>> live from Washington, D. C. It's the Cube covering a ws public sector summit by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back, everyone. You are watching the Cuban. We're kicking off our day two of our live coverage a ws public sector summit here in our nation's capital. I'm Rebecca Knight co hosting with John Fer Yer John. It's great to be here. 18,000 people having important conversations around around governments and cloud computing. Let's extract the signal from the noise. Let's do with the Cube. Does best, >> Yeah, I mean, this is to me a really exciting event because it's got the confluence of what we love tech and cloud computing and all the awesomeness of that and that enables. But even in Washington, D. C. With the backdrop against tech clash on this, you know, narrative run tech for illah tech for bad, bad check whatever you want to call it. Anti trust is a lot of narratives around that there's a huge story around check for good. So I think there's an interesting balance there around the conversations, but this is world of heavy hitters are this week You've got senior people at the government level here, you have senior tech people hear all kind of meddling and trying to figure out howto let the tail winds of cloud computing Dr Change within government against this backdrop of tech for ill as Jay Carney, whose the global marketing policy guy for Amazon on reports to Jeff Bezos, former Obama press secretary. He's super savvy on policy, super savvy on tech. But this is a really big point in time where the future's gonna be determined by some key people and some key decisions around the role of technology for society, for the citizens, United States, for nation states as people start to figure out the role of data and all the impact of this so super exciting at that level, but also dangerous and people are telling a little bit. But I also want to run hard. That's pretty much the big story. >> So let's let's let's get into this tech backlash because you're absolutely right. Through the public, sentiment about technology and the tech behemoths has really soured. The regulators are sharpening their blades and really paying much more attention, uh, particularly because so many people say, Hey, wait a minute, why? How does Google and Facebook know all this stuff about me, but what do you think? What are we hearing on the ground in terms of where regulation is going? Before, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about this idea of regulators working closely with the innovators, observing but not meddling. I mean, do you think that that's that's That's these dollars underwears We're going in? >> Well, not really. I think that that's where people wanted to go in. I think right now the the surprise attack of tech taking over, if you will in the minds of people and or without Israel or not, it's happened, right? So I was talking yesterday around how the Internet, when Bill Clinton was president, really grew a little bit slower than the pace of this today. But they did a good job of managing that they had private sectors take over the domain name system. We saw that grow that created in the open Web and the Web was open. Today it's different. It's faster in terms of technology innovation, and it's not as open. You have Facebook, LinkedIn and these companies that have silos of data, and they're not sharing it with cyber security General Keith Alexander, former head of the NSA and the first commander of cyber command in the U. S. The United States under Obama. He pointed out that visibility into the cyber attacks aren't there because there's no sharing of data. We heard about open data and knishes from a think tank. The role of data and information is going to be a critical conversation, and I don't think the government officials are smart enough and educated enough yet to understand that So regulatory groups want to regulate they don't know how to. They're reaching out the Amazons, Google's and the Facebook to try to figure out what's going on. And then from there they might get a path. But they're still in the early stages. Amazon feels like they're not harming anyone there. Lower prices, fast delivery, more options. They're creating an enablement environment for tons of startups, so they feel like they're not harming anyone. You're the antitrust, but if they're going to being monopolizing the market place, that's another issue. But I still think Amazon still an enabling mode, and I think you know, they're just running so hard. It's going so fast, I think there's gonna be a big challenge. And if industry doesn't step up and partner with government, it's going to be a real mess. And I think it's just moving too fast. It's very complicated. Digital is nuanced. Now. You get the role of data all this place into into into effect there. >> Well, you're absolutely right that it's going fast. Teresa Carlson on the other day talking about eight of US growth, UH, 41% year over year and she said, Cloud is the new normal. The cloud cloud is here more and more governments on state and local, really recognizing and obviously international countries to recognize that this, this is they're adopting these cloud first approach is, >> yeah, I mean, I think the first approach is validated 100%. There's no debate. I think it's not an ah ha moment. Cloud Israel. Amazon has absolutely proven since the CIA deal in 2013 that this is a viable strategy for government to get to value fast, and that is the whole speed of cloud game. It's all about time to value with agility. Eccentric center. We've been talking about that with Dev Ops for a long, long time. The real thing that I think's happening that's going on. That's kind of, you know, to read the tea leaves and we'll hear from Corey Quinn. Our host at large will go on later. This is a new generation of talent coming on board and this new generation. It feels like a counterculture mindset. These are Dev ops, mindset, people not necessarily Dev ops like in the Cloud Computing Way. They're younger, they're thinking differently, and they think like Amazon not because they love Amazon, because that's their nature. Their got their getting content in a digital way, their digital natives. They're born into that kind of cultural mindset. Of what is all this nonsense red tape? What's the bottlenecked in solving these problems? There's really not a good answer anymore, because with cloud computing and machine learning an A I, you can solve things faster. So if you expose the data, smart people go well. That's a problem that could be song. Let's solve it. So I think there's going to be a resurgence is going to be a renaissance of of younger people, kind of in a counter culture way that's going to move fast and an impact society and I think it's gonna happen pretty quickly over the next 10 years. >> Well, that's one of the things that's so inspiring about being at a conference like this one a ws public sector summit, Because we are hearing getting back to what you just said. We're solving problems and these air problems about not just selling more widgets. This's actually about saving lives, helping people, delivery of healthcare, finding Mr Missing Persons and POWs who are missing in action. >> I mean, the problems could be solved with technology now for goodwill, I think will outweigh the technology for Ayla's Jay Carney calls it. So right now, unfortunately, was talking about Facebook and all this nonsense that happened with the elections. I think that's pretty visible. That's painful for people to kind of deal with. But in the reality that never should have happened, I think you're going to see a resurgence of people that's going to solve problems. And if you look at the software developer persona over the past 10 to 15 years, it went from hire. Some developers build a product ship it market. It makes some money to developers being the frontlines. Power players in software companies there on the front lines. They're making changes. They're moving fast, creating value. I see that kind of paradigm hitting normal people where they can impact change like a developer would foran application in society. I think you're gonna have younger people solving all kinds of crisis around. Whether it's open opioid crisis, healthcare, these problems will be solved. I think cloud computing with a I and machine learning and the role of data will be a big catalyst. >> But money, the money, the money is the thing we're going to have Cory Quinn on later talking about this this talent gap because there are people who are, As you said, they're young people who are motivated to solve these problems, and they want to work for mission driving institutions. What better mission, then helping the United States government >> just heard in the hallway? This has been the I've heard this multiple times here. This show I just heard someone saying Yeah, but that person's great. I can't keep them. What's happening is with the talent is the people that they need for cloud computing. Khun, get a job that pays three times Mohr orm or at the private sector. So, you know, Governor doesn't have stock options, >> right? All right, all right. If >> you're, ah, machine learning, >> people call girls in the lounge. >> Eso all kinds of different diners. But I think this mission driven culture of working for society for good might be that currency. That will be the equivalent stock option that I think is something that we were watching. Not haven't seen anything yet, But maybe that will happen. >> Paid in good feelings way. We've got a lot of great guests. Wave already teed up. We've got your E. Quinn. Bill Britain from Cal Poly to talk more about ground station. We have alien Gemma Smith of YSL Itics, uh, and Jameel Jaffer. >> Think ground station. But the biggest surprise for me and the show so far has been ground station that that product has got so much traction. That's ridiculous. I thought it would be kind of cool. Spacey. I like it, but it's turning into a critical need for a I ot I mean, I was just talking with you. Came on about the airplane having WiFi on the plane. We all like Wow, we expected now, but you go back years ago is like, Oh, my God. I got WiFi on the plane. That's a ground station, like dynamic people going. Oh, my God. I can provision satellite and get data back, all for io ti anywhere in the world. So that is pretty killer. >> Excellently. I'm looking forward to digging in with you with many guests today. >> Good. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. For John. For your stay tuned, you are watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE! Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Public Sector here in beautiful Washington D.C. Springtime in D.C., there's no better time to be here. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting along with John Furrier, always so much fun to work with you. >> Great to see you. >> And this is a very exciting event for you in particular 'cause you've been doing a lot of great reporting around the modernization of IT in government. I'd love to have you just start riffing, John. What's on your mind right now coming into this show? What are some of the questions that're burning? >> I mean clearly the most important story that needs to be told and is being talked about here in D.C. in the tech world is, for this show specifically, is the JEDI contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative. It's a word that's not being kicked around at this show because-- >> Rebecca: Nothing to do with Star Wars. >> It's literally the elephant in the room because the contract's been waiting, Oracle's been dragging it on and Oracle's been part of apparently, my opinion from my reporting, is involved in some dirty under-handed tactics against Amazon. But it's being delayed because they're suing it. And Oracle's out. They have no chance of winning the deal, it's really Microsoft and Amazon are going to get a lion's share of the business. So you have, that's the biggest story in tech in D.C. in a long time, is the role of cloud computing is playing in reshaping how government, public sector operates. Combine that with the fact that a new generation of workers are coming in who have no dogma around IT technology, how it's bought or consumed and purchased, and the overcharging that's been going on for many many years, it's been called the Beltway Bandits for a reason because of the waste and sometimes corruption. So a new generation's upon us and Amazon is the leader in making the change happen. The deal they did with the CIA a few years ago really was the catalyst. And since then, public sector and the government has realized that there's advantages to cloud, not only for operating and serving society and its citizens but also competitiveness on a global scale. So a huge transformation, that's the story we're following. That's the story that we got into from the cloud side of the business here in D.C. and that is just raging and expanding and compounded by other factors like Facebook. Irresponsibility in how they managed the data there. Elections were tied in the balance. You're seeing Brexit in the UK. You're seeing counter-terrorism organizations using the dark web and other cyber security challenges at the United States. Literally digital war is happening so a lot of people, smart people, have recognized this and it's now for the first time coming out. >> Right, and I think the other thing that we're also starting to talk much more about is the regulation. I know that you're friendly with Kara Swisher and she bangs on about this all the time. But then she said in a column the other day the problem is is that they're now guns ablazing but do they really understand it? And also, is it too feeble, too little too late? >> I mean, Kara Swisher nailed her story in the New York Times and opinion piece. And I've had similar opinions. Look it. She's been around for a long time, I've been around for a long time. I remember when Bill Clinton was president, that's when the internet was upon us, the Department of Commerce did a good job with the domain name system, they shepherded the technology and they brought it out in a way that was responsible and let government and industry have a nice balancing act with each other and the government really didn't meddle too much. But there was responsibility back then and it wasn't moving as fast. So now you look at what's happening now, the government can't just not ignore the fact that YouTube is, in essence, its own state. And it's acting irresponsibly with how they're handling their situation. You got Facebook run by a 30-something-year-old, which essentially could be as large as a government. So there's no ethics, there's no thinking behind some of the consequences that they've become. So this begs the question, as a technology hock myself, I love tech, never seen tech I didn't like. I mean I love tech. But there's a point where you got to get in there and start shaping impact on ethics and society and we're seeing real examples of how this can wildfire out of control, how tech has just become uncontrollable in a way. >> Yes, no absolutely. And so who is going to be the one to do that? I know that on the show later you're going to be talking to Jay Carney who was obviously in the Obama administration, now here at AWS. It's a well-worn path from the public sector to technology. Susan Molinari, a couple of other, David Plouffe. That is the thing though, that these people really need to get it. Before they can lay down regulations and laws. >> Again, back to why we're here and stories we're trying to tell and uncover and extract is I think the big story that's emerging from this whole world is not just the impact of cloud, we talked about that, we're going to continue to cover that. It's the societal impact and this real there there, there's the intersection of public policy and technology and science where you don't have to be a programmer, you can be an architect of change and know how it works. Then being a coder and trying to codify a government or society. I think you're going to see a new kind of skillset emerge where there's some real critical thinking into how technology can be used for good. You're seeing the trends, Hackathon For Good here, you're seeing a lot of different events where you have inclusion and diversity, bringing more perspectives in. So you got the perfect storm right now for a sea change where it won't be led by the nerds, so to speak, but geeky digital generations will change it. I think that's going to be a big story. Not just workforce changeover but real disciplines around using machine-learning for ethics, societal impact. These are the storylines. I think this is going to be a big long 10-year, 20-year changeover. >> But what will it take though? For the best and the brightest of the nerds to want to go into public service rather than go work for the tech behemoths that are making these changes? I mean that's the thing, it's a war for talent and as we know and we've discussed a lot on theCUBE, there's a big skills gap. >> I think it's been talked about a lot on the web, the millennials want to work for a company that's mission-based. What more mission-based can you look for than so unto our public service right now? John F. Kennedy's famous line, "Ask not what your country can do for you, "what you can do for you country." That might have that appeal for the younger generation because we need it! So the evidence is there and you look at what's going on with our government. There's so many inefficiencies from healthcare to tax reform to policies. There's a huge opportunity to take that waste, and this is what cloud computing and AI and machine-learning can do, is create new capabilities and address those critical waste areas and again, healthcare is just one of many many many others in government where you can really reduce that slack with tech. So it's a great opportunity. >> And where would you say, and I know you've been reporting on this for a long time, where is the government in terms of all of this? I remember not very long ago when healthcare.gov was rolled out and it was revealed that many agencies were still using floppy disks. The government is, first of all is not this monolithic thing, it's many different agencies all with their own tech agendas and with their own processes and policies. So where do you place the government in terms of its modernization right now? >> On the elected officials side, it's weak. They're really not that smart when it comes to tech. Most of the people that are involved in the elected side of the Hill are either lawyers or some sort of major that's not technical. So you can see that with Sundar Pichai from Google and Mark Zuckerberg's testimony when the basic kind of questions they're asking, it's almost a joke. So I think one, the elected officials have to become more tech-savvy. You can't regulate and govern what you don't understand. I think that something that's pretty obvious to most digital natives. And then on the kind of working class, the Defense Department and these other agencies, there's real people in there that have a passion for change and I think there's change agents, Amazon's done really well there. I think that is a piece where you're going to see a movement, where you're going to see this digital native movement where people going to be like, "There's no excuse not to do this right." And I think there's new ways to do it, I think that's going to change. So that's that. On the business side, to how the government procures technology is literally like the '80s, it's like that movie "Hot Tub Time Machine" where you get thrown back. Everything is based on 1980s procurement, 1990s procurement. I mean, shipping manuals. So all these things have to change. How do you procure cloud? If you got to go through a six-month procurement process just to spit up some servers, that's not agility. So procurement's got to change. Competitiveness, what does that mean? This Oracle deal with JEDI highlights a lot of flaws in the government. Which is Oracle's using these rules around procurement to try to stall Amazon, it's kind of like a technicality but it's so irrelevant to the reality of the situation. So procurement has to change. >> Well one of the things you said about how there's a lot of pressure to get it right. And that is absolutely true because we are dealing with national security issues, people's lives, health, these really important topics. And yet the private sector doesn't always get it right the first time either. So how would you describe the government, the federal approach to how they start to implement these new technologies and experiment with other kinds of tools and techniques? >> Well I think there's obviously some agencies that have sensitive things. CIA's a poster child in my opinion of how to do it right. The JEDI, Department of Defense is emulating that and that's a good thing. The Department of Defense is also going multicloud as they put out in their statement. Amazon for the JEDI piece which is for troops in the field. I think that every agency's going to have its own workload and those workloads should decide which cloud to use based upon the architecture of the workload. 