>> (Narrator) The CUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding by Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Fira Barcelona. It's theCUBE live at MWC23 our third day of coverage of this great, huge event continues. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've got Dell and Dish here, we are going to be talking about what they're doing together. Andy Sheahen joins as global director of Telecom Cloud Core and Next Gen Ops at Dell. And Marc Rouanne, one of our alumni is back, EVP and Chief Network Officer at Dish Wireless. Welcome guys. >> Great to be here. >> (Both) Thank you. >> (Lisa) Great to have you. Mark, talk to us about what's going on at Dish wireless. Give us the update. >> Yeah so we've built a network from scratch in the US, that covered the US, we use a cloud base Cloud native, so from the bottom of the tower all the way to the internet uses cloud distributed cloud, emits it, so there are a lot of things about that. But it's unique, and now it's working, so we're starting to play with it and that's pretty cool. >> What's some of the proof points, proof in the pudding? >> Well, for us, first of all it was to do basic voice and data on a smartphone and for me the success would that you won't see the difference for a smartphone. That's base line. the next step is bringing this to the enterprise for their use case. So we've covered- now we have services for smartphones. We use our brand, Boost brand, and we are distributing that across the US. But as I said, the real good stuff is when you start to making you know the machines and all the data and the applications for the enterprise. >> Andy, how is Dell a facilitator of what Marc just described and the use cases and what their able to deliver? >> We're providing a number of the servers that are being used out in their radio access network. The virtual DU servers, we're also providing some bare metal orchestration capabilities to help automate the process of deploying all these hundreds and thousands of nodes out in the field. Both of these, the servers and the bare metal orchestra product are things that we developed in concert with Dish, working together to understand the way, the best way to automate, based on the tooling their using in other parts of their network, and we've been with you guys since day one, really. >> (Marc) Absolutely, yeah. >> Making each others solutions better the whole way. >> Marc, why Dell? >> So, the way the networks work is you have a cloud, and you have a distributed edge you need someone who understands the diversity of the edge in order to bring the cloud software to the edge, and Dell is the best there, you know, you can, we can ask them to mix and match accelerators, processors memory, it's very diverse distributed edge. We are building twenty thousands sides so you imagine the size and the complexity and Dell was the right partner for that. >> (Andy) Thank you. >> So you mentioned addressing enterprise leads, which is interesting because there's nothing that would prevent you from going after consumer wireless technically, right but it sounds like you have taken a look at the market and said "we're going to go after this segment of the market." >> (Marc) Yeah. >> At least for now. Are there significant differences between what an enterprise expects from a 5G network than, verses a consumer? >> Yeah. >> (Dave) They have higher expectations, maybe, number one I guess is, if my bill is 150 dollars a month I can have certain levels of expectations whereas a large enterprise the may be making a much more significant investment, are their expectations greater? >> (Marc) Yeah. >> Do you have a higher bar to get over? >> So first, I mean first we use our network for consumers, but for us it's an enterprise. That's the consumer segment, an enterprise. So we expose the network like we would to a car manufacturer, or to a distributor of goods of food and beverage. But what you expect when you are an enterprise, you expect, manage your services. You expect to control the goodness of your services, and for this you need to observe what's happening. Are you delivering the right service? What is the feedback from the enterprise users, and that's what we call the observability. We have a data centric network, so our enterprises are saying "Yeah connecting is enough, but show us how it works, and show us how we can learn from the data, improve, improve, and become more competitive." That's the big difference. >> So what you say Marc, are some of the outcomes you achieved working with Dell? TCO, ROI, CapX, OpX, what are some of the outcomes so far, that you've been able to accomplish? >> Yeah, so obviously we don't share our numbers, but we're very competitive. Both on the CapX and the OpX. And the second thing is that we are much faster in terms of innovation, you know one of the things that Telecorp would not do, was to tap into the IT industry. So we access to the silicon and we have access to the software and at a scale that none of the Telecorp could ever do and for us it's like "wow" and it's a very powerful industry and we've been driving the consist- it's a bit technical but all the silicone, the accelerators, the processors, the GPU, the TPUs and it's like wow. It's really a transformation. >> Andy, is there anything anagallis that you've dealt with in the past to the situation where you have this true core edge, environment where you have to instrument the devices that you provide to give that level of observation or observability, whatever the new word is, that we've invented for that. >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean has there, is there anything- >> Yeah absolutely. >> Is this unprecedented? >> No, no not at all. I mean Dell's been really working at the edge since before the edge was called the edge right, we've been selling, our hardware and infrastructure out to retail shops, branch office locations, you know just smaller form factors outside of data centers for a very long time and so that's sort of the consistency from what we've been doing for 30 years to now the difference is the volume, the different number of permutations as Marc was saying. The different type of accelerator cards, the different SKUS of different server types, the sheer volume of nodes that you have in a nationwide wireless network. So the volumes are much different, the amount of data is much different, but the process is really the same. It's about having the infrastructure in the right place at the right time and being able to understand if it's working well or if it's not and it's not just about a red light or a green light but healthy and unhealthy conditions and predicting when the red lights going to come on. And we've been doing that for a while it's just a different scale, and a different level of complexity when you're trying to piece together all these different components from different vendors. >> So we talk a lot about ecosystem, and sometimes because of the desire to talk about the outcomes and what the end users, customers, really care about sometimes we will stop at the layer where say a Dell lives, and we'll see that as the sum total of the component when really, when you talk about a server that Dish is using that in and of itself is an ecosystem >> Yep, yeah >> (Dave) or there's an ecosystem behind it you just mentioned it, the kinds of components and the choices that you make when you optimize these devices determine how much value Dish, >> (Andy) Absolutely. >> Can get out of that. How deep are you on that hardware? I'm a knuckle dragging hardware guy. >> Deep, very deep, I mean just the number of permutations that were working through with Dish and other operators as well, different accelerator cards that we talked about, different techniques for timing obviously there's different SKUs with the silicon itself, different chip sets, different chips from different providers, all those things have to come together, and we build the basic foundation and then we also started working with our cloud partners Red Hat, Wind River, all these guys, VM Ware, of course and that's the next layer up, so you've got all the different hardware components, you've got the extraction layer, with your virtualization layer and or ubernetise layer and all of that stuff together has to be managed compatibility matrices that get very deep and very big, very quickly and that's really the foundational challenge we think of open ran is thinking all these different pieces are going to fit together and not just work today but work everyday as everything gets updated much more frequently than in the legacy world. >> So you care about those things, so we don't have to. >> That's right. >> That's the beauty of it. >> Yes. >> Well thank you. (laughter) >> You're welcome. >> I want to understand, you know some of the things that we've been talking about, every company is a data company, regardless of whether it's telco, it's a retailer, if it's my bank, it's my grocery store and they have to be able to use data as quickly as possible to make decisions. One of the things they've been talking here is the monetization of data, the monetization of the network. How do you, how does Dell help, like a Dish be able to achieve the monetization of their data. >> Well as Marc was saying before the enterprise use cases are what we are all kind of betting on for 5G, right? And enterprises expect to have access to data and to telemetry to do whatever use cases they want to execute in their particular industry, so you know, if it's a health care provider, if it's a factory, an agricultural provider that's leveraging this network, they need to get the data from the network, from the devices, they need to correlate it, in order to do things like automatically turn on a watering system at a certain time, right, they need to know the weather around make sure it's not too windy and you're going to waste a lot of water. All that has data, it's going to leverage data from the network, it's going to leverage data from devices, it's going to leverage data from applications and that's data that can be monetized. When you have all that data and it's all correlated there's value, inherit to it and you can even go onto a forward looking state where you can intelligently move workloads around, based on the data. Based on the clarity of the traffic of the network, where is the right place to put it, and even based on current pricing for things like on demand insists from cloud providers. So having all that data correlated allows any enterprise to make an intelligent decision about how to move a workload around a network and get the most efficient placing of that workload. >> Marc, Andy mentions things like data and networks and moving data across the networks. You have on your business card, Chief Network Officer, what potentially either keeps you up at night in terror or gets you very excited about the future of your network? What's out there in the frontier and what are those key obstacles that have to be overcome that you work with? >> Yeah, I think we have the network, we have the baseline, but we don't yet have the consumption that is easy by the enterprise, you know an enterprise likes to say "I have 4K camera, I connect it to my software." Click, click, right? And that's where we need to be so we're talking about it APIs that are so simple that they become a click and we engineers we have a tendency to want to explain but we should not, it should become a click. You know, and the phone revolution with the apps became those clicks, we have to do the same for the enterprise, for video, for surveillance, for analytics, it has to be clicks. >> While balancing flexibility, and agility of course because you know the folks who were fans of CLIs come in light interfaces, who hate gooeys it's because they feel they have the ability to go down to another level, so obviously that's a balancing act. >> But that's our job. >> Yeah. >> Our job is to hide the complexity, but of course there is complexity. It's like in the cloud, an emprise scaler, they manage complex things but it's successful if they hide it. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> It's the same. You know we have to be emprise scaler of connectivity but hide it. >> Yeah. >> So that people connect everything, right? >> Well it's Andy's servers, we're all magicians hiding it all. >> Yeah. >> It really is. >> It's like don't worry about it, just know, >> Let us do it. >> Sit down, we will serve you the meal. Don't worry how it's cooked. >> That's right, the enterprises want the outcome. >> (Dave) Yeah. >> They don't want to deal with that bottom layer. But it is tremendously complex and we want to take that on and make it better for the industry. >> That's critical. Marc I'd love to go back to you and just I know that you've been in telco for such a long time and here we are day three of MWC the name changed this year, from Mobile World Congress, reflecting mobilism isn't the only thing, obviously it was the catalyst, but what some of the things that you've heard at the event, maybe seen at the event that give you the confidence that the right players are here to help move Dish wireless forward, for example. >> You know this is the first, I've been here for decades it's the first time, and I'm a Chief Network Officer, first time we don't talk about the network. >> (Andy) Yeah. >> Isn't that surprising? People don't tell me about speed, or latency, they talk about consumption. Apps, you know videos surveillance, or analytics or it's, so I love that, because now we're starting to talk about how we can consume and monetize but that's the first time. We use to talk about gigabytes and this and that, none of that not once. >> What does that signify to you, in terms of the evolution? >> Well you know, we've seen that the demand for the healthcare, for the smart cities, has been here for a decade, proof of concepts for a decade but the consumption has been behind and for me this is the oldest team is waking up to we are going to make it easy, so that the consumption can take off. The demand is there, we have to serve it. And the fact that people are starting to say we hide the complexity that's our problem, but don't even mention it, I love it. >> Yep. Drop the mic. >> (Andy and Marc) Yeah, yeah. >> Andy last question for you, some of the things we know Dell has a big and verging presents in telco, we've had a chance to see the booth, see the cool things you guys are featuring there, Dave did a great tour of it, talk about some of the things you've heard and maybe even from customers at this event that demonstrate to you that Dell is going in the right direction with it's telco strategy. >> Yeah, I mean personally for me this has been an unbelievable event for Dell we've had tons and tons of customer meetings of course and the feedback we're getting is that the things we're bring to market whether it's infrablocks, or purposeful servers that are designed for the telecom network are what our customers need and have always wanted. We get a lot of wows, right? >> (Lisa) That's nice. >> "Wow we didn't know Dell was doing this, we had no idea." And the other part of it is that not everybody was sure that we were going to move as fast as we have so the speed in which we've been able to bring some of these things to market and part of that was working with Dish, you know a pioneer, to make sure we were building the right things and I think a lot of the customers that we talked to really appreciate the fact that we're doing it with the industry, >> (Lisa) Yeah. >> You know, not at the industry and that comes across in the way they are responding and what their talking to us about now. >> And that came across in the interview that you just did. Thank you both for joining Dave and me. >> Thank you >> Talking about what Dell and Dish are doing together the proof is in the pudding, and you did a great job at explaining that, thanks guys, we appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guest and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from MWC 23 day three. We will be back with our next guest, so don't go anywhere. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. To the cubes coverage of AWS summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. We're here, live on the floor at the Mosconi south events are back. I'm John fur, your host. Remember AWS summit 2022 in New York city is coming this summer. We'll be there with the live cube there as well. Look for us there, but of course, we're back in action with the cloud and AWS. Our next guest Garrett Miller is the general manager of navigation at Mapbox. I mean, it's been a Amazon customer for a long time, Garrett. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Yeah. Thanks for having us, John. >>So you guys are in the middle of, I love the whole location base slash we developer integration. We've had many conversations on the cube around how engineers and developers are becoming embedded into the application, whether it's from a security standpoint, biometrics, all kinds of stuff, being built into the app and, and location navigation. That's right. Is huge from cars. Everyone knows their car, car map. That's right. GPS satellites, some space it's complicated. It sounds like it sounds easy, but I know it's hard. Yeah. You, you get the keynote going on today. Give us a quick update on Mapbox and we'll then we'll talk about the keynote. >>Yeah. You bet John that's right. So as you were saying, you know, it really is. It's all about location intelligence. And how does that get embedded into the applications? And to the point you made vehicles that are out there on the roads to today. So we target developers. Those are our key customers, and we've got over three and a half million registered on the platform today. They consume the modules that we build with APIs, SDKs, data sets, and more and more applications to accomplish whatever those location needs might be. >>Why we appreciate you coming on. You are featured keynote by presenter here at summit, which means Amazon thinks you're super important to share. I'll say your customer. So you, I know you've been a customer for a long time as a company, but what was your keynote about what was the main theme? The developers were all here. You got the builders. What was your content? What did you present this morning on the keynote? Yeah, >>Well, this morning we really talked a lot about logistics and the, this story that we told was know in the logistics industry, there is a massive movement to shorter and shorter delivery windows. And so the, the, the story that we told is really around a 10 minute delivery. Now, have you ever wondered how you get a 10 minute delivery? You, you place an order on your phone and all of a sudden somebody shows up at your front doorstep. You ever wonder about that? >><laugh> >>Some shows supply >>Chain. Someone's waiting in the wings from my call. >>Yeah. >>Yeah. Well, that's right. >>John's about to order sometime soon. That's right. You ready? That's right. Do all these assets. That's >>Right. They're all ready for you. But there's actually a tremendous amount that actually goes into that. And so it really starts with designing the right distribution system up front. And so we've got tools and, and applications and, and APIs that support that. And really it, every single step of the way, location is a critical aspect to making that delivery happen and getting it to a customer's doorstep in 10 minutes or less. And so how are you understanding the real time road graph that underlies a, a, a driver going from perhaps a dark store, dark kitchen to getting in, excuse me, in front of a customer in 10 minutes with hot food. >>I mean, this is a big point. I was just joking about waiting for me, you know, that, but the point is, is that it's not obvious, but it sounds really hard. I know it's hard because to have that delivery, a lot of things have to happen. It's not just knowing location. >>That's exactly >>Right. So can you just UN pull appeal back the covers on that? What's going on there? >>Yeah. So imagine this is, is, it really starts, as I was saying with designing that distribution system and it's putting in place where you might not expect it, it's actually putting in place a retail store, but these aren't any retail stores, right? These are dark stores. These are dark kitchens that are strategically placed as close as possible, the customer density, so that you can actually shorten that window as much as possible to get you whatever that order might be. But from there, it actually goes quite a bit further when an order actually comes in, you've gotta be able to understand how do I sign an, a driver to get that order to the customer in that, in that very short period of time, more often than not, it's getting it to the driver that can get there the fastest, once you've got the right driver identified, how are you actually then going to enable them to get from point a to B to get that order. >>And then perhaps from B to C to get to your front door, being able to do turn by turn navigation that reflects everything. That's how happening in the real world to be able to get there on a timely way is critical. And then wrapping around that actually the, the, the end customer's experience your experience with how are you placing that order? Yeah. How are you using Mapbox services to do that? How are you being able to track on your application and say, well, you know, great, I expect 10 minutes and they're five minutes away. Are you gonna show up our APIs and SDKs power? That experience, >>I wanna get into the product in a second, but you brought up something I think's important to highlight. One is dark kitchens, dark stores. That's right. Okay. Term people may or may not have heard of, we all have experience in COVID going to our favorite restaurant, which has been kind of downsized because of the COVID and we're waiting for our food. And someone comes in from another delivery ever standing in line next was just pick something up. I mean, they're going through the front door. That's like the, the, the branded store. So, so is it right to say that dark kitchens are essentially replicas of the store to minimize that traffic, but, but also to be efficient for something else that's right. >>It actually even goes further than that. There are many restaurant brands. Now, it only exists as a brand. They don't have a restaurant that you can go to and sit down and have that meal. They actually only operate dark kitchens to, to serve that demand of people wanting to order up, Hey, I want my food. I want it. Now, those brands exist to serve that need. >>All right. So great for the definition, we just define dark kitchens, dark stores, but also brings, I wanna get your reaction to this before we get into the product, cuz this is a trend that's right. This is not like a one off thing. That's right. It's not a pulled forward TA a market that was COVID enabled. This is actually a user experience inflection point. That's >>Right. >>Can you share your vision on what this means? Because there's mobile ordering, there's the dynamics of the kitchens as a supplier of something in stores. So that's content or a product that's being delivered to a consumer via of the web. So now there's gotta be a whole nother reef factoring of the operating environment. Now that's what's happening is that might get that >>Right? No, that's exactly right. And even if you step back, even further and you, you think about the, the journey that the logistics industry has been on, it used to be that two days was that really exciting delivery time. Right. And everybody got it super excited. Then it became next day. Then it became same day and now it's become 10 minutes. And even some companies are out there offering seven minute deliveries, right. And in order to do that, you've gotta completely retool your business. So you can think the logistics and industry really existing on two continuums, you've got pre-planned deliveries on one hand and on-demand deliveries on the other. And there are two parallel distribution systems and ecosystems and industries really springing up to serve those different types of demand. >>So you've been on Amazon web services customer for how many years, >>Since 2013 in our founding. And you know, actually we're really proud to say that we were born on Amazon and we have scaled on Amazon. >>How are they helping you scale? What are they doing to help you? >>Well, I'd say just about everything. And if you think about their, the, the services that Amazon provides for us, they power every single step of our business along the way. And so I'll give you an example. We can walk through that with some of the tech technology. I, if you think about again, how do you get 10 minutes? You gotta have a pretty precise understanding of what's going on in the real world. And so to do that, it, for us, it all starts with collecting billions and billions of data points from sensors that are out there in the world. We stream that into our technology stack, starting at the very beginning with Amazon ESIS. And so that's just the start. But then that feeds into our entire technology stack that all runs on site on top of AWS, to where we're running our own AI models that we use Amazon SageMaker to make, and then stream it back out to our AP, through our APIs, to our se Ks and applications that sit on the edge again, all leveraging Amazon technology. >>Well, I think this is a great use case and I'll get back into the, the Mapbox a second, but Amazon, you guys are executing what I call the super cloud vision, which is snowflake you guys building on their CapX leverage. You're building a super cloud on your own. It's your app, it's your cloud. >>That's right. That's right. So if you, again, if you think about it, you know, and actually just stepping back for a moment, tell about Mapbox for a second is what, what Mapbox can do is provide the most accurate digital representation of the physical world. Think about the Mapbox technology, delivering the most accurate digital twin of mother earth, right? That's what we do. And the way that we do that is to consume, as I said earlier, vast amounts of data, we've got powerful AI that structures that data, and then really robust and scalable infrastructure that underpins all of that. Now the benefit of working with a company like AWS is that they take care of that third point. Yeah. Which means we get to go focus on the first two, which is how we differentiate and build our >>Business. And that's exactly the model of how you win in the cloud. In my opinion, that's the go big piece, the go and there's tools that fit in white spaces. But that's the, I think that's the right formula. Let's get back to Mac boxer. I know you've got news. You got the, the, uh, Mapbox fleet SDK. You announced, I wanna hold on that we'll get to in a second, let's get back to what you got are providing that example as you have this new operating environment of how delivery and, and supply chain and that's example, I want to know how tech your technology is making all that work. Because I was just talking to someone last night about this web van was web 1.0 and crash never was successful. Instacart is kind of hurting. So maybe they're optimized. You could save them. I mean, cuz the economics gotta work. If you don't have the underlying system built, that might fail. So there'll be probably the third version that gets it. Right. Maybe at Mapbox again, I'm speculating, but I'll let you talk. Yeah. How does Mapbox solve the, that problem? >>You know, it's interesting if you come back to that, that, that analogy we're using with AWS and how do you use AWS to win in the cloud? It's the same story for Mapbox of how do you win in the location industry? And what we do is provide those same tool sets of APIs and SDKs, the thing go power, those logistics companies like an Instacart, who's a great customer of ours to run in their logistics business on top of it again, it's all about how do you provide technology that allows your customers yeah. To focus on what matters from a differentiation perspective as they focus on building their >>Business and you think your economics is gonna enable these people to be successful >>100%. That's >>The goal >>100%. >>All right. So another thing that I wanna bring up is the fleet SDK, what was the, that you announced they can, you just quickly share the news on what this >>Is? