>> Man: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's the Cube. (music) Covering VMworld 2019. (music) Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> And welcome, indeed, here to the cube and our coverage of VMworld 2019. We are in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. They're open, they're back in business and so is VMware. And we're watching the folks stream out from this morning's keynote session, Pat Gelsinger hosting that session. And it was an impressive setup to say the least. Thousands packing that ballroom downstairs for a plethora of announcements, all from Pat Gelsinger. I'm John Walls, Justin Warren joins us. We haven't been together for a while, it's good to see you.- It's been a little while, yeah. >> How've you been? >> I've been well, I've been well. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I'm surprised they brought us back together after the last time. >> I don't believe... let's not talk about that incident. >> I thought it went so well, we just end on a high note. But it is a pleasure to be with Justin, we'll be with him throughout the week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, our coverage here. We're joined right now by two guests, Paul Savill, whose the SVP of Network and Technology Solutions at CenturyLink and Omar Sunna who is the Director of Digital Products at GE Health care. And gentlemen thanks for being with us, it's good to have you here on the Cube. >> Thank you John. >> First off, let's just, gimme, your both, your take just on VMWorld 2019. What you're looking for, what you're expecting, and kind of the early vibe that you have going on. Paul, why don't you take that first? >> Sure, one of the things I've really been impressed with is how VMware is expanding, the kind of open nature of it's relationships, it's developing it's ecosystem, really broadening it out, it's making a number of acquisitions to enable new capabilities. And we're really excited about that. CenturyLink and VMware have been partners for, I think, around 12, 15 years. As we've been building out our own cloud services and so it's a very exciting time to see all this technology coming together in the way that it is. >> I love with the way you put it too, acquisitions. Pat made a little comment about that, it's like, "I can't wait to find out who I'm "going to buy next." >> Yes. >> And they've been, certainly been in a full speed ahead modefor the past year, year and a half. Omar, you're take, early. >> Yeah, man, I think I look at it from a health care solutioning perspective and it's exciting to see this level of technology and kind of the building out of the ecosystem and what could it enable for health care consumers. Especially with the big focus around privacy and and data management. I think some of their, and security, some of their latest acquisitions could actually help grow that ecosystem and offer more options especially to the health care industry. >> All right, well now let's talk about your portfolio at work then, a little bit, at GE Healthcare. Obviously health systems, health care's a huge user you know, these days, well it's kind of simplifying it a bit, but just talk about what you're concerns are, what your attention is, and kind of the things that are keeping you up at night, these days, in terms of health care and what you're doing in the IT space. >> You know, I mean, I think the, you know when we look at our customer environment globally, you know, we tend to kind of summarize some of the key challenges for our customers around three pillars. Access, so being able to provide access to all the patients that need it, regardless of location. With aging population in a lot of developed countries, with also a lot of people having the means to receive more proactive health care, it is challenging the health systems to be able to provide adequate access to patients. Capacity, providing capacity when the resources, including the human capital resources, that health systems have. So how do you free up your specialists to make sure that they're able to provide the right level of patients who need it, patient care for the patients that need it. As well as clinical efficacy. How do we help with software applications, with technology, to help reduce the variation of care, and improve patient outcomes, regardless where the patient is receiving care, within the rural community or with advanced academic medical centers. So we try to kind of think of our solution technologies as helping our customers solve for access, capacity, and clinical efficacy. >> Yeah, so a lot of health care, it's kind of a retail setup in that there's lots of hospitals and other allied health professionals who have lots of different locations that they need to provide heath care for them and that technology needs to live where the patients are and where the doctors are. So it was interesting to see, in the key note, earlier this morning, talking about edge and different kinds of edge as well. We've got thin, medium, and thick edge, according to VMware. So how do you see that rise of edge computing effecting the way that you deal with health care. >> Yeah, I mean tremendous, actually, opportunity for us. And GE is working on capitalizing on the technology, on edge technology, to allow us to bring in AI application right to, where kind of within the customer network. And that is, that's helping us solve for a lot of concerns around private security as well as moving large data sets to the cloud to process, to be able to get benefit out of algorithm and additional applications. So that's actually an exciting area. And agree with you, I mean we're seeing more and more large distributed health care networks emorph, in the U.S. we've definitely seen huge merger and acquisition movement that we continue to see, and consolidation. And then we also see that globally. With regional delivery networks coming up and being able to have software applications live within this distributed network and provide information for