'Cause the data needs to be in the cloud, it needs to be real time. And to take the military example, you can't have lag in military, it's not a video game, it's real life, people die. Lag can literally kill people in the field. So technology can be a betterment there but technology to avoid fighting is another one. So you have all these things going on, I think the government's got to really design everything around the workload, their mission, their applications, rather than designing around here's your infrastructure, then decide. >> One of the things we talk about all the time, almost ad nauseam, on theCUBE is digital transformation. And so how do you think about those two, private sector versus public sector? What are the big differences in terms of these institutions on their own journeys of digital transformation? >> I think the government's slower. That's an easy one to talk about. I think there's a lot of moving parts involved, you mentioned some of the procurement things, so a lot of processes. It's the same kind of equation. People process technology, except the people that process is much more complicated on the public sector side than private sector, unless it's a big company. So imagine the biggest company in the private sector side, multiply that times a hundred, that's the government. So in each agency there's a lot of things going on there. But it's getting better. I think cloud has shown that you can actually do that, the people side of things going to be addressed by this new migration of new generation of people coming in saying, "I don't really care how you did it before, "this is how we're going to do it today." The processes are going to be optimized so there's some innovation around process improvement that's going to end on the wayside and the technology everyday is coming faster and faster. Recognition, facial recognition software. Look at that. AI. These are things that are just undeniable now, they have to be dealt with. What do you do to privacy? So again, back to process. So people process technology. >> AWS is a behemoth in cloud computing. What do you want to be hearing here at this conference? They're so far ahead of Google and Microsoft but we cannot count those two companies out, of course not. But what are you looking for for key messaging at this show? >> Well I'm looking forward to seeing Andy Jassy's Fireside Chat with Teresa Carlson tomorrow. I'm interested in some of the use cases coming out of Teresa Carlson's top customers in public sector, again it's global public sector so it's not just in North America here in the United States. I'm interested in also understanding what's real and what's not real around the fear, uncertainty and doubt that a lot of people have been putting on Amazon. Because I see Amazon posturing in a way that's saying go faster, make change and it's not so much that they want to monopolize the entire thing, they're just moving faster. And I think Andy Jassy yesterday saying that they welcome regulation is something that they're trying to push the regulators on. So I think they welcome change. So I want to understand if Amazon really wants to go faster or is there an agenda there. (laughs) What's going on? >> I know, methinks these tech titans are asking for a little too much regulation right now. I mean obviously Mark Zuckerberg has also said, "Please regulate us, I can't do this alone." And here we have Andy Jassy yesterday saying those same things. >> Andy Jassy said on stage yesterday with Kara Swisher, "We can't arrest people." So if their tech goes bad, they're only beholden to the consequences as a private entity. They're not the law so this is where again, back to top story here is that, what is the role of government? This change is here. It's not going away, it's only going to get faster. So the sooner the elected officials and all the agencies get out in front of the digital transformation, the sooner the better. Otherwise it's going to be a wrecking ball. >> Well I cannot wait to dig into more of this over the next two days with you, here at AWS Public Sector. >> All right. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, you are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cubes Live coverage here in Las Vegas. The Cube covering del technology World twenty nineteen. I'm John for Michael David. Want Dave? Lot of strategy being discussed. A lot of new product introductions, availability of things and beta. Michael Dell on stage of Pat Nelson, You're starting to tell a lot of great things. Jeff Clarke, master of ceremonies and here with us, Matt Baker was senior vice president's strategy and playing. Works for Jeff Clarke. Re to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. It's great to be back. >> So you're the man behind the curtain for Jeffrey. You get mall. Who's their devices? You sending all the place? He's Tom Brady. You're Bill Belichick. I >> don't have my >> so pretty strategic couple years for del sure. So take a step back because you know one of the luxuries of doing the queue for ten years. As we get some one on ones with Michael, we seem in the hallways. We get the child, then he's very approachable. We talk to him before you went private when he went private or three. Dellums buying him. See? And then when he bought the emcee. So serious conversations. But it's always had that vision of scale. Benefits of that and the numbers were off the chart. People's eyes were popping out their head. So a lot of strategy coming in with the founder with the team pretty impressive. Take us through the pieces on the board, What happened, what didn't have and what could have happened and how it all transpired. >> That's that's a long journey, and it could take a little weight. And second, I think, you know, Michael is a visionary. He's always had a vision for something bigger and certainly the history of del shows that scale matters. And, you know, we we saw display out with our competitors and our strategy versus their strategy. They got smaller, we got bigger and you know, so we're sitting here today. Following all of those moves was a vision tio become that, as Michael would say, essential infrastructure provider and in addition to that not just the physical infrastructure but the logical infrastructure of the management of all that. So vision that Michael saw through to, you know, the acquisition of the M C along with the constituent parts that were the federation inside of there being bm where an opportunity to really bring forward a solutions powerhouse that was ableto address this broad challenge that our customers were having, Which is how do you manage all of this stuff? And, you know, putting a lasso around that and figuring out how to help our customers with what is becoming increasingly complicated. It's not becoming simpler. The individual components are becoming simpler, and that's our job. To make each of those elements more automated more, you know, easy to use, more approachable for more people. But ultimately, people are trying to achieve so much with technology today that you gotta drain away the complexity of that and bring a higher order platform and a higher order operating environment to allow people to really realize their goals. >> And one of the things that you've got to do and your job is you also got not only look at that but also cut through the hype. Sure, I mean how many times we heard the PC is dead. Many times we heard that if you're not here there, you're out of business somewhat true when you have transformational markets. But then the day that the value activities that they're involved in a company is pretty simple, they have operations. They sell a product, good or service. They give it to a customer, they collect cash. At the end of the day, this workload. So you look at everything all things being equal. This is a developer operational and a workload kind of challenge to do something. Certainly pretty much. It's so operation leads a big advantage. >> Well, I think that's what our customers are struggling with is that there are very good reasons to choose different operating environments. I mean, tohave things in different localities. Simply you might want to preposition content like you guys do. I'm sure somewhere behind the Cube is a cdn right for distributing content and so that service benefits from geographic distribution. But you shouldn't have to create a diverse operating environment in order to operate a geographically diverse environment. What we're creating is the singular operational hub for your entire environment. You can run workloads in azure. You Khun, run workloads in eight of us, you Khun run workloads in the four thousand VC PP partners that that Pat mentioned during the key note. And you could do that all through a single operational framework. I don't want to stay single pane of glass, but in essence, the sink. Thank you. Single operational framework that allows you to orchestrate and manage your entirety of your operations. Which allows you to choose the best horse for the given course. >> So strategy guy? Yeah, dial back a few years, even maybe before the acquisition. How clear wasn't you? Was it to you? And what gave you the confidence that acquiring Because you guys were quiz, It'd Dell was inquisitive, and I say a lot of them didn't really pan out the way you had hoped. And you're going to bring in this giant PMC cleanup. VM wears cloud strategy, leverage it across the portfolio. Really, Dr Scale Become that sort of arms dealer, if you will. Sure. What gave you confidence at the time or was it more? Hey, this is a great asset. We'LL figure it out. Can you share with us? >> I think you need to roll the clock back much further to the fact that We were partners for a long time with the emcee, and we were certainly one of the largest. And year by year, the largest or second largest partner to VM were. So we were incredibly familiar with one another and incredibly familiar with our capabilities. We were the early company that worked on. I can't remember what it was called. It might have been Oh, my God. I can't even remember the name of a guy. Integration. No, no, I'm talking about the early visa and implementations that went to market with Dell. Right? So we have been collaborating on hyper Converged. We've been collaborating on Cloud management. We've been working with the emcee years prior. In fact, some of the folks that are appearing on you know your show today. Our people that were my partners ten years ago at that Del. So I think we had the confidence and Michael certainly had a long history with with the organization. And I think he saw on opportunity that there was sort of ah, confluence of of opportunities around, you know, the markets, you know, our ability to pull a deal like that off. But I think ultimately Michael had the confidence that this was going to create a powerhouse and those assets were undeniable. And to some degree, what you were saying about, you know, the sort of these zero some assumptions is like Okay, well, software to find it's going to disrupt traditional race. To the extent that it's going to be, there are no zero sum outcomes in it. We continue on, and those markets continue to be robust. In fact, the storage market has been growing quite robustly, so sort of like this is a set up of capabilities that people need. We need to get bigger, not smaller. >> I buy that and I buy this not a zero sum. I heard Bill Clinton at Adele World years ago talk about how it's not a zero sum game and that I thought was pretty credible. However, historically the IT business has been a winner. Take most you know the leader gets most of the the prophet the second makes does okay and the third kind of barely breaks even. And there is no fourth, fifth and sixth. So it is sort of a winner. Take All are going to take most market, isn't it? >> I think to some degree, but it depends on how you define markets and Barney we all. We all tend to participate and find opportunities. Teo to move and cross into new market areas. Market extension is a a basic of strategy, right? Like look for adjacent sees expend. So there's plenty of room in this three plus trillion dollars market for us all to really participate. The job of strategists and business leaders is what air those best opportunities and how do we get after them? And certainly Michael is proven to be the strategist to figure this out. Like what? What? You know Dell's acquiring A and C. It's like, Yeah, way are you know that >> nineteen ninety billion You grew fifty fourteen percent last year. What? Yeah, >> it's always good that the founder around always great to have that leadership in the history. But one of the things I really like about the strategy that you guys are taking is one. I love the bigger scale leverage. I think that's right on the money. We called that right out of the gate. I'm here in the Q right when it happened, but there's nothing that's emerging. I want to get your thoughts on what? I see this clearly with Google. Google has a sorry sight, reliable engineer, and they run measurement for the massive interest for themselves. They're clouds. Not yet. Translating is no one's like Google, right? There's no enterprise that actually just Google, so it's like a tailored suit for one person. Google Operational Consistency is a huge message here. This year has been for a while. This is really important. I want you to take a minute to explain why that strategy and what the impact will be for customers. >> Yeah, well, I think that you just sort of it's the analog within our customers to what you just described with our business. Achieving scale allows you to accelerate growth. Achieving scale, innit operations allows you to achieve scale and accelerate. Your digital transformation is a customer. So if you're able to create the equivalent of these sightless reliability, in other words, creating a highly scaleable environment, there is no lack of demand, for it fueled innovation in any business anywhere today. That's why we're so bullish on the future that were in the middle of this massive investment cycle of digitizing codifying business process into application and growing the footprint and sort of surface area of all businesses. So if you're able tto create this consistent operating level rather than spending all day down in the plumbing of it all, automate that layer and then focus on the business value. That's if you go look through our studies around, you know, digital transformation. What our customers air doing. It shows that to some degree they face did transformation stall right there. They're like, How do I get everybody aligned to this tea? I've got the business increasingly were like You all need to come together as an organization and focus up and helping our people free up and scale themselves to get closer to the business and really be a part of that sort of strategic discussion for the company. It's the same thing it's achieved. Scale works everywhere, achieve scale, innit Operations frees up time and investment dollars tto help the debs to help the business >> rival revenue to drive revenue well, not justa cost issue. You take away that cost, which is a cost consolidation, cost, leverage, efficiency, et cetera. But the flip side is like Bank of America was saying on the keynote. They gotta know we gotta run their business and make money. So the APP developers are critical. Well, tonight could be a part of the revenue stream, >> and I think the sort of basics of it all is that this wee keeps throwing around the term digital transformation. But at the end of the day, people are codifying business process and their customer experiences and all of that into technology. And that's how they're delivering new business products, new experiences for their customers. You know, I have a branch list bank that I use, I have. You know, I adopted them because the technology was great, right, because their experience of banking through them is amazing. If Andre never >> they know you that its data model, that actually is not an account number and >> absolutely so I think that that's the point you're asking. Why is a consistent operating model important? It helps it achieve scale. And some people say, Well, it's all about developments like them. Look, it's the It's the interplay between ops and death. There's two words there. It's not know ops. It's Dev and Ops and Achieve Scale. You need operators who can achieve scale to achieve scale, you need consistent capabilities. Tooling >> excited. So what you're saying about revenue scale is really important because most big acquisitions, they talk about synergies. That's a code word for cut. You guys grew fourteen percent last year, so I'm sure you have, you