>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (light airy music) >> Hi, everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is in the house. John Furrier is pounding the news from our Palo Alto studio. We are super excited to be talking about cloud at the edge, what that means. Charles Tsai is here. He's the Senior Director of product management at Dell Technologies and Peter Fetterolf is the Chief Technology Officer at ACG Business Analytics, a firm that goes deep into the TCO and the telco space, among other things. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Yeah, good to be here. >> So I've been in search all week of the elusive next wave of monetization for the telcos. We know they make great money on connectivity, they're really good at that. But they're all talking about how they can't let this happen again. Meaning we can't let the over the top vendors yet again, basically steal our cookies. So we're going to not mess it up this time. We're going to win in the monetization. Charles, where are those monetization opportunities? Obviously at the edge, the telco cloud at the edge. What is that all about and where's the money? >> Well, Dave, I think from a Dell's perspective, what we want to be able to enable operators is a solution that enable them to roll out services much quicker, right? We know there's a lot of innovation around IoT, MEG and so on and so forth, but they continue to rely on traditional technology and way of operations is going to take them years to enable new services. So what Dell is doing is now, creating the entire vertical stack from the hardware through CAST and automation that enable them, not only to push out services very quickly, but operating them using cloud principles. >> So it's when you say the entire vertical stack, it's the integrated hardware components with like, for example, Red Hat on top- >> Right. >> Or a Wind River? >> That's correct. >> Okay, and then open API, so the developers can create workloads, I presume data companies. We just had a data conversation 'cause that was part of the original stack- >> That's correct. >> So through an open ecosystem, you can actually sort of recreate that value, correct? >> That's correct. >> Okay. >> So one thing Dell is doing, is we are offering an infrastructure block where we are taking over the overhead of certifying every release coming from the Red Hat or the Wind River of the world, right? We want telcos to spend their resources on what is going to generate them revenue. Not the overhead of creating this cloud stack. >> Dave, I remember when we went through this in the enterprise and you had companies like, you know, IBM with the AS400 and the mainframe saying it's easier to manage, which it was, but it's still, you know, it was subsumed by the open systems trend. >> Yeah, yeah. And I think that's an important thing to probe on, is this idea of what is, what exactly does it mean to be cloud at the edge in the telecom space? Because it's a much used term. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about cloud and edge, in sort of generalized IT, but what specifically does it mean? >> Yeah, so when we talk about telco cloud, first of all it's kind of different from what you're thinking about public cloud today. And there's a couple differences. One, if you look at the big hyperscaler public cloud today, they tend to be centralized in huge data centers. Okay, telco cloud, there are big data centers, but then there's also regional data centers. There are edge data centers, which are your typical like access central offices that have turned data centers, and then now even cell sites are becoming mini data centers. So it's distributed. I mean like you could have like, even in a country like say Germany, you'd have 30,000 soul sites, each one of them being a data center. So it's a very different model. Now the other thing I want to go back to the question of monetization, okay? So how do you do monetization? The only way to do that, is to be able to offer new services, like Charles said. How do you offer new services? You have to have an open ecosystem that's going to be very, very flexible. And if we look at where telcos are coming from today, they tend to be very inflexible 'cause they're all kind of single vendor solutions. And even as we've moved to virtualization, you know, if you look at packet core for instance, a lot of them are these vertical stacks of say a Nokia or Ericson or Huawei where you know, you can't really put any other vendors or any other solutions into that. So basically the idea is this kind of horizontal architecture, right? Where now across, not just my central data centers, but across my edge data centers, which would be traditionally my access COs, as well as my cell sites. I have an open environment. And we're kind of starting with, you know, packet core obviously with, and UPFs being distributed, but now open ran or virtual ran, where I can have CUs and DUs and I can split CUs, they could be at the soul site, they could be in edge data centers. But then moving forward, we're going to have like MEG, which are, you know, which are new kinds of services, you know, could be, you know, remote cars it could be gaming, it could be the Metaverse. And these are going to be a multi-vendor environment. So one of the things you need to do is you need to have you know, this cloud layer, and that's what Charles was talking about with the infrastructure blocks is helping the service providers do that, but they still own their infrastructure. >> Yeah, so it's still not clear to me how the service providers win that game but we can maybe come back to that because I want to dig into TCO a little bit. >> Sure. >> Because I have a lot of friends at Dell. I don't have a lot of friends at HPE. I've always been critical when they take an X86 server put a name on it that implies edge and they throw it over the fence to the edge, that's not going to work, okay? We're now seeing, you know we were just at the Dell booth yesterday, you did the booth crawl, which was awesome. Purpose-built servers for this environment. >> Charles: That's right. >> So there's two factors here that I want to explore in TCO. One is, how those next gen servers compare to the previous gen, especially in terms of power consumption but other factors and then how these sort of open ran, open ecosystem stacks compared to proprietary stacks. Peter, can you help us understand those? >> Yeah, sure. And Charles can comment on this as well. But I mean there, there's a couple areas. One is just moving the next generation. So especially on the Intel side, moving from Ice Lake to the Sapphire Rapids is a big deal, especially when it comes to the DU. And you know, with the radios, right? There's the radio unit, the RU, and then there's the DU the distributed unit, and the CU. The DU is really like part of the radio, but it's virtualized. When we moved from Ice lake to Sapphire Rapids, which is third generation intel to fourth generation intel, we're literally almost doubling the performance in the DU. And that's really important 'cause it means like almost half the number of servers and we're talking like 30, 40, 50,000 servers in some cases. So, you know, being able to divide that by two, that's really big, right? In terms of not only the the cost but all the TCO and the OpEx. Now another area that's really important, when I was talking moving from these vertical silos to the horizontal, the issue with the vertical silos is, you can't place any other workloads into those silos. So it's kind of inefficient, right? Whereas when we have the horizontal architecture, now you can place workloads wherever you want, which basically also means less servers but also more flexibility, more service agility. And then, you know, I think Charles can comment more, specifically on the XR8000, some things Dell's doing, 'cause it's really exciting relative to- >> Sure. >> What's happening in there. >> So, you know, when we start looking at putting compute at the edge, right? We recognize the first thing we have to do is understand the environment we are going into. So we spend with a lot of time with telcos going to the south side, going to the edge data center, looking at operation, how do the engineer today deal with maintenance replacement at those locations? Then based on understanding the operation constraints at those sites, we create innovation and take a traditional server, remodel it to make sure that we minimize the disruption to the operations, right? Just because we are helping them going from appliances to open compute, we do not want to disrupt what is have been a very efficient operation on the remote sites. So we created a lot of new ideas and develop them on general compute, where we believe we can save a lot of headache and disruptions and still provide the same level of availability, resiliency, and redundancy on an open compute platform. >> So when we talk about open, we don't mean generic? Fair? See what I mean? >> Open is more from the software workload perspective, right? A Dell server can run any type of workload that customer intend. >> But it's engineered for this? >> Environment. >> Environment. >> That's correct. >> And so what are some of the environmental issues that are dealt with in the telecom space that are different than the average data center? >> The most basic one, is in most of the traditional cell tower, they are deployed within cabinets instead of racks. So they are depth constraints that you just have no access to the rear of the chassis. So that means on a server, is everything you need to access, need to be in the front, nothing should be in the back. Then you need to consider how labor union come into play, right? There's a lot of constraint on who can go to a cell tower and touch power, who can go there and touch compute, right? So we minimize all that disruption through a modular design and make it very efficient. >> So when we took a look at XR8000, literally right here, sitting on the desk. >> Uh-huh. >> Took it apart, don't panic, just pulled out some sleds and things. >> Right, right. >> One of the interesting demonstrations was how it compared to the size of a shoe. Now apparently you hired someone at Dell specifically because they wear a size 14 shoe, (Charles laughs) so it was even more dramatic. >> That's right. >> But when you see it, and I would suggest that viewers go back and take a look at that segment, specifically on the hardware. You can see exactly what you just referenced. This idea that everything is accessible from the front. Yeah. >> So I want to dig in a couple things. So I want to push back a little bit on what you were saying about the horizontal 'cause there's the benefit, if you've got the horizontal infrastructure, you can run a lot more workloads. But I compare it to the enterprise 'cause I, that was the argument, I've made that argument with converged infrastructure versus say an Oracle vertical stack, but it turned out that actually Oracle ran Oracle better, okay? Is there an analog in telco or is this new open architecture going to be able to not only service the wide range of emerging apps but also be as resilient as the proprietary infrastructure? >> Yeah and you know, before I answer that, I also want to say that we've been writing a number of white papers. So we have actually three white papers we've just done with Dell looking at infrastructure blocks and looking at vertical versus horizontal and also looking at moving from the previous generation hardware to the next generation hardware. So all those details, you can find the white papers, and you can find them either in the Dell website or at the ACG research website >> ACGresearch.com? >> ACG research. Yeah, if you just search ACG research, you'll find- >> Yeah. >> Lots of white papers on TCO. So you know, what I want to say, relative to the vertical versus horizontal. Yeah, obviously in the vertical side, some of those things will run well, I mean it won't have issues. However, that being said, as we move to cloud native, you know, it's very high performance, okay? In terms of the stack, whether it be a Red Hat or a VMware or other cloud layers, that's really become much more mature. It now it's all CNF base, which is really containerized, very high performance. And so I don't think really performance is an issue. However, my feeling is that, if you want to offer new services and generate new revenue, you're not going to do it in vertical stacks, period. You're going to be able to do a packet core, you'll be able to do a ran over here. But now what if I want to offer a gaming service? What if I want to do metaverse? What if I want to do, you have to have an environment that's a multi-vendor environment that supports an ecosystem. Even in the RAN, when we look at the RIC, and the xApps and the rApps, these are multi-vendor environments that's going to create a lot of flexibility and you can't do that if you're restricted to, I can only have one vendor running on this hardware. >> Yeah, we're seeing these vendors work together and create RICs. That's obviously a key point, but what I'm hearing is that there may be trade offs, but the incremental value is going to overwhelm that. Second question I have, Peter is, TCO, I've been hearing a lot about 30%, you know, where's that 30% come from? Is it Op, is it from an OpEx standpoint? Is it labor, is it power? Is it, you mentioned, you know, cutting the number of servers in half. If I can unpack the granularity of that TCO, where's the benefit coming from? >> Yeah, the answer is yes. (Peter and Charles laugh) >> Okay, we'll do. >> Yeah, so- >> One side that, in terms of, where is the big bang for the bucks? >> So I mean, so you really need to look at the white paper to see details, but definitely power, definitely labor, definitely reducing the number of servers, you know, reducing the CapEx. The other thing is, is as you move to this really next generation horizontal telco cloud, there's the whole automation and orchestration, that is a key component as well. And it's enabled by what Dell is doing. It's enabled by the, because the thing is you're not going to have end-to-end automation if you have all this legacy stuff there or if you have these vertical stacks where you can't integrate. I mean you can automate that part and then you have separate automation here, you separate. you need to have integrated automation and orchestration across the whole thing. >> One other point I would add also, right, on the hardware perspective, right? With the customized hardware, what we allow operator to do is, take out the existing appliance and push a edge optimized server without reworking the entire infrastructure. There is a significant saving where you don't have to rethink about what is my power infrastructure, right? What is my security infrastructure? The server is designed to leverage the existing, what is already there. >> How should telco, Charles, plan for this transformation? Are there specific best practices that you would recommend in terms of the operational model? >> Great question. I think first thing is do an inventory of what you have. Understand what your constraints are and then come to Dell, we will love to consult with you, based on our experience on the best practices. We know how to minimize additional changes. We know how to help your support engineer, understand how to shift appliance based operation to a cloud-based operation. >> Is that a service you offer? Is that a pre-sales freebie? What is maybe both? >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> It's both. >> Yeah. >> Guys- >> Just really quickly. >> We're going to wrap. >> The, yeah. Dave loves the TCO discussion. I'm always thinking in terms of, well how do you measure TCO when you're comparing something where you can't do something to an environment where you're going to be able to do something new? And I know that that's always the challenge in any kind of emerging market where things are changing, any? >> Well, I mean we also look at, not only TCO, but we look at overall business case. So there's basically service at GLD and revenue and then there's faster time to revenues. Well, and actually ACG, we actually have a platform called the BAE or Business Analytics Engine that's a very sophisticated simulation cloud-based platform, where we can actually look at revenue month by month. And we look at what's the impact of accelerating revenue by three months. By four months. >> So you're looking into- >> By six months- >> So you're forward looking. You're just not consistently- >> So we're not just looking at TCO, we're looking at the overall business case benefit. >> Yeah, exactly right. There's the TCO, which is the hard dollars. >> Right. >> CFO wants to see that, he or she needs to see that. But you got to, you can convince that individual, that there's a business case around it. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And then you're going to sign up for that number. >> Peter: Yeah. >> And they're going to be held to it. That's the story the world wants. >> At the end of the day, telcos have to be offered new services 'cause look at all the money that's been spent. >> Dave: Yeah, that's right. >> On investment on 5G and everything else. >> 0.5 trillion over the next seven years. All right, guys, we got to go. Sorry to cut you off. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> But we're wall to wall here. All right, thanks so much for coming on. >> Dave: Fantastic. >> All right, Dave Vellante, for Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin's in the house. John Furrier in Palo Alto Studios. Keep it right there. MWC 23 live from the Fira in Barcelona. (light airy music)

(soft music) >> We're in Las Vegas at The Venetian for our continued coverage here of re:Invent '22, AWS's big show going on. Great success off to a wonderful start. We're in the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And we're going to talk about public health and the cloud, how those have come together in the great state of North Carolina. Charles Carter is going to help us do that. He's assistant secretary for technology services with the state of North Carolina's Department of Health and Human Services. Charles, good to see you. Thanks for joining us here on "theCUBE". >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Yeah, thanks for making the time. So first off, let's talk about what you do on the homefront before what you're doing here and where you're going. But in terms of kind of what your plan has been, what your journey has been from a cloud perspective and how you've implemented that and where you are right now in your journey. >> Sure, so we started. When I got there, we didn't have a cloud footprint at all. There was a- >> Host: Which was how long ago? >> I got there in 2016, so about six years. >> Host: Six, seven years, yeah. >> Yeah, five, six years. So anyways, we started off with our first module within our Medicaid expansion. And that was the first time that we went into the cloud. We worked with AWS to do our encounter processing system. And it was an incredible success. I think the ease of use was really kind of something that people weren't quite ready for. But it was really exciting to see that. And the scalability, to be able to turn that on and cover the entirety of North Carolina was awesome. So once we saw that and get a little taste of it, then we really wanted to start implementing it throughout DHHS. And we marshaled in a cloud-only cloud-first strategy where you had to actually get an exemption not to go to the cloud. And that was a first for our state. So that was really kind of the what launched us. But then COVID hit. And once COVID came in, that took us to a new level. COVID forced us to build technologies that enabled a better treatment, a better care, a better response from our team. And so we were able to stand up platforms in 48 hours. We were able to stand up COVID vaccine management systems in six weeks. And none of that would've been possible without the cloud. >> So forced your hand in a way because all of a sudden you've got this extraordinarily remote workforce, right, and people trying to- And you're doing different tasks that were totally unexpected, right, prior to that. What kind of a shock to the system was that from I get from an IT perspective? >> Yeah, so from a state government perspective, for example, you never hear you have all the money you need and you have to do it quickly. It just doesn't work like that. But this was a rare moment in time where you had this critical need. The entire country and our state population was kind of on edge. How do we move through this? How do we factor our lives into this new integration? What is this virus? Is it spreading in my county, in my city, my zip code? Where is it? And that kind of desperation really kind of focused everybody in on build me technologies that can get me the data that I need to make good healthcare decisions, good clinical decisions. And so that was our challenge. Cloud enabled it because it can scale so quickly. We can set up things, we can exchange data. We can move data around a lot easier. And the security is better from our perspective. So that COVID experience really kind of pushed us, you know, if you will, out the door. And we're never going back because it's just too good. >> Yeah, was that the aha moment then in a way because you had to do so much so fast and before capabilities that maybe you didn't have or maybe hadn't tapped? >> Yeah, yeah. >> I mean what was the accelerant there? Was COVID that big, or was it somebody who had to make a decision to say, this is where we're going with this, somebody in your shoes or somebody with whom you work? >> Yeah, no, I mean cloud at the end of the day, we knew that in order to do what we needed to do we couldn't do it on-prem. It wasn't an option. So if we wanted to build these capabilities, if we wanted to bring in technologies that really brought data to our key, our governor, our secretary, to make good decisions on behalf of our residents in North Carolina, then we were going to have to build things quickly. And the only way you can do that is in the cloud. So it was when they came back and said, "We need these things," there's only one answer. That's a good thing about technology. It's pretty binary, so it was either go with what we had, which wasn't adequate, or build to what we knew we could do and pretty short order. And because of that, we were able to actually usher in a huge expansion of cloud footprint within DHHS. And now we've actually been able to implement it in other departments simply because of our expertise. And that's been a huge asset for the state of North Carolina as a whole. >> So what's your measuring stick then for value in terms of identifying benefit? 