the right clinician at the right time is a big initiative for us. And for us this makes a huge difference in the way our providers are able to deliver care for their patients. >> This seems like an ideal opportunity for the folks at CenturyLink to help you with that. >> Abso-- (nervous laughter) >> Yeah, that's right, I mean CenturyLink really, to that point, sees this landscape evolving rapidly. And we even have a phrase internally we use that, "The network is the data center." We believe that in the future, compute is going to be distributed so widely, in such a broad geography and dropped in places where it's most efficient to run it and where it's most efficient to connect it with network, that really, the data centers we think about it today, becomes this very widely distributed platform that is connected together with high performance networking solutions. And that's part of what we're working with GE Healthcare on. >> I'm old enough to remember when "The network is the computer" was the slogan that we're all following now, and it seems that's actually coming true now. Where we have this idea of it, it's not just cloud, and it's not just data centers, and it's not just edge, it's actually a combination of all of them. And you need to be able to deal with that technology wherever it needs to live. Which is, I think, is a positive change from what we were talking about a few years ago, where it seemed to be, we had to make one choice. Now the choice is you actually need a bit of everything. >> Right. >> Tell me about your decision, or at least in terms of on-prem, off-prem, and health care, I would assume, extremely sensitive, obviously, to security concerns and management and certain policies about who can access what, where, when and how, whatever. How are you going about making that decision in this new multi-cloud environment, this hybrid-cloud environment, when people are making migrations, you know, with their businesses, and they're going off-prem. But you, I would assume, have to be a lot more sensitive, or more sensitive to other factors than, perhaps, other businesses have to be. >> Yeah, we definitely do. There is, you know, with regulations, you know, and, for example in Europe, GDPR, there's in country regulations around where data resides. All of that kind of plays a factor in customer adoption of technologies and where they're comfortable. We've talked a lot of CIOs in the health care sector and a lot of them say, "Hey, listen we're on a journey, "we're used to hugging our servers, "we're used to controlling it, and technology has evolved. "But, in terms of our policies, ability to accept liability "of data breaches and what technology providers are willing "to sign up for. "All of that plays a roll in that journey." Like Justin had mentioned, it is actually a, in developing an ecosystem, where you have combination of on-prem and off-prem, is a lot of where health care health systems are investing their money. So we're seeing certain data that resides on-prem that is mission critical versus more historic data can go into cloud technology, cloud storage technology and others. But, there's no doubt that we're at an inflection point, we're seeing a lot more health systems sign up to cloud based SAS applications. Invest in private cloud hosting service, invest in also public cloud hosting services. And all of that actually will create, as a software provider, all that could actually help us create more opportunities and more solutioning for our customers. I love listening to some of the cloud computing power that would allow us to develop newer applications. So it's actually exciting, it's a journey with our customers, you know, we're choosing to kind of be alongside of our customers and help them. Doing a lot of education. And being able to have a relationship with CenturyLink, be able to see the advances and availability of resources that CenturyLink makes available for us as well as other partners that we have help us really make sure that we're able to build the right level of technology meeting the health care customer needs. >> So Paul, fill in the gaps a little bit about where CenturyLink is in trying to solve this, I wouldn't say dilemma, but it certainly is a puzzle of some sort, right, as decisions are made about what's going to be off loaded, what's not, how are we going to access, what do we allow. How do you see CenturyLink's role when you have a customer like Omar, like GE Healthcare, coming to you with their unique needs, and addressing those? >> Sure, well, as unique as GE Healthcare is in the health care industry, there are some common characteristics about how we are seeing enterprise customers look at these situations. And one of them is that placing compute on the premise itself, that, that is generally the most expensive real estate that an enterprise has when it has to go in the hospital, when it has to go at the retail store location. And a lot of enterprises today are doubling the amount of compute and storage that they're having at their premise locations every year because the volume is just growing so much. That's becoming a problem, because you don't want your, you don't want your hospital becoming a bigger and bigger data center, so to speak, right? And so the way that we're approaching the problem and working with this, is in VMware was actually, you know, expressing a very similar viewpoint about the edge and about how the thick edge and the thin edge, and the thin edge of the customer premise is where you want to have the lightest load, but you want to have the most critical applications that are sitting there, you want to have the information that you have to protect the most in a most guarded way that's most important for your operations there. But from there you can more efficiently run things from a distance backing out going all the way back to the public cloud core, if you connect it with high performance networking from end to end. And so what CenturyLink has been doing is putting together these