know, costs energies. But they're our revenues, energies as well to your point >> and customers as well. >> I think we've just been successful, showing the power of the full portfolio and and that's turned into will make a bigger and bigger bets with you. And during the the Post keynote press briefing, you know, it was stated. Look, you know, people I don't necessarily want more and more and more more vendors. They want fewer more strategic vendors for certain elements, and then they want to look for new innovation in in other areas on. So I think that it's sort of we're benefitting from the fact that we are the company that you could turn to to solve this broad challenge of it, and then you can work with others around your specific vertical, what you might do. We've got a huge network of partners that we work with that can help customers with the spoke applications for their specific vertical health care retail. So on and so forth. So, yeah, I think we value chain in the valley. Twenty infrastructure >> suppliers to your point about that zero sum. Um, uh, thesis is not being zero. Sum is infrastructure loves automation. Automation loves data. So if you have an end to end architecture, you have better data. Correct. You have opportunities, you know, being around automation machine learning, too. Set the standard for the next layer >> up. Well, and that consistency extends all the way across. Right? So if I can create a consistent model, that model is also four out in the data. And then I can create a consistent engine to consume that data to Dr Automation that continues to add value in value in value. So putting that loop around it is hugely important to driving value for our >> customers. Do your kids play? Would you rather you know, they say we gotta like this Really? The hot desert or freezing cold, right. So, Matt, would you rather be a fighter test pilot or a college professor? >> You know, you must have read something from my Twitter feed. I would rather >> you gotta answer. Definitely. Fighter pilot. Fighter pie. Okay. How about would you rather be a professional hunting and fishing guide or professional ocean racing skipper? >> Probably the ocean racing skipper. Although I'd like to be closer to my family. Both of those. You're out out of >> the way with your top five jobs. >> That was Those are my theoretical jobs. I love my job. I don't want a new job. I love my job. Like I don't I don't want to go anywhere. But if that was purely theoretical of it, >> Matt, thanks for coming on the Cube. I'LL give you the final word. In short, what's the core strategy of Adele Technologies? >> Well, I think it's to continue to drive value across the totality of this entity that has so much power. And I hope that's on display. An obvious to you both that we're really pulling together to create solutions that deliver a massive amount of value to our customers. And I think that's unmatched in the industry. So I appreciate you having me on toe talk through this and give me a little rip me a little about my tweets about my >> friend. Give a quick flight for your video log. The Baker's Dozen. >> Yeah, the Bakers, half dozen >> figures That doesn't give it. What's it about what he wants? The focus. >> It's It's basically a six minute spot that I go through. Six and a half things. Baker's dozens thirteen. It's hard to divide it by two way. End up with a half thing. It's sort of funny, but I just take people through a basic rundown of Hey, what's going on in the marketplace? And I try to make it simple, funny and just sort of poke fun at myself. So it's funny. >> Matt Baker, senior vice president of strategy and planning for Del Technologies. I'm Jeffrey Worry David Lantz. Stay too. From more live coverage of day One of three days of wall to wall coverage to cube sets, A lot of content. The cube cannon blowing out the content here, Del Technologies world. Stay with us. We'LL be right back

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is day three of our coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World. We're in the home stretch. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante joining you, with Alison Dew, the newly minted CMO of Dell. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> So, you've been with Dell for a long time. >> 10 years >> You know the drill, you know the culture. But, 23 days as CMO? >> Yes >> Well congratulations. You were on stage today, awesome show. >> Thank you, I couldn't be more delighted. Great experience for me personally. Great show for our customers. >> Yeah, I'll bet. I mean, and you brought in some outside speakers this year, which has not been typical of this show, at least the legacy EMC world, and certainly Dell World did that. >> Stu: Dell World did, definitely. >> Alison: Dell World did do it more, you know. >> Yep, Bill Clinton, we saw some other amazing speakers. >> Elon Musk >> Elon Musk, I remember the year Elon came. >> So that's good, and you got to interview Ashton Kutcher >> Yeah >> Which was quite amazing. He's an unbelievable-- people don't know, he's an investor, he's kind of a geek. >> Alison: Yep >> Even though he's, you know >> An engineer by training? >> Right, so what'd you think of his discussion? >> I mean, I thought it was fantastic and, as you said, I think people don't quite realize how involved in technology he actually is. And also, how well and successful his businesses have been. And then, equally important, the work that he's doing with his foundation and the way he's using technology for really important human causes. I don't think he gets enough credit for that, so it was great to sit on stage and have that conversation. It was super fun. >> Yeah, cause we know him from That 70's Show. >> I know, I like That 70's Show. >> And he's a goofball, and he comes across He's a great actor, lot of fun. >> Yeah, there was one of the lines I actually really loved from the presentation. It's that he looks for companies that have counter-intuitive thesis because if you're doing something that everybody else is, then chances are somebody is going to catch you and everything else like that. You also had to talk about geeks. You know, John Rose and Ray O'Farrell, up there. Share a little bit about some commonalities you saw between these speakers, and some of the unconventional things they're doing. >> So, I completely agree. I love the point of talking, there's so much hype in the space. And that's why I think that line is so important. And so, the big commonality that we're really seeing and talking about this year in particular is we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and of business transformation, and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies. So, things like AI, IOT, Blockchain, which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value because for years, there's been this hype about big data, but I don't think the reality has quite been there. And now as those technologies catch up, we're really starting to see some practical applications and use cases and that's why I thought, in particular, John Rose's section on AI and how we're seeing some of those really emerging practical applications was so interesting and fun and tied really well to Ashton's talk track. >> You know, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like we started covering the big data trend really early on. And I feel like big data was like the warm up. It's cheaper now to collect all this data. Now that we have all this data, we're going to apply machine intelligence to that data. We're going to scale it, with cloud economics and that's really what's going to drive value and innovation. What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. We talked this morning on the stage even about some of the companies, large and small, who are really doing that. I think one of the examples that's really interesting Wal-Mart using Blockchain technology to decrease the amount of time from seven days to mere seconds that it takes them to identify the source of food contamination. Really interesting things where, a couple of years ago even, frankly even 18, 20 months ago, that would have been a promise, but maybe not a reality. And so that's what I think is really exciting. Finally. >> It's something that's actually resonated with me this week. We've talked for my entire career, there's the journeys. And it was like, a lot of times it's the journey of the technology. A couple of years ago, digital transformation was "Okay, is it real? Isn't it?" Every customer I talk to, they understand making it real as you said in the keynote, where they're going. What kind of feedback are you getting from people at the show? >> So one of the things I talked about briefly on Monday, but I think is really important, is this promise and the hope and the optimism of digital transformation. And yet also, the fear behind it as well. Through some of the work that we've done in our own research for Realizing 2030, we're really seeing that about 50% of our respondents say they believe in the power of the human machine partnership, which means that 50% don't. And all of the data questions are really divided and polarizing like that. And as a lifelong researcher, that's really interesting to me because it says that there's something going on there. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing over 85% of the respondents that we talk to who say they're committed to becoming a software defined company in five years. So this idea of "I know what I want to do "I know what it means to transform an industry, "And yet, I'm still not really sure that's going to "do me or my business good. "I'm not really sure what that means for "myself or my employees, getting really practical. "Obviously about the technologies, "that's what we do, "but the examples of how people can do "that better from a business perspective." That's a lot of the customer conversation that I've had over this week. >> But you're an optimist. You believe the world would be a better place as a result of machines. >> Yes, I do and we do. Are you an optimist? >> I am, I think there's some obviously some challenges but there's no question. Stu and I talk about this all the time, on theCUBE, that machines have always replaced humans throughout history. For the first time now, it's on cognitive functions, but the gap is creativity and eduction. So I am an optimist if we invest in the right places and I think there's an opportunity for public policy to really get involved. Leadership from companies like yours and others, politicians, of course. >> Dave and I did an event a couple of years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssono, you had Andy here. Cause it's really it's not just the technology, it's technology and people, and those have to go together. And Dave said, there's policy and there's so many different layers of this that have to go into it. >> And I think we're just starting to really enter into that. On that optimist versus the robots are coming to get us spectrum, obviously there are things that we have to look out for as leaders, as society, as businesses. And yet, even if you look at the example from this morning, where Ashton is talking about minimizing child sexual trafficking and using AI and machine learning to one, arrest many of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as free thousands of children from sexual slavery. I mean, you hear those examples, and it's hard not to be an optimist. >> I want to ask you about your digital transformation and how that's being led inside of Dell, what it means to you. >> So, obviously, we are two huge companies that came together. So when we talk about digital transformation, and what that really means, have a very different way of operating and working with IT and being in a different business model, we know that really well. One of the things that's really interesting for me personally, as the CMO for 23 days, is one of the biggest line items in my budget is actually for our own marketing digital transformation. Obviously, Dell in particular, had many, many years starting in the consumer and small business, and then growing up to larger businesses, of direct marketing. And we have a great relationship with our customers, but we also have all of these legacy systems and processes and way that work is done and now as we come together with EMC and we start to build Dell Technologies, the idea of what a data driven marketing engine can be, that possibility is something that we're also working to build ourselves. And so, everything from "how do we build our "own data lake to actually bring all "of these sources of data together? "How do we clean up that data?" is something that I'm pretty deeply into myself. There's a lot of that work going on across the company, and then for me personally, as CMO. Big initiative. >> So it's customer experience as part of it, but it's also a new way to work. >> Exactly. And it sounds so trite in a way to say the technology is the easy part, but the really hard part begins when the technology is finished. And I really believe that because if I look at my own team and my own teams experience, there's so many places where they've been doing marketing one way for a very long time. And if you come in and you ask them to do something differently, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. And the only way to unlock the power of the data and the power of the new technologies, is to actually change how work is done. And I know it's an analogy that's overused, but if you'd ask the taxi dispatch "Are you important to the taxi business?" they would have said "Yes, of course "I'm the most important person in this chain." That's how taxis get to customers. And then along comes Uber, and suddenly you don't need that. You have to really think differently about that and as a leader, that's exciting and also really hard. >> I don't know if you've ever heard Sanjay Poonen talk about change, he says there's three reactions to change. Either run from it, fight it, or you embrace it. That's it. And the third is the only way to go. >> It's the only way. >> How about messaging? I'm sensing different messaging. Much more around the business, maybe a little bit less on the products. Plenty of product stuff here, but the high level stuff. What's your philosophy on messaging? >> I used to say "I'm a person that "believes in shades of gray" and about seven years ago I had to stop saying that. (laughs) >> But the truth is, I am a person who believes in shades of gray and I almost always believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle. So you get in marketing into these debates about is it these thought leadership and high level conversations or is it about product messaging and selling what's on the truck? And the honest truth is, you have to do both. You have to set a vision, you have to build the brand, you have to talk about the business and where we're going from a business perspective. As we talk about things like 2030, that's a really lean into the future conversation. At the same time, we also want to sell you some PCs and some servers and some storage and some data protection, so we need to do that well, too. And frankly, we need to get better as a marketing machine, as a company, and as salespeople, in terms of talking to customers. The right conversation at the right time. Again, sounds like marketing 101, but it's actually quite hard to do. When do you want to have a connected cities conversation? When do you want to just talk about how to modernize your data center? >> It's true, we always talk about above the line and below the line. When you're talking above the line, you might be speaking one language and below the line, another language. You try to mix the two, it doesn't work. >> Right, exactly. >> You have to target the appropriate audience. >> The conversation one of the women on my team started talking about this and I thought it really made sense was macro-conversations, micro-conversations. So to get out of this advertising vernacular, and I grew up in the ad industry, sort of above the line, below the line, and those were always two departments who didn't even talk to each other and usually hated each other. Instead of above the line, below the line, what's the macro-conversation? How are we talking about Realizing 2030? How are we talking about digital transformation? And then what are some of those micro-conversations where I'm going to talk to you about what are the personas that you have in your work force? And lets talk about some in user compute technology together with something really simple, like a monitor, that's going to help them be more productive. Those things don't have to fight with each other, you just have to be honest about when you're doing each one. >> Target them in the right place. >> Alison, we're getting to the end of the show here. >> Yeah, I can talk a lot. >> First of all, New Media Row here gave us the biggest set. We've done this show for nine years, we're super excited. The therapy dogs next door-- >> I love the therapy dogs. >> Are really fun to see, but every once in a while, give a little bit of color in the background here. For people that didn't get to come and experience in person, I know the sessions are online, but give us some of the flavors and some of the fun things you've seen and what would we expect from you in the future? >> I think this is just one of the most fun shows. I mean, obviously it's important for us to set our vision, it's important for people to come into the hands on labs, and the training, and the breakouts, and to learn and to engage. But, you see things like the beanbags and sitting out there, the therapy dogs, and my team does want me to say that every year we get new beanbag covers so we don't recycle those. And then really experience the fun in the Solutions Expo and talking about the way that we're taking trash, plastic trash, out of oceans and making art with it, so we can talk about our sustainable supply chain in an interesting way. I think, I'm biased, but I think this is the best show in terms of actual education and vision, but also some fun. Hopefully you guys think so too. >> Well, Sting. >> And Walk the Moon. Do you guys know who Walk the Moon is? >> Yes. >> I don't. >> Me neither. (laughs) >> Come on and dance with me. >> Oh, okay. Alright, great. >> I'm a child of the 80's, what can I say? >> Alright, so 23 days on the job, what should we be watching from you, your team, and Dell? >> So, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is our first Dell Technologies World, so obviously, we have just gone through some of the biggest integration of large tech companies in the history. And we're really proud of how successful that integration has been, and yet we also still have so much work to do around telling that integrated story. Yes, Dell and Dell EMC, but also together with VM, we're a pivotal RSA Secureworks, and the extend is strategically aligned businesses. And so that's what you'll see us really lean into is "How do we tell "that story more effectively?" We're continuing to invest in the brand, so a lot of the work that you've seen with Jeffrey Wright and those TV spots we launched again in March, and just making sure that people understand what the Dell Technologies family actually is. >> So really a more integrated story. But something that Dell always tried to tell, but you didn't have the portfolio to tell it. Now you do, so that's got to be exciting for you. >> It is exciting, yeah. >> Great. Alison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> My pleasure. Cheers, thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World in Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, break it all down. Stu, this is our ninth year at Dell, EMC, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies World. >> Yeah, I mean Dave, and Old EMC World was one of the first places I met you. I think it was like 2008 or something like that. There was like a little blogger lounge. >> Yeah, this is 15 for you, I think it's 11 or 12 for me. >> Stu: Yeah. >> So it's been quite a run. I mean you remember the early days of this event. It was really a technical show. And I think that's probably why it's had such staying power. Because the roots are embedded in technology, but wow what a long way we've come. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, Dave, theCUBE, oh my god, I can't believe, double set here. We were looking at photos of us shoved in the corner with horrible lighting and no good cameras, and we've got a massive crew here. You're always looking sharp as usual, Dave. >> Thank you Stu. (laughing) >> Yeah, I mean gosh, that first year, I was wearing a vendor polo. (laughing) No hoodies back then. I wear a hoodie some now. But it's interesting for me, especially, since I spent 10 years working at EMC. I've been at Dell World for four or five years, kind of the mash up of those two is the biggest tech merger we've been covering since it was announced. This show has a lot of Dell overtones. So you and I have been that, Dell World was originally that CIO event. You had people like Bill Clinton and Elon Musk up onstage here. At this show we've got people like Walter Isaacson up onstage, I love reading his books, listen to the podcast. >> Dave: Andy McAfee. >> Andy McAfee, who you and I have interviewed a few times, talking about the second machine age, so some of those kind of high-level business issues as opposed to the deep in the portfolio, Dave Donatelli upstage walking through 37 different product announcements. >> So back then did you have hair or was this... >> Yeah, come on Dave, I was, when I started at EMC I was 7 foot tall and had hair. You know, the years of tech beat me down. >> So let's look at this merger, Stu. We go back, we've said, you and I have talked about this a lot. It was inevitable. You had Amazon coming in hard, driving margins of the enterprise down. Something had to happen to HPE, something had to happen to EMC, these infrastructure companies, and we said at the time that what we were going to see is 19% gross margin company married to the 16% gross margins company, come somewhere together in the low 30s gross margin. That's exactly what we've seen. The thing that's a little bit surprising to me is we've seen growth out of Dell. I've seen a lot of growth out of many enterprise infrastructure companies that are large and incumbents. Obviously people like Pure Storage grow very quickly. But at the time the merger we pinned them at slow 70s and they're now $80 billion, and we want to break that down a little bit. But did the growth surprise you? Particularly the client side grew. And the storage side declined multiplicitously. >> Dave, as you've been breaking down and I've been watching you, half of their business is the client side, and when they call out 21 consecutive quarters of growth, well if half the business has grown, that's good. And VMWare, doing well. We just interviewed Pac Elsinger. You know, VMWare's clicking well, integrating with the cloud. There's a lot of change there. Just one quick thing, talk about EMC. For me, one of the saving graces for EMC is they never bought a large services organization. You know, back in the day it was like, oh they were going to buy Accenture. There were some of these things. You look at the companies that have 100,000 services people, they're having to trim down, they're having to spin things out. You know the Dell spin merge, is Dell did spin off per row. So, while there have been some consolidation and some reductions since Dell and EMC have come together, you know, overall they're growing, there's good, there's new areas that they're putting R and D together. >> Just to give our audiences a little sort of overview in case you're not that familiar with what Dell has become, Dell Technologies, I mean, essentially you're looking at an $80 billion business. The core client side and infrastructure of the enterprise side comprised about 69 billion. VMWare's almost 8 billion, and then other, you know RSA, and well, whatever was back then pivotal before the IPO, etc., you know, Dell Financial, etc., was about 3 billion. That gets you to 80 billion. As you said, the client side is about half of the business. It's growing very nicely at about 7% a year, and it's about five and a half, 5.6% operating income. The ISG business, which is the core of, the classic EMC, all the server stuff, all the networking stuff. It's about, let's see 30.7 billion, almost 31 billion. The servers and networking side are growing at 20% a year. The storage is declining quite significantly. Double digits, they're sort of moderating that decline. And it's a higher percentage operating income, as percentage of revenue about 7%. You'd like to see that significantly higher. Now you go to VMWare, right? VMWare is 10% of the company's revenue but it accounts for half of the company's operating cash flow because it's margins, operating margins, are way up, high 20s, low 30s-- >> Yeah, I mean Dave, it was, I remember VM World, I think it was two years ago, I went to Michael, I'm like, "Michael, people think you're going to sell that off." And he was just foaming at the mouth. He's like, "They're stupid, they don't understand math." >> Dave: Well why would he? >> You know VMWare absolutely-- >> I mean, there's a 35% operating margin business, I mean it's a fantastic business. >> Dave, to be honest, everybody watching, is VMWare went through a little bit of a downturn. You know, the show two years ago wasn't great. >> Dave: Okay, right. >> But you know, NSX is now cooking, vSAN's doing great. There's lots of good areas that they have there. And the cloud picture. I mean turn back three years ago, Dave, VMWare was making statements like, when the old bookseller wins we're losing. EMC on their side was kind of trying to play a little bit with public cloud, but it was well understood in the field, public cloud is your enemy. And the market has matured. It understood that companies are figuring out their cloud strategy and their application and data strategy. And it's not a winner take all, zero sum game, everything goes to one of the top three or four public cloud players. >> So I got to ask you, so you feel as though that's sustainable, right? 'Cause I got to say, if I were AWS I would be looking at this saying this awesome. I need to get into the enterprise. I got to deal with the number one enterprise infrastructure player in VMWare in terms of its brand and its presence. I mean half a million customers, I think, is the number. I'm very excited. The flip side of that is the reality is, that deal for VMWare has been a huge tailwind for them. So help us square that circle. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's nuanced and complicated. Because when I talk to service providers, when I talk to the channel partners here with VMWare and with Dell, they're all starting to work more and more with VMWare. So you know, short-term, next two to three years, I think there's a great tailwind for VMWare to get involved here, but my concern is long term that people get on Amazon and they say, this is great and look at all these services and all of these things, maybe I don't need to pay for my server virtualization anymore. Maybe I don't need some of those pieces. What do I need in my data to center, sure I'll continue, but it's slowly declining like you mentioned. Storage is on a bit of a decline overall. So it's death by 1000 cuts. It is that replacement. For me it's always watching that data and that applications. It is tough, like super tough. David Floyer always say migrations, don't do 'em. You're going to go through so much pain, especially things like database migrations. But it is something that's happening. It's going to take the next five to 10 years as we look at these shifts. People are building new apps all the time. That tends to favor the public clouds, and there's so much happening in that space, but you know, the whole Dell family including Pivotal and VMWare, Virtustream, RSA, there are places where they win and still do well because, remember of course, none of these companies, it's not like they have 75% market share. So you know, if you ask Michael Dell, number one thing is he wants to take market share from HPE, and if he continues to take some of their market share it can help offset some of the things that he's losing to the public cloud. >> And well you have to take market share in a market that's not growing that fast. But you know, as we say on theCUBE many times, these disruptions are not binary, right? We still have mainframes for example. In fact, they're helping their tailwind for IBM right now. So you can put forth a scenario where yeah, a lot of these cloud native apps are going to be built in AWS and a lot of VMWare customers are going to do that, but as we often say, organizations can't just take their data and stuff it into the cloud, the public cloud, right? They've got to bring the cloud operating model to their data, to their business. We ask Pat, is it just use case specific, the Amazon Cloud and IBM I guess as well, or is it really bringing that cloud experience. And you know, he definitively said it's both, and I presume you buy that? >> Yeah, and I mean, Dave I listened to Michael DEll's keynote, and he said their goal is to integrate from the edge to the multi-cloud world. There's things that I want to understand this week. You know, I talked to some of my, you know, the real pellor heads here, that do really advanced type of technology. There are sessions here on containers. There's probably people talking about serverless here at the show. So they're looking at those next generation things, especially the VMWare side of the house is there. At the edge, you and I got to hear really the IoT strategy that Dell laid out towards the end of last year. Edge, absolutely huge opportunity, and there is no clear leader today because it's very early here, so how real are some of these opportunities to really expand beyond the traditional market because look, Dell's doing great in servers, that's the core of their business. It's the main driver for a lot of it, and you know, as Michael's happy to say, he said, "You know, hey, the PCs "and laptops are still doing well "two decades after IBM called it the post PC world." >> Thank goodness for client side. I mean that has been the savior here. What do you think, I mean you were at EMC for a number of years. What do you think happened to the storage side? That was a surprise to me because EMC is very rarely, if ever, a lost share in storage. They've either held share or bumped it up, doing acquisitions and so forth. But you had kind of Tucci with his hand at the wheel, doing tuck-in acquisitions, really focused on maintaining that share. Do you think it was just the disruption of the merger? Was it just inevitable that you had just the storage business getting too long in the tooth? What happened? >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, and there are so many things. Everything from the quarter shifted. So you know, it was going to take the end of quarter, which EMC always had a huge hockey stick on, shifted by a month. So some of it it was just financial where it landed up in the quarter, some of the big shifts that are happening in the market. EMC was very early on flash and did well in it, and they've got the VMAX and they've got the XtremeIO, and they're doing well there, but there's lots of competition there. Hyperconverge, once again, Dell and EMC doing great there. But there are some of these macroshifts and clouds eating away at it. So I don't have a single answer. There's so many different pieces. You know, storage has always been a knife fight. One of the things I want to understand this week, Dave, is the old EMC, well, we're going to have nine or 17 different products, and they'll all overlap. You wonder if Dell is, I really expect that Michael Dell, Jeff Clarke are going to streamline that portfolio. Profitability, make sure that they're getting the market share that they need because the old model might have worked in a growing market, but in a flat to slightly negative market it's not going to make much sense. >> And you already said that, I mean you made the point, Michael's keynote, the keynotes generally this morning, no question had Michael's fingerprint on them. That's much more like a Dell World than a traditional EMC World. We had Jeremy and Jonathan coming out on motorcycles and all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, much more staid. I think conservative, sending a message of steady. We're here for you to support your digital transformation. We are your infrastructure partner, so I mean, I think it's clear who's running the company. Alright, Stu, well, looking forward to this week. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, double CUBE sets, check out thecube.net for all the live coverage. Check out siliconangle.com, wikibon.com as well for all the research. We'll be back right after this short break. We're live at Dell Technologies World 2018.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (peppy digital music) >> Veritas Vision 2017 everybody. We're here at The Aria Hotel. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Vtas, #VtasVision, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stuart Miniman who is my cohost for the week. Stu, we heard Richard Branson this morning. The world-renowned entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson came up from the British Virgin Islands where he lives. He lives in the Caribbean. And evidently he was holed out during the hurricane in his wine cellar, but he was able to make it up here for the keynote. We saw on Twitter, so, great keynote, we'll talk about that a little bit. We saw on Twitter that he actually stopped by the Hitachi event, Hitachi NEXT for women in tech, a little mini event that they had over there. So, pretty cool guy. Some of the takeaways: he talked a lot about- well, first of all, welcome to day two. >> Thanks, Dave. Yeah, and people are pretty excited that sometimes they bring in those marquee guests, someone that's going to get everybody to say, "Okay, wait, it's day two. "I want to get up early, get in the groove." Some really interesting topics, I mean talking about, thinking about the community at large, one of the things I loved he talked about. I've got all of these, I've got hotels, I've got different things. We draw a circle around it. Think about the community, think about the schools that are there, think about if there's people that don't have homes. All these things to, giving back to the community, he says we can all do our piece there, and talking about sustainable business. >> As far as, I mean we do a lot of these, as you know, and as far as the keynote speakers go, I thought he was one of the better ones. Certainly one of the bigger names. Some of the ones that we've seen in the past that I think are comparable, Bill Clinton at Dell World 2012 was pretty happening. >> There's a reason that Bill Clinton is known as the orator that he is. >> Yeah, so he was quite good. And then Robert Gates, both at ServiceNow and Nutanics, Condi Rice at Nutanics, both very impressive. Malcolm Gladwell, who's been on theCUBE and Nate Silver, who's also been on theCUBE, again, very impressive. Thomas Friedman we've seen at the IBM shows. The author, the guy who wrote the Jobs book was very very strong, come on, help me. >> Oh, yeah, Walter Isaacson. >> Walter Isaacson was at Tableau, so you've seen some- >> Yeah, I've seen Elon Musk also at the Dell show. >> Oh, I didn't see Elon, okay. >> Yeah, I think that was the year you didn't come. >> So I say Branson, from the ones I've seen, I don't know how he compared to Musk, was probably the best I think I've ever seen. Very inspirational, talking about the disaster. They had really well-thought-out and well-produced videos that he sort of laid in. The first one was sort of a commercial for Richard Branson and who he was and how he's, his passion for changing the world, which is so genuine. And then a lot of stuff on the disaster in the British Virgin Islands, the total devastation. And then he sort of went into his passion for entrepreneurs, and what he sees as an entrepreneur is he sort of defined it as somebody who wants to make the world a better place, innovations, disruptive innovations to make the world a better place. And then had a sort of interesting Q&A session with Lynn Lucas. >> Yeah, and one of the lines he said, people, you don't go out with the idea that, "I'm going to be a businessman." It's, "I want to go out, I want to build something, "I want to create something." I love one of the early anecdotes that he said when he was in school, and he had, what was it, a newsletter or something he was writing against the Vietnam War, and the school said, "Well, you can either stay in school, "or you can keep doing your thing." He said, "Well, that choice is easy, buh-bye." And when he was leaving, they said, "Well, you're either going to be, end up in jail or be a millionaire, we're not sure." And he said, "Well, what do ya know, I ended up doing both." (both laughing) >> So he is quite a character, and just very understated, but he's got this aura that allows him to be understated and still appear as this sort of mega-personality. He talked about, actually some of the interesting things he said about rebuilding after Irma, obviously you got to build stronger homes, and he really sort of pounded the reducing the reliance on fossil fuels, and can't be the same old, same old, basically calling for a Marshall Plan for the Caribbean. One of the things that struck me, and it's a tech audience, generally a more liberal audience, he got some fond applause for that, but he said, "You guys are about data, you don't just ignore data." And one of the data