'Cause it's not really about cost. This is about service, I assume, right? >> Right. >> So, you know, how do you quantify the values and the benefits that you're deriving from this migration over to the cloud? >> So from our perspective, it hits several different areas. I mean, you can start in security. We know that if we're in the cloud the tools that can manage and give us visibility in the cloud are 10 times better than an on-prem environment. And so if we can take a lot of these legacy systems and move them to the cloud, we'll be in a better security posture. So we have that piece of it. The other part of it is the data aspect of it, being able to- We're 33 divisions strong, right? We have a large footprint. We have a lot of siloed data elements. And cloud allows us to start integrating those data sets in a much more usable fashion so that we can see that if Charles Carter's in one area in division, a specific division with DHHS, is he somewhere else? And if he is somewhere else, then how do we provide a better clinical care for that individual? And those are conversations that we can't really have if we don't move to the cloud. So those types of- And of course there's always the OKRs, the actual measurements that you apply to things that we're doing. But at the end of the day, can we get the requirements from our business partners, bring those requirements to bear in technology, and really enable the indoctrination of these requirements throughout our clinical and healthcare kills? >> What about they're always pillars here, right? Governance, huge pillar, security, huge pillar, especially in your world, right? >> Yeah. >> So making that move over to the cloud and still recognizing that these are essentials that you have to have in place, I wouldn't say adjustments, but what kind of, I guess, recognition have you had toward that and making sure that you're still very true to those principles that are vital in the terms of public health? >> It is a great question because our secretary at the time and our governor, Roy Cooper, were very focused on enabling transparency. We had to be very transparent with what we were doing because the residents in North Carolina were just really kind of, "What's going on?" It was a scary time for a lot of us. So transparency was a key element towards our success. And in order to do that, you've got to have proper security. You got to have proper governance. You've got to have proper builds within technology that really enable that kind of visibility. One of the things that we did very early on was we set up a governance structure for our cloud environments so that as we wanted to and stand up an easy-to environment or we wanted to do some sort of work within a cloud or stand up in a different environment, we were able actually to set up a framework for how do you introduce that. Are you doing it correctly? Do you have the proper security on it? Do you have the funding for it? Like all the steps that you need to really kind of build into the scaffolding around a lot of these efforts we had to put in place and pretty quickly to get them going. But once we did that, the acceptance and the adoption of it was just tremendous. I mean, it was a light on for all of our business partners 'cause they understood I can either build on-prem, in which case I won't be able to get what I want in any kind of reasonable time period. Or I can build on cloud. And I can have it in some cases in 48 hours. >> Right, tomorrow. >> Yeah, exactly. >> You know, it was a huge difference. >> So where are you there? I mean, this is just not like a really big old lift and shift and we're all done and this is great. Cloud's taken care of all of our needs. Where are you in terms of the journey that you're undertaking? And then ultimately where do you want to go, like how far? What kind of goals have you set for yourself for the next two, three years down the road? >> Yeah, so this is an exciting part because we have actually- Like I mentioned earlier, we are a cloud-first cloud-only strategy, right? There's no reasons for us to be on-prem. It's just a matter of us kind of sunsetting legacy systems and bringing on cloud performance. We hope to be a 60% of our applications, which we have over 400 applications. So it's pretty large footprint. But we're wanting to migrate all of that to the cloud by 2025. So if we can achieve that, I think we'll be well on our way. And the momentum will carry forward for us to do that. We've actually had to do a reorganization of our whole IT structure. I think this is an important part to maintain that momentum because we've reorganized our staff, reorganized ourselves so that we can focus more on how do you adopt cloud, how do you bring in platforms which are all cloud-based, how do you use data within those systems? And that has allowed us to kind of think differently about our responsibilities, who's accountable for what, and to kind of keep those, that momentum going. So we've got some big projects that are on right now. Some of them are lift and shift, like you mentioned. We have a project with kind of a clumsy, monolithic system. It's called (indistinct). We're trying to migrate that to the cloud. We're in the process of doing that. And it's an excellent demonstration of capability once we pull that off. And then of course any new procurement that we put out there no one's making anything for on-prem anymore. Everyone's making their SaaS products for cloud-based experiences. Or if we're going to build or just use integrators then we'll build that in house. But all of it's based on cloud. >> And you mentioned SaaS. How much of this stuff are you doing on your own? And how much are you doing through managed services? >> Yeah, so like I mentioned, we have over 400 applications. So we had a pretty large footprint, right? >> Big, it's huge, right. >> So we're only who we are, and we can only build so much. So we're kind of taking- We did a application rationalization effort, which kind of identified some threats to our systems. Like maybe they're older things, FoxPro, kind of older languages that we're using. And in some cases we got people who are retiring. And there's not many people who can support that anymore. So how do we take those and migrate them to the cloud, either put them on a Salesforce or ServiceNow or Microsoft Dynamics platform and really kind of upgrade those systems? So we're in the process of kind of analyzing those elements. But yeah, that's kind of the exciting launch, if you will, of kind of taking the existing visibility of our applications and then applying it to what we're capable of with the cloud. >> And if you had advice that you could give to your colleagues who are in public health or just in public, the public sector- And your resources, they're finite. This is kind of what you have to deal with. And yet you have needs, and you're trying to stay current. You've got talent challenges, right? You've got rev or spending challenges. So if you could sit down your colleagues in a room and say, "Okay, this has been our experience. Here's what I would keep an eye out for," what kind of headlights would you beat for them? >> Yeah, so I think the biggest aha that I'd like to share with my contemporaries out there is that you've got a great ability to lower your costs, to excite your own personnel because they want to work on the new stuff. We've actually set up a whole professional development pathway within our organization to start getting people certified on AWS, certified on other platforms, to get them ready to start working in those environments. And so all of that work that we're been doing is coming together and allowing us to maintain the momentum. So what I'd recommend to people is, A, look at your own individual staff. I don't think you need to go outside to find the talent. I think you can train the talent that you have interior. I think you've got to aggressively pursue modernization because modernization enables a lot more. It's less expensive. It enables quicker adoption of business requirements and modern business requirements. And then lastly, focus on your data sharing because what you're going to find in the platforms and in the clouds is that there is a lot more opportunities for data integrations and conjoining disparate data sources. So if you can do those elements, you'll find that your capabilities on the business side are much more, much greater on the other end. >> Don't be scared, right, jump in? (laughing) >> Definitely don't be scared. Don't be, the water's warm. (host laughing) Come on in, you're fine, you're fine. (laughing) >> No little toe dipping in there. You're going to dive into the deep end, let her rip. >> Exactly, just go right in, just go right in. >> Well, it sounds like you've done that with great success. >> I'm very happy with it. >> Congratulations on that. And wish you success down the road. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you, Charles. All right, back with more. You are watching theCUBE here in Las Vegas. theCUBE of course the leader, as you know, in tech coverage. (soft music)

>>Hey everyone. Lisa Martin of the cube here, HPE and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment. And I'm here with four guests. Please. Welcome Charlie Mulrooney global presales engineering manager at Athi John saws also of Shi joins this global pre-sales technical consultant. And back with me are Terry Richardson, north American channel chief and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Welcome gang. Great to have you all here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thanks. You good to be here? >>All right, Charlie, let's go ahead and start with you. Keeping the earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions. Greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses, right? Everywhere. Globally. Can you talk Charlie about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable? It? >>Sure. So starting about a year and a half, two years ago, we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports, their chairman's letters, their sec filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral or carbon zero goals starting with 2050 dates. And then since then we've seen 20, 40, and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and RFPs, RFIs that we're fielding. Certainly all now contain elements of that. So this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers, our fortune two 50 and fortune 500 customers. For sure. We're, we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this. We get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand, you know, here's what we have today. What can we do better? What can we do different to help make an impact on those goals? >>So making an impact top of mind, pretty much for everyone, as you mentioned, John SAS, let's bring you into the conversation. Now, when you're in customer conversations, what are some of the things that you talk about with respect tohis approach to sustainability, sustainable it, are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space? >>Well, so Charlie touched on something really important that, you know, the, the wake up moment for us was receiving, you know, proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability. And it was really around two years ago, I suppose, for the first time. And those requests started coming from European based companies, cuz they had a bit of a head start over the us based global companies even. And what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to use renewable energy for data centers utilize the, they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance cost and other factors that you typically have at the top. So as we started working with them, I guess at beginning it was more tactical cuz we really had to find a way to respond. >>We were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability, we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second headquarters in Austin, Texas, those are lead gold certified. We've been installing solar panels, reducing waste across the company, recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles, all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in, in, in our offices and in our headquarters. But it's a lot more than that. And what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of, of customers and partners. We have over 30,000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers. And we wanted to find best practices and technologies and services that we could talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a, as a really large global reseller and integrator. We can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple partners that we work with to help solve customer problems. And so over time it's become more strategic and we've been as a company building the, the, the, the, the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that, and then also reporting for CDP Ecova and so forth. And it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years. And we take it very seriously. >>It sounds like, and it also sounds like from the customer's perspective, they're shifting from that tactical, maybe early initial approach to being more strategic, to really enabling sustainable it across their organization. And I imagine from a business driver's perspective, John saws and Charlie, are you hearing customers? You talked about it being part of RFPs, but also where are customers in terms of, we need to have a sustainable it strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers. Charlie, John, what are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, that's top of mind with, with all the folks that we're talking to, I would say there's probably a three way tie for the importance of attracting and retaining investors. As you said, plus customers, customers are shopping, their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities and sustainable priorities with their own and who is gonna help them with their own reporting of, you know, scope two and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining talent. It's another element now of when you're bringing on new talent to your organization, they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align. So we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with, with the customers we're talking to. And it was a little surprising, cuz it, we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors, but it really has become quite a bit more than that. And it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization >>More comprehensive across the organization. Let's bring Dr. John Fry into the conversation and Terry your next. So stay tuned. Dr. Fry, can you talk about HPE and S H I partnering together? What are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned? >>Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them. No one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our collective customers the same way. From an HPE perspective, we bring the expertise on our products. We bring in sustainable it point of view, where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies implement a sustainable it program. But our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers. And in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table. So they extend the reach, they bring their own expertise. Their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just enterprise products. So by working together, we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs, give them the right technology solutions and enhance that customer experience because they get more value from us collectively. >>It really is better together, which is in a very appropriate name for our segment here. Terry, let's bring you into the conversation. Talk to us about AMD. How is it helping customers to create that sustainable it strategy? And what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that, that are able to be delivered through partners like Shi? >>Well, Lisa, you used the word enabling just a short while ago. And fundamentally AMD enables HPE and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers. So in the data center space, we began our journey in 2017 with some fundamental design elements for our processor technology that were really keenly focused on improving performance, but also efficiency. So now the, the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about is really that measure of performance per wat. And you'll continue to see AMD enabled customers to, to try to find ways to, to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing, whether it's availability of power data center space, or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals. So we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to HPE and two Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers. >>Sounds like to me, Terry, that it's, that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler, but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability. >>You you're right about that. And, and we actually have tools, greenhouse gas, TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the, the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals. So we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like HPE and Shi >>Better together. As we said at the beginning in just a minute ago, Charlie, let's bring you back in, talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable it and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives. >>So for quite a while, we've had some offerings to help customers, especially in the end user compute side. A lot of customers were interested in, I've got assets for, you know, let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and, you know, those need to be refreshed. What do I do with those? How do I responsibly retire or recycle those? And we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time. It's within the last year or two, when we started offering for them guarantees and assurances assurances of how they can, if that equipment is reusable by somebody else, how can we issue them? You know, credits for carbon credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else. So it's not necessarily going to be e-waste, it's something that can be recycled and reused. We have other programs with helping extend the life of, of some systems where they look at well, I have a awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the, the, the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically. We can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment. So we've been able to come up with some creative solutions specifically around end user compute in the past, but we are looking to new ways now to really help extend that into data center infrastructure and beyond to really help with what are the needs, what are the, the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them. >>That's a great point that you bring up. Charlie and security kind of popped into my head here, John Saul's question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about, or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling, where are you having those customer conversations? Cause I know sustainability is a board level, it's a C level discussion, but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization? >>Well, so it's a, it's a combination of organizations within the customer. These are these global organizations. Typically when we're talking about asset life cycle management, asset recovery, how do you do that in a sustainable green way and securely the customers we're dealing with? I mean, security is top sustainability is right up there too. O obviously, but Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are global rollouts, tens of thousands of employees typically to, to have mobile devices, laptops, and phones, and so forth. And they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to, to the employees. And how do you do that in a sustainably? You need to think about that. Does it all go to a central location or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way? >>And I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that, well for, for example, one European pharmaceutical that states in their reports that they're already in scope one in scope two they're fully net zero at this point. And, and they say, but that only solves 3% of our overall sustainability goals. 97% is scope three, it's travel, it's shipping. It's, it's, it's all the, the, all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times, but they're coming to us now as a, as a supplier and as, and, and we're filling out, you know, forms and RFPs and so forth to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal >>Sustain sustainable supply chain. Absolutely. Yes. Dr. John Fry and Terry, I want to kind of get your perspectives. Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective, customers coming through RFP saying, Hey, we've gotta work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway, HPE and AMD hearing the same thing Dr. Fry will start with you. And then Terry >>Sure, absolutely. We receive about 2,500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year. And that's come up from a few hundred. So yeah, absolutely accelerating. Then the conversations turn deeper. Can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption? Then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can HPE offer net zero or carbon neutral technology solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those solutions in their own carbon footprint. So the questions are getting more sophisticated, the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing. And as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions, I think this trend is just gonna continue up. >>Yeah. And we see the same thing. We get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals. But the surveying that survey work that we've done with customers has led us to, you know, understand that, you know, approximately 75% of customers are gonna make sustainability goals, a key component of their RFIs in 2023, which is right around the corner. And, and, you know, 60% of those same customers really expect to have business level KPIs in the new year that are really related to sustainability. So this is not just a, a kind of a buzzword topic. This is, this is kind of business imperatives that, you know, the company, the companies like HPE and AMD and the partners like I, that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really gonna be ahead of the game. >>That's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't, we're not talking about a buzzword here. We're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all industries and Dr. Far, you mentioned regulations. And something that we just noticed is that the S E C recently said, it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions. If they were, if that were to, to come into play, I'm gonna pun back to Charlie and John saws. How would Shi and, and frankly at HPE and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of regulation were to be implemented. Charlie. >>Yeah. So we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that, with the reporting, we know reporting is a challenge. The scope two reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was gonna be a ways out now, all of a sudden, Hey, if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three targets, then you have to report on them. So that, that has become really important very quickly as word about this requirement is rumbling around there's concern. So we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose, but stay tuned, cuz we have something coming. That's interesting. >>Definitely PED my, my ears are, are, are perk here. Charlie, we'll stay tuned for that. Dr. Fry. Terry, can you talk about together with Shi HPE and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the da data obviously, which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it. We talked a little bit about security, but how are from a better together perspective, Dr. Fry will start with you, how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it? And at these days what it's real time requirements. >>Yeah. It's, it's an increasing challenge. In fact, we have changed the H HP story the way we talk about H HP's value proposition to talk about data first modernization. So how often do you collect data? Where do you store it? How do you avoid moving it? How do you make sure if you're going to collect data, you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value. And then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable it, because when I talk to technology executives, what they tell me again, and again, is there's this presumption within their user community, that storage is free. And so when, when they have needs for collecting data, for example, if, if once an hour would do okay, but the system would collect it once a minute, the default, the user asks for of course, once a minute. And then are you getting insights from that data? Or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge, because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network. There's huge power and carbon implications of doing that. So it's really making a better decision about what do we collect, why do we collect it, what we're gonna do with it when we collect and how we store it. >>And, and for years, customers have really talked about, you know, modernization and the need to modernize their data center. You know, I, I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that catalyst to really drive true modernization. And as they think forward, you know, when we work with, with HPE, you know, they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in, you know, specific customer workloads from the largest, super computers down to kind of general purpose servers. And when we work with partners like Shi, not only can they deliver the full suite of offerings for on premise deployments, they're also very well positioned to leverage the public cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there. And, and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end to end sustainability goal. >>That's a great point that, that it needs to be strategic, but it also needs to be an end to end goal. We're just about out of time, but I wanted to give John saws the last word here, take us out, John, what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest, but what are some of the things that you are excited about as HPE AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives? >>Sure. Couple comments here. So Charlie, yeah, you touched on some upcoming capabilities that Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management. See, this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way. This is a train coming at everybody very quickly and they're not ready. Most customers aren't ready. And if we can help as, as a reseller integrator assessments, to be able to understand what they're currently running compare to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state, that seems valuable if we can help in that way. That's, those are things that we're looking into specifically, you know, greenhouse gas, emissions, relevant assessments, and, and, and within the comments of, of, of Terry and, and John around the, the power per wat and the vast portfolio of, of technologies that they, that they had to address various workloads is, is fantastic. >>We'd be able to help point to technologies like that and move customers in that direction. I think as a, as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers, I saw an article on BBC this morning that I, I, I think if, if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems. The BBC article mentioned this was Ethereum, a cryptocurrency, and they have a big project called merge. And today was a go live date. And BBC us news outlets have been reporting on it. They basically changed the model from a model called power of work, which takes a, a lot of compute and graphic, GPU power and so forth around the world. And it's now called power of stake, which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct. >>They have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency. And if they're wrong, it's taken from them. This new model reduces the emissions of their environment by 99 plus percent. The June emissions from Ethereum were, it was 120 telos per, per year, a Terra terat hours per year. And they reduced it actually, that's the equivalent of what the net Netherlands needed for energy, so comparable to a medium sized country. So if you can think differently about how to solve problems, it may be on-prem, it may be GreenLake. It may be, it may be the public cloud in some cases or other, you know, interesting, innovative technologies that, that AMD HPE, other partners that we can bring in along, along with them as well, we can solve problems differently. There is a lot going on >>The opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting. We thank you so much for talking together about how HPE AMD and SSHA are really working in partnership in synergy to help your customers across every organization, really become much more focused, much more collaborative about sustainable it. Guys. We so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights. >>Thank you, Lisa. Thank you. My >>Pleasure. Thank you, Lisa. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