solutions that make that balance of trade, so to speak, between the cost of compute, the cost of where you have to put it, to where it best can be housed, what kind of latency performance that it needs to have to meet it to the performance specification, all the way back to the public cloud design and how to tie it in to the public cloud. And that's where we've been building our competency and the solutions we've been putting together for customers. >> You mentioned the need for high performance networks in there so I've got to ask you about 5G. From what I know about 5G it looks like the kind of situation you have with health care, where you've got lots of mobile tablet devices, you've got lots of other actual equipment IoT devices in a health care situation. That seems like an ideal use case for 5G. Is that what hot 5G is actually for, is the hype real? >> Well, 5G is certainly going to transform the world in terms of it's ability to provide wireless high bandwidth connectivity and low latency connectivity to devices. But, edge compute is not about 5G. You can have edge compute without 5G. In fact, it's a bit of a myth that edge compute can't arrive until 5G comes, because edge compute is something that is available to do today. And, in fact, CenturyLink is deploying edge compute solutions with, by basically building fiber into enterprise locations and then housing compute at different areas of the network at the point that's most optimal for the solution. And there are a variety of wireless solutions that can be used in that campus environment other than 5G to connect wireless devices back securely and safely to that edge compute that sits there. >> But it seems like it still should be, or at least looks like it could be a game changer in what it's going to allow in terms of, I guess, advancing edge computing. >> Right? I mean, you're still going to provide new capabilities and new reach and new functionalities that don't currently exist. >> I take Paul's point, though, because there are other technologies like Wi-Fi 6, for example, which is, it's basically the same thing as 5G, it just uses a different radio communications mechanism. But, and I also take your point that you can do edge computing today, absolutely. You can put computing into retail situations and you can have, I mean we have tablet devices now. We have laptops. So we kind of have edge computing. We always have, it just now, now it has a name. >> Yes, that's correct. >> So, tell me before we let you go, Catalyst Award winner from CenturyLink and VMware, Paul, first off let's talk about how you assess that, what's the determination, the criteria, for that and then I'm going to let crow a little bit Omar, about receiving that award. But tell us about the Catalyst Award first. >> Yes, well we call it the Catalyst Award because, when you think about it, a catalyst is something that excites a chemical process. Technically that is the definition of catalyst. But catalyst, in the way we view it, is something that we wanted to recognize a person or a company, that we felt like was really driving innovation, that was really solving a problem and working, also collaboratively together with VMware and CenturyLink in solving some of these problems. So we looked at GE Healthcare and really felt like, in a place where certainly we have seen such great advances in health care administration and building to save people's lives. Oddly, medical errors is becoming an increasing amount of now the problems in terms of death rates. Because, while we have so many ways to solve problems, so many ways to address it, that portion of what's causing deaths is actually on the rise. And so GE Healthcare is taking the technology that they're deploying and helping to solve that problem, that's why we wanted to recognize Omar and the company today. >> An honor for you I would assume you're all pretty proud of that. >> Yeah, absolutely, and thank you, and, yeah, I mean it's was really fantastic to be recognized by our partners. And a great testimony to the team at GE Healthcare. And our team wakes up in the morning and our mission is to improve lives in the moment that matters. A lot of our technology is used in mission critical and the way we're able to deliver that to our customers relies heavily on our ability to leverage advances in technology and be able to improve our ability to deliver our different applications for our customers. So this, actually been fantastic, the relationship has been tremendous for us. Where we have hosted our solutions in CenturyLink, the level of support that we have received have really enabled us to deliver important application for our customers and meet their SLAs and meet their clinical use cases and the needs of software uptime. So that has been tremendous for us. >> Well congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Well then thanks for your time, both of you. And enjoy the show, enjoy San Francisco, we've got good weather this week. >> That's right, yeah. >> So get out and enjoy that, thank you Paul and Omar. Back with more on the Cube, you're watching our coverage here live in San Francisco in VMWorld 2019. (music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to Las Vegas. We are live here at AWS re:Invent along with Justin Moore and I'm John Wallis. I know when you travel these days, all you want is, you want it to work, right? >> Yeah. >> We just want to get there. Well, I'll tell you what, Phil Wood from EasyJet wants you to get there as well. As does Matt Leonard from CenturyLink. Gentlemen, glad to have you with us. >> Thanks very much. >> We appreciate it. >> EasyJet, a European-based carrier just north of London, so we're talking about air travel. You are, as we've just recently learned, you are a Catalyst Award winner from CenturyLink, there's a reason for that and that's a point of distinction. So Matt, if you would maybe take us through a little bit about what EasyJet did to earn that distinction. >> Sure, the Catalyst Award is an award that we