time on our academy, making it easier to train people, build digital era skills. We announced our academic alliance, right? We hired an amazing Chief of Learning Officer. You saw Tom Clancy. You know him and his team. We're going to train a million students in three years. You know, we're worried about the middle class. We're worried about people who are farther along in their careers and helping them re-skill. So, we take that as a part of our job as a company to figure out how to up-skill people and make them a part of this. And I'm really excited because a year ago when I joined, everybody said, the big problem you have is people going to worry about taking away jobs. I don't hear that from the 1500 customers in here today. >> Well, isn't a part of that re-skilling? Learning how to apply automation, maybe even learning how to apply RPA? Maybe even doing some automation? >> Yeah, so obviously there is-- World Economic Forum came out two weeks ago with a study that said, automation will add net 60 million jobs, I think that was for the people that losses, it will two x gains in jobs. Now those are different jobs in some cases. Some of those jobs are digital era skills, some of those jobs are AI, data science. So, I think that there's... But there are some cubicle jobs that will be affected, right? There are some swivel chair jobs that will be affected, but no different than when they automated toll booths, right? Or automated different parts of mundane work that we've all seen throughout our lives, right? So I think the speed at which this is happening is what worries people. Unlike, in the past, it took a little longer for automation or industrialization to impact jobs. But we're focused on this, right? We're going to put money towards this and we're just not seeing that today. Maybe it's because the economy is doing so great. People have a workforce shortage, but we're just not hearing it. >> Well, I mean, maybe a number of factors. I mean, there's no question, machines have always replaced humans. This is the first time in history of replacing humans in cognitive functions. >> Bobby: Augmenting >> Yes, absolutely, but It does suggest that there's opportunities for whether it's for education, you guys are investing there, training, and re-skilling whether it's around creativity and that's really where the discussion, in our view anyway, should be. Not about, okay lets protect our future, the past from the future. You don't want to just repave the cow path and use another bromide. You got to move forward and education is a key part of that. And you guys are putting your money where your mouth is. >> Yeah, we are and I think our academy that we launched a little over a year and a half ago has a quarter of a million people in it. They are already diplomas on LinkedIn. I watch everyday, people post their new diplomas, the different skills they've earned, right? Go through the courses, it's free. Democratization runs at the heart of this company, it's why we're growing so much faster than at automation anywhere, right? It's why we are a different kind of company. They're a very commercial minded kind of company. They're a marketplace, you have to be a customer. If your URL when you type in your email isn't a customer, you can't go to their store and do anything. We're free, open, share your automations and it's a very different mindset and community runs at our heart. If you're a small business, you know, under a million dollars, you get to use our software for free. And you can run your robots and we have one of our orchestrators run a manager. So, I think all of this is helping get companies and people more comfortable with our technology. There are kids and students now, we had University of Maryland up here. The professor, he's building whole classes now at the University of Maryland. All in the business school, all using our technology. Every student should have a robot, through their entire career, through their entire time at University of Maryland. That's every university, this is going to go so fast, Dave and Stu, so fast. And when I think back again, a year ago, I mean next year when we do this again, right? At our big flagship event, at three or four thousand people, you'll have felt that progression but the year I've been here, it's night and day already. >> Alright, so Bobby you know we're big fans of community. The open source stuff, you've for a long background in that. Help us put together some of these stats here. When I looked in your keynote, you said there's 114,000 certified RPA developers out there across the globe. 139 countries, 250,000 people have downloaded. You've only got at UiPath about 2,000 customers. So, you know, we talk business model and how your business grows, the industry grows, you know? Help us understand that dynamic. >> These are going to go exponential. So, we have large companies now that are committing to deploy UiPath to every employee. Every employee becomes a user then, so you're going to see that user number go like this. While the enterprise customer number goes like this. We're adding six new customers a day right now. The real opportunity for us is every one of our customers, very few are down their journey like an SMBC is. SMBC, RPA is in their annual reports, right? They say 500 million dollars already, right? It's a societal thing. They actually in Japan share together, to help each company. Here, in the U.S., we're a little competitive, right? Banks don't share with other banks typically, right? But, this is kind of what we're driving. It's, when you make an automation at UiPath. While we're not open source as a platform, the automation is open source. You put it on go, I can take that, you can take that. I had the same kind of problem. Put in the studio right away, modify it a bit and you're good to go. Now you've sped your implementation which is already fast by 70, 80, 90%. This is, we're just getting started. So, you're going to see companies adopting across HR, across supply chain, contact centers, you know. Today we're, for the most of our customers we're in one division. So, the opportunity to grow within a company, where we were barely 5% penetrated in our biggest client. >> And you've seen my prediction. A lot of the market forecast are under counting this space. >> Bobby: Right. >> There is a labor shortage, a skilled labor shortage There's more jobs than there are people to fill them. They don't have the right skills today. There is a productivity problem >> Bobby: Right. >> Productivity line is flat. RPA is going to become a fundamental component of digital transformations. It's about a billion dollar business today. I got it pegged at 10X by 2023. >> Craig at Forestry upped his guidance today, he may have told you all, to a 3.3 billion dollar market in 2021. Now I was a little disappointed, it was 2.9 before. I think he's still way under shooting it. But nevertheless, to grow 10% in one year, in his mind, is still pretty big. >> Yeah, a lot of those market forecasts are kind of linear. You're going to see, you know, an S curve, like growth in this market. I think there's no question about it. Just, in speaking to the customers today, we've seen this before in other major industry trends. We certainly saw it at ServiceNow, we saw it at Splunk, we saw it at Tableau. UiPath feels like a very similar vibe here. In Tenex, when we did the show here. I just feel an explosion coming, I already see it. It's palpable. >> One other reason for the explosion which is a little different than say most of the open source tech companies is that they were in IT sales. You don't have to use code to automate your tasks, right? The best developers for us are actually the subject matter experts in finance, in supply chain, in HR. So suddenly we've empowered them. Because IT everywhere is constrained, right? They're dealing with keeping systems current. So suddenly this these tools of software is available to any employee to go learn and automate what they do. The friction we've removed between business have to go to IT, IT be understaffed, IT have to get the requirements. All that's gone! So you create robots overnight, over the weekend. And make your life better. Again, most of the world still does not understand what's going on. I mean you can feel it now. But it's an epiphany for anyone when they see it. >> Well the open mindset that Daniel talked about today, he said, you know our competitors are doing what we do and that's okay. The rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing. That puts pressure on you guys to stay ahead of the pack. Big part of what Tom Clancy is doing is the training piece. That's huge. Free training. So you got to move faster than the market. You're confident you can do that. What gives you confidence? >> I think, one, is our product is simpler to use. So I think, you know, you go to Automation Anywhere and you need the code, right? You don't have to code with our design tool. We're told, we're about 40% faster to implement. And that's, look at the numbers. We shared our numbers again today. 100 million we announced in July 1st, for our first half of in ARR, 140 now, right? We are telling our numbers, we're open and transparent. Our competitors, well Blue Prism is public, right? We know they're growing slower. Another difference is the market, requirements are not created equal. Blue Prism only works in an unattended robot fashion, only in the back office. So, if you have front office automation, with call centers and customer service, they don't have the concept of an attended robot. You know, this idea of so, they lack the ability to serve all the requirements of a customer. I, think, it's just architecturally, I think what we're seeing in terms of simplicity and openness. And then market coverage very different then either Automation Anywhere or BluePrism. >> Alright Bobby, let me poke at something. So, if I look at, you came out this morning and said accelerate everything. One of the concerns I have is say okay, if I take existing processes, a lot of the time if you look at them, they're not ideal. They were manual in nature, it's great to do that but, how much do you need to wait and revisit and get consultants in to kind of fix things rather than just say oh okay. Faster is better for some things but not necessarily for all things unless you can make some adjustments first. >> You don't want to automate a bad process, right? So, we're not encouraging anyone to do that. So, you see a combination of... One thing about RPA is which great, is you don't have to go in and say, I'm going to go do procure to pay like Traditional IT guy. And so you can go into that process and say, oh look at all these errors, these tasks, these sub processes, these tasks. Where this huge friction and you can go automate that and get huge value. >> Almost like micro services. >> Yes, exactly. You're able to go in and that's really what people are doing. On the more ambitious projects, they're saying I'm also going to go optimize my process, think differently. But the reality is, people are going in, they're finding these few parts of a bigger process, automating it, getting immediate outcomes, immediate outcomes. And paying back that entire project in six months, including the fees on extension or PWC or other. That doesn't exist anywhere in technology. That kind of, you know, speed to an outcome and then payback period. It just doesn't exist. >> Well, the fact that the SIs are here. Yeah, we heard 15 day payback today. Super fast, ROI. The fact that the big SIs are here, especially given the relatively early days says a lot about the potential market size. I always joke, those guys like to eat at the trough. This is big business and it's important for you guys because they're strategic, they're at the board level. You need the top down support, at the same time, it sounds like there's a lot of bottom up activity. >> Bobby: Right. >> And that's where the innovations going to come from. What's next for you guys, you taking this show on the road again? >> Right, so the next Forward is in London. So, we had one in Europe and one in the U.S. We do what we call togethers, which is more intimate. Or all around the world, which are country specific or industry. I mean, we're going to go and call it the Automation First Tour. And we're going to go start our next tours up all through next year. Hit all the cities again, probably three times this size, each city. You know, I looked at Washington D.C. with federal government, we started federal government in January. Federal government for us next year should be a 60 million software business. For our partners, give them 6, 8, 10X on services on top of that. That's meaningful, that's why you see them here. That same calculation exists in every vertical and in every country. And so it's good for our partners. It's great, we want them to focus on building their skills though. Getting good skills and quality. So, we do a lot with them. We host a partner Forward yesterday with 500 partners, focusing on them. Look, we are investing in you, but you got to deliver quality, right? So, I think we amplify everything we did this year because it worked for us well. We amplify it big time and Forward in a year from now, whether it's Vegas or Orlando or we'll announce it soon, willl be substantially larger. >> Well, any company that's digitally transforming is going to put RPA as part of that digital transformation. It's not without its challenges but it's a tailwind. You better hop on that wave or you going to end up driftwood as Pat Gelsinger likes to say. Bobby, thanks so much. >> Bobby: Thank you Dave. >> Thanks for having us here. This has been a fantastic experience and congratulations and good luck going forward. >> Thank you. >> Alright guys, that's a wrap from here. This is theCUBE. Check out theCUBE.net Check out SiliconeANGLE.com for all the news. Cube.net's where all the videos are, wikimon.com for all the research. We are busy Stu, we're on the road a lot. So again, look at the upcoming events. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time.

Published Date : Oct 4 2018

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by UiPath. Bobby, great to see you again. We go to a lot of other industry events obviously, You hit Cloud, right as the wave was building. We'll have 2,000 by the end of the year. You sent me the Forrester Wave, third this year, you leapfrogged into first. you guys were, like, really open. that you actually have written some automations. This is the part where I see it, what do you hate doing, what are you manually doing? I joined, everybody said, the big problem you have Unlike, in the past, it took a little longer for automation This is the first time in history And you guys are putting your money where your mouth is. And you can run your robots and we have one of our So, you know, we talk business model and how So, the opportunity to grow within a company, where we A lot of the market forecast are under counting this space. They don't have the right skills today. RPA is going to become a fundamental component he may have told you all, You're going to see, you know, an S curve, like growth I mean you can feel it now. That puts pressure on you guys to stay ahead of the pack. So, if you have front office automation, a lot of the time if you look at them, they're not ideal. And so you can go into that process and say, But the reality is, people are going in, The fact that the big SIs are here, the innovations going to come from. Right, so the next Forward is in London. You better hop on that wave or you going to end up driftwood and good luck going forward. So again, look at the upcoming events.

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Bev Crair, Lenovo | Microsoft Ignite 2018


 

(digital music) >> Live, from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Bev Crair. She is the vice president data center group product development and quality at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Rebecca, thanks Stu. >> So, Lenovo is a longstanding partner of Microsoft. Why don't you just sent the scene for our viewers, and talk a little bit about the history of the partnership and where you are today. >> So, Lenovo and Microsoft have had a partnership of about 25 years, which is a long time in this industry. And we work really closely together on both innovation, but also making sure that anything that Microsoft is building runs best on Lenovo. >> Great, and what about, here at this conference, what are you hearing, what are you seeing in terms of this partnership? >> We have actually six things that we're really talking about here at the conference, which is a lot if you think about it. But the first is the announcement of our ThinkAgile MX, which is that integrated WSSD system. It's pre-certified, you just buy it as itself. There's four or five different sizes of it, if you will. The second one is our Azure Stack, but also our Azure services. So we're now doing both on prem Azure Stack and Azure services, which is really about customer choice. Because a lot of data center customers are really struggling with how do I build a hybrid cloud infrastructure, and what do I do with that. The third thing that we're doing, oh my gosh, I'm not going to remember them all. The third thing that we're doing is our SQL Server performance. We continue to be the best in performance for all of our SQL Server efforts. Our two-socket systems are best performing. Our four-socket systems are best performing, and so are eight-socket systems are best performing. In addition to that, we have, when we're proud to work with Microsoft on the launch of Windows Server 2019. Again, that's part of that 25 year partnership. It's just something you got to do. And we're really proud of that. The other thing that we've announced here is what we're calling the buy back program. And a lot of companies have buy back programs where you can actually buy back equipment, and you buy back your competitors equipment in order to build your stuff up, but the one thing that's kind of different about what Lenovo's doing is something I call Zillow for systems. So, you actually can go online and put in the systems that you have or the equipment that you have and we give you an automatic, instant quote back. Nobody else is actually doing that. So, it's kind of a Zillowish system where you can see what's my stuff really worth. >> I want to click in a little bit. So, I know the partnership for a long time. I think about PCs, you think about servers, obviously. Lenovo has the gear, Microsoft has the OS and various pieces that go on there. When I look at solutions like WSSD and Azure Stack, Microsoft has a number of partners, maybe help us understand what that partnership means, how Lenovo differentiates from some of the other players out there. >> So, that is one of the things I forgot. One of the things that we've announced today, and that we showed today, and actually Jeff Wosley talked about it in his talk earlier today, is an integration of Microsoft's Windows Admin Center for WSSD, and Lenovo's Xclarity system management system. So, via a single pane of glass from your Windows Admin Center, you can actually not just look at Windows Admin in the Window's infrastructure, but you can actually dig down and really understand what's actually happening with the hardware itself that WSSD is running on. And that's part of that really close partnership and relationship that we have. >> Can you talk a little bit about the approach to the partnership just because we had a Microsoft Executive on here earlier today, and he said that "our partnerships, we have this, we're able to have "a collaborative and collegial partnership "with our competitors." So, it's sort of part of their DNA." How does Lenovo think about when it partners and how it partners with a competitor? >> Well, but Microsoft isn't actually a competitor of ours. Right? And this is the thing I think that Lenovo, as a company, really is focusing on offering to our customers is choice. Right? We have a co-located lab up in Seattle with Microsoft. We have had for years. We do innovation summits with them, we look at where the technology is going and what is it that we can do together in order to make that more effective for our shared customers and how they deliver in the long run. And so it really is a very strong collaboration. We don't build operating systems. We don't build all of the SQL Server. We don't build the Azure Stack, and the Cloud, and all the rest of that. So, the partnership with Lenovo, Microsoft gets to take advantage of all of our supply chain goodness, all of our services goodness, as well as all the platform stuff that we do as well. >> Now, if you look, HCI is one of the things that we've been talking a little bit more about here. Obviously, it makes sense for Lenovo to partner here, but Lenovo also has a number of other solutions. How do you look at it? What are you hearing from customers when it comes to that kind of solution and how Microsoft-- >> It really is about choice. Right, it really is about choice. Customers have different kinds of problems in their environments, and they're seeking partners to help them solve those problems in their environments. And that, and those choices are actually really critical for them. So, when you're working with somebody like Lenovo, where we also offer Vmware, we also offer some of the other solutions that are out there in the market, that, you work with a partner like Lenovo, where we have all of the services and the infrastructure to back that up, plus the long standing relationships that we have with our partners, enables us to offer that kind of choice that allows our end customers to solve their customer's problems. And that's really the core piece that we're looking at. >> Yeah, Microsoft, of course, partners with a lot of companies. I heard in some of the technical key notes, I heard that get mentioned quite a bit. Of course, Rebecca and I were with your team at Lenovo Transform in New York City recently. And maybe for our viewers that might not have caught that show, give us the update, what you're hearing from people about the big partnership -- >> So, we announced a partnership with network compliance, NetApp, at our Transform show last week, I guess it must have been. We've been working on it for awhile, so, just the fact that the announcement happened was really cool. And it's kind of a three-part partnership. The first part is that Lenovo will be branding NetApp's a couple of the sets of systems that NetApp has. And it allows us to fill out our storage infrastructure. Last year, when we launched our largest portfolio of servers, we launched eight all in a single day, and the rest of the Purley platforms followed from my team in the next quarter. This year, with NetApp, we actually launched the largest storage portfolio in the market. And so, this partnership actually allows us to do that very, very collaboratively. Then the second part of the relationship is joint venture that we're starting with NetApp in China. Given the depth of work that Lenovo does in China, it allows NetApp to actually build their market, and their infrastructure. And I think, some of the customers in China are actually really looking for the kinds of solutions that NetApp has available. And then the third is moving forward to build innovative solutions together. Taking the innovation and the 25 years worth of innovation that my team has done over the years, and all of the work we do in performance, all the number one on client satisfaction, all the number one on reliability for the fifth year in a row, and bringing that into our NetApp alliance. >> One of the themes at this conference, and also frankly at Lenovo Transform, is about company culture and about this idea of the importance of collaboration and creativity and teamwork, and inclusivity. Can you describe a little bit for us how you think the Lenovo culture is similar to the Microsoft one that Satya Nadella is a proponent of and also how it's different? >> How is is similar and how is it different? That's a really interesting question. The thing that I have found about the Lenovo culture that I think surprised me the most, one year in, is how committed Lenovo is to really understanding how people think and bringing that in to how we build effective solutions together. It is by far the most diverse organization that I've worked in. In lots of lots of ways, but if you look at the senior leadership level, right? You would expect it, given that the company is actually headquartered in Beijing and the United States, and we're on the Hong Kong stock exchange, you would expect it to be Chinese. But it's not. The leadership team is actually incredibly diverse. Way more diverse than I expected. But even on my team, and further down in the organization, a lot of our engineers have spent multiple years overseas. They've raised their kids overseas. They've gone to school overseas. And so the have a very inclusive perspective on how do we solve problems. And they also understand that the way in which we solve problems, isn't necessarily the best way. So, in our conversations with Microsoft and the culture that we create with them together, it becomes very collaborative. 'Cause we go back to what's the customer problem we're really trying to solve. How are we actually helping our customers in their intelligent transformation? How do we become their trusted partner? And how do we actually help solve humanity's greatest challenges? And that's a together statement, right? With Microsoft and just kind of peeling back the onion on what are the real problems that we need to get to to solve together. >> You mentioned how diverse a company Lenovo is, and that's actually at a time where the technology industry is not known for its diversity. In fact, it's really known for its bro culture. It's the dearth of female leaders. I'm wondering if you could just give me your thoughts on how technology, sort of the state of affairs today is it as bad as the newspaper headlines make it out to be? And (Rebecca and Bev laugh) what we need to do to move forward. >> So, I think in part, there's two answers to that. One of them is that the participants in technology are changing. So, if you look around the room and you watch who's here, what you're seeing is that there's a whole generation of new people coming in who've always had technology at their fingertips. And so they think differently and assume differently about what that technology is supposed to do for them. And so just age diversity starts to come into play. But also the people that buy our stuff, right? 65 to 75% of commercial electronics are bought by women. That's a stunning figure when you really think about it 'cause it's very different from the people that actually create or have in the past created that technology. So when you start to see who's buying and why they're buying, you actually have to start to understand that they're buying for very different reasons than perhaps you were creating the technology for. So, an example of this is the new Hub 500 or the Hub 700. Have you seen this? So, it's a link connected system that sits on the table and you push a button and you're automatically connected with everybody that's going to be in your Lync meeting or everybody that's going to be in your Skype meeting. And we had to do a fair amount of work to really understand how people were going to interact with the system or not interact with the system. And even colors like red and green, and the fact that they mean different things in different cultures, and how are we going to display those colors, right? But that's where the diversity of participation in solving a problem really comes into play. >> Great. Well Bev, it was a pleasure having you on the show. It was really fun talking to you. >> Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat digital music)

Published Date : Sep 25 2018

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by Cohesity, of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County and talk a little bit about the history of the partnership So, Lenovo and Microsoft have had a partnership So, it's kind of a Zillowish system where you can see So, I know the partnership for a long time. So, that is one of the things I forgot. and how it partners with a competitor? and all the rest of that. Now, if you look, HCI is one of the things And that's really the core piece that we're looking at. I heard in some of the technical key notes, and all of the work we do in performance, One of the themes at this conference, and the culture that we create with them together, is it as bad as the newspaper headlines make it out to be? So, it's a link connected system that sits on the table It was really fun talking to you. Thank you very much. in just a little bit.

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Kirk Skaugen, Lenovo Data Center Group & Brad Anderson, NetApp | Lenovo Transform 2018


 