foreign [Music] Lisa Martin of the cube here hpe and AMD better together with Shi is the name of our segment and I'm here with four guests please welcome Charlie mulrooney Global pre-sales engineering manager at SHI John saw is also of shi joins us Global pre-sales Technical consultant and back with me are Terry Richardson North American Channel Chief and Dr John Fry Chief technologist of sustainable transformation at hpe welcome gang great to have you here all here Thank you Lisa thank you good to be here all right Charlie let's go ahead and start with you keeping the Earth sustainable and minimizing carbon emissions greenhouse gases is a huge priority for businesses right everywhere globally can you talk truly about what Shi is seeing in the marketplace with respect to sustainable I.T sure so starting about a year and a half two years ago we really noticed that our customers certainly our largest Enterprise customers were putting into their annual reports their Chairman's letters their SEC filings that they had sustainability initiatives ranging from achieving carbon neutral uh or carbon zero goals starting with 20 50 dates and then since then we've seen 20 40 and 2030 targets to achieve net neutrality and rfps rfis that we're Fielding certainly all now contain elements of that so this is certainly top of mind for our largest customers our Fortune 250 and Fortune 500 customers for sure where we're seeing an onslaught of requests for this we get into many conversations with the folks that are leading these efforts to understand you know here's what we have today what can we do better what can we do different to help make it an impact on those goals so making an impact top of Mind pretty much for everyone as you mentioned John Sal's let's bring you into the conversation now when you're in customer conversations what are some of the things that you talk about with respect to shi's approach to sustainability sustainable I.T are you seeing more folks that are implementing things tactically versus strategically what's going on in the customer space well so Charlie touched on something really important that you know the the wake-up moment for us was receiving you know proposal requests or customer meeting requests that were around sustainability and it was really around two years ago I suppose for the first time and those requests started coming from european-based companies because they had a bit of a head start uh over the U.S based global companies even um and what we found was that sustainability was already well down the road and that they were doing very interesting things to uh use renewable energy for data centers uh utilized they were already considering sustainability for new technologies as a high priority versus just performance costs and other factors that you typically had at the top so as we started working with them uh I guess that beginning was more tactical because we really had to find a way to respond uh we were starting to be asked about our own efforts and in regards to sustainability we have our headquarters in Somerset and our second Headquarters in Austin Texas um those are the gold certified we've been installing solar panels producing waste across the company recycling efforts and so forth charging stations for electric vehicles all that sort of thing to make our company more sustainable in in uh in our offices and in our headquarters um but it's a lot more than that and what we found was that we wanted to look to our vast number of supply of customers and partners we have over 30 000 partners that would work with globally and tens of thousands of customers and we wanted to find best practices and Technologies and services that we could uh talk about with these customers and apply and help integrate together as a as a really large Global uh reseller and integrator we can have a play there and bring these things together from multiple uh partners that we work with to help solve customer problems and so over time it's become more strategic and we've been uh as a company building the uh the the the forward efforts through organizing a true formal sustainability team and growing that um and then also reporting for CDP echovatus and so forth and it's really that all has been coming about in the last couple of years and we take it very seriously it sounds like it also sounds like from the customer's perspective they're shifting from that tactical maybe early initial approach to being more strategic to really enabling sustainable I.T across their organization and I imagine from a business driver's perspective John saws and Charlie are you hearing customers you talked about it being part of rfps but also where are customers in terms of we need to have a sustainable I.T strategy so that we can attract and retain the right investors we can attract and retain customers Charlie John what are your thoughts on that yeah that's top of mind with uh with all the folks that we're talking to uh I would say there's probably a three-way tie for the importance of uh attracting and retaining investors as you said plus customers customers are shopping their customers are shopping for who has aligned their ESG priorities in sustainable priorities uh with their own and who is going to help them with their own reporting of you know spoke to and ultimately scope three reporting from greenhouse gas emissions and then the attracting and retaining Talent uh it's another element now of when you're bringing on a new talent to your organization they have a choice and they're thinking with their decision to accept a role or not within your organization of what your strategies are and do they align so we're seeing those almost interchangeable in terms of priorities with with the customers we're talking to it was a little surprising because we thought initially this is really focused on investors attracting the investors but it really has become quite a bit more than that and it's been actually very interesting to see the development of that prioritization more comprehensive across the organization let's bring Dr John Fry into the conversation and Terry your neck so stay tuned Dr Frey can you talk about hpe and Shia partnering together what are some of the key aspects of the relationship that help one another support and enable each other's aggressive goals where sustainability is concerned yeah it's a great question and one of the things about the sustainability domain in solving these climate challenges that we all have is we've got to come together and partner to solve them no one company's going to solve them by themselves and for our Collective customers the same way from an hpe perspective we bring the expertise on our products we bring in a sustainable I.T point of view where we've written many white papers on the topic and even workbooks that help companies Implement a sustainable I.T program but our direct sales forces can't reach all of our customers and in many cases we don't have the local knowledge that our business partners like Shi bring to the table so they extend the reach they bring their own expertise their portfolio that they offer to the customer is wider than just Enterprise Products so by working together we can do a better job of helping the customer meet their own needs give them the right Technology Solutions and enhance that customer experience it's because they get more value from us collectively it really is better together which is a very appropriate name for our segment here Terry let's bring you into the conversation talk to us about AMD how is it helping customers to create that sustainable I.T strategy and what are some of the differentiators that what AMD is doing that that are able to be delivered through Partners like Shi well Lisa you use the word enabling um just a short while ago and fundamentally AMD enables hpe and partners like Shi to bring differentiated solutions to customers so in the data center space We Begin our journey in 2017 with some fundamental Design Elements for our processor technology that we're really keenly focused on improving performance but also efficiency so now the the most common measure that we see for the types of customers that Charlie and John were talking about was really that measure of performance per watt and you'll continue to see AMD enable um customers to to try to find ways to to do more in a sustainable way within the constraints that they may be facing whether it's availability of power data center space or just needing to meet overall sustainability goals so we have skills and expertise and tools that we make available to hpe and to Shi to help them have even stronger differentiated conversations with customers sounds like to me Terry that it's that AMD can be even more of an more than an enabler but really an accelerator of what customers are able to do from a strategic perspective on sustainability you're right about that and and we actually have tools greenhouse gas TCO tools that can be leveraged to really quantify the impact of some of the the new technology decisions that customers are making to allow them to achieve their goals so we're really proud of the work that we're doing in partnership with companies like hpe and Shi Better Together as we've said at the beginning and just a minute ago Charlie let's bring you back in talk to us a little bit about what Shi is doing to leverage sustainable I.T and enable your customers to meet their sustainability goals and their initiatives so for quite a while we've had uh some offerings to help customers especially in the end user compute side a lot of customers were interested in I've got assets for you know let's say a large sales force that had been carrying tablets or laptops and you know those need to be refreshed what do I do with those how do I responsibly retire or recycle those and we've been offering solutions for that for quite some time it's within the last year or two when we started offering for them guarantees and Assurance assurances of how they can if that equipment is reusable by somebody else how can we issue them you know credits for uh carving credits for reuse of that equipment somewhere else so it's not necessarily going to be E-Waste it's uh something that can be recycled and reused we have other programs with helping extend the life of of some systems where they look at boy I have an awful lot of data on these machines where historically they might want to just retire those because the the sensitivity of the data needed to be handled very specifically we can help them properly remove the sensitive data and still allow reuse of that equipment so we've been able to accomplish some Creative Solutions specifically around end user compute in the past but we are looking to new ways now to to really help extend that into Data Center infrastructure and Beyond to really help with what are the needs what are the the best ways to help our customers handle the things that are challenging them [Music] that's a great point that you bring up Charlie and the security kind of popped into my head here John saw his question for you when you're in customer conversations and you're talking about or maybe they're talking about help us with waste reduction with recycling where are you having those customer conversations I know sustainability is a board level it's a c-level discussion but where are you having those conversations within the customer organization well so it's a it's a combination of um organizations within the customer these are these Global organizations typically when we're talking about asset like cycle management asset recovery how do you do that in a sustainable Green Way and securely the customers we're dealing with I mean security is top sustainability is right up there too obviously but uh um Charlie touched on a lot of those things and these are Global rollouts tens of thousands of employees typically to to have mobile devices laptops and phones and so forth um and they often are looking for a true managed service around the world that takes into consideration things like the most efficient way to ship products to to the employees and how do you do that in a sustainable way you need to think about that does it all go to a central location um or to each individual's home during the pandemic that made a lot of sense to do it that way I think the reason I wanted to touch on those things is that well for for example one European pharmaceutical that the states and their reports that they are already in scope one in scope two they're fully uh Net Zero at this point and and they say but that only solves three percent of our overall sustainability goals uh 97 is scope three it's travel it's shipping it's it's uh it's all the all these things that are out of their direct control a lot of times but they're coming to us now as a as a supplier and ask and and we're filling out forms and rfps and so forth uh to show that we can be a sustainable supplier in their supply chain because that's their next big goal so sustainable supply chain absolutely Dr John Fry and Terry I want to kind of get your perspectives Charlie talked about from a customer requirements perspective customers coming through RFP saying hey we've got to work with vendors who have clear sustainability initiatives that are well underway hpe and AMD hearing the same thing Dr Fry will start with you and then Terry sure absolutely we receive about 2500 customer questionnaires just on sustainability every year and that's come up from a few hundred so yeah absolutely accelerating then the conversations turn deeper can you help us quantify our carbon emissions and power consumption then the conversation has recently gone even further to when can hpe offer Net Zero or carbon neutral Technology Solutions to the customer so that they don't have to account for those Solutions in their own carbon footprint so the questions are getting more sophisticated the need for the data and the accuracy of the data is climbing and as we see potential regulatory disclosure requirements around carbon emissions I think this trend is just going to continue up yeah and we see the same thing uh we get asked more and more from our customers and partners around our own corporate sustainability goals but the surveying that the survey work that we've done with customers has led us to you know understand that you know approximately 75 percent of customers are going to make sustainability goals a key component of their rfis in 2023 which is right around the corner and you know 60 of those same customers really expect to have business level kpis uh in the new year that are really related to sustainability so this is not just a a kind of a buzzword topic this is this is kind of business imperatives that you know the company the companies like hpe and AMD and the partners like Shi that really stand behind it and really are proactive in getting out in front of customers to help are really going to be ahead of the game that's a great point that you make Terry there that this isn't we're not talking about a buzzword here we're talking about a business imperative for businesses of probably all sizes across all Industries and Dr Farr you mentioned regulations and something that we just noticed is that the SEC recently said it's proposing some rules where companies must disclose greenhouse gas emissions um if they were if that were to to come into play I'm going to come back to Charlie and John saws how would Shi and frankly at hpe and AMD be able to help companies comply if that type of Regulation were to be implemented Charlie yeah so we are in the process right now of building out a service to help customers specifically with that with the reporting we know reporting is a challenge uh the scope 2 reporting is a challenge and scope three that I guess people thought was going to be a ways out now all of a sudden hey if you have made a public statement that you're going to make an impact on your scope three uh targets and you have to report on them so that that has become really important very quickly uh as word about this requirement is rumbling around uh there's concern so we are actually working right now on something it's a little too early to fully disclose but stay tuned because we have something coming that's interesting definitely peaked my ears are are parked here Charlie well stay tuned for that Dr Brian Terry can you talk about together with Shi hpe and AMD enabling customers to manage access to the data obviously which is critical and it's doing nothing but growing and proliferating key folks need access to it we talked a little bit about security but how are from a Better Together perspective Dr Fry will start with you how are you really helping organizations on that sustainability journey to ensure that data can be accessible to those who need it when they need it and these days what is real-time requirements yeah it's an increasing challenge in fact we have changed the HP Story the way we talk about hpe's value proposition to talk about data first modernization so how often do you collect data where do you store it how do you avoid moving it how do you make sure if you're going to collect data you get insights from that data that change your business or add business value and then how long do you retain that data afterward and all of that factors into sustainable I.T because when I talk to technology Executives what they tell me again and again is there's this presumption within their user community that storage is free and so when when they have needs for collecting data for example if if once an hour would do okay but the system would collect it once a minute the default the user asks for of course is once a minute and then are you getting insights from that data or are we moving it that becomes more important when you're moving data back and forth between the public cloud or the edge because there is quite a network penalty for moving that equipment across your network there's huge power and carbon implications of doing that so it's really making a better decision about what do we collect why do we collect it what we're going to do with it when we collect and how we store it and for years customers have really talked about you know modernization and the need to modernize their data center you know I fundamentally believe that sustainability is really that Catalyst to really Drive true modernization and as they think forward um you know when we work with with hpe you know they offer a variety of purpose-built servers that can play a role in you know specific customer workloads from the larger supercomputers down to kind of general purpose servers and when we work with Partners like Shi not only can they deliver the full Suite of um offerings for on-premise deployments they're also very well positioned to leverage the public Cloud infrastructure for those workloads that really belong there and that certainly can help customers kind of achieve an end-to-end sustainability goal that's a great point that that it needs to be strategic but it also needs to be an end-to-end goal we're just about out of time but I wanted to give John saws the last word here take us out John what are some of the things Charlie kind of teased some of the things that are coming out that piqued my interest but what are some of the things that you're excited about as hpe AMD and Shi really help customers achieve their sustainability initiatives sure um a couple of comments here um so Charlie yeah you touched on some upcoming capabilities uh that uh Shi will have around the area of monitoring and management see this is difficult for all customers to be able to report in this formal way this is a train coming at everybody very quickly and um they're not ready most customers aren't ready and if we can help um as as a reseller integrator assessments to be able to understand what they're currently running compared to different scenarios of where they could go to in a future state that seems valuable if we can help in that way that's those are things that we're looking into specifically uh you know greenhouse gas emissions relevant assessments and and um and what in the comments uh of Terry and John around the power per watt and um the vast um uh portfolio of technologies that they that they had to address various workloads is uh is fantastic we'd be able to help point to Technologies like that and move customers in that direction I think as a as an integrator and a technical advisor to customers I saw an article on BBC this morning that I I think if we think about how we're working with our customers and we can help them maybe think differently about how they're using their technology to solve problems um the BBC article mentioned this was ethereum a cryptocurrency and they have a big project called merge and today was a go live date and BBC US news outlets have been reporting on it they basically changed the model from a model called The Power of work which takes a a lot of compute and graphic GPU power and so forth around the world and it's now called a power of stake which means that the people that validate that their actions in this environment are correct they have to put up a stake of their own cryptocurrency and if they're wrong it's taken from them this new model reduces the emissions of their um uh environment by 99 plus percent the June emissions from ethereum were it was 120 uh terawatts per per year terawatt hours per year and they reduced it um actually that's the equivalent of what the Netherlands needed for energy so the comparable to a medium-sized country so if you can think differently about how to solve problems it may be on-prem it may be extremely it may be that may be the public cloud in some cases or other you know interesting Innovative Technologies that the AMD hpe other partners that we can bring in along along with them as well we can solve problems differently there is a lot going on the opportunities that you all talked about to really make such a huge societal impact and impact to our planet are exciting we thank you so much for talking together about how hpe AMD and sha are really working in partnership in Synergy to help your customers across every organization really become much more focused much more collaborative about sustainable I.T guys we so appreciate your time and thank you for your insights Thank you Lisa thank you my pleasure for my guests I'm Lisa Martin in a moment Dan Molina is going to join me he's the co-president and chief technology officer of nth generation you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music]

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hi everybody this is dave vellante thecube and we have some news for you pure storage has acquired portworx the kubernetes specialist for 370 million dollars in an all-cash transaction charlie giancarlo is here he's the ceo of pure storage and he's joined by merlin theorem alley who is the ceo of portworx gentlemen good to see you thanks for coming on thank you dave thanks for having us so charlie uh the transaction all cash transaction north of 300 million your biggest transaction uh ever your biggest acquisition uh give us give us the hard news yeah well the the hard news is uh easy news for our customers we're bringing together uh two great companies uh pure as you know the the leader in technology and uh data storage and management and we're bringing together in uh to our team uh the port works team that is the has been the leader uh in container orchestrated uh storage systems and uh it really is gonna match uh you know the existing and and uh legacy uh hardware and application environment to the new environment of containers and we couldn't be more excited so to so tell us you know what was the rationale the sort of thesis behind the acquisition what are you hoping to accomplish charlie yeah you know uh containers is the way that uh applications are going to be developed in the future uh with with no doubt and uh containers utilize storage differently than traditional application environments whether those are rvms or even bare metal application environments and uh because of that it's a very new way of of handling data management the other thing we saw was a philosophy within um portworx very similar to pure of building cloud everywhere and make it look the same whether it's in a private data center or in the uh public uh cloud environment and so by bringing these two things together we create a very consistent environment for uh for customers whether they're utilizing and going with their existing application environment or with the new container environment for their new applications so merlin let me go to you first of all congratulations you know this isn't your your your first uh nice exit we we've known each other for a long time so so that's fantastic for you and the team uh so so bring us up to date on kind of where the company you know started and and where it's gone and and why you feel like this is such a good fit and a good exit for portworx well let's start with the company you know we've been uh at this for uh five and a half years almost six now and we started with these the very premise that that as containers were beginning to be deployed and apps started to kind of be seen everywhere containerized that data agility needed to match the app agility that people were getting from containers and that was something that was missing and so one of the things we did was really kind of take an entirely different approach to storage we turned kind of storage on its head and and designed it from the app down and effectively what we did was leverage kubernetes which was being used really until then to orchestrate really just the container part of the of this system to start orchestrating data and storage as well so northbound you know we containers are being orchestrated or orchestrated by kubernetes to manage the apps and southbound portworx now added the ability to manage data with kubernetes and what that's resulted in dave is that you know uh in in the last several years we've gained 160 customers uh household names right comcast t-mobile lufthansa ge roblox uh rbc who have all sort of deployed us in production and and really kind of built a leadership position in the ability to aid digital transformation uh of you know which customers are going through with containers hey guys i wonder if you could bring up that the chart uh i want to just introduce some etr data here so so this is one of our favorite views x y view the vertical axis is spending momentum when what we call net score higher the better and the vert and the horizontal axis is is market share and you can see i've outlined with that little pink area container orchestration and container platforms and you can see it's very elevated right there with machine learning and ai a little bit above cloud computing right there with robotic process automation this is the april survey of 1200 uh respondents uh the july survey you know robotic process automation bumps up a little bit which changes the shape but i wanted to show this picture to really explain to our audience the you know the popularity and this is where people are investing and charlie you can see storage kind of you know right there in the in the middle and you it seems to me you're now connecting the dots to containers which are gonna disperse everywhere we often think of containers sometimes as a separate thing but it's not i mean it's embedded into the entire stack i wonder if you can talk containers are just the next generation way of of building applications right and one of the great things about uh containers when you build an app on containers it becomes what's known as portable you know it can operate in the cloud it can operate on your own hardware inside your own data center and of course pure is known for making data portable as well between both private data centers and hyperscalers such as aws and uh and azure so by bringing this together making it possible not just for as we talked about container based applications but also for existing uh application environments whether those are vm or bare metal