give out in combination with VMware to kind of highlight customers that are doing new and exciting things with regard to digital transformation. We've been a provider of services and a partner with EasyJet for a long time and they've done some really cool things with regard to services they provide their end customers. And we play a very very small part of that. Two exciting things that are my personal favorites with regard to EasyJet is the Look and Book service. So within the application if you want to book a new trip you normally have to type in the airport that you want to go to, and you have to figure out what's the name of the airport, or the three-digit code. With the EasyJet application you can upload a picture and it has intelligence that's used to figure out that picture and what that landmark is and then what the nearest airport is. So that's pretty exciting. And the second exciting thing within the application >> is a trip in one tap. So you can basically justdial in how much money you want to spend for a trip, hit the Go button, in literally one tap it'll recommend a city, a hotel, and a fun and exciting thing that's happening during that duration of time. So for last minute travelers, my family's certainly one of those, we got a free period of time, one tap it'll tell you where to stay, how to get there with EasyJet and then what's exciting happening within that city. >> So I could put in, I say, I want to spend 300 dollars a ticket, and tap boom, and it'll say you can go to Brussels, you can go to Amsterdam but you can't make it to Dublin this weekend, right? Or whatever. I love that. So what has that done for your business in terms of, on a micro level and a macro level, what's it doing in terms of that interface and what's it mean to your business in general? >> As a business, we're 23 years old, so we started very much like a startup and we kind of came in at low-cost airline bracket. But now what we're renowned for is the convenience, and you've got two examples there where our customers love that because it's a convenient way. They don't have to do lots of searching, they can just take the photograph and they know exactly where they're going to go. And that's really what differentiates us is that convenience and the customer experience that we offer to all of our customers. We have a lot of customers. We have 90 million passengers a year. They come to us because they know not just that we give great value but that experience. So what it's done, it's made us grow. And that's literally how we continue to grow is to expand those customer services and Centurylink have been a part of that journey for over half of our tenure as an airline. >> It sounds like technology is actually right on the edge of driving that value for customers and making things easy. Like just the experience of being able to walk out and take a photo of something and say, I want to go here. I would like to go out and see if I can trick it by taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower out in the back here. >> We'll go and try it out in a bit. >> I'm confident. >> We'll see how it goes. That's making use of a whole bunch of technologies. It's got mobile technology in there, it's got image recognition, it's got machine learning. What else are you seeing at the show here at AWS, what are some of the technologies that you think will drive the next evolution of things, what's going to win you the next award? >> I think one of the things I've really been looking at is around data and around the personalization. So we talked about customer experience but our whole journey of taking a plane, taking a holiday, for example, it's from the moment you book it to the moment you get back. There's so many touch points during that and there's so much data that we can take from that. So I've been really interested in looking at how different organizations and how Amazon have been using data. I also think you can't come to a show like this without looking at machine learning and AI. We're using aspects of that in how we analyze our data, but that's certainly something I think's going to change the airline industry moving forward. >> How important is a partnership with someone like CenturyLink in making sure that you get the best use of these technologies? >> Matt talked about that they have a small part to play but you've got to understand that every single customer, every single search on our website goes through a network. In order for us to connect to our customers, be they booking a flight, be they on a flight, we've got to go through a reliable network. And the way I describe it, it needs to be effortless. It needs to just work. You mentioned that right at the beginning. But I also think as well for us to exploit technologies like the cloud, which is what we're starting to invest a lot more into, we need a partner who can help us on that journey. So again, that's where CenturyLink and the partnership we've got has been absolutely crucial. The things that we're doing with CenturyLink around making sure that we're only paying for our network for what we use. We're an airline. Our airports are seasonal so kind of traditional networks, what you'll end up doing is paying for bandwidth all year, when in the winter seasons if you're not flying there that's dead money. So it's simple things like that but that makes a huge difference towards my cost base perspective. >> And time of day, I assume that affects that as well? >> Absolutely. I mean, clearly in our summer periods we fly a lot, so time of day during the summer, there's not that many hours we don't fly. >> You get a lot of daylight over there, right? (laughter) >> But certainly in winter where we have our kind of summer destinations, it makes a big big difference. And that's cost we pass on to the customer as well which is massively important. >> What is it about the customer that you don't know? You talked about AI, what that could do for you down the road. How much information, how much data do you think you