>> Live, from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2.0. Brought to you by, Lenovo. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Lenovo Transform, here in New York City. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We have two guests here on this segment, We have Kirk Skaugen, he is the president of Lenovo Data Center Group, and Brad Anderson, the Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Mobility for NetApp. Thanks for coming on the program. >> Thank you for having us. >> So the big news of the day, the NetApp Lenovo partnership, explain to our viewers exactly what this means. These are two global powerhouses joining forces. >> Yeah sure, so I think Lenovo has had an amazing year. Last year in our Transform 1.0 we announced the largest server portfolio in our history. And this year we announced the largest data center, data management storage portfolio in our history. With a partnership with NetApp, so we're creating a multi-billion dollar global alliance, a multi-year alliance and it has a place in a joint venture in China as well as we'll be distributing NetApp products in over 160 countries in the world. >> So tell us about the background to this partnership. How did it come about? >> Well, you know, for NetApp we were looking for expanding our reach, and there was two markets that were kind of underserved in. One being kind of the commercial SMB SME channel, and Lenovo has a high-velocity channel there, a strong position. So Lenovo made complete sense in that space as well as in China, where we have a strong brand but we're underserved there as well, so who is better in China than Lenovo? So for us this is all about global market and then the fact that they're a server vendor is just icing on the cake, because the other two server vendors in the marketplace are also our competitors. And then, Lenovo is so much more compatible and complementary to our entire business. >> Kirk, maybe you could spend a little more, because when you look at storage today, storage is really built on servers. You know, NetApp is, you know, at it's heart a software company, even back in the day NetApp was never, some of the other storage companies spent a lot of time and money on the hardware pieces. And of course had reliable, good, trustable hardware, but maybe explain how much, kind of, I.P. goes into this partnership. >> Yeah, sure. So I think today we have about 15 percent coverage of the overall storage market within Lenovo. We've grown our flash array business over 100 percent over the last four quarters. IDC had us at 30% quarter to quarter growth. So we've done well, but we've only cover 15% of the market. After this announcement, and shipping now today, we'll cover over 90% of the market in more than 160 countries. So we're using our global supply chain which is ranked number five in the world by Garner. Manufacturing in Europe, in China, in Mexico et cetera. Really expand this out through our channel partnership program. And in China we're taking a very unique approach to this joint venture. This isn't about taking global products and just trying to force fit them into China. China has unique software solutions, unique hyper scale requirements. So we're pooling our R and D there. Lenovo will be a 51% owner, NetApp a 49% owner. Brad's going to be on the board and there we're going to be delivering products in China for China. >> Yeah, is it, you've got a lot of experience with that. You talk about coming in the future there's an NFV software and hardware solution in China, so Lenovo has some experience doing this kind of engagement, you know. >> Yeah, I think we have a more than 50% growth now, year on year in China. We retooled a lot of the operations that we had there. We have a really nice, broad portfolio now since we launched Think System and Think Agile so it's a nice place to grow on. But today we talked about the joint venture with NetApp and also the fact that over the next year we'll be building out a telecom NFV company after having China Mobile and China Telecom with us as at Mobile World Congress. As well as new edge gateway and edge server solutions. >> Brad, I know cloud is in your title for what you are doing, when I hear NetApp talking, I see NetApp at all the cloud shows we go to. It's a very different world than when I think about NetApp ten years or twenty years ago as like, you know, the Nas Filer company. So bring us up to speed of kind of the NetApp today the momentum and what this brings. >> Yeah, I mean we are going through our own transformation where we were principally a storage company and now we want to be a data company, and increasingly to be a data company you got to be a cloud company. And so, we continue to develop what we think are the, you know, the best storage products in the world, but they are all cloud connected. 'Cause we want data to be able to flow from prim to cloud and customers be able to, you know. That's what really kind of fuels these digital enterprises is that data is the new oil. And so in doing that we have kind of expanded NetApp's charter significantly to being the data authority in hybrid cloud. Hybrid being both the private and the public. And so part of my business is really focused on providing products and solutions so customers can have the same experience in building their own private clouds that they enjoy in the public. And then on the public side we have partnerships with all the hyper scalers to put NetApp's in there so they can deliver native cloud data services. And so, this is a very different company where we're getting more and more cloudy every day. (Rebecca laughs). And that's part of our transformation intentionally. >> So, the transformation, it's the theme of this conference and you were up on the main stage talking about Lenovo's turning this corner and really accelerating its growth, and also talking about the transformation from within the company. Changing the look of the leadership team in particular. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that strategy. >> Sure, so we acquired the IBM system X business in late 2014 and we did some things really well and we did some things that we've learned from. So we spent, you know, basically the last 18 months transforming the whole company. New channel programs, new system integrator partnerships, new training certifying over 11,000 people in the world now. Tripling the number of our solution recipes. And we have transformed The management team as well. We have replaced about 19 executives because we wanted the right balance of external and internal perspectives from our competitors as well as from ex-Lenovo and ex-IBM employees. So we feel like we have a very customer-centric organization now and, again, Gardner now is saying we are growing 49% year on year in units, IDC said we are growing 87% year on year in revenues. So I think customers are responding to the new product line. Over the last year the Think System brand truly meant the highest customer performance, the highest reliability, the highest customer satisfaction. And as a result it does take a while to transform. And I think that over the last 12 months you've seen that and we're exponentially growing now as a company. >> And you see it in your results. I mean, they are outstanding. >> So Brad, bring us inside the products a little bit. So we've got, it's the Think System DE and DM. Of course the storage industry very much, they need to trust it, they need to understand it. Gives little to understand, I believe DE maybe has something to do with the >> The E series >> The E series there and tell us the DM series, what's underneath there and how do people understand what's different and what's the same. >> Yeah, I mean the. We're taking platforms across our E series, our FAS and our all flash arrays. So the DE corresponds to the E series. The DM will have our FAS products as well as our all flash array products in there. So that's kind of the mapping. We're putting initially I think, ten products in there. We have the capacity to expand and I'm sure we're going to learn a lot because these are serving markets that NetApp doesn't typically serve. So I think not only is this going to give Lenovo the tools to compete, it's going to give us a lot of information to even build better products, better solutions for both NetApp and our Lenovo customers. So we're super excited about that. The second thing is, it's OnTab, it's the same core software, and all the value and performance testing and validation you get with NetApp. That all goes into the Lenovo branded products as well. And we have made it one of our hallmarks is our data fabric. All of the data services that are on top of this that you can move data and manage data between platforms, that is really important for the NetApp customer. All those values extend to the Lenovo customer. So if they also have NetApp in their environment, or vice-versa, they can share or move data between both those platforms. So that's, nowhere else in the industry is that possible across vendors let alone within. >> So how does it work when you are in the product development process. Two companies, both relentlessly focused on customers. This is part of your culture, part of your DNA. So how do you work together in terms of innovating and collaborating. >> Well, I think the first thing is you just look at the core business: our server business and NetApp branded storage, or Lenovo branded storage based on NetApp's portfolio. We're going to have a better together solution. So the first thing we're looking at is a set of solution recipes so that when you use NetApp and Lenovo together, you're going to get a better experience as a customer base. So that's why I am excited today. We've launched three times as many engineered solutions as we did a year ago. And trained these 11,000 people because we have a very solution oriented sales force and a very complementary channel. From a development perspective, we're going to be building X Clarity management into our portfolio. So the same systems management software that is mission critical for Lenovo server products will now manage the big system DE and DM products. So it's a very familiar management interface for customers, there's an engineering effort gone with that. And then on service and support, we're going to use over 10,000 people around the world that Lenovo has to go service and support these products. So we can deliver a premium customer experience. Whether you're buying the server or the storage. And back to the customer base: we're going to, especially in China, have deep engineering collaborations. Where we're walking into those customer bases and asking what's unique about the China market. >> And, and. It really helps that the two companies are very complementary. So NetApp has deep storage expertise, Lenovo has tremendous compute expertise. So they are very complementary and as customers want more and more complete solutions, we are learning, our engineers are learning from each other and it doesn't hurt the fact that we have a large engineering. We NetApp, have a large engineering population in the research triangle where Kirk's people are at. >> That's right. We're probably one kilometer away from each other in research triangle park. >> Geography matters, location location location. >> No, and our two support organizations are next door as well. So I think that proximity will only contribute to the collaboration. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Alright, so the storage industry actually has a relatively good track record of some deep, long partnerships. NetApp has had a number of them over the years. Tell us, what does success look like if we look back three years from now, what's this partnership. >> Well, what we said publicly is we plan to have a multi-billion dollar, multi-year alliance. So that's going to be fantastic as we grow in over 160 countries. We're going to use Lenovo's extensive supply chain network. So you know as one of the largest kind of procurers of componentry and things around the world, we get to leverage this global factory network to build even more value into that situation. And in China specifically, we've set a goal of being a top three storage player. So we both have probably single digit share in China but together with this collaboration we are setting sights quite high to be in the top three over the next several years. >> I think that's exactly right and I think those are all achievable goals. But right now, we want to get out the gate fast. I mean this is a partnership with two companies with a lot of momentum and I see this as a huge opportunity for both our companies to kind of amplify that momentum near term. And so while there's a lot of excitement on the future, I think success is going to look like, you know, some very exciting results that Kirk can share at Transform 3.0 next year. >> That's right. And for our customer base, we have already gone into production. Taking orders, as of today and tons of engineering, tons of manufacturing development. So we'll have a whole host of seed units and early access units. Our customers can get their hands on this stuff right away and start testing it in their environment. >> As you said, it is an audacious vision. You announced an audacious vision last year, you did another one again this year. So when you think about what you want to be talking about next year. You said what success looks like. What are some other things that you're working on? You said, this is a process, Lenovo has turned the corner and it's got a lot of momentum. But what else are you, what else do you have on tap that you're... >> Well, if we tell all of you that, (Rebecca laughs) we won't have this here next year. >> Yeah >> But I think today is about entry and midrange. About expanding Lenovo's breadth from 15 to 90% of the market and being very aggressive against our top competitors that have a combined server storage portfolio. And I think as I've gone around the world, I've been in Latin America, in India, our channel partners are incredibly excited about this. So I think while other customers might be taking business more direct, we've traditionally been very channel-centric. So, I've seen a lot of pull for choice in the market and I think that's what we're going to deliver to our channel partners. But we will have a lot more in store, that I can promise you. This is phase one of a multi-phase, multi-year plan. >> I think there's a lot of things, there's a lot of possibilities on the product development side and how we can do better products, but I think a lot of success is going to look, it's going to come in our global market. Already, Kirk, since I've been here, I've had a channel partner come up and said "Hey, this makes me rethink my channel partners all over again", because now that channel partner who's a Lenovo has the full breadth of the storage portfolio. So I think this is going to be really good for both of us. Particularly when, you know, Lenovo and NetApp are both very channel friendly partners and companies and I think this I going to be a catalyst to have more people on our side than ever before. >> Kirk, just last thing, just give you the opportunity to talk about some of the other breadth and choice and other things that Lenovo has going on. We're going to talk to some of your team about, you know, hyper converge and hyper scale and other hyper things, but yeah. (Rebecca laughs) >> Well I think the good news about our growth now is that we're doing it across multiple segments in the industry. There isn't just one part of the market that growing. So last year we set an audacious goal of being the largest supercomputer company in the world by 2020. We've now crossed that actually this year. So we are the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers now are there. And we're expanding that into a lot of AI offerings as well with our four artificial intelligence centers, from China, Germany, Taipei, Beijing. All having customers bring their AI workloads into a controlled environment with our partners where there's intel and video or the FGBA vendors. So super-computing is alive and well and we continue to innovate with our warm-water cooling technology that's going to be here on display. We think we're building one of the largest supercomputers in Europe right now using that technology. So not just helping solve global warming but being more energy-efficient while we are computing on that as well. In hyper scale we've grown to about delivering six of the top ten hyper scalers products. And we're doing that through, basically starting with a white sheet of paper with our customers and building more than thirty customized products. In the motherboard, in the system, in putting it through our entire supply chain. Versus just, in the past maybe two years ago, maybe just leveraging ODM products, so. Significant growth in hyper scale where we're bringing on new billion dollar customers on a regular basis now. And then in flash arrays, our traditional business, we were over 100% growth year on year. So we're building off of momentum. We had great products but only covering 15% of the market, now much larger. Last but not least, we did announce since Transform, new divisions in embedded and IoT as well as in telecommunications NFVF software. We think each of those can be billion dollar groups within Lenovo, so that's probably a lot of what we would be talking about next year is announcements and innovations we've had. Would be Transform 3.0 probably. (Rebecca laughs) >> Well, we're already looking forward to the next Transform. >> 3.0 will be CUBEd so we look forward to that. >> Stu, very nice. Very nice. Excellent. Well thank you so much Brad and Kirk for being on the show, I really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform and theCUBE's live coverage, just after this. (intense electronic music)

Published Date : Sep 13 2018

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by, Lenovo. We have Kirk Skaugen, he is the president So the big news of the day, in over 160 countries in the world. So tell us about the background to is just icing on the cake, because the other a software company, even back in the day So I think today we have about You talk about coming in the future a lot of the operations that we had there. I see NetApp at all the cloud shows we go to. And so in doing that we have kind of expanded of the leadership team in particular. So we spent, you know, basically And you see it in your results. Of course the storage industry very much, The E series there and tell us the DM series, So the DE corresponds to the E series. in the product development process. So the first thing we're looking at is and it doesn't hurt the fact that we have away from each other in research triangle park. So I think that proximity Alright, so the storage industry actually has So that's going to be fantastic as we grow on the future, I think success is going we have already gone into production. So when you think about what you want Well, if we tell all of you that, of pull for choice in the market and So I think this is going to We're going to talk to So we are the largest supercomputer company for being on the show, I really appreciate it. We will have more from Lenovo Transform

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Lenovo Transform 2.0 Keynote | Lenovo Transform 2018


 

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪

Published Date : Sep 13 2018

SUMMARY :

and those around you, Ladies and gentlemen, we ask that you please take an available seat. Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask and software that transform the way you collaborate, Good morning everyone! Ooh, that was pretty good actually, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and the strategies that we have going forward I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say is that the first products are orderable and being one of the largest device companies in the world. and exactly what's going on with that. I think I'll need that. Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, You're in Munich? and it's a great place to live and raise kids, And I miss it a lot, but I still believe the best sushi in the world and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. (Christian laughing) the real Oktoberfest in Munich, in relation to Oktoberfest, at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, and consequently ended up with you. and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, and that is the workstation business . and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, I hate to use the word game changer, is certainly going to ensure that future. And the core of this is that we need to be, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? that would fit to that. and thank you for the introduction. and the technology you are deploying and more productive during the meeting. how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, You imagine looking at all the devices we use. and we really appreciate the partnership. and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. and how many operators in the world Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote.

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Alaina Percival, Women Who Code | Women Transforming Technology (wt2) 2018


 

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE covering Women Transforming Technology. >> Hi, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are on the ground at VMware in Palo Alto, with the third annual Women Transforming Technology event and I'm very excited to be joined by the CEO of Women Who Code, Alaina Percival. Alaina, nice to have you here. >> Hi, thank you very much for having me. >> So tell me about Women Who Code. You co-founded it a while ago. Give us a little bit of a background about what your organization is. >> Yeah, Women Who Code is the largest and most active community of technical women in the world. Our mission is to see women excel in technology careers, and that's because we have a vision of women becoming executives, technical executives, founders, board members, and of course through a pathway of being software engineers. >> So Women Who Code started, originally, back in 2011 as a community. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of that and what you've transformed it into, today. >> Yeah, it started off as a local community, and it was just a space to get together with other technologists, and what we started to see is it was this thing that was just fun and kind of our little secret for, you know, that first year, and we realized-- at one point I said, "Hey other women around the world deserve to have this, as well." And, that's really where the focus to grow globally came about and focus on women: building on their skills and building up their leadership skills and if you invite software engineers to a leadership and networking event, they won't come, but we hold an average of five free technical events every single day, throughout the world, and at those events, they're primarily technology events where we weave in a little bit of leadership and networking, but it feels authentic and its an event that software engineers are excited to be. >> Five events per day, that's incredible. So, VMware became a partner back in 2015, when you had around nine or 10,000 members. Now, today, its over 137,000 global members. Talk to us about the strategic partnership with VMware and what that's enabled Women Who Code to achieve. >> Yeah, we can't accomplish what we accomplish without the partners that support us. We try not to charge our members for anything. So, those 1,900 events we put on last year were free. We've given away $2.8 million in our weekly newsletter of scholarships, and conference tickets, encouraging our community to go out there in the broader tech community and we can do those things, we can launch in the cities that we can launch in, we can elevate women as leaders around the world, but we can only do that through partners, and VMware is one of our founding partners and what that took is someone in executive leadership to see who we could be, because we're very small, and we were very local when we came to VMware and talked to them about what our vision was and what we were going to accomplish and I say now, what I said back then, is we've only scratched the surface of what we are going to achieve. >> There's some commonalities, some parallels that Women Who Code has with VMware. You know, this is the third annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware here and its sold out within hours. Walking into that room it's very empowering. The excitement and the passion are there and you just start to feel a sense of community. Tell me about the parallels that you see with VMware and some of the visions that they share about, not just raising awareness for the diversity gaps and challenges, but also taking a stand to be accountable in that space. And what they announced this morning with Stanford, with this massive $15 million investment in this Innovation Lab of actually wanting to dig deep into these barriers to help identify them to help eradicate them. What are some of the visionary similarities with Women Who Code and VMware? >> Yeah, so what you see with that is you know, you're investing in someone or an organization that already has the potential. Our average age of our community is 30. We have a lot of trouble claiming that you achieve what you achieve in your career, because of us. We know we play a part in it, but we know that potential, that raw power, exists within you, and when someone sees and knows that that's there and gives you what you need to be able to harness that potential, you are able to achieve great things, global things. You're able to change the world, and that's what we do for our members and their careers, and that's what our partners, like VMware do for us. >> I saw on your website: 80% of members experience a positive career impact, after joining Women Who Code. 80% of women, that's huge. >> Yeah, and a lot of that comes from the people that you connect with, the sense of belonging. We had a women at the end of Hackathon, in Manila come up to our leaders, there, and she started crying. She said, "I was about to leave the industry and I realize I have a place." And that sense of belonging that you get from coming to a Women Who Code event that's very welcoming, it can really help to override all of those unconscious biases that you encounter every day, throughout the course of your career, and it helps you to realize, "I'm not alone. There's a lot of really smart, talented women in the tech industry, who want me to be in my job and being in my job isn't just for me. I'm lifting up the people around me, as well." >> So one of the things that we hear a lot about is a lot of focus on STEM programs and getting young girls interested in STEM fields to study in college, but another thing that's huge is the attrition rates. Women are leaving technology at alarming rates, and a lot of people think it's to go off and have children, and it's actually not the case. What are some of the things that have surprised you about women kind of in that, maybe, mid-stage of their career that are leaving, and how can Women Who Code help to impact that, positively? >> Yeah, so what you're speaking to is definitely the data showing that women are leaving their technical careers at a rate of 50% at the mid-career level, and they're leaving their overall careers, if you aggregate women in careers, at a rate of 20% over a 30 year period, so that gap is huge and the industry is a great industry for women. You've got a lot of job security, a lot of job opportunity, a lot of flexibility. All of these things are great for women and their careers, but what you're encountering is often being the only, or one of the only, and you really don't overcome that, until you're getting above 20%, 25%, 30% of that feeling of being the only on a team, and what I think is the biggest issue with women coming into their careers at what kind of wears you down is the unconscious bias. It's something that you encounter on a daily, or multiple times a day basis. That thing that if you complained about a single one of them, you'd be the weird person who complains, at your company. And so, what Women Who Code really does is: one, it helps to create a sense of belonging, it helps to build domain-specific and non-domain-specific skills, it helps you to envision your career, not just the next step in your career, but the step after that, and the step after that, so it's really working to combat those things that you're to, on a daily basis, to provide that sense of community, to remind you, you do belong, and to really help you envision and achieve your career goals, long-term. >> So you have about 137,000 members, globally. And when we had Lily Chang on earlier, she was talking about the Shanghai and Beijing and kind of what that sort of thing meant to her going back there now, on the board. Tell us, maybe give me an example of a real shining star, who joined Women Who Code and was able to get that support, and that guidance, and that camaraderie to continue to be successful, and actually be promoted, and succeed. >> Yeah, so one example that I love is a woman came up to me at an event, last year, and she said, "Hey Alaina, I was going to the Women Who Code Python events, and I now, today, because of what I learned, ended up choosing a path in data science. I'm a senior data scientist, and this year, I'm being flown across country to speak, as an expert in data science. I would not be in this career path, without Women Who Code." Another story that I love is a woman who came up to me at a Hackathon and she told me her story that she had joined Women Who Code, in February, and she was going to our events and kind of figured out what she wanted to do, and by the summer she had transitioned into a new job, gotten a job with The Weather Channel, as a software engineer, and she was making more than double any salary that she had had prior to that. >> Wow. >> And so its career direction, competing job offers, which really increases your likelihood of having a higher salary, those are kind of two examples that I love. The one thing that we haven't talked about is our leadership program. We have a global leadership program, which really actions you to build skill-based volunteering and become a local tech leader. It opens up lines of communication between you and executives at your company. You often get called in as a thought leader at companies. You typically will receive a promotion or a pay increase, at a higher rate than you would otherwise. Some of our leaders get press mentions, get invited to be speakers at conferences, or even advisors on advisory boards. And so, when I look at the stories that are coming from our leaders, one of my favorite stories is a woman in Atlanta. She had a master's in CS. She was inside of the box, you know, the person that every company wants to hire. She was incredibly shy, and when she stepped up as a Women Who Code leader she said, "Oh Alaina, I'm going to be the worst leader." And, okay you've got this. At her first event, she stoop up and she was like, "My name's Erica. Feel free to ask me questions," and kind of sat down, as quickly as possible, but she stood in the front of that room. She began to be perceived by the community, and by herself, as a leader. And in under one year, she was invited, she didn't even apply, to speak at three different tech conferences, and she went from barely being able to say her name in front of a nice community to giving a talk to a standing-room-only crowd. >> Wow, very impactful. And is that for other opportunities that you guys deliver, in terms of public speaking, or was that because she was able to, through Women Who Code, to start to get more confidence in her own capabilities and in her own skin? >> Experience, confidence, self-perception, community-perception, I had one lead at our community tell me that she became a leader at Women Who Code, by regularly attending events. One day, the leader was running late, so she said, "Oh, well, you know I can probably get this started. I've been coming enough," so she went and stood at the front of the room, welcomed everyone, got everything going, said our pitch and she said, by the end of that three-hour event, people thought she was a leader and she began to think, "Oh yeah, I'm a leader," and she says, "Hey, I know that I can get an interview anywhere I want. I know that this opens doors for me." I had one leader tell me that she interviewed with SpaceX, and they specifically told her in the interview that they were impressed with her Women Who Code leadership and that was one of the reasons they were interviewing her. >> Wow, what have been some of the things that have really blown you away, in the few years that this organization has been around? >> It's just the individual stories. It's, every step of the way, the impact that it has in the lives of our leaders in our community. And I honestly feel, everyday, that I get to do this for a job. >> With what VMware announced this morning, with Stanford and this huge investment that they're making into Women's Leadership and Innovation Lab, to look at some significant barriers that women in technology are facing and to identify those barriers that we can then eradicate, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to, from that research and how you think that can actually benefit Women Who Code? >> Yeah, I'm very excited to see what comes out from there. I think we need a lot more research to help us to understand at what point things are happening and what things you can be doing that really help to overcome. I think that combining research with the real-world, in-person action that Women Who Code does and the work that we do with our community would have an even bigger impact. >> I also think what it speaks to is accountability. You know, a very large, very successful, 20-year-old organizations standing up saying, "We actually want to study this," and I think that there's a message there of accountability, which is, I think, a very important one that other organizations can definitely learn from. >> Yeah, I think that also they're going to an organization outside of them and funding that. And so, the research that comes out of there might come back and say, "You're doing this wrong. This is how you can be doing it better." And so, the fact that they're willing to make an investment and say, "Hey, we want to see this better, not only for us. It's not just going to be internal. This data's going out to the world." That's an investment in global change. That's not just holding that in at a personal or organizational level. >> Right, so in addition to that news that came out today, what are some of the things that you're going to walk away, from this third annual Women Transforming Technology event going, "Ah, that was awesome. Now, this gives me even more ideas for Women Who Code." >> Yeah, I think this is a great opportunity to connect with, especially, women who are in leadership positions and figure out how we can better service women at the higher tiers of their career, because you don't stop needing support, and you don't stop growing your career, once you become a director or a vice president. You continue to invest in your career, and you continue to needs support. And so, I'm really looking for ways that we can better serve those women. >> And hopefully, we start to see that attrition number at 50% start to come down. >> Alaina: Definitely. >> Alaina, thanks so much for your time. It was a pleasure to chat with you, and we wish you continued success with Women Who Code. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, on the ground at VMware, for the third annual Women Transforming Technology event. Thanks for watching. (funky electronic music)

Published Date : May 24 2018

SUMMARY :

Narrator: From the VMware campus Alaina, nice to have you here. about what your organization is. and most active community of technical women in the world. and what you've transformed it into, today. and kind of our little secret for, you know, and what that's enabled Women Who Code to achieve. and talked to them about what our vision was and some of the visions that they share about, and knows that that's there and gives 80% of women, that's huge. Yeah, and a lot of that comes from the people and a lot of people think it's to go off of that feeling of being the only on a team, and and that camaraderie to continue to be successful, and kind of figured out what she wanted to do, but she stood in the front of that room. that you guys deliver, in terms of and she began to think, "Oh yeah, I'm a leader," that it has in the lives of our leaders in our community. and what things you can be doing and I think that there's a message there And so, the research that comes out of there Right, so in addition to that news that came out today, and you don't stop growing your career, attrition number at 50% start to come down. and we wish you continued success with Women Who Code. at VMware, for the third annual

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Lily Chang, VMware | Women Transforming Technology (wt2) 2018


 