you know we create a very flexible portable environment i wonder if we could talk merely about you know just sort of the evolution of i mean vms and then and obviously containers the you know the virtual machines when we were spinning them up in the early days storage was like the second class citizen and then through a series of integrations and you know hard work you had you know storage much more native but every vm is is is kind of fat right it's sharing the same uh or has its own operating system my understanding is containers they could share a single operating system uh and and so but talk a little bit more first of all is that right and where does storage fit in in containers i mean we think of them at least at least in the early days as ephemeral uh but you're solving a different problem of persistence maybe talk about that that problem that you're solving sure dave i think you know you characterize this as uh the right way right there's kind of vms uh that have dominated sort of in in the world of infrastructure for for for the last 10 15 years now but what what is really happening here is a little bit more profound right really is if you think about it this is the transformation of a data center from being very very machine centric which is sort of the look back view of the world to being much more application centered going forward and this is being accomplished not just by you know what charlie talked about which is applications being deployed in containers but by the evolution of using kubernetes now as the new control plane for the data center so in in the last couple of years something amazing has happened right people have adopted containers and in doing so they've realized they need to orchestrate these containers and lo and behold they've kind of deployed kubernetes as they've done that they've begun to recognize that kubernetes now gives them a an amazing capability they can now let everything be application driven so kubernetes is now the new app defined control plane for the for the data center just like vms and vmware was the you know the kind of compute centered machine defined data center of the past so we're one of those modern day companies for the modern you know digital transformation stack and it doesn't just mean it's just not just products like portworx but other products in there right whether it's a rancher an open shift or or security solutions that are extensions of kubernetes so to your point what we've done is we've taken kubernetes and extended it to managing storage and data and we're doing that in a way that allows it to be fully distributed completely automated and in fact what happens is now the management of of the app and the data go hand in hand at the same time you don't have these separation of sort of responsibilities so the person who is really our buyer and buying set is a very different buyer than traditional storage and you know you know traditional storage i've talked to you about that part of the business a long time many times in the in the past our buyers are actually devops buyers so we land in devops and we expand in it ops our budgets are coming from uh a digital transformation budget like move to cloud or or even just kind of business transformation and our users are really not the classic storage user but really the the person who's driving kubernetes the person who's making automation decisions cloud architects automation architects they can now operate storage without having to know storage through products like portworx that extend kubernetes uh and and and allow it to be all application driven okay so it's much more happen so it's much more than just bringing i'd say jess much more than bringing state uh to what was originally a stateless environment it's bringing more data management uh correct so charlie connect the dots for us in terms of where pure fits in that in that value chain well as you know i mean we've developed a large number of products and capabilities that uh go well beyond storage into data management so whether it's snapshotting or replication or data motion you know into uh you know from uh from on-prem into the cloud and as we've been doing that we've been building up a control plane to do this with you know traditional uh block and file storage now this is extending that set of same set of capabilities uh to the container side uh you know whether it'll be block because contain there are a lot of container systems that are looking at block but even into the object space overall so think of this as the integration of data manage of a data management control plane for both existing and new apps and and that data control plane existing not just in one location such as uh the the private data center or the private cloud but also into the public uh cloud as well so that a company can orchestrate their both their uh their container-based apps but also the data that goes along with them and the data that goes to their traditional apps with one orchestration tool so you know you mentioned you know i think when you said motion i think of vmotion uh and and if i want to move a workload from one vm to another i can preserve at state is that kind of where you're headed with with control you're thinking of it very much in a push you know i t push sense rather than just the application calling for data access and being given given it through a set of apis so again very much more dynamic environment rather than rather than it be a human uh instigated you know think of it being as as a policy and and pro and programmer initiated set of activities uh i'm glad you brought that up because i think about we think about you know we also often think in monolithic terms and and containers are not right it's really like you said we can have applications even though they run inside of vms it sort of breaks they can but they don't have to right they can run on bare metal uh but of course you know with the with vmware they they've designed it to be able to run inside of vms as well if that's what customers are most comfortable with sure ultimately you were going to add some color to that yeah i think i think you know what what what charlie is describing is really kind of a new paradigm that's a self-service paradigm where application owners and application drivers people who are creating apps deploying apps now can can self-service themselves through a kubernetes-based interface and and it's all automated right so in in a in a funny way one way to think about this is a somebody who who's you know deploying apps they are doing that with the help of kubernetes their hands never leave the kubernetes wheel and now all of a sudden they're deploying you know data and storage and doing all of that without an intimate knowledge of the storage infrastructure so that kind of idea of automation driving and it's and this app-driven self-service model really enables that agility for data in addition to the agility for uh for the app layer and and i think dave the key thing here is you know why why it why has that container bubble floated to the top of of your of your of the graph that you just showed it's because i think modern day enterprises are doing two things that are imperative for their success right one of them is the fast enterprises are gonna eat the slow so they need to move fast and the way for that fast to be translated from an app agility to the agility throughout the whole stack is enabled by this the other thing that they are doing is data is the new oil and and folks really need to be able to leverage their data whether it's their own data external data but bring it all together in real time mine it and they can't do that without automating the heck out of it right and that's what kubernetes enables also so the combination of data agility and being able to kind of create that ability to mine in real time the data through an app-oriented interface is is completely revolutionary if you think about it and in my view going forward what you're going to start seeing is that kubernetes is going to start revolutionizing not just the app world but the world of infrastructure the world of infrastructure is going to change significantly with the advent of kubernetes being used to manage infrastructure yeah we often say in the cube the data is the new development kit and and you're talking about you know infrastructure as code is the perfect instantiation here so charlie i i wonder if are developers sort of a new distribution channel for you do you see that involving yeah you know we did a lot of studying uh before bringing the two companies together and about 40 percent of the buyers of uh of uh this uh environment of of port works our customers that we do talk to regularly in the it group and about 60 in the devops environment so you know one of the beautiful things about this is we have a good head start with the people we're selling to today but also it opens up a whole new uh buying area for us with devops and one that we plan on uh investing in as we go forward so charlie i would imagine this is a pretty fast close right uh what's the yeah these are two california companies and and luckily we've we we scoot under the uh uh the uh uh legal radar of hsr so we think we'll be able to close this within 30 days great and and how will you organize it you're going to where it's going to be it's going to be a a new business unit uh reporting directly to me uh as especially as we go through the you know the early days of of integrating but really we want to learn from the way that poor works has built a successful business make sure that we combine the best of both organizations together uh and uh really understand uh you know how to best uh tie together our go-to markets uh in the uh you know with uh the combination of of legacy and container and so so emerald are you gonna hang out for a while absolutely i you know uh i was i was talking to my team earlier and i said look the journey of business success is like a thousand steps and the part of a startup is only the first 250 steps i'll tell you i think we've kind of run up those first 250 steps pretty fast but we're going to sprint through the next 750 steps with with uh you know in the company of of pure because look pure is has always been well known as a disrupter in the business uh for a long time and we are a relatively new disruptor in the kubernetes space i think this is this this level of our joint ability to disrupt that market end to end is gonna be just just uh astounding astonishing i i'm just really looking forward to kind of taking this to a greater level of accelerating our our business well charlie i mean you see in the data i mean if you pick a analyst firm the vast majority of new applications are being you know developed in using kubernetes and containers but uh give us the last word uh give us the the summary from you in your final thoughts you know i think you know for uh both pure and port work customers what they're going to see is just a great marriage of two great companies i think it's a marriage of two great technologies and they're going to see the ability to be able to orchestrate all of their data across you know their existing as well as their new application environments and across both their development of their private cloud and the public cloud environment so this is uh you know a great addition to uh the advancement that customers are seeing through orchestration orchestration both of their application environment but just as importantly the orchestration of their data storage and management excellent well gentlemen thanks so much for your time really appreciate you coming on thecube thank you david thank you all right and best of luck to you both and thank you for watching everybody this is dave vellante for the cube and we'll see you next time you

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back live >> here on the Cube Of'em world 2019 that Mosconi Center, Downtown San Francisco along with stew Minimum. I'm John Walton. Thanks for joining us here Day one of our three days of coverage here via World 2019. We're now joined by the CEO of equity. Ex Charles Myers is with us and a cube rookie. We >> love that. Nice to have you on the ship here. Pleasure. Thanks for >> being here with us. Let's let's talk about first big picture here from the higher level, the whole multi cloud hybrid cloud movement. What's going on now with the Enterprise? Your perspective on kind of where we are in that shift, if you will, or that transformation and what's what's driving it? What what's what's creating all the. >> But you get that question a lot, right? People ask me what inning O'Ryan question. Um, you know, it's a regular >> is so what way? Well, >> you know, said I would say a couple of years ago, you know, people said, I don't think that I think the national anthem is still being played kind of thing, you know? And, uh, I think the game has probably started to know, but But I still think we're very early innings. Um and, uh, you know, I think I'd actually bring it up to even a higher level and talk about what's happening in terms of how companies were thinking about digital transformation and what I what I think is happening is it's becoming a board level priority for cos they can't afford to ignore it. Um, you know, digital is changing the U no basis for competitive advantage in most industries around the globe. Um and so they're investing in digital transformation. And I think they're gonna do that, frankly, independent of whatever macro economic climate we operated, Um, and so Ah, and I think you know the big driving force. Probably, you know, individual transformation today. So the cloud on DSO and what we're seeing is there is that, you know, is a particular architecture of choice that's emerging for customers. >> So, Charles, give us a little >> bit of a scope of your world because, you know, there was a move many years ago. We used to say in the I t industry, you know, friends don't let friends build data center because there's only a handful of companies in the world that are good at it. I believe your company's one of s O and not only, you know, even, you know, you talk about the megastar providers like, you know, Google and Amazon. They actually don't build many of their own data centers. They partner with certain companies and and you're one of the first companies that I talked to that was, You know, when you talk about how we position multi cloud today, well, you know, let me put some gear in an equinox environment, you know, have that direct fiber you know, into AWS or Azure in the lake s O. That was early, and we've been talking for a while, so it gives a little bit that that that broad look, you know, because from the big public cloud, you know, they're spending tens of billions of dollars a year to build that out. So, you know, and often your real estates a big piece of your world's >> absolutely and well, we certainly like to think we're pretty damn good to build an operating data centers. But >> there actually are a lot of >> people to build, not break data centers and and, of course, the clouds Dubai from third parties. But they, uh, you know, they build some of their own, and they do buy from third parties as well. We think we occupy a pretty special place in the overall data center landscape because, candidly, people, you know can buy credible data center capacity from a number of players what they can't but they really want, though, is not so much a data center as they want to connect to somebody specifically, Um, and that's where Equinox is really different. You know, with 10,000 you know, customers inside of our digital ecosystems, you know, And we operate in 200 data centers across 52 markets around the world. And, you know, we represent something very special. And it's that interconnection piece there really differentiates at clinics. From the rest. >> You've had some, I guess expansion news in terms of partnerships with the, um, where that you announced talk about that a little bit if you would, but how you've grown that relationship. And what do you think that'll take you? >> Sure. And it bridges a little bit back to suit earlier question to which is, you know, kind of What what role do we play and how is it, you know, frame in the overall cloud landscape? What was announced today was a preferred partnership with between ourselves and and, uh, and now Veum wear and and also Del to deliver the VMC on Del um you know, offering which is really aimed at the sort of hybrid cloud requirements for enterprises, customers who have workload, a set of workloads, some of which may be very well suited to public cloud. And they may go either native on AWS or with of'em CNW s type solution. But a >> lot of >> times they, for a variety of reasons, are looking for a hybrid cloud solution on, and they want to implement that on private infrastructure. But they would like to get the benefits of clout they would get, like to get the simplicity, that flexibility as a service convenience. But they need the control, the compliance, the predictability and the performance that private infrastructure allows. And so where that's what that's what the solution is all about. And were there were the preferred global cola partner for that solution. >> And do companies have a pretty good idea when they come to you about what they want to do and where they want to do it? Or do you have to shepherd them through that a little bit? Because there are a number of factors that would think that go into that consideration? >> Absolutely. And >> I would say it's more typically the ladder. There are certainly >> some who come with a well developed, you know, sort of view on >> things, but it that often >> changes to some degree, and and we we like to think of ourselves. As you know, it's probably an overused term in I T. But it's as a trusted advisor in terms of helping a customer think through. It's >> really one of the great things that I think >> both of'em where and Equinox are positioned, as which is somebody who doesn't bring, say, here's the answer. Instead, they come and say, Look, the answer probably depends on a lot of factors, and so you may want a private cloud solution. You may want a public cloud solution. You probably want a hybrid cloud solution and a hybrid multi cloud solution. So let's talk through what you're trying to accomplish and how we can get you there. >> Yeah, Charles, you know, we know that things were going to change, and the advice we always give to practitioners is whatever you deploy, you need to be able to have the agility and have options. So that a decision you make today is not going to freeze you from doing something in there. Absolutely. A lot gets talked about in the multi cloud world. What is portable and what things were moving. And, you know, we know KUBERNETES is not magic. Right? Um, your your company must have actually really good view of things going from the public cloud to my own racks, too. Moving sideways because many times moving between clouds is just moving between Rose and your data centers, right? Or over some connection gives a little insight what you're seeing. Yeah. What's the trend along >> that line? You bring up a really great point and one, Frankly, I think our you know, our sales teams and are are, you know, solution. Architects are constantly talking to our customers about which is fruit future proofing your architecture because you don't know kind of what your needs are going to be tomorrow, Um, and so being able to deploy infrastructure in a way that has greater agility and flexibility is really critically important. And that's why putting private infrastructure immediately proximate to the cloud, being able to get to the performance benefits the economic benefits of that is really key. So that's that's definitely something we're seeing, you know, as a critical part of the conversation with our customers. >> How about EJ computing? That's something that touched on a little bit this morning. But, you know, I'm sure you've got some strong feelings about where we are >> today. You know, it's funny because I always I always telling everybody inside my company around. I said, Be careful about the word edge because one person's edge in another person's court, right, you know? And so, um, you know, we actually talk about eh? Quinyx as really the best manifestation of the digital edge today, and perhaps that sounds somewhat self serving. But I would say that when you look at people who want to place infrastructure geo geographically distributed way and they want to interconnected with clouds with networks with other members of their sort of supply chain. Equinox is really best solution for that in many, many cases. And so we really talk about EJ oriented solutions with our customers inside of our are, you know, sort of population of 200 data centers across 52 markets today. Now, when I when typically I think when you're hearing edge today people are talking about an even more geographically distributed footprint that is out, You know, closer I ot sensors or closer to, you know, customer endpoints and those kind of things, Um >> and I I think that will happen over time. And I >> think people talk about compute storage moving closer to that edge. But >> I think that's gonna, you know, >> take place over a long period of time. I think five g once it's fully dense, ified and deployed. I think we'll start to drive some of those applications. But we're seeing today is the current digital edge at a quinyx works very well for most of these edge related applications. >> So what would you call it then, if it's not edge? Because you said one >> man's, we do call it yet. Yeah, right. We call it a vigil. Some people might operate out there as a >> core business right into them. That's the core you raise. An interesting point Depends on your perspective and how you see it. So we called the digital and you think from the telco side of that slate mobile applications, mobile devices. You know, we all know about the usage trends. What you see in the last 10 15 years, that's good. Just explode. So how are you preparing for that on slot? Because, you know, five G's coming >> it is. Well, we're actively >> involved. In fact, we haven't We've had real success in a number of I would call him EJ sensitive Reg related ecosystems, digital payments, you know, connected car these things and people love to talk about autonomous driving. The reality is that most autonomous driving, Um, you know, interactions are done on boards. You you don't even have time to go out and making a request to the cloud. Right? You know, But other connected car value propositions that do interact, you know, with, you know, with of farther edge are things that we've actually been working really closely with equipment providers and service providers on, and they're having great success in implementing those things. Using at clinics is part of the architecture. All right, >> Charles, how about security? You know, when you live in this multi cloud world, you know I need security that can living across the environment. How does a clinic make sure that it's a trusted partner in that? That whole security store? >> There's a variety of sort of layers to it, you know, you are the biggest response to be we have specifically is physical security because people are trusting their infrastructure to reside in one of our facilities, and it needs to be physically secure. So there's five layers of security between the front door. I know you've toured one of our facilities and have gotten the full experience of all the biometrics and all the checks and balances that occur in terms of being able to someone to being able to gain access to the facility. So there's the >> physical side. Then there's >> really, you know, sort of virtual or, you know, ah, digital security. And you know what we're doing there is really cultivating the ecosystem of providers. We have a number of really sophisticated customers who are delivering cloud based security solutions. VM. Where is one example of that? But you know, there's a variety of other customers that have a sort of, you know, security oriented value proposition companies like C Scale and other people that are really doing that well for customers. So I think that, you know, we're really more about cultivating that full ecosystem so that customers have access to the full portfolio of security tools that they need. >> Charles, Thanks for the time. We appreciate that. And I do want to congratulate you on having probably the strongest team showing >> of the Cube so far. Take, they have Charles do today. Everybody All right, That's the equities culture, all right? Trust me, they're clapping. I expected a little more of around next time we'll work on it. A good deal. Thanks for being with us side your baby. Thank you very much for big connects. Back >> with more where we're alive. Here in San Francisco at Veum World 2019