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that, John. Yeah. So today on the Eve of earth day, we're very excited to announce Mapbox fleet going into, uh, our beta launch and what Mapbox fleet is, is, uh, a set of tools and application that allows our customers to more efficiently route their vehicles, which means lowering their fuel consumption. And at the same time, more efficiently dispatching those vehicles, which means that you can get more done with fewer assets, essentially. How do you get more packages onto a single vehicle to get those to the customers? Now you may be watching the news and understanding, yeah, there's a tremendous explosion of delivery going. Yeah. And that's fantastic. Right? That's great business for our logistics customers. Good business for us too. What's happening though, is that as those volumes are ballooning, everybody's all of a sudden, really looking at their cost structures and trying to understand how do I manage this? >>Right. I have efficiency targets as a business. Maybe I've been really focused on customer acquisition. Now it's time to flip the model and really understand in the economics of profitable growth. We help with that, with that focus on efficiency, but the double edged sword with growth and, and you know, running a logistics business is that you actually have a tremendous amount of carbon emissions that are associated with that. Yeah. For a car to show up or a truck to show up, to deliver something to your house, their emissions associated with that. So what we find is that we're able to not only drive dollar savings for our customers, but also as part of that, with the efficiency angle, really help to drive down the overall carbon impact in the carbon footprint of what they do. And >>How do you do that? >>Well, it's the efficiency lens, right? So if somebody is driving 20%, fewer miles, they're going to emit 20% fewer. Okay. >>Gotcha. So it's a numbers game across the board with actual measurement. That's exactly right. Built in and say optimization paths, all kinds of navigation. >>That's exactly right. So embedded within Mapbox fleet application are those optimization algorithm. >>So you got a platform that's setting up for the next level delivery system slash new way to connect people to goods and services and other things getting from point a to point B, you got the sustainability check you're in the cloud, born in the cloud cloud scale. I gotta a, I can't go without asking if you're on Amazon, you do all this cool stuff. There's gotta be a machine learning an AI angle. So what is that? Yeah, absolutely. >>Absolutely. AB yeah. You know, <laugh> guilty as charged. >>I would say >>John. Uh, so look, I >>Think, I mean AI and, and sustainability are gonna be, I think filings in my, in the future we be talking about on the cube, if you're not an AI company or, and doing force for good stuff, I think there's gonna be mandatory requirements on those. >>I couldn't three more. I think the ESG agenda is an incredibly important one. One that's core to Mapbox has been since the founding of the company back in 2013. Uh, but if you look at how does AI and ML fit into Mapbox, it does that in a number of different ways. And really when we come back to this idea of Mapbox creating a digital twin of the earth, the way that we do that, it is through ingesting a tremendous amount of sensor data. Right? You can imagine, uh, Mapbox customers on any given week drive, billions of miles, we're capturing all of that telemetry data to understand and make sense of what does that mean for, for, for the world that allows us to push in any given day 700,000 updates to our underly, your location technology stack, and at the same time provide insights as to exactly what's happening. Are there roadside incidents? Are there, are there issues with traffic? So by collecting all of that data, we run incredibly powerful AI models on top of it that allow us to create the, the real world representation of what's happening. That's exactly how >>It works. What, what, as they say in the, um, big data AI world is you guys have a tremendous observation space. You're looking at a lot of surface area data that's exactly right. Across multiple workloads and apps. That's >>Exactly >>Right. You can connect those dots with the right AI. >>That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And I think I, you know, coming back to your point around sustainability, I do think that the AI and ML capabilities that are being delivered are going to be paramount to that. It being such a fundamental aspect to what am, to what Mapbox does as a business allows us to launch these game changing solutions like Mapbox fleet and staying on that, that kind of environmental and sustainable kick for a second. Just last week, we launched our, our EV routing API that powers the next generation of EVs. So AI ML sustainability. If it's not core business today, it's gotta very quickly become core. >>It's really interesting. I really think what we're teasing out here and it's fun to talk about it now because we'll look back at it later 10 years or more and say, wow, this is completely refactored the industry and lives and the planet ultimately. Right. So this is a, a kind of got force for good built into the system natively. That's >>Right. That's >>That's interesting, Garrett, thanks so much for sharing the story. Give you the last word, share with the audience, what you guys are up to, what you're promoting, what you're looking for. Are you hiring, uh, is there a call to action? You wanna share? Give the plug for the company? Yeah, >>Absolutely hiring like crazy come join Mapbox and BU build the future of geolocation and intelligent location services with us. Uh, the, thanks so much for the time, >>John. Thanks for coming on cube coverage here in San Francisco, California Mosconi center back at live events. I'm John for host cube stayed with us as day two wraps down. Remember New York city. This summer will be there as well. Cube coverage of more cloud coverage events are back. Thanks for watching.

>> From "theCUBE" studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from "theCUBE" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> There are very few political issues that get bipartisan support these days, nevermind consensus spanning geopolitical boundaries. But whether we're talking across the aisle or over the pond, there seems to be common agreement that the power of big tech firms should be regulated. But the government's track record when it comes to antitrust aimed at big tech is actually really mixed, mixed at best. History has shown that market forces rather than public policy have been much more effective at curbing monopoly power in the technology industry. Hello, and welcome to this week's "Wikibon CUBE" insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in frequent "CUBE" contributor Dave Moschella, author and senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Dave, welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks Dave, good to be here. >> So you just recently published an article, we're going to bring it up here and I'll read the title, "Theory Aside, Antitrust Advocates Should Keep Their "Big Tech" Ambitions Narrow". And in this post you argue that big sweeping changes like breaking apart companies to moderate monopoly power in the tech industry have been ineffective compared to market forces, but you're not saying government shouldn't be involved rather you're suggesting that more targeted measures combined with market forces are the right answer. Can you maybe explain a little bit more the premise behind your research and some of your conclusions? >> Sure, and first let's go back to that title, when I said, theory aside, that is referring to a huge debate that's going on in global antitrust circles these days about whether antitrust should follow the traditional path of being invoked when there's real harm, demonstrable harm to consumers or a new theory that says that any sort of vast monopoly power inevitably will be bad for competition and consumers at some point, so your best to intervene now to avoid harms later. And that school, which was a very minor part of the antitrust world for many, many years is now quite ascendant and the debate goes on doesn't matter which side of that you're on the questions sort of there well, all right, well, if you're going to do something to take on big tech and clearly many politicians, regulators are sort of issuing to do something, what would you actually do? And what are the odds that that'll do more good than harm? And that was really the origins of the piece and trying to take a historical view of that. >> Yeah, I learned a new word, thank you. Neo-brandzian had to look it up, but basically you're saying that traditionally it was proving consumer harm versus being proactive about the possibility or likelihood of consumer harm. >> Correct, and that's a really big shift that a lot of traditional antitrust people strongly object to, but is now sort of the trendy and more send and view. >> Got it, okay, let's look a little deeper into the history of tech monopolies and government action and see what we can learn from that. We put together this slide that we can reference. It shows the three historical targets in the tech business and now the new ones. In 1969, the DOJ went after IBM, Big Blue and it's 13 years later, dropped its suit. And then in 1984 the government broke Ma Bell apart and in the late 1990s, went after Microsoft, I think it was 1998 in the Wintel monopoly. And recently in an interview with tech journalist, Kara Swisher, the FTC chair Lena Khan claimed that the government played a major role in moderating the power of tech giants historically. And I think she even specifically referenced Microsoft or maybe Kara did and basically said the industry and consumers from the dominance of companies like Microsoft. So Dave, let's briefly talk about and Kara by the way, didn't really challenge that, she kind of let it slide. But let's talk about each of these and test this concept a bit. Were the government actions in these instances necessary? What were the outcomes and the consequences? Maybe you could start with IBM and AT&T. >> Yeah, it's a big topic and there's a lot there and a lot of history, but I might just sort of introduce by saying for whatever reasons antitrust has been part of the entire information technology industry history from mainframe to the current period and that slide sort of gives you that. And the reasons for that are I think once that we sort of know the economies of scale, network effects, lock in safe choices, lot of things that explain it, but the good bit about that is we actually have so much history of this and we can at least see what's happened in the past and when you look at IBM and AT&T they both were massive antitrust cases. The one against IBM was dropped and it was dropped in as you say, in 1980. Well, what was going on in at that time, IBM was sort of considered invincible and unbeatable, but it was 1981 that the personal computer came around and within just a couple of years the world could see that the computing paradigm had change from main frames and minis to PCs lines client server and what have you. So IBM in just a couple of years went from being unbeatable, you can't compete with them, we have to break up with them to being incredibly vulnerable and in trouble and never fully recovered and is sort of a shell of what it once was. And so the market took care of that and no action was really necessary just by everybody thinking there was. The case of AT&T, they did act and they broke up the company and I would say, first question is, was that necessary? Well, lots of countries didn't do that and the reality is 1980 breaking it up into long distance and regional may have made some sense, but by the 1990 it was pretty clear that the telecom world was going to change dramatically from long distance and fixed wires services to internet services, data services, wireless services and all of these things that we're going to restructure the industry anyways. But AT& T one to me is very interesting because of the unintended consequences. And I would say that the main unintended consequence of that was America's competitiveness in telecommunications took a huge hit. And today, to this day telecommunications is dominated by European, Chinese and other firms. And the big American sort of players of the time AT&T which Western Electric became Lucent, Lucent is now owned by Nokia and is really out of it completely and most notably and compellingly Bell Labs, the Bell Labs once the world's most prominent research institution now also a shell of itself and as it was part of Lucent is also now owned by the Finnish company Nokia. So that restructuring greatly damaged America's core strength in telecommunications hardware and research and one can argue we've never recovered right through this 5IG today. So it's a very good example of the market taking care of, the big problem, but meddling leading to some unintended consequences that have hurt the American competitiveness and as we'll talk about, probably later, you can see some of that going on again today and in the past with Microsoft and Intel. >> Right, yeah, Bell Labs was an American gem, kind of like Xerox PARC and basically gone now. You mentioned Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft and Intel. As many people know, some young people don't, IBM unwillingly handed its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft by outsourcing the micro processor and operating system, respectively. Those two companies ended up with IBM ironically, agreeing to take OS2 which was its proprietary operating system and giving Intel, Microsoft Windows not realizing that its ability to dominate a new disruptive market like PCs and operating systems had been vaporized to your earlier point by the new Wintel ecosystem. Now Dave, the government wanted to break Microsoft apart and split its OS business from its application software, in the case of Intel, Intel only had one business. You pointed out microprocessors so it couldn't bust it up, but take us through the history here and the consequences of each. >> Well, the Microsoft one is sort of a classic because the antitrust case which was raging in the sort of mid nineties and 1998 when it finally ended, those were the very, once again, everybody said, Bill Gates was unstoppable, no one could compete with Microsoft they'd buy them, destroy them, predatory pricing, whatever they were accusing of the attacks on Netscape all these sort of things. But those the very years where it was becoming clear first that Microsoft basically missed the early big years of the internet and then again, later missed all the early years of the mobile phone business going back to BlackBerrys and pilots and all those sorts of things. So here we are the government making the case that this company is unstoppable and you can't compete with them the very moment they're entirely on the defensive. And therefore wasn't surprising that that suit eventually was dropped with some minor concessions about Microsoft making it a little bit easier for third parties to work with them and treating people a little bit more, even handling perfectly good things that they did. But again, the more market took care of the problem far more than the antitrust activities did. The Intel one is also interesting cause it's sort of like the AT& T one. On the one hand antitrust actions made Intel much more likely and in fact, required to work with AMD enough to keep that company in business and having AMD lowered prices for consumers certainly probably sped up innovation in the personal computer business and appeared to have a lot of benefits for those early years. But when you look at it from a longer point of view and particularly when look at it again from a global point of view you see that, wow, they not so clear because that very presence of AMD meant that there's a lot more pressure on Intel in terms of its pricing, its profitability, its flexibility and its volumes. All the things that have made it harder for them to A, compete with chips made in Taiwan, let alone build them in the United States and therefore that long term effect of essentially requiring Intel to allow AMD to exist has undermined Intel's position globally and arguably has undermined America's position in the long run. And certainly Intel today is far more vulnerable to an ARM and Invidia to other specialized chips to China, to Taiwan all of these things are going on out there, they're less capable of resisting that than they would've been otherwise. So, you thought we had some real benefits with AMD and lower prices for consumers, but the long term unintended consequences are arguably pretty bad. >> Yeah, that's why we recently wrote in Intel two "Strategic To Fail", we'll see, Okay. now we come to 2022 and there are five companies with anti-trust targets on their backs. Although Microsoft seems to be the least susceptible to US government ironically intervention at this this point, but maybe not and we show "The Cincos Comas Club" in a homage to Russ Hanneman of the show "Silicon Valley" Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all with trillion dollar plus valuations. But meta briefly crossed that threshold like Mr. Hanneman lost a comma and is now well under that market cap probably around five or 600 million, sorry, billion. But under serious fire nonetheless Dave, people often don't realize the immense monopoly power that IBM had which relatively speaking when measured its percent of industry revenue or profit dwarf that of any company in tech ever, but the industry is much smaller then, no internet, no cloud. Does it call for a different approach this time around? How should we think about these five companies their market power, the implications of government action and maybe what you suggested more narrow action versus broad sweeping changes. >> Yeah, and there's a lot there. I mean, if you go back to the old days IBM had what, 70% of the computer business globally and AT&T had 90% or so of the American telecom market. So market shares that today's players can only dream of. Intel and Microsoft had 90% of the personal computer market. And then you look at today the big five and as wealthy and as incredibly successful as they've been, you sort of have almost the argument that's wrong on the face of it. How can five companies all of which compete with each other to at least some degree, how can they all be monopolies? And the reality is they're not monopolies, they're all oligopolies that are very powerful firms, but none of them have an outright monopoly on anything. There are competitors in all the spaces that they're in and increasing and probably increasingly so. And so, yeah, I think people conflate the extraordinary success of the companies with this belief that therefore they are monopolist and I think they're far less so than those in the past. >> Great, all right, I want to do a quick drill down to cloud computing, it's a key component of digital business infrastructure in his book, "Seeing Digital", Dave Moschella coined a term the matrix or the key which is really referred to the key technology platforms on which people are going to build digital businesses. Dave, we joke you should have called it the metaverse you were way ahead of your time. But I want to look at this ETR chart, we show spending momentum or net score on the vertical access market share or pervasiveness in the dataset on the horizontal axis. We show this view a lot, we put a dotted line at the 40% mark which indicates highly elevated spending. And you can sort of see Microsoft in the upper right, it's so far up to the right it's hidden behind the January 22 and AWS is right there. Those two dominate the cloud far ahead of the pack including Google Cloud. Microsoft and to a lesser extent AWS they dominate in a lot of other businesses, productivity, collaboration, database, security, video conferencing. MarTech with LinkedIn PC software et cetera, et cetera, Googles or alphabets of business of course is ads and we don't have similar spending data on Apple and Facebook, but we know these companies dominate their respective business. But just to give you a sense of the magnitude of these companies, here's some financial data that's worth looking at briefly. The table ranks companies by market cap in trillions that's the second column and everyone in the club, but meta and each has revenue well over a hundred billion dollars, Amazon approaching half a trillion dollars in revenue. The operating income and cash positions are just mind boggling and the cash equivalents are comparable or well above the revenues of highly successful tech companies like Cisco, Dell, HPE, Oracle, and Salesforce. They're extremely profitable from an operating income standpoint with the clear exception of Amazon and we'll come back to that in a moment and we show the revenue multiples in the last column, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, just insane. Dave, there are other equally important metrics, CapX is one which kind of sets the stage for future scale and there are other measures. >> Yeah, including our research and development where those companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the years. And I think it's easy to look at those numbers and just say, this doesn't seem right, how can any companies have so much and spend so much? But if you think of what they're actually doing, those companies are building out the digital infrastructure of essentially the entire world. And I remember once meeting some folks at Google, and they said, beyond AI, beyond Search, beyond Android, beyond all the specific things we do, the biggest thing we're actually doing is building a physical infrastructure that can deliver search results on any topic in microseconds and the physical capacity they built costs those sorts of money. And when people start saying, well, we should have lots and lots of smaller companies well, that sounds good, yeah, it's all right, but where are those companies going to get the money to build out what needs to be built out? And every country in the world is trying to build out its digital infrastructure and some are going to do it much better than others. >> I want to just come back to that chart on Amazon for a bit, notice their comparatively tiny operating profit as a percentage of revenue, Amazon is like Bezos giant lifestyle business, it's really never been that profitable like most retail. However, there's one other financial data point around Amazon's business that we want to share and this chart here shows Amazon's operating profit in the blue bars and AWS's in the orange. And the gray line is the percentage of Amazon's overall operating profit that comes from