>> Narrator: From the VMware Campus in Palo Alto California, it's The Cube covering Women Transforming Technology. (upbeat music) >> I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube and we are on the ground in Palo Alto with VMware for the third annual, Women Transforming Technology event. Excited to welcome back to the Cube, Lily Chang, VP of strategic transformation here at VMware. Lily it's great to have you back. >> Thank you, it's fantastic to have this event again, for the third time in the history. >> Yes, in fact, I read online that it was sold out within hours and the keynote this morning was... >> Lily: Fantastic >> Fantastic >> And very inspiring. >> Very inspiring. For those of you who don't know, Laila Ali was the keynote this morning. What a great analogy, not just being a sports star, but being someone, a woman, in a very male dominated industry who just had this sort of natural confidence that she just knew what her purpose was. I thought that was a very inspiring message for those of us in tech as well. >> Yeah, and it's also very key that women leaders, such as herself, is willing to come out and share the story, and be the role model and set a path and show the example for the younger generation to follow and to look up to. That is incredible. >> I love for one of the things she said, Lily, when she said she still sometimes kind of loses sight and has to reignite that inner warrior. I thought that was a really important and empowering message too that even really strong women who are naturally confident still have times where they have to kind of remind themselves of what their purpose is. I just thought that was a very impactful statement and I think regardless of any industry you're in. >> That is absolutely true. I mean, we're only human, right? So every one of us experiences challenges in life so there are times even all genders, you're going to bump into road blocks, you're going to bump into challenges and then you need to self motivating and lift yourself up and rise to the ocassions of the challenge. A lot of times these changes, and I'm sure it's true for her as well, that actually make her a better leader. >> Definitely. So you are one of the board members of Women Who Code. This is something that's very near and dear to VMwear's heart. VMwear got involved in 2016 when it was about a 10,000 person organization. >> Actually, a little bit less than that. >> A little less than 10,000? And now it's? >> We were very young. >> And now how large is it? >> It's 137,000 members globally, 20 counties, 60 cities. >> So what's the mission of Women Who Code? >> The mission is very simple. Basically we want to basically help all women that inspire and excel in their technical career journey and in their career development. So that's basically the simple mission statement and for that a very critical thrust that Women Who Code has and kind of coincide with VMware's community vision, is basically technical woman community. So they were very young but we saw the passion, we saw the commitment, and we believed that this is a great mutual opportunity because we want to be a global company. We want to not only view leadership within U.S., we wanted it to be in NIA, to be in APJ, We have R & D research offices everywhere and so we basically collaborated with Women Who Code and that has been a very successful leadership program which only work with them. And they basically blossomed under the collaboration and we're not the only company but we are the one of two founding partner in sponsor for Women Who Code. >> It's grown dramatically as you said. >> Lily: Dramatically. >> Yeah, just a couple of years since you've been involved with VMware. What are a some of things that have surprised you about, not just the growth, but about some of the lesson that maybe you've learned by watching some of these other women come into this organization and be inspired and impact their careers? >> So I see the story, both in VMware woman leadership, and also in outside community woman leadership. Right? So what I see is all these woman basically have the passion but they were a little bit worried about let it come out but when you're actually in a community you're supporting one and other and you have that platform where they feel very comfortable to communicate, network, share, and learn, and so basically that is a very powerful thing and I see the growth and the booster of the potential, it's kind of like we lift them up all of a sudden. Right? One of the stories recently is that, for example, on the external side, We have basically a Canada city director is all volunteer positions. Right. And within a year, she actually moved from a line management position to basically to a director position because the city director role basically expose you to basically get the community view out and that encourage you and challenge you to basically has hands on soft leadership skill and so a lot of the technical woman have a lot of technology and a lot of the technologist mentality but you need to accompany that with a lot of the soft skill. And then the combination of the two that makes a perfect combination. And we see a lot of that in our VMware women as well. So we set out to do basically cities in China, we actually opened China for Women Who Code. It was zero member, and now it has like 3,000-4,000 members. It's actually in China. It's a little bit of a difficult mysterious place. Right? But we made it happen in Beijing. We made it happen in Shanghai. And it's basically participate by a lot of the local company, not just multi-national company. And in India we actually open it up, and in India now is blossomed like crazy so there are like since VMware's opening up in Bangalore basically there are three other cities that joined in. India is like basically a rose in blossoming peak point right now. And we also opened up a Sophia, so basically we work with women who go to do a corporate leadership program. And within the first year, where we appointed some of the city directors from our women, basically we have experience about a 50% promotion rate and pretty much 100% retention rate. >> Lisa: Wow. >> Yeah. >> 50% promotion and 100% retention is incredible. >> It is incredible, so I see that miracle happening and then I become very convinced after year one and then I've also learned that I'm not the only leader in the world that believes in this. That's the reason why they blossom like crazy. >> I imagine growing up in China, I was reading a little bit about your story, that the expansion in China must mean something a bit personal for you as well. It sounds like you were a bit fortunate though, with your parents saying "hey," you had two choices when you graduated from college, flight attendant, or secretary and your parents thought "she should have more options that that." So maybe kind of full circle, how was that for you when those two in Shanghai and Beijing opened? >> To me, I feel like, that is what is 21st century supposed to be. I wish it were true in the 19th century and but bottom line is, minor correction, actually I did interview for those two positions. I was rejected. I was not qualified. >> Lisa: Lucky VMware. >> Yeah. (laughing) Actually lucky United State. >> There you go. >> So basically my dad and my mom, they basically raised me up very differently in that era. They basically feel that they give me kind of almost a virtual space where I do not feel there is any difference between genders. They always made me feel like I'm a equal citizen in the family. I have the same speaking right, my dad, my mom both foster me that so when they learned that I could not get those two possible jobs and I was very well educated, graduated from the best university in the island, quoting my dad, he basically "invested on me," right? So he basically said "well" what he needs to do is "continue to invest in me." So that's the reason why he exported me to United States and then basically I went to the graduate school here and then since then I been very blessed. So this is almost like the Beijing and Shanghai success of the Women Who Code. It's almost like I'm giving it back to my origin. Right? And I'm bringing a lot of the blend between the western and eastern culture together. Right? To open that up which is fantastic and basically in the global environment to make it very diverse and inclusive at the same time. >> So you had really strong parents who instilled this belief in you that you could do anything. When we look at some of the statistics that show that less than 25% of technical roles are held by women and then we also look at the retention, the attrition is so high in tech. What were some of the things that kept you kind of focused on your dreams? How did you kind of foster that persistence? And I'm wondering what your advice is for women who are in tech and might be thinking of leaving. >> Well, very interesting, so first advice I have is, basically believe in yourself and dream very big. Because that, and the second this is never afraid of change. Change is always a good thing and that has been throughout my growth in a foreign country as well as here. Right? And I remember when I was in the university, even thought it was the best university, and I actually changed department and major twice and the third time I attempted to do it, because at that time I told my dad, say "hey, I heard there's this cool computer science thing I really want to go do" he did some calculation and said "look, if you transfer again, the third time, it will take you five to six years to graduate" so he said "no, just stick with it and then later on you want to move, go ahead." Right? So in grad school I changed again and I was very blessed that there are a lot of sponsors and mentors. Not just my parents. Throughout my growth and throughout my journey in the career basically really foster and help me, supported me, give me a lot of advice, so I'm a big believer in mentorship and sponsorship and that's what I believe the technical woman community will offer. It's kind of a genetically built it within that philosophy in the community. Right? It doesn't matter which forum. It is basically bringing in the common belief and the vision together and it's basically peer to peer mentorship and because there are different walks and different levels of women and technologist in that community then you actually could do the tiering and peering and basically help people to either inspire, basically move into new career journey, or elevating themselves. So I'm a very big believer in mentorship and sponsorship. >> Speaking of change, we talked about the changes you've made previously. You've made a big change from R & D to financier. >> Lily: That's correct. >> The very first at VMware to do that? >> Lily: Yes, very first... >> Tell us about kind of the impetus and what excited you and what you are benefiting from. >> Well, I'd been in the R & D career for a couple decades and so every ten years I look at my resume and then I kind of try to have an out of body experience to basically advise myself and say, what would you do differently, so that you actually are setup for the growth for the next ten years. Right? So when I look at my career about a year ago I basically said to myself and said "well, you've got enough R & D experience, you made enough investment. For you to be in the next journey you really need to have the business experience." And even though I have basically with VMware's support and sponsorship I did go back to the business school and got kind of the Berkeley business certificate and I got lots of great executives supporting me. But the reality is if you don't do that role, day in and day out, and really experience it blended into your DNA, it's not going to come natural. Right? And I don't want to be an imposter, so essentially I made a fairly major determination that I want to basically switch into business world. So I'm kind of a unique case in the sense that I'm both over-qualified and under-qualified at the same time. I'm very lucky that I have a lot of the executive sponsorship that I was able to find a perfect role that allowed me to learn and excel and basically be inspired basically in my role today and that is something fantastic. Only after I transfer that's where I learn that I'm actually the first employee in VMware's history that moved from R & D to finance and I still remain as the only one so far and I hope that my success can actually inspire more R & D people because I truly believe that a lot of times when you can actually can look at from the other lens it would just simply make you be able to do your original job better. Like right now, I would tell my old R & D self that some of the decision I made I would have debated and petitioned and argued and thought about it in a completely different way because my thinking has shift which I think is a very healthy shift. >> I agree, and you know, one of the things that Laila Ali said this morning was basically encouraging people to get uncomfortable, to be comfortable and that's, you talked about change, absolutely there's so many opportunities and we know that on one level but it can be pretty intimidating to change something. But I love also what you said. I think there's a parallel with saying now that you have this business experience looking through that other lens at R & D, you would have made decisions differently and I think that is very reflective and an opportunity for organizations to invest in creating a more diverse executive team. When you bring in that though diversity. >> Lily: Exactly. >> And it just opens the door, not just seeing things through different lenses and perspectives whether we're talking about gender or what not, but the profitability that can come from that alone is tremendous. >> Yeah, so for example one of the things that there is a statistics actually based on McKinsey for company that basically has reasonable percentage blend of woman leadership actually grows better and makes much sounder decision and so the experience I have moving from R & D to business and then now I work still very closely with R & D community and the product business unit, basically that's kind of a testemonial for that because the decision making all of a sudden is multi facet. And you always will be able to make a better decision and a sound decision. Now, you will be able to see a different risk at a different level, and we will be communicating in a more common language, like I used to not be able to speak the business tone and the business language, now I actually can be that effective communication bridge, which I find it very powerful and very exciting and very illuminating in terms of just the whole shift, make it a very worth while actually. It's just a very fantastic personal and professional experiences so far. >> You studied that Mckinsey report and that was actually mentioned this morning that the press release that VMwear did with the Stanford Institute investing 15 million in building a womens innovation lab to study the barriers, identify how to remove those barriers, but in that press release McKinsey report found that, and this is shocking, that companies that have more diversity at the executive level, are 21% more profitable. >> Lily: Exactly. >> That's a huge number. >> That's because you actually, for business, right? The technology moves so fast and there are so many different factors will be coming in hitting the business, giving business decision, you just go down a unique lane and not basically bringing all the different facets of perspective, you tend to basically gradually work yourself into a corner or you may just believe what you want to believe. Right? So that's where the other genders perspective or even the inclusive culture will bring you, basically. So this is my firm belief. Right? It's just in a different dimension basically. >> And I think that's great advice for all walks of life Lily. Thank you so much for stopping by The Cube and sharing with us what you're doing with Women Who Code and congratulations on being the first VMware to successfully transition from R & D to finance. >> Yeah, I actually hit my one year anniversary. >> Oh congratulations and thanks so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching the cube. I'm Lisa Martin, on the ground at Women Transforming Technology VMware. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

Published Date : May 24 2018

SUMMARY :

Narrator: From the VMware Campus in Palo Alto California, Lily it's great to have you back. for the third time in the history. Yes, in fact, I read online that it was sold out For those of you who don't know, and be the role model and set a path and show the example and has to reignite that inner warrior. and then you need to self motivating and lift yourself up So you are one of the board members of It's 137,000 members globally, and for that a very critical thrust that Women Who Code has and be inspired and impact their careers? and that encourage you and challenge you and then I become very convinced after year one So maybe kind of full circle, how was that for you and but bottom line is, minor correction, Yeah. and inclusive at the same time. and then we also look at the retention, and the third time I attempted to do it, Speaking of change, we talked about the and what you are benefiting from. and got kind of the Berkeley business certificate I agree, and you know, one of the things that Laila Ali And it just opens the door, not just seeing things and so the experience I have moving from R & D to business and that was actually mentioned this morning and there are so many different factors will be coming in and sharing with us what you're doing We want to thank you for watching the cube.

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Mark Collier, OpenStack Foundation | OpenStack Summit 2018


 

>> Announcer: Live, from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer. And happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, Mark Collier, who's the chief operating officer of the OpenStack Foundation. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me back. >> Thank you for having us back and thank you again for doing the show in Vancouver, so-- >> Oh man, such an amazing place. Like this convention center, I don't think it's fair to call it a convention center because it's like a work of art, you know? >> And it's my second time here for this show, and I think kudos to your team because you have good enough content that people aren't just wandering around, taking pictures of the mountains. My wife is off seizing the whale watching right now, but everybody else here, they're engaged. And that's what you want in the community. >> Yeah, definitely. I guess you have to make sure you don't lose their attention to the whales and the sea planes, but so far everyone seems to be gettin' down to business. >> You know, I think it would be fair to say that there's some transitions going on in the marketplace in general, and at this show I notice when I got the invitation, it's like the OpenStack slash open infrastructure summit. Got a big track on edge computing, got another one on containers, been talking about containers for a few years at this show, which really interesting to talk about. And I mean, the edge stuff, we were talking about it as NFV and the telcos and all that stuff in the past. What is the OpenStack Summit these days, Mark? >> Yeah, I mean I think that it's evolving to reflect what people are doing with open source when it comes to infrastructure. And so we call it open infrastructure, but basically it's just a world of possibilities have been opened up by, of course, OpenStack, but also many, many other components, some of which came before like Linux and things like that, and some of which started after, like Kubernetes, and there's many other examples, TensorFlow for AI machine learning. So there's kind of this like embarrassment of riches these days if yo want to automate your infrastructure in a cloud-like fashion. You can do so many more things with it, and OpenStack solves a very specific, very important layer which is that kind of traditional infrastructure as a service layer, compute storage and networking. But once you automate that, it's proven, it's reliable, you could run millions of cores with it like some of our users are doing. You want to do more and that means layering other things on top or sort of connecting them in different ways. So just trying to help users get something more out of the technology is really what we're about and OpenStack becomes like an enabler rather than kind of like the whole conversation. Yeah, one of the things I always say in this industry, sometimes we just don't have the right expectations going into these environments. You know, when I think back 15 years ago as to what we thought Linux was going to do. Oh it's going to crush Microsoft. It's like, well, Microsoft is still doing quite well and Linux has done phenomenal. We wouldn't have companies like, Google if it wasn't for the likes of Linux. In an open source you've got a lot of tools out there. So while there are the CERNs and Walmarts of the world that take a full OpenStack distribution and put out tons of cores, I've run into software companies where when I dig into their IP, oh what do ya know, there's a project from OpenStack in there that enables what they're doing. So I've seen at a lot of shows they're like, there's companies that are like, yes, I want it, and then there's like, oh no, there's this piece of it I want, there's that piece what I want. And that's kind of the wonder of OpenStack that I can do all of those things. >> Yeah exactly. I think we've talked before about sort of calling it composable open infrastructure, and making, OpenStack's always been architecturally designed from, in terms of the goals around it, to be pluggable so from the beginning you could plug multiple hypervisors kind of underneath and you could plug different backends for storage and networking, so that sort of concept of being something, integration engine that plugs things in is part of the OpenStack kind of philosophy, but now you see that the OpenStack services themselves are sort of, you can think of them as microservices, and like if you just need block storage you can use sender. And that may make sense for some specific environments, and are you running OpenStack? Well, you are, but it gets a little bit fuzzy in terms of are you running all of it or part of it? And the reality is the things are not as simple as a binary yes or no. It's just that the options are much greater now. >> Well Mark, that has been some of the discussion in the community over the last few years, the core versus the big tent, and now of course with all this interoperability, conversations with both OpenStack participating in other communities and other communities here today, this week. I mean, what's the current state of that conversation about what is OpenStack and how does it interrelate? I think you kind of touched on it with this composable idea. >> Yeah, I mean I think that basically it's kind of like OpenStack is as OpenStack does, you know? So what are people doing with it and that tells you kind of what it is and what people are doing with it. There are a lot of different patterns. There's no like one specific deployment pattern that everyone uses, but probably by and large, by far the most common pattern is OpenStack plus Kubernetes. And so when you talk about the interop piece, this is a really good example where OpenStack has evolved to become a better, kind of better citizen, I guess, of open infrastructure by having more reliable APIs, kind of being a target that tools that build on top can rely on and not sort of have to worry about the snowflakes of different clouds and there's still more work to be done in that area, but we talked about OpenLab, which is an initiative, this morning, that puts together OpenStack, Kubernetes, and other pieces like Terraform and things like that, and does constant end-to-end testing on it, and that's really how you make sure that you know kind of what combinations work well together, and sometimes you just find bugs, and it turns out a couple of changes need to be made upstream in Kubernetes or in OpenStack or in gophercloud or in Terraform, and just if you don't know, then the user kind of with the some assembly required model, finds out and they're like, I don't know, it doesn't work, it's broken. Well, is it OpenStack's fault or Kubernetes's fault, and they don't, they just want it to work. >> So you're saying >> Identified upstream we can fix it. >> You're saying OpenStack has become more of a stable layer of the (mumbles). >> Yes exactly, yes. It has become a much more stable layer. >> Which means there wasn't a whole lot of flashy storage network and compute up on stage actually. >> A lot of the talk-- >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I think it's just really proven in that way, and you know, one of the things that was highlighted was like the virtual GPUs, right? So, if OpenStack is designed to be pluggable, what do people want to have as an option now in terms of compute storage and networking, on the compute side is they want GPUs, because that gives an AI machine learning much faster, if they're bit coin miners, like I'm sure you all are in your basement, they're going to want GPUs. And what was really interesting is that the PTL, like the technical leader of the Nova Project, got up and talked about virtual GPUs. I was back in the green room and like three of the other keynote speakers were like, oh man, we are so excited about this VGPU support. Like, our customers are asking for it, the guy, Mohammad from Vexos, is the CEO of Vexos, he said, our customers are demanding this queens release, which is the latest OpenStack, and we were kind of surprised, they just really want this queens release. So we asked them why and they're like well they want VGPU. So that's kind of an example of an evolution in OpenStack itself, but it's an extension, enabler for things like GPUs, and that's kind of an exciting area as well. >> You know, it's interesting because in previous years it was the major release was one of the main things we talked about. Queens, as you mentioned, other than the VGPUs and that little discussions, spent a lot more time outside, talked to a lot of the users. You talked about the new tracks that were there. And something I heard a lot this year that I hadn't heard for a few years was, get involved, we're looking to build. And I was trying to think of a sports analogy, and maybe it was like, okay, we're actually building more of a league here and we're looking to recruit as opposed to or is it rebuilding what exactly OpenStack 2.0 is in the future? >> Yeah, that's a really interesting point. You're absolutely right, and I can imagine or can remember sort of talking to some of the speakers as they were working on their content, and I don't think I totally picked up that that was a big trend, but you're absolutely right, that was a major call to action from so many different people. I think it's because when we think about what we are as a community, I talked about how we're a community of people who build and operate open infrastructure, and it's really about solving problems, and if you're as open to community collaboration and you want to solve problems, you can't be afraid to stand up and say we have problems. And sometimes maybe that feels awkward. It's like the tech 101 is get up and say you solved all the problems and you should buy it today. It's online or downloaded or whatever. And I think we just realized that the magic of our community is solving problems. There's always going to be more problems to solve, now you're putting more pieces together, which means the pieces themselves have to evolve and the testing and integration has to evolve. Like it's just a new set of challenges and sort of saying, here's what we're trying to solve, it's not done, help us, actually is more, I think, true to kind of what the community is all about. >> I'm wondering, do we know how many people are at the show this year? >> I don't have the exact count. I think it's around 2600, something like that. >> Yeah, so fair to say it might be a little bit less than last year's North America show? >> Yeah, it is a little bit less. >> And what are you hearing from the user? What are the main things they come for? That you got the new tracks, you've got the open dev conference co-located. What kind of key themes can you get from the users? >> Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we found is that we have twice as many cloud architects this year than a year ago. So I think there's always this period of time where conference attendance is driven by curiosity. Like, I've heard about this thing, what is it, or it's the cool factor, hype curves and all that stuff, I want to learn about it. At this point people know what OpenStack is. We've got tons of ways you can learn about it. There's local meetups, there's OpenStack Days all over the world, there's content, videos online. It's just not like a mystery anymore. Like the mystery draws in kind of the people that are just poking around to learn. Now we're at that point of, okay I know what it is, I know what it's for, I want to architect a solution around it, so seeing twice as many cloud architects I think is an interesting data point to think about how we're shifting more towards, people are not asking if it's proven, they're like it's been proven for whatever, two, three years, however, the perception is, but the technology is just very, very solid. It's running infrastructure all over the world, the largest banks and so on and so, I think that's kind of how things are shifting to what else can we do and put on top of it, now that it's a solid foundation. >> I wonder, sometimes there's that buzz as to what's going on out there. There was a certain large analyst firm that wrote a report a couple months ago that wasn't all that favorable about OpenStack. There's others that watching on Twitter during the keynote, and they're like, they're spending all their time talking about containers, why isn't this just part of the Cloud Native Con, KubCon show? What's the foundation's feedback on, what are you hearing kind of, what's your core deliverables? And why this show should continue in the future? >> Sure, I mean I think that what we're hearing generally from users and seeing in our data as well as from analysts like 451 and IDC, those are a couple of different reports coming out, like right now or just came out, that Jonathan mentioned this morning, I think is adoption just continues to grow, and so you know, I think people are not looking at just one technology stack. And maybe they never were, but I think there was this kind of temptation to just think of it, is it containers versus VMs or is it Kubernetes versus OpenStack? And it's like, no one who really runs infrastructure thinks like that because they might have thought it until they tried it, they realized these things go together. So I think the future of this conference is just becoming more and more centered around what are the use cases? What are the technical challenges we're trying to solve? And to the extent we're getting patterns and tools that are emerging like the lamp stack of the cloud, so to speak. How can people adopt them? So you think about cloud as taking all kinds of new forms, edge computing, those are the kinds of things that I think will become a bigger part of the conference in the future. I do like the open infrastructure angle on this. I mean, as infrastructure folks, right, you know that that storage compute network doesn't manage itself, doesn't configure itself. >> Mark: Totally. >> Doesn't provision itself. And so a lot of the app layer things should rely on this lower layer. And I thought last year in Boston there was this kind of curious OpenStack or containers conversation, which seemed odd at the time, and that's clarified, I think, at a number of levels from a number of camps and vendors. >> Yeah I agree, I think we have done our best from our point of view, from the foundation, myself, and the others that are involved in our community to try to dispell those myths or tamper down that kind of sense of a rivalry, but it takes time and I do feel like there is kind of a sea change now. There are just so many people running in production with various container tools, predominantly Kubernetes and in OpenStack that I think that that sort of myth that they're, that one's replacing the other, it's hard for that cognitive dissonance to last forever when you're given like the hundredth example of like somebody running in production at scale. Like they must be doing it for a reason, and then people start to go, well why is that? >> And I did like the comment you did make about cloud is not consolidating and simplifying, right? Even at the Dell Technologies World show, Michael Dell got up and talked about the distributed core, which is a little bit of an oxymoron, but the fact is compute and compute is everywhere, right? And it's not only, it's on the edge, it's on telephone poles, it's in little boxes in our, you know, going to be on our walls, in our walls, right? And this open infrastructure idea can play everywhere. It's not just about an on-prem data center anymore. >> Yeah and I think that's a big part of why we started to say open infrastructure instead of cloud, just because, I mean, you know, I guess we spent 10 years arguing over the definition of cloud, now we can argue over open infrastructure. But to me it's a little more descriptive and a little less kind of, I don't know, a little less baggage than the term cloud. >> Yeah, definitely differentiates it as to where you sit in the marketplace. And one thing I definitely want to give the foundation great kudos on, the diversity of this show is excellent. Not just that there was a welcome happy hour and there's a lunch, but look at all the PTLs, the project leads that are there, a lot of diversity, up on stage. It's just evident. >> Mark: Thank you. >> And it's just something kind of built into the community, so great job there. >> Thank you, I'm very proud of the fact that we had just so many excellent keynote speakers this morning, and you know, that's always something that we strive for, but I feel like we got closer to the goal than ever in terms of just getting broad representation up on the stage. And some amazing leaders. >> It's always nice from our standpoint because we always say give us your keynote speakers and give us some of the main people making things happen, and it just naturally flows that we have a nice diversity, from gender, from geography. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> From various backgrounds, so that's good. All right, want to give you the final word. Take aways that you want people after the show or maybe some things that people might not know if they didn't make it here for the show. >> I mean, I think, you know, the number one take away is it's all about the people, and we want to make it about the headlines or the technology, and even the technology is about the people, but certainly the operators are not, like I said, logos don't operate clouds or infrastructure, people do, so getting to meet the people, seeing what they're doing, like the Adobe I mentioned, they're marketing cloud. They have 100,000 cores of compute with four people operating it. So if you've got the right four people and the right playbook, you can do that, too. But you got to meet those people and find out how they're doing it, get their recipe, get their playbook, and they're happy to share it, and then you can run at that kind of scale, too, without a big team and you can change the way you operate. >> Yeah, I know I said in my last question, but the last thing, I know there's been a big emphasis to not just do the two big shows a year, but the OpenStack days and other events globally, give people, how do they get involved and where can they come to find out more? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked because, there are so many ways to get involved and of course it's online, it's IRC, it's mailing lists 24/7, but there's no substitute when it's about the people for meeting in person. So we have the two summits a year. We're also having an event which is called the PTG, which is really for the developers and some of the operators will be coming this fall as well where we're having it in Denver, but the summits are the big shows twice a year, but the OpenStack days are really important. Those are annual, typically one to two day events, in 15 plus countries around the world. One in particular that is going to be really exciting this year is in Beijing. You know, we've had that for the last couple of years. Huge event, but of course, others throughout Europe and Asia. Tokyo is always an awesome OpenStack day, and then there are quite a few in Europe as well. So that's another way you can get involved. Not necessarily have to fly around the world, but if you do have to fly around the world, being in Vancouver is not a bad spot, so. >> Yeah, absolutely, and boy we know there's a lot of OpenStack happening in China. >> Yes there is. >> So Mark Collier, thanks again to the foundation for allowing theCUBE to cover this. >> Sure. >> And thanks so much for joining us. >> Mark: Thank you. >> For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back here with lots more of three days wall-to-wall coverage here from OpenStack Summit 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music) (shutter clicks)

Published Date : May 21 2018

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by Red Hat, of the OpenStack Foundation. Thanks for having me back. I don't think it's fair to call it a convention center and I think kudos to your team I guess you have to make sure you don't and the telcos and all that stuff in the past. Yeah, one of the things I always say in this industry, It's just that the options are much greater now. Well Mark, that has been some of the discussion and that tells you kind of what it is we can fix it. of the (mumbles). It has become a much more stable layer. flashy storage network and compute up on stage actually. and you know, one of the things that was highlighted one of the main things we talked about. and the testing and integration has to evolve. I don't have the exact count. And what are you hearing from the user? but the technology is just very, very solid. what are you hearing kind of, and so you know, I think people are not looking at And so a lot of the app layer things and then people start to go, well why is that? And I did like the comment you did make about Yeah and I think that's a big part of why as to where you sit in the marketplace. And it's just something kind of built into the community, and you know, that's always something that we strive for, and it just naturally flows that we have a nice diversity, Take aways that you want people after the show and the right playbook, you can do that, too. and some of the operators will be coming this fall as well Yeah, absolutely, and boy we know So Mark Collier, thanks again to the foundation And thanks so much back here with lots more of three days wall-to-wall coverage

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Action Item, Graph DataBases | April 13, 2018


 