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have Charlie Emer. He is the senior director data management and governance strategy at Honeywell. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> And Randy Mickey, senior vice president global professional services at Informatica. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Charlie, I want to start with you. Honeywell is a household name, but tell us a little bit about the business now and about your role at Honeywell. >> Think about it this way. When I joined Honeywell, even before I knew Honeywell, all I thought was thermostats. That's what people would think about Honeywell. >> That's what I thought. >> But Honeywell's much bigger than that. Look, if you go back to the Industrial Revolution, back in, I think, '20s, we talked about new things. Honeywell was involved from the beginning making things. But we think this year and moving forward in this age, Honeywell is looking at it as the new Industrial Revolution. What is that? Because Honeywell makes things. We make aircraft engines, we make aircraft parts. We make everything, household goods, sensors, all types of sensors. We make things. So when we say the new Industrial Revolution is about the Internet of Things, who best to participate because we make those things. So what we are doing now is what we call IIOT, Industrial Internet of Things. Now, that is what Honeywell is about, and that's the direction we are heading, connecting those things that we make and making them more advancing, sort of making life easier for people, including people's quality of life by making those things that we make more usable for them and durable. >> Now, you're a broad platform customer of Informatica. I'd love to hear a little bit from both of you about the relationship and how it's evolved over the years. >> Look, we look at Informatica as supporting our fundamentals, our data fundamentals. For us to be successful in what we do, we need to have good quality data, well governed, well managed, and secure. Not only that, and also accessible. And we using Informatica almost end to end. We are using Informatica for our data movement ETL platform. We're using Informatica for our data quality. We're using Informatica for our master data management. And we have Informatica beginning now to explore and to use Informatica big data management capabilities. And more to that, we also utilize Informatica professional services to help us realize those values from the platforms that we are deploying. IIoT, Industrial IoT has really been a hot trend. Industrial implies factories building big things, planes, wind farms, we've heard that before. But what's interesting is these are pre-existing physical things, these plants and all this manufacturing. When you add digital connectivity to it and power, it's going to change what they were used to be doing to new things. So how do you see Industrial IoT changing or creating a builder culture of new things? Because this connect first, got to have power and connectivity. 5G's coming around, Wi-Fi 6 is around the corner. This is going to light up all these devices that might have had battery power or older databases. What's the modernization of these industrial environments going to look like in your view? First of all, let me give you an example of the value that is coming with this connectivity. Think of it, if you are an aircraft engineer. Back in the day, a plane landed in Las Vegas. You went and inspected it, physically, and checked in your manual when to replace a part. But now Honeywell is telling you, we're connecting directly to the mechanic who is going to inspect the plane, and there will be sort of in their palms they can see and say wait a minute. This part, one more flight and I should replace this part. Now, we are advising you now, doing some predictive analytics, and telling you when this part could even fail. We're telling you when to replace it. So we're saying okay, the plane is going to fly from here to California. Prepare the mechanics in California when it lands with the part so they can replace it. That's already safety 101. So guaranteeing safety, sort of improving the equity or the viability of the products that we produce. When we're moving away from continue to build things because people still need those things built, safety products, but we're just making them more. We've heard supply chain's a real low-hanging fruit on this, managing the efficiency so there's no waste. Having someone ready at the plane is efficient. That's kind of low-hanging fruit. Any ideas on some of the creativity of new applications that's going to come from the data? Because now you start getting historical data from the connections, that's where I think the thing can get interesting here. Maybe new jobs, new types of planes, new passenger types. >> We are not only using the data to improve on the products and help us improve customer needs, design new products, create new products, but we also monitorizing that data, allowing our partners to also get some insights from that data to develop their own products. So creating sort of an environment where there is a partnership between those who use our products. And guess what, most of the people who use our products, our products actually input into their products. So we are a lot more business-to-business company than a B2C. So I see a lot of value in us being able to share that intelligence, that insight, in our data at a level of scientific discovery for our partners. >> Randy, I want to bring you into the conversation a little bit here (laughs). >> Thanks. >> So you lead Informatica's professional services. I'm interested to hear your work with Honeywell, and then how it translates to the other companies that you engage with. Honeywell is such a unique company, 130 years of innovation, inventor of so many important things that we use in our everyday lives. That's not your average company, but talk a little bit about their journey and how it translates to other clients. >> Sure, well, you could tell, listening to Charlie, how strategic data is, as well as our relationship. And it's not just about evolution from their perspective, but also you mentioned the historicals and taking advantage of where you've been and where you need to go. So Charlie's made it very clear that we need to be more than just a partner with products. We need to be a partner with outcomes for their business. So hence, a professional services relationship with Honeywell and Charlie and the organization started off more straightforward. You mentioned ETL, and we started off 2000, I believe, so 19 years ago. So it's been a journey already, and a lot more to go. But over the years you can kind of tell, using data in different ways within the organization, delivering business outcomes has been at the forefront, and we're viewed strategically, not just with the products, but professional services as well, to make sure that we can continue to be there, both in an advisory capacity, but also in driving the right outcomes. And something that Charlie even said this morning was that we were kind of in the fabric. We have a couple of team members that are just like Honeywell team members. We're in the fabric of the organization. I think that's really critically important for us to really derive the outcomes that Charlie and the business need. >> And data is so critical to their business. You have to be, not only from professional services, but as a platform. Yes. This is kind of where the value comes from. Now, I can't help but just conjure up images of space because I watch my kids that watch, space is now hot. People love space. You see SpaceX landing their rocket boosters to the finest precision. You got Blue Origin out there with Amazon. And they are Honeywell sensors either. Honeywell's in every manned NASA mission. You have a renaissance of activity going on in a modern way. This is exciting, this is critical. Without data, you can't do it. >> Absolutely, I mean, also sometimes we take a break. I'm a fundamentalist. I tell everybody that excitement is great, but let's take a break. Let's make sure the fundamentals are in place. And we actually know what is it, what are those critical data that we need to be tracking and managing? Because you don't just have to manage a whole world of data. There's so much of it, and believe me, there's not all value in everything. You have to be critical about it and strategic about it. What are the critical data that we need to manage, govern, and actually, because it's expensive to manage the critical data. So we look at a value tree as well, and say, okay, if we, as Honeywell, want to be able to be also an efficient business enabler, we have to be efficient inside. So there's looking out, and there's also looking inside to make sure that we are in the right place, we are understanding our data, our people understand data. Talking about our relationship with IPS, Informatica Professional Services, one of the things that we're looking at is getting the right people, the engineers, the people to actually realize that okay, we have the platform, we've heard of Clare, We heard of all those stuff. But where are the people to actually go and do the real stuff, like actually programming, writing the code, connecting things and making it work? It's not easy because the technology's going faster than the capabilities in terms of people, skills. So the partnership we're building with Informatica professional services, and we're beginning to nurture, inside that, we want to be in a position were Honeywell doesn't have to worry so much about the churn in terms of getting people and retraining and retraining and retraining. We want to have a reliable partner who is also moving with the certain development and the progress around the products that we bought so we can have that success. So the partnership with IPS is for the-- >> The skill gaps we've been talking about, I know she's going to ask next, but I'll just jump in because I know there's two threads here. One is there's a new generation coming into the workforce, okay, and they're all data-full. They've been experiencing the digital lifestyle, the engineering programs. To data, it's all changing. What are some of the new expertise that really stand out when evaluating candidates, both from the Informatica side and also Honeywell? What's the ideal candidate look like, because there's no real four-year degree anymore? Well, Berkeley just had their first class of data analytics. That's new two-generation. But what are some of those skills? There's no degree out there. You can't really get a degree in data yet. >> Do you want to talk about that? >> Sure, I can just kick off with what we're looking at and how we're evolving. First of all, the new graduates are extremely innovative and exciting to bring on. We've been in business for 26 years, so we have a lot of folks that have done some great work. Our retention is through the roof, so it's fun to meld the folks that have been doing things for over 10, 15 years, to see what the folks have new ideas about how to leverage data. The thing I can underscore is it's business and technology, and I think the new grads get that really, really well in terms of data. To them, data's not something that's stored somewhere in the cloud or in a box. It's something that's practically applied for business outcomes, and I think they get that right out of school, and I think they're getting that message loud and clear. Lot of hybrid programs. We do hire direct from college, but we also hire experienced hires. And we look for people that have had degrees that are balanced. So the traditional just CS-only degrees, still very relevant, but we're seeing a lot of people do hybrids because they know they want to understand supply chain along with CS and data. And there are programs around just data, how organizations can really capitalize on that. >> And also we're hearing, too, that having domain expertise is actually just as important as having the coding skills because you got to know what an outcome looks like before you collect the data. You got to know what checkmate is if you're going to play chess. That's the old expression, right? >> I think people with the domain, both the hybrid experience or expertise, are more valuable to the company because maybe from the product perspective, from building products, you could be just a scientist, code the code. But when you come to Honeywell, for example, we want you to be able to understand, think about materials. Want you to be able to understand what are the products, what are the materials that we use. What are the inputs that we have to put into these products? Now a simple thing like a data scientist deciding what the right correct value of what an attribute should be, that's not something that because you know code you can determine. You have to understand the domain, the domain you're dealing with. You have to understand the context. So that comes, the question of context management, understanding the context and bringing it together. That is a big challenge, and I can tell you that's a big gap there. >> Big gap indeed, and understand the business and the data too. >> Yes. >> Charles, Randy, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. (funky techno music)

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way. >> Welcome back to Miami. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. This is Day two of the mon 2019 3 cubes. Third year at V mon, We did New Orleans. We did Chicago last year. Course here at the Fountain Blue in Miami. Great venue for an event like this. I'm Dave a lot. It was my co host, Peter Burroughs. Abba Dabbas. Eye is Adi is here. He's the head of a Charles Russell speech. Liza London based law firm. How about great. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thankyou. So you tell us about this judge. Interesting name. Charles Russell. Speech lease. It was a merger of two firms, Right. Tell us how it all came about. >> Back in 2,014 Charles, loss of species performed for a merger between two different companies. Charles docile and speaks Lee Burcham from a 90 perspective. That was very interesting for the two departments coming together s So we have a limited time period where we had to merge these two companies Two different systems different data centers, different data sets. So it was formed by emerging back in 2,014 for five years on way here today >> that we see this a lot, you know, Emanate goes down. The acquiring company of this sounds like it was a merger. You know, they sort of battle. Okay, who's going toe? Really? Which framework is going to win? Because I'm sure had that conversation. But so to take us through that merger, what it entailed what? What the scenario looked like and how you plan for it. Sure. >> So I was part of the Charles. Also legacy Charles Russell team on, then obviously speaks about. Some had their own team as well. So initially, when we first found out about the merger, it was essential for the two teams to get together to work out. Okay, What systems? You have free mail. What systems you have for document management system playing trump cards. Which is who's got the best system and which way do we wantto move forward? A little. >> Ah, >> so but being a law firm, most law firms around the world and in the UK especially used the same types of software so essentially that from that perspective it was It was it was quite simple. But then way had to work out. How do we How do we go forward with this? Because two different headquarters in the London area. Which office do we move into? Sort of logistics around that. Can we fit in pre merger? It was six. Charles Lawson had sickle. Roughly 600 people, especially birds, had roughly 500 people. So pretty comparable. Yeah, yeah. So working out space logistics was was an issues >> making that even even more complicated, right? Yeah. >> One of the things that's interesting about a law firm, like versus a traditional manufacturer or AW financial services firm that has a lot of very fast right writing systems and have to scale on those lines is a law firms feature very complex dogs, very complex in from out of files, a lot of files that are written. But at the same time, you have to be repurposed to a lot of different work flows very sensitive to external contingent regulatory change. And so you have all of that happening, especially, I mean, two years ago from now on MySpace steak, and it was you're getting into brexit stuff, too, so that also had to be a source of uncertainty. So how has it been combining external regulatory issues the way that technology is being used in law firms and some of the new work clothes that you guys trying to support? And then adding, On top of that, the complexity of bringing these two firm GPR >> GPO itself was It was a year old project for us on. Obviously, we've got offices. The Middle East, but obviously is in the Far East on DH in Central Europe has well, so data logistics or where it sits, is an issue for us as well. So GDP, ours being a big project for us in terms of the merger itself. It was it was very, very difficult for the two I T departments to come together on actually work out. How how do we go to one unified systems? Essentially one doctor man, just in one email system. All of that took a lot of plan in law project management on essentially within the legal press itself. We got doubted in the time frames that we had that we can achieve it on within. I think It was 18 month period. We had merged order, different systems and various offices because speech the Bertram and Time is what I had. Offices in Zurich and Geneva were to merge with different offices together as well. So it was. It was a big, big task for the i T department on the firm itself. >> They're very tight migration deadlines. And and as you started to approach those deadlines you had to worry about, Okay, When we're going to cut over, how do we avoid downtime? How do we make sure that we don't? You know, I have bad data, data, corruption and the like. So how did you plan for that? And how did it go? >> So wait, we're here. C'mon on DH. Veen was It was it was a big part of our migration process. So where we had two different parts of the business Different storage systems, Different actualization system's way used to mean a CZ. The middleman basically, to my great data, from one day to center to another, using swink it. So where there was a large amount of terabytes and terabytes, amount of data way had swing kit available to us using team were able to be to be essentially a love the environments into the swing care and then bring them over to the other side of the business. And vain was essentially part on on top of that, making sure that the data that we were coming that will bring in a cross is true and not corrupt on DH, that using some of their technology is sure backups and stuff like that really, really was essential to, you know, do migration going well >> And was was Wien installed and both organizations at the time? Or was that something that you had to sort of redeploy? >> And yeah, So Legacy Charles also had way was actually myself going back probably eight years ago. Version For a time, I think team had 20,000 customers. So to here >> there were version 10 now 33 150 >> 1,001,000, 4,000 month. >> That makes me proud that we invested in vain when we did good car. So yeah, it was It was a good call from us, and essentially three other side of the business did not have. But then we just wait. Expanded our Venus State to look at both sides and then bring him across on. And then, ever since then, we've grown our vamos state across the world, across all of officers. So >> So how did you do that? So that was that was another migration that had to occur. And did you? You kind of do those simultaneously. Did you do the theme of migration first, and then bring the two systems together? >> Do you seem to do Stouffer special sauce in the migration? >> Yeah. So Veen was essentially a tool that we used to my great data sensors from one data center to another using their backup technology using their replication technology, we were able to replicate all of one side's virtual machines to the other. And then that gave us that gave us the flexibility as well. When when we had the limited down time periods that we've had, they give us the flexibility to actually Circe the business is during these particular ours. We're not gonna be able to You're not gonna have access to these systems because we're going to bring up systems from point A to point B. So veen was essential to them if >> you had to do it over again. If he had a mulligan, what would you have done differently? What what advice might you give to somebody who's trying to go through a similar migration? >> I would say Give your partners and lawyers more realistic time. Pray the time frame that we would get. >> Or don't let them give you an unrealistic time for him. >> Exactly. Yeah, so says ensured that the amount of work it's it's not just day to itself. You know, we're talking network and we're talking security. We're talking, you know, to to similar sized companies coming together. We were very, very limited time frame, consolidating all of their systems into one which is essential for the two parts of the business to collaborate together because, you know, way could have taken our time. We could have got to take this free four years a CE, far as we're concerned. But the fact that we did do it in such a quick time for him and that business to parts of the business from Day one can collaborate much better with each other. So >> we talked a lot about digital business transformation and you know, our approach or our observations on the digital business transformations, the process by which you altar and change your firm to re institutionalize the work. Change your game. Tomato Grover. All governments model as you use data as an asset, so that's affecting every firm everywhere. How's it affecting a law firm and you know your law from specifically on? How is that going to change your stance in your approach to data protection >> Data is incredibly important to unlawful. A zit is to most most organizations, but in terms of, you know, one of one of the things that's quite important in terms of law firms. We work with the financial institutions, so we held information by that. We hold personal data way hold all times of information. Charles Oscar speech leads works with Aware is of law apart from Kunal. So the areas of law that they worked with his vast in terms of the amount of data that we hold and essentially I mean, for us data is the most important thing that runs the firm and having visibility tow our data. How do we How do we work that data? How do we then market based on the data that we have? How do we market ourselves from that data. You know, there might be one area the business that's dealing with a family issue, family law. But then, you know that that could correspond with the litigation issue. You know, how do we work that data? To be to be an advancing to our businesses is extremely important. For >> what? What do you think of the announcements this week? I'm kind of curious. I was liketo ask the practitioners of what they think about. You know what was announced. You had, uh, well, you had the ve made $1,000,000,000. That's kind of fun and cool, but But you had the with the program, which was kind of interesting. The whole ap I look the beam availability orchestrator, where they're really talking about recovering from backups as a host that needed to recover from, you know, a replicated instance. You know, some of the automated testing stuff was kind of interesting. They talked about dynamic documentation, things you saw this week that you'll actually go back and say, Hey, I can apply that to solve a problem. Sure. >> So, essentially, I think I've been a really good question is very relevant to us many of not just ourselves law firm but many of the other law firms around the world are now looking at cloud based services now for us. I mean, this was a big thing five years ago way you know, everyone was talking about public clouds. Us. We're now we're now looking clouds and where basically, we've bean pushed by the vendors themselves to go towards cloudlike Citrix, for example. Their licensing model was based around their services. So is Microsoft in Mike's off? You don't you don't really have, you know, exchange anymore. Within premises you have off 365 A lot of the SAS applications are moving toward the cloud on DH. What wrote me? I had to say doing the keynote in regards to act, too. And how team are trying to be the visionaries in terms of look at that cloud is their next big thing for the next 10 years, offering often a crucial and for businesses like ours who have limited exposure to cloud technologies limited understanding, essentially having a tool that could migrate from one cloud to another. It's fantastic, you know, we've offered, you know I've spoken to, obviously are United directors around the other law firms where I wanted to have gone to the public cloud. But they don't know how to come back in and having a tall that essentially gives you that flexibility to bring it back in house to go form a ws to zoo. Or if there's a particular assess application, for example, that piers better with a W s. But you've got your other application that piers with that particular application is your Why would you want to have in the door? You'll probably want to move into a W eso for us, I think. What? The message coming out of'em on this year has bean really, really helpful for us. >> So So when you started with theme, they had it said 20,000 custom You like the 20001st customer on DIT was coincided with the virtual ization, you know, craze. Do you feel like the team knowing what you know about them, you have a lot of experience with them Consort of Replicate that success in this town intendant and in Act two, >> I think when I first looked at them, Wow, this is really, really simple. It's a bit like an iPhone. You know you given iPhone to your grandmother or to your children, and they have to play with it. And I see the beam as an intuitive piece of software that easy fighting professionals to get on with it, as their slogan said a few years ago. It just works. It does just work. Wear were great advocates of him. It's worked wonders for us. We've acquired smaller businesses using we've managed companies using and when I see you know, when you go to the sessions and you see the intelligence behind their thinking, I think going back to your question I think Wei si oui, si, vamos a strategic partner for us when we see their vision and we believe in their vision, and I think what they're doing in terms of what they working on next few years, I think we're well favor there, and I think, you know, essentially, that's where the most of their business is going to come from, >> where you sit down with, you know, rat mayor over over vodka and he says, Tell me the one thing I could do to make your life you know, easier, better you can't say cut prices s a hellhole. But what would you advise him to >> make my life better >> other than Jim instead of >> yeah, eyes that >> would make you crazy. >> So in terms of a zoo, a technology, >> your business relationship or something, she'd like to see them do that would. I >> think in terms of mergers and acquiring companies, seen license rentals will be a good thing. I know, I know. They give you a valuation license keys, and that's something that you can use. So, for example, if we were to acquire a company that has hundreds of servers and PM's having license rentals for a period of time, able >> to spin it up and spin it down actually allowed >> Exactly. Yeah, that would be an advantage. I think in terms of what you know what they're doing in the marketplace, and a lot of law firms use him. I feel I can't do any more than they are doing now. And in all the years that we've used to be my fingers on eight years now, but we've only had one serious problem, and the way they got that problem, you know the way, the way they communicated to reverse the way they a lot of different teams across the the Europe and the US go involved. I think, you know, in terms of service, in terms of software, in terms of what they what they do for us. I don't think there's anything more to add. Teoh. Right? Maia's vision. >> That's great for their custom of it. Well, thanks so much for coming on. The Cube is not heavy. Really? Thank you very much. You're welcome to keep it right there, buddy Peter, and I'll be back with our next guests right after this short break. We're live from Miami at the front of Blue Hotel. You're watching the Cube from Vienna on 2019 right back.

>> Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum D.C. 2018. Brought to you by Infor. >> Good afternoon, and welcome back to the Walter Washington Convention Center, we're at Inforum 2018, here live on theCUBE, John Walls with Dave Vellante, and it's a pleasure now to welcome the CEO of Infor, Charles Phillips with us. Charles, good to see ya! >> Good to see you guys again, another year. It's great, it's great. >> Yeah, I tell ya, you are a man of demand aren't you? I mean, tell me about the week so far for you, how it's gone, and just your overall thoughts about the show? >> Yeah, it's been a fun Inforum for 2018 here. Great attendance, and a lot of energy level, and the common feedback we get is you guys just keep innovating and bringing new things, this is great, and that's why they come, they want to see what we're working on and kind of dream the art of the possible. We know what you, what we think you get a couple years ago, but if we don't have someone pushing us and painting a picture of what we could be doing, and we just think we might be missing it, so we want to hear it first hand. So that's what the conference is about, and hopefully they got that. >> Well, certainly thematically, human potential, you talk about that, you see that on the keynote stage, that's been a very consistent theme with our guests here, we've heard that a lot, you hear it down on the show floor. Talk about the theme if you would, a little bit, in terms of it's development, where that came from, and in how you think that's being expressed here this week. >> Well, we're one of the few companies that build mission critical operational systems, be it manufacturing or hospital operations, but we're also in HCM in a big way. And so we were talking to kind of both sides of the house, for some applications you're talking to the line of business manager, but for HCM you're talking to the CHRO, and rarely were those two people talking, and we saw obvious synergies. Don't you want to know how your people are doing, how to allocate people, and how they're performing, how they're changing the outcomes on a manufacturing floor or in a hospital, and a lot of HR directors weren't thinking like that because they think of HR, and they have their own world, they go to HR conferences and that's it. And the manufacturing guys are the same thing, and so we're trying to bring these two worlds together and say "Actually, you're in the same business, it's the same goals, and you actually could help each other a lot." And so by focusing on putting the employee at the center of all these applications and mapping all these operational processes to HR data, it's a different way of thinking about the role of HR. They can actually help drive the business, not just be an administrative function, and so it's resonating with a lot of the CHROs we met with, 'cause they want a seat at the table, they want to be more strategic, and this is a way for them to do that and at the same time the operational people want to know how their people are doing, want to develop talent, and want to know what are the tools out there I could be doing differently, and how am I doing, and which employees are working the best So, I think we can bring both sides together. >> So I first met Infor through AWS, at re:Invent, Pam Murphy came on, and we were like Infor? Back then it was like 2012, 2013 was kind of Infor who? And then we were invited to New Orleans, and then started to learn more about your micro-vertical strategy and a little bit about the platform, it was somewhat opaque to me. And now, fast forward last year and this year it's really starting to come in to view. The OS, the platform vision, the Birst acquisition, and of course Coleman, and I'm a sucker for platform plays especially when there's real R&D behind it that's actually having a business impact. So I wonder if you could talk about that piece of the strategy, I love the stack, was that sort of always your vision and now you're getting aggressive in it, did it sort of come together serendipitously, how'd we get here? >> Having our own stack and a platform was always the vision, but it's a lot harder to do than it sounds like, and it takes time. And so, when we arrived almost eight years ago, there were different applications, all had their own separate stacks and would say "This is not going to work." So, we need, just to be able to scale, to be able to serve multiple industries with different products, we can't have every development organization building their stack as well. So we set about taking that away from the development groups we're going to do this as a shared service, but it takes time, and as we build it you will adopt components of it. So what's changed is we've built out the entire stack, so, starting with ION, with integration, then we added document management, workflow, analytics, now AI and a lot of other services, Mongoose, platform as a service, on and on and on, in collaboration, those things took time, they're all on a single platform, federated security, single siloed across it all, and now it makes the developers job who's developing apps so much simpler. So they have Infor OS for the immediate platform, for cloud services they have AWS, I don't have to worry about any of those things anymore, just go and develop industry functionality. So, it's come together nicely, but the fact that we had the time to do it and the money to do it, and we weren't public, and we told our investors "This is the only way this is going to scale, this is the future, and it'll pay out later, you just got to trust us." And now that we've gotten there, they're seeing the synergy and go "Okay, now we see why you did that." >> So, Michael Dell's been on theCUBE many times, he used to talk about the 90 day shot clock, we obviously see what he's done in terms of transforming; but I want to talk about your business a little bit, because you've had that patient capital, I mean you're a quasi-public company in the sense that you do report so we can see the numbers on the income statement, but the income statement doesn't really tell the whole story It's about three billion in revenue, several hundred billion dollars on the balance sheet, but if you look at the SaaS component of it it looks rather small, maybe about 25% of the business, but from a booking standpoint I'm sure it's much, much larger than that. So how should we interpret the income statement in terms of the momentum in your business, where is all the action? >> So as a percentage of our sales, it's the highest of any of our competitors, so, about 70% of our new sales are on SaaS, we have about a $700 million SaaS business, so it's growing. There's nothing we can do about the maintenance piece of it, if it's related to perpetual, so if you take that out, it's a big percentage of our business. And over time the maintenance will turn into SaaS, so that's one of our big opportunities to look at that maintenance space and say "Move those over to cloud customers." and that's usually a financially lucrative thing for us to do, because we do even more for them, because they usually add on four or five other products when they move, they replace these third party products and so we get a bigger suite of products if they decide to move to the cloud. So that's part of the strategy, that's what UpgradeX is, let's move you from on-premise, so that maintenance revenue will turn into SaaS revenue, but bigger SaaS revenue over time. >> So let me make sure I understand, so it's not the classic case where you see a lot of software companies that are going from a perpetual model to a ratable model, you're goin' from a maintenance model which is ratable to a ratable model which is SaaS, but there's cohorts sales which increase the top line, is that correct? >> Exactly. So usually, because of what we do, we're doing something mission critical. So if you're going to take that, then you should do ACM financials, all the other things around it. So why would I move to core and leave the edge on-premise? So, almost by definition we have to do the whole suite. So when we do that it expands the deal, 'cause on-premise we may have been one vendor with 30 other ones existing, but the whole reason they want to get out of all of that is to move to the cloud and simplify. So we can't take all that with us, so we have to have the full suites, we've built that now. So now we can move them, but, it expands the size of the deal because we're replacing all these other products. >> Okay, and then some of the stats, just correct me if I don't get this right. Your SaaS business grown 50% faster than Oracle's, growing at a rate, I'd say 2X SAP's and a rate comparable to Workday, are those correct figures? >> Those are correct, and profitable. >> Oh, and profitable. >> Throw that in. (all laugh) >> Right, so okay. And then last year Koch Industries invested, so you kind of recap the company, you've made a big deal about that. One of the things that we've noted is you're seeing a tailwind there in terms of guys like Accenture and Capgemini, we've asked them "Do you guys service Koch Industries?" they said "Yep!" they helped us see the opportunity, and they said "Look, look for something substantive, we're not going to try to force you to do something, but we want you to take a look." So that's been helpful. Talk about that and maybe other things Koch has brought to the table? >> It's a, the relationship with the integrators is evolving, it probably was not a plus for us in the first four, five years. More recent years we've won enough deals where they had to say "Okay, we can't keep losin' these deals." And where they wanted to get engaged. Koch helped, because they had relationships and they wanted to run that business, that's why they're implementing our products globally, and so, they're a large customer for all of these guys, and one of the largest for Deloitte for instance, but what's really more-- that helped, but it was more the, what was happening in the market, the fact that we're in a Liberty Steel and replace SAP, or that we're in a Travis Perkins interview with SAP and Microsoft, so, if you're on the wrong side of those deals enough times your manager starts to ask you what's goin' on, and you got all these people on the bench here, okay, we train them for Infor if they're winning in that region, or in that industry. So, we just had to earn our way into it, our initial strategy was not one that, at least on the surface, looked like it was integrator-friendly because we were trying to take all those mods they like to do and put 'em in the product, and that's the whole thesis, let's the take the vertical industry features and let's put it in there once, I don't want everybody customizing my apps, we do that. And so now they've had to move up, okay we can do other things, configuration, changed management, there's AI, there's other things you can do, but you're not going to do that. So now that they've accepted that, there's a basis for us to work together, and, it just had to take time to get there. >> What can you tell us about where you want to go with this? I mean you've presided over public companies before, you know that business well, you were a rockstar analyst, is there an advantage to being a public company, is that something that you eventually want to do? >> I would say there are pluses and minuses, our board is evaluating that, that's going to be their call. The upside is, it would solve probably our biggest challenge which is brand recognition, almost instantly, because would be a top 10 tech IPO. It makes it a little easier to hire people because they can see public currency, they can value more quickly, and it gives you some acquisition currency; so those are the positives. But then you're on the 90 day cycle, and we're kind of on that anyway, 'cause we report publicly and we have publicly traded bonds. So for us it's, in some sense we have the worst of all worlds, right? We have the discipline of being a public company, and the scrutiny, without the capital, (laughs) and the branding, so. I think that's what everybody's evaluating. Every bank on Wall Street's visiting us telling us to go now, the window's great, you have the numbers. >> Oh, of course. (Dave and John laugh) >> And so, so we could do it, I just don't know what their decision's going to be. The advantages to being private as well, you have a little more flexibility obviously, and, we don't need the capital, we have plenty of capital coming from Koch and others who want to invest. >> Well, the flip side of that too, is you get to write your own narrative, right? >> Yeah. >> I mean, we're talkin' about the nuances of the income statement, the Street is obviously right now hooked on growth heroin, and if you got the transition in the base it doesn't become a tailwind, so, no rush from that standpoint. I want to pivot to the theme of this event, which is the human potential. My understanding is you sort of were instrumental in coming up with that. HCM this year got a big play on stage, where's that come from? >> Yeah, just as I talk to CEOs who are struggling to find talent, like I mentioned on stage 6.7 million jobs that are unfulfilled. It's not like we don't have people here, we have people here with their own skills, so, you're not going to fill those jobs any other way, we're not doing immigration to any degree and scaling more, that's been shut down. We have an aging population with the baby boomers, so the most logical thing that you would do is train people who are already here who want to work. And, let's take people who have jobs that they probably aren't thrilled about, and give them different skills so they can fill these 6.7 million jobs. So to do that, you have to make these applications easier to use, and I felt like we're probably in the best position to do it because we actually know what they do for a living, 'cause we wrote all those last features in those industries, we understand what they do. And if you're just doin' HR replication or financials, you actually have no idea what they do. So, we had to learn those jobs to automate those jobs, so we can find ways to use our HCM applications to better train people, professional development, coaching, take all these HR skills, and put them as part of the applications in the context of while you're working. >> We had Anne Benedict on just a little bit ago talking about really a test case that you can be for yourself. So how are you putting these things to practice yourself, and how are you working out maybe some kinks before you take them out to somebody else? And so, you can leverage your own success for your own success, and also learn from mistakes too I would think. >> We do. So we have this program called Infor at Infor, where everything we do, we want it to be on an Infor product, which was not the case when we arrived. Like a lot of companies, a mish mash of different things, and so we've implemented not only HR Financials of course, Birst, but the big innovation has really been talent science, that every employee we hire has to take that test, and all the executives have taken it as well. And what we've discovered is, is that, when people hire and go against the talent science recommendation, 68% of the time they end up being wrong. So it's better at judging people than people are sometimes, and you can't use it exclusively, but it'll tell you these are the things you should look into, some questions you might want to ask, here's how they rate on certain skillsets, they're very well meshed for this job, they look like they'd see their best performance in this area, but ask these questions. And so people don't know how to interview and how to think about this, and so, having a guide to go into an interview is actually pretty helpful. We hire much better people now by using that. >> So it's like StrengthsFinder in a way? >> No, it's different from that, this is AI, it's kind of Moneyball for business people. >> Well you're talking about that today, almost there. >> Yeah so it's 39 personality attributes, behavioral attributes we call them, so, empathy, resistance to authority, do you have the ambition or not, and depending on the job, you think all those things are good, depends on the job, so. For some jobs, it's actually better to have low ambition because, a lot of our customers who have low wage, fast food service jobs, people who have ambition are going to leave in four months, right? They're not going to stay, so, okay we're not going to be here long, at least know that going in, and know who wants to get promoted, and other people are fine with it. And so it depends on the mix of skills, just like I said, 39 attributes, and for that job role, you tune it to the people who like that job, they look like this. And, we've also found that it's 60% more diverse when you hire using science, because you don't know that when you're looking at the data, what they look like. >> It must've been super interesting getting those reports. You took it, obviously right? >> Yeah I took it. >> How'd you do? (laughs) >> Uhhh, nobody really likes their profile. (all laugh) >> I was going to say, I imagine I would be really defensive about this, oh I don't know. >> This can't be right! >> That is not me! I am not like that! (all laughing) >> Every person on our executive team said the same thing so. That's what it's for is to, you have certain perceptions even about yourself, and it calls it out, right? And there's no gaming the system because the questions have no right or wrong answer, it just puts you in scenarios that you answer what would you do, how do you feel about this? You're not clear what they're trying to get at, and you only have 27 minutes or 22 minutes to do the test. >> So you can't game it? >> You can't game it. >> Data doesn't lie! >> And we built the science, we know when someones trying to game it, they're taking to long on multiples, and changing their answers too much, so it's-- And we've now, I think we've tested some 200 million people over time, over years, so we have 20 years of data about people. >> That's, I mean, sounds unique, certainly unique of being infused into enterprise software, I've not seen anything like this from another enterprise software company. Can you confirm that, or? >> Yeah, so, we're the only ones that do this at scale, there's a few startups trying to do it, but they're trying to do it all facial recognition which is, we think pretty ridiculous, we're trying to get away from physical attributes not use that. So there's a company out there doing that, depending on your facial movements, but this is, we're eliciting responses about your personality in response to situations that we give you, and have a bunch of scientists that crunch the data and they basically shape it to the job role. And they test your best performance, and you get a DNA profile for your best performance for that job role, and then, that's what you're matching, and it's highly accurate. So we had a company on the Las Vegas Strip use it, because they have to hire in volume a lot, and essentially what they wanted to do was get better blackjack dealers. You need somebody that's good at math, good under pressure, not too emotive, don't give away anything; and so we did that, fine tuned the test, they call us back nine months later and said "We need you to change the test." We said "We did exactly what you wanted, what happened?" He said well, the winnings went up 30%, but everybody's leaving the hotel in 24 hours 'cause they lost all their money, so we don't need them to be that good. (all laugh) >> Dial it down a little bit. >> Which we did. And so that's part of the service is we fine tune it, you tell us what your goals are, and we'll tune to that. >> That's a great story. The other surprise for me this week has been the emphasis on robotic process automation, it's a space that we've kina looked at. And a lot of people are scared about software robots replacing humans, but if you talk to people who are using RPA, they love it. It's taking away these mundane tasks, I didn't realize that you guys had such capabilities there? >> Yeah, so we built that as part of a Coleman RPA platform, and not only can we automate and use RPA for ourselves, but we've built a whole development environment for our customers to build their own, 'cause we can't think of every process that they might want to automate, and we gave that platform to our partners as well, so. We don't want them doing database schema work anymore, and they used to get paid for that, there's other things you can do up the stack in AI, here's what we want you to focus on. So we had that meeting on Monday with the partners, and they all agreed that's what we're going to do. But there's tons of mundane things that people shouldn't be spending time on, and they can be much more productive, it makes them more loyal to the company, they're enjoying their job more, and they're thinking and innovating more. So I don't see it as replacing people, as making people better. And giving that engagement that I talked about during the keynote, they're engaged now, because they can do things that are more value adding now. >> So, back to New Orleans next year? That's the first Inforum that theCUBE was ever at was in N'Orleans, and, jazz, you like jazz, obviously, right? >> I like jazz, I met with the mayor when I was down there, Mitch Landrieu at the time, and he became a customer after that meeting, so the city of New Orleans runs on Infor software, it's another reason to go there; so thank you. >> You've get--nice. >> Yeah, thank you Mitch, so that worked well. And so as a thank you we're going back down there, they're a big customer now, and it's always fun, you know what I mean, you know. >> That's great. >> Just, before you go, you mention, I watched in the keynote this morning, Brooks Koepka. >> Yes. So you're working with him. I do a little bit of work on the golf side as well, so I was just intrigued because, he's not the, well he's not Tiger, right? >> Yeah. >> U.S. Open Champion, twice over. What was the attraction to him, and then can you play in the golf world a little bit, and with those brands, and is that an entry into that world? >> Well, we always like to bet on the scrappy guy, the next up and coming generation guy, and that's kind of our brand that's what we are, the Brooklyn Nets, someone who's not quite there yet, but they're moving up, that's kind of our scrappiness, that's why we like the whole Brooklyn image as well. And we started talkin' to him, like I said, before he won the U.S. Open, because he was ranking pretty high, moving up, but wasn't well known. A quite guy, very personable when you meet him, we thought he'd be good in front of clients, let's bet on his career, and we're going to work with him; and literally three weeks later he wins the U.S. Open, we go "Okay." (all laugh) >> Good grab! >> We'll take it! (laughs) So, we didn't even think it'd happen that quickly, and now he's a rockstar so. We were planning on hosting a CX event with him, and, we're not sure how many people are going to come, but when that happened, now, everybody RSVP'd right away of course. So now it's doing exactly what we wanted. >> Do you play golf? >> I don't play golf, I just started playing, 'cause we were doing these golf tournaments with customers over the last year, but I haven't had enough time to get out there yet. >> I'll bet Brooks would give you a lesson or two. (laughs) >> Yeah, he, a lot of people want to lesson from him. >> Charles thank you >> Alright, thank you guys, >> for the time, great show. >> Good to see ya again. See ya in New Orleans. >> Thank you, yeah. >> Congratulations. >> Alright guys, see ya. >> Wonderful week here in Washington, D.C. Back with more live on theCUBE here from D.C. right after this. (bubbly music)