can extract from the customer to make that experience even better, and what do you need to know about them, and how will CenturyLink help you get there? >> You need to know everything. I mean, we know that we sell a hundred seventy million bacon sandwiches a year. Whether that's useful or not, but we know that. >> There's hungry people. >> That's a lot of bacon. >> It is a lot. But it means that we know the type of food that our customers want to eat, we know the top destinations, even knowing how long between booking a flight and actually flying. So we know from a price perspective and from a making sure our planes are full or making sure we're not overselling our flights. All of that information, there's just a wealth of data that you're getting out there. And it's not just customers. One of the big factors for us is safety. So we use our data now to analyze maintenance. So we have predicted maintenance around when's the right time to put in spare parts but also what's the most efficient time so that we're not disrupting the customer. So actually we may want to bring a maintenance cycle sooner so we can open up more routes for customers to fly when they want to. So it's very hard to answer that question cause every day we're coming up with new ideas or new bits of information that at the time we never thought we needed to know but that actually turns out to be an absolutely crucial part of our offer. >> That's not an unusual thing for most people in a world where there's this much dynamic, this much change going on. So what process do you run through to figure out, where should we be looking to find out the next set of optimizations? Or how do you discover what is the next thing that you should work on, like where does the idea for, maybe we should build this app. Where does that come from? >> I don't think there's one model. I think what's always been at the heart of EasyJet is innovation, and we've always focused on the customer. So we have a great loyalty scheme and our customers are very loyal. We have 75% loyalty with our customers which is phenomenal. We get a lot of feedback and that feedback drives a lot of the ideas that we push forward. So I think it's a mixture of our passion, it's a mixture of our experience, but I'd say that feedback from the customer, that drives a lot of the ideas that we do moving forward. >> From the CenturyLink perspective, you received certification for the MSP designation. >> Yup. >> Working in the travel business, what does that do, or how does that MSP certification translate over to learning about a different industry, to applying different approaches, unique approaches, because it's not one size fits all. They have very, very specific challenges that you're trying to address. >> Yeah, so on a broader sense, our mission with clients like EasyJet and customers interested in the cloud is really to connect, migrate, and then manage their workloads within the cloud. That's really what we're focused on. And there's certainly commonalities within verticals but every customer's different, and really assessing, starting with the customer, and that's a common thing that I think both EasyJet as well as CenturyLink and certainly Amazon have in common, really focused on that customer journey. One of the approaches that we take through a program called CustomerLink is put the customer right in the center of the team and we've applied the Agile methodology to that customer engagement process. So we do a standup meeting once every two weeks, we do sprints once every two weeks. A lot of our customers are part of that board that we use to activate the sprint and to define priorities and what actions are. So really pulling the whole team together across different departments, focusing on the customer first, and in many cases the customer's customer first cause a lot of your priorities are based on what your customers are after, and really making sure that we're working on the right activity in a very lean way, pulling away as much waste as possible that aren't contributing to adding value to the customer journey. >> And then from your side of the fence going forward, you've mentioned four or five general areas, you've said, we could improve here, we could look at this, we could look at that. How do you prioritize and say, okay, let's focus here now and then we'll move on. So if you had to focus now, or for the next twelve months, what would that be on? >> So we've actually just relaunched our strategy. At the heart we are an airline so our priority is about being number one or number two in all the primary airports. We've got to keep that. But we also recognize from the data that the amount of our customers who will book hotels or book further products through some of our partners that's something that we can actually capitalize on. So we're looking more into holidays now. Taking that customer centricity, and how do we make the end-to-end journey for our customers so including travel to and from airport and the whole day. So that's a priority for us. Continue building our customer loyalty. So as much as we pride ourselves on loyalty, we believe there's a lot more you can do. I think the airline loyalty schemes need to be shaken up a little bit more. If you look in the retail sector or things like that they're focusing on different things. It's no longer just the case of air miles. People want speedier boarding, or they want a better experience, better seating arrangements. So we're looking at our loyalty. And then also business. We talk about, we've got really good slots for when we fly planes. And they're slots that are competitive to a business traveler. So that's our three main areas, I would say, are business, holidays, and loyalty. >> Matt, you're going to be in business for a while. I think you're okay. If you could work on legroom, I'm sold. Matt and Phil, thank you for being with us. We appreciate the time. Join us here on theCUBE. You're watching our live coverage from Las Vegas at AWS re:Invent. (electronic music)