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris. Welcome to Wikibon's Action Item. (electronic music) Once again, we're broadcasting from our beautiful theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, California. Here in the studio with me, George Gilbert, and remote, we have Neil Raden, Jim Kobielus, and David Floyer. Welcome, guys! >> Hey. >> Hi, there. >> We've got a really interesting topic today. We're going to be talking about graph databases, which probably just immediately turned off everybody. But we're actually not going to talk so much about it from a technology standpoint. We're really going to spend most of our time talking about it from the standpoint of the business problems that IT and technology are being asked to address, and the degree to which graph databases, in fact, can help us address those problems, and what do we need to do to actually address them. Human beings tend to think in terms of relationships of things to each other. So what the graph community talks about is graphed-shaped problems. And by graph-shaped problem we might mean that someone owns something and someone owns something else, or someone shares an asset, or it could be any number of different things. But we tend to think in terms of things and the relationship that those things have to other things. Now, the relational model has been an extremely successful way of representing data for a lot of different applications over the course of the last 30 years, and it's not likely to go away. But the question is, do these graph-shaped problems actually lend themselves to a new technology that can work with relational technology to accelerate the rate at which we can address new problems, accelerate the performance of those new problems, and ensure the flexibility and plasticity that we need within the application set, so that we can consistently use this as a basis for going out and extending the quality of our applications as we take on even more complex problems in the future. So let's start here. Jim Kobielus, when we think about graph databases, give us a little hint on the technology and where we are today. >> Yeah, well, graph databases have been around for quite a while in various forms, addressing various core-use cases such as social network analysis, recommendation engines, fraud detection, semantic search, and so on. The graph database technology is essentially very closely related to relational, but it's specialized to, when you think about it, Peter, the very heart of a graph-shaped business problem, the entity relationship polygram. And anybody who's studied databases has mastered, at least at a high level, entity relationship diagrams. The more complex these relationships grow among a growing range of entities, the more complex sort of the network structure becomes, in terms of linking them together at a logical level. So graph database technology was developed a while back to be able to support very complex graphs of entities, and relationships, in order to do, a lot of it's analytic. A lot of it's very focused on fast query, they call query traversal, among very large graphs, to find quick answers to questions that might involve who owns which products that they bought at which stores in which cities and are serviced by which support contractors and have which connections or interrelationships with other products they may have bought from us and our partners, so forth and so on. When you have very complex questions of this sort, they lend themselves to graph modeling. And to some degree, to the extent that you need to perform very complex queries of this sort very rapidly, graph databases, and there's a wide range of those on the market, have been optimized for that. But we also have graph abstraction layers over RDBMSes and multi-model databases. You'll find them running in IBM's databases, or Microsoft Cosmos DB, and so forth. You don't need graph-specialized databases in order to do graph queries, in order to manipulate graphs. That's the issue here. When does a specialized graph database serve your needs better than a non-graph-optimized but nonetheless graph-enabling database? That's the core question. >> So, Neil Raden, let's talk a little bit about the classes of business problems that could in fact be served by representing data utilizing a graph model. So these graph-shaped problems, independent of the underlying technology. Let's start there. What kinds of problems can business people start thinking about solving by thinking in terms of graphs of things and relationships amongst things? >> It all comes down to connectedness. That's the basis of a graph database, is how things are connected, either weakly or strongly. And these connected relationships can be very complicated. They can be based on very complex properties. A relational database is not based on, not only is it not based on connectedness, it's not based on connectedness at all. I'd like to say it's based on un-connectedness. And the whole idea in a relational database is that the intelligence about connectedness is buried in the predicate of a query. It's not in the database itself. So I don't know how overlaying graph abstractions on top of a relational database are a good idea. On the other hand, I don't know how stitching a relational database into your existing operation is going to work, either. We're going to have to see. But I can tell you that a major part of data science, machine learning, and AI is going to need to address the issue of causality, not just what's related to each other. And there's a lot of science behind using graphs to get at the causality problem. >> And we've seen, well, let's come back to that. I want to come back to that. But George Gilbert, we've kind of experienced a similar type of thing back in the '90s with the whole concept of object-orientated databases. They were represented as a way of re-conceiving data. The problem was that they had to go from the concept all the way down to the physical thing, and they didn't seem to work. What happened? >> Well it turns out, the big argument was, with object-oriented databases, we can model anything that's so much richer, especially since we're programming with objects. And it turns out, though, that theoretically, especially at that time, you could model anything down at the physical level or even the logical level in a relational database, and so those code bases were able to handle sort of similar, both ends of the use cases, both ends of the spectrum. But now that we have such extreme demands on our data management, rather than look at a whole application or multiple applications even sharing a single relational database, like some of the big enterprise apps, we have workloads within apps like recommendation engines, or a knowledge graph, which explains the relationship between people, places, and things. Or digital twins, or mapping your IT infrastructure and applications, and how they all hold together. You could do that in a relational database, but in a graph database, you can organize it so that you can have really fast analysis of these structures. But, the trade-off is, you're going to be much more restricted in how you can update the stuff. >> Alright, so we think about what happened, then, with some of the object-orientated technology, the original world database, the database was bound to the application, and the developer used the database to tell the application where to go find the data. >> George: Right. >> Relational data allowed us not to tell the applications where to find things, but rather how to find things, and that was persisted, and was very successful for a long time. Object-orientated technologies, in many respects, went back to the idea that the developer had to be very concrete about telling the application where the data was, but we didn't want to do things that way. Now, something's happened, David Floyer. One of the reasons why we had this challenge of representing data in a more abstract way across a lot of different forms without having it also being represented physically, and therefore a lot of different copies and a lot of different representations of the data which broke systems of record and everything else, was that the underlying technology was focused on just persisting data and not necessarily delivering it into these new types of datas, databases, data models, et cetera. But Flash changes that, doesn't it? Can't we imagine a world in which we can have our data in Flash and then, which is a technology that's more focused on delivering data, and then having that data be delivered to a lot of different representations, including things like graph databases, graph models. Is that accurate? >> Absolutely. In a moment I'll take it even further. I think the first point is that when we were designing real-time applications, transactional applications, we were very constrained, indeed, by the amount of data that we could get to. So, as a database administrator, I used to have a rule which you could, database developers could not issue more than 100 database calls. And the reason was that, they could always do more than that, but the applications became very unstable and they became very difficult to maintain. The cost of maintenance went up a lot. The whole area of Flash allows us to do a number of things, and the area of UniGrid enables us to do a number of things very differently. So that we can, for example, share data and have many different views of it. We can use UniGrid to be able to bring far greater amounts of power, compute power, GPUs, et cetera, to bear on specific workloads. I think the most useful thing to think about this is this type of architecture can be used to create systems of intelligence, where you have the traditional relational databases dealing with systems of record, and then you can have the AI systems, graph systems, all the other components there looking at the best way of providing data and making decisions in real time that can be fed back into the systems of record. >> Alright, alright. So let's-- >> George: I want to add to something on this. >> So, Neil, let me come back to you very quickly, sorry, George. Let me come back to Neil. I want to spend, go back to this question of what does a graph-shaped problem look like? Let's kind of run down it. We talked about AI, what about IoT, guys? Is IoT going to help us, is IoT going to drive this notion of looking at the world in terms of graphs more or less? What do you think, Neil? >> I don't know. I hadn't really thought about it, Peter, to tell you the truth. I think that one thing we leave out when we talk about graphs is we talk about, you know, nodes and edges and relationships and so forth, but you can also build a graph with very rich properties. And one thing you can get from a graph query that you can't get from a relational query, unless you write careful predicate, is it can actually do some thinking for you. It can tell you something you don't know. And I think that's important. So, without being too specific about IoT, I have to say that, you know, streaming data and trying to relate it to other data, getting down to, very quickly, what's going on, root-cause analysis, I think graph would be very helpful. >> Great, and, Jim Kobielus, how about you? >> I think, yeah I think that IoT is tailor-made for, or I should say, graph modeling and graph databases are tailor-made for the IoT. Let me explain. I think the IoT, the graph is very much a metadata technology, it's expressing context in a connected universe. Where the IoT is concerned it's all about connectivity, and so graphs, increasingly complex graphs of, say, individuals and the devices and the apps they use and locations and various contexts and so forth, these are increasingly graph-based. They're hierarchical and shifting and changing, and so in order to contextualize and personalize experience in a graph, in an IoT world, I think graph databases will be embedded in the very fabric of these environments. Microsoft has a strategy they announced about a year ago to build more of an intelligent edge around, a distributed graph across all their offerings. So I think graphs will become more important in this era, undoubtedly. >> George, what do you think? Business problems? >> Business problems on IoT. The knowledge graph that holds together digital twin, both of these lend themselves to graph modeling, but to use the object-oriented databases as an example, where object modeling took off was in the applications server, where you had the ability to program, in object-oriented language, and that mapped to a relational database. And that is an option, not the only one, but it's an option for handling graph-model data like a digital twin or IT operations. >> Well that suggests that what we're thinking about here, if we talk about graph as a metadata, and I think, Neil, this partly answers the question that you had about why would anybody want to do this, that we're representing the output of a relational data as a node in a network of data types or data forms so that the data itself may still be relationally structured, but from an application standpoint, the output of that query is, itself, a thing that is then used within the application. >> But to expand on that, if you store it underneath, as fully normalized, in relational language, laid out so that there's no duplicates and things like that, it gives you much faster update performance, but the really complex queries, typical of graph data models, would be very, very slow. So, once we have, say, more in memory technology, or we can manage under the covers the sort of multiple representations of the data-- >> Well that's what Flash is going to allow us to do. >> Okay. >> What David Floyer just talked about. >> George: Okay. >> So we can have a single, persistent, physical storage >> Yeah. >> but it can be represented in a lot of different ways so that we avoid some of the problems that you're starting to raise. If we had to copy the data and have physical, physical copies of the data on disc in a lot of different places then we would run into all kinds of consistency and update. It would probably break the model. We'd probably come back to the notion of a single data store. >> George: (mumbles) >> I want to move on here, guys. One really quick thing, David Floyer, I want to ask you. If there's, you mentioned when you were database administrator and you put restrictions on how many database actions an application or transaction was allowed to generate. When we think about what a business is going to have to do to take advantage of this, are there any particular, like one thing that we need to think about? What's going to change within an IT organization to take advantage of graph database? And we'll do the action items. >> Right. So the key here is the number of database calls can grow by a factor of probably a thousand times what it is now with what we can see is coming as technologies over the next couple of years. >> So let me put that in context, David. That's a single transaction now generating a hundred thousand, >> Correct. >> a hundred thousand database calls. >> Well, access calls to data. >> Right. >> Whatever type of database. And the important thing here is that a lot of that is going to move out, with the discussion of IoT, to where the data is coming in. Because the quicker you can do that, the earlier you can analyze that data, and you talked about IoT with possible different sources coming in, a simple one like traffic lights, for example. The traffic lights are being affected by the traffic lights around them within the city. Those sort of problems are ideal for this sort of graph database. And having all of that data locally and being processed locally in memory very, very close to where those sensors are, is going to be the key to developing solutions in this area. >> So, Neil, I've got one question from you, or one question for you. I'm going to put you on the spot. I just had a thought. And here's the thought. We talk a lot about, in some of the new technologies that could in fact be employed here, whether it be blockchain or even going back to SOA, but when we talk about what a system is going to have the authority to do about the idea of writing contracts that describe very, very discretely, what a system is or is not going to do. I have a feeling those contracts are not going to be written in relational terms. I have a feeling that, like most legal documents, they will be written in what looks more like graph terms. I'm extending that a little bit, but this has rights to do this at this point in time. Is that also, this notion of incorporating more contracts directly to how systems work, to assure that we have the appropriate authorities laid out. What do you think? Is that going to be easier or harder as a consequence of thinking in terms of these graph-shaped models? >> Boy, I don't know. Again, another thing I hadn't really thought about. But I do see some real gaps in thinking. Let me give you an analogy. OLAP databases came on the scene back in the '90s whatever. People in finance departments and whatever they loved OLAP. What they hated was the lack of scalability. And now what we see now is scalability isn't a problem and OLAP solutions are suddenly bursting out all over the place. So I think there's a role for a mental model of how you model your data and how you use it that's different from the relational model. I think the relational model has prominence and has that advantage of, what's it called? Occupancy or something. But I think that the graph is going to show some real capabilities that people are lacking right now. I think some of them are at the very high end, things, like I said, getting to causality. But I think that graph theory itself is so much richer than the simple concept of graphs that's implemented in graph databases today. >> Yeah, I agree with that totally. Okay, let's do the action item round. Jim Kobielus, I want to start with you. Jim, action item. >> Yeah, for data professionals and analytic professionals, focus on what graphs can't do, cannot do, because you hear a lot of hyperbolic, they're not useful for unstructured data or for machine learning in database. They're not as useful for schema on read. What they are useful for is the same core thing that relational is useful for which is schema on write applied to structured data. Number one. Number two, and I'll be quick on this, focus on the core use cases that are already proven out for graph databases. We've already ticked them off here, social network analysis, recommendation engines, influencer analysis, semantic web. There's a rich range of mature use cases for which semantic techniques are suited. And then finally, and I'll be very quick here, bear in mind that relational databases have been supporting graph modeling, graph traversal and so forth, for quite some time, including pretty much all the core mature enterprise databases. If you're using those databases already, and they can perform graph traversals and so forth reasonably well for your intended application, stick with that. No need to investigate the pure play, graph-optimized databases on the market. However, that said, there's plenty of good ones, including AWS is coming out with Neptune. Please explore the other alternatives, but don't feel like you have to go to a graph database first and foremost. >> Alright. David Floyer, action item. >> Action item. You are going to need to move your data center and your applications from the traditional way of thinking about it, of handling things, which is sequential copies going around, usually taking it two or three weeks. You're going to have to move towards a shared data model where the same set of data can have multiple views of it and multiple uses for multiple different types of databases. >> George Gilbert, action item. >> Okay, so when you're looking at, you have a graph-oriented problem, in other words the data is shaped like a graph, question is what type of database do you use? If you have really complex query and analysis use cases, probably best to use a graph database. If you have really complex update requirements, best to use a combination, perhaps of relational and graph or something like multi-model. We can learn from Facebook where, for years, they've built their source of truth for the social graph on a bunch of sharded MySQL databases with some layers on top. That's for analyzing the graph and doing graph searches. I'm sorry, for updating the graph and maintaining it and its integrity. But for reading the graph, they have an entirely different layer for comprehensive queries and manipulating and traversing all those relationships. So, you don't get a free lunch either way. You have to choose your sweet spots and the trade-offs associated with them. >> Alright, Neil Raden, action item. >> Well, first of all, I don't think the graph databases are subject to a lot of hype. I think it's just the opposite. I think they haven't gotten much hype at all. And maybe we're going to see that. But another thing is, a fundamental difference when you're looking at a graph and a graph query, it uses something called open world reasoning. A relational database uses closed world reasoning. I'll give you an example. Country has capital city. Now you have in your graph that China has capital city Beijing, China has capital city Beijing. That doesn't violate the graph. The graph simply understands and intuits that they're different names for the same thing. Now, if you love to write correlated sub-queries for many, many different relationships, I'd say stick to your relational database. I see unique capabilities in a graph that would be difficult to implement in a relational database. >> Alright. Thank you very much, guys. Let's talk about what the action item is for all of us. This week we talked about graph databases. We do believe that they have enormous potential, but we first off have to draw a distinction between graph theory, which is a way of looking at the world and envisioning and conceptualizing solutions to problems, and graph database technology, which has the advantages of being able, for certain classes of data models, to be able to very quickly both write and read data that is based on relationships and hierarchies and network structures that are difficult to represent in a normalized relational database manager. Ultimately, our expectation is that over the next few years, we're going to see an explosion in the class of business problems that lend themselves to a graph-modeling orientation. IoT is an example, very complex analytics systems will be an example, but it is not the only approach or the only way of doing things. But what is interesting, what is especially interesting, is over the last few years, a change in the underlying hardware technology is allowing us to utilize and expand the range of tools that we might use to support these new classes of applications. Specifically, the move to Flash allows us to sustain a single physical copy of data and then have that be represented in a lot of different ways to support a lot of different model forms and a lot of different application types, without undermining the fundamental consistency and integrity of the data itself. So that is going to allow us to utilize new types of technologies in ways that we haven't utilized before, because before, whether it was object-oriented technology or OLAP technology, there was always this problem of having to create new physical copies of data which led to enormous data administrative nightmares. So looking forward, the ability to use Flash as a basis for physically storing the data and delivering it out to a lot of different model and tool forms creates an opportunity for us to use technologies that, in fact, may more naturally map to the way that human beings think about things. Now, where is this likely to really play? We talked about IoT, we talked about other types of technologies. Where it's really likely to play is when the domain expertise of a business person is really pushing the envelope on the nature of the business problem. Historically, applications like accounting or whatnot, were very focused on highly stylized data models, things that didn't necessarily exist in the real world. You don't have double-entry bookkeeping running in the wild. You do have it in the legal code, but for some of the things that we want to build in the future, people, the devices they own, where they are, how they're doing things, that lends itself to a real-world experience and human beings tend to look at those using a graph orientation. And the expectations over the next few years, because of the changes in the physical technology, how we can store data, we will be able to utilize a new set of tools that are going to allow us to more quickly bring up applications, more naturally manage data associated with those applications, and, very important, utilize targeted technology in a broader set of complex application portfolios that are appropriate to solve that particular part of the problem, whether it's a recommendation engine or something else. Alright, so, once again, I want to thank the remote guys, Jim Kobielus, Neil Raden, and David Floyer. Thank you very much for being here. George Gilbert, you're in the studio with me. And, once again, I'm Peter Burris and you've been listening to Action Item. Thank you for joining us and we'll talk to you again soon. (electronic music)

Published Date : Apr 13 2018

SUMMARY :

Here in the studio with me, George Gilbert, and the degree to which graph databases, And to some degree, to the extent that you need to perform independent of the underlying technology. that the intelligence about connectedness from the concept all the way down both ends of the use cases, both ends of the spectrum. and the developer used the database and a lot of different representations of the data and the area of UniGrid enables us to do a number of things So let's-- So, Neil, let me come back to you very quickly, I have to say that, you know, and so in order to contextualize and personalize experience and that mapped to a relational database. so that the data itself may still be relationally But to expand on that, if you store it underneath, so that we avoid some of the problems What's going to change within an IT organization So the key here is the number of database calls can grow So let me put that in context, David. the earlier you can analyze that data, the authority to do about the idea of writing contracts But I think that the graph is going to show some real Okay, let's do the action item round. focus on the core use cases that are already proven out David Floyer, action item. You are going to need to move your data center and the trade-offs associated with them. are subject to a lot of hype. So looking forward, the ability to use Flash as a basis

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Action Item | AWS re:Invent 2017 Expectations


 