points that he threw out was that the Atlantic Ocean at some points during Irma was 86 degrees, which is quite astounding. So, he's basically saying, "Time to make a commitment "to not retreat from the Paris Agreement." And then he also talked about, from an entrepreneurial standpoint and building a company that taking note of the little things, he said, makes a big difference. And talking about open cultures, letting people work from home, letting people take unpaid sabbaticals, he did say unpaid. And then he touted his new book, Finding My Virginity, which is the sequel to Losing My Virginity. So it was all very good. Some of the things to be successful: you need to learn to learn, you need to listen, sort of an age-old bromide, but somehow it seemed to have more impact coming from Branson. And then, actually then Lucas asked one of the questions that I put forth, was what's his relationship with Musk and Bezos? And he said he actually is very quite friendly with Elon, and of course they are sort of birds of a feather, all three of them, with the rocket ships. And he said, "We don't talk much about that, "we just sort of-" specifically in reference to Bezos. But overall, I thought it was very strong. >> Yeah Dave, what was the line I think he said? "You want to be friends with your competitors "but fight hard against them all day, "go drinking with them at night." >> Right, fight like crazy during the day, right. So, that was sort of the setup, and again, I thought Lynn Lucas did a very good job. He's, I guess in one respect he's an easy interview 'cause he's such a- we interview these dynamic figures, they just sort of talk and they're good. But she kept the conversation going and asked some good questions and wasn't intimidated, which you can be sometimes by those big personalities. So I thought that was all good. And then we turned into- which I was also surprised and appreciative that they put Branson on first. A lot of companies would've held him to the end. >> Stu: Right. >> Said, "Alright, let's get everybody in the room "and we'll force them to listen to our product stuff, "and then we can get the highlight, the headliner." Veritas chose to do it differently. Now, maybe it was a scheduling thing, I don't know. But that was kind of cool. Go right to where the action is. You're not coming here to watch 60 Minutes, you want to see the headline show right away, and that's what they did, so from a content standpoint I was appreciative of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. And then, of course, they brought on David Noy, who we're going to have on in a little while, and went through, really, the updates. So really it's the expansion, Dave, of their software-defined storage, the family of products called InfoScale. Yesterday we talked a bit about the Veritas HyperScale, so that is, they've got the HyperScale for OpenStack, they've got the HyperScale for containers, and then filling out the product line is the Veritas Access, which is really their scale-out NAS solution, including, they did one of the classic unveils of Veritas Software Company. It was a little odd for me to be like, "Here's an appliance "for Veritas Bezel." >> Here's a box! >> Partnership with Seagate. So they said very clearly, "Look, if you really want it simple, "and you want it to come just from us, "and that's what you'd like, great. "Here's an appliance, trusted supplier, "we've put the whole thing together, "but that's not going to be our primary business, "that's not the main way we want to do things. "We want to offer the software, "and you can choose your hardware piece." Once again, knocking on some of those integrated hardware suppliers with the 70 point margin. And then the last one, one of the bigger announcements of the show, is the Veritas Cloud Storage, which they're calling is object storage with brains. And one thing we want to dig into: those brains, what is that functionality, 'cause object storage from day one always had a little bit more intelligence than the traditional storage. Metadata is usually built in, so where is the artificial intelligence, machine learning, what is that knowledge that's kind of built into it, because I find, Dave, on the consumer side, I'm amazed these days as how much extra metadata and knowledge gets built into things. So, on my phone, I'll start searching for things, and it'll just have things appear. I know you're not fond of the automated assistants, but I've got a couple of them in my house, so I can ask them questions, and they are getting smarter and smarter over time, and they already know everything we're doing anyway. >> You know, I like the automated assistants. We have, well, my kid has an Echo, but what concerns me, Stu, is when I am speaking to those automated assistants about, "Hey, maybe we should take a trip "to this place or that place," and then all of a sudden the next day on my laptop I start to see ads for trips to that place. I start to think about, wow, this is strange. I worry about the privacy of those systems. They're going to, they already know more about me than I know about me. But I want to come back to those three announcements we're going to have David Noy on: HyperScale, Access, and Cloud Object. So some of the things we want to ask that we don't really know is the HyperScale: is it Block, is it File, it's OpenStack specific, but it's general. >> Right, but the two flavors: one's for OpenStack, and of course OpenStack has a number of projects, so I would think you could be able to do Block and File but would definitely love that clarification. And then they have a different one for containers. >> Okay, so I kind of don't understand that, right? 'Cause is it OpenStack containers, or is it Linux containers, or is it- >> Well, containers are always going to be on Linux, and containers can fit with OpenStack, but we've got their Chief Product Officer, and we've got David Noy. >> Dave: So we'll attack some of that. >> So we'll dig into all of those. >> And then, the Access piece, you know, after the apocalypse, there are going to be three things left in this world: cockroaches, mainframes, and Dot Hill RAID arrays. When Seagate was up on stage, Seagate bought this company called Dot Hill, which has been around longer than I have, and so, like you said, that was kind of strange seeing an appliance unveil from the software company. But hey, they need boxes to run on this stuff. It was interesting, too, the engineer Abhijit came out, and they talked about software-defined, and we've been doing software-defined, is what he said, way before the term ever came out. It's true, Veritas was, if not the first, one of the first software-defined storage companies. >> Stu: Oh yeah. >> And the problem back then was there were always scaling issues, there were performance issues, and now, with the advancements in microprocessor, in DRAM, and flash technologies, software-defined has plenty of horsepower underneath it. >> Oh yeah, well, Dave, 15 years ago, the FUD from every storage company was, "You can't trust storage functionality "just on some generic server." Reminds me back, I go back 20 years, it was like, "Oh, you wouldn't run some "mission-critical thing on Windows." It's always, "That's not ready for prime time, "it's not enterprise-grade." And now, of course, everybody's on the software-defined bandwagon. >> Well, and of course when you talk to the hardware companies, and you call them hardware companies, specifically HPE and Dell EMC as examples, and Lenovo, etc. Lenovo not so much, the Chinese sort of embraced hardware. >> And even Hitachi's trying to rebrand themselves; they're very much a hardware company, but they've got software assets. >> So when you worked at EMC, and you know when you sat down and talked to the guys like Brian Gallagher, he would stress, "Oh, all my guys, all my engineers "are software engineers. We're not a hardware company." So there's a nuance there, it's sort of more the delivery and the culture and the ethos, which I think defines the software culture, and of course the gross margins. And then of course the Cloud Object piece; we want to understand what's different from, you know, object storage embeds metadata in the data and obviously is a lower cost sort of option. Think of S3 as the sort of poster child for cloud object storage. So Veritas is an arms dealer that's putting their hat in the ring kind of late, right? There's a lot of object going on out there, but it's not really taking off, other than with the cloud guys. So you got a few object guys around there. Cleversafe got bought out by IBM, Scality's still around doing some stuff with HPE. So really, it hasn't even taken off yet, so maybe the timing's not so bad. >> Absolutely, and love to hear some of the use cases, what their customers are doing. Yeah, Dave, if we have but one critique, saw a lot of partners up on stage but not as many customers. Usually expect a few more customers to be out there. Part of it is they're launching some new products, not talking about very much the products they've had in there. I know in the breakouts there are a lot of customers here, but would have liked to see a few more early customers front and center. >> Well, I think that's the key issue for this company, Stu, is that, we talked about this at the close yesterday, is how do they transition that legacy install base to the new platform. Bill Coleman said, "It's ours to lose." And I think that's right, and so the answer for a company like that in the playbook is clear: go private so you don't have to get exposed to the 90 day shock lock, invest, build out a modern platform. He talked about microservices and modern development platform. And create products that people want, and migrate people over. You're in a position to do that. But you're right, when you talk to the customers here, they're NetBackup customers, that's really what they're doing, and they're here to sort of learn, learn about best practice and see where they're going. NetBackup, I think, 8.1 was announced this week, so people are glomming onto that, but the vast majority of the revenue of this company is from their existing legacy enterprise business. That's a transition that has to take place. Luckily it doesn't have to take place in the public eye from a financial standpoint. So they can have some patient capital and work through it. Alright Stu, lineup today: a lot of product stuff. We got Jason Buffington coming on for getting the analyst perspective. So we'll be here all day. Last word? >> Yeah, and end of the day with Foreigner, it feels like the first time we're here. Veritas feels hot-blooded. We'll keep rolling. >> Alright, luckily we're not seeing double vision. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back right after this short break. This is theCUBE, we're live from Vertias Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (peppy digital music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's the Cube covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to NEXTConf everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with Stu Miniman. This is the president's segment. Sudheesh Nair is back. Good to see you again, Sudheesh, the president of Nutanix. And Captain Canada himself, Chad Sakac. >> Dave. >> Cube alum, good friend. >> Dave, it's good to see you. >> Good to see you again. Stu. Hey everybody, most important thing, great, you know, .NEXTConf, but look, Canada Day, July 1st, is right around the corner. So remember, everybody, go have some poutine, drink some beers and celebrate. Then there's this July 4th thing that is apparently right around that. >> Yeah, well, it's important to us, 'cause we've ended an eight-week sprint of the Cube, so. >> Isn't Chad wearing red, white and blue? I think he's, uh ... >> I actually did that on purpose. You noticed! >> Here in DC, nice job. >> I figured when in DC, you know, celebrate Americana. >> Why not? Well, there's a lot of celebration going on here. You guys have been celebrating several years now. What is it? Two and a half years of ... >> With Dell, yes. With Chad it's relatively new, so ... (all laughing) >> It's actually been about three years, and it's been a ridiculously successful partnership. You know, I think ... >> I would say face-meltingly successful, but ... >> Yeah, you know what? I agree. >> Okay, so coming into this role, did you have misconceptions about Nutanix, or was that just marketing, when you were kind of ... >> No. Nutanix basically created the HCI category. They've been at it now for seven and change years. You know, great technology, very happy customers. I'd say out of the 6,200 or so Nutanix customers, roughly around 2,500, 2,700 are XC customers, so I've gotten to know them really well. They tell me pretty clearly what they like about Nutanix and what they like about XC. >> All right, so Chad, I'm looking at my notes here, and there was a guy Chad Sakac who said, "Niche corner case for VDI only," you know, that was Nutanix. >> Love it. >> You know, you're singing a little bit of a different story than we might've heard a couple of years ago. >> You know, I would say that it's important to acknowledge when you're wrong, Stu. You know, and I think that HCI in general has moved absolutely out of any corner case segment whatsoever. I met with a customer this morning that is basically a hospital that is running the bulk of all of their mission-critical customer healthcare records, packs, all on XC. And again, you know, I don't want to get us in trouble here at the .NEXT Conference, but we have an HCI portfolio, we see customers deploying HCI for every workload under the sun at this point. And frankly, I've said it publicly now, firmly and as clearly as I can, SDS and HCI models are ready for the majority of x86 workloads. That's not just my opinion, it's the company, it's Dell Technologies' point of view overall. >> You know, Joe Tucci was the master of sort of building an ecosystem with quasi-competitors, coop-etition, whatever you want to call it, and certainly the Dell/EMC relationship of many years ago was epic, one of the, probably the most successful storage relationship ever. So and, Sudheesh, you get a lot of concerns of Wall Street, when's this going to end? You guys used to get that all the time with Cisco and VC, and yet you continue to ... >> Still do. >> Yup. >> Chad: Still do. >> Valid questions, you know, it's the obvious place for analysts, snarky analysts to go. But in retrospect ... >> Chad: Is there such a thing as a non-snarky analyst? >> There're a couple, there're a couple out there. >> They're sitting here, right here. (Chad laughs) >> It is, getting paid ... >> After the comments that I've already gotten! >> It's getting paid to be snarky. >> That's what's fantastic, by the way. That's what's like watching Charlie Rose and Bill Clinton. Hard but smooth. >> So, if I go back into history, though ... I wish Michael were here, and I'll ask Michael, I know you watch, I'll you next time I see you. I wonder if he had to do it all over again, if he knew then what he knew now, if he would've just said, "You know what? "I'm going to do better just staying with the EMC partnership, "instead of going out and buying Equallogic or Compellent, "and we would've done better for customers, "might've made more money." I wonder if you've learned anything from that experience. I mean, you were biased, 'cause you were on the EMC side of that, obviously you didn't want to see Dell end that relationship, but are there similarities here? >> You know, I think that there's similarities, but there's a notable difference. When the Dell/EMC merger occurred, and the first time I came out to visit headquarters, I mean, lots of discussions with Sudheesh and with Dheeraj. There's a core thing here that's important to understand. The market is not in a zero-sum game. So if, if there's 6,200 Nutanix customers, 2,500 XC customers, roughly 3,000 VX Real customers, roughly 8,000 VSAN customers, you know how many VNX customers there are? 300,000. Do you know how many power-edge servers there are out there? 27 million. We're on the earliest days of the software-defined and HCI journey, and frankly, that's just the first step towards building hybrid clouds on-prem and off-prem that bridge one another, which has been a big part of the announcements from this week. >> Yeah, look, I think the first part of the question you asked, you got to be honest that, you know, when you flip sometimes TV channels, let's say you come across National Geographic, right? And then there's a cheetah chasing a deer. You stop, you want to watch. You know what's going to happen, the cheetah's going to eat the deer, one way or other, that's going to happen. You know it, but you want to watch it. The way we think of our industry, status quo is the cheetah. The deer is all of us, the moment you stop innovating. That is particularly true for companies like ours, young companies. The partnership that we have is not built on anything but the fact that we are adding more value for customers than what we would individually do. That's it. The sum of the parts of this should be higher than the individual parts, right? So what we have learned, for example, last quarter, you're absolutely right, financial analysts, they'll always ask us about the Dell EMC overhang. Last quarter, for example, we for the first time publicly talked about the fact that Dell EMC business was around eight to nine percent of our overall revenue. And it is not because that didn't grow. It is growing, but the overall business we are able to keep growing. Our destiny's in our hands, and it comes down to couple of things6: our ability to really accelerate innovation, because as a younger company, more agile, we are expected to do more, and you saw this morning. Number two, make sure that we are playing fair. There are rules of engagement that we are, because we know that they have tremendous amount of portfolio, and some of them will overlap, and that's okay. But you have to clearly define the rules of engagements, and be very fair in how we treat the partner. And if you do those two things right, we know that this is a relationship that'll last long time. >> And just a quick little add, I mean, the things that we bring is extending the platform's scale and reach. There's no question that you're a younger company, there's no question that we're a larger company. The number of customers that say, "We want the better together thing," and we give them that choice, it's very important for us to do that, but also add value. So whether it's integrating data protection, whether it's what we've done around running Cloud Foundry on top of XC. Home Depot talked about it. >> Classic example, yeah. >> It's a great example, where they want this, that, all together. Now I can't emphasize enough that what we've been trying to emphasize is be transparent, be consistent about those rules of engagement, and telling our customers, you know, driving