AWS. That's the right most access, so last quarter we were well over a hundred percent underscoring the power of AWS and the horrendous margins in retail. But AWS is essentially funding Amazon's entrance into new markets, whether it's grocery or movies, Bezos moves into space. Dave, a while back you collaborated with us and we asked our audience, what could disrupt Amazon? And we came up with your detailed help, a number of scenarios as shown here. And we asked the audience to rate the likelihood of each scenario in terms of its likelihood of disrupting Amazon with a 10 being highly likely on average the score was six with complacency, arrogance, blindness, you know, self-inflicted wounds really taking the top spot with 6.5. So Dave is breaking up Amazon the right formula in your view, why or why not? >> Yeah, there's a couple of things there. The first is sort of the irony that when people in the sort of regulatory world talk about the power of Amazon, they almost always talk about their power in consumer markets, whether it's books or retail or impact on malls or main street shops or whatever and as you say that they make very little money doing that. The interest people almost never look at the big cloud battle between Amazon, Microsoft and lesser extent Google, Alibaba others, even though that's where they're by far highest market share and pricing power and all those things are. So the regulatory focus is sort of weird, but you know, the consumer stuff obviously gets more appeal to the general public. But that survey you referred to me was interesting because one of the challenges I sort of sent myself I was like okay, well, if I'm going to say that IBM case, AT&T case, Microsoft's case in all those situations the market was the one that actually minimized the power of those firms and therefore the antitrust stuff wasn't really necessary. Well, how true is that going to be again, just cause it's been true in the past doesn't mean it's true now. So what are the possible scenarios over the 2020s that might make it all happen again? And so each of those were sort of questions that we put out to others, but the ones that to me by far are the most likely I mean, they have the traditional one of company cultures sort of getting fat and happy and all, that's always the case, but the more specific ones, first of all by far I think is China. You know, Amazon retail is a low margin business. It would be vulnerable if it didn't have the cloud profits behind it, but imagine a year from now two years from now trade tensions with China get worse and Christmas comes along and China just says, well, you know, American consumers if you want that new exercise bike or that new shoes or clothing, well, anything that we make well, actually that's not available on Amazon right now, but you can get that from Alibaba. And maybe in America that's a little more farfetched, but in many countries all over the world it's not farfetched at all. And so the retail divisions vulnerability to China just seems pretty obvious. Another possible disruption, Amazon has spent billions and billions with their warehouses and their robots and their automated inventory systems and all the efficiencies that they've done there, but you could argue that maybe someday that's not really necessary that you have Search which finds where a good is made and a logistical system that picks that up and delivers it to customers and why do you need all those warehouses anyways? So those are probably the two top one, but there are others. I mean, a lot of retailers as they get stronger online, maybe they start pulling back some of the premium products from Amazon and Amazon takes their cut of whatever 30% or so people might want to keep more of that in house. You see some of that going on today. So the idea that the Amazon is in vulnerable disruption is probably is wrong and as part of the work that I'm doing, as part of stuff that I do with Dave and SiliconANGLE is how's that true for the others too? What are the scenarios for Google or Apple or Microsoft and the scenarios are all there. And so, will these companies be disrupted as they have in the past? Well, you can't say for sure, but the scenarios are certainly plausible and I certainly wouldn't bet against it and that's what history tells us. And it could easily happen once again and therefore, the antitrust should at least be cautionary and humble and realize that maybe they don't need to act as much as they think. >> Yeah, now, one of the things that you mentioned in your piece was felt like narrow remedies, were more logical. So you're not arguing for totally Les Affaire you're pushing for remedies that are more targeted in scope. And while the EU just yesterday announced new rules to limit the power of tech companies and we showed the article, some comments here the regulators they took the social media to announce a victory and they had a press conference. I know you watched that it was sort of a back slapping fest. The comments however, that we've sort of listed here are mixed, some people applauded, but we saw many comments that were, hey, this is a horrible idea, this was rushed together. And these are going to result as you say in unintended consequences, but this is serious stuff they're talking about applying would appear to be to your point or your prescription more narrowly defined restrictions although a lot of them to any company with a market cap of more than 75 billion Euro or turnover of more than 77.5 billion Euro which is a lot of companies and imposing huge penalties for violations up to 20% of annual revenue for repeat offenders, wow. So again, you've taken a brief look at these developments, you watched the press conference, what do you make of this? This is an application of more narrow restrictions, but in your quick assessment did they get it right? >> Yeah, let's break that down a little bit, start a little bit of history again and then get to Europe because although big sweeping breakups of the type that were proposed for IBM, Microsoft and all weren't necessary that doesn't mean that the government didn't do some useful things because they did. In the case of IBM government forces in Europe and America basically required IBM to make it easier for companies to make peripherals type drives, disc drives, printers that worked with IBM mainframes. They made them un-bundle their software pricing that made it easier for database companies and others to sell their of products. With AT&T it was the government that required AT&T to actually allow other phones to connect to the network, something they argued at the time would destroy security or whatever that it was the government that required them to allow MCI the long distance carrier to connect to the AT network for local deliveries. And with that Microsoft and Intel the government required them to at least treat their suppliers more even handly in terms of pricing and policies and support and such things. So the lessons out there is the big stuff wasn't really necessary, but the little stuff actually helped a lot and I think you can see the scenarios and argue in the piece that there's little stuff that can be done today in all the cases for the big five, there are things that you might want to consider the companies aren't saints they take advantage of their power, they use it in ways that sometimes can be reigned in and make for better off overall. And so that's how it brings us to the European piece of it. And to me, the European piece is much more the bad scenario of doing too much than the wiser course of trying to be narrow and specific. What they've basically done is they have a whole long list of narrow things that they're all trying to do at once. So they want Amazon not to be able to share data about its selling partners and they want Apple to open up their app store and they don't want people Google to be able to share data across its different services, Android, Search, Mail or whatever. And they don't want Facebook to be able to, they want to force Facebook to open up to other messaging services. And they want to do all these things for all the big companies all of which are American, and they want to do all that starting next year. And to me that looks like a scenario of a lot of difficult problems done quickly all of which might have some value if done really, really well, but all of which have all kinds of risks for the unintended consequence we've talked before and therefore they seem to me being too much too soon and the sort of problems we've seen in the past and frankly to really say that, I mean, the Europeans would never have done this to the companies if they're European firms, they're doing this because they're all American firms and the sort of frustration of Americans dominance of the European tech industry has always been there going back to IBM, Microsoft, Intel, and all of them. But it's particularly strong now because the tech business is so big. And so I think the politics of this at a time where we're supposedly all this great unity of America and NATO and Europe in regards to Ukraine, having the Europeans essentially go after the most important American industry brings in the geopolitics in I think an unavoidable way. And I would think the story is going to get pretty tense over the next year or so and as you say, the Europeans think that they're taking massive actions, they think they're doing the right thing. They think this is the natural follow on to the GDPR stuff and even a bigger version of that and they think they have more to come and they see themselves as the people taming big tech not just within Europe, but for the world and absent any other rules that they may pull that off. I mean, GDPR has indeed spread despite all of its flaws. So the European thing which it doesn't necessarily get huge attention here in America is certainly getting attention around the world and I would think it would get more, even more going forward. >> And the caution there is US public policy makers, maybe they can provide, they will provide a tailwind maybe it's a blind spot for them and it could be a template like you say, just like GDPR. Okay, Dave, we got to leave it there. Thanks for coming on the program today, always appreciate your insight and your views, thank you. >> Hey, thanks a lot, Dave. >> All right, don't forget these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search, "Breaking Analysis Podcast". Check out ETR website, etr.ai. We publish every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @davevellante. Comment on my LinkedIn post. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Michelle for "theCUBE Insights" powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (slow tempo music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020, brought to you by Mirantis. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Mirantis Launchpad 2020. Big event, multiple tracks powered by theCUBE365. Happy to welcome you to the program. We have a first time guest, Willem du Plessis. He's the Director of Customer Success and Operations with Mirantis. Willem, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu, thanks for having me. >> So customer success, of course, a big topic in the industry last few years. CX a is so important. Employee success and enabling that, but what, give us a little bit, your background and the purview that you and your team cover. >> Exactly, yeah, so everything under my umbrella would be basically post-sales. The whole customer experience after the point of a sale's been made so the whole account management, thereafter, the success of the accounts, as well as the health of the account, thereafter, that will be anything basically post-sales would be under my umbrella. >> Wonderful, well, the big piece is the shift. As we know, software went from shrink wrapped, and hardware talking about CapX to the cloud really ushered in OpX we're touching more subscription managed services and the like, so Mirantis has a subscription offering. Why don't you lay out for us the new pieces of this and how Mirantis puts together its offerings? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with the launch of our new product, Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, we're making two subscriptions available as well, named ProdCare, which is a 24/7 mission critical support offering and OpsCare, being a fully managed platform as a service subscription. Now, these offerings have been available on the Mirantis Cloud platform side of our business for quite some time, we've been very successful with them, so it's really excited making them available to our Docker Enterprise customers. So what we're trying to achieve with these accounts or with these subscriptions, rather, you know, 30% of the Fortune 100 companies are Mirantis customers, so we work on a day to day basis with their container and Kubernetes initiatives. So when we speak to these customers, there are really two trends that are becoming very clear, the first being the requirements of service providers or vendors being able to provide a true 24/7 experience. What I mean by that is not the ability to just react to an incident on a 24/7 basis. That's what I mean, what I mean is all of these companies would have operation centers spread across the globe. So it is at every hour of the day, it would be business as usual. And what these companies require is a, a partner or a service provider that can match that level, that way of operating. That is the first trend that we're noting. The second piece is really the, the evolution of the dev environment. The dev environment is no longer really seen as a secondary or a lower class citizen, if you want to call it, it's really become part of the whole DevOps pipeline, so it is really part of a mission critical process so that what customers, what we hear from our customers is that they require a real enterprise-grade subscription that they can cover this whole pipeline under and, you know, have the same quality of service from whether that is a dev or a production environment. So if you have a failure on your dev environment and your developer cannot push code, that is, is the same level of criticality than there would then they would be on if the failure was on the production environment. So this whole pipeline is decidedly seen as a mission critical component. And that's a great, that's really where ProdCare comes in. It is really this 24/7 mission critical follow the sun, enterprise-grade subscription that provides our customers with enhanced SLAs that, like I said, we've been running on the Mirantis Cloud platform side for quite some time, we've had some significant success with some really large companies. The second offering that we're making available with, like I said, is OpsCare. Now OpsCare is an ITIL-based managed service subscription, where we provide a platform as a service experience to a customer on their infrastructure of choice. So it is really irrelevant for us what your infrastructure is, whether that is on-prem or in the public cloud, as long as the product can support the infrastructure, you know, the subscription would be available for you and the experience would be very much the same. So what OpsCare, like I said, entails is, is this whole ITIL framework that would include, you know, the monitoring and managing of your alerts, the incident management process, the problem management process, as well as change management that would include the lifecycle management of the whole environment. And that would just enable our customers to run on the latest and greatest offer of our product at all times. And same as with ProdCare that's been available for our brass cloud platform customers for quite a while, and have seen some significant success with that, as well. >> Well, we definitely have seen that growth of the managed care offerings like you're talking about with OpsCare, you know, shift left is so important for companies to be able to focus on what's critically important. As you said, developers need to be enabled, it can't just be waiting for things or be, you know, relegated to, you know, have to wait in line or use something that's not optimal. What are some of those outcomes? What can companies do that they weren't able before? What are some of those successes that you're seeing with the managed care OpsCare solution? >> Yeah, so the real way we OpsCare really comes to its own is allowing the customer ability to focus on what is important to their business and spend less time on what we call, keep the lights on. What I mean by that is they're solely focused on developing the application, developing the workload and spend basically no time on managing the infrastructure and, you know, maintaining it, or, you know, providing, do whatever to, to keep the platform stable, because that is done by Mirantis, already. So for example, if we take 2020 year to date, all the platforms running under OpsCare has an availability number of above four nines, and that is a significant number. So that really just sets such a strong foundation for a customer to just have that sole focus on, on what is important to them and, you know, just sets that foundation for them to develop their workload, to develop their business, and achieve their goals. >> Well, what about when it comes to the managing and monitoring of the environment? What kind of metrics are your customers having? Help us understand what the customer still does themselves or the reporting they're getting and what Mirantis, I'm assuming there's probably a Tam involved for at least some of the larger accounts there. Help us understand that shared responsibility, if you would for these type of environments. >> Yeah, exactly. So the whole ITIL framework, as I explained earlier, incident management, problem management, change, all of that, this is wrapped around why a customer success manager that is, you know, brings a single level of ownership on an accountability, and just have a customer direct for a single point of contact as a business partner. So all this is all our customers, their primary KPI or metric that we look at is just the availability of the platform. That is the primary SLA and thereafter, all of the other things happening, you know, the success of the workload and so on, because there's a lot of things that makes the result of the workload, not just the platform or the infrastructure, it's the quality of the workload, and so on, and so forth. But the main metric our customer would be looking at is that availability number, you know, how available and how stable and accessible is the environment, and, you know, like I said, just removing that requirement for them to spend, basically, no time on the platform or the infrastructure, and just focusing on the workload. >> Yeah, when it comes to in the field, your field, your partners, that line between ProdCare and OpsCare, obviously, the trend is going towards, you know, the fully managed option, but what guidance do you have out there, or what trends do you seeing? Is it a certain size company, that tends to be trending that way? Are there certain verticals that may be are further ahead? What's the reality, today? What do you expect to see over the next kind of six, 12 months? >> Yeah, so most of the companies that we see that as, that is engaging with us on an OpsCare, or managed service engagement, you know, they have the ambitions to go down the block model and build, operate, transfer, you know, to take the operations over themselves, at some point, and we have that option available to them, if they wish to choose it further along the line. What we do find is, is that they, that they don't really, you know, exercise that later on. It is, we do find it is such a smooth integration with our customers, that they tend to stay on OpsCare and see the value. This is actually a money saver for them, if they could, just focus their efforts on building, you know, focusing their time on the workload on top of the platform. From a vertical perspective, it's really anything and everything. We have customers in the science and research, we have TELCOs, large manufacturing, manufacturing, a lot of large organizations. There's really the breadth of the verticals that we see that are utilizing OpsCare and not even to mention ProdCare, that's really everything in there, as well. So it is not a really a subscription that is, that is custom for one vertical. It is basically something that we, that any vertical can actually utilize and find a significant amount of value in. >> All right, well, what final words do you have that you want to leave everyone with today? >> Yeah, so over the last six to nine months, you know, we've invested a significant amount of resources in the Docker Enterprise support business and we just with one focus, and that is just to take the support business to the next level and improve or give the customers an optimal customer experience. So with the availability of all these new subscriptions, I'm really excited to engage with our Docker Enterprise customers with these new, enhanced SLAs and just be able to work with them on these, like I said, enhanced subscriptions and just see, just give them a better customer experience. So, I'm really looking forward to working with them on the subscriptions. >> Willem, thank you so much for all the updates and want to welcome everyone to be sure to check out all the rest of the tracks on the Launchpad 2020 event. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to London everybody, this is Dave Vellante with The Cube, the leader in tech coverage, and we're here at AWS. We wanted to cover deeper the public sector activity. We've been covering this segment for quite some time, with the public sector summit in DC, went to Bahrain last year, and we wanted to extend that to London. We're doing a special coverage here with a number of public sector folks. Anjenesh Babu is here, he's a network manager at Oxford GLAM. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube, it's good to see you. >> Thank you.], thanks. >> GLAM, I love it. Gardens, libraries and museums, you even get the A in there, which everybody always leaves out. So tell us about Oxford GLAM. >> So we are part of the heritage collection side of the University. And I'm here representing the gardens and museums. In the divisions we've got world renown collections, which has been held for 400 years or more. It comprises of four different museums and the Oxford University Botanic Gardens and Arboretum. So in total, we're looking at five different divisions, spread across probably sixteen different sites, physical sites. And the main focus of the division is to bring out collections to the world, through digital outreach, engagement and being fun, bringing fun into the whole system. Sustainment is big, because we are basically custodians of our collections and it has to be here almost forever, in a sense. And we can only display about 1% of our collections at any one point and we've got about 8.5 million objects. So as you can imagine, the majority of that is in storage. So one way to bring this out to the wider world is to digitize them, curate them and present them, either online or in another form. So that is what we do. >> In your role as the network manager is to makes sure everything connects and works and stays up? Or maybe describe that a little more. >> So, I'm a systems architect and network manager for gardens and museums, so in my role, my primary focus is to bridge the gap between technical and the non-technical functions, within the department. And I also look after network and infrastructure sites, so there's two parts to the role, one is a BAU business as usual function where we keep the networks all going and keep the lights on, basically. The second part is bringing together designs, it's not just solving technical problems, so if I'm looking at a technical problem I step out and almost zoom out to see, what else are we looking at which could be connected, and solve the problem. For example, we could be looking at a web design solution in one part of the project, but it's not relevant just to that project. If you step out and say, we could do this in another part of the program, and we may be operating in silence and we want to breakdown those, that's part of my role as well. >> Okay, so you're technical but you also speak the language of the organization and business. We put it in quotes because you're not a business per say. Okay, so you're digitizing all these artifacts and then making them available 24/7, is that the idea? What are some of the challenges there? >> So the first challenge is only 3% of objects are actually digitized. So we have 1% on display, 3% is actually digitized, it's a huge effort, it's not just scanning or taking photographs, you've got cataloging, accessions and a whole raft of databases that goes behind. And museums historically have got their own separate database collection which is individually held different collection systems, but as public, you don't care, we don't care, we just need to look at the object. You don't want to see, that belongs to the Ashmolean Museum or the picture does. You just want to see, and see what the characteristics are. For that we are bringing together a layer, which integrates different museums, it sort of reflects what we're doing in out SIT. The museums are culturally diverse institutions and we want to keep them that way, because each has got its history, a kind of personality to it. Under the hood, the foundational architecture, systems remain the same, so we can make them modular, expandable and address the same problems. So that's how we are supporting this and making it more sustainable at the same time. >> So you have huge volume, quality is an issue because people want to see beautiful images. You got all this meta data that you're collecting, you have a classification challenge. So how are you architecting this system and what role does the Cloud play in there? >> So, in the first instance we are looking at a lot of collections were on premises in the past. We are moving as a SaaS solution at the first step. A lot of it requires cleansing of data, almost, this is the state of the images we aren't migrating, we sort of stop here let's cleanse it, create new data streams and then bring it to the Cloud. That's one option we are looking at and that is the most important one. But during all this process in the last three years with the GLAM digital program there's been huge amount of changes. To have a static sort of golden image has been really crucial. And to do that if we are going down rate of on premise and trying to build out, scale out infrastructures, it would have a huge cost. The first thing that I looked at was, explore the Cloud options and I was interested in solutions like Snowball and the Storage Gateway. Straightforward, loads up the data and it's on the Cloud, and then I can fill out the infrastructure as much as I want, because we can all rest easy, the main, day one data is in the Cloud, and it's safe, and we can start working on the rest of it. So it's almost like a transition mechanism where we start working on the data before it goes to the Cloud anyway. And I'm also looking at a Cloud clearing house, because there's a lot of data exchanges that are going to come up in the future, vendor to vendor, vendor to us and us to the public. So it sort of presents itself a kind of junction, who is going to fill the junction? I think the obvious answer is here. >> So Snowball or Gateway, basically you either Snowball or Gateway the assets into the Cloud and you decide which one to use based on the size and the cost associated with doing that, is that right? >> Yes, and convenience. I was saying this the other day at another presentation, it's addictive because it's so simple and straight forward to use, and you just go back and say it's taken me three days to transfer 30 terabytes into a Snowball appliance and on the fourth day, it appears in in my packets, so what are we missing? Nothing. Let's do it again next week. So you got the Snowball for 10 days, bring it in transfer, so it's much more straightforward than transferring it over the network, and you got to keep and eye on things. Not that it's not hard, so for example, the first workloads we transferred over to the file gateway, but there's a particular server which had problems getting things across the network, because of out dated OS on it. So we got the Snowball in and in a matter of three days the data was on the Cloud, so to effect every two weeks up on the Snowball, bring it in two weeks, in three days it goes up back on the Cloud. So there's huge, it doesn't cost us any more to keep it there, so the matter of deletions are no longer there. So just keep it on the Cloud shifting using lifecycle policies, and it's straight forward and simple. That's pretty much it. >> Well you understand physics and the fastest way to get from here to there is a truck sometimes, right? >> Well, literally it is one of the most efficient ways I've seen, and continues to be so. >> Yeah, simple in concept and it works. How much are you able to automate the end-to-end, the process that you're describing? >> At this point we have a few proof of concept of different things that we can automate, but largely because a lot of data is held across bespoke systems, so we've got 30 terabytes spread across sixteen hard disks, that's another use case in offices. We've got 22 terabytes, which I've just described, it's on a single server. We have 20 terabytes on another Windows server, so it's quite disparate, it's quite difficult to find common ground to automate it. As we move forward automation is going to come in, because we are looking at common interface like API Gateways and how they define that, and for that we are doing a lot of work with, we have been inspired a lot by the GDS API designs, and we are just calling this off and it works. That is a road we are looking at, but at the moment we don't have much in the way of automation. >> Can you talk a bit more about sustainability, you've mentioned that a couple of times, double click on that, what's the relevance, how are you achieving sustainability? Maybe you could give some examples. >> So in the past sustainability means that you buy a system and you over provision it, so you're looking for 20 terabytes over three years, lets go 50 terabytes. And something that's supposed to be here for three years gets kept going for five, and when it breaks the money comes in. So that was the kind of very brief way of sustaining things. That clearly wasn't enough, so in a way we are looking for sustainability from a new function say, we don't need to look at long-term service contracts we need to look at robust contracts, and having in place mechanisms to make sure that whatever data goes in, comes out as well. So that was the main driver and plus with the Cloud we are looking at the least model. We've got an annual expenditure set aside and that keeps it, sustainability is a lot about internal financial planning and based on skill sets. With the Cloud skill sets are really straightforward to find and we have engaged with quite a few vendors who are partnering with us, and they work with us to deliver work packages, so in a way even though we are getting there with the skills, in terms of training our team we don't need to worry about complex deployments, because we can outsource that in sprints. >> So you have shipped it from a CAPX to an OPX model, is that right? >> Yes >> So what was that like, I mean, was that life changing, was it exhilarating? >> It was exhilarating, it was phenomenally life changing, because it set up a new direction within the university, because we were the first division to go with the public Cloud and set up a contract. Again thanks to the G-Cloud 9 framework, and a brilliant account management team from AWS. So we shifted from the CAPX model to the OPX model with an understanding that all this would be considered as a leased service. In the past you would buy an asset, it depreciates, it's no longer the case, this is a leased model. The data belongs to us and it's straight forward. >> Amazon continues to innovate and you take advantage of those innovations, prices come down. How about performance in the cloud, what are you seeing there relative to your past experiences? >> I wouldn't say it's any different, perhaps slightly better, because the new SDS got the benefit of super fast bandwidth to the internet, so we've got 20 gigs as a whole and we use about 2 gigs at the moment, we had 10 gig. We had to downgrade it because, we didn't use that much. So from a bandwidth perspective that was the main thing. And a performance perspective what goes in the Cloud you frankly find no different, perhaps if anything they are probably better. >> Talk about security for a moment, how early on in the Cloud people were concerned about security, it seems to have attenuated, but security in the Cloud is different, is it not, and so talk about your security journey and what's your impression and share with our audience what you've learned. >> So we've had similar challenges with security, from security I would say there's two pots, one's the contractual security and one is the technical security. The contractual security, if we had spun up our own separate legal agreement with AWS or any other Cloud vendor, it would have taken us ages, but again we went to the digital marketplace, used the G-Cloud 9 framework and it was no brainer. Within a week we had things turned around, and we were actually the first institution to go live with and account with AWS. That is the taken care of. SDS is a third party security assessment template, which we require all our vendors to sign. As soon as we went through that it far exceeds what the SDS requires, and it's just a tick box exercise. And things like data encryption at rest, in transit it actually makes it more secure than what we are running on premise. So in a way technically it's far more secure than what we could ever have achieved that's on premise, and it's all taken care of, straight forward. >> So you've a small fraction of your artifacts today that are digitized. What's the vision, where do you want to take this? >> We're looking at, I'm speaking on behalf of gardens, this is not me, per say, I'm speaking on behalf of my team, basically we are looking at a huge amount of digitization. The collection should be democratized, that's the whole aspect, bringing it out to the people and perhaps making them curators in some form. We may not be the experts for a massive collection from say North America or the Middle East, there are people who are better than us. So we give them the freedom to make sure they can curate it in a secure, scalable manner and that's where the Cloud comes in. And we backend it using authentication that works with us, logs that works with us and roll-back mechanisms that works with us. So that's were we are looking at in the next few years. >> How would you do this without the Cloud? >> Oh. If you're doing it without the Cloud-- >> Could you do it? >> Yes, but we would be wholly and solely dependent on the University network, the University infrastructure and a single point. So when you're looking at the bandwidth it's shared by students using it network out of the university and our collection visitors coming into the university. And the whole thing, the DS infrastructure, everything's inside the university. It's not bad in its present state but we need to look at a global audience, how do you scale it out, how do you balance it? And that's what we're looking at and it would've been almost impossible to meet the goals that we have, and the aspirations, and not to mention the cost. >> Okay so you're going to be at the summit, the Excel Center tomorrow right? What are you looking forward to there for us from a customer standpoint? >> I'm looking at service management, because a lot of our work, we've got a fantastic service desk and a fantastic team. So a lot of that is looking at service management, how to deliver effectively. As you rightly say Amazon is huge on innovation and things keep changing constantly so we need to keep track of how we deliver services, how do we make ourselves more nimble and more agile to deliver the services and add value. If you look at the OS stack, that's my favorite example, so you look at the OS stack you've got seven layers going up from physical then all the way to the application. You can almost read an organization in a similar way, so you got a physical level where you've got cabling and all the way to the people and presentation layer. So right now what we are doing is we are making sure we are focusing on the top level, focusing on the strategies, creating strategies, delivering that, rather than looking out for things that break. Looking out for things that operationally perhaps add value in another place. So that's where we would like to go. >> Anjenesh, thanks so much for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you >> It was a pleasure to have you. All right and thank you for watching, keep right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube, from London at Amazon HQ, I call it HQ, we're here. Right back. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering .conf2018 brought to you by Splunk. >> Welcome back to Splunk's .conf2018. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're here in Orlando. Day one of two days of wall to wall coverage, this is our seventh year doing Splunk .conf, Stu amazing show, a lot of action, partnership is growing, ecosystem is growing. And we're going to to talk to one ecosystem partner, Gemini Data. J.R. Murray's here as the vice president of technical services. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Happy to be here. >> Yeah so when we first started this, Splunk ecosystem was really tiny and it's just sort of growing and growing and now is exploding. But tell us about Gemini Data what are you guys all about. What's your role? >> Sure, so my role is VP of technical services. I manage our sales engineers and professional services consultants as well as our managers services practice, based in the United States. So what I do is I go through and help make sure all the operations go pretty smoothly. And in terms of the company and what we do we've got a couple different things that we work on. Primarily our focus is around big data platforms and making them easier to deploy and manage. We offer a hardware appliances as part of that package and we also have an investigate software platform that we feed data into and it helps analysts jobs be a little bit more easier and quicker to do investigations. >> And you guys started the company three and a half, four years ago, is that right? >> That's right, that's right. >> Back when big data was and kind of still is a mess. >> That's right. >> Doug even said that in his conversations today. He said that we live in a world filled with change. The messiest landscape is the data. >> That's right. >> The bigger, the faster, the more complex the data, the messier it is. So you guys kind of started to solve a problem. Why did you start the company? What was the problem you were trying to solve? >> So really where we started is we focused on there's a problem with deploying big data platforms, customers have poor experiences in terms of it's too complicated, there are a lot of very technical details you have to worry about. And if you're a little bit lower on the maturity curve of technology solution implementation you might need some help along the way or if you are a little bit further along in the technical maturity curve you may actually need some help in getting something that's more turn-key in order to alleviate a lot of the challenges that go along with IT bureaucracy. You've got maybe something that you need that's purpose built because you've got something that's very central to your security strategy. You need to make sure that it's up and running, and reliable, and dependable. So that's where we come in. We have a platform that we allow you to implement. It's a turn-key solution, multiple systems get your Splunk deployment up and running. >> And when you do that on your website looking at, you support various technologies, I see Splunk on there, FireEye, Cloud Era, Service Now, Amazon, Azure, so those are sort of systems, RSA. I mean they've got a lot of products and a lot of cases it's cloud or, they've got a platform like Splunk. Will you actually do like bottoms up stuff with Hadoop and pig and hive or are you really focused on sort of that higher level helping customers integrate those platforms that they brought in. >> Right. >> Kind of helping them be a platform of platforms if you will, is it the former or the latter? >> Yeah so that's kind of the idea right? We come in and we go through and we say what are your actual goals here do you just want to go through and install Splunk or do you actually have a big data strategy that we can help you execute on. So it's kind of a cohesive holistic approach in terms of, what you need to deploy and how we help you get there. So if you need to deploy Splunk we help you install Splunk. If you want to do Splunk and have a Hadoop data role for example you can have hadub just alongside your Splunk all on the same platform. You can go through and manage that centrally and make it a little bit easier to manage via policy push out jobs centrally all the automation and orchestration is there and the under pendings for all those solutions. >> Yeah J.R. who who are you typically selling to? One of the things we look at data is pervasive in the company in companies but who owns it, I've talked to a number of people at this company that are like well I've got Splunk and everybody comes and asks me questions right now. So where do you fit in in the organization? >> So we've got a few different things going on. So in terms of who we sell to and where we focus, its kind of across the board we've got very large enterprises who are pushing tens of terabytes into the deployment, and we help them out with getting a solution that's going to be something that's a little bit more manageable. You've got a limited staff, the knowledge of Splunk is hard to hard to actually cultivate and then actually keep and retain folks that know Splunk. They are generally very well paid. So its easy for them to find opportunities elsewhere. You've invested a lot in these people, your success is very critical and they're a critical part of it. And it's important to keep those people around. So we've got a manage service to help with customers like that. We call it Gemini Care. We come in and we are actually able to have an automated monitoring and break fix type of resolution service that factors into those types of deployments. And as part of that we go through and offer some services and touch points throughout the month to make sure they're getting what they need from a value standpoint. I mean its one thing to have the platform and the deployment, and the data but in fact if you're not getting any value out of that what good is it? So if you don't have the talent the skills you're able to go through it and use us to implement some of those used cases and things like that. >> Yeah yeah one of the other things that changed a lot in the last 3, 4 years is the on the premises of course is where a lot of the customers are and a lot of data is but partner with the cloud, you partner with the Ager's and Amazon's in the world even if you start talking about edge that diversity of where my data lives. How how is that playing into your solution? >> So it's funny you mention that we came to arka we led with and applied base solution and we said customers that are having problems either getting hardware common thing is you want to put a box in or 10 or 20 boxes but you've got the storage team saying hey we need to hook up to our our sand we spent millions of dollars on this, we're going to get some use out of it and guess what Splunk you're going to be our biggest consumer of all of our storage internally on this brand new sand we got. A lot of times its not attractive to a lot of interim customers. You've got IOPS requirements, you've got all these other requirements. Folks don't understand you've got hard requirements for CPU's and and the band width there. So if you're using virtual solutions which a lot of customers are forced into doing you actually have a very difficult time getting reserved resources on those virtual hosts. So you get a bare metal box in there, you get a platform on it you have none of those issues. So in terms of where we pivoted from there the industry is obviously going towards cloud. So what we're trying to do is actually, we have a solution in the market today. Customers are really interested in us helping them on that journey so we've got plenty of customers who are on premise today they have a cloud strategy they want to get out of the data center business and they need to get into cloud. So what we're doing is we're helping them we've got equipment who in a code located data center and what we're doing is migrating customers over to that infrastructure as more of a subscription basis. So it's the same platform but now it's in the cloud. There are benefits to that. >> So I want to I want to actually let me follow up now, so the subscription basis >> Right. How does that work? So it used to be what sort of an upfront perpetual license and then here you go and then we'll you when there's another upgrade. >> Right >> And now how's it work I know 75% last quarter of Splunk's bookings or revenue I'm not sure which one. Were subscription based irratible and there was a big long discussion about whatever it was 606 and all the Wall Street guys trying to part through it. What does it mean for the customer? What does that transition like? >> Okay >> Is it like hey good news. >> Right >> We're not going to go through the spike cycles we're going to smooth things out for you. But what's that conversation like? >> We've got a lot of flexibility with customers. We've got the ability to do OPX or CAPX, we've got the ability to ship as an appliance kind of as an all in one solution. However what we've really migrated to as what the market has demanded is customer feedback. Is, "hey we can buy this box anywhere" and we're like, "you know what you're right. If you want to go right ahead here's the software subscription. So now we have the option to sell the appliance and the software subscription together as one package that's also partially subscription but what happens when you migrate that into the cloud, is now you've got a cloud based subscription infrastructure and that software license is sort of included in that. >> I want to ask you about use cases. You were talking a little bit before but if you pre go back before the term big data came to fruition, you kind of had the EDW was the so called data big data used case and you had maybe a couple of analysts that knew the decision support systems and could build a cube and they were like the data gods. So big data comes in and you had used cases like a cheaper EDW that was kind of a really popular one. Certainly fraud detection was one, precision marketing, ad serving, obviously Splunk and the security and IT operations base although Splunk never really used the term big data so its only sort of more recent and line of business analytics. So you see all these sort of new uses for data very complex as you pointed out. You guys started the company to sort of help squint through some of that complexity and actually build solutions. So the brief history of big data by Dave Vellante. So given all that how has your customers use of data changed over the last since you guys have started and where do you see it going? >> So we originally started, originally we had some customers that came over into this new business venture existing relationships and what not they were using a different sim platform. You one of our primary objectives were to was to get them all in to Splunk and that's something that we were able to do successfully. So they were doing security analysis, log retention, those were their primary goals and that's it. Maybe compliance, okay. So their really focusing on that. Now today we're doing entirely different things. We're focusing on as you mentioned anti-fraud. Huge opportunity in the space there with Splunk the tools in that space today are prohibitively expensive, very complex and we come in with Splunk we're able to take in data from all sorts of places and technologies really know really know understanding of the data at that point required yet and then we convert that into business value for the customer by means of services. Because there's very little in the way of precan used cases for that and frankly when it comes to the fraud space a lot of customers their requirements are all different. There aren't really many shops that are very much alike at all. So you've got to sort of manage around that. Now that's one way but we're also seeing folks who want to do executive reporting out of their Splunk data. You're talking about being able to go through and do year to year reporting how are we doing from a risk management standpoint. These are the things you are starting to see trickle up to the Csuite in terms of what does that mean for us and the way we need to make these business decisions. >> So I understand that. So really started out kind of hard core IT and certainly security used cases. What I'm hearing is Splunk is expanding into lines of business actually using data in in ways that perhaps others were trying to do in the past but not really succeeding. >> That's right >> What is it about Splunk that allows you to do that. We heard a lot about 7dot2 today, performance improvements, some efficiency in your granular storage and compute. I'm sure that Csuite doesn't know or care about that but being able to analyze more data is something that they probably would care about, mobile is probably something that they care about. >> Absolutely. So what is that Splunk's doing that maybe others aren't doing or can't do, architecturally or technology wise? >> Now a couple things stand out right off the top. So you've got the ability to scale, you've got horizontal distribution of data which means you can spread that load across many many nodes. We're able to go through and distribute that load and it makes things actually perform. So we get an acceptable user experience and that means everything to a customer, right? So that's one thing. The second thing with Splunk you've skemead read you're able to pull in as much data as you want for as long as you want without having to understand that data. You can actually come back through later and and parse, interpret, report on, and get value out of that data historically without having to necessarily having to understand it upfront. That's in my personal experience been a huge impediment right up front to onboarding data with other we'll call them legacy solutions. But there still some in the market today that require and depend on that is knowing the data upfront. We can't pull in this data unless we know exactly what its supposed to look like and can sanitize it and parse it