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome once again to Action Item. (funky electronic music) Every week, Wikibon gathers together the research team to discuss seminal issues that are facing the IT industry. And this week is no different. In the next couple of weeks, somewhere near 100,000 people are gonna be heading to Las Vegas for the Amazon, or AWS re:Invent show from all over the world. And this week, what we wanna do is we wanna provide a preview of what we think folks are gonna be talking about. And I'm joined here in our lovely Palo Alto studio, theCUBE studio, by Rob Hof, who is the editor-in-chief of SiliconANGLE. David Floyer, who's in analyst at Wikibon. George Gilbert, who's an analyst Wikibon. And John Furrier, who's a CUBE host and co-CEO. On the phone we have Neil Raden, an analyst at Wikibon, and also Dave Vellante, who's co-CEO with John Furrier, an analyst at Wikibon as well. So guys, let's jump right into it. David Floyer, I wanna hit you first. AWS has done a masterful job of making the whole concept of infrastructure as a service real. Nobody should downplay how hard that was and how amazing their success has been. But they're moving beyond infrastructure as a service. What do we expect for how far up Amazon is likely to go up the stack this year at re:Invent? >> Well, I can say what I'm hoping for. I agree with your premise that they have to go beyond IAS. The overall market for cloud is much bigger than just IAS, with SaaS and other clouds as well, both on-premise and off-premise. So I would start with what enterprise CIOs are wanting, and they are wanting to see a multi-cloud strategy, both on-premise and multiple clouds. SaaS clouds, other clouds. So I'm looking for AWS to provide additional services to make that easier. in particular, services, I thought of private clouds for enterprises. I'm looking for distributed capabilities, particularly in the storage area so they can link different clouds together. I want to see edge data management capabilities. I'd love to see that because the edge itself, especially the low-latency stuff, the real-time stuff, that needs specialist services, and I'd like to see them integrate that much better than just Snowball. I want to see more details about AI I'd love to see what they're doing in that. There's tremendous potential for AI in operational and to improve security, to improve availability, recovery. That is an area where I think they could be a leader of the IT industry. >> So let me stop you there, and George I wanna turn to you. So AWS in AI how do we anticipate that's gonna play out at re:Invent this year? >> I can see three things in decreasing order of likelihood. The first one is, they have to do a better job of tooling, both for, sort of, developers who want to dabble in, well get their arms around AI, but who aren't real data scientists. And then also hardcore tools for data scientists that have been well served by, recently, Microsoft and IBM, among others. So this is this Iron Man Initiative that we've heard about. For the hardcore tools, something from Domino Data Labs that looks like they're gonna partner with them. It's like a data-science workbench, so for the collaborative data preparation, modeling, deployment. That whole life cycle. And then for the developer-ready tooling, I expect to see they'll be working with a company called DataRobot, which has a really nifty tool where you put in a whole bunch of training data, and it trains, could be a couple dozen models that it thinks that might fit, and it'll show you the best fits. It'll show you the features in the models that are most impactful. In other words, it provides a lot of transparency. >> So it's kind of like models for models. >> Yes, and it provides transparency. Now that's the highest likelihood. And we have names on who we think the likely suspects are. The next step down, I would put applying machine learning to application performance management and IT operations. >> So that's the whole AI for ITOM that David Floyer just mentioned. >> Yeah. >> Now, presumably, this is gonna have to extend beyond just AI for Amazon or AWS-related ITOM. Our expectation's that we're gonna see a greater distribution of, or Amazon take more of a leadership in establishing a framework that cuts across multi-cloud. Have I got that right, David Floyer? >> Absolutely. A massive opportunity for them to provide the basics on their own platform. That's obviously the starting point. They'll have the best instrumentation for all of the components they have there. But they will need to integrate that in with their own databases, with other people's databases. The more that they can link all the units together and get real instrumentation from an application point of view of the whole of the infrastructure, the more value AI can contribute. >> John Foyer, the whole concept of the last few years of AWS is that all roads eventually end up at AWS. However, there's been a real challenge associated with getting this migration momentum to really start to mature. Now we saw some interesting moves that they made with VMware over the last couple of years, and it's been quite successful. And some would argue it might even have given another round of life to VMware. Are there some things we expect to see AWS do this time that are gonna reenergize the ecosystem to start bringing more customers higher up the stack to AWS? >> Yeah, but I think I look at it, quickly, as VMware was a groundbreaking even for both companies, VMware and AWS. We talked about that at that research event we had with them. The issue that is happening is that AWS has had a run in the marketplace. They've been the leader in cloud. Every year, it's been a slew of announcements. This year's no different. They're gonna have more and more announcements. In fact, they had to release some announcements early, before the show, because they have, again, more and more announcements. So they have the under-the-hood stuff going on that David Floyer and George were pointing out. So the classic build strategy is to continue to be competitive by having more services layered on top of each other, upgrading those services. That's a competitive strategy frame that's under the hood. On the business side, you're seeing more competition this year than ever before. Amazon now is highly contested, certainly in the marketplace with competitors. Okay, you're seeing FUD, the uncertainty and doubt from other people, how they're bundling. But it's clear. The cloud visibility is clear to customers. The numbers are coming in, multiple years of financial performance. But now the ecosystem plays, really, the interesting one. I think the VMware move is gonna be a tell sign for other companies that haven't won that top-three position. >> Example? >> I will say SAP. >> Oh really? You think SAP is gonna have a major play this year where we might see some more stuff about AWS and SAP? >> I'm hearing rumblings that SAP is gonna be expanding their relationship. I don't have the facts yet on the ground, but from what I'm sensing, this is consistent with what they've been doing. We've seen them at Google cloud platform. We talked to them specifically about how they're dealing with cloud. And their strategy is clear. They wanna be on Azure, Google, and Amazon. They wanna provide that database functionality and their client base in from HANA, and roll that in. So it's clear that SAP wants to be multi-cloud. >> Well we've seen Oracle over the past couple of years, or our research has suggested, I would say, that there's been kind of two broad strategies. The application-oriented strategy that goes down to IAAS aggressively. That'd be Oracle and Microsoft. And then the IAAS strategy that's trying to move up through an ecosystem play, which is more AWS. David Floyer and I have been writing a lot of that research. So it sounds like AWS is really gonna start doubling down in an ecosystem and making strategic bets on software providers who can bring those large enterprise install bases with them. >> Yeah, and the thing that you pointed out is migration. That's a huge issue. Now you can get technical, and say, what does that mean? But Andy Jassy has been clear, and the whole Amazon Web Services Team has been clear from day one. They're customer centric. They listen to the customers. So if they're doing more migration this year, and we'll see, I think they will be, I think that's a good tell sign and good prediction. That means the customers want to use Amazon more. And VMware was the same way. Their customers were saying, hey, we're ops guys, we want to have a cloud strategy. And it was such a great move for VMware. I think that's gonna lift the fog, if you will, pun intended, between what cloud computing is and other alternatives. And I think companies are gonna be clear that I can party with Amazon Web Services and still run my business in a way that's gonna help customers. I think that's the number one thing that I'm looking for is, what is the customers looking for in multi-cloud? Or if it's server-less or other things. >> Well, or yeah I agree. Lemme run this by you guys. It sounds as though multi-cloud increasingly is going to be associated with an application set. So, for example, it's very difficult to migrate a database manager from one place to another, as a snowflake. The cost to the customer is extremely high. The cost to the migration team is extremely high, lotta risk. But if you can get an application provider to step up and start migrating elements of the database interface, then you dramatically reduce the overall cost of what that migration might look like. Have I got that right, David Floyer? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what AWS, what I'm expecting them to focus on is more integration with more SaaS vendors, making it a better place-- >> Paul: Or just software vendors. >> Or software vendors. Well, SaaS vendors in particular, but software vendors in particular-- >> Well SAP's not a SaaS player, right? Well, they are a little bit, but most of their installations are still SAP on Oracle and moving them over, then my ass is gonna require a significant amount of SAP help. >> And one of the things I would love to see them have is a proper tier-one database as a service. That's something that's hugely missing at the moment, and using HANA, for example, on SAP, it's a tier-one database in a particular area, but that would be a good move and help a lot of enterprises to move stuff into AWS. >> Is that gonna be sufficient, though, given how dominant Oracle is in that-- >> No, they need something general purpose which can compete with Oracle or come to some agreement with Oracle. Who knows what's gonna happen in the future? >> Yeah, I don't know. >> Yeah we're all kinda ignoring here. It will be interesting to see. But at the end of the day, look, Oracle has an incentive also to render more of what it has, as a service at some level. And it's gonna be very difficult to say, we're gonna render this as a service to a customer, but Amazon can't play. Or AWS can't play. That's gonna be a real challenge for them. >> The Oracle thing is interesting and I bring this up because Oracle has been struggling as a company with cloud native messaging. In other words, they're putting out, they have a lot of open source, we know what they have for tooling. But they own IT. I mean if you dug up Oracle, they got the database as David pointed out, tier one. But they know the IT guys, they've been doing business in IT for years as a legacy vendor. Now they're transforming, and they are trying hard to be the cloud native path, and they're not making it. They're not getting the credit, and I don't know if that's a cultural issue with Oracle. But Amazon has that positioning from a developer cloud DNA. Now winning real enterprise deals. So the question that I'm looking for is, can Amazon continue to knock down these enterprise deals in lieu of these incumbent or legacy players in IT. So if IT continues to transform more towards cloud native, docker containers, or containers in Kubernetes, these kinds of micro services, I would give the advantage to Amazon over Oracle even though that Oracle has the database because ultimately the developers are driving the behavior. >> Oh again I don't think any of us would disagree with that. >> Yeah so the trouble though is the cost of migrating the applications and the data. That is huge. The systems of record are there for a reason. So there are two fundamental strategies for Oracle. If they can get their developers to add the AI, add the systems of intelligence. Make them systems of intelligence, then they can win in that strategy. Or the alternative is that they move it to AWS and do that movement in AWS. That's a much more risky strategy. >> Right but I think our kind of concluding point here is that ultimately if AWS can get big application players to participate and assist and invest in and move customers along with some of these big application migrations, it's good for AWS. And to your point John, it's probably good for the customers too. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah I don't think it's mutually exclusive as David makes a point about migrating for Oracle. I don't see a lot of migration coming off of Oracle. I look at overall database growth is the issue. Right so Oracle will have that position, but it's kind of like when we argued about the internet growth back in 1997. Just internet users growing was so great that rising tide flows. So I believe that the database growth is going to happen so fast that Amazon is not necessarily targeting Oracle's market share, they're going after the overall database market, which might be a smaller tier two kind of configuration or new architectures that are developing. So I think it's interesting dynamic and Oracle certainly could play there and lock in the database, but-- >> Here's what I would say, I would say that they're going after the new workload world, and a lot of that new workload is gonna involve database as it always has. Not like there's anything that the notion that we have solved or that database is 90% penetrated for the applications that are gonna be dominant matter in 2025 is ridiculous. There's a lot of new database that's gonna be sold. I think you're absolutely right. Rob Hof what's the general scuttlebutt that you're hearing. You know you as editor of SiliconANGLE, editor-in-chief of SiliconANGLE. What is the journalist world buzzing about for re:Invent this year? >> Well I guess you know my questions is because of the challenges that we're facing like we just talked about with migrating, the difficulty in migrating some of these applications. We also see very fast growing rivals like Google. Still small, but growing fast. And then there's China. That's a big one where is there a natural limit there that they're gonna have? So you put these things together, and I guess we see Amazon Web Services still growing at 42% a year or whatever it's great. But is it gonna start to go down because of all these challenges? >> 'Cause some of the constraints may start to assert themselves. >> Rob: Exactly, exactly. >> So-- >> Rob: That's what I'm looking at. >> Kind of the journalism world is kinda saying, are there some speed bumps up ahead for AWS? >> Exactly, and we saw one just a couple, well just this week with China for example. They sold off $300 million worth of data centers, equipment and such to their partner in China Beijing Sinnet. And they say this is a way to comply with Chinese law. Now we're going to start expanding, but expanding while you're selling off $300 million worth of equipment, you know, it begs a question. So I'm curious how they're going to get past that. >> That does raise an interesting question, and I think I might go back to some of the AI on ITOM, AI on IT operations management. Is that do you need control of the physical assets in China to nonetheless sell great service. >> Rob: And that's a big question. >> For accessing assets in China. >> Rob: Right. >> And my guess is that if they're successful with AI for ITOM and some of these other initiatives we're talking about. It in fact may be very possible for them to offer a great service in China, but not actually own the physical assets. And that's, it's an interesting question for some of the Chinese law issues. Dave Vellante, anything you want to jump in on, and add to the conversation? For example, if we look at some of the ecosystem and some of the new technologies, and some of the new investments being made around new technologies. What are some of your thoughts about some of the new stuff that we might hear about at AWS this year? >> Dave: Well so, a couple things. Just a comment on some of the things you guys were saying about Oracle and migration. To me it comes down to three things, growth, which is clearly there, you've talked about 40% plus growth. Momentum, you know the flywheel effect that Amazon has been talking about for years. And something that really hasn't been discussed as much which is economics, and this is something that we've talked about a lot and Amazon is bringing a software like marginal economics model to infrastructure services. And as it potentially slows down its growth, it needs to find new areas, and it will expand its tan by gobbling up parts of the ecosystem. So, you know there's so much white space, but partners got to be careful about where they're adding value because ultimately Amazon is gonna target those much in the same way, in my view anyway that Microsoft and Intel have in the past. And so I think you've got to tread very carefully there, and watch where Amazon is going. And they're going into the big areas of AI, trying to do more stuff with the Edge. And anywhere there's automation they are going to grab that piece of value in the value chain. >> So one of the things that we've been, we've talked about two main things. We've talked about a lot of investments, lot of expectations about AI and how AI is gonna show up in a variety of different ways at re:Invent. And we've talked about how they're likely to make some of these migration initiatives even that much more tangible than they have been. So by putting some real operational clarity as to how they intend to bring enterprises into AWS. We haven't talked about IoT. Dave just mentioned it. What's happening with the Edge, how is the Edge going to work? Now historically what we've seen is we've seen a lot of promises that the Edge was all going to end up in the cloud from a data standpoint, and that's where everything was gonna be processed. We started seeing the first indications that that's not necessarily how AWS is gonna move last year with Snowball and server-less computing, and some of those initiatives. We have anticipated a real honest to goodness true private cloud, AWS stack with a partnership. Hasn't happened yet. David Floyer what are we looking for this year? Are we gonna see that this year or are we gonna see more kind of circumnavigating the issue and doing the best that they can? >> Yeah, well my prediction last year was that they would come out with some sort of data service that you could install on your on-premise machine as a starting point for this communication across a multi cloud environment. I'm still expecting that, whether it happens this year or early next year. I think they have to. The pressure from enterprises, and they are a customer driven organization. The pressure from enterprises is going to mandate that they have some sort of solution on-premise. It's a requirement in many countries, especially in Europe. They're gonna have to do that I think without doubt. So they can do it in multiple ways, they can do it as they've done with the US government by putting in particular data centers, whole data centers within the US government. Or they can do it with small services, or they can have a, take the Microsoft approach of having an AWS service on site as well. I think with pressure from Microsoft, the pressure from Europe in particular is going to make this an essential requirement of their whole strategy. >> I remember a number of years going back a couple decades when Dell made big moves because to win the business of a very large manufacturer that had 50,000 work stations. Mainly engineers were turning over every year. To get that business Dell literally put a distribution point right next to that manufacturer. And we expect to see something similar here I would presume when we start talking about this. >> Yeah I mean I would make a comment on the IoT. First of all I agree with what David said, and I like his prediction, but I'm kind of taking a contrarian view on this, and I'm watching a few things at Amazon. Amazon always takes an approach of getting into new markets either with a big idea, and small teams to figure it out or building blocks, and they listen to the customer. So IoT is interesting because IoT's hard, it's important, it's really a fundamental important infrastructure, architecture that's not going away. I mean it has to be nailed down, it's obvious. Just like blockchain kinda is obvious when you talk about decentralization. So it'll be interesting to see what Amazon does on those two fronts. But what's interesting to note is Amazon always becomes their first customer. In their retail business, AWS was powering retail. With Whole Foods, and the stuff they're doing on the physical side, it'll be very interesting to see what their IoT strategy is from a technology standpoint with what they're doing internally. We get food delivered to our house from Amazon Fresh, and they got Whole Foods and all the retail. So it'll be interesting to see that. >> They're buying a lot of real estate. And I thought about this as well John. They're buying a lot of real estate, and how much processing can they put in there. And the only limit is that I don't think Whole Foods would qualify as particularly secure locations (laughing) when we start talking about this. But I think you're absolutely right. >> That only brings the question, how will they roll out IoT. Because he's like okay roll out an appliance that's more of an infrastructure thing. Is that their first move. So the question that I'm looking for is just kind of read the tea leaves and saying, what is really their doing. So they have the tech, and it's gonna be interesting to see, I mean it's more of a high level kind of business conversation, but IoT is a really big challenging area. I mean we're hearing that all over the place from CIOs like what's the architecture, what's the playbook? And it's different per company. So it's challenging. >> Although one of the reasons why it looks different per company is because it is so uncertain as to how it's gonna play out. There's not a lot of knowledge to fuse. My guess is that in 10 years we're gonna look back and see that there was a lot more commonality and patterns of work that were in IoT that many people expected. So I'll tell you one of the things that I saw last year that particularly impressed me at AWS re:Invent. Was the scale at which the network was being built out. And it raised for me an interesting question. If in fact one of the chief challenges of IoT. There are multiple challenges that every company faces with IoT. One is latency, one is intellectual property control, one is legal ramification like GDPR. Which is one of the reasons why the whole Europe play is gonna be so interesting 'cause GDPR is gonna have a major impact on a global basis, it's not just Europe. Bandwidth however is an area that is not necessarily given, it's partly a function of cost. So what happens if AWS blankets the world with network, and customers to get access to at least some degree of Edge no longer have to worry about a telco. What happens to the telco business at least from a data communication standpoint? Anybody wanna jump in on that one? >> Well yeah I mean I've actually talked to a couple folks like Ericson, and I think AT&T. And they're actually talking about taking their central offices and even the base stations, and sort of outfitting them as mini data centers. >> As pops. >> Yeah. But I think we've been hearing now for about 12 months that, oh maybe Edge is going to take over before we actually even finish getting to the cloud. And I think that's about as sort of ill-considered as the notion that PCs were gonna put mainframes out of business. And the reason I use that as an analogy, at one point IBM was going to put all their mainframe based databases and communication protocol on the PC. That was called OS2 extended edition. And it failed spectacularly because-- >> Peter: For a lot of reasons. >> But the idea is you have a separation of concerns. Presentation on one side in that case, and data management communications on the other. Here in this, in what we're doing here, we're definitely gonna have the low latency inferencing on the Edge and then the question is what data goes back up into the cloud for training and retraining and even simulation. And we've already got, having talked to Microsoft's Azure CTO this week, you know they see it the same way. They see the compute intensive modeling work, and even simulation work done in the cloud, and the sort of automated decisioning on the Edge. >> Alright so I'm gonna make one point and then I want to hit the Action Item around here. The one point I wanna make is I have a feeling that over, and I don't know if it's gonna happen at re:Invent this year but I have a feeling that over the course of the next six to nine months, there's going to be a major initiative on the part of Amazon to start bringing down the cost of data communications, and use their power to start hitting the telcos on a global basis. And what's going to be very very interesting is whether Amazon starts selling services to its network independent of its other cloud services. Because that could have global implications for who wins and who loses. >> Well that's a good point, I just wanna add color on that. Just anecdotally from my perspective you asked a question and I went, haven't talked to anyone. But knowing the telco business, I think they're gonna have that VMware moment. Because they've been struggling with over the top for so long. The rapid pace of innovation going on, that I don't think Amazon is gonna go after the telcos, I think it's just an evolutionary steamroller effect. >> It's an inevitability. >> It's an inevitability that the steamroller's coming. >> So users, don't sign longterm data communications deals right now. >> Why wouldn't you do a deal with Amazon if you're a telco, you get relevance, you have stability, lock in your cash flows, cut your deal, and stay alive. >> You know it's an interesting thought. Alright so let's hit the Action Item around here. So really quickly, as a preface for this, the way we wanna do this is guys, is that John Furrier is gonna have a couple hour one on one with Andy Jassy sometime in the next few days. And so if you were to, well tell us a little about that first John. >> Well every re:Invent we've been doing re:Invent for multiple years, I think it's our sixth year, we do all the events, and we cover it as the media partner as you know. And I'm gonna have a one on one sit down every year prior to re:Invent to get his view, exclusive interview, for two hours. Talk about the future. We broke the first Amazon story years ago on the building blocks, and how they overcame, and now they're winning. So it's a time for me to sit down and get his insight and continue to tell the story, and document the growth of this amazing success story. And so I'm gonna ask him specific questions and I wanted, love to know what he's thinking. >> Alright guys so I want each of you to pretend that you are, so representing your community, what would your community, what's the one question your community would like answered by Andy Jassy. George let's start with you. >> So my question would be, are you gonna take IT operations management, machine learn enable it, and then as part of offering a hybrid cloud solution, do you extend that capability on-prem, and maybe to even other vendor clouds. >> Peter: That's a good one, David Floyer. >> I've got two if I may. >> The more the merrier. >> I'll say them very quickly. The first one, John, is you've, the you being AWS, developed a great international network, with fantastic performance. How is AWS going to avoid conflicts with the EU, China, Japan, and particularly about their resistance about using any US based nodes. And from in-country telecommunication vendors. So that's my first, and the second is, again on AI, what's going to be the focus of AWS in applying the value of AI. Where are you gonna focus first and to give value to your customers? >> Rob Hof do you wanna ask a question? >> Yeah I'd like to, one thing I didn't raise in terms of the challenges is, Amazon overall is expanding so fast into all kinds of areas. Whole Foods we saw this. I'd ask Jassy, how do you contend with reality that a lot of these companies that you're now bumping up against as an overall company. Now don't necessarily want to depend on AWS for their critical infrastructure because they're competitors. How do you deal with that? >> Great question, David Vellante. >> David: Yeah my question is would be, as an ecosystem partner, what advice would you give? 'Cause I'm really nervous that as you grow and you use the mantra of, well we do what customers want, that you are gonna eat into my innovation. So what advice would you give to your ecosystem partners about places that they can play, and a framework that they should think about where they should invest and add value without the fear of you consuming their value proposition. >> So it's kind of the ecosystem analog to the customer question that Rob asked. So the one that I would have for you John is, the promise is all about scale, and they've talked a lot about how software at scale has to turn into hardware. What will Amazon be in five years? Are they gonna be a hardware player on a global basis? Following his China question, are they gonna be a software management player on a global basis and are not gonna worry as much about who owns the underlying hardware? Because that opens up a lot of questions about maybe there is going to be a true private cloud option an AWS will just try to run on everything, and really be the multi cloud administrator across the board. The Cisco as opposed to the IBM in the internet transformation. Alright so let me summarize very quickly. Thank you very much all of you guys once again for joining us in our Action Item. So this week we talked about AWS re:Invent. We've done this for a couple of years now. theCUBE has gone up and done 30, 35, 40 interviews. We're really expanding our presence at AWS re:Invent this year. So our expectation is that Amazon has been a major player in the industry for quite some time. They have spearheaded the whole concept of infrastructure as a service in a way that, in many respects nobody ever expected. And they've done it so well and so successfully that they are having an enormous impact way beyond just infrastructure in the market place today. Our expectation is that this year at AWS re:Invent, we're gonna hear a lot about three things. Here's what we're looking for. First, is AWS as a provider of advanced artificial intelligence technologies that then get rendered in services for application developers, but also for infrastructure managers. AI for ITOM being for example a very practical way of envisioning how AI gets instantiated within the enterprise. The second one is AWS has had a significant migration as a service initiative underway for quite some time. But as we've argued in Wikibon research, that's very nice, but the reality is nobody wants to bond the database manager. They don't want to promise that the database manager's gonna come over. It's interesting to conceive of AWS starting to work with application players as a way of facilitating the process of bringing database interfaces over to AWS more successfully as an onboarding roadmap for enterprises that want to move some of their enterprise applications into the AWS domain. And we mentioned one in particular, SAP, that has an interesting potential here. The final one is we don't expect to see the kind of comprehensive Edge answers at this year's re:Invent. Instead our expectation is that we're gonna continue to see AWS provide services and capabilities through server-less, through other partnerships that allow AWS to be, or the cloud to be able to extend out to the Edge without necessarily putting out that comprehensive software stack as an appliance being moved through some technology suppliers. But certainly green grass, certainly server-less, lambda, and other technologies are gonna continue to be important. If we finalize overall what we think, one of the biggest plays is, we are especially intrigued by Amazon's continuing build out of what appears to be one of the world's fastest, most comprehensive networks, and their commitment to continue to do that. We think this is gonna have implications far beyond just how AWS addresses the Edge to overall how the industry ends up getting organized. So with that, once again thank you very much for enjoying Action Item, and participating, and we'll talk next week as we review some of the things that we heard at AWS. And we look forward to those further conversations with you. So from Peter Burris, the Wikibon team, SiliconANGLE, thank you very much and this has been Action Item. (funky electronic music)

Published Date : Nov 17 2017

SUMMARY :

of making the whole concept be a leader of the IT industry. So AWS in AI how do we anticipate For the hardcore tools, Now that's the highest likelihood. So that's the whole AI for ITOM is gonna have to extend for all of the components they have there. the ecosystem to start that AWS has had a run in the marketplace. I don't have the facts yet on that goes down to IAAS aggressively. and the whole Amazon Web Services Team of the database interface, And I think that's what but software vendors in particular-- but most of their installations And one of the things I happen in the future? But at the end of the day, look, So the question that I'm looking for is, of us would disagree with that. that they move it to AWS for the customers too. So I believe that the database that the notion that we have solved because of the challenges 'Cause some of the to comply with Chinese law. the physical assets in China and some of the new technologies, of the things you guys how is the Edge going to work? is going to make this because to win the business and all the retail. And the only limit is that just kind of read the Which is one of the reasons even the base stations, And the reason I use that as an analogy, and the sort of automated of the next six to nine months, But knowing the telco the steamroller's coming. So users, don't sign longterm with Amazon if you're a telco, the way we wanna do this is guys, and document the growth of that you are, so and maybe to even other vendor clouds. So that's my first, and the second is, in terms of the challenges is, and a framework that So it's kind of the

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Jim Wu, Falcon Computing | Super Computing 2017


 

>> Announcer: From Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE covering Super Computing '17. Brought to you by Intel. (upbeat techno music) Hey welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Super Computing 2017 in Denver, Colorado. It's our first trip to the show, 12,000 people, a lot of exciting stuff going on, big iron, big lifting, heavy duty compute. We're excited to have our next guest on. He's Jim Wu, he's the Director of Customer Experience for Falcon Computing. Jim, welcome. Thank you. Good to see you. So, what does Falcon do for people that aren't familiar with the company? Yeah, Falcon Company is in our early stages startup, focus on AVA-based acceleration development. Our vision is to allow software engineers to develop a FPGA-based accelerators, accelerators without FPGA expertise. Right, you just said you closed your B round. So, congratulations on that. >> Jim: Thank you. Yeah, very exciting. So, it's a pretty interesting concept. To really bring the capability to traditional software engineers to program for hardware. That's kind of a new concept. What do you think? 'Cause it brings the power of a hardware system. but the flexibility of a software system. Yeah, so today, to develop FPGA accelerators is very challenging. So, today for the accelerations-based people use very low level language, like a Verilog and the VHDL to develop FPGA accelerators. Which was very time consuming, very labor-intensive. So, our goal is to liberate them to use, C/C++ space design flow to give them an environment that they are familiar with in C/C++. So now not only can they improve their productivity, we also do a lot of automatic organization under the hood, to give them the highest accelerator results. Right, so that really opens up the ecosystem well beyond the relatively small ecosystem that knows how to program their hardware. Definitely, that's what we are hoping to see. We want to the tool in the hands of all software programmers. They can use it in the Cloud. They can use it on premises. Okay. So what's the name of your product? And how does it fit within the stack? I know we've got the Intel microprocessor under the covers, we've got the accelerator, we've got the cards. There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle. >> Jim: Yeah. So where does Falcon fit? So our main product is a compiler, called the Merlin Compiler. >> Jeff: Okay. It's a pure C and the C++ flow that enables software programmers to design APGA-based accelerators without any knowledge of APGA. And it's highly integrated with Intel development tools. So users don't even need to learn anything about the Intel development environment. They can just use their C++ development environment. Then in the end, we give them the host code as well as APGA binaries so they can round on APGA to see a accelerated applications. Okay, and how long has Merlin been GA? Actually, we'll be GA early next year. Early next year. So finishing, doing the final polish here and there. Yes. So in this quarter, we are heavily investing a lot of ease-of-use features. Okay. We have most of the features we want to be in the tool, but we're still lacking a bit in terms of ease-of-use. >> Jeff: Okay. So we are enhancing our report capabilities, we are enhancing our profiling of capabilities. We want to really truly like a traditional C++-based development environment for software application engineers. Okay, that's fine. You want to get it done, right, before you ship it out the door? So you have some Alpha programs going on? Some Beta programs of some really early adopters? Yeah, exactly. So today we provide a 14 day free trial to any customers who are interested. We have it, you can set up your enterprise or you can set up on Cloud. Okay. We provide to where you want your work done. Okay. And so you'll support all the cloud service providers, the big public clouds, all the private clouds. All the traditional data servers as well. Right. So, we are twice already on Aduplas as well as Alibaba Cloud. So we are working on bringing the tool to other public cloud providers as well. Right. So what is some of the early feedback you're getting from some of the people you're talking to? As to where this is going to make the biggest impact. What type of application space has just been waiting for this solution? So our Merlin Compiler is a productivity tool, so any space that FPGA can traditionally play well that's where we want to be there. So like encryption, decryption, video codec, compression, decompression. Those kind of applications are very stable for APGA. Now traditionally they can only be developed by hardware engineers. Now with the Merlin Compiler, all of these software engineers can use the Merlin Compiler to do all of these applications. Okay. And when is the GA getting out, I know it's coming? When is it coming? Approximately So probably first quarter of 2018. Okay, that's just right around the corner. Exactly. Alright, super. And again, a little bit about the company, how many people are you? A little bit of the background on the founders. So we have about 30 employees, at the moment, so we have offices in Santa Clara which is our headquarters. We also have an office in Los Angeles. As well as a Beijing, China. Okay, great. Alright well Jim, thanks for taking a few minutes. We'll be looking for GA in a couple of months and wish you nothing but the best success. Okay, thank you so much, Jeff. Alright, he's Jim Lu I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from supering computing 2017. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

Published Date : Nov 14 2017

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by Intel. Verilog and the VHDL to develop FPGA accelerators. called the Merlin Compiler. We have most of the features we want to be in the tool, We provide to where you want your work done.