>> Narrator: Live, from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering, Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018! Brought to you by: Pure Storage. (upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I am Lisa Martin, supporting the Prince look today. We're at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, this is a super cool building, 1915 it was built, and is the home of so many cool artists, so got to represent today. Dave Vellante's my co-host for the day. >> Well, I got to tell you, Charlie, thank you for wearing a tie. >> Yeah, well-- >> My tie's coming off. >> Okay, well, hey, look, you and me both. >> You have to wear yours-- >> Well, I do, I still have investors later. >> I'm not the only one who's representing musicians today. >> I got my tee shirt underneath here, all right. >> Oh, oh oh! >> Ladies and gentlemen, you will not want to miss this. >> Bill Graham, right, I'm on a Who, Lisa. >> "I'm on a Who", oh he said The Who! >> The Who! >> We got Roger Daltrey-- >> Charlie: Oh, that's fantastic. >> (laughing) >> Pete Townshend-- >> The Who! >> That's my deal. >> He's being so careful not to ruin his shirt with the buttons. >> The Who. >> I got to say-- >> Well done. >> Tower of Power was really my band. >> Oh, wow. >> They didn't play here, but Bill Graham was the first to sign him. >> Wow, representing. >> Well, I was an East Coast boy, so it was all the New York concerts and venues for me, but it was fantastic, I used to watch, you remember, Bill Graham presents? That was-- >> Yes! >> Yeah! >> I always thought if I found myself on stage, there'd be a couple of security guys dragging me off. >> Love that line! >> Nobody today, and you got a lot of applause, a lot of confetti. So Charlie, kick things off this morning at the Third Annual Accelerate, packed house, orange as far as the eye can see, but just a couple days ago-- >> Sea of orange. >> Exactly, sea of orange, a proud sea of orange. >> Right. >> Just two days ago, on the 21st of May, you guys announced your fiscal 19 first quarter results. Revenue up 40%, year over year, you added 300 new customers, including the U.S. Department of Energy, Paige.ai, and the really amazing transformational things they're doing for cancer research. You also shared today your NPS score: over 83! >> Correct. >> Big numbers shared today. >> These are big numbers. >> You've been the CEO for about nine months or so now, tell us what's going on, how are you sustaining this? Stocks going up? >> Right, right, stock's up about 80% year over year right now, so that's very good, but really I think it's a recognition that Pure is playing a very important role in the data processing, in the high-tech landscape, right? I think, you know, storage was really, I think up until now, really viewed as maybe an aging technology, something that was becoming commoditized, something where innovation wasn't really important, and Pure was the one company that actually thought that storage was important. As I mention in my keynote talk, you know, I really view technology as being a three-legged stool. That is, it's comprised as three elements: compute, networking, and storage. If any of one of them falls behind, you know, it becomes unbalanced, and frankly, you know, computers has advanced 10X over the last 10 years, networking has advanced more than 10X over the last 10 years, and storage didn't keep up at the same time that data was exploding, right? Pure is the one company that actually believes that there's real innovation to be had in storage. Paige.ai is a great example of that, I know it tugs on all of our heartstrings, but Paige.ai took lots of analog data, what was it, we're talking about cancer samples that were on slides, okay, they took literally millions of samples, digitized it, and fed it into an AI machine learning engine. Now, if you understand the way machine learning operates, it has to practice on thousands, or actually tens of thousands, millions, of samples. It could take all year, or it can take hours. What you want it to do is take minutes or hours, and if the data can't be fed fast enough into that engine, you know, it's going to take all year. You want your cancer pathology to be analyzed, you know, really quickly. >> Immediately. >> Immediately, right? That's what this engine can do, and it can do it because we can feed the data at it fast, at the rate it needs to be able to analyze that cancer. Data is just becoming the core of every company's business, it's becoming, if you will, the currency, it's becoming the gold mine, where companies now want to analyze their data. Right now, only about a half of 1% of the data that companies have can even be analyzed, because it's being kept in cold storage, and at Pure, we believe in no cold storage, you know, it's all got to be hot, it's all got to be available, able to be analyzed, able to be mined. >> Do you think, I got to ask you this, do you think that percentage will rise faster than the amount of data that's going to be created? Especially when you're thinking things at the edge. >> It's a great question, and I think absolutely! The reason is because it's not only the data that's being generated, or saved now, that's important. If you really want to analyze trends and get to know your customers, you know, the last five years, the last 10 years of data, is just as important. Increasingly, I think you may know this just from online banking, right, it used to be that maybe you'd have last month's checks available to you, but now you want to go back a year, you want to go back five years, and see, you know, you get audited by the IRS, they say: "Well, prove to us you did this," you need to find those checks and banks are being expected to have that information available to you. >> I got to ask you, you're what we call a tech-athlete, you were showing your tech-chops on stage, former CTO, but you've been a CEO, a board member of many prominent companies, why, Charlie, did you choose to come back in an operating role? You know, why at Pure, and why in an operating role? >> You know, I love being part of a team, it's really that. You know, I've had great fun throughout my career, but being part of a team that is focused on innovation, and is enabling, you know, not just our industry but frankly, allowing the world's business to do a better job. I mean, that's what gets me thrilled. I like working with customers every day, with our sales people, with our engineers. It's just a thrilling life! >> You did say in your keynote this morning that you leave the office, at the end of the day, with a smile, and you get to the office in the morning with a smile, that's pretty cool. >> I do, and if you asked my wife she'd tell you the same thing right, so I really enjoy being part of the team. >> Dave: So, oh, go ahead, please >> Oh, thank you sir. One of the things that Pure has done well is: partners, partnerships. We're going to be talking with NVIDIA later today, so this is going to be on, you guys just announced the new AIRI mini, and I was just telling Dave: I need to see that box, cause it looks pretty blinged out on the website. Talk to us about, though, what you guys are doing with your partnerships and how you've seen that really be represented in the successes of your customers. >> Right, well there are several different types of partnerships that we could talk about. First of all, we're 100% channel lead in our organization. We believe in the channel. You know, this is ancient history now, but when I arrived at Cisco, they were 100% direct at that time, no partners whatsoever. >> Belly to belly. >> Belly to belly, and I was very much apart of driving Cisco to be 100% partner over that period of time. So, you know, my history and belief in utilizing a channel to go to market is very well known, and my view is: the more we make our partners successful, the more we make our customers successful, the more successful we will be. But then, there are other types of partnerships as well. There are technology partnerships, like what we have with Cisco and NVIDIA, and again, we need to do more with other companies to make the solutions that we jointly provide, easier for our customers to be able to use. Then, there are system integration partners, because, let's face it, with as much technology as we build, customers often need help from experts of system integrators, to be able to pull that all together, to solve their business problems. Again, the more we can work with these system integrators, have them understand our products, train them to use them better, the better off our customers will be. >> Charlie, Pure has redefined, in my opinion, escape velocity in the storage business, it used to be getting to public, you saw that with 3PAR, Compel, Isilon, Data Domain, you guys are the first storage to hit one billion dollars since NetApp-- >> Right, 20 years ago. >> Awesome milestone, I didn't think it was possible eight years ago, to be honest, so now, okay, what's next? Can you remain an independent company? In order to remain independent, you got to grow, NetApp got to five billion in a faster growing market, you guys got to gain-share, how do you continue to do that? >> Well, you're right, each and every day we have to compete. We have to, you know, kill for what we eat. Our European sales lead calls it, our competition, on an account basis, a: knife fight in a phone booth. So the competition is tough out there, but we are bringing innovations to market, and more importantly, we're investing in the technology at a rate that I think our competitors are not going to be able to keep up with. We invest close to 20% of our revenue every year in R&D. Our competitors are in single-digits, okay, and this is a technology business, you know, eventually, if you don't keep up with the technology, you're going to lose, and so, that I think is going to allow us to continue growing and scaling. You're right, growth is important for us to be able to stay independent, but I looked very deeply at the entire industry before joining, and you know, I was in private equity for awhile, so we know how to analyze an industry, right? My view was that all of the other competitors are either no longer investing, and that's either internally, or in terms of large acquisitions, or they've already made their beds, and so I didn't really see a likely acquirer for Pure, and that was going to give us, if you will, the breathing room to be able to grow to a scale where we can continue to be independent. >> Almost by necessity! >> Almost by necessity, yeah. >> It's good to put the pressure on yourselves. >> So, in terms of where you are now, how is Pure positioned to lead storage growth in infrastructure for AI-based apps? There's this explosion of AI, right, fueled by deep-learning, and GPUs, and big data. How are you positioned to lead this charge is storage growth there? >> That's such a great question, you know, to get to the part of, you know, I started hearing about AI when I graduated college, which is a really long time ago now, and yet why is it exploding now? Well, computing has done its job, right, we're here today with NVIDIA, with GPUs that are just, you know, we're talking about, you know, giga-flops, you know, just incredible speeds of compute. Networking has done its job, we're now at 100 gigabits, and we're starting to talk about 400 gigabit per second networks, and storage hadn't kept up, right, even though data is exploding. So, we announced today, as you know, our data-centric architecture, and we believe this is an architecture that really sets our customers' data free. It sets it free in many ways. One of which, it allows it to always be hot, at a price that customers can afford, not only can afford, it's cheaper than what they're doing today, because we're collapsing tiers. No longer a hot tier, warm tier, cold tier, it's all one tier that can serve many, many needs at the same time, and so all of your applications can get access to real-time data, and access it simultaneously with the other applications, and we make sure that they get the quality of service they need, and we protect the data from being, you know, either corrupted or changed when other applications want it to be the same. So, we do what is necessary now, to allow the data to be analyzed for whether it's analytics, or AI, or machine learning, or simply to allow DEV-ops to be able to operate on real-time data, on live data, you know, without upsetting the operation's environment. >> I want to make sure I understand this, so you're democratizing tiering, essentially-- >> Charlie: Democratizing tiering. >> So how do you deal with, you know, different densities, QLC, et cetera, is that through software, is that? >> Well, so we hide that from the customer, right, so we're able to take advantage of the latest storage because we speak directly to the storage chips themselves. All of our competitors use what are called SSDs, solid state drives. Now, think about that for a moment. There's no drive in a solid state drive, these things are designed to allow Flash to mimic hard disk, but hard disk has all these disadvantages, why do you want Flash to mimic hard disk? We also set Flash free. We're able to use Flash in parallel, okay, we're able to take low quality Flash and make it look like high quality Flash, because our software adapts to whatever the specific characteristics of the flash are. So we have this whole layer of software that does nothing other than allow Flash to provide the best possible performance characteristics that Flash can provide. It allows us to mix and match, and completely hide that from the customer. >> With MVME, you're taking steps to eliminate what I call: the horrible storage stack. >> Charlie: That's exactly right. >> So, you talked earlier about the disparity between storage and the other two legs of the stool, so as you attack that bottle neck, what's the new bottle neck? Is it networking, and do you see that shaking out? >> It's a great question, I think the new bottle neck, I would actually put it at a higher layer, it's the orchestration layer that allows all this stuff to work together, in a way that requires less human interaction. There are great new technologies on the horizon, you know, Kubernetes, and Spark, and Kafka, a variety of others that will allow us to create a cloud environment, if you will, both for the applications and for the data, within private enterprises, similar to what they can get in the cloud, in many cases. >> You also talked about, innovation, and I want to ask you about the innovation equation, as both a technologist and a CEO who talks to a lot of other CEOS. We see innovation as coming from data, and the application of machine intelligence on that data, and cloud economics at scale, do you buy that? And where do you guys fit in that? >> We do buy that, although cloud economics, we believe, that we can create an environment where customers and their private data centers can also get cloud economics, and in fact, if you look at cloud economics, they're very good for some workloads, not necessarily good for other workloads. They're good at low scale, but not initially good at high scale. So, how do we allow customers to be able to easily move workloads between these different environments, depending on what their specific needs are, and that's what we view as our job, but also point something else out as well. About 30% of our sales are in the cloud providers themselves. They're in softwares that service, infrastructures that service, platforms as a service. These vendors are using our systems, so as you can see, we are already designed for cloud economics. We also already get to see how these leading-edge, very high scale customers construct their environments, and then we're able to bring that into the enterprise environment as well. >> I mean, I think we buy that. You're an arm's dealer to the cloud, you know, maybe not the tier zero to use that term, which is, but also, you're helping your On-Prem customers bring the cloud operating model to their data, cause they can't just stuff it into the cloud. >> It won't always be the right solution for everyone, now, it'll be the right solution for many, and we're doing more and more to allow the customers to bridge that, but we think that it's a multi-cloud environment, including private data centers, and we want to create as much flexibility as we can. >> Would you say Pure is going to be an enabler of companies being able to analyze way more than a half a percent of their data? >> If we don't do that, then there's no good reason for us to be in business. That is exactly what we're focused on. >> Last question for you Charlie, you've been the CEO about nine months now; cultural observations of Pure Storage? >> Oh, you know, you've seen the sea of orange that's here, and by the way, the orange is being sported not just by Puritans, not just by our employees, but by our partners and our customers as well. It's a bit infections, I have to be honest, I had one piece of orange clothing when I started this job, and you know, my mother's into it, she's sending me orange, you know, all sorts of orange clothing, some of which I'll wear, some of which I won't. My wife, everyone, there's a lot of enthusiasm about this business, it has a bit of a cult-like following, and Puritans are really very, very dedicated, not just to the customer, I mean, people become dedicated, you know, not to an entity, they become dedicated to a cause, and the cause for Pure is really to make our customers successful, and our employees feel that it's what drives them every day, it's what brings them to work, and hopefully it's what puts a smile on their face when they go home at night. >> Charlie Giancarlo, CEO of Pure Storage, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE today! >> Thank you, thank you. >> For The Who Vallante, I'm Prince Martin, and we are live at Pure Accelerate 2018, in San Francisco, stick around, Who and I will be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

live from Vancouver Canada it's the cube OpenStack summit North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat the OpenStack foundation and its ecosystem partners welcome back I'm Stu minimun here at the OpenStack summit 2018 in Vancouver with my co-host John Troyer happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest Charles Ferlin who's the vice president of business development at nuage networks thanks for joining us thank you for having me all right so the OpenStack show we're always talking about the maturity of it where customers are going with it you're in business development so what one of the one of the things we were discussing from the keynote this morning is the telcos and the service providers and who's doing what and you know who makes up that environment so it gives us your free point what you're seeing as to you know where some of the real action is in this in this marketplace fair enough we've been talking about nav for example for many years as you know but I would say probably since the second half of 2016 that we've started to see some significant large deployment and the service provider service provider paying attention to building up a telco cloud to host their VN nav applications right so so really from the second half of 26 16 2017 we've seen massive deployments of OpenStack with a service provider and a lot of them to host applications to serve their branch office customers yeah that's that's an another motivation for them to deploy this yes so Charles you know we've talked to the 18 t Verizon you know Deutsche Telekom's up there all these big ones but I look at it and say is this an opportunity of 20 global you know you know you know telcos or is do we go down to some of the MSP CSPs however you want to call those service providers a regional one you know they're some of the regional ones that maybe aren't as much telcos or are they where's that line what do you see is kind of the TAM if you will for this space obviously the large service provider will have a piece there but we see a lot of regional customer consuming services from a local provider right they do have either for language reasons for regulation and in governance so we see a lot of them consuming services from a local service provider so an openstack sort of became the building block of these and if the infrastructure for the service provider yeah it's interesting we actually just had a infrastructure as a service company from Australia okay on and I said you know you look at their website it doesn't say OpenStack anywhere they provide cloud offerings so it's one of the things there's all these telcos and service fighters that use it but it's not like they're like we're your preferred distribution of OpenStack it's just part of the plumbing underneath the use cases that that are address buh-bye OpenStack and served by OpenStack really fits well and a lot of the telco space right now yeah so we've seen a lot of growth for virtual private cloud we see a lot of growth for a dynamically deploying application having application residing in the data center or moving closer to the users at the edge for example and these are sort of the use cases that nuage and OpenStack address pretty well well that's an interesting pivot point right I understand as an enterprise technologist why software-defined networking is important right it's important in your stack it's got to be important inside of an open OpenStack but can you talk a little bit about some of these use cases like I hadn't really thought about SD win and how that that really and what architectures and deployments would really kind of mean that they would need to deploy that with some and that's a good point because really NT as the win served as the catalyst for the service providers who start paying attention to deploying an NFV infrastructure before that there was an interest it was a motivation however SD wins be offered of dynamic flexible agile branch office connectivity that allows them to dynamically insert value-added services so yes as the one provided connectivity between the branch office but really where is the service provider are going after is offering Application Firewall DDoS services or URL filtering in all of these applications residing in the data center and all of a sudden as I hold on I cannot have it as the one solution disjoint from my data center OpenStack deployment and this is where the nuage actually served as a connecting to both environment but also this is what served as a catalyst the sd1 deployment sort of a catalyst for for them to start deploying a dynamic infrastructure in today's yes so Charles just on the SD way in piece itself we've seen a lot of activity that bunch of acquisitions in that market what what differentiates nuage in in this space well fair enough we've seen these acquisition as a complement to the strategy that we have taken over the past five years paying off we are from the get-go started to have an end-to-end as the in solution so it's not just about connecting branch office together it's not about just connecting application in the data center it's actually connecting the users in the branch office with the applications in the data center or in the public cloud and what differentiate us the most is that we have the exact same platform the same as the n solution and 2n to connect branch office programming branch routers or programming virtual switches in the data center or bare metal physical service so that is perhaps new our single most biggest differentiator is the capability to have that single policy that singled as the n framework from the users and branch to the data center or public cloud alright you've mentioned bare metal I remember it was funny when the project came out for bare metal of course it's called ironic because most people can't win OpenStack started it was it's a good name in that it was virtualized environment of course today we've got containers starting to go up the stack with kubernetes so we understand why bare metals there what are you seeing in that space and and what what kind of what do you hear from your customers so we we have a lot of traction with ironic actually it's ironic but we do and we did that actually in open Saxony in November we did a Coe presentation with Fujitsu who deployed our k5 infrastructure using nagy networks and ironic integration to roll out on top of that is flexible you can put a platform as a service they can do whatever they want on top of it but the bare amount of provisioning is somewhere we is a we have a couple of large accounts that they have deployed this globally yeah okay are you working with the cotta containers that they have here and whether you are not would love to hear kind of the security story when we talk things everything for bare metal in containers and what you're doing with OpenStack and that's that's perhaps the other the biggest differentiator we have is because we're able to have the single networking policies from a container to or programming the network of a container or a KVM VM or hyper-v or the we have the symbol their single as the end platform and we're able we see all the therefore we see all the traffic in the data pack and we're able to index this into a elasticsearch database right and and in creating an index and set a lot of users to create some thresholds and that is what is perhaps the newest thing at knowledge is the capability now to say hey once those thresholds or cross why don't we reprogram the network dynamically so near realtor in real near-real-time we're actually able to take an action to reprogram the network based on some live feed that's what can information that we're receiving from the the various element that we have program either in the branch office or in a container level okay so today cotta containers is not something you're involved with or I didn't quite that cotta containers from the new high-level project from the the OpenStack foundation I don't know right now but but your customers are using container technology docker and various others we have an integration with kubernetes so we provide CNI they're absolutely involved there and this is how a lot of our customers are using us right now and the customers we're talking about these would often be service providers is that is that correct in the context of containers and kubernetes it would mainly be on the enterprise okay out of an agile type of development where they want to have a there's a lot of developer and they want to have the networking program and the same life cycle as the application project is rolling out and having the micro segmentation meaning that we are able to isolate each one of the project from one another so in if one gets contaminated the other one doesn't and so this is where a lot of the kubernetes and deployment has been on the on the large enterprise okay that makes sense because I'm trying to as a as a person outside the telecom industry but but following kind of the enterprise and OpenStack it's interesting to see this vision of the service providers who are not dumb pipes certainly but through OpenStack and these these the nfe and the services they are able to provision with folks like nuage you know able to provide services so just trying to figure out where the line you know maybe you could draw us a picture of you know what what the modern service provider will be able to provide versus what's still left then for the at the enterprise level depending on which market size analysis analyst you're looking at you know is depends VPN connectivity will be it it varies between two to six to eight to twelve it's a relatively contained small market compared to the applicator to manage applications right manage security that's tenfold that that market race so really as you said the the objective here if the service provider is not to to become a dumb virtual pipe and the ability to dynamically insert some value-added services over the top and this is what having an agile as the when now gives them the capability to say hold on a second I can now start serving a value-added application because my dynamic network is available now and this is this is what is fueling a lot of the OpenStack deployment right now in the datacenter yeah Charles one of discussions we've been looking at the last couple of years is there's OpenStack and then there's containers and kubernetes everything how do you see those go together what are you hearing from customers general discussion here but I'd love to hear some real-world so yeah in the context of ironic as we just mentioned a lot of the time the bare metal servers are actually deployed using OpenStack and what goes on top of it is actually kubernetes right and this is very common and it gives that isolation or its deploying a virtual machine running a pass platform in there right so so actually we do see the OpenStack to be used often to deploy the the infrastructure and program and provision I should say the infrastructure and whatever goes on top it could be kubernetes and work just a very nicely Charles you've been involved with OpenStack for many years I had this is how many OpenStack summits well probably eight and a weight or more yeah how are you seeing the OpenStack community evolved what do you I know you've just arrived which day one here at this summit you know beautiful Vancouver but in terms of the energy of the community the the people who are here it's a little bit smaller this year but it you know we've got people here are actual users and actual deployers so exactly yeah thoughts there so this is perhaps the well we went through a marketing height which is great however what I would say regardless of the event today in general the OpenStack community is a lot more mature it's a lot more stable as well and in the product and the product the technology at the community is more focused around solving real use cases and real problem couple years ago there was a lot of interest a lot of hype you know but it would have solve world world hunger as well right now I think it's very pointed very precise and I'm actually new I was quite proud to be participating in contributing in that community because we're starting to see the technology really addressing key key problems here all right Charles last thing I wanted to ask is the network sits in a very special place when you talk about really the multi cloud world that customers are talking about what are you seeing when it comes to that environment you know how do customers figure out where they put their applications are they moving you know things or is it just kind of a heterogeneous but still complicated world they're still figuring out that's right I mean that it's a very dynamic environment but I would say if I had to draw a conclusion most of the customers are deploying the application on-premise they like to have either for storage either for some of the governance they do I like to have applications on-premise however the multi cloud scenario is often used in large banks to compute or a large organization to compute on a burst capability right the capability to say hey I need to have X compute power available for X time is very appealing for them and this is how most of the deployment of nuage are used right now is having doing the plumbing the virtual plumbing inside a data center and dynamically based on demand the capability to do the same networking policy the same networking extension to one of the public cloud offering is very appealing because it sporadic it's a burst type of scenario yeah especially a lot of those service providers have that direct ability right as well correct correct and it you're right that it can become a little bit complex when you have when you want to to deploy nets with the same that's working policies across on-premise and multiple cloud provider and if you have interim service provider then it becomes a little bit complicated to have to orchestrate all of it and this is where Sdn gives them that hardware abstraction and and maintain the same networking policy well Charles Berlin appreciate the update on nuage and all of your viewpoints from from the customers that you're seeing my pleasure very very much for John Troyer I'm Stu Mittleman back with more coverage here at the open sex I'm at 2018 in Vancouver thanks for watching the Q [Music]