that choice and giving them that benefit is something that we have to sustain. >> And it's also important to understand that you know, if you spent this morning watching the keynote, you clearly saw that we did not talk about hyperconverged. What we talked about were two things. One is pushing that cloud intelligence to the edge, and then building a hyper-cloud experience that is totally transparent. And the second thing was about building a multi-cloud environment through Calm. We did not talk about hyperconverged. Those things are not built on a platform that is not built for ... Those things are built on a platform that is ready for web-scale architecture. So the foundation that we have built in the last seven years is on which we are building, and as long as we continue to add value like that, and partner, for example, on PCF, you know, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, that's a classic example, a Home Depot example, right? They need that same experience that they're getting from Edibus. And Edibus is not just doing IAAS. They're doing PAAS, they're doing the entire thing. To do that, there is no shame in figuring out what we do well, what we don't do well, understand their strengths and weakness, come together, and deliver something that is better for customers. >> Sudheesh, I'm curious, actually, 'cause Home Depot is a, you know, lighthouse account for Pivotal, on Google Cloud platform. Talking to them about it for the last six months. How does that fit in? We know that the Dell family is a multi-function, so I'm curious to want to hear the Nutanix piece of how that fits in. >> Look, I think the Google thing is a relatively new thing for us. We are expecting two different areas that we are going to partner with them. >> No, no, but Home Depot specifically, is that related? >> No. >> Because they're a big GCP customer, so maybe Chad needs to fill it in. >> This specific project is all on Exceed with PCS. >> The thing that I think is fascinating, and to watchers, I would say, for the intellectually curious that are willing to double-click and go a little bit further, it's a little more of a complex, nuanced story, but everyone's looking for a soundbite, whether it's in politics, as we're here in DC, or whether it's in news, or whatever. Home Depot, like a ton of customers, is using GCP. They're using XC, they're using vSphere, they're using NSX, they're using PCF. It's not like there's some singular thing. Another fascinating example is, I talked to a customer who's a fantastic ScaleIO, VxRack FLEX customer, vSphere, enormous scale and scope, and when I asked them, they want a hybrid cloud to this point. HCI is just a foundation for hybrid cloud use. When I asked them, like, what are their hybrid cloud targets, they're like, "AWS, but we use GCP because we depend on TensorFlow." It is, we live in a world which you need to expand your mind and not naturally create this, like, binary A/B thing. >> Stu: It's a multi-cloud world, Chad. >> It's a multi-stacked, multi-cloud, multi-use case world. >> An inter-genius mess in IT that we've been dealing with. >> So another thing that analysts do a lot is give unsolicited advice. (Chad laughs) So I want to do that and maybe get your reaction. So, Amazon's operating profits are roughly almost double what EMC's were, Amazon Web Services, when EMC was a public company. Massive change and disruptive force in our industry. And frankly, if it weren't for AWS, we wouldn't be where we are today as fast as we were, so I see your joint challenge as fulfilling the vision of what we call true private cloud. Substantially mimicking the cloud experience on-prem. And you're behind, and you know you're behind at that, because Amazon's by definition in the lead. So your challenge as we see it is to create that experience and create that automation and allow people to shift their labor costs to the fun stuff. >> By the way, I agree, and I accept that advice. You can answer for you, but I'll tell you, we've been trying to ... So we started with the first enterprise hybrid cloud efforts almost three and a half years ago, and they're enormous, and at the time we said, "And deploy it on anything you want." And you know what? We had very limited success with that. And the reason we had limited success wasn't because we didn't get the customer going, "Yes, I want to have a hybrid cloud, "where I can bridge and connect to "multiple different public cloud targets." That idea, dead right. The idea of you can build it any way you want? Wrong. Then we said, "Okay, you know what? "CI is a simplification." What we realized is that life cycling CI stacks along with a CMP layer, whether it's inside an integrated thing, or whether it's directly adjacent, still too complex. The latest is basically all of our hybrid cloud, whether it's destined towards enterprise IAAS or PAAS on prem, runs on HCI. When? Always. Because HCI is fundamentally orders of magnitude easier to symph, to deploy, to scale, to version, etc., etc. What I've been seeing over the last 24 hours about basically the Calm acquisition becoming part of Acropolis, is the example where Nutanix is taking it, where they're trying to build it into the Calm and Acropolis stack. I think that's a common vision between the two companies. >> What you will hear from HP or Cisco or EMC or Nutanix, the picture isn't going to change much, because we all know what the blueprint looks like. I think the real question is, how do you get there? How you do that is where the difference is going to be, and the advantage we have is that because we built every stack with that clean architecture in mind, the North Star being, we have to deliver a fully-automatable stack, we have an added advantage of building every step connect naturally to the next step. So for example, our metadata structure, our storage fabric, our virtualization fabric, AHV, our automation fabric on Calm, and how we are introducing Xi, that's a hybrid cloud service, it is all controlled from Prism. And that Prism itself and Prism Central are fully distributed. So that ability to deploy this at scale across multiple continents and manage it, that is very similar to how Amazon ... The reason why Amazon can deliver millisecond billing on Lambda stack is not because they are taking ten different products. They have technology that is built to deliver that level of granularity. >> So again, I agree, but there's an element that I disagree. Calm was an acquisition. Calm was an acquisition of people and talent to basically extend up into the IAAS, chargeback, billing, self-service portal domain. No disrespect of the decision, technology, architecture. You've done, obviously, great progress that you've shown to the market the last two days about how you're integrating that into your stack. We've been at this now for four years, and we've looked at, how do we need to keep evolving our own Dell Technologies stacks? Again, it's not an either/or. So for example, we do multi-site PCF deployments directly on top of a HCI target that has total life cycle, completely distributed stack, and the Pivotal/Google work around Kubernetes coming as part of Pivotal, which echoes a lot of the Kubernetes becoming part of your stack as well. Kubo highlights what we're all trying to do towards that target. Again, I think that the natural tendency because people like to see car races to watch for crashes, cheetahs chasing lions ... >> Or something like that. >> I think we're all striving to do what you said. The customer demand for simple-to-operate, simple-to-deploy, simple-to-scale, turnkey IAAS, PAAS, and even SAAS stacks that're a hybrid deployment model, that is a fact. How customers need to evaluate all the choices in the marketplace is again, who does it best? >> And if you don't, you're the deer, is your point. >> Chad: You're the lion or the deer. >> I wish we had more time, guys. I'll give you both the last word. Chad, you're everywhere this week, and everywhere every week, but final thoughts. >> Final thoughts, I mean, customers can know that we're committed to customer choice, we're committed to this partnership. The number of customers in revenue continues to grow. Our point of view is that we've got a portfolio approach, but no one should be confused about what that means. That means that we're committed to the partnership. Customers, I've talked to a lot of them here, they're happy. Never punch your customer in the face, and never punch yourself in the face. Simple strategy from Chad Sakac. >> Sudheesh, put a capstone on it. >> My point's very simple. I think this is a partnership that is working. The company's run by really smart people. I don't think we are interested in doing anything that is going to make our customers' decision a wrong one for them. And we are committed, we are committed to innovate, and are committed a service to join customers together. Thank you. >> Guys, you know, you guys make this job fun. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. >> It's our pleasure, guys. Remember, Happy Canada Day! >> All right, July 1st. Love it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (electronic music)

>> [Announcer] Live from Boston Massachusetts. This is theCUBE. Covering Sparks Summit East 2017. Brought to you by Databricks. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> [Dave] Welcome back to Boston everybody, this is Spark Summit East #SparkSummit And this is theCUBE. Ion Stoica is here. He's Executive Chairman of Databricks and Professor of Computer Science at UCal Berkeley. The smarts is rubbing off on me. I always feel smart when I co-host with George. And now having you on is just a pleasure, so thanks very much for taking the time. >> [Ion] Thank you for having me. >> So loved the talk this morning, we learned about RISELabs, we're going to talk about that. Which is the son of AMP. You may be the father of those two, so. Again welcome. Give us the update, great keynote this morning. How's the vibe, how are you feeling? >> [Ion] I think it's great, you know, thank you and thank everyone for attending the summit. It's a lot of energy, a lot of interesting discussions, and a lot of ideas around. So I'm very happy about how things are going. >> [Dave] So let's start with RISELabs. Maybe take us back, to those who don't understand, so the birth of AMP and what you were trying to achieve there and what's next. >> Yeah, so the AMP was a six-year Project at Berkeley, and it involved around eight faculties and over the duration of the lab around 60 students and postdocs, And the mission of the AMPLab was to make sense of big data. AMPLab started in 2009, at the end of 2009, and the premise is that in order to make sense of this big data, we need a holistic approach, which involves algorithms, in particular machine-learning algorithms, machines, means systems, large-scale systems, and people, crowd sourcing. And more precisely the goal was to build a stack, a data analytic stack for interactive analytics, to be used across industry and academia. And, of course, being at Berkeley, it has to be open source. (laugh) So that's basically what was AMPLab and it was a birthplace for Apache Spark that's why you are all here today. And a few other open-source systems like Mesos, Apache Mesos, and Alluxio which was previously called Tachyon. And so AMPLab ended in December last year and in January, this January, we started a new lab which is called RISE. RISE stands for Real-time Intelligent Secure Execution. And the premise of the new lab is that actually the real value in the data is the decision you can make on the data. And you can see this more and more at almost every organization. They want to use their data to make some decision to improve their business processes, applications, services, or come up with new applications and services. But then if you think about that, what does it mean that the emphasis is on the decision? Then it means that you want the decision to be fast, because fast decisions are better than slower decisions. You want decisions to be on fresh data, on live data, because decisions on the data I have right now are original but those are decisions on the data from yesterday, or last week. And then you also want to make targeted, personalized decisions. Because the decisions on personal information are better than aggregate information. So that's the fundamental premise. So therefore you want to be on platforms, tools and algorithms to enable intelligent real-time decisions on live data with strong security. And the security is a big emphasis of the lab because it means to provide privacy, confidentiality and integrity, and as you hear about data breaches or things like that every day. So for an organization, it is extremely important to provide privacy and confidentiality to their users and it's not only because the users want that, but it also indirectly can help them to improve their service. Because if I guarantee your data is confidential with me, you are probably much more willing to share some of your data with me. And if you share some of the data with me, I can build and provide better services. So that's basically in a nutshell what the lab is and what the focus is. >> [Dave] Okay, so you said three things: fast, live and targeted. So fast means you can affect the outcome. >> Yes. Live data means it's better quality. And then targeted means it's relevant. >> Yes. >> Okay, and then my question on security, I felt like when cloud and Big Data came to fore, security became a do-over. (laughter) Is that a fair assessment? Are you doing it over? >> [George] Or as Bill Clinton would call it, a Mulligan. >> Yeah, if you get a Mulligan on security. >> I think security is, it's always a difficult topic because it means so many things for so many people. >> Hmm-mmm. >> So there are instances and actually cloud is quite secure. It's actually cloud can be more secure than some on-prem deployments. In fact, if you hear about these data leaks or security breaches, you don't hear them happening in the cloud. And there is some reason for that, right? It is because they have trained people, you know, they are paranoid about this, they do a specification maybe much more often and things like that. But still, you know, the state of security is not that great. Right? For instance, if I compromise your operating system, whether it's in cloud or in not in the cloud, I can't do anything. Right? Or your VM, right? On all this cloud you run on a VM. And now you are going to allow on some containers. Right? So it's a lot of attacks, or there are attacks, sophisticated attacks, which means your data is encrypted, but if I can look at the access patterns, how much data you transferred, or how much data you access from memory, then I can infer something about what you are doing about your queries, right? If it's more data, maybe it's a query on New York. If it's less data it's probably maybe something smaller, like maybe something at Berkeley. So you can infer from multiple queries just looking at the access. So it's a difficult problem. But fortunately again, there are some new technologies which are developed and some new algorithms which gives us some hope. One of the most interesting technologies which is happening today is hardware enclaves. So with hardware enclaves you can execute the code within this enclave which is hardware protected. And even if your operating system or VM is compromised, you cannot access your code which runs into this enclave. And Intel has Intell SGX and we are working and collaborating with them actively. ARM has TrustZone and AMB also announced they are going to have a similar technology in their chips. So that's kind of a very interesting and very promising development. I think the other aspect, it's a focus of the lab, is that even if you have the enclaves, it doesn't automatically solve the problem. Because the code itself has a vulnerability. Yes, I can run the code in hardware enclave, but the code can send out >> Right. >> data outside. >> Right, the enclave is a more granular perimeter. Right? >> Yeah. So yeah, so you are looking and the security expert is in your lab looking at this, maybe how to split the application so you run only a small part in the enclave, which is a critical part, and you can make sure that also the code is secure, and the rest of the code you run outside. But the rest of the code, it's only going to work on data which is encrypted. Right? So there is a lot of interesting research but that's good. >> And does Blockchain fit in there as well? >> Yeah, I think Blockchain it's a very interesting technology. And again it's real-time and the area is also very interesting directions. >> Yeah, right. >> Absolutely. >> So you guys, I want George, you've shared with me sort of what you were calling a new workload. So you had batch and you have interactive and now you've got continuous- >> Continuous, yes. >> And I know that's a topic that you want to discuss and I'd love to hear more about that. But George, tee it up. >> Well, okay. So we were talking earlier and the objective of RISE is fast and continuous-type decisions. And this is different from the traditional, you either do it batch or you do it interactive. So maybe tell us about some applications where that is one workload among the other traditional workloads. And then let's unpack that a little more. >> Yeah, so I'll give you a few applications. So it's more than continuously interacting with the environment continuously, but you also learn continuously. I'll give you some examples. So for instance in one example, think about you want to detect a network security attack, and respond and diagnose and defend in the real time. So what this means is that you need to continuously get logs from the network and from the more endpoints you can get the better. Right? Because more data will help you to detect things faster. But then you need to detect the new pattern and you need to learn the new patterns. Because new security attacks, which are the ones that are effective, are slightly different from the past one because you hope that you already have the defense in place for the past ones. So now you are going to learn that and then you are going to react. You may push patches in real time. You may push filters, installing new filters to firewalls. So that's kind of one application that's going in real time. Another application can be about self driving. Now self driving has made tremendous strides. And a lot of algorithms you know, very smart algorithms now they are implemented on the cars. Right? All the system is on the cars. But imagine now that you want to continuously get the information from this car, aggregate and learn and then send back the information you learned to the cars. Like for instance if it's an accident or a roadblock an object which is dropped on the highway, so you can learn from the other cars what they've done in that situation. It may mean in some cases the driver took an evasive action, right? Maybe you can monitor also the cars which are not self-driving, but driven by the humans. And then you learn that in real time and then the other cars which follow through the same, confronted with the same situation, they now know what to do. Right? So this is again, I want to emphasize this. Not only continuous sensing environment, and making the decisions, but a very important components about learning. >> Let me take you back to the security example as I sort of process the auto one. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So in the security example, it doesn't sound like, I mean if you have a vast network, you know, end points, software, infrastructure, you're not going to have one God model looking out at everything. >> Yes. >> So I assume that means there are models distributed everywhere and they don't know what a new, necessarily but an entirely new attack pattern looks like. So in other words, for that isolated model, it doesn't know what it doesn't know. I don't know if that's what Rumsfeld called it. >> Yes (laughs). >> How does it know what to pass back for retraining? >> Yes. Yes. Yes. So there are many aspects and there are many things you can look at. And it's again, it's a research problem, so I cannot give you the solution now, I can hypothesize and I give you some examples. But for instance, you can look about, and you correlate by observing the affect. Some of the affects of the attack are visible. In some cases, denial of service attack. That's pretty clear. Even the And so forth, they maybe cause computers to crash, right? So once you see some of this kind of anomaly, right, anomalies on the end devices, end host and things like that. Maybe reported by humans, right? Then you can try to correlate with what kind of traffic you've got. Right? And from there, from that correlation, probably you can, and hopefully, you can develop some models to identify what kind of traffic. Where it comes from. What is the content, and so forth, which causes behavior, anomalous behavior. >> And where is that correlation happening? >> I think it will happen everywhere, right? Because- >> At the edge and at the center. >> Absolutely. >> And then I assume that it sounds like the models both at the edge and at the center are ensemble models. >> Yes. >> Because you're tracking different behavior. >> Yes. You are going to track different behavior and you are going to, I think that's a good hypothesis. And then you are going to assemble them, assemble to come up with the best decision. >> Okay, so now let's wind forward to the car example. >> Yeah. >> So it sound like there's a mesh network, at least, Peter Levine's sort of talk was there's near-local compute resources and you can use bitcoin to pay for it or Blockchain or however it works. But that sort of topology, we haven't really encountered before in computing, have we? And how imminent is that sort of ... >> I think that some of the stuff you can do today in the cloud. I think if you're on super-low latency probably you need to have more computation towards the edges, but if I'm thinking that I want kind of reactions on tens, hundreds of milliseconds, in theory you can do it today with the cloud infrastructure we have. And if you think about in many cases, if you can't do it within a few hundredths of milliseconds, it's still super useful. Right? To avoid this object which has dropped on the highway. You know, if I have a few hundred milliseconds, many cars will effectively avoid that having that information. >> Let's have that conversation about the edge a little further. The one we were having off camera. So there's a debate in our community about how much data will stay at the edge, how much will go into the cloud, David Flores said 90% of it will stay at the edge. Your comment was, it depends on the value. What do you mean by that? >> I think that that depends who am I and how I perceive the value of the data. And, you know, what can be the value of the data? This is what I was saying. I think that value of the data is fundamentally what kind of decisions, what kind of actions it will enable me to take. Right? So here I'm not just talking about you know, credit card information or things like that, even exactly there is an action somebody's going to take on that. So if I do believe that the data can provide me with ability to take better actions or make better decisions I think that I want to keep it. And it's not, because why I want to keep it, because also it's not only the decision it enables me now, but everyone is going to continuously improve their algorithms. Develop new algorithms. And when you do that, how do you test them? You test on the old data. Right? So I think that for all these reasons, a lot of data, valuable data in this sense, is going to go to the cloud. Now, is there a lot of data that should remain on the edges? And I think that's fair. But it's, again, if a cloud provider, or someone who provides a service in the cloud, believes that the data is valuable. I do believe that eventually it is going to get to the cloud. >> So if it's valuable, it will be persisted and will eventually get to the cloud? And we talked about latency, but latency, the example of evasive action. You can't send the back to the cloud and make the decision, you have to make it real time. But eventually that data, if it's important, will go back to the cloud. The other question of all this data that we are now processing on a continuous basis, how much actually will get persisted, most of it, much of it probably does not get persisted. Right? Is that a fair assumption? >> Yeah, I think so. And probably all the data is not equal. All right? It's like you want to maybe, even if you take a continuous video, all right? On the cars, they continuously have videos from multiple cameras and radar and lidar, all of this stuff. This continuous. And if you think about this one, I would assume that you don't want to send all the data to the cloud. But the data around the interesting events, you may want to do, right? So before and after the car has a near-accident, or took an evasive action, or the human had to intervene. So in all these cases, probably I want to send the data to the cloud. But for the most cases, probably not. >> That's good. We have to leave it there, but I'll give you the last word on things that are exciting you, things you're working on, interesting projects. >> Yeah, so I think this is what really excites me is about how we are going to have this continuous application, you are going to continuously interact with the environment. You are going to continuously learn and improve. And here there are many challenges. And I just want to say a few more there, and which we haven't discussed. One, in general it's about explainability. Right? If these systems augment the human decision process, if these systems are going to make decisions which impact you as a human, you want to know why. Right? Like I gave this example, assuming you have machine-learning algorithms, you're making a diagnosis on your MRI, or x-ray. You want to know why. What is in this x-ray causes that decision? If you go to the doctor, they are going to point and show you. Okay, this is why you have this condition. So I think this is very important. Because as a human you want to understand. And you want to understand not only why the decision happens, but you want also to understand what you have to do, you want to understand what you need to do to do better in the future, right? Like if your mortgage application is turned down, I want to know why is that? Because next time when I apply to the mortgage, I want to have a higher chance to get it through. So I think that's a very important aspect. And the last thing I will say is that this is super important and information is about having algorithms which can say I don't know. Right? It's like, okay I never have seen this situation in the past. So I don't know what to do. This is much better than giving you just the wrong decision. Right? >> Right, or a low probability that you don't know what to do with. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> Excellent. Ion, thanks again for coming in theCUBE. It was really a pleasure having you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. George and I will be back to do our wrap right after this short break. This is theCUBE. We're live from Spark Summit East. Right back. (techno music)

>> A cube at DMC World twenty fourteen is brought to you by D. M. C. Redefine, see innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. >> Welcome back to the Cube. This silken angle TVs live wall to wall Coverage of DMC World twenty fourteen here in the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. We've got three days to stage is over eighty guests. Lots of practitioners, execs, business leaders got a special segment. I'm bringing you today, bringing onto two thirds of the geek whispers, podcasts, Those in the story for the virtual ization and Claude Communities. No art is to guess. Well, let me introduce it's John Troyer, who's making his debut as the founder of tech reckoning. >> Thanks for having me. >> And we've got Amy Lewis influence marketing from Cisco. Name is your first time on the Cube, so, you know, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me on. >> All right, so So, guys, you know, we've been to a lot of conferences way we've hung out with, You know, the various influencers bloggers. It's changed a lot. This is my twelfth year coming M. C World. If you had told me twelve years ago some of things I'd be doing at this show, I wouldn't have believed you. I mean, I was one of the guys in a polo that only got out of out of the office once a year to give a presentation and, you know, talks in people about some cool tak um, and you know, social media is one of those things that, you know turn my career. Eleven. So you know what? Let's have a conversation about what's going on in the industry with kind of community influences and everything. John, maybe you could start us often. You know, Maybe if it leads in tow your new gigs? >> Sure, sure, on one on one, and things have changed. On the other hand, the same dynamics are playing out. Buying the buying cycle has changed. The buying process has changed. Customers are looking much more to their peers and not to traditional media analysts. Marketing folks, they can't find more ads. You can't send out more E mail. So what do you do? You need to get part of the conversation. We've been saying that for five or ten years, that's actually happened. Now the folks that were early on into the blogging space have turned themselves into communicators as well as technologists. We've seen, you know, their careers have have gone and all sorts of interesting places, for instance, you. But I think now that even we could talk about his art Is blogging dead? But I think now we're seeing it. We're seeing social media not as a trade or a practice practice, but simply a tool set that we all use. So that's all I'm saying is it's a It's more of a it spread throughout our organization. Not so much in one tiny niche, right? >> Yeah, Jonah, I love that point. I I I've been preaching for a bunch of years that this is an important skill, something you have to have their wonderful tools. But you've been doing community for a lot longer than Social Media has been around, and, you know, so it's peace, Amy, your influence marketing. What would please way out on this? >> Yeah, I chose the title, actually myself on purpose. To say it's not just social media, think social Media is very important, but like John was saying that to me is a set of tools. They're important platforms or important communications channels, but influencers the people who between the term citizen analysts they are unpaid analyst. But people are very passionate about technology, and they want to write on block and share, really engage their community. That's an important group of people. It's a really a buying center, and we have to find new ways to address them. So community is more important than >> ever. Citizen analysts thought, Let's focus that >> some of the >> people you know, I say some people goto event and they get it, get it, get wined and dined and they get to, you know, write about a bunch of stuff I'm like, you know you're better than journalists, you know, you'll You know you do some really good stuff and sometimes it's a little bit too friendly to the people that are doing it. So you know where do you see the role of kind of the press? You know, the analyst and the influencer? >> It's a great question I've been checking. We need to abstract the or chart. It is. It is a complicated question, but I think the traditional presses really trained and rightfully so in giving us that neutrality. So that is still a very important role. I think the analysts are paid Tio Tio, analyze particular sets, etcetera. They have nation specialty. I think the citizen analyst is interesting because they are what you don't know about the neutrality. But you do know that there are people who roll up their sleeves and really touched the technology. So that becomes a very interesting set because they really care about the technology Kazakh but could become their problem if they don't, you know, raise our voice and sort of engaged with technology and let the community know what, what the new trends are, what they need, what business needs. Our etcetera gives us a really applied version, the PR in the e R outside. >> Don't you want to comment on matter? >> I mean, these are the folks that they lose their jobs if they picked the wrong technology. So they have much more. Their discussions have it. They have more skin in the game. >> Aye, that's right. If you've got the practitioner, you know whether it be the end user sometime times it's the you know channel guy that they do that that's good, You know? What about the people inside the corporations that are also using these? >> I'm super bullish about the use of employees as advocates and evangelists in our community, both for technical education. And for the commercial part of our conversation in the enterprise space, we don't sell solutions with Russia. Your hair's a pressure and very nice calm. Give me a call. We sell it with relationships with people. I've been working on the social media since it existed, I suppose. And what we've seen over and over again is the social channels are really great for getting the word out. But without that personal component, it's like just handing out brochures. So you need your employees out there. You need your employees talking to folks. You need your employees without their representing your brand, just like they would have an event. I've seen that at something. On one hand, it's something that's so trivial that we all agree it's true. On the other hand, I don't. I think a lot of people are just realizing that now. >> So, John, you know, there's some some big companies, you know, creative certification programs to do some of this. There's some companies that just, you know, sign everybody up and, you know, it could be kind of an echo chamber or things like that. You know what? What do you see in these days? To kind of help out. You know the community >> well. There's a lot of software and a lot of programmatic things you could do. Those may be useful in terms of organizing you. It comes down to the people in the culture of the company and help much. You trust your people to go out. I think the best thing we can do is sit up platform for folks to be able to, to communicate. I think that's actually what Amy does really well at Cisco. >> X. It's, um I always talk about influence marketing as being people, platforms in content. And so I agree. I think that we sorted out some of the platform issues as we've learned about social media and grew up with it. I think that we are still working out the people in the content side and what's appropriate, how we can join together and do that and how we can creates a mute platforms may be using the tools of social tio to drive the conversation forward. >> All right. So, I mean, I got one for you. You know, how do we balance the kind of creation of information and kind of the community and fund? I mean, you do a lot of fun event you've got, you know, awful club this week. You've got, you know, bacon, stack and B bacon and bacon. I e I mean, I can't keep track of you, deport vacants and everything. And, you know, there'd be some executives here that would be like that, That social stuff. And they're playing games and things like that. So how do we balance kind of attic business value and greeting, you know, value to the community. And, you know, having fun in building community. >> No, it's a great question. A couple of years ago, I got a text in the middle of the night that said, Please explain to me how the bacon is a marketing play. Please explain this and you know, I need a power point slide. So if you've never had to explain, be bacon on the power points, I for that challenge out to everyone. But I think in the last couple of years people started to see it more and more as we're, uh, we're similar to the sales role, and that's how we've sort of changed the language. So I perform a sales like function, except I don't carry a quota. So it is about building the relationship like John was saying, and it is about balancing fun with your intent. So I think that if you create a fun environment, if you create an openness and willingness to listen, then the good things will follow. So you form the relationships of people. You open up their ability to create content with you because they don't feel under attack. They're ready to share. And again, it's it's kind of a magical formula. Be nice and create opportunity. >> Yeah, so >> I think we'll part of it's a generational ship. I think part of it a generational shift and part of it is a temperamental she So tradition again, going back to sales traditional enterprise sales. You might go and play golf with somebody, cause that's what you enjoy doing for our kind of geeks. Our golf is eating bacon and talking about the duplication strategies, right? That's where we're having the most fun. So it's It's just it's same sort of thing. Just a shift in generations. >> Yeah, I wonder if you know what, what role this community help in kind of careers. You know, I think you know, we're talking so much of these shows about, you know, if your storage admin. If you're networking admin and you know you're down there, you know, configuring Luns or setting up the land, you know, we're going to have a job in a couple of years because automation is gonna change. You know, how much does the community help in kind of those career paths and education? >> So, John, I think we should interview stew on this one. Should we have the geek whispers takeover. I think this is your great example. You've talked about you, you were on a career path and we hear this a lot, and