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Peter Chen, Intel | The Computing Conference


 

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE, for our exclusive coverage in Hangzhou, China for Alibaba Cloud Conference here, it's a Cloud Computing Conference. The entire city is a cloud. We're here at the Intel booth with Peter Chen, who's the general manager of Products and Technology, for Data Center Group Sales of Intel Corporation. Peter, AI is the hottest topic, IoT, Alibaba Cloud, I mean, a huge event here mixing, kind of a cultural shift, generational shift, young developers. >> Definitely lots of crowd, you can see people surrounding us, right? So, artificial intelligence is definitely a hot word here in China for the past 12 months. Everybody's trying to figure it out, what's going on, how they can really use them, so we're very excited as well to really partner with Alibaba to really explore some of the potentials. >> I had a chance to speak with some of the Alibaba executives, and obviously, a strategic partnership with Intel, pretty strategic, and it matters what's inside the Cloud. But it's not an Intel inside like a PC. The AI is showing that there's a little bit of Intel on everything, from IoT, industrial IoT to data center. It's a range of technology that's powering a new kind of software. This is where AI is shining. We're seeing that with machine learning and as data driven technology. So, I got to ask you. What is the view from Intel on AI? Obviously, we see the commercials, we see the technology from Intel. How does that translate to your view on AI? What's that view? >> So, essentially today's AI, artificial intelligence, is powered by three factors, the amount of data, the new algorithms, and lastly the compute power. And Intel has historically been the leader of create and compute. So, for the past many years, we has always been generating new compute powers into the cloud and data centers as well as PCs. But going forward as we look at applying AI to different usages like autonomous driving, for example, you cannot expect everything to be done just in the cloud because we need the real data to be inputted from a car, for instance, all the cameras, all the sensors. So, we do definitely see a need of actually faster processors at the edge as well to constantly bring in the data back into the cloud, so they have an autonomous feedback loop, make sure there will be right decision making. >> Yeah, so Cloud drives this, right? So, it's not just Cloud though, it's software. There's exponential growth in open source software that's causing a Renaissance in the developer community. You're seeing it here in China, a lot of young demographics here. Software and data's tsunami going on. You need compute power. >> Yes, yes. I think, everybody knows Intel is a hardware company, but we do have a very large effort on engaging a software ecosystem. From the old days on engaging Linux, the cloud different software stack, and working with CSPs like Alibaba in China to really make sure they can create and write the new latest software AI framework and taking the most advantage of our hardware platform as well. So, that's something that we've been very focusing on. >> And one of the themes here is the IoT for traffic in China. Obviously, if you've been here, you know it's kind of congested. But Alibaba is giving a lot of talks on how they're using data in this cloud city for traffic, which is an example of IoT, Internet of Things, but applied to the real world. That's where the AI kind of connects with the data. Is that kind of where it's going? >> Yeah, so I think this is a great application, as you just mentioned. And Alibaba calls it City Brain. So, essentially, imagine a normal city like in China, can easily go five million, 10 million people. The amount of people and the amount of traffic that goes on the road every day. So, if the city is able to utilize all these videos' stream of data, feedback from different traffic intersections, and be able to direct traffics and control the traffic lights dynamically, using artificial intelligence, you'd actually solve a lot of the city's congestion problem. So, I think this is where we are seeing a lot of application being explored in China, they're using very innovative, different ways by Alibaba. >> Peter, I've got to ask you because one of the things we're seeing in theCUBE and Wikibon Research is the growth of new kinds of ecosystems. Karen Liu, who runs the America's, general manages for America's Alibaba, said to me that ecosystem is super important for Alibaba as an example. But a new kind of ecosystem is developing. Cloud service providers are becoming a new hot growth area because the specialty of building applications in the cloud is not like it was kind of in the old days. You got to have a little bit of a cloud native mindset, but yet, domain expertise, whether it's traffic or a certain vertical solution. So, it's a little bit of both. Always often scalable, yet specialism. This is going to create a lot of opportunities for cloud service providers. What's your view on that from Intel's perspective? How are you guys seeing that market? Do you agree? And what are you guys looking at, at that market? >> So, obviously cloud service provider, the likes of Alibaba or Amazon, are one of our fastest growing customer base over the past five years. And in the near future, we expect this trend to continue to grow. We definitely see CSPs as a leading edge of driving innovation because they are not just the leading edge of driving consumer usages but they also, like the City Brain project, they've been really close on solving the enterprise problem as well with public cloud. So, I think we're very excited to have the opportunity to be a close partner with a CSP like Alibaba to really help them, providing our latest hardware technology to allow them to drive innovation on top of this offer and with the programs and the algorithms. >> How are they, how are those big cloud service providers, or CSPs like Alibaba, they're a big one, they're the fourth cloud in the world, enabling their CSPs? Because I was just talking to someone on the floor here, an ISV in the old world, who was telling me that he's now a cloud service provider, so you have now this nice balance in the ecosystem developing. You guys see the same thing? How do you guys, looking at that? >> So, this is what we call a hybrid situation. So, while the big CSPs like Alibaba, they have a lot of competency and they have a lot of internal engineering, it may not make sense for them to create every single application in the world. So, there may be some legacy enterprise application, for instance, a CRM software in China, maybe it was really popular, for them to forge a collaboration with the leading company Alibaba to translate their on-prem software stack into a cloud solution. So, I think we definitely see a lot of that collaboration happening, to take the best of the best from the legacy as well as the new public cloud environment to really make the better service for the companies and the customers. >> Create ecosystem opportunity. Okay, so I got to ask. What is the Intel relationship that you guys are doing on your end with Alibaba Cloud? Obviously, they're taking names, they're kicking butt. They're doing well. They're going global. They're not just in China. They're the first cloud provider here in China to go outside the mainland. Obviously, they're in the US, they're in Silicon Valley, our backyard. What's the collaboration? Share the relationship. >> We work very closely with Alibaba. Like you said, they're now the leading cloud service provider in China. They're starting going abroad. And we as an ingredient, knowledge provider perspective, we have a very close collaboration with them, sharing with them our technologies on hardware roadmap as well as software enabling to make sure they can take full advantage of it. So, we're very excited to see the growth of Alibaba over the past few years, and we look forward to seeing them continue to expand their business together with us. >> Yeah, great company. So, I got to ask you, one of the collaborations that got my attention was the, I don't want to say hack-a-thon, it was a competition, it was the AI competition called Tianchi that you guys were a part of with Alibaba. What was Intel's role in that? I saw some of the winners earlier. I didn't get a chance to get the specifics, but take me through this AI competition that Alibaba did with these entrepreneurs. >> So, I'm very, actually very excited. I just talked to one of the winning team just now. So, what happened is, when we talk about artificial intelligence, today it's a lot about image recognition, voice recognition but that's just pure technology. So, what Alibaba decide to do, which in terms of partner, is we created a medical image contest. So, we pick a particular subject, for instance, lung cancer and we invited 16 local hospitals to provide some of the image data of the patients anonymously, and then we opened it up for the software ecosystem, the academia, professors, the schools, and say, hey, why don't you come in and try to compete on the image recognition accuracy based on those X-ray images, using these images? So, it takes about six, we have overwhelming turnout. We have about 3,000 teams from 20 different countries applying to join in the contest, and then we just select the winner yesterday. So, basically, the three winning teams, two of them are from the best universities here in China, one of them is from overseas. And again, Intel's role in this is we provide a lot of consultation help. First of all, we provide the hardware system based on our Xeon Phi clusters, and on top of that, we provide a lot of the software tools, Caffe, image recognition libraries, Intel material libraries to really help the contestant to be able to use the Intel hardware for the maximum to drive the best performance. >> And so, you guys provided the technology, Alibaba the Cloud, and let these guys just take. What was the results? Was there any success? Was there a winner? >> There was a winner. I think the big winner was Beijing University. But I think overall, we are not just excited just because of this specific winners but really the larger intent. If you can imagine in a country like China, there's a lot of people, meaning there's a lot of patients at different part of the country, and not every tier two, tier three city have the same resource or access of the best doctors. If we're able to simplify the lung cancer image recognition to be able to provide this as a tool for all the tier two, tier three cities of China, imagine how much this will change. >> It's a societal impact. >> Definitely. >> And you've got a collective intelligence. It's almost like an open source kind of thing, where the more people doing it. >> It gets better, it gets better. >> The fly wheel. >> And then, we have definitely a lot of hospitals who want to really take advantage of this as well. So, we're really glad on the results of this first round, and I think Alibaba will do a next round with a different subject as well, and we're looking forward to partnering with them again. >> That's inspirational. Okay, great to have you on. Thanks for the commentary. Exclusive coverage. Final thought, what's your thoughts on the event? Where's AI going? Where do you see this trajectory of Alibaba and Intel going? >> So, definitely the event's wonderful and great. This is my third year here. It gets just bigger and bigger every time. So, I'm looking forward to come back for the next couple of years again. Our collaboration with Alibaba has been very close. We work with each other deeply, with our engineers' collaboration, and I look forward to continuing to bring out more successful projects. >> And they're really bringing together, not just science and developers, but artists. You've got a music festival here, feels like South by Southwest meets a developer conference. Societal impact, traffic, solving problems, lung cancer, big data, and data is changing the world. Now, you need the compute power, you need the analytics. Of course, you need SiliconANGLE and theCUBE and Wikibon, exclusive coverage here in China of the Alibaba Cloud Conference. Thanks for watching.

Published Date : Oct 24 2017

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by Intel. We're here at the Intel booth with Peter Chen, who's the general manager of Products and So, artificial intelligence is definitely a hot word here in China for the past 12 months. So, I got to ask you. the real data to be inputted from a car, for instance, all the cameras, all the sensors. There's exponential growth in open source software that's causing a Renaissance in the software AI framework and taking the most advantage of our hardware platform as well. And one of the themes here is the IoT for traffic in China. So, if the city is able to utilize all these videos' stream of data, feedback from different Wikibon Research is the growth of new kinds of ecosystems. So, obviously cloud service provider, the likes of Alibaba or Amazon, are one of our You guys see the same thing? of the best from the legacy as well as the new public cloud environment to really make What is the Intel relationship that you guys are doing on your end with Alibaba Cloud? forward to seeing them continue to expand their business together with us. So, I got to ask you, one of the collaborations that got my attention was the, I don't want for the maximum to drive the best performance. And so, you guys provided the technology, Alibaba the Cloud, and let these guys just lot of patients at different part of the country, and not every tier two, tier three city have And you've got a collective intelligence. So, we're really glad on the results of this first round, and I think Alibaba will do a Okay, great to have you on. So, definitely the event's wonderful and great. of the Alibaba Cloud Conference.

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Paul Daugherty, Accenture | Accenture Lab's 30th Anniversary


 

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's The Cube, on the ground with Accenture Labs' 30th anniversary celebration. >> Hello, everyone, welcome to the special coverage of The Cube, on the ground here at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. It's The Cube's coverage of Accenture Labs' 30th year celebration. I'm here with Paul Dougherty, the chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture Labs. Welcome to The Cube conversation. Thanks for joining me. >> It's great to be here. >> So first I want to toast you guys to 30 years from turning to an accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, to Accenture Labs Consulting. Guys are really changed. Congratulations to all your success. Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, thanks, it's been an incredible journey. If you think back in the 30 years, it's the 30th anniversary of Accenture Labs, and the transformation of our company to now be an innovation-led company, leading in IT services and IT innovation, and with the amazing innovations that are happening in technology, it's a great time to be doing what we're doing. >> So the theme here at the party is magic. There's a magic show going on. We can't get coverage. It's a little private event, probably some G-rated, probably ... >> Lots of magic. >> A lot of magic. But there's magic right now. We were commenting earlier, before you came on, about, you know at my age, I love this innovation cycle, but if I was 20 years old, I'd really be excited. There's so much going on. It's really magical. You've got the convergence of infrastructure, cloud, software. You guys have been on all sides of innovation, from the mini-computer boom, all the way now through now, where AI and software and now data science is coming together. What's the exciting thing for you right now? Because it's beyond software eating the world, it's beyond data eating software. This is real applications. >> Yeah, this is ... We're at an era where technology is the driving force behind every business. There was a survey recently of CEOs, and they asked CEOs how do they view their business, and 81% of CEOs, 81%, said their company's a technology company. And that was a cross-industry survey. And that's why it's an exciting time, because the option we have as Accenture is to work with any company, and every company, and help them transform, change their business, and lead them through the transformation to deliver technology-enabled digital products and services. And that's why it's an exciting time. >> What I find exciting about these global system integrators, as they're now called, is that you guys have always been a consultative organization to customers, helping them through their journey of that generational shift. Now it's interesting, with cloud computing, you guys are not only just advising, you're delivering services. A mindset transformation as well as talent, technology, process, and people. How are you doing it? What's the secret formula? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we found, the reason we've driven our business model in that direction, is our clients need help throughout the cycle. So we help with Accenture strategy, with advising our clients. We help with Accenture consulting, on helping our clients transform. Accenture digital, bring the digital capabilities in. Accenture technology, building the solutions in. Accenture operations, providing business process, infrastructure, and cloud operations. So, we've found that our clients, they need help with it all. They want to understand where to take their business, they want to understand how to get there, and they want somebody to help them manage their business as they do. And that's why we've taken the business in that direction. >> Not to give you guys a lot of props, but I do want to give you guys kudos, Accenture, Accenture Labs, is that all of folks might not know, or some, you guys probably do know, you've accumulated a lot of data scientists over the years. You've got thousands of data scientists, a lot of talent coming in. Accenture Labs is a booming operation, it's not just a throwaway lip-service kind of operation for customers, to say "Hey, we got some smart people." You guys have actually have a real organization. What are some of the cool things that you guys are doing? Can you give some examples? >> Yeah, let's just step back and talk about Labs a bit, and then I'll give some examples. We've been at Labs now for 30 years, hence the celebration we're talking about, and it's thousands of patents, it's billions of dollars of impact on the revenue of our business. And really, you're driving innovation that sets us ahead in the marketplace. And it's a fabric of a global organizations. We have labs here in Silicon Valley. We have labs in Washington, DC, that focus on security and other things. We have labs in Dublin, Ireland, in Tel Aviv, in Bangalore, India, in Beijing, in Sophia Antipolis in France. And it's that global infrastructure that allows us to tap into the innovation, I think in the key hot spots where it's happening. The kinds of innovation that we've driven are, think back to the early days of the cloud, we were doing R&D in patents and research in the cloud before the term "cloud" existed. And once the cloud phenomena took off, we had assets and architectures that we turned into the Accenture cloud platform, which has made us a leader in the multi-billion dollar ... Built a multi-billion dollar business in the cloud market. So that's an example of research and idea in early patents going to scale business for Accenture. That's the research to results that we talk about and what makes a difference in our business. >> So, talk about AI. AI's a hot trend, it's a great buzzword. I love AI because it gets young people excited about software. IOT is a little bit more boring than AI. But AI is augmented intelligence, also a little bit of artificial intelligence. Look no further than a test load, look no further than some of these cool things. How's AI impacting your world? >> AI's massive. I would say AI is the biggest single innovation and the most disruptive innovation of the information age to date. And probably, the biggest impact on how we work and live since the industrial revolution a couple hundred years ago. That started a couple hundred years ago. So AI is a big impact, and we're just at the start of it. That's kind of a paradox, though, because AI has been around for 60 years. The term was coined 60 years ago in 1956 at Dartmouth. And it just did it kind of slowly, but now we're at the inflection point where we have the computing hardware and the data and the processing power to make it really happen. So for the next five to 10 and 20 years, it's all about applying intelligence to augment the way we as people work and live and really create new opportunities to improve the productivity and creativity of humans. That's why we're excited. >> It's a perfect innovation storm. You've got great compute capability, almost unlimited capacity, software, new developer, open source is booming, and now you have STEM. >> Well, before you get to STEM, let me just make one comment on that. I think the other exciting thing about AI is we've been working with dumb technology up until this point. Think about the way we interact with our thumbs on a mobile phone. Think about the way you use traditional software in an enterprise on your PC or your screen. We're slaves to dumb technology, and the power and potential of AI is to make technology smarter, more human-like, and really enhance our ability as humans to use it. And that's why it's an exciting era. >> That's a great perspective from someone who has been in the process business. The classic example is, does the process work for you? Do you work for the process? >> Dougherty: Yeah. That's what technology ... >> And technology, we don't work for technology. They should work for us. >> And that's what's changing. That's the inflection point. >> So now, 30 years now, a lot's changed, certainly in Silicon Valley lately. Women and the role of women in the industry is certainly important. We're going to be at Grace Hopper for the fourth year this year as part of our women in tech celebration, in California this year covering women in tech. STEM is huge, but also, the gender gap is still there. You guys have a pledge to be 50% by 2025, Accenture as an organization. Labs, in particular, getting STEM in the technical roles is also a challenge. What are you guys doing to address that, and what's your personal philosophy? What's your comment about STEM and women in tech? >> Well, look, the technology industry in general has a gender diversity problem, and we believe at Accenture, we can really set the standard for how to really get to gender equality in the workforce. And that's the commitment we've got with our 50/50 gender diversity pledge by 2025. We're well along the path to getting there, right about 36% or so. Now, with the actions we're taking, the formula we've got, I'm confident that we'll get to the 50/50 pledge that we set out there. And it's an imperative for the technology industry, not just for Accenture, because we won't innovate to the potential of the industry, and we won't create the right opportunity if we don't have the right gender balance in the workforce. That's what will lead to the right innovations. In this new era where the humanity of how we apply technology, as you were saying earlier, flipping the lens on a people-centric view, we need all the perspectives and an equal representation of the population going into the way we develop solutions. That's why it's a priority for us. And we think we can really set a standard for how to apply to the technology industry. >> It's certainly a topic near and dear to my heart and our company's heart. I want to ask one more question on that as a follow-up. Computer science was always kind of narrow, I'm not saying super narrow, but now it's broadened, with analytics, the tech science side is opening up, for all the reasons you were just talking about, the AI stuff. It's a broad landscape now for many diverse roles. Can you share your thoughts on where the entry points could be for women, where it's not a man-led culture or new opportunities or new areas, new opportunities to engage, learn? Certainly digital will help that, in terms of acquiring knowledge. But in terms of getting into the business, what is the surface area of opportunities? >> The surface, it's the whole surface area. I think the wrong approach is to think that there are certain roles that are better for women or better for any group to do. There's equal opportunity in all the roles. One stat that's striking to me is the fact that, when I graduated from college in 1986, 35% of the graduates were women. 35% in 1986. Today that number is about 18%. We've gone backwards in the percentage of women graduates from computer science programs. That's a problem that we need to address. We need to get more women into technology careers. It's about sponsorship, it's about mentorship, it's about having the right role models, and it's about painting the right picture of the opportunity in technology. One of the organizations I'm involved with is Girls Who Code, where I'm on the board of directors because of our Accenture involvement because I believe that we need that kind of early involvement with girls to get them on the right paths and make them aware of the right opportunities that we can get them into the pipeline earlier. >> Congratulations. Thanks for doing that; it's great stuff. Personal question. 30 years, you've been in Accenture for a long time, 30 years of labs now, celebrating. What's the coolest thing you've done? >> You know, the coolest thing, the coolest thing is building the fabric of innovation of the company, so what we've done with the labs, creating Accenture Ventures, which is our tool for investing in companies, formalizing our Accenture research capabilities, that we now have an innovation fabric that goes from research to our ventures into our labs and the rest of Accenture's business. So we can take innovations like quantum computing and scale it and ramp it right into our business like we're doing today. So that's what's exciting to me, is to have created a funnel that we can use to take the early-stage innovations and pump them into real impact on our business. >> Awesome, and quick, what's happening here tonight? We're here at the 30th, labs here in Silicon Valley, Computer History Museum, historic event, magic. What's the show about today? >> Yeah, it's all about the past, the present, and the future. The past is how we got here with tremendous leaders of Accenture Labs, who built the organization to where it is today. The present is what I was just talking about, all the opportunity we have. And the future is more exciting that it's ever been. The next 30 years ... My only regret is that I'm not 20 years old right now. So the next 30 years are going to be even more exciting than the 30 years that I've lived through. And we're in a great place. Computer History Museum isn't just about the past. It's about the future. I'm on the board of trustees here at the Computer History Museum, and I love the mission of the museum in the way it brings the stories of innovation to light and sets us on the course for the future as well. >> Well, since you have so much influence, we're going to have to get our genes edited for sequencing so we can actually live longer because that's coming around the corner, too. >> I think that's the right idea. >> Cheers. Congratulations. >> Paul: Cheers. >> We'll be back with more coverage here live in The Cube. Accenture Labs' 30-year anniversary. I'm John Furrier with Paul Daugherty, chief technology and information officer, great work, innovation officer, great work. Congratulations. More coverage after this short break. Thanks for watching.

Published Date : Jul 19 2017

SUMMARY :

on the ground with Accenture Labs' of The Cube, on the ground here So first I want to toast you guys to 30 years and the transformation of our company So the theme here at the party is magic. What's the exciting thing for you right now? because the option we have as Accenture is to work What's the secret formula? Accenture technology, building the solutions in. What are some of the cool things that you guys are doing? That's the research to results that we talk about of artificial intelligence. of the information age to date. open source is booming, and now you have STEM. Think about the way we interact with our thumbs in the process business. And technology, we don't work for technology. That's the inflection point. Women and the role of women in the industry is of the population going into the way we develop solutions. for all the reasons you were just talking about, of the right opportunities that we can get them What's the coolest thing you've done? of the company, so what we've done with the labs, We're here at the 30th, labs here in Silicon Valley, and I love the mission of the museum because that's coming around the corner, too. Congratulations. I'm John Furrier with Paul Daugherty,

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Kirk Skaugen, Lenovo - Red Hat Summit 2017


 

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Kirk Skaugen, he is the Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo Data Center group, Lenovo. So thanks so much for joining us, Kirk. >> Thanks for having me. >> I want to start out by talking about Lenovo's commitment to open source, right. We're hearing a lot about this in this summit, It's the real deal! >> Yeah, well I was at for 24 years and had a long partnership with Red Hat there so as I moved over to Lenovo on that, open source is a key aspect of our strategy. Kind of foundational for us and where we sit with the days in our company, because we don't have this legacy. We're not someone who's trying to protect an old router business or an old storage business. So as we look at open source as part of our, kind of, open partnerships commitment, it's pretty foundational to what we're doing. >> Kirk, could you help us unpack that a little bit? We heard in Keynote this morning they talked about open source hardware. I know you guys have been involved in OCP. How much is software, how much is hardware? Where do you guys put commitment in? How much of it is partners? >> Yeah, so I think we're in about over 30 different standards bodies now committed to open source. It really happened after our acquisition of the IBM xSeries server business, so now we're the third largest x86 server provider in the world and we're expanding ahead in the data center, so we're participating about 30 standards bodies. We have about 12 open source projects going on with Red Hat, and we're really at the base level, announcing today something called Open Platform at Lenovo. It's something we said we would do a year ago at this conference, and now here at the Red Hat summit we're showing it in our booth actually there. It's a base open platform with an optimized stack which you can put NFE and other solutions on top of, so that's one example of things we said we were going to do a year ago today and then are doing today. It's really about, from our perspective, optimizing the base hardware for all these platforms. >> Interesting, we look at things. I hear people look at open source and there's more transparency. It's not like '08; there's a secret project we're working on and here it is. You worked at Intel. Everybody kind of understood the tick-tock that went on there, how does open source influence the planing that you guys go into and do you feel the road maps at a company like Lenovo are more transparent since you're part of open source? I mean, again, what you should expect from us is we're a leader in x86 system technology but we've also acquired assets like blade network technologies in the past as well. We're expanding as a company out of our server routes into networking and storage. We think containerization is going to be the future. Today we're sitting with, something like 32 world record benchmarks and our theme is kind of "different is better" which means it's the little things that we're doing with all these partners to tune out the best performance of these systems working with our partners. We're not trying to go far up the stack and compete with our partners. I think that makes us a little bit unique. We're in trying to be the best x86 system provider in the world. Expand that into storage and networking as we get the software defined. >> Great, and absolutely. It would be useful to kind of explain your role in the data center group itself. As you said, you've got in some pieces. >> Some came from the IBM, there's various acquisitions. >> Kirk: Mmmhmm. >> Lay out a little bit more of what you guys do and what your partner does. >> Sure, so I think a lot of people know Lenovo as being number one in PCs. This is the 25th year of ThinkPad and we look at our Think Server brand today and our X series brand that we acquired from IBM. >> So we're, again, the third largest server provider but expanding that into storage and networking and then we acquired the Motorola phone business, so we just crossed to be number four in the world outside of China, with a presence in India. So we basically have three businesses within Lenovo but Data Center group, we believe, is a big growth driver for the future. A lot of people I think, 25 years ago, would have never thought Lenovo would be number one in PCs worldwide. I think we're kind of sitting there as a server provider with number one in customer satisfaction, number one in server reliability, number one in quality by all these third party measures. Our biggest issue is people don't realize we acquired this amazing asset from IBM so we're here at the summit basically showing and promoting our brand, but also promoting the proof points underneath that. >> This event is very global, multicultural. Lenovo's also a global company. Maybe speak a little bit to that; where your teams live, where development happens and what your customer base looks like. >> I live in Raleigh. We have a dual headquarters in Raleigh and Beijing, but we operate in over 160 countries. We have over 10,000 IT professionals now within the data center group. We have manufacturing in the United States, in Mexico, in Hungary, in China, so we can basically globally ship everywhere. When I looked at moving from Intel to another company, number one this enabled me to get one step closer to the customer, but I thought Lenovo's one of the best companies I saw that we're partnering. I think in the data center group, you look at our list of partners and it's unprecedented partly because we don't have a legacy business, so almost every startup and everybody who wants to do something new ends up wanting access to our presence in China, being number one in China, but also because we're not protecting a legacy so they see us as someone interesting and unique to partnership with. So open source is one of those areas where I think, now that we separated from IBM we're clearly an x86 provider committed to open source and the way we're getting into telecom, where we hadn't been, and competing with our big customers is because we're open and ideally we're more agile and partner better. >> I'm wondering if you could comment on the culture of these culture of these various places. As you said, you've been in Portland for a long time. You're now new to Raleigh. Your company is Beijing and Raleigh and you do business all over the world. How do you experience how these engineers, are they different in different parts of the world? Or is open source really transcending that and there is a much more of an openness and a transparency? >> Yeah, I thought I'd fit really well into the Lenovo culture. I think six months into the job, I feel like it's exceeded my expectations. If you look at the executive staff at Lenovo there's something like seven different nationalities on there from Italy, and Switzerland, and Australia, and the U.S., and China, Hong Kong, Singapore, India. >> Rebecca: And that's by design. >> Yeah, by design. So I think it provides a really unique perspective as you're looking at market trends, and then customers and things like that. When you look at the engineering aspect of it I'm looking at this efficiencies of the PC, the cost economics of the PC, having some of these factors. We're actually one of the last companies who's designing our own systems and putting them in our own factory, so from that perspective we get the efficiencies of being part of a larger PC company, but listen, data center's very different, right? We have a completely autonomous data center group now but we get the efficiencies of that, so we can kind of get the best of all the cultures that we participate in with development in Romania, in India, in China, Raleigh and again, we can manufacture in any place the customer wants us to manufacture pretty much. >> You mentioned that you're one of the last companies that's designing your own systems and putting them into your machines. Is that going to go by the wayside? You're one of the last, so all these other companies have decided it's just not sustainable. Can you comment on that? >> Well I think consolidation is absolutely key. If you look at the PC industry, and I managed the PC business at Intel the last three years. There's absolutely been consolidation in that market. You should look at some of the Japanese suppliers going away, but that's what enabled Lenovo to continue to grow in a multi-hundred million unit market. Today we ship about 100 servers a minute. A hundred servers an hour, rather, about one a minute. If you look at the consolidation trends I think still going to be a lot of consolidation in the market around that, so we believe we can grow in that market. PCs through consolidation, and if the PC market flattens out, even in the data center space where I think there'll be fewer and fewer players that will be able to compete. It really gets down to just uber-efficiency. When you're running in a factory that's building as the number one PC company, you get manufacturing efficiencies that other people can't do at our subscale. So as an example, when we look at things like supercomputing we're now the fastest growing supercomputing company on the planet. 99 of the top 500 supercomputers. That's because we can build very, very efficient products in a market that typically runs on razor-thin margins, right. >> Kirk, we talk about that huge volume of servers. Can you speak to where Lenovo's playing in the service provider and cloud marketplace? >> Sure, I think we just reorganized into kind of, four customer-centric markets. So first is in hyperscale, we participate with Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and we're expanding across some of the largest hyperscale providers in the West Coast. We believe designing our own board, putting in our own factories gives us the cost economics to compete with the largest data centers in the world, just 'cause we can make money in PC desktop towers which is a pretty commoditized business. We think we can make money there. Software-defined, I think what we're seeing is because of our lack of legacy hardware whether it's a legacy SAN or a legacy routing business, we can leap ahead there both through our own stack but also our partner's stack. Third is supercomputing, so this is something where we brought a lot of that application knowledge over from IBM to the acquisition, and our goal is to continue to be the fastest growing supercomputing company on the planet and right now we're number two in the world, so we're building our Barcelona supercomputer right now to be 12 times more powerful that what it is today. With the University of Adelaide, 30 times more powerful than their last computer. Supercomputing's the third, and then the fourth is just traditional data center. So there you look at things like SAP HANA, where we were solutions-lead. We're trying to not just ship the hardware, but deliver optimized solutons so we feel like the little things don't mean a lot, the little things mean everything. So why does Lenovo have 32 worldwide per benchmarks? 'Cause we're tuning things with SAP, and now, for example, SAP just went public that they're running their own internal HANA on Lenovo. So I think it's a testament, it's the fine tuning of the application. It's hyperscale, software-defined, supercomputing, and then legacy data center infrastructure lead by solutions. Those are our four segments. >> Kirk, you talked about, it was 25 years for ThinkPad. As I look out towards the future, the data center group, what's kind of the touchstone? What are people going to really understand and know that group for in the future? >> Well, I think we want to be most trusted from a data center provider, right. We're not trying to contain anyone in a legacy thinking. We want to leap ahead into software-defined. We think we have the base hardware, customer satisfaction, reliability to do that. So I think, number one, we want to be most trusted. Number two, we're trying to be incredibly agile. Much faster than companies that are larger than us. That's been an innovation culture that's lead us to be number one in PCs, not through cost, but through innovation. We want to be known for innovation and being faster to deploy innovation both with us, but as well was with our partners. So if you go into our both, you showcasing with Intel. We're showcasing with Juniper. We're showcasing with Red Hat. So that's a very decent foundation. I think we can leap ahead, not be encumbered by the past, and be trusted, innovative, cost-effective, and make a lead to software-defined. What's interesting to me is, I think when I joined Intel in 1992, there was something like 100 gigabytes a day. When I joined Lenovo 24 years later, it was like 250 million gigabytes a day of data, if I have my numbers correctly. It's going to leapfrog up just in a massive way over the next 10 years with 5G and the whole internet buildup so you hear that from almost every keynote speaker, but what it means to me is that, we're just at the beginning of cloud transformation. A company like Lenovo, we didn't invent the PC, we just became number one in it over 25 years. We didn't invent servers, but we acquired amazing people. They can then leap us ahead over the next, now, 25 years. (laughing) >> Well Kirk, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your time. >> Yeah. Thank you It's a pleasure, it's a great event. So thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We'll be more with the Red Hat summit after this. (electronic music)