into fields. >> So Stu I want to follow up if I may. So a lot of people in the big data world talk about no scheme on write or scheme on read >> Sure >> And what they do is they toss everything into a data lake. The big joke is the lake becomes a swamp, they got to go and clean it up. Why is that not the case with Splunk? What's different about Splunk and that they're able to, I forget exactly how Doug said it but essentially structure the data when you need it. >> That's right >> In the moment >> So the difference with Splunk is that you're able to you're able to foster and really pull together the community resources more or less crowdsourcing how to parse all these data sources. You no longer have individuals at every given company with a very specific data source say Windows event logs that might be universal to many other applications and organizations, needing to roll their own. So you're able to socialize and share those things on a place like Splunk base and then suddenly everyone's able to really capitalize on the data, so I see that as more like a force multiplier. You've got the entire community behind you helping you parse your data because they have the same data and that's really what I think makes the difference. >> Whereas the so called data lake would be like the big data metaphor for a god box where only a few people know how to get to the data, right? >> Basically yeah, thats right? And the amount of skill required, okay, that's another big piece when you're in Splunk everything is very well documented so if you need to write a search and its there are plenty of resources you've got the Splunk community, you've also got all of the documentation, you've got the quick reference sheets. Its not hard to get into its hard to become an expert but if you just need to do something very quickly it's not that difficult. >> Well if we look at where Splunk is going next you talk a lot about the AI and the ML and one of the tensions you hear out there is, "how much am I willing to let the system just take that action?" So I'm curious on your product line and working with Splunk what you hear how real people are, the advances that we're getting with AI, ML and deep learning and are users ready to embrace that yet? >> Yeah so that's a technology that's truly made leaps and bounds even over the past five years. Right. So what we're seeing is customers are able to use machine learning to go through and do predictive analytics and to be able to have the machines to sort of speculate as to and you can say predict but its really I think speculation more like what a given categorical value might be. Is it yes or no, maybe for the answer to a question based on what those events say, or is it is there an outage coming up that potentially you could predict based on different values. And there all sorts of applications for that and all sorts of platforms that are trying to do that. Now what Splunk's done is sort of bring that to the masses with machine learning toolkit and made that a little bit easier to really digest for the common person. What they haven't done at least until very recently from what my understanding is that they're doing is that they're actually taking more of that function out and making it more intuitive helping customers understand the most common challenges I'll say. So you're really lowering the bar in terms of the amount of information or knowledge rather and skills to be able to leverage some of these more advanced algorithms and computing resources to go through and get the types of results you expect out of machine learning. >> Well J.R. Murray thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. >> Pleasure. Thank you >> Great to meet you. Alright everybody keep it right there Stu and I will be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE from Splunk .Conf18 in Orlando. We'll be right back.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE. Covering Inforum, DC 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> We are back this afternoon here in Washington, D.C., at the Walter Washington Convention Center. As we continue our coverage here of Inforum 2018 along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls, and we now welcome Mr. Cormack Watters to the program today, EVP of Emea and APAC at Infor. Cormack, good to see you sir. >> Nice to be here. >> So, we're going to talk about Guinness, over in Ireland (chuckling). Cormack's from Dublin, so we had a little conversation. We're getting a primer here. >> It's actually the best conversation we should have, right? >> Right, we'll save that for the end. How about that? So, you're fairly new, right? About a year or so. >> Ten months or so, not that I'm counting it by the day >> No no no, always going forward, never backward. But a big plate you have, right, with EMEA and APAC? Different adoptions, different viewpoints, different perspectives... We've talked a lot really kind of focusing domestically here for the past couple of days. Your world's a little different than that though, right? >> It is. It is. And it's very good that you've actually recognized it because that's actually the biggest challenge that we have. To be a little bit humble about it, I think we've got world-class products and solutions. I actually fundamentally believe that. But we have lots of different languages, cultures, and localization requirements in the multiple Countries that we look after. So, it's great to have great products, but it needs to be in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Arabic, which most of them are. Customers realize that we are actually international and localized for many, many markets. But now we've become an intriguing option for them, if you're a multi-national business, with subsidiaries all over the world. So, it's good that Infor is big enough to do that. We need to do a better job of letting everybody know that we've done that, if that makes any sense. >> Sure. >> So what's happening in Europe? Europe's always pockets, there's no..I mean.. Yes, EU but there's really still no one Europe. What's going on? Obviously, we have Brexit hanging over our head. I felt like U.S. markets are maybe a little bit overheated in Europe has potential upside. >> Yeah >> And it seems like others seem to agree with that. What happening on the ground? Any specific, interesting areas? Is Southern Europe still a concern? Maybe you can give us an update? >> Yeah, so Brexit is quite a dominant conversation. I am from Ireland. I live in Dublin, but I'm working all over Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Far East. So, I don't get to be at home very often, except the weekends. London is really our regional headquarters from a European perspective, and Brexit is on everybody's mind. Interestingly, when you go outside the UK, Brexit is not such a big topic because... That's Europe. And they kind of go, "Well if you don't want to be here, then you don't need to be here." Right? So it's a little bit of that, and they're saying, "Well, we'd like for them to stay, but if they don't want to stay, well, don't wait around." But in the UK, it's causing a lot of uncertainty. And the UK's one of our biggest markets. It's a lot of uncertainty, and what would be best is if we just knew what was going to happen, and then we could deal with it. And actually, once we know what's going to happen, that's going to bring a degree of change. And change, from our industry perspective means there's going to be some requirements that emerge. So, we need to be ready to serve those, which is opportunity. But the uncertainty is just slowing down investment. So, we need that to be resolved. >> So, clarity obviously is a good thing obviously a good thing in any market. Are there any hotspots? >> Yeah, actually for us, we're doing, for us the Hotspots right now, we're doing incredibly well in Germany. Which, one of our lesser known competitors is a small Company called SAP. And they're headquartered in Germany. It's quite interesting to see that we're actually taking a lot of market there in Germany, which is fantastic. That's a little bit unexpected, but it's going very well right now. We're seeing a ton of activity in the Asia Pacific, I would say that region is probably our fastest growing in all of Infor. And consistently so for several quarters and maybe past a year at this point. So Asia Pacific, Germany, U.K., and then as it happens, we are doing very well in Southern Europe, which is a combination of countries really. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Hard to put it down to which particular Country is doing well, but there seems to be a general uplift in that region. Because they were hit the hardest, arguably, by the crash back in 2008. So they've definitely come out of that now. >> And when they come out, excuse me I'm sorry John, but, they come out, Cloud becomes more important to them, Right? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Anyone who's been delaying investment for years, can actually leapfrog what's been happening and jump straight to what you might call the future. So lots of Companies, lots of our Customers, are trying to simplify their Business. So Cloud is a great equalizer. We believe in your, what we call Last Mile of Functionality per industry. And that should make the projects shorter, more compact more predictable and the infrastructure worries go away, because that's our responsibility to the Customers. >> We definitely so that in the U.S., 2008-2009, CFO's came in said shift to the Cloud, because we want to shift Capx to Opx, and when we came out of the downturn, they said "wow this stuff works pretty well, double down on it" and then there were other business benefits that they wanted to accelerate, and so maybe Southern Europe was a little bit behind >> I think that may be the case right, and they are picking up. And what we're seeing are a lot of other advantages. Not to make this a sale's pitch, but, I am here so >> Go for it >> You've got a microphone >> I've got a microphone and I'm Irish, so I've got to talk right? What the Cloud is actually doing is, lots of Companies have put in big ERP over the years, the decades. And then they get stuck at various points and maybe years behind, because upgrades become painful and really want to avoid them. So what they're seeing is, if they can get onto the Cloud, they never need to upgrade again. Because it's always current, because we upgrade it every week, or every month and they're never falling behind. So they want to be ready to take advantage of the innovations that they know about and those that they don't even know about. So by keeping on the latest version, that opportunities open to them. Also, there's a big issue in Europe specifically about a thing called GDPR, which is data protection. Security. So we believe that we can do a better job of providing that, than any individual Company. Because we provide it for everybody, our resources can be deployed once and then deployed many times. Where as if you're an individual customer, you've got to have that speciality and put it in place. So GDPR is a genuine issue in Europe, because, the fines are absolutely huge if a Company is found to breach it. >> It's become a template for the globe now, California's started moving in that direction, GDPR has set the frame work. >> Well and just to follow up on that, and now you're dealing with a very different regulatory climate, then certainly here in the United States. And many U.S. Companies are finding that out, as we know. Overseas right now. So how do you deal with that in terms of, this kind of balkanized approach that you have, that you know that what's working here doesn't necessarily translate to overseas, and plus you have, you know, you're serving many masters and not just one or two. >> What's happening is the guys in our RND have done very well, is they understand the requirement of, in this instance, GDPR. They look at the other regulatory requirements, lets say in Australia, which is subtly different, but it is different, and they can take, well what do we have to do? What's the most extreme we have to achieve? And if we do that across our suite into our platform suite, the N4RS, that can then be applied to all the applications. And then becomes relevant to the U.S. So it's almost like some requirement across the seas, being deployed then becoming really relevant back here because over here you do need to be aware of the data protection, as well, it's just not as formalized yet. >> It's coming >> A Brewing issue right? >> What about Asia Pacific? So you have responsibility for Japan, and China, and the rest of the region. >> Right >> Which you are sort of re-distinct... >> Really are right? There are several sub regions in the one region. The team down there, as I say, arguably the most successful team in Infor right now, so Helen and the crew. So you see Australia, New Zealand then you see Southeast Asia, then you see China, Japan and so on. So different dynamics and different markets, some more mature than others, Japan is very developed by very specific. You do need very specialized local skills to succeed. Arguably Australia, New Zealand is not that similar from say some of the European Countries. Even though there are differences and I would never dream to tell an Australian or a New Zealander that they are the same as Europeans, cuz I get it. I smile when people say "you're from the U.K and you're not from Ireland?" I understand the differentiation. (laugher) And Southeast Asia, there's a ton of local custom, local language, local business practice that needs to be catered for. We seem to be doing okay down there. As I say, fastest growing market at scale. It's not like it's growing ridiculously fast but from a small base. It's as a big market already and growing the fastest. >> And China, what's that like? You have to partner up? >> Oh yeah >> To the JV in China? >> You have to partner up, there are several of the key growth markets that it's best to go in with partners. Customers like to see we've got a presence. So that they can touch and feel that Infor entity. We can't achieve the scale we need, and the growth we want fast enough without partnering. So we have to go with partners to get us the resources that we need. >> And in the Middle East, so my business partner, Co-Host, John Furrier, is on a Twenty Hour flight to Bahrain. The Cube Bahrain. Bahrain was the first Country in the Middle East to declare Cloud first. AWS is obviously part of that story, part of your story. So what's going on over there? Is it a growing market? Is it sort of something you're still cracking? >> No, no, again it's growing. We have several key markets down there, big in hospitality in that part of the world. Hotels, tourism obviously. Shopping, very interesting markets, and Healthcare, interestingly enough. I think arguably some of the worlds best Hospitals are in that region. Definitely the best funded Hospitals. >> Probably the most comfortable. (laughter) >> So again part of our stent is the number of industries we serve, so if you can put in our platform as it were, then you could have multiple of the industry flavors applied. Because what's interesting in that part of World, there seem to be a number of, I guess we call them conglomerates. So maybe family owned, or region owned, and they have just a different array of businesses all under the one ownership. So you would have a retailer that's also doing some tourism, that's also doing some manufacturing. So we can put our platform in, and then those industry flavors they can get one solution to cover it all. Which is a little bit unusual, and works for us. >> Your scope is enormous. I mean essentially you're the head of Non-U.S. I mean is that right? >> Yeah, and Latin America as well. >> That's part of it? That's not... >> Excluding the Americas. So there's Americas and then everything else, and you're everything else. >> I missed a meeting you see so they just gave it to me >> What you raised your hand at the wrong time? >> I wasn't there (laughter) >> So how do you organize to be successful? You obviously have to have strong people in the region. >> Right. So the key is people, right. We organize somewhat differently to over here. We've gone for a regional model, so I have six sub-regions, that I worry about. So four in Europe, the Nordic Countries. Scandinavian, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark. We call Western, which is Ireland, U.K. and the Benelux. Germany is Central and East, and then Southern is the Latin Country, Spain, Portugal, Greece and so. Then we've got the Middle East, and Africa, and then we got Asia Pacific. I've got six regional teams, all headed by a regional leader, and each of them are trying to be as self contained as they can. And where we see we've got an opportunity to move into something new, we've got one team working with me directly as an incubator. For example, we're driving a specific focus on Healthcare, in our part of the world, because it's very big over here. We haven't quite cracked the code over there. When we get some scale, then it'll move into the regions, but for now that's incubating under me. >> And, what about in Country? Do you have Country Managers? One in the U.K., one in France, one in Germany. >> We have what we call local leaders, right? So in some cases it could be a sales oriented individual, it could be consulting, others it could be the local HR guy. So that's more for us to make sure we're building a sense of community within Infor. Rather than it being more customer facing. We're still trying to make sure that there is a reasonably scarcity of senior skills. So regionalizing lets us deploy across several Countries, and that works with the customer base, but for employees we need local leaders to give them a sense of feeling home and attached. >> So the regions are kind of expertise centers if you will? >> Yes >> So I was going to ask about product expertise, where does that come from? It's not parachuted in from the U.S. I presume? >> No, we're pretty much self-sufficient actually, which is great. So from both what we call solution consulting, which is the product expertise, and then consulting which is the product deployment. And we're doing more and more of our deployments with Partners. As I say, we need to really rapidly embrace that partner ecosystem to give us the growth opportunity. RND, is all over the World. That's not under my direct control. So for a major suites, take for example, LN, happens to be headquartered out of Barneveld, in the Netherlands. From a Historic perspective, which is great. And Stockholm, which is also great. But a lot of the development resource room in Nila and in India. So we work closely with the guys, even though they don't actually report to me. >> And out of the whole area, the area of your responsibility what's the best growth opportunity? We all think of China, but that's been fits and starts for a lot of people. >> Yeah, yeah I think we've got multiple opportunities, you can look at it a few ways. You can look at it geographically, and you would say China. You can look at Eastern Europe, and you can look at Africa. There's a ton of opportunity in those regions, geographically. Interestingly we are also at a point where I think the Nordics, and we've got a very solid base Historically, and so on. But we probably haven't put enough focus on there in recent times, that the opportunities are really scaled in Nordics is really quite significant. And then they can look at it from a Product Perspective. So for example, we have, what we believe to be World Leading, and actually a Company called Gartner would equally agree with us. Enterprise Asset Management, EAM, that's a product suite that can fit across all of our industries. I think that could well be the significant growth area for us across the entire six regions. And it's a huge focus for us here at the conference actually. So we can do it by product, EAM, Healthcare, or by Region. I think Eastern Europe, China, and Africa, as well as the Nordics. >> And the other big opportunity is just share gains, market share gains, particularly in Europe, I would think, with your background. >> Yup. Completely, I mean, that's why I said, it's really interesting that we are winning market share in Germany. Who'd of thought that a few years ago? That's a big market, I mean, Germany, U.K., France, Italy. They're huge. Right, I mean U.K., is what, Sixty-Five Million People? It's a big economy, so we've got many of the worlds G7, in our backyard. So we just really need to double down on those, and give them the opportunities to grow that we need. >> And just back to Japan for a second. Japan has traction, it takes a long time to crack Japan. I know it first from personal experiences. >> Yeah, Okay, Interesting. >> Yeah you just got to go many many times and meet people. >> That's it, Right. And it's a different culture, of when you think they're saying yes and you think they're there, that's just yes to the next step. (laughter) >> Alright, so it does take time to get there. We've actually cracked it to some extent, that we've now got some solid referenceability, and some good wind. We need local leaders in Japan, to really crack the code there. >> And then once you're in, you're in. >> I think that once you've proven yourself, it's a lot of word of mouth and referencing. >> Well I hope you get home this weekend. Are you headed home? >> Yes! Actually I'm lucky enough. My Wife is originally from Chicago. So she and our Daughter have come over for the weekend, to go sight seeing in Washington. So that'll be fun. So we'll be going home on Sunday. >> Your adopted home for the weekend then. >> That's exactly right. >> Well we'll talk Guinness in just a bit. Thanks for the time though, we appreciate it. >> Thank you Gentlemen. >> Good to see you, Sir. Alright, back with more here from Inforum 2018, and you're watching Live, on theCube, here in D.C. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are continuing our coverage of VMworld 2018 day 3. I'm Lisa Martin, with two very stylish men next to me. I'm quite impressed. Dave Vellante, my esteemed co-host. >> Oh shucks. >> Rocking the salmon, King Salmon Vellante. And The Zog is back, Eric Herzog. Great to have you back. I was looking at you on Twitter and you have been on theCUBE 17 times. Is this 18 or 19? >> You know, I think Dave said I was on one of the very first CUBEs way back in 2010. So I've been on a few. >> That's a whole other criteria of VIP level. Well thank you for coming back. You have been, not only is he, you can't do a CUBE without Eric Herzog. You've been everywhere all over VMworld. I saw you're speaking at IBM booth on VMware and IBM, you're at Cisco, you're giving sessions. How do you fit it all in and still have time for us? >> Well, I always make time for theCUBE. >> Always? Thank you, thanks for that. >> Always make time for you guys. Love talking to CUBE. You guys have been very helpful. We appreciate everything that you do. Love doing shows, love 'em. I may be 60 years old, but I'm really 18 down underneath, so if I only sleep three hours a night, not a problem. >> What do you love about them? I mean, is it? >> Number one is meeting customers. Customers and channel partners, right? Well, all of the employees of all the various companies here get a paycheck from whoever that may be, me, IBM, someone from other companies, people from VMware. That's not who pays your salary. It's the end-users and the channel partners, if they buy through the channel. They're the ones that really pay your salary. So being close to the customers and the partners is number one. Second thing, of course, is seeing all the cool technology. You know, seeing what's going on, what's hot, what can we leverage from our perspective, what can we tie ourselves to. So for example, the hot things, that IBM's really been doing from a storage perspective. Cloud and modern data protection. Those are the two big things we've been focused on for the last couple of years. And how do we integrate our storage solutions and our modern data protection with cloud infrastructure, and then also how do we, if you're not in the cloud, how do we help customers protect their data better in a modern way and reuse their secondary data, instead of making 27,000 copies of the same data. >> So when theCUBE first started at VMworld, modern data protection at the time was dealing with the lack of physical resources, 'cause you went from 10 servers down to one, and you didn't have all that excess capacity to do a run up back up job anymore. Today, modern data protection is all around cloud and multi-cloud and software defined, so I wonder if you can help us sort of paint a picture of what modern data protection is for IBM? >> Sure, I think there's a couple, couple aspects too. So, first of all, you have to support the cloud, and that's two ways. So for us, several of our backup products are used by cloud service providers. In some cases they use our name, and say, "Featuring IBM Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus." Other cases, they have their own brand but it's our software underneath the hood so that if the end user is backing up to their cloud, they're actually using our software. So that's item number one. The second thing is you need to make sure that your traditional storage software can TEAR to the cloud, can migrate data to the cloud, can transparently move data to the cloud in an automated fashion using AI. So using artificial intelligent when the data's hot if you connote a target, and that target could be a cloud, and when the data's hot it TEARs the data to the cloud. Sorry, when it's cold. When it's hot it pulls it back in and that needs to be all automated through AI base. So we've done both, we have our backup software which is available from several cloud providers as a backup as a service, we also offer it through the cloud so IBM Cloud actually sells spectrum protect backup as a service solution All of our primary storage software and even our spectrum scale software can automatically TEAR data to a cloud target device. >> Eric I got to ask you so TEARing used to be predominantly, correct me if you disagree but, it used be a one way trip to the bit-bucket. You just described going there and coming back. Has cloud changed that because of big data, analytics? Where people want to pull back data increasingly? >> So I think of a couple of things. So first of all, there's no doubt that the world is data driven. The most valuable asset isn't gold, it's not silver, it is absolutely not oil, it's not diamonds. It is data. And it doesn't matter whether you're one of the largest banks in the world, you're in manufacturing, you're in the government, or whether you're Herzog's barn grill. The data is your most valuable asset. What you do with your customer data, how you manage your business, what you do with your supply chain if your a services company, how are you servicing, what are you charging, what are you billing, all of that is the most critical thing that you have. So in a data driven world, its critical that you use the data. And that also means that because of valued data, when you backup the data or you snapshot or replicate the data, you now created a secondary copy. Well what if you could use it to do tests? What if you could use it to do big data analytics? What if you could use it for DevOps? So instead of making one copy for tests, one copy for disaster recovery, one copy for this, and have basically a plethora of copies all over the place, with what we've provided in modern data protection, you can use a backup, you can use a snap or a replica, and you can use that to do tests or development or to do big data analytics. And using that one copy not making multiple copies. So that's- >> I just want to pick up on something you said there's going to be some folks in our audience like, "yeah yeah we hear that data is more valuable than oil or more valuable than gold, et cetera, more valuable than platinum." There's evidence, if you look at the market value of the top five companies, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they've surpassed the banks, they've surpassed the energy companies, and I would argue its cuz of data. People are recognizing that they're data companies, you agree? >> But if you look at that name the only one that actually builds anything of substance, as a fair amount of their volume of revenue, is Apple. >> Is Apple, right. >> Amazon doesn't, they ship stuff. Facebook clearly doesn't, Google has a few things but not really builds stuff its really about the data. Absolutely and if your a more traditional company like a bank or someone building the table. Whoever builds this table if they have their act together and they're using that data right, they're building the table cheaper than anyone else, they're shipping it to theCUBE cheaper than anyone else could ship it to you. They got more colors because they know what their doing. And they ship you the right color table and they don't screw it up and send you a black table when you want it this color table because black won't show up on theCUBE very well. The more you do that the more money you make. Even something as simple as a table manufacturer. And that's all about the data and how you use that data. >> So Eric you love talking with customers which is great as the CMO for IBM storage. Got to talk to those customers. Let's talk about how you're seeing customers take the efficiencies of what IBM is doing with data protection, storage, et cetera. to be able to harness the power of AI, the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, and transform their businesses. Give us some of your favorite customer examples where its really revolutionary. >> So we had a great example today, we did a panel with a bunch of end users as part of the show agenda. And one of the customers is a provider of softwares of service to universities and schools. 45,000 customers between the universities, junior colleges, schools districts, et cetera. In North America so Canada and the U.S. And they are doing softwares of service so for them performance is critical, they can't go down. All of the college bookstores, if you go into a college bookstore, all of the infrastructure behind that is them. So they're called Follet. So a couple of things, one because they're doing softwares of service and managing all that. Its critical, can't go down. Got to be available, it's got to be performant, it's got to be resilient, it's got to be reliable. So that's how the storage melds in. From modern data protection the way it melds in is how many books did Dave buy? What did Eric buy? Oh is Dave buying a used book? Or is Eric buying a new book? Okay say we know that the propensity is certain of members of the community. I went to UC Davis, University of California Davis, are going to buy used books, Dave, whereas Herzog's going to buy new. They can figure that out, how many used books they need, how many new books they need, that's all about efficiency and how they make more money. What are the store hours? Certain universities it's this, other universities it's that. What do they do in the winter time? At UC Davis you can go in the winter time, I know you went to school in Boston its probably snowing, no one's going in the bookstore in the wintertime. >> Trend towards book rentals, how do we capitalize on that? >> That's all they do. One of the things they talked about was how they always have to protect that data and back it up. The other thing they talked about was they have to assume a lot of capacity. So what they do is they bought assuming they would have to refresh in 18 months. And because our storage arrays have a ton of different data reduction technology whether that be block, D2, compression, et cetera. And they have petabytes of data. Petabytes. 12 Petabytes. They've actually calculated it out they won't need to buy new storage for 36 months instead of 18 so they just saved on CapX. Through the intelligence of the storage. So in that case you've got both modern data protection and you've got a storage message. One of our other customers who's a public reference, not here at the show, which is a hospital, they were backing up all their data, both cloud and on premise with our backup software, and they went down and their entire system went down and they didn't lose one stitch of data and its a hospital. It's a teaching hospital, think they're in Pennsylvania, and in the public reference in the video he said, "and we went down and off that backup we were able to get all of the data back. We didn't lose any patient data, we didn't lose any research data, we didn't lose any billing data, if you break your arm they do bill you, they didn't lose anything." >> That's not just money, that's lives so that's huge. >> Absolutely. >> I want to ask you about you know that table example you were giving, and we were talking about the big five companies in terms of market cap being data orientated. There seems to be a gap between those sort of traditional companies and those data companies and that gap tends to be the data is often is often in silos its human expertise or expertise around a bottling plant or the manufacturing plant or whatever it is versus a data model with humans who understand how to leverage that data. Do you see, whether its through new data protection techniques or other storage techniques that IBM is working on, ways to help customers break down those data silos so they can become more digital and be able to take advantage of data? >> So I think there's a couple of things. So first of all at the very tactical level we provide this automated IA based data TEARing. We can tear from anything to anything so we can take data from an IBM array and TEAR it to an EMC array. We can take data from an EMC array and TEAR it to a net app array. A net app array to a Tachi array, an HP array back to our array, so we can do this transparent data move based on hot and cold. Not only does that allow you to control CapX and OpX you can move the data from array to array, and once you move that data set it might be working that other array could be hooked up to a different set of servers through the SAN that's running a different workload and then takes that dataset and use it with that other piece of software out on the server side. So that's item number one. Item number two is IBM not just in the storage but overall has a global program where IBM is promoting, through universities all over the world, data scientists. Part of that is training data scientists not only how to do the science of data and analyzing data and mining data and doing it, but to break down those walls. The value is more there. And we also have from a storage perspective some products are spectrum scale products, one of our customers who's one of the largest banks in the world they run 300,000 servers attached to a giant spectrum scale repository, petabytes and petabytes, and they do real time data analytics to see if Dave Vellante or Lisa's credit card was stolen. >> Thank you! >> Oh yes, thank you! >> So that's real world analytics they run but they need petabytes of data. And then with our IBM cloud object storage technology where we have several customers at the exabyte level in production with an exabyte of data, you put the data out when its cold but guess what, if you want to mine it you might want to pull it back and guess what, you can TEAR data from spectrum scale to IBM cloud object storage and then spectrum scale can pull it back in to do the big data analytic workloads. >> And that AI you're using is it heavy open source? Is there a little bit of Watson sprinkled in there? >> It's stuff the storage division developed years ago and then has peppered in the AI based technology into that software to determine when the dataset is hot or cold and then move it back or forth. We also do the old style, so if you go back 10 years ago, the automation of storage was policy based. So we had it way back when which was if the data is 30 days old move it to this array. >> The old HSM kind of... >> Yeah and it was automated so once it hit 30 days, but now what we've done is, we started with that, what I would call automation, and now we've moved that to AI. And by the way, if you still want to do it the old way and say move this data when its 60 days old, you can still do that. But the modern way is let the storage figure out for you and move it back and forth whether it be to the cloud or whether it be on premises. >> So it's intelligent hierarchical storage management? So if the characteristics change the system knows what to do as opposed to- >> So when it's hot it'll pull the data back into flash, for example, when its cold it'll put it out to cloud, it'll put it out to tape or it'll put it out to slow hard drives, either way. >> Alright Eric, so we're almost out of time here. You've been at IBM a long time, IBM's been around a long time, you said you even have customers at exabyte scale. I'm hearing heterogeneity, customer choice, but if I'm a small hospital in the middle of America and I have choice with data protection vendors, storage vendors, some smaller than IBM that might be able to move faster, what are the top three differentiators of why I would want to go with IBM's storage solutions? >> Sure so the first thing is our broad portfolio. Whether it be file block or object, whether it be modern data protection, whether it be archiving if you still want to use tape, we're the number one provider of tape in the world and we sell gobs of it to the web scale guys. >> Of course you do. >> They're the guys that buy it. >> Cuz its cost effective. >> So we've got one throat to choke, all of it talks to each other, and happens to work with all the cloud vendors not just IBM cloud. We work with Amazon, we work with Microsoft, we work with Google, and we work with IBM's own cloud. So we can work with anything. That's out of mind. Second thing, for smaller shops we have a network of business partners all over the world, some of them even deal with the big global Fortune 500 and others deal with small accounts. And then really the third thing is that IBM makes sure that our stuff works with everyone else's stuff. Whether that be cloud, our spectrum tech software which has been around for years and is the leading enterprise backup package, the bulk of what it backs up is not IBM storage. The vast bulk of it is from two of the competitors on the floor of this show, they also back up our stuff too. And we backup everyone's. There's probably 20 storage vendors we backup every one of their data. So if someone buys storage from XYZ, call me, we can back it up. If someone buys it from one of the big competitors we back it up, from us we back it up. So the fact that our software works with everyone's gear is of an advantage for both the small shop and the big shop. We make sure that our software, whether its embedded in our arrays or whether we sell it as just a pieces storage software and we are the number one storage software provider on the planet as well, we can meet the needs of any company big or small because we have this flexibility of working with our stuff and working with everybody else stuff and most of the other guys don't do that. If its a small shop their stuff usually only works with their stuff. >> And from a support perspective, you play with everybody? >> Global network. I mean we're known for our support whether it be IBM direct or what we do with our partners all the partners are certified, its a big certification process, and if they can't certify the product they can't sell IBM's stuff. That's just how we operate. Other people, if they can move a lot of boxes but they don't have anyone pick up the phone or can come out to Dave's house to install, they let them sell, we don't do that at IBM. We don't use those box mover types we go for guys that add value and know how to work with the cloud, know how to do hybrid cloud. One of our resellers designed a Watson based AI system that's used in bottle factories. Packaging. Beer, soda, milk, and it can figure out if its full or not full, if the bottle or can or carton is damaged. And they used Watson to do it. Now they're regular resell. They resell all the storage, they resell our power, they resell mainframe, but they've gone into the software development side using this Watson thing and they're selling a full solution with the software included to bottling plants all over the world. >> Wow, Eric. This has been a super charged conversation. Thanks for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about not just your excitement about talking with customers but really how IBM is really empowering customers of any size worldwide to succeed. We know we'll see you again soon but thanks for stopping by a couple of times this week. >> Great well thank you. Thank you, really appreciate the time. >> And the outfit choices are just on point guys, you blend well too. For Eric, Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 day 3. Stick around, we'll be back with our next guest after a short break. (electro music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are continuing our coverage of VMworld 2018 day 3. I'm Lisa Martin, with two very stylish men next to me. I'm quite impressed. Dave Vellante, my esteemed co-host. >> Oh shucks. >> Rocking the salmon, King Salmon Vellante. And The Zog is back, Eric Herzog. Great to have you back. I was looking at you on Twitter and you have been on theCUBE 17 times. Is this 18 or 19? >> You know, I think Dave said I was on one of the very first CUBEs way back in 2010. So I've been on a few. >> That's a whole other criteria of VIP level. Well thank you for coming back. You have been, not only is he, you can't do a CUBE without Eric Herzog. You've been everywhere all over VMworld. I saw you're speaking at IBM booth on VMware and IBM, you're at Cisco, you're giving sessions. How do you fit it all in and still have time for us? >> Well, I always make time for theCUBE. >> Always? Thank you, thanks for that. >> Always make time for you guys. Love talking to CUBE. You guys have been very helpful. We appreciate everything that you do. Love doing shows, love 'em. I may be 60 years old, but I'm really 18 down underneath, so if I only sleep three hours a night, not a problem. >> What do you love about them? I mean, is it? >> Number one is meeting customers. Customers and channel partners, right? Well, all of the employees of all the various companies here get a paycheck from whoever that may be, me, IBM, someone from other companies, people from VMware. That's not who pays your salary. It's the end-users and the channel partners, if they buy through the channel. They're the ones that really pay your salary. So being close to the customers and the partners is number one. Second thing, of course, is seeing all the cool technology. You know, seeing what's going on, what's hot, what can we leverage from our perspective, what can we tie ourselves to. So for example, the hot things, that IBM's really been doing from a storage perspective. Cloud and modern data protection. Those are the two big things we've been focused on for the last couple of years. And how do we integrate our storage solutions and our modern data protection with cloud infrastructure, and then also how do we, if you're not in the cloud, how do we help customers protect their data better in a modern way and reuse their secondary data, instead of making 27,000 copies of the same data. >> So when theCUBE first started at VMworld, modern data protection at the time was dealing with the lack of physical resources, 'cause you went from 10 servers down to one, and you didn't have all that excess capacity to do a run up back up job anymore. Today, modern data protection is all around cloud and multi-cloud and software defined, so I wonder if you can help us sort of paint a picture of what modern data protection is for IBM? >> Sure, I think there's a couple, couple aspects too. So, first of all, you have to support the cloud, and that's two ways. So for us, several of our backup products are used by cloud service providers. In some cases they use our name, and say, "Featuring IBM Spectrum Protect or Spectrum Protect Plus." Other cases, they have their own brand but it's our software underneath the hood so that if the end user is backing up to their cloud, they're actually using our software. So that's item number one. The second thing is you need to make sure that your traditional storage software can TEAR to the cloud, can migrate data to the cloud, can transparently move data to the cloud in an automated fashion using AI. So using artificial intelligent when the data's hot if you connote a target, and that target could be a cloud, and when the data's hot it TEARs the data to the cloud. Sorry, when it's cold. When it's hot it pulls it back in and that needs to be all automated through AI base. So we've done both, we have our backup software which is available from several cloud providers as a backup as a service, we also offer it through the cloud so IBM Cloud actually sells spectrum protect backup as a service solution All of our primary storage software and even our spectrum scale software can automatically TEAR data to a cloud target device. >> Eric I got to ask you so TEARing used to be predominantly, correct me if you disagree but, it used be a one way trip to the bit-bucket. You just described going there and coming back. Has cloud changed that because of big data, analytics? Where people want to pull back data increasingly? >> So I think of a couple of things. So first of all, there's no doubt that the world is data driven. The most valuable asset isn't gold, it's not silver, it is absolutely not oil, it's not diamonds. It is data. And it doesn't matter whether you're one of the largest banks in the world, you're in manufacturing, you're in the government, or whether you're Herzog's barn grill. The data is your most valuable asset. What you do with your customer data, how you manage your business, what you do with your supply chain if your a services company, how are you servicing, what are you charging, what are you billing, all of that is the most critical thing that you have. So in a data driven world, its critical that you use the data. And that also means that because of valued data, when you backup the data or you snapshot or replicate the data, you now created a secondary copy. Well what if you could use it to do tests? What if you could use it to do big data analytics? What if you could use it for DevOps? So instead of making one copy for tests, one copy for disaster recovery, one copy for this, and have basically a plethora of copies all over the place, with what we've provided in modern data protection, you can use a backup, you can use a snap or a replica, and you can use that to do tests or development or to do big data analytics. And using that one copy not making multiple copies. So that's- >> I just want to pick up on something you said there's going to be some folks in our audience like, "yeah yeah we hear that data is more valuable than oil or more valuable than gold, et cetera, more valuable than platinum." There's evidence, if you look at the market value of the top five companies, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, they've surpassed the banks, they've surpassed the energy companies, and I would argue its cuz of data. People are recognizing that they're data companies, you agree? >> But if you look at that name the only one that actually builds anything of substance, as a fair amount of their volume of revenue, is Apple. >> Is Apple, right. >> Amazon doesn't, they ship stuff. Facebook clearly doesn't, Google has a few things but not really builds stuff its really about the data. Absolutely and if your a more traditional company like a bank or someone building the table. Whoever builds this table if they have their act together and they're using that data right, they're building the table cheaper than anyone else, they're shipping it to theCUBE cheaper than anyone else could ship it to you. They got more colors because they know what their doing. And they ship you the right color table and they don't screw it up and send you a black table when you want it this color table because black won't show up on theCUBE very well. The more you do that the more money you make. Even something as simple as a table manufacturer. And that's all about the data and how you use that data. >> So Eric you love talking with customers which is great as the CMO for IBM storage. Got to talk to those customers. Let's talk about how you're seeing customers take the efficiencies of what IBM is doing with data protection, storage, et cetera. to be able to harness the power of AI, the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, and transform their businesses. Give us some of your favorite customer examples where its really revolutionary. >> So we had a great example today, we did a panel with a bunch of end users as part of the show agenda. And one of the customers is a provider of softwares of service to universities and schools. 45,000 customers between the universities, junior colleges, schools districts, et cetera. In North America so Canada and the U.S. And they are doing softwares of service so for them performance is critical, they can't go down. All of the college bookstores, if you go into a college bookstore, all of the infrastructure behind that is them. So they're called Follet. So a couple of things, one because they're doing softwares of service and managing all that. Its critical, can't go down. Got to be available, it's got to be performant, it's got to be resilient, it's got to be reliable. So that's how the storage melds in. From modern data protection the way it melds in is how many books did Dave buy? What did Eric buy? Oh is Dave buying a used book? Or is Eric buying a new book? Okay say we know that the propensity is certain of members of the community. I went to UC Davis, University of California Davis, are going to buy used books, Dave, whereas Herzog's going to buy new. They can figure that out, how many used books they need, how many new books they need, that's all about efficiency and how they make more money. What are the store hours? Certain universities it's this, other universities it's that. What do they do in the winter time? At UC Davis you can go in the winter time, I know you went to school in Boston its probably snowing, no one's going in the bookstore in the wintertime. >> Trend towards book rentals, how do we capitalize on that? >> That's all they do. One of the things they talked about was how they always have to protect that data and back it up. The other thing they talked about was they have to assume a lot of capacity. So what they do is they bought assuming they would have to refresh in 18 months. And because our storage arrays have a ton of different data reduction technology whether that be block, D2, compression, et cetera. And they have petabytes of data. Petabytes. 