when you raise your hand to volunteer, we sort of jokingly call the spokes uniforms. You both really enjoy the technology and like to communicate about it. When you raise your hand and make yourself known to the community, to your employers, to the world at large, it gives you different opportunities. And I think I don't think you go into technology really without wanting to have an evolving, exciting career. So I think that he's becoming proficient in these tools. Joining your community is an opportunity to learn from your peers to get back to your peers and to raise her profile and open yourself up to the possibility of a new opportunity or a new idea or different engagement. A new way to learn >> In today's business environment, communication is a key part of whatever you do, even if you're the guy sitting there configuring the lungs, because if you're not communicating with your teams and the application teams and the storage of network virtualization team, you're not going to succeed so I think that's an important part of it, right? Being a communicator, absolutely critical and art. Barney. >> All right, so either one of you feel free to answer, but I think back to my early days, you know, two thousand eight, I was so excited when I got invited to a couple of conferences. A blogger, you could kind of get a pass, and I would, You know, ten might take my own vacation time and usually spend that on expenses because my employer at the time didn't get it. It was this innovation conference in, like, in a New York City with four hundred people, and it was like, kind of amazing. I've seen people go to B m world on their own dime where they can get a pass. I mean, you know, it's great to see when you when you got the passion. So I guess the question I wanted to ask is, you know, with companies today, who should they be inviting? How do they do it? You know? You know. Is it you know, the blogger Or is it the, you know, empty Alexis co expert? You know, bm where be expert, you know, What? How's that? How's that changing? Or is it >> changing? Well, I think what you've seen happen over the years is something that was a little more unstructured, which was a kind of blogger relations program. Working with both customers partners, employees in your ecosystem has turned into something a little more formal. We created the V Expert program in two thousand nine to formalize what we were already doing. It's an analogy to the endless relations, press relations, investor relations, sorts of programs. So I mean, it's it's it's a little more buttoned up. It's a little more of a membership thing, but we I know both of DMC and BM where and it Cisco, Francisco champions to try to embrace all the folks that are out there blogging. I think you know, if you're a market or you need to make sure that you're keep your eyes open and you don't just talk to the people that you've gathered in your living room, Bye. You know, a lot of it's pretty easy if you're enthusiastic about technology, if you're engaged with the technology, if you put some effort into it, it's actually pretty easy to get involved with one of these programs there, there, there and there, there, fourth of people in them right there. They're not there to say the glory of the emcee and glory of Cisco and glory of'em, where they're there to help you with your career. They're there to give you tools to give you networking and, you know, hopefully get you to places like this. So I encourage everybody that that's interested in starting, you know, go ahead and get started. It's easier than you think to get involved. >> I agree with that, and I think that way want to be almost like an airline program that you'd actually want to participate. And it's sort of my job like this is a customer service activity, and I often talk about if you talk about the large pool of influencers. Maybe they haven't identified yet. Or maybe they prefer to stay independent. Or maybe they do have interest in a lot of different technologies. Me for them to engage in one of these programs, that stolen, important set of people that you have to deal with the mark, you know, and again set up these blogger days have longer briefings. But like John was saying, When you have the group of people that you name and give it a program name, this is a little bit of inside baseball if we don't talk about giving program a name and funding can follow. So if you're working in a corporate marketing environment, it's really important to explain to people that marketing structure behind what you're doing and when you treat them as a class, it gives you some advantage is you can scale out a little easier. You can provide more assets to those individuals, and it frees you up to Dio. What I love to do, which is is to really engage with those individuals and create content with them. So, >> yeah, so how is engagement these days? You know, I think back, you know, that you know, ten years ago, you talk. You know, one percent of the community would, you know, be doing almost all the contribution. Ten percent might be a little active and everybody else's lurker. You know, when we founded Wicked Bond Day, Volonte actually has on his business card that he's a one percenter which goes back to you know it. It's, you know, the one percent that causes all the trouble, the one percent that causes all all of the commotion. So, you know, with this wave, I mean, we were founded off of, you know, economics in crowd sourcing and everything else, and the Cube is all about, you know, sharing information. We put it all out there. We want everybody to contribute and, you know, give that feedback. You know, How are we along now? You know that that journey to get more people involved. >> I think the opportunity is there more than ever. I think you're right. I mean, there's always gonna be a percentage of people who want to raise her hand, the class that want to give up their PTO to go to a conference that that had this other life they just can't help themselves. And so in some ways it's finding the most impassioned and giving them opportunities. But I think that with the platforms and the scale, there is a greater opportunity for people. They don't want to start their own block. For instance, one of the things we do it Cisco champions is allowed people to guess, block or allow them to come post a podcast. So I think there are more more ways to and there, you know, that's one example. There's lots of other groups that provide people again a little bit a dose of it so they might not want to run a full media company on their own. They don't wanna build Q, but they want to participate. And I think that we have so many more opportunities for them to do that that we're seeing group. >> We're seeing platform ships over the years. I think we as technologists human beings have a tendency to forget their past relatively quickly, as people have moved from the MySpace world to the Facebook Twitter world. I think actually, we're headed for I don't call it I don't want to call it post Facebook, but it certainly is. A multi platform world made >> it just like >> it's a multi device world. We're not opposed PC world in that. I think you're seeing the rise of more specialized communities. They come back again from from our from our origins back ten or twenty years ago. I think we're seeing that people want more deeper engagement along the company. A lot of the report building and kind of conversation. And hey, how are you? Goes on on Twitter. But I think people are really looking for a place where they can have a better conversation, more interaction, more lasting death that might not be on their own. Blogger in their own kind of indie web sort of style, roll your own block. But there are more and more platforms that people are making available for this kind of connection again. What was once niche eventually permeates the whole >> yes. So, you know, the concern I have is it's tough because it is so dispersed right now, you know? You know, I love Twitter, you know? Hi, I'm stew, you know, on Twitter. And I know you guys are big on it, too. And I don't love the multi platform discussion. You know, I always love when you dropped that kind information on the community. But, you know, how >> do we How do we get that >> depth? It's one of the things I always worry about is, you know, people will read the headline and, you know, just react at it and, you know, they might even share it a bunch, but they haven't read it. Uh, so how do we get that deeper engagement? Deeper understanding. I mean, you know, I always say, you know, the I'm too busy is a poor excuse because, you know, you know Michelangelo and I'd sign that many hours in the day way we did and, you know, sure they didn't have their phone buzzing all over >> the place. >> I actually think we should do less. Not more. I think I think too much information, too many channels, too many corporate channels, too many personal channels, too much bad content. The world does not need more crappy content. So whether you're a individual, blogger or marketer, I'd say just turn the dial back a little bit. Did work on better, longer pieces that add more? I think that's the only way that we can shift the conversation. >> Yeah, long for love it. Oh, no, absolutely. I still read so >> well. It's a curatorial function as well, that we have to be responsible. And that's yet one more way people can participate. We see people rise and in the community because they're really great curator Sze, because they syndicate the content in ways are interesting to others because time is of a value so that becomes a real asset. And the skill is Well, >> yeah, great. Great point. Could you know, so many times I'm like I really like to do a thousand word post on this, but, you know, sometimes all I'll come out of this show and take, you know, I did a year ago. I did it. I didn't article on the federation. You know, the ZPM were pivotal and coming out of the show, I've got a lot of new data, and I could really quickly take some photos. I've done. Takes some of the notes. I take some of the tweets and, you know, put together an order. Won't take me as long. I mean, I'll probably do it on the plane ride home. So what I wanna ask next is, you know, you guys see a lot of things out there. What coolest thing you're seeing either at a at a conference or event or you know what? What? What's catching, right? What? What's interesting? Done. >> There's a whole new side out there called Tech, right? I don't know what's cool out there again. I'm seeing multi channel multi, a lot of experiments. There's some cool stuff going on with the indie web. There's I mean, everything is mobile. I don't know. There's just a lot of places. It >> sounds like you Let's give the plug. Integrity has finally cool things and, you know, solid. But something >> like that tech reckoning is a site that's gonna bring. It's an independent site. It's not associate with any vendor. It's going to bring some of the community and enterprise community together to talk about some of these things about Where is it going as a whole? Where's technology going, where our career is going to try to help us get to whatever this you know, it is a service. Third platform, Whatever you wanna call it, where the heck were going? It looks pretty interesting, and it looks like it isn't gonna be quite the same thing. So we're trying to bring together a set of people and just tackle some of those problem and also work together and collaborate. It's so much easier with open source with cloud. With all the tools we have available, it's so cheap and easy to build new pieces of technology, not just a type of each other words online, but to actually build stuff that I'm very excited about. The power taking going far. This from open source, right? Taking the power of people to come together and build cool new stuff. That's what I would like to. >> Still, I'm just angry that you scooped Matt and I on getting to interview John first about >> tech recognition. So, Amy, you you do some cool things that some of events we talk about, the waffle bacon, you What have you seen out there that that's kind of interesting? Or, you know, how do you find some of the cool new ideas? >> Yeah, I think you always I'm working with a really talented events team right now. And I think one of the things I've seen them sort of transform is that social is not other, you know? And we're seeing the social and this concept of community permeate and really think about our audience to really engage that core base, those those tech enthusiasts, and to see what you can do to in engage them. So I'm saying it in real life and in these community platforms. So I think that's been one of the other great trends is watching people band together and various kinds of consortiums. I won't name names, but there's a few folks outlook community. We're seeing a lot of this happen where they're sort of grouping together, and they're saying if they pull their resource is what happens, they might be able to gather enough money to go to a conference or to fund a buddy or to get a hotel room that they've got extra spaces somebody can crash. So I'm saying it's very cool, sort of stitching together opportunity and working together to learn more. So again, the combination of the platforms, using the technology and then in real life connection. >> All right, so I've been asking all the questions here. So before we wrap up, you know, Amy, anything you want, Johnny, when as me, John same, we throw it open. When Whenever >> you first signed up for your Twitter account, did you think it would lead you here because you have the best Twitter >> account? No, actually, a friend of mine for me and Steve Todd, who was blogging before I was, and he said, You know, when there's trepidation when you're gonna get published and you never know where it leads. And we were talking about this after he and I were on the stage at Radio City Music Hall right after Bill Clinton had been on because they brought the bloggers down when we were there. And it's like, Come on, you know, I'm, you know, I'm an engineer by training, you know, I've done. You know, I've done some sales. I've done engineering. I've done you no operations. Technologist is hard. So you know, some of the places the people I've met. I mean, if you just reach out to people, it still, even though there's so many people on Twitter, you know, the people that right and our authors and bloggers, If you comment or you reach out to them, a lot of them reach back. I mean, you know, I still amazed at some of the people I've met get to rub elbows with. No, just just have had a blast with him. So >> get another one. So do you think unicorns can be trained? Do you think people have to be born with the skill set, Or do you think you can be a uniformed rancher? >> No, I think I think I think they could be trained. You know, it's absolutely it's Ah, it's a tough skill set. I mean, you know, doing video is not easy. First couple of times you do it. It's different there's there's all these muscles. You know, Writing is one of those things that you know. I thought I was an okay writer, but hadn't done a lot of it. They're things you do. So try it out. And that thing I tell you, you got to stick with it for a while. I thought Twitter was pretty stupid. First Go on it. But, you know, I stuck on it for another six months and have some fun with it. No, here we are six years later and you know it is a lot and, you know, blocking of writing and blogging and everything else you know all over. I >> like the muscle memory idea. >> It's hard. You were on camera, have remember not to scratch my face. Strange. He'll set, I ask. I actually, I'm seeing a lot of interest in short form video. I know the kids are all doing it. I mean, obviously, we're doing it here. You do it. It's part of your practice. But in talking with people about our new activities, it's just so easy to take a chair. I think that's actually, even though it's been coming up for years, I think where I think that's an interesting thing >> on all right now, I'll give one of those inside tips videos. Great. Some people don't like to watch video. Yeah, broadcaster great. Some people don't like to listen to him, you know, writing's great. Some people won't read. So you know what? One of the early lessons I had is when I was, you know, being a, you know, active member on standard evangelizing of solution. I did it everywhere it you know that give presentations that shows you put it up on slide chair. You do you two videos, you blogged about it. You talk to everybody, you bet that you can everywhere. And you know, it just permeates out there. It could be a bunch of works and then there's tools that are out there. >> They're all connected events, right? I've discovered recently, and I can't believe I just realized this. But it was with the conversation with Amy on our Christmas broadcast that even though I've been part of an online group for years, I'm part of digital marketing for BM. Where for years, Uh, actually, most of my work. Half of my work is off line having my workers meeting people in person, getting to meet them and connecting that online and offline. And the synergy there is just is immense. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, other than the keynotes, my phone stays in my pocket for the most time. Unless I'm going between events. It's the in real life and nearly getting to know things. I was joking, You know, Twitter went away. Tomorrow might be a little sad, but I can connect the most. All those people, we got him on LinkedIn, Facebook and, you know, email. I still use something. Don't taking their holds. Absolutely. So you know, to wrap. I guess if you want to, just You know what people find more on your podcast. Find your website. You know Amy, Like it start? Well, >> where >> are Equus? Versace, of course. Geek hyphen whispers dot com on way, published every week. So give us a listen. See what you think. And I'm >> Matthew Brender. Sorry you couldn't join this time, but it's a lot as it were. A DMC world and you two are here in Matthew's. >> It's hard. We're going toe to toe. It's true. We're going to record with him like it's a Max headroom figure on a yes tomorrow, so and also I'm on Twitter as calms mention and I block under that same constantly dot com girls have engineers. That's true. I have engineers, unplug dot com as well. And now sixty second Tech, the short first on the popcorn version >> and I. J. Troia on Twitter and tech reckoning dot com. I went inside. >> Hey, Amy, John. Thanks so much. We We love taking the podcast. Inception. Sile inside the Cube. Look forward to seeing you lost events connecting with the community and everybody. Definitely check out their stuff. I'm at stew on Twitter with yvonne dot org's is where most of my articles go, and, of course, silicon angled on TV is where you can find all the video. Thanks for joining us. We will be back with the rest of DMC world covered.