Published Date : May 4 2017

SUMMARY :

covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. he is the Executive Vice President It's the real deal! in our company, because we don't have this legacy. I know you guys have been involved in OCP. and now here at the Red Hat summit we're it's the little things that we're doing Great, and absolutely. Some came from the IBM, and what your partner does. and our X series brand that we acquired from IBM. and then we acquired the Motorola phone business, and what your customer base looks like. and the way we're getting into telecom, and you do business all over the world. and the U.S., and China, Hong Kong, and again, we can manufacture in any place You're one of the last, so all these other companies and I managed the PC business at Intel the last three years. in the service provider and cloud marketplace? the cost economics to compete with the largest and know that group for in the future? and the whole internet buildup Thank you for your time. Thank you We'll be more with the Red Hat summit after this.

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Willie Tejada, IBM - IBM Interconnect 2017 - #ibminterconnect - #theCUBE


 

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Interconnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live in Las Vegas for the CUBE's coverage of Interconnect 2017. This is three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Stay with us for the entire event. This is day two. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante and Esques' Willie Tejada, who's the IBM chief developer advocate at IBM. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you, guys. I'm really pleased to be here. >> So, love to have you on because all we do is talk about developers and what's in it for them, who's doing what, who's got the better cloud, who's enterprise ready, all that good stuff, commentating. But I love Ginny Rometty's conversation today because we just had Google Next, covered Amazon events, all the cloud events, and the thing that's been on our agenda, we've been really looking at this, is cloud readiness in the enterprise. And this is really kind of fundamental, what she was talking about, enterprise strong, data first, cognitive to the core, which kind of is their three pillars, but this is the, where the action is right now. >> Yeah you know for developers that's exactly true. You know, what you outlined is really this idea of basically there's three kind of core architectures, right? It's cloud, number one, followed by data layered on top of that, and essentially AIR cognitive on top. And what that means actually for the developer communities is that there's a new set of skill sets that are probably moving faster than we have ever seen before, right? And a lot of it's actually driven by this explosion of data, and so um, one of the things that we think that there's going to be a huge shortage of and there is a huge shortage of, is data scientists and cognitive developers. Because in those layers, what we've seen is that more and more, you operate on a data first model and by that, by just that definition, what you need to know about data is pushing towards a practitioner level of data scientists and the reality is that we think that type of core skill sets going to be needed across all of the developer communities. >> So take a minute to describe what will define a cognitive developer >> Tajeda: Sure, >> And what that, and the nuance behind it, because obviously the developers are doing really cool creative things, and then you've got the heart under the hood, production work loads and IT so where is the cognitive developer fit in those spectrums and what is the core definition from your standpoint? >> Yeah you know, the cognitive developer really is a person who's actually participating in actually the generation of a system that's fully cognitive, so you know, adding a cognitive feature is one thing, but actually building a full cognitive system is something different. You know if I use a comparison, think about how some of these roles in big data came about big data came, but we didn't have things like a data scientist, we didn't have a data engineer, and it kind of came after the fact the roles that were actually defined. Now we're onto these new cognitive systems where everything from, you have to train the system you have to have explicit knowledge of what the APIs actually do and you have to have infrastructure that actually curates data that continues this training along those lines. So you know the cognitive developers, really one that's participating in that particular ecosystem now what's really important though about that is they are usually programming in the language that their usually programming in. Whether it be Java, data scientists are using r or they're using Python, but the reality is that a cognitive developer's is that one that's applying those cognitive properties to their system that they're developing. >> So this is interesting, you mentioned the cognitive develop new tools and stuff, but there's some really good trends out there that are, that's the wind at the back of the developer right now. Cloud native is a booming trend that's actually phenomenal, you're seeing container madness continue, you've got micro services, all with kubernetes under the hood so there's some cool exciting things in the trend lines, can you unpack that for us and what this means to the developers, how does it impact their world? I mean we hear composability, lego blocks most developers know API economy is here, but now you've got these new tail winds, these new trends, >> Tajeda: Yep >> What's the, what are they, add to at, what's the impact to the developer? >> Well we talked about the new container service based on kubernetes that's allowing us to actually build to tremendous scale, and really simplify that type of development actually when you're doing native cloud development. You know, probably the most important things for developers is just accessibility of all these pieces, of course it's driven by open source, but you know if you want to learn these technologies if you want to participate and experiment with these technologies, they've never been more available than they actually are today. >> Vellante: So if I may, so Tanmay is a good example of a cognitive developer >> Absolutely. >> He's all cloud native, he's all cognitive, >> Nice shout out from the CEO today >> Yeah. >> He's also an algoithmist, you know self declared algorithmist, >> I can't even say that, >> Okay so here's Tanmay, he's never going to know anything else, right? But now, of you're a sort of mainstream developer, what do you do, you know? Where do you get the skills, what do you recommend that that individual does, and how do they get up the ramp? >> So you know, lots of times as you know the developer's learnings is not like kind of a linear pattern, right? They go to blogs basically they go and pull basic a library for them to >> Vellante: They figure it out. >> Along those lines, they go to a meet up or a hack from that stand point that's based on cognitive development and you know, so they should just go about what they normally do kind of along those lines, and then you know I think basically there's am advancement because ultimately we're publishing these things called journeys, which are really kind of use cases in the cognitive based environment so as an example, we might publish a journey on a cognitive retail chat bot, and it will combine a variety of these micro services that Watson's actually built on but give them exploration as to how they use the chat bot, how they use a service called discovery, and how they use persistence basically so that essentially they can learn from the data that they actually have and then ultimately if what they want to do is get deeper into it, there's organizations that we partner with where we give them cognitive curricullum that allows them to experience these pieces like top coder you can go on and do a cognitive challenge, right on top coder or you can go to a a cognitive course designed by galvanized one of our partners in relation to skills development. >> So that's interesting about that journey, so when you think about big data we talked about big data before, the sort of point at which at a company like IBM would engage in that journey is somebody who's exploring and maybe kicking the tires a little bit or somebody at a data warehouse that was like killing them, right? Where is, obviously there's a part of that in the cognitive world which is experimental >> Tajeda: Yep >> Is there a sort of analog to the data warehouse sort of disaffection if you will. >> Yeah, you know one of the things that we spend a lot of time on is that every organization that's going to build a cognitive system is looking for cognitive developers and data scientists, you know so essentially, >> Furrier: It's across all industries by the way, >> Absolutely >> Cyber securities to, >> Absolutely so you know, one of the key pieces is what kind of tools do you actually give that data scientist, to mess around with that data set, we provide something called a data science experience, and the idea there is essentially how do you give them an environment that allows them essentially to look into the data very quickly actually have these sets, and really kind of explore the data in a way that they never were capable of actually doing that, you know, those are the types of things that we're actually trying to that a data scientist, so that you can bridge over if you were a data engineer, or you're a business analyst, and you're looking to actually get into data science, you can actually play with some of these big data sets and actually explore what things you can do. >> Willie, I couldn't agree with you more on the whole, how developers learn it's really not a course ware online and the fiscal classroom, maybe they're offering it in college but, it's the practitional world of non linear learning through experience and these journeys are super valuable, and just for a tactical question, where do they find the journeys, or URL? >> What you'll find basically, come April first, we're going to launch a number of them, on developer.ibm.com/accelerate so they'll be focused on several different categories, number one will be just developing in the cloud cloud native, what's a journeys basically that they're kind of like common set ups that you actually need, we'll do, next one's on cognitive analytics where you pull together a set of services along those lines, and as you heard Ginny talk about, you know it's really important that a cloud have knowledge about a domain or an industry and so we'll create some journeys that are actually very industry specific, you know we announced, >> Furrier: Like they're like templates bascially, >> They are, >> People jump start it, not so much a reference implementation, >> Exactly, >> You know what I'm saying, the old days >> But you know, what it's all about is you mentioned this non linear journey that developers don't actually learn fundamentally they have a core thing that they're trying to get actually get done which is, get you help me get my stuff done faster, right? And fundamentally, when you talk about cognitive or data science, we're trying to actually deliver them tool sets or examples that do that. >> So I now got to go to the next level with that question, because it's first of all it's awesome, now how do you intersect that with community? Because now, that's super important because and you might want to take a minute to just do a plug for IBM in terms of the open source goodness you guys are doing because you guys do a great job with open source. >> Tajeda: You know we just hosted a very large, what we believe is, one of the largest open tech meet ups, right before basically InterConnect started, and we had one of the ballrooms actually full, and we talked about our new service we had Jim Basic from the Linux Foundation actually come, he stated a stat which was really interesting in open source which IBM is a large contributor to, that I think the stat that he said was Linux basically has a project now, there's 10,800 new lines of code and 1,800 lines of code that are modified every day, right? >> Furrier: Yeah, >> And that's the community. >> And that's only going to get faster, if you think about like just, the physical media like ssds, in memory, which spark the kernal, >> Vellante: The quantum, >> Linux is going evolve in a radical and killer way I mean, this is just the beginning. >> And to your point about the community, when you think about that advancement at the pace by which basically that software's actually going to move, there's not one organization that can outpace that type of community in the way they actually do it, it doesn't matter what the services actually are so, >> Well the other interesting thing is the impact on human kind, you heard Benny Hoff and Ginny talking about this morning and they were both really emphasizing machine augmented, right? But, it's like a Pac Man device, I mean there's so much human interaction that's being automated today, >> Tajeda: Yeah, abslutely, >> So, and I know IBM obviously big believer in augmentation, but it's hard to predict what things human's are going to be do, be able to do that machine's can't do, any insight on that? >> Yeah you know, I think, we like to use the word cognitive assisted, So when you think about it, I'll give one example, let's say for example in the medical profession, so, if you look at it, in the healthcare industry, about 90 percent of the data in there is not structured data, right? It's all unstructured data, a lot of it is images, so if you take a look at someone basically that's in oncology work taking a look at things like melanoma, the amount of time I think the data set said the amount of time he needed to watch or get trained on to look at all the new papers that were ever published, was probably three weeks basically, if he's thinking about that in a month. The amount of time that that person allocates to actually keeping up with all these particular trade journals is a few hours a week, and so he's constantly behind, this where something like a watson enabled, or a cognitive enabled type of application can help him actually keep up to date with all the new findings and research papers in his particular field, and do something like ingest millions of documents and understand them but actually apply that to his work, so you know what you find is doctors actually utilizing a cognitive assistant powered by Watson to help him do a better diagnosis. >> Will you're an advocate for the chief developer advocate for IBM, talk about for the last couple minutes we have, what's on your plan, we just saw the news yesterday, the 10 million dollar investment to get education out there and bring this cognitive developer category, kind of lift that up and, with Galvanize which we've supported some of those signature moment events with the Cube, where are you going to be out in the field, what's some of your go to market activities how you going to do this, and then talk about the patterns you've seen in the developer make up. >> Yeah, >> Just over the past year, what's changed, what's notable? >> Yeah, so you know what, you know some of the things that we're actually doing is number one, we're we're taking up very large presence in probably nine cities around the world with a very big emphasis on building on data science and cognitive developers, so you know, there's kind of the usual suspects, the San Franciscos, the New Yorks, the Tokyos, the Londons, some presence in Sao Paulo, we're doing Beijing, we recently basically announced a partnership of how we can actually get presence actually there and through that, we're looking actually to bring, basically this presence into those communities, so this idea that we help, actually put forth these journeys but in many cases actually be right in the presence of things, we have, in some cases we have some programs that we're actually spinning up that are all about essentially how we actually do things like IOT Thursdays, or Cognitive Tuesdays where they can actually see actual experts in those particular areas, and just come do office assignments, >> Furrier: Do Throwback Thursday, you hack on a mainframe >> Tajeda: That's it! (laughter) >> That's what they're actually looking at from that standpoint so, so yeah a lot of this stuff basically is just actually getting to some of those folks in a very very intimate way, and like you said actually kind of populating these folks where kind of where they are, and really what that's all about is actually getting the tools and tool sets in the communities that they find and the peer learning that they do, which is real, >> Furrier: Well we'll see you at some of the Galvanize events you guys got goin on we'll certainly see you at Dockercon we got a lot of Cube line ups, for this Spring tour, and the Fall ton of developer activity, the Cloud Native stuff is really an intersection point with big data colliding with cloud IOT and AI and this cognitive is just an accelerant, >> Tajeda: Absolutely, absolutely >> For the cloud, the perfect storm is a good opportunity. >> There's never been more available time in terms of technology, and the technology never moved as fast, >> I was just saying to Tanmay when he was on yesterday, "I wish I could be 13 again", coding is so much more fun now than it was when we were doing it. Well great to have you on Willie, >> Hey thanks very much, it was actually very good visiting with you guys. >> Great insight, insight from the chief developer advocate here at IBM, I'm John Furrier, Steve Vellante stay with us for more coverage, great interviews all day today, and tomorrow, here live in Las Vegas, we'll be right back.

Published Date : Mar 21 2017

SUMMARY :

brought to you by IBM. We're live in Las Vegas for the CUBE's coverage I'm really pleased to be here. So, love to have you on because all we do what you need to know about data and you have to have infrastructure that are, that's the wind at the back of the by open source, but you know if you want to kind of along those lines, and then you know warehouse sort of disaffection if you will. so that you can bridge over if you that you actually need, But you know, what it's all about is the open source goodness you guys are doing I mean, this is just the beginning. a lot of it is images, so if you take a look at where are you going to be out in the field, For the cloud, Well great to have you on Willie, it was actually very good visiting with you guys. Great insight, insight from the chief

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>> Announcer: Life from Palo Alto. It's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017. Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Women Transforming Technology Conference held at VMware here in beautiful Palo Alto, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Lily Chang. She is the VP R&D/Office of CTO VMware. Thanks so much for joining us, Lily. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're also a board member. You started out on the advisory board, but now you're a board member on Women Who Code. >> Lily: Yes, recently. >> What is the organization? I mean, it's such a powerful and important organization. Can you tell us a little bit more about it? >> Women Who Code has a mission, which is very similar like today's conference you were seeing. It's to propel the technical women and R&D women across the globe. Basically no boundary of region, cities, or countries. So they're spanning about 50 plus countries and many cities, and we being a founding partner ... We, VMware, have been a founding partner since middle of 2015. They have gone through a rapid growth. I think we bet on the right horse ... (both laugh) Using the business term, and interestingly, they have gone through, in the past 18 months, a tremendous growth of the membership, and because it resonates with a lot of the technical women across the countries over the world, in China, in India, in eastern Europe, based in United States and Europe as well. Basically, right now their membership is about 87,000. They started with 10,000 members back about 18 months ago. >> So it's propelling the women who are already in the industry, but also bringing in new people, new young women into the industry, too. >> It's more than that. We focus on very much mid-range ... >> Okay. >> And early-stage career as well, but the professional bell curve, that golden bell curve, where in the middle of your career, or you're in the career for about two, three years, you're thinking about expanding your career horizon to be a different technical area. You just need that technical skills, and you need a way to be in a non-intimidating environment in a very gender-friendly environment and a very supporting and sponsoring setting where you're learning from each other and sharing all the knowledge, like different programming language, big data, algorithms, mobile technology, how that's involved. And that's really the key value proposition from Women Who Code, and that's what we subscribe to as well. >> Well, Lily, you talked about that sweet spot of a woman's career ... >> Lily: Right. >> And that also happens to be when a lot of women get stuck, or they leave ... >> Lily: Exactly. >> Or they have children, or they pull back and work part-time ... What will it take ... What are you doing with Women Who Code to get them over that, and as you said, help them gain those next skills to help them move up? >> So we basically establish a strategic partnership with Women Who Code, and we offer together with them a monthly meetup or sometimes bi-weekly meetup. We actually opened to several countries in the world. That's where we believe R&D, innovation, are also key. For example, we opened to China. We basically expanded to India and elevated it. In fact, Women Who Code has a annual technology conference for tech women in that particular region, like US is coming in April. We, VMware, are working with Women Who Code later this week to actually launch the first international Connect conference in India. And basically we got huge support and passion and commitment, and we also find it's a very good thing for women to basically learn about leadership and basically be able not to share just their technology with one another, about what they're good at. It's also a way for them to do networking, to learn how to communicate more effectively, and how to basically build the team, sustain the team. So we work out a global leadership initiative through this collaboration with Women Who Code. So we're driving China, we're driving India, we're driving Sofia. We collaborated on the Silicon Valley as well. >> And are the issues the same across the board? >> Yes, we have found the issue is very similar globally. It's where a woman needs encouragement, and a woman needs a very specific setting about how they learn from one another. These technical meetups and these chat over the woman technology community basically are helping that, and then we're also, in a non-profit way, sponsoring Women Who Code through their job board, and that's a non-profit way of helping, opening opportunities and possibility for technical women that basically want to expand their career or finding different avenue in their progression as well. So, basically, for ... You early on talked about, this is age where you're choosing between, do I want to have kids? Do I want to focus more on that? >> These are real things, yes! >> There's a sense of guilt, right. >> Right, right. >> Like, am I going to be so selfish, not to be a working mother? And what we found is that these technical meetings or conferences is not only just a way for women in the appropriate setting to learn about new technology without a very unnecessary peer competition, and they also can basically start sharing what they know, and they can learn together and grow together, and so for example, we offer all this with no charge. If you're a mom, I still remember, with young kids, basically, you will probably want that one or two hours to just spend ... (Rebecca laughs) >> In a bath. >> Yeah, not that you don't love your kids, right? >> Yes. >> But it's just you need that one or two hours. Your brain needs that kind of a chemistry balance as well. >> Yes, yes. >> And you're more rejuvenated, and then when you go back to work, you don't feel like, God, I am missing so many months of work, right? >> Right. >> Reality is you're spending a lot of time rejuvenating your knowledge, and you're keeping pace with the industry growth. We find a lot of other companies that are basically sharing the same vision as we are. >> And that is exactly what this conference is doing. >> Lily: Yes. >> There is a mix of technical breakout sessions, the hard skills, mixed in with the professional tips ... >> Lily: Exactly. >> Of how to give a better presentation and things like that. >> Exactly. So in some of the meetups, for example, if you're a woman that has an upcoming conference and usually there's the stage fright, right, and I kid you not ... >> Rebecca: But men face it too! >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's not ... But then how can we create a more nurturing environment to help the woman to curate her contents without fear and without intimidation. So that's basically the ... Sometimes the meetup is devoted to do things like that, or to just do a programming hackathon, but you're basically collaborating across the genders and the age group ... And your career span as well. Basically, it created a lot of this more collaborative and nurturing environment. >> One of the stereotypes about women in the workplace is that they are very competitive and don't help each other, and there's a real queen bee syndrome, a bitchiness that takes place. >> Lily: Yes, I'm aware of that. >> Yeah, well, what's your experience? Because it's ... There are some women, sure, but what's your experience? >> My experience is it's a matter of perspective and how you actually set up the environment. If you set up the environment where women can actually collaborate, I believe that is actually one of the gender's strength. A lot of the women leaders are into details, and some of the women are into strategic thinking and orientation. We found that if you can blend that together, especially in the global sense, that helps not only learning technology and advancing technology ... Like, one of the most popular thread of technical discussion is the algorithms. When you're talking about innovation, and when you talk about creativity, when you talk about the science, and that's where things has no boundary. >> Yes. >> And it's only yourself that's imposing that kind of thing. So we believe the sponsorship of this, or like the conference today, is breaking down a lot of those barriers. >> That's the theme of the day! >> Bringing the more kind side of the gender onto the table. >> And a camaraderie, too, around solving problems. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So let's actually talk about what you're doing at VMware. You're leading a joint venture in China. Can you tell us more about it? >> Yeah, China is full of myth. >> Rebecca: It's full of ...? >> It's a very mythical country, and so there's a lot of talk about how Chinese does business. I was born and raised in one part of the greater China, and so I was very fortunate to be brought up by a very loving father and a mother. My mom, in those days... In those days, women have to really fight for anything, even education. There wasn't really good career for any technical women that graduated from the best university in the island. So the job I was kind of really encouraged to look for was like a secretary job or an airline stewardess job. My mom is not one of those types. She believed I need to come overseas and study and propel myself. She believes in lifelong learning. She's a career woman, and she coached my dad, who owns his own business, and he cultivated me a lot about this business best practice. How do you do business in China, and how do you work through the generation gaps and communicate more effectively? So I'm very blessed that I'm bilingual, and logically, I can debate and think basically in both language and both cultural mode, and so that helps a lot, in terms of doing a successful job in China. And the joint venture is really VMware's way to do it the right way in China, and we're not trying to brag about, we're a multinational company. We're trying to basically say, this is a good economy and a good part of the world that we want to be able to have our technology to make a difference. So we collaborated with a local China company called Qù Guàng and formed a private joint venture that's focusing on basically cloud management system, and we're bringing a lot of the virtualization and combining the technology and innovation from both cultures together. So that's really the mission of this company. >> And would you say that the Chinese customers are similar to the western customers in terms of what their needs are and where they want their businesses to go? >> At the very high level, absolutely. Relatively speaking, how do you get to that end target, that's where culture difference and social difference and how you orient your habits of doing business is where that difference comes in. But we focus on ... We were very fortunate to have this company that works with us. We have the same mission, same vision, and the same strategy. So we're basically co-founding this and marrying the best technology from both sides of the region together to basically offer to advance the data centers for all of China. For example, China has a very major initiative to revamp a lot of their data center across all provinces. That includes your very rich town like the Beijing and very, very far away regions, and we're very proud that the software can make anything happen. We believe this is a magical combination to basically help the economy and the society. >> And do you think ... Because this is so important, this joint venture, and as you said, we're coming in and doing this the right way in China ... >> Lily: Yes. >> Will this be the blueprint from now on for how VMware sets up its joint ventures? >> Well, this will be the first joint venture we do in greater China, and so far, it's been pretty successful. We are basically writing the blueprint as we go. So one of the key things I love about VMware is just we love creativity and we choose and bet on the right innovation, and we propel and drive and push for that, and we inspire all the country and the regions and the people and the teams around us to do it. So I think this is showing that spirit, meaning that, regardless what the policymaker may say, we believe business and technology, when you marry them in the right way, it's going to make a difference, and will make a revolutionary difference. So we're writing the blueprint as to how to do that. >> How would you describe the differences in the technology cultures of China and the US? Kara Swisher, in her keynote, took Silicon Valley to task a little bit and made fun the buzzy words about how people brag and failing and disruptor and other kind of buzzy things. Innovation, pivot. How would you describe the way the Chinese business culture thinks about creativity and innovation? >> So there is some similarity with western culture, or what you see in Silicon Valley, like what she was talking about. Young generation. They don't understand there is any limit. In fact, that is across genders. I notice a lot of the technology women actually are leading companies and starting companies, and basically, for example, in November, we did a pitch competition with Women Who Code in Beijing, and we focused only on women C-level in the China startup, and we're basically collaborating with local venture company and the VC company to basically choose the most innovative woman leaders in the startup industry, because the country is so entrepreneur, and to some extent, China is growing, and they're basically learning how to basically be really big, and scalability it a big thing. And this is where our technology can come in and our culture, working with them. To basically together make it a better place also comes in as well. So that portion, entrepreneurship is the same. The desire and aspiration, that undying commitment to basically propel the society, those are all the same. I do see a lot of young people, but I also see a lot of the generation, like in my age, basically are coming in with very much a mentoring and a sponsoring attitude to basically help cultivate a younger generation, and very forgiving on that, and so that is something I see, and it does remind me a lot about the focus on the family and the focus on this team working together. >> And is that having an impact on your western colleagues, seeing ... >> Yes, I think it's a little bit of a culture difference, a lot less about yourself. A lot more about, how do I make this work? There's a little bit of a pride in some of these young startup, or even in the age group like me, saying, I am going to help this country to be stronger. I'm going to help the people to be stronger. So they take pride in that as well. And that reminds me a little bit about ... I heard about made in USA, so China talk about made in China, but in essence, it's all the same. You want to take pride with your family. >> A national pride, yes. >> Yeah, you want to take pride with your family, with your national pride, but it doesn't mean you don't want to do business internationally. You still value your international collaboration. Then the key is, how do you go across that culture boundary and focus on the right business problem and the right social phenomenon to solve the problem and the challenges, and just propel the society and the people altogether. >> But that is a good point, that the pride that you feel in your country, someone else from another country feels that same degree of pride for their country, and that's the ... >> Exactly. And sometimes I feel doing this job is not just a technologist job or an R&D job. It's almost like blending the DNA between the two countries and the two cultures together, and how to figure out working together. I know it sounds like a cliche. But when you go ... >> Rebecca: Or a great campaign slogan. >> Yeah, but it's really something that's actually a big challenge, especially with some of the political environment nowadays. But what I notice is when we work together as a group of engineers, we don't talk about those kinds of things. We talk about technology, and we talk about products. We talk about innovation. We talk about customer problems. We talk about how to make the place better. And that's basically what we focus on. Day in, day out. >> Well, Lily Chang, thank you so much for talking to us today. It's been great. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, and we'll be right back with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology. (upbeat techno music)