12 Petabytes. They've actually calculated it out they won't need to buy new storage for 36 months instead of 18 so they just saved on CapX. Through the intelligence of the storage. So in that case you've got both modern data protection and you've got a storage message. One of our other customers who's a public reference, not here at the show, which is a hospital, they were backing up all their data, both cloud and on premise with our backup software, and they went down and their entire system went down and they didn't lose one stitch of data and its a hospital. It's a teaching hospital, think they're in Pennsylvania, and in the public reference in the video he said, "and we went down and off that backup we were able to get all of the data back. We didn't lose any patient data, we didn't lose any research data, we didn't lose any billing data, if you break your arm they do bill you, they didn't lose anything." >> That's not just money, that's lives so that's huge. >> Absolutely. >> I want to ask you about you know that table example you were giving, and we were talking about the big five companies in terms of market cap being data orientated. There seems to be a gap between those sort of traditional companies and those data companies and that gap tends to be the data is often is often in silos its human expertise or expertise around a bottling plant or the manufacturing plant or whatever it is versus a data model with humans who understand how to leverage that data. Do you see, whether its through new data protection techniques or other storage techniques that IBM is working on, ways to help customers break down those data silos so they can become more digital and be able to take advantage of data? >> So I think there's a couple of things. So first of all at the very tactical level we provide this automated IA based data TEARing. We can tear from anything to anything so we can take data from an IBM array and TEAR it to an EMC array. We can take data from an EMC array and TEAR it to a net app array. A net app array to a Tachi array, an HP array back to our array, so we can do this transparent data move based on hot and cold. Not only does that allow you to control CapX and OpX you can move the data from array to array, and once you move that data set it might be working that other array could be hooked up to a different set of servers through the SAN that's running a different workload and then takes that dataset and use it with that other piece of software out on the server side. So that's item number one. Item number two is IBM not just in the storage but overall has a global program where IBM is promoting, through universities all over the world, data scientists. Part of that is training data scientists not only how to do the science of data and analyzing data and mining data and doing it, but to break down those walls. The value is more there. And we also have from a storage perspective some products are spectrum scale products, one of our customers who's one of the largest banks in the world they run 300,000 servers attached to a giant spectrum scale repository, petabytes and petabytes, and they do real time data analytics to see if Dave Vellante or Lisa's credit card was stolen. >> Thank you! >> Oh yes, thank you! >> So that's real world analytics they run but they need petabytes of data. And then with our IBM cloud object storage technology where we have several customers at the exabyte level in production with an exabyte of data, you put the data out when its cold but guess what, if you want to mine it you might want to pull it back and guess what, you can TEAR data from spectrum scale to IBM cloud object storage and then spectrum scale can pull it back in to do the big data analytic workloads. >> And that AI you're using is it heavy open source? Is there a little bit of Watson sprinkled in there? >> It's stuff the storage division developed years ago and then has peppered in the AI based technology into that software to determine when the dataset is hot or cold and then move it back or forth. We also do the old style, so if you go back 10 years ago, the automation of storage was policy based. So we had it way back when which was if the data is 30 days old move it to this array. >> The old HSM kind of... >> Yeah and it was automated so once it hit 30 days, but now what we've done is, we started with that, what I would call automation, and now we've moved that to AI. And by the way, if you still want to do it the old way and say move this data when its 60 days old, you can still do that. But the modern way is let the storage figure out for you and move it back and forth whether it be to the cloud or whether it be on premises. >> So it's intelligent hierarchical storage management? So if the characteristics change the system knows what to do as opposed to- >> So when it's hot it'll pull the data back into flash, for example, when its cold it'll put it out to cloud, it'll put it out to tape or it'll put it out to slow hard drives, either way. >> Alright Eric, so we're almost out of time here. You've been at IBM a long time, IBM's been around a long time, you said you even have customers at exabyte scale. I'm hearing heterogeneity, customer choice, but if I'm a small hospital in the middle of America and I have choice with data protection vendors, storage vendors, some smaller than IBM that might be able to move faster, what are the top three differentiators of why I would want to go with IBM's storage solutions? >> Sure so the first thing is our broad portfolio. Whether it be file block or object, whether it be modern data protection, whether it be archiving if you still want to use tape, we're the number one provider of tape in the world and we sell gobs of it to the web scale guys. >> Of course you do. >> They're the guys that buy it. >> Cuz its cost effective. >> So we've got one throat to choke, all of it talks to each other, and happens to work with all the cloud vendors not just IBM cloud. We work with Amazon, we work with Microsoft, we work with Google, and we work with IBM's own cloud. So we can work with anything. That's out of mind. Second thing, for smaller shops we have a network of business partners all over the world, some of them even deal with the big global Fortune 500 and others deal with small accounts. And then really the third thing is that IBM makes sure that our stuff works with everyone else's stuff. Whether that be cloud, our spectrum tech software which has been around for years and is the leading enterprise backup package, the bulk of what it backs up is not IBM storage. The vast bulk of it is from two of the competitors on the floor of this show, they also back up our stuff too. And we backup everyone's. There's probably 20 storage vendors we backup every one of their data. So if someone buys storage from XYZ, call me, we can back it up. If someone buys it from one of the big competitors we back it up, from us we back it up. So the fact that our software works with everyone's gear is of an advantage for both the small shop and the big shop. We make sure that our software, whether its embedded in our arrays or whether we sell it as just a pieces storage software and we are the number one storage software provider on the planet as well, we can meet the needs of any company big or small because we have this flexibility of working with our stuff and working with everybody else stuff and most of the other guys don't do that. If its a small shop their stuff usually only works with their stuff. >> And from a support perspective, you play with everybody? >> Global network. I mean we're known for our support whether it be IBM direct or what we do with our partners all the partners are certified, its a big certification process, and if they can't certify the product they can't sell IBM's stuff. That's just how we operate. Other people, if they can move a lot of boxes but they don't have anyone pick up the phone or can come out to Dave's house to install, they let them sell, we don't do that at IBM. We don't use those box mover types we go for guys that add value and know how to work with the cloud, know how to do hybrid cloud. One of our resellers designed a Watson based AI system that's used in bottle factories. Packaging. Beer, soda, milk, and it can figure out if its full or not full, if the bottle or can or carton is damaged. And they used Watson to do it. Now they're regular resell. They resell all the storage, they resell our power, they resell mainframe, but they've gone into the software development side using this Watson thing and they're selling a full solution with the software included to bottling plants all over the world. >> Wow, Eric. This has been a super charged conversation. Thanks for stopping by and talking with Dave and me about not just your excitement about talking with customers but really how IBM is really empowering customers of any size worldwide to succeed. We know we'll see you again soon but thanks for stopping by a couple of times this week. >> Great well thank you. Thank you, really appreciate the time. >> And the outfit choices are just on point guys, you blend well too. For Eric, Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 day 3. Stick around, we'll be back with our next guest after a short break. (electro music)

(techy music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back in not-so-sunny Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at day three, wall-to-wall coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Inaugural Dell Tech World. I'm here with Tom Sweet, who's the CFO of the 80 billion dollar Dell Technologies empire. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> So, really thrilled to have you on. I think it's the first time you've been on theCUBE. >> You guys usually don't let me on, so you know, they're letting me out a little bit, I guess. >> Well, I say, we're happy to have you. So, a lot going on, obviously, in your business. I mean, let's start with, you know, we're a couple of years into the integration, you guys, obviously, you dug in. You've got a pretty good handle on this, like I said, 80 billion. When it started, you guys were in the low 70's, I believe, so you've seen some growth. Not a lot of growth in this business, but you guys are growing. So, give us the rundown of your business. How should we think about the Dell empire, as I called it? >> Look, I think that we're very happy with the progress that we've made since the integration, which was back in September of 16, so over the last 20 months, we've been focused on building velocity within the business, and particularly, as you think about our major tranches of product, if you will. So, you know, our client business is growing quite nicely, as we evidenced by last year, 21 consecutive quarters of share gain. Pleased with our server velocity. Last year, we were number one in servers. Storage has been a bit of a work in process, as you know, but I think we're beginning to see a little bit better velocity in that business. Clearly, we have VMware, and we have Pivotal. So, what's been really interesting is how the companies have come together, and the offerings have come together in a much more integrative fashion, which has been fun to watch and fun to sort of help put this thing together. The customer buy-in and the customer acceptance of the vision and the story has been pretty remarkable, from my perspective. >> And, the client's side of the business surprised me anyway. It's like the gift that keeps on giving. >> Well, you know, what was it, 10 years ago, they said the PC was dead, you know, and today it's roughly half of our revenue and growing nicely. I think the secret, as always, as you know, is work gets done on a keyboard. The tablet and the phone become an and device, a notebook and a tablet, a notebook and a phone. We keep innovating form factors or innovating the interfaces with the device, so we're pretty excited about it. It's just a really good, really great business for us. >> I think what Michael said in his keynote, when IBM announced the end of the PC era, since then there's been four, I think he said four billion PCs shipped. >> Yes, exactly. >> It's astounding. >> Clearly, the overall market for PCs is flat to slightly down, it's going to be in that range, but in that type of market, our point of view, as you well know, is you have to take share, you have to grow. The team's done a nice job. Jeff Clark and his product team have done a really nice job around form factor innovation, 87 CES awards this year for PCs, so really good business. >> And, from a CFO's perspective, it's throwing off cash, you're comfortable with, what is it, a 5% to 6% operating margin, basically? >> We typically think of that as about a 5% op inc business, but it provides huge amount of scale for us, if you think about our supply chain, our ability. It's a nice, predictable, really strong cash flow business for us, so it's a good business. >> And, the higher end, the server business and the storage business is what now, around 7% op inc, and there's a lot of upside there, potentially? >> Yeah, it's a little bit higher than that, but there is upside there as we continue to drive the business and drive efficiency in that business and, as you know, we're doing a lot of work right now in our storage area in terms of how, over time, do we evolve that road map around the solution set, and working more in an integrative fashion with VMware around the convergence of hardware and software, into more thoughtful and more smarter designs or in the storage platforms. So, you know, that business is, that's going to be a really interesting business for us over the next year or so. >> Well, really, VMware, people look at Dell as a hardware company, but VMware is not a hardware company. It's software, marginal economics. It throws off 50% roughly of your operating cash, I mean, it's a gem. >> We're actually huge fans of VMware. It's a great company, growing very nicely, and extraordinarily well-positioned, as you think about the world of Multi-Cloud. And, what we're doing and how they're thinking about any device to any device, any Cloud to any Cloud, that whole story is resonating, and from a CFO perspective, you got to like software margins. It's a good business. >> So, let's talk about the debt a little bit, because I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there. You paid down $10 billion in debt, I think it's roughly around 40 billion now. Is that about right? >> A little bit higher than that, because we've added some debt related to our GFS business, but I think the way you ought to think about our debt load is that very manageable, we're right on the schedule we thought we were going to be on, in terms of debt paydown, and we'll continue to pay down debt, from a capital allocation focus. You know, 60-70% of our capital is focused on debt paydown, doesn't mean we're not investing in the business properly, 'cause I think we are, and we're continuing to fuel those investments, and then we're going to add some debt, because our DFS, or financing business, we use debt to fund that business, but that's a little bit different sort of perspective. We think about that debt separately and different than the core debt of the business, and our analyst community and the credit rating agencies think about that debt differently. And the GFS business is growing very nicely in terms of originations, and it's a great tool for our sales force to help in terms of the financing capacity and credit capacity for our customers. So, it's a good business. >> And, let's talk taxes for a second. I know it's kind of off the normal CUBE interviews, but a lot of people talk about that. All the legislation tax, legislation, that's bad for Dell, you can't write off that debt, but essentially, from what I've read, it's a net neutral to you guys. >> It's generally neutral to maybe slightly negative, as we understand the debt regulatory environment today, with the US tax reform. They did put some limits on how much interest, and there's transition rules around how much you can deduct, but you know, you got to lower corporate tax rate in the US, you also have the immediate expensing of CapX, and then you've got the repatriation toll charge, but when you throw it all together, slightly negative, but it's not a big cash dynamic for us, it's not a driver of, geez, we've got to go do something with our capital structure as a result of that. So, that's just a misconception that's out there right now. >> And then, you've told me earlier that the Pivotal move was not about delevering, it was a move that you guys have been planning for a while. I mean, that was in the works before the merger. Talk about that. >> Look, I mean, Pivotal's done, their growth at Pivotal and the acceptance of Pivotal's been remarkable. So, that conversation around should we IPO, when should we IPO, has been in the works for over a year, and Pivotal needed to continue to grow and mature a little bit in some of its processes and making sure that when you decide to go public that you're ready to go public. For that last year, that's what they've been working on. But in terms of the actual, to go public and the proceeds from that, that's all about giving Pivotal their own capital to fund their business growth and dynamic. We could have done it at the Dell level, Dell technology level, but I thought it was more appropriate, the size of company they are, that they have their own capital. They're doing business with over half of the Fortune 500, so they need some substance, and it's a great retention to 'em, in terms of having currency for their employee base, for both their attracting talent and retaining talent. >> A Silicon Valley company with its own, I've visited those offices. It's not the normal corporate office down on Howard Street, right? >> No, you know, they're doing the huddles in the morning, but that's what's interesting about Dell technology, the family of businesses, the different cultures, the different capabilities, it's a pretty remarkable set of companies with it. >> The market's booming right now, hope it continues, knock wood here, but what are the assumptions you're making in your business, maybe the economy, you could touch on that. >> We look across the top 45 economies right now, where we do business. They're all growing, GDP's growing, so we feel pretty good about the overall economic environment. Interest rates are slightly rising, but not a big issue for us, even with our debt load. We're about, roughly 70% fixed, 30% floating, so the fact that LiveBoard's up a little bit isn't a big deal. Currency's relatively stable, so we're positive, and companies and institutions are spending on IT, the round of innovation that's being driven, the round of investments and the changes in business models. Typically, one of the first things they go do is they invest in IT to help with that digital transformation, that IT transformation. We're bullish on the economics, so it's a good platform for us. >> One of the things I've said for quite some time now is that the merger between Dell and EMC was inevitable. You had these pressures of Cloud, you needed a company who was comfortable, with a lower margin business and had a profitability model that could thrive, and it made a lot of sense. But, you don't have a public cloud, and you're comfortable with that, but you've done a lot of work with, I'll call, utility pricing. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Well, one of the feedback things we got from our customers is, hey, look, I like the economics of the Cloud. I like this pay-as-you-consume, pay-as-you-grow, that flexibility to scale up, scale down, so through our Dell Financial Services and using our own balance sheet, we have put together flexible consumption models, so I can offer you a pay-as-you-grow, pay-as-you-consume, or we can do a straight out utility where the assets are on my balance sheet and you're paying a monthly fee, if you will. So, all we're trying to do there is to normalize the economics for our customers, say, hey, I want you to take economics out of your decision about whether you want to go to the Cloud or not, because we can offer that capacity and capability. And, let's really talk why, and what's the purpose, and what's the work load, what's the problem that you're trying to solve? >> And, you obviously recognize that as radical revenue. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I'm guessing it's not meaningful, like a software company shifting from a perpetual model, or is it? >> Well, I think over time you're going to see the rise in these types of models. Customers are interested, as a service models. So, there is interest in that, and I think you'll see that piece of the business grow over time, but I don't think it's going to be a step function change. But, again, it's just another example, I think, of Dell Technologies offering customers what they want and in different and innovative ways to do business with us. >> One of the things that EMC did, was they did a lot of M&A. That's kind of how EMC innovated, no offense to my friends from EMC, but they fill gaps. And, a lot of times, those gaps created huge overlaps. You guys are addressing that carefully, I understand that. How has the merger, the debt, affected your ability to do M&A? How critical is that to you guys, because you are very acquisitive, obviously, as well? >> We are still very active, as we look at the technology trends and what type of capabilities and new technologies are on the horizon, so we haven't done a lot of M&A since the acquisition of EMC. We've principally focused on the integration, but if you look at VMware, they've done acquisition, we've done a couple of really small tuck-ins within the family, but we'll continue to look at that. And, one of the other tools in our tool chest, as you know, is Dell Technologies Capital. I think we've got roughly over 81 investments in technology startups, principally on the West Coast, but some overseas, and very focused on security, AI, machine learning, next-generation storage capabilities, and so we get exposed to that type of technology, and we put our R&D teams together with them, so I feel like we're in a reasonable position, and as the business tells me they need something, we'll go evaluate it. >> I want to ask you a question about your peers, the CFOs. I'm getting to know you a little bit. I think you're a rock star CFO. One of our analysts said to us the other day, Tom Sweet is a stud, I said, yeah, it's the make-up on theCUBE. >> I don't know about that. >> So, what's going on in the, well, you've got a big job, and you've got a really good handle on what's going on here. What's going on in the world of CFOs these days? I mean, obviously, you've got stuff like GDPR that gets in there, but digital transformation is obviously a huge theme among the C-Suite. Security is a board level issue. What kind of discussions are you having with your peers these days? >> Look, I mean, most of the conversations tend to be around two or three different areas. One is how do you think about how does the finance function and our capabilities change over the coming three, five years, right? How do you think about the use of AI, machine learning, and in the processes of the company? And, what is everybody doing to innovate around that? That's a pretty common conversation we're having. You know, security cyber is a huge conversation point in terms of how is your board looking at it, how are you thinking about it. Since we're CFOs, we're always talking about how much money, what's that investment profile you need to have there, in terms of what's the right amount? As you well know, you can spend a lot of money there. Are you guaranteed of a perfect defense? Absolutely not, so that tends to be a common area, but more importantly, there's this whole comment, this whole big data conversation that's also happening around how do you help the business make better decisions? How do you add and drive value back to the business? How are you using advanced analytics to drive insight back into the business, the various businesses? So, pretty much the same sort of conversations we're having with our customers, we're having internally, or amongst the CFO community. >> A lot of risk management, obviously, >> Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. >> goes into that equation. >> I mean, inside of tech or outside of tech, are there companies or CFOs that you sort of follow, admire, kind of models that you look at? >> Look, there's some great CFOs that I've had the opportunity to have interactions with. You know, Mark Hawkins at Salesforce is a great CFO, also a good friend, Amy up at Microsoft, really doing a really nice job up there, and then Bob Swan at Intel. So, we tend to sort of be industry-organized, just because that's how we interact, but they're all doing nice jobs and really interesting innovative things within the context of their companies' business models. >> Have you changed the sources of where you guys get information? Obviously, your peers is probably number one, but as the digital world comes forward, have you sort of changed the sources, or still sort of the Wall Street Journal every day? >> Well, it's guys like you, right? We're all watching the blogs and, look, the amount of data and information that's flowing these days can be overwhelming, so I tend to be, I'm looking at industry publications, I'm looking at some of the online blogs in terms of trying to understand where are our competitors headed, where is the industry headed, what are the themes out there? You know, Michael's got a perspective with his leadership team that, hey, he wants us out in front of customers, so I spend roughly 30% of my time with customers and partners. You have to be aware of, obviously, what's going around in the industry, not only to be thoughtful and intelligent, but to also help think about where do you position the company, three and five years down the road? And, helping Michael in that thought process, and helping the leadership team in that thought process. >> Well, Tom, it's been a real pleasure getting to know you a little bit, and watching you guys in action. Wish you best of luck. >> I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for being on theCUBE. >> It was a lot of fun. >> All right. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. You're watching Dell Technologies World, live on theCUBE. (techy music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering VM World, 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the CUBE's live continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017. We're on day two, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks so much for joining. I'm joined by my cohost Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to be joined by CUBE first time visitor, Mike Flaum senior product manager to HPE. Welcome Mike. >> Thank you for inviting me here. I appreciate to have the opportunity. >> Great announcements over the last day and half. Tell us what's new with HPE and Vmware. >> Sure, so today our announcement went out, Vmware cloud foundation on top of Synergy. This is a follow on announcement that we had for Vmware cloud foundation on top of DL380 which is the industry leading rack based server. What we've done is we've now extended to our composable platform on Synergy and that was the announcement that went out earlier today. >> Composable infrastructure and Vmware cloud foundation, on paper doesn't kind of make sense. That you have this thing that's super flexible and what's supposed to be a reference kind of validated design, how does that work. >> It really accomplishes two things. What we're hearing from our customers very specifically is how do we make it easier. It's really not about technology, it's that how do people consistently do these deployments. So by using a composable platform it allows them to standardize and do the implementations. Then on top of that Vmware cloud foundation has its own installation appliance that installs to the Vsphere, the VSAN and the NSX. We're totally online with Vmware by making it easier for the customer implementations. Then the ongoing maintenance and support of it. >> Sorry, I was going to say from a go to market perspective, yesterday I think Pat Gelsinger had said 10,000 customers on VSAN, a huge install base with Vsphere. Talk to us about sort of the specific joint customer opportunities globally that you are seeing. >> Sure, so with the install base of Vsphere and then the VSAN install base, our customers are really asking for this. One of the things that we've done also is that we have OEM SKUs. We're actually taking the VCF and the VCN and you're able to buy these products directly from us, from Vmware. There's a synergy between, no pun intended, to actually have our customers be able to buy just from one vendor. So we're able to purchase the Vmware and the Synergy from HPE. That's been ongoing. >> Customer reaction in general? The concept is kind of abstract. We get Vmware on AWS. It took us awhile to get that. Are customers getting kind of, they can have that type of flexibility in their own data center? >> Absolutely. What happens is, is that when the DL380 announcement happened it was great for a rack based system. But that really doesn't scale super large. Customers think about customers that have multiple cabinets, multiple rows, multiple data centers, and that's really where the VCF on Synergy makes a huge difference. It's for the large data center deployments. Those customers are like wow we really see the value in VCF, but we really want to have it on Synergy for this platform because we have large data centers. That's really where. And the customers take those large data centers, they also want to be able to leverage VCF on AWS. They want to have this hybrid approach to having the workloads being both in the cloud and on premise. >> So let's talk a little bit about day two operations. What is it like, or what's the differentiator for Synergy and VCF versus any other solution? >> The difference is what makes it composable. On the Synergy platform we have an actual hardware that's the composure and it runs OneView. OneView has certain templates in order to make the compute, network and storage all run appropriately for the VCF on top of it. The part that the customers like about VCF is the SDDC manager, which is they look at this and wow that manages all the Vsphere, the NSX and VSAN. They need to have the composable and OneView management of the underlying hardware. That's where we come in from the composable side. >> One of the things that, I think it was Michael Dell that talked about this morning about this growing volumes of data. Everybody knows data is fuel and its pathway to other sources of economy within an organization. As we look at servers and storage, what is the sea level conversation around these technologies in terms of the benefits, like speeds and feeds and things like that. How is the HPE Vmware announcement today with composable, what are some of the key business problems that that's going to solve for a CEO, CIO, CTO? >> One of the things that happens is this proliferation of equipment. They buy a blade system. They buy a storage array. They buy networking. It ends up being on three different vendors. One of the benefits of doing it on Synergy, is that we're using the local storage. So the local storage is great but it requires the VSAN that comes from Vmware. Then the VCF is what puts it all together. It's not that you can't use Vsphere and NSX and VSAN separately, the benefit is to put it onto one system on the Synergy that combines it all together. For the CIO what happens is instead of buying three different equipment, three different vendors, managing three different firmware streams, now you have it all converged onto one system that's purpose built for this. So that's really the main difference. >> I hear cost reduction. Reduced CAPX, reduced OPX. Are you seeing customers be able to move resources around and be able to utilize resources for other strategies within their companies? >> Absolutely. On the Synergy we have a technology called Virtual Connect which is actually hardware. One of the things that it does when you run these composable templates on top of it, is that it makes it one resource pool. If you have compute resources or storage resources that are in different cabinets, it presents that to the VCF manager and you're able to move that as needed. It makes it easier because it sets it up as one giant computer. Whereas before it might be segmented based upon the cabinet level. That's really one of the main differences, have the fluid resource pools. But it really relies on having the VCF on top of it. >> Talking about that data center wide resource pool, I'm a customer, I have complicated data center, I have DL380s, I have DL580s, I have Synergy, I have original chassis. Help me move forward to this vision of VCF. What's the road map for a typical customer who has a diverse data center? >> This question comes up all the time. The customers say look we're on your existing products and we have those for years. What I tell them is if you just need to do an incremental add, then to buy that particular hardware platform. If you're building a new data center, you want to pick the next generation platform and so what you want to do is do your proof of concept on the Synergy and then build that for the future. It's not that the other platforms don't work. It's not that they're not going to continue to be supported. They will. But you're always taking a look at where do I want to be two years from now. That's the big difference is that I'm going to look at Synergy and leverage the Vsphere which I've been using for years. I'm going to use the VSAN which was just recently certified. But it's also a component of VCF and I'm able to leverage that local storage which compresses it all down into one hardware platform. That's where the customer's really get the added benefit. >> Terrific, well Mike thank you so much for joining us on the CUBE today and explaining from your perspective the impact that the announcement with HPE and Vmware on composable means today. We want to thank you for watching the CUBE again. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Keith Townsend. We are live on day two of VMWorld 2017. Keep watching, we'll be right back. (funky music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Live from VMworld 2017 day one. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host, Dave Vellante. Very excited to be joined by our next guest. CUBE alumni, Peter McKay, President and co-CEO of Veeam. Welcome to theCUBE, welcome back. >> Great to be here, thanks Lisa. >> Good to see you again. >> Good to see you. Fellow Bostonian. >> Dave: Yeah, alright. Go Sox! >> Good to be here. >> Dave: It's not looking so good right now. >> Aah, and it only matters how it ends. >> That's true. Yep. Until October, it's not over 'til it's over. >> Peter: Not over until it's over. >> So, some good news. You guys were just named a leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant >> Peter: Yes, we were. >> for Backup and Recovery. What is next generation availability for, the enterprise has to always be on, 24/7? >> Yeah, you know it's a category. We call it availability. And now, kind of the market has adopted this availability label term. And it's really around any application, any file, any service. Access to your data at any time. So, it's always on. Always available. Seven by 24, 365. And more and more companies need to be always on. And so it's not, it used to be it's just about back up, back up, and you can back up a hundred times, but it's about the recovery. The time to actually get back up. And so, that's becoming a bigger driver for a lot of companies. They need to be always on. So, this category of availability is what we focus on. Everybody at Veeam, wakes up every morning thinking about how we can help our customers stay up and running and always on. Always available. >> From a buyer's perspective, are you seeing this elevated to the level of the C-Suite or are you still talking more with some of the guys and gals in IT or at lines of business? >> So, I would say, if you asked me two years ago, it was definitely IT-centric. More and more, as you start to see, British Airways, I mean, almost everyday you're seeing another outage. Major outage of a service or access to data or Australian Internal Revenue Service equivalent being down for days. It's starting to be a bigger issue and CIOs, CEOs. It's a major focus here, and not just for the cost of revenue, but also just the brand, associated with it being down. And with new buyers, these new millenniums and people always on access to devices. You know, if you have a shoddy service, they're going to go elsewhere. And so, more and more companies are focused on that being a differentiator for their business and that's why it's elevating up the C-Suite. >> I've personally been, sort of, getting more knowledge about Veeam in the past six or seven months. We had you guys on at HP Discover in London. And then of, course, we did Veeam On. You were at Pure Show. You were at the Nutanix show. >> Nutanix show Yeah. >> The HP in Vegas. And I just recently ... >> Peter: So, it's been more than four. >> Yeah. And I just recently presented to your alliance team back in Boston. So kind of getting the feel for what's going on here. >> You're going to be an expert at Veeam. >> I am starting to. So, one of the things I'm noticing is you guys are moving up market, getting into the enterprise. Talking a little more CIO, CXO language. So, I want to challenge you on something, Peter. And you've really brought in a lot of that new branding and messaging. A lot of people talk about digital transformation. And to us digital transformation is all about how well you leverage data. So, in your mind, is that a viable sort of definition, if you will? And how is Veeam helping its customers particularly upmarket leveraged data? >> Well, more and more companies are leveraging data on almost every aspect of their business. To drive new markets. To drive new products to market. And so the importance of data in this digital transformation, they call it the currency of digital transformation. The more that data is growing in its importance, the more the need for accessing that data and to have that data always available for you to make faster, quicker decisions is only growing. Not only is it the size of data, but it's the ability to access it at all times, in any location. On premise, off premise. Is becoming more and more because of the importance of data, right?. So the applications need to have access to it. Decisions. I mean, I look at our business. More and more of what I do everyday is off of data we're accumulating and how we drive our business. How people are buying. How we can market our products better. So if we're just an example of what we're seeing, not just in the enterprise, but in that medium sized business as well, where data is becoming a crucial differentiator. And one of the leading movements. The kind of drivers of digital transformation. >> I was going to ask, is that the underpinning of your enterprise portion? What you're saying is, not just the enterprise, it's the small businesses as well. >> Peter: Yeah. >> It really was just simplicity, which was the attractiveness to Veeam historically. >> Peter: Yeah. >> You're saying that's changing and it's becoming a data centricity. >> It is. I think as the importance of data. But it's not just the accumulation of data and the access of data, but it's also regulatory and security is also driving that, right? You need to, you know, with regulation, DDPR in Europe is becoming a bigger issue, right? And so, how are we managing that data? What are we doing? Are we in compliance or not with that data? Making sure that data is secure and you can back up, if there's ransomware. So, you look at a lot. As you accumulate this personal, identifiable information on people and your customers. The protecting of that data. The making sure that that's always available and you're in compliance. It's just growing in importance. Which has been a major driver for the growth of our business over the past couple years. >> Could you talk about that growth? What kind of metrics? You know you're a private company, but what kind of metrics can you share with us about recent growth, recent quarters? >> Yeah. So we're growing at about 35% year over year. So that's been kind of consistent over the past two, three years. We have 256,000 customers. We're adding about 4,000 customers a month. Small, medium and now, larger companies. The growth continues to drive. All of that is through our channel organization. Our alliance partners that we've continued to add. Steady, up and to the right has been our business. >> Well you've said, your stake in the ground is a billion, right? >> A billion. We're on track. Our goal is 800 this year. A billion next year. And 1.2, 1.5 in 2020. We're well on our way. >> So, speaking of partners, you were a VMware guy for a while? >> Peter: Yes, I was. >> We were talking about that. And you've been with Veeam for about a year or so? >> Peter: Year and a half. >> Tell us about, what was, the theme that we've had for the last couple of hours is that data protection, backup and recovery is a hot topic. It's something that you've probably seen evolve over time. Tell us about some of your thoughts on some of the announcements today that VMware has made regarding helping customers migrate to the cloud around data protection. What are some of the things that excite you about working with VMware? >> Well, I think most companies have a hybrid strategy in that medium. Definitely small is moving to either buying applications in the cloud or moving more off premise. That's in the S and B market. Anything above that, it's a hybrid story. There'll always be an on premise. There'll always be kind of a cloud component. And we're seeing a multi-cloud component. And so the announcement on VMware cloud on AWS is important. We're the only solution that is ready to go from a backup recovery. From availability perspective. VMware is an incredibly important partner for us. Announcements around anything data protection is critical because we built our business on the back of VMware's virtualization and vSphere. So whenever you talk virtualization and data, that's Veeam. But also security in moving, allowing that flexibility of moving from off premise to cloud solutions. That's music to our ears. That's a big part of what excites me about the VMworld in 2017. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on the market. I mean, it's on fire. VMware is booming. The data center is smoking hot. If you look back. Take your VMware experiences, look back two years ago. VMware as a company was under fire. Its license revenue was down 1% to flat. Now it's growing. 13% I guess is the latest quarter. Cash flow is cruising. The stock's doubling. Is this, in your view, sort of a product cycle thing? Updates of ELAs or is this a sustained recognition by the customer base that not everything is going to go into the public cloud, that we're going to bring the cloud operating model to the business. What's your sense? >> It's a great question. I think a big part of this is ... I do think it's a, it will be a sustainable growth going forward. I think a big part when I was at VMware. They had the whole vCloud Air cloud environment, which was confusing to the public cloud. And for customers because I think people didn't buy in on the vCloud Air strategy. I think what changed it. One aspect that changed it for VMware was this VMware Cloud on AWS announcement. Which, a lot of companies want to move to AWS and want to move to the cloud. But they want to do it with the same infrastructure that they have on premise, so if you can give them vSphere, the same kind of stack, but in the cloud, >> There's a pathway. >> it opens up opportunities. And that's when we started to see a VMware where companies would do a one-year, two-year agreement because we weren't sure of their long term cloud strategy. Now, they are. That's a great model. That's a great plan. Now, I'll go three, four years with VMware because I like that strategy. And it's great for AWS because they weren't getting a lot of mission critical apps going to AWS in the enterprise. But, now you've got VMware infrastructure that makes it so much easier for companies to take some of this on premise mission critical and move it to the cloud. So, I think it was great for Amazon. Great for VMware. But I also think a lot of some of the smaller drivers, I think Microsoft kind of not focusing as much on Hyper-V has kind of led vSphere to kind of rebirth of vSphere in the market. We see that growth and we're pegged a lot to the vSphere and Hyper-V, the whole virtualization side. I think it's part of VMware getting a better strategy for the cloud, but I think it's also customers kind of getting comfortable that it's not going to be this massive shift to the cloud. It's going to be a hybrid story. >> Well, it's interesting. The vCloud Air piece was always, even go back to Maritz, it was the recognition that the advantage that the hyperscalers had was homogeneity. vCloud Air was always homogenous, like to like. Or what Oracle called same same. And so, in effect, what VMware is doing, I wonder if you agree with this, with AWS, certainly with IBM, and potentially others, is similar to the vCloud Air strategy. They just don't own the cloud. >> Peter: Yeah. >> So, it's a two-edged sword. VMware did a debt, they raised about another four billion. Their CapX is relatively low. >> Peter: Yeah. >> Couple hundred million. >> Peter: Yeah. >> So, they don't have all that Hyperscale CapX. That's an advantage, but at the same time they don't have the vertical integration. >> Peter: Yeah. >> What's your thought on that as a sort of observer? >> That's a big ... I was acquired into VMware. >> Right. >> Three year, four year, whatever years ago from Desktone. And the CEO of Desktone came in. And it was desktop as a service, so desktops in a cloud. And so I got the whole vCloud Air and the cloud market and I kind of said when I came in, I think building your own cloud is, don't do it. Because it's going to suck a lot of cash and it's all up front when you're behind in the race to the public market, right? You had IBM already there. You had Amazon there. You had Azure, Google. VMware was going to be late to the game on vCloud Air. And so, I thought it was the smart move of kind of moving that out. Plus, VMware with vCloud Air alienated the other managed service providers that are building a business. So, you're almost competing with the same people you're trying to load up with your technology. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So, it was like, no. Stay neutral. Stay out of that. You've stayed out of the hardware. Stay out of the cloud. >> So, I want to bring that back to Veeam. Because for you guys, I think the clarity is a great thing. It reduces all that friction and all that noise and now the mission is clear. I wonder if you can comment on that? >> Peter: Yeah. I think that was the, that's what the market wanted. More clarity on what's your cloud strategy. That was I think the biggest mover in the market. VMware's growth has really came when they flicked that switch. When they announced that whole Amazon strategy. And I think it helped us because we're an obviously strong partner with VMware and strong partner with Amazon, so putting them together is perfect. That's why we were able to do it faster than anybody. When you go by our booth, you can see it. We demo it. It's all up and running. But, I think it helped VMware get clarity on their strategy. It helped Amazon and it drove our market. >> You guys draft right behind that. >> We just draft in right behind you, right? So I think that was a good move for everybody. >> Last question for you as the CEO, co-CEO of Veeam. Been around in this space for a long time. What are some of the core things that Veeam does to attract and retain talent as we look at technology like backup and recovery that's hot again? >> Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's a, you've got to, I think a lot of it comes down to culture. We've got, I mean, we've always had great technology. So the product has always been the driver. It gets in, it does a really good job. And then it becomes, then it's the people. We've got a great culture of people. We call it hungry, humble, and smart people. You know, and we have fun. We drive, we're aggressive. We're scrappy. We're hungry. But no egos. In our partner community, is similar. And so, I think it makes because of that you get a reputation and it's kind of a spot that people want to come to. We've done a good job of as we're growing, we've invested in our team to make our team better. But we've also brought in a lot of skill set. Especially in the enterprise where we need to get more skills outside of kind of S and B and commercial. So we've done I think a good job of merging, the investment in our existing team with a lot of really good skills and expertise that we didn't have but also fit the culture. So keep that founders, that Ratmir's founder mentality as the business grows and scales. And make it still being that fun scrappy software company that made Veeam what it is today. >> Yeah, it kind of gets to my last question which was you guys are maturing even though there's a lot of immature things going on. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: Which is a lot of fun. >> It's fun. We can talk about that ... (laughter) >> All good. But, we talked about this. Veeam's ascendancy was during the virtualization craze. And you guys really got a strong foothold. And beat the competition. And now you're seeing a lot of emergent cloud data protection guys. Very well funded. Hundreds of millions of dollars in a business that's not capital intensive. How are you going to maintain your relevance there? It's a big part of your job. >> Peter: Yeah, it is. >> It's a big part of why they brought you in. >> It is. I mean, a lot of it is kind of continue to do what we've done in terms of being as you grow, and as you scale, don't lose the aggressiveness. It's, think big, right? We've always been taking bigger and bigger steps as an organization. Taking risks. Being aggressive. Being bold. Doing things that you do it as a small company but continue to do it. And that's still with our founders. That's the mentality of our business. A big part of my job is to make sure we don't lose that, right? As you get to 800 and a billion, still be that hungry and aggressive and scrappy company that we were six years ago, seven years ago when we were much smaller. But it's even more important today to be that as we move forward in this hyper competitive different market that exists. We've just got to be so much better every day. Every day that we come to work, we got to be better than we were the day before. >> And scrappy and hungry. I love it. >> Peter: Scrappy and hungry. (laughing) >> Peter McKay, thank you so much for your we'll say nth time on theCube. >> Yes. >> Lisa: Does that work? >> That's fair. >> Alright. For Peter McKay, the President and Co-CEO of Veeam and my co-host, Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube live from day one of VMworld 2017. Stick around. We will be right back. (techno music)