Published Date : Feb 28 2017

SUMMARY :

Brought to you by VMware. coverage of the Women You started out on the advisory board, What is the organization? a lot of the technical women in the industry, but also We focus on very much mid-range ... and sharing all the knowledge, Well, Lily, you talked And that also happens to be skills to help them move up? and how to basically build the team, and that's a non-profit way of helping, in the appropriate setting But it's just you need the same vision as we are. And that is exactly what the hard skills, mixed in Of how to give a better So in some of the meetups, for example, and the age group ... One of the stereotypes Yeah, well, what's your experience? and some of the women are into or like the conference today, of the gender onto the table. And a camaraderie, too, Can you tell us more about it? and combining the and the same strategy. and as you said, we're and the people and the in the technology cultures and the focus on this And is that having an impact or even in the age group like me, and focus on the right business problem and that's the ... and the two cultures together, and we talk about products. for talking to us today. and we'll be right back

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Yanbing Li | Women Transforming Technology 2017


 

>> Narrator: Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Women Transforming Technology conference held at VMware here in beautiful Palo Alto, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Yanbing Li, who is the senior vice president and general manager for storage and availability here at VMware. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, Rebecca. I'm so excited to meet you actually. I've done quite a few CUBE interviews. >> You're a CUBE veteran, yes, I know. >> But you're the first female host I got to talk to, so really excited meeting you. >> Well, the pleasure's all mine. >> Thank you. >> So Business Insider calls you one of the most powerful women engineers in the world, in Silicon Valley. It's exciting to be talking to you. VMware is committed to diversity and inclusion. We're here at a Women Transforming Technology conference. You're hosting the conference. Talk a little bit about your experience and what you're involved in, in terms of that emphasis on diversity and inclusion here. >> Yes, certainly being a part of VMware and certainly being a female engineering leader myself, this is very near and dear to my heart. My experience, actually involvement in women leadership initiative started many years ago when I was actually based in China. My career at VMware, I've been here for nine years. >> You led the Chinese operation for a while. >> Yeah, I was leading the China engineering operation in China for a few years, and when I was based in China, I started a series of women technology conferences in Beijing. So we started in 2011, and that quickly turned into an industry event, kind of very similar to what's going on here at Women Transforming Technology. So this has been certainly close to my heart, and I've been involved in starting the initiative in China. And when I moved back to Palo Alto, I have been part of the VM Women initiative. I was part of a dialogue circle, and this year, we expanded the initiative, or since last year, from just the women focus to now a much broader diversity focus and certainly being Chinese myself, I'm also representing the Chinese community at VMware. We have a Chinese VMware circle that create that community feeling for all the Chinese and Chinese Americans working at VMware. >> Can you talk a little bit about what you've observed with the women in China and the women here in Silicon Valley? Are the issues the same? Is the culture similar? What are your experiences? >> I think there is a lot more similarity than differences. China, there has been a stronger emphasis of women contributing to the society for the past 50, 60 years, so you see a higher percentage of women working. You see a slightly higher percentage of women in tech. But the issues are still the same. You know, how we deal with stereotype of women, especially how we overcome unconscious bias and how we overcome the lack of women in technology and lack of women in leadership. I think these issues definitely transcend culture and community. It was interesting, we hosted an APJ discussion on diversity. >> In China? >> In Sydney. >> Okay. >> So this was part of our APJ initiative. And there were tables of people from different countries talking about the women issue, the gender issue. And the simple question was, is there a glass ceiling in your country? And I guess every country's answer was yes, except for the country, the table of Japan because their answer was they didn't have a glass ceiling, they had a steel ceiling. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> But you get the point is, yeah, this is a issue that's everywhere. >> And did you find that your Chinese colleagues in China were as mobilized to work on them and to make changes? >> Yeah, I think definitely, you see that coming down from the leadership level. I think when you have initiatives like this, often sometimes, you have grassroot initiatives, but it's much more important to up-level that to a business focus. And I think that is what VMware is doing by starting VM Women several years ago and now extending that to VM Inclusion. At VMware, the leadership team definitely see this as a business imperative rather than just something we want to do good to the society. So there is a balance of trying to do good but also trying to do smart. You know, how we move the needle from a business outcome point of view. You know, we've been very open about our diversity data. We've been tracking them as part of leadership MBOs, so I'm excited to see the levels of investment and emphasis that VM as a company is putting on. >> As a leader, you are a senior vice president here. How do you make sure that you are, you're a woman, you're a Chinese woman, but we also know that we're not immune just because we're women to subtle biases, to discrimination. How do you work on yourself in your day-to-day practice as a leader and a manager? >> Yeah, I think it's... Along our career, we've seen a lot of things like sexism or how people apply unconscious bias toward women and certain stereotyped view of women. I think we've all experienced that. And just the, I can think of lots of examples on a daily basis. I was having dinner with a male coworker, which is a very important way for us to build strong relationships. >> Relationships, yeah. >> And as we were eating, we were mistaken as on a date. There's all these subtle things that reminds you somehow people see women not necessarily, even if you're having a business setting, they tend to not assume the same. So I think that's happening all the time. So my approach towards this has been recognizing that it happens and have a good way to defuse it because most people are doing it in a very unconscious way. And when you have a way to defuse it, you help have a positive impact on that person. Give you an example. I think for women, we are constantly introduced as a woman something. One year, I was speaking at an event, and when we were doing the rehearsal, a senior leader was introducing me as a woman engineering leader. So I just gently said, "Hey, look. "People can tell I'm a woman. "You don't have to say it." >> The dress gives it away. >> Yeah, and that made him become aware. Yeah, that's, the merit you're standing on that stage is not because of your gender or shouldn't be limited by your gender, rather than because of the message or the business or the technology that you're bringing to the audience. >> But that's not always easy for people to do, to use humor to defuse the situation. We just heard from Kara Swisher, the founder of Recode, and one of her pieces of advice was to be authentic, be genuine, be an original. Your Twitter handle is ybhighheels. I love it. I love it. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> But it is this mix of professionalism and femininity. Is that hard to do? Is it hard to pull off? >> It is hard, and I have debated over and over. Where I got my Twitter handle actually, one of my coworkers, my team members from many years ago said to me, "Yanbing, you're the high tech girl "in high heels." And I kind of liked it. It felt like very me. But there's been lots of people telling me, Oh, is that really good? Is that insulting? Or is that demeaning of the levels of the position, the type of job you have? And I actually felt otherwise. First of all, it is fairly authentic of me. If people who, I remember when I was leaving one job and my male boss was commenting, saying, "Yanbing, you didn't leave very big shoes to fill. "You leave very high shoes." >> Very tall shoes. (laughs) >> To fill. So I'm known to like high heels. And people, and I've also learned that once you establish your competence, this does not become something that is negative. And I've seen increasingly your colleagues or coworkers, people around you, want to embrace who you are rather than penalize for who you are, as long as you're confident about who you are. So I find that, yeah, having lots of fun with my Twitter handle. >> Right. Right, right. But as you said, as a woman, you have to also have proved yourself and that you are smart and just 'cause you wear high heels and you like high shoes, you also can get the job done. >> Yeah, and it's not just high shoes or whatever shoes of choice that people have. Yeah, and we are most comfortable and most successful when we are truly authentic to ourselves. >> Being who you are at work, at home, and in your private life. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So talk a little bit. The last time you were on the show, you talked about the hyper-converged world. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of what's going on in the software space and what you're working on now? >> Yeah, it's a very exciting time. Certainly as part of the storage business unit, a key initiative that we're working on is vSAN. This is VMware's leading product in a hyper-converging infrastructure. And what we're seeing certainly is this fundamental disruption that's going on in storage and data centers and infrastructure in general. And if you think about what is one of the highest gross market segment that's happening in a data center and infrastructure today is actually hyper-converge. As a market, this is quickly disrupting the traditional way of delivering storage, and it's growing at 60% for the next few years. And we as a business has been growing triple digits. Last year, we almost tripled our the size of the business, and we're seeing tremendous customer momentum and tremendous customer adoption and seeing hyper-converged is really becoming a mainstream way of delivering infrastructure to our customers. So a very exciting time. >> It is exciting, and yet, it's hard to think beyond hyper-converged because if everything then becomes one, what's next? What do you see down the pipeline two, three years from now, in terms of how businesses deal with their storage? >> Yeah, so certainly VMware are, being a leading infrastructure software vendor, we're going through a fundamental transformations of providing not just the best in class software for your data center, you know, how we modernize it, how we provide higher levels of automation in the private cloud but increasingly, there is a shift towards service-based consumption and cloud-based delivery of infrastructure. And I think the same thing is happening in the storage space. You know, certainly, with a hyper-converged infrastructure, not only we see a highly, high degrees of integration, automation, but we're also seeing the same architecture is extending into the cloud. And as we look at the cloud, we also constantly think about how do we take the value prop of just building the best infrastructure, the best storage, take that infrastructure plate now to an application plate or a data plate. And certainly, from a storage side, we're increasingly focusing on how we make data better managed, better governed, how we provide more insights through data. So taking that storage levels of innovation to focus on data. >> Understanding what the data is telling you and making that data work for customers. What are you hearing from customers in terms of what is keeping them up at night? >> Keeping our customers are all facing the challenge of how they keep up with their business demand. As we look at it, every company is now being transformed but into a digital business, and suddenly, the role of IT becomes so much more interesting and exciting and it's really about enabling business. And so, that put demand on how you deliver things in a much more agile fashion, how you keep costs down so that you can invest for really where the business value at is, and how you can ready yourself to adopt a new way of building your application for the future. So these are the typical challenges that we hear from our customer, is really to keep up with their business demand. And we are certainly excited to see VMware is playing a very vital role in helping solving our customers' digital transformation challenges. >> So the role of Silicon Valley looms large in our business world and also just in our imagination. What do you think the media get wrong about Silicon Valley? Or just, what do you think is the line out there that you wish you could dispel in the sense of this is not right, this is not the way it happens? >> Yeah, so I have lived in Silicon Valley for the past 20 years, except for a few years where I was back in Beijing. I decided to move back because I just feel for being someone in tech, this is really just an amazing place to live in. >> To be at the center, yeah. >> And it's definitely the epicenter. I have three children, and I just see how privileged they're growing up, being exposed in this very dynamic, innovative, vibrant environment. So this is what I absolutely love about Silicon Valley. But on the other hand, when you go outside the world, I do think it feels like it's almost like a little ivory tower. You know, there's so much technology, so much access, so much wealth being created here. Sometimes, we tend to forget life is different outside Silicon Valley. And so, I think having that perspective is very, very important. >> In terms of, you mentioned you're a mom, what do you wish for your children? I don't even know if you've got daughters or sons, but in terms of just getting back to why we're here, breaking barriers is a theme of this year's conference, Women Transforming Technology, what barriers do you want to see broken for your kids, for the next generation? >> Right, I'm excited. My kids, certainly being a part of Silicon Valley and being in this very dynamic environment right now, I think there is incredible levels of awareness in them about what's going on in the world. It was funny, I was just talking to my son. He's got a new shirt, and he's 13 years old. And I didn't know where the shirt had come from because I didn't buy it. That turned out, it's the first shirt he bought using his own money, and he bought a pink shirt. And he told me that he wanted to get a pink shirt because he wanted to break the gender stereotype. And I certainly wasn't thinking anything like that when I was 13 years old. And this is just being exposed to certainly what's going on in Silicon Valley, being exposed to working parents and being exposed to what's happening in the political arena, that led him to make a very interesting choice. And I have two 11-year-old girls, and I wish they can grow up, they love technology to begin with. Their Christmas wish was to build all of their Christmas cards using some online language. And so, we all got these electronic animated things from my girls, and they want to write video games. And so, I wish they grow up in an environment feeling when they have that social awareness, being female does not create a barrier for them to pursue what they love because they genuinely are excited and interested in technology. And I'm hoping that's the environment we're going to help create for them, but I'm also very excited to see, at a very young age, they have demonstrated levels of awareness that I certainly didn't experience when I was young. >> And just speaking about that level of awareness and you brought up politics and sort of what's happening on the national stage, so much about this administration really does go against what are core values of Silicon Valley and particularly in terms of immigration, in terms of gender issues, transgender rights, gay rights. Do you feel that Silicon Valley will take a leadership stance on these things and stand up? >> I think we should. We should because Silicon Valley has benefited tremendously from the success of our technology and success of our businesses. And so, with that, we have incredible power, incredible platform that's being. >> And a voice. >> And a voice, being created out of Silicon Valley. I think, yeah, we should play a role in advocating for what we believe in, just like VMware and other partner companies are taking a leadership position to advocating women transforming technology, the role women play in Silicon Valley and in technology at large. I wish all of the companies here have the willingness and you know, to really stand up for what we believe in. Yeah, so given the power that we have and given the influence that we have, not just in this country but all over the world. >> Yanbing Li, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you, Rebecca. I'm so glad to have spoken to you. Thank you for having me back at theCUBE. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll be back with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here in Palo Alto.

Published Date : Feb 28 2017

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brought to you by VMware. of the Women Transforming I'm so excited to meet you actually. female host I got to talk to, and what you're involved in, and certainly being a female You led the Chinese operation I have been part of the and lack of women in leadership. And the simple question was, But you get the point is, and now extending that to VM Inclusion. As a leader, you are a And just the, I can And when you have a way to defuse it, Yeah, and that made him become aware. easy for people to do, Is that hard to do? the position, the type of job you have? (laughs) to embrace who you are and that you are smart Yeah, and we are most and in your private life. and what you're working on now? And if you think about what is in the private cloud the data is telling you and suddenly, the role of IT becomes in the sense of this is not right, for the past 20 years, And it's definitely the epicenter. And I'm hoping that's the environment and you brought up politics from the success of our technology and given the influence that we have, This has been a pleasure talking to you. I'm so glad to have spoken to you. here in Palo Alto.

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Michelle Dennedy, Cisco | Data Privacy Day 2017


 

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Data Privacy Day at Twitter's World Headquarters in downtown San Francisco. Full-day event, a lot of seminars and sessions talking about the issue of privacy. Even though Scott McNealy in 1999 said, "Privacy's dead, get over it," everyone here would beg to differ; and it's a really important topic. We're excited to have Michelle Dennedy. She's the Chief Privacy Officer from Cisco. Welcome, Michelle. >> Indeed, thank you. And when Scott said that, I was his Chief Privacy Officer. >> Oh you were? >> I'm well acquainted with my young friend Scott's feelings on the subject. >> It's pretty interesting, 'cause that was eight years before the iPhone, so a completely different world than actually one of the prior guests we were talking about privacy is an issue in the Harvard Business Review from 125 years ago. So this is not new. >> Absolutely. >> So how have things changed? I mean that's a great perspective that you were there. What was he kind of thinking about and really what are the privacy challenges now compared to 1999? >> So different. Such a different world. I mean fascinating that when that statement was made the discussion was a press conference where we were introducing Connectivity. It was an offshoot of Java, and it basically allowed you to send from your personal computer a wireless message to your printer so that a document could come out (gasp). >> That's what it was? >> Yeah. >> Wireless printing? >> Wireless printing. And really it was gyro technology, so anything wirelessly could start talking to each other in an internet of things world. >> Right. >> So, good news bad news. The world has exploded from there, obviously; but the base premise of, can I be mobile, can I live in a world of connectivity, and still have control over my story, who I am, where I am, what I'm doing? And it was really a reframing moment of when you say privacy is dead, if what you mean by that is secrecy and hiding away and not being connected to the world around you, I may agree with you. However, privacy as a functional definition of how we define ourselves, how we live in a culture, what we can expect in terms of morality, ethics, respect, and security, alive and well, baby. Alive and well. >> (laughs) No shortage of opportunity to keep you busy. We talked to a lot of people who go to a lot of tech conferences. I have to say I don't know that we've ever talked to a Chief Privacy Officer. >> You're missing out. >> I know, so not you get to define the role, I love it. So what are your priorities as Chief Priority Officer? What are you keeping an eye on day to day as well as what are your more strategic objectives? >> It's a great question. So the rise of the Chief Privacy Officer, actually Scott was a big help in that and gave me exactly the right amount of rope to hang myself with. The way I look at it is, probably the simplest analogy is, should you have a Chief Financial Officer? >> Yeah. >> I would guess yeah, right? That didn't exist about 100 years ago. We just kind of loped along, and whoever had the biggest bag of money at the end was deemed to be successful. Where if somebody else who had no money left at the end but bought another store, you would have no way of measuring that. So the Chief Privacy Officer is that person for your digital currency. I look at the pros and the cons, the profit and the loss, of data and the data footprint for our company and for all the people to whom we sell. We think about, what are those control mechanisms for data? So think of me as your data financial officer. >> Right, right. But the data in and of itself is just stagnant, right? It's really just the data in the context of all these other applications. How it's used, where it's used, when it's used, what it's combined with, that really starts to trip into areas of value as well as potential problems. >> I feel like we scripted this before, but we didn't. >> Jeff: We did not script it, we don't script the-- >> So if I took out a rectangle out of my wallet, and it had a number on it, and it was green, what would you say that thing probably is? >> Probably Andrew Jackson on the front. >> Yeah, probably Andrew Jackson. What is that? >> A 20 dollar bill. >> Why is that a 20 dollar bill? >> Because we agree that you're going to give it to me and it has that much value, and thankfully the guy at Starbucks will give me 20 bucks worth of coffee for it. >> (laughs) Exactly. Well which could be a cup the way we're going. >> Which could be a cup. >> But that's exactly right. So is that 20 dollar bill stagnant? Yes. That 20 dollar bill just sitting on the table between us is nothing. I could burn it up, I could put it in my pocket and lose it and never see it again. I could flush it down the toilet. That's how we used to treat our data. If you recognize instead the story that we share about that piece of currency, we happen to be in a place where it's really easy to alienate that currency. I could go downstairs here and spend it. If I was in Beijing I probably would have to go and convert it into a different currency, and we'd tell a story about that conversion because our standards interface is different. Data is exactly the same way. The story that we share together today is a valuable story because we're communicating out, we're here for a purpose. >> Right. >> We're making friends. I'm liking you because you're asking me all these great questions that I would have fed you had I been able to feed you questions. >> Jeff: (laughs) But it's only that context, it's only that communicability that brings it value. We now assume as a populous that paper currency is valuable. It's just paper. It's only as good as the story that enlivens it. So now we're looking at smaller, smaller Microdata transactions of how am I tweeting out information to people who follow me? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> How do I share that with your following public, and does that give me a greater opportunity to educate people about security and privacy? Does that allow my company to sell more of my goods and services because we're building ethics and privacy into the fabric of our networks? I would say that's as valuable or more valuable than that Andrew Jackson. >> So it's interesting 'cause you talk about building privacy into the products. We often hear about building security into the products, right? Because the old way of security of building a bigger wall doesn't work any more and you really have to bake it in at all steps of the application: development, the data layer, the database, et cetera, et cetera. When you look at privacy versus security, and especially 'cause Cisco's sitting on, I mean you guys are sitting on the pipes, everything is running through your machines. >> That's right. >> How do you separate the two, how do you prioritize, and how do you make sure the privacy discussion is certainly part of that gets the right amount of relevance within the context of the security conversation? >> It's a glib answer that's much more complicated, but the security is really in many instances the what. I can really secure almost any batch of data. It can be complete gobbley gook zeroes and ones. It could be something really critical. It could be my medical records. The privacy and the data about what that context is, that's the why. I don't see them as one or the other at all. I see security and security not as not a technology but a series of verb things that you actually physically, people process technologies. That enactment should be addressed to a why. So it's kind of Peter Drucker's management of you manage what you measure. That was like incendiary advice when it first came out. Well I wanted to say that you secure what you treasure. So if you treasure a digital interaction with your employees, your customers, and your community, you should probably secure that. >> Right. But it seems like there's a little bit of a disconnect about maybe what should be treasured and what is the value with folks that have grown up. Let's pick on the young kids, not really thinking through or having the time or knowing an impact of a negative event in terms of just clicking and accepting the EULA and using that application on their phone. They just look at in a different way. Is that valid? How do they change that behavior? How do you look at this new generation, and there's this sea of data which is far larger than it used to be coming off all these devices, internet of things, obviously. People are things too. The mobile devices with all that geolocation data, and the sensor data, and then oh by the way it's all going to be in our cars and everything else shortly. How's that landscape changing and challenging you in new ways, and what are you doing about it? >> The speed and dynamics are astronomical. How do you count the stars, right? >> Jeff: (laughs) >> And should you? Isn't that kind of a waste of time? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> It used to be that knowledge, when I was a kid, was knowing what was in A to Z of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Now facts are cheap. Facts used to be expensive. You had to take time and commit to them, and physically find them, and be smart enough to read, and on, and on, and on. The dumbest kid is smarter than I was with my Encyclopedia Britannica because we have search engines. Now their commodity is how do I critically think? How do I make my brand and make my way? How do I ride and surf on a wave of untold quantities of information to create a quality brand for myself? So the young people are actually in a much better position than, I'll still count us as young. >> Jeff: Yeah, Uh huh. >> But maybe less young. >> Less young, less young than we were yesterday. >> We are digital natives, but I think I am hugely optimistic that the kids coming up are really starting to understand the power of brand: personal brand, family brand, cultural brand. And they're feeling very activist about the whole thing. >> Yeah, which is interesting 'cause that was never a factor when there was no personal brand, right? You were part of-- >> No way. >> whatever entity that you were in. >> Well, you were in a clique. >> Right. >> Right? You identified as when I was home I was the third out of four kids. I was a Roman Catholic girl in the Midwest. I was a total dork with a bowl haircut. Now kids can curate who and what and how they are over the network. Young professionals can connect with people with experience. Or they can decide, I get this all the time on Twitter actually. How did you become a Chief Privacy Officer? I'm really interested in taking a pivot in my career. And I love talking to those people 'cause they always educate me, and I hope that I give them a little bit of value too. >> Right, right. Michelle, we could go on for on and on and on. But, unfortunately, I think you got to go cover a session. So we're going to let you go. >> Thank you. >> Michelle Dennedy, thanks for taking a few minutes of your time. >> Thank you, and don't miss another Data Privacy Day. >> I will not. We'll be back next year as well. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. See you next time.

Published Date : Jan 28 2017

SUMMARY :

talking about the issue of privacy. And when Scott said that, I was his Chief Privacy Officer. Scott's feelings on the subject. one of the prior guests we were talking about I mean that's a great perspective that you were there. the discussion was a press conference And really it was gyro technology, if what you mean by that is secrecy and hiding away (laughs) No shortage of opportunity to keep you busy. I know, so not you get to define the role, I love it. exactly the right amount of rope to hang myself with. and for all the people to whom we sell. It's really just the data in the context What is that? and thankfully the guy at Starbucks Well which could be a cup the way we're going. I could flush it down the toilet. had I been able to feed you questions. It's only as good as the story that enlivens it. How do I share that with your following public, and you really have to bake it in The privacy and the data about what that context is, and the sensor data, and then oh by the way How do you count the stars, right? So the young people are actually in a much better position hugely optimistic that the kids coming up I was a total dork with a bowl haircut. So we're going to let you go. of your time. See you next time.

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