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we are live on day one of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. This is a huge event, the biggest they've ever had, 14,000 live attendees expected, and an additional 35,000 expected to engage with the live streaming in the on demand video experiences, amazing. We're excited to welcome, from Dell Education Services, Sophie Barratt, Senior Director, and Charles Atkins, VP of Education Services. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Thank you for having us. >> Lisa: Absolutely, our pleasure. So this morning in Michael Dell's keynote, he talked about, and we're going to hear a lot over the three days, of digital transformation, IT transformation, security transformation. There's a fourth transformative element that companies need to apply to be successful, and that's workforce transformation. Chuck, Charles, sorry, I'm giving you a new name, Chuck. We already have a Chuck. You're Chuck for the day. >> We're all friends already. >> We're already old friends. >> Exactly, we go way back. Charles, talk to us about workforce transformation, from a thought leadership perspective, what does it mean? >> Well it's key when you think about digital transformation, that large, at the end of the day it's all about people. I mean you can have a common digital vision for your company, for your infrastructure, but at the end of the day you got to have the workforce to make that real. So, us in Education Services, I mean we talk to our customers on a daily basis, we look at, you know, a nauseating level of research, and there's a huge skillset gap, that continues to grow, expodentiously. And when you look at the level of automation that's been introduced, in all across the workforce, the gap is continuing to grow. So in education, we're taking a long hard look at, okay, what are the skillsets of the future that are needed today? When you think about machine learning, you know, artificial intelligence, data data data, you know, years ago big data was, you know, all the rage. Now we have all of that data. Now that data's becoming more intelligent. Now we need to educate our workforce, to live and work in a digital age, right along with robotics and everything else. So pretty exciting time. >> Well Charles, I would love to hear both you guys are veterans of education, veterans of the IT industry, it has changed tremendously over the past five years, versus when I cut my teeth 20 years ago in IT. It was very step ladder, you know, I got a vendor certification, I learn the product, I was able to get into the industry, how has machine learning, digital transformation, how has that changed your jobs, and your approach to how you educate your customers? >> So great question, and I too come up in that age, right? So back in the day when you needed a Microsoft certification or a storage level certification, having that kind of siloed view, all of that has changed. And when we think about skillsets needed today, it's across multi-Cloud environments, security infrastructure, the in-user devices are as smart as the data center solutions that are driving the Clouds on the backend. So now you have to have a broad range of skillset, so obviously, times have changed, skillset development has changed, and that's a big reason why we in Education Services are hyper focused on that fourth tower, workforce transformation, to enable that digital realization. >> You wrote a blog recently on skills transformation, can you kind of break it down, some of the transformation certifications that Dell EMC's enabling? >> Absolutely, so we just launched four net new transformational certifications, super excited about this, and when you think about, again, the history, you think about product level certifications. You know, individuals go out, and they get trained and educated on how to use that specific product. But as those silos start to go away, and the technology starts to become across multiple platforms, we had to take a step back and say, "Okay, education today needs to change". Both in how learners learn, how they have need personalized education services, 365, 24 by seven across the globe, but also, they need to be less product centric. So we launched four new certifications in the security realm, converged infrastructure, multi-Cloud, enterprise architecture, big one. So think along the line of an enterprise architect, building an end to end, company to company solution, that is a multi-Cloud environment, security architecture on the backend, product level, that's a completely different skillset than we had 10, 15 years ago. So, you know, that is the workforce of the future, is having those individuals, really multi-facet, multi-skilled, all across not only Dell EMC products and technology, but also all the strategic aligned businesses. So we have you know, co-skilled, co-badged, certifications available today, with VMWare and Dell EMC, starts to broaden that range of the true skillset that's needed for today and definitely for the future. >> So I would love to hear from you Sophie, about the CI0, CTO story, what is the ask? Because, there's a combination of University, there's the combination of vendor training, What's the ask from the CIO, (mumbles), on the services that they're expecting from Dell when it comes to education? >> So they're expecting us, just as Charles had articulated, to go well beyond product level training, right? They want their people to understand the context to that they're operating in, and they want them to be able to see themselves as service providers, right? They're managing now a portfolio of IT services, and they need to think about how they deliver that portfolio to their customers. That could be other departments within IT, or onto the end customer, which is a very different way of thinking about IT, right? That when you're just sort of operating, you know, a product, or a suite of products. So that's something we hear from CIOs pretty often. And the other thing I would say is, you know, sort of in return, we have an ask for CIOs, right? Which is to understand that, it's really not just about, sort of training, and making sure that people are trained on, you know, particular solutions, whatever the flavor of the day happens to be, but making sure that as they're thinking about digital transformation, IT transformation, that they're underpinning it with a focus on continuous learning. Because the technology has morphed incredibly quickly, the expectations of IT are morphing incredibly quickly, and if learning doesn't happen continuously, you know, individuals and COs themselves are not going to be able to keep up. So we're trying to enable them with a suite of, you know, sort of point solutions, as well as that continuous learning environment, and sort of cultural affinity, that can help them be successful and make IT really a competitive differentiator. >> In the spirit of continuous development, talk to us about some of the research that you've done recently to understand, and really kind of shape the direction of the new Education Services, that Dell EMC is delivering. >> Sure, well actually you know, one of the really fascinating findings, and I sort of started to elude to it just then, was the importance of sort of the commitment from the CIO level down, as well as the individuals up. And that sort of reciprocity between a person, like an IT professional's commitment to learning, and their own development, as well as the management team creating that environment, where it's okay to learn, right? And it's okay to admit that, you know, you don't know something, or that you have an appetite to develop yourself. So we just did some research that showed that where individuals are the most transformation ready, themselves, is actually in IT departments that have a very strong commitment to learning. And that inverse is also true. >> When we look at IT transformation, as Michael Dell even said this morning, as the opportunity for IT to become a profit center, IT transformation has so much potential to enable every part of the business, to use data and apply it multiple times, to combine it, re-combine it, identify how customers are using that, how can IT, as you were saying, seems like it's much more of a cultural propensity to learn, how can IT help influence other parts of the business, to have this appetite to continuously learn? >> Sure, let me start with that, and then Charles you can add your perspective, but, you know, interestingly we have a customer advisory panel, here at Dell Technologies World every year, and we'll probably talk about it when we have this year's event tomorrow, but last year this was actually a topic that came up, and IT professionals struggle with that, frankly, right. How they can better partner with the business, to talk the same language as the business is talking, and translate the business requirements back into a technology solution, and architecture that makes sense for that digital future. And actually that was one of the main drivers behind our new multi-enterprise architect certification that Charles eluded to a minute ago, so there's a lot there in that, you know, there's a big journey for IT departments to travel, but we're doing our best between helping with those continuous learning environments, the training and certifications that can really sort of bridge the gap right between the business and IT. >> I think most IT organizations are in that transformation, or at the cusp of it, and it really goes back to having that digital vision, and really that digital thought of saying, "Okay, where do we want to go? And how do we get there?". Workforce transformation's a big piece of it, obviously all of the IT architecture software development aspect on the backend is huge. But you got to come up with that vision first, and you really need to think about the future of the IT organization, as really expected customer outcomes. So the customers that they service whether they're internal or external customers, they're expecting an outcome, so really truly becoming an IT customer service organization. And you know, some are struggling, some are at the onset, some are deep into that transformation, and I would like to echo one of the things that Sophie said, when I looked at all of the research, 61% employees surveyed said they're not digitally ready. 61% of companies said, "We don't have a clear digital strategy". So, you know, the emphasis really is upfront, now's a good, opportunistic time for companies to take a step back, and say, "Okay, what does that digital future really look like?". >> Keith: 'Cause we're not-- >> If you look over, sorry, when I look over the next five years or so, look at the advancement in machine learning, artificial intelligence, get too far behind that digital evolution, some companies might not be here. >> So I had a really engaging conversation with one of the leaders in open source, serverless, and he was, he debated that enterprises are absolutely ready for this transformation. Me, maybe not so much. How do you help to do that heavy lifting? We talked about enterprise IT inspiring other organizations, but Sophie, you eluded to that this is a two way conversation. This is not just about Dell EMC Education going out and producing materials, IT professionals have to feel motivated to actually consume that data, and move forward, so that they can embrace the digital transformation, and help educate. Help talk to me about the boots on the ground. How are you guys hoping to inspire regular enterprise IT folks, the legacy DNS administrator who's sitting at his desk. I've been doing DNS for 10 years, I know how to do DNS, now we're asking him to engage and maybe not do machine learning, but embrace DevOps for example. >> Sophie: So there's a few tools that we have at our disposal, actually, speaking of AI and ML and sort of, you know, advanced ways of doing business, we're also trying to incorporate some of those technologies in the way that we create learning experiences. So we're also trying to make the learning experiences themselves more compelling to the people. But that aside, in terms of the content itself, we actually recently did a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course, around DevOps, so there are a ton of resources for IT professionals who want to get started, and just kind of immerse themselves in this space, and learn, sort of incrementally, like sort of be exposed to it, and then once they decide that they want to take that step and get certified, or whatever it is, we have those more formal tracks for them as well. >> I'm wondering to even how much, in our personal lives, we have everything in our pockets, we expect that, and how many people have our home assistants and are actually using or part of the machine learning user experience at home, and not really thinking about that. How much do you think culturally that's actually going to help the IT folks become more able to make workforce transformation real, at the spirit of the event, by what's happening in their personal lives? Do you think that's going to be a big influence? >> Charles: I think it's going to be huge. I mean, look at the automobile industry, and the transformation that's gone throughout, just the last decade alone. And apply that to our everyday life. I mean, again, if you look at it as a core edge solution, the edge solution, I mean, the amount of data that is transacted on a daily basis just from me driving my vehicle, everything from health and vehicle reports, when it's time to change the oil, et cetera, I mean it's going to be a consumer driven motivator. And it's going to force companies to really kind of think through, okay how do we get more intelligent with our data, because the customer expectations have now increased 10X. And it's going to create smarter devices. I mean, whether it's our mobile phones and, I'm old enough to remember when that got introduced, I don't know if that's a positive or negative, but in looking how much that one device has changed my life, and now the level of intelligence that I see just in the software apps that are on the phones. I mean, it's going to be a key motivator. One of the things I would like to touch on, that Sophie briefly touched on, you said, "Boots on the ground". So we have something called skillset analysis, Learning Needs Assessment's what we're going to name it, but really it's an opportunity for individuals to go out and really go through and define what their level of technical expertise is. I think it's something that, you know, when I look at learning and development worldwide, even for myself, I need an area I can go out and, kind of test my skills, to your point about the DNS person, right? And I talk to these individuals on a daily basis, being an old engineer myself, already know all of that. But getting those individuals to go out there and really do an assessment of what is their true skillset, in this net new world of technology and digitalization, helps create at least a profile that tells Charles, "Hey I'm not really that good in this this and this". So maybe there is an opportunity to improve my skillset development in those areas. I think having that personalized level of learning interaction, and it allows the individual to be honest with where their skillset is, and take a step back and say, "Okay maybe I do need to go learn X Y and Z". And that'll help propel it. >> Lisa: And I'm wondering too, with Imposter Syndrome being something that is so publicized, I didn't even know what it was and I had it, until I saw it being talked about and I thought, I know, it made me feel a little bit better, but I'm wondering, on the personalization front, you know, we expect our lives and all of the digital assistance that we have, in our cars or our home or whatnot, to give us a personally, help us through life. How are you encouraging participants to take this assessment and go, you know what, maybe I've been in this for 20 years but there are things that I don't know. Maybe that's more of a psychological thing, but how do you encourage people to kind of identify, I have Imposter Syndrome, but I want to actually get better. What's the cultural education component to that? >> Charles: Alright, you have to take a a personalized social approach. How many surveys have you done that have randomly popped up in one of your apps on your phone? Or whatever the case may be. Now, obviously we're starting as a little bit more internal, really looking on our internal skillset and capability but, as this, you know, user interface goes live around the world, I expect both customers and employees internally to go out there and just be curious. Where do you fall? And whether you've done an IQ test online, or hey what are your 10 favorite movies, getting that social action, our interaction I think will be a key enabler in driving that. And that's really going to create the stickiness 'cause I would much rather not have a conversation between individuals saying, "Well Charles, you're really not that good at X". I would like to go out and do an assessment so, wow, I was right, I'm really not that good at X. Okay now what do I need to do to drive my own career advancement, my own education advancement, and that really puts, you know, learning in the hands of the end user, because I want to be responsible for my career, yes I want to do great things for the company, but I'm also trying to figure out, okay where does my career go from here? And this allows that user to be in control of that. >> I think it comes back also that reciprocity right, between sort of the environment in which you're working and creating that safe space or learning culture where you are empowered to take ownership of your own development in your own career, and that you have the toolkit, such as this Learning Needs Assessment, you know, that we can provide, as well as many other things, to be proactive and to take those first steps, and then to have sort of air cover if you will, from your organization to do that. >> Last question, how many people are you expecting to go through certification trainings, initiated at Dell Technologies World? >> Several hundred for sure. We have many people who pre-registered to take exams, and there's a continuous flow down through the professional center, you all should come on down and check it out, downstairs, Casanova 501, so we are running exam prep sessions, exams sort of continuously from morning till night, all three and a half days of the show, so we expect probably several hundred new certifications to come out of it. >> It's a tremendous opportunity, I'm afraid if I go down there and take, I'm going to fail all the assessments. I might need your help. >> It's okay 'cause the first failure's free, at least you get an assessment of how (mumbles) you are or not. >> Oh it's my lucky day, I'm going to go gamble. >> I at least understand the questions on there. >> Maybe you could help me cheat? Okay, so Sophie and Charles, or Chuck, as we're now calling you, thank you guys so much for stopping by, and sharing with us the continued learning opportunities that Dell EMC has provided us with. >> Thanks for having us. >> Absolutely, thanks for having us. >> And for my co host, Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from day one of Dell Technologies World, in Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)

(dramatic music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California at theCUBE headquarters and studio. Got exciting next guest Chuck Davis, who's the CTO of Element Data doing a decision cloud, but really, the story is about the role of data in decision-making, biases, cognition, all the stuff that we love around big data. Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Thank you for having me, John. >> We were talking before we came on camera about stories around how decision-making is always grounded in data, and actually, it's analog data, not a lot of digital data. With the emphasis on cloud now, we're seeing data at the center of the value proposition. In fact, at a recent event at AWS, Amazon Web Services, IBM Think a couple weeks earlier, you got blockchain, AI, and data in the middle. For IBM and Amazon, it's cloud-scale and machine learning. Obviously, this is a big part of the culture we're seeing in society globally, not just in North America and the US, but around the world. People are trying to get their handle on all this stuff, so let's have that conversation. >> Absolutely. >> Your thoughts on data science, where it is today. How far has it come over the past 20 years? >> I think it's come tremendously far. There are certain things, obviously, that have happened. These inflection points in the industry that have taken place. One of the big inflection points, obviously, was the reduction of cost of storage, which then led to the advent of big data. Now you can collect more stuff, and it was cheaper to store it. Obviously, you can transmit it much easier. But now I think we're starting to really look at the origins of data itself, and the implications of that. I think that that is really where we're going to spend the next decade or so, is really understanding the things that actually make up the data. I mean, we generate the data ourselves, and so we spent a lot of time in computer science trying to figure out ways of isolating signal and noise. The things that make us uniquely human tend to be characterized as noise, and I think we're starting to finally come around and realize, especially with the advent of AI and ML, that that's not necessarily noise, that it might be the most important signal. >> You know, when I started SiliconANGLE and theCUBE nine years ago, the slogan really was, "Extracting the signal from the noise." But our tagline was, "Where computer science intersects social science." That really wasn't that original. Steve Jobs had the technology/liberal arts kind of signs with Apple, and it was when he was turning around Apple, that was the big comeback, there. But this really was, we're seeing it now, we're seeing a lot of infrastructure shifts happening whether you look at blockchain and cryptocurrency changing the nature of money and decentralization, whether you're seeing things on social media. Data now is really going to be the key equation. You guys are doing something in your company. You've been doing this for 20 years. Take a minute to explain what you're working on. You've been doing this for 20 years, but talk about the project you're executing now. >> Sure. Element Data is concerned with creating a at scale, essentially a decision cloud. What does that really mean? Well, what it means is that if you were to, we're really focused on the psychology of data. Not just data for data's sake, but the psychology of data. What does that mean? It means the way that data is perceived and the way that human beings actually make decisions, and that tends to be based on a series of trade-offs. It's based on our cognitive experiences. It's the reason why I can present you with something, you can present me with something, and if we were to look at it from a strictly logical standpoint, in terms of science, we should come to the same conclusion. But oftentimes, we don't. Since we give rise to data, how do we maintain the integrity of that signal, that emotional intelligence that's contained within the data? That's what we're trying to do. >> Talk about the role of bias, because, to me, I like to study the social, the science aspect of technology impact, whether it's new venture creation, entrepreneurship, or just a better society impact. Everything seems to be mission-driven these days, so it's very relevant. As you get these, and certainly, the US elections have recently polarized everybody, the role of bias is actually an interesting concept. I want to get your thoughts on how bias is changing people's, either subjective or objective views of things. Is bias good, or is it bad? How should we handle biases, because everything's now contextual and there's not a lot of context. You can go to Facebook any day these days, you see all kinds of weirdness going on. But as people are connected and are sharing the same data and looking at the same signal, there's going to be biases built into everything. What's your take on bias, and from a data science and data discovery, and cognition? >> Well, I'm biased against bias. It's interesting, you can't escape bias. A bias is part of the human condition. Cognitive bias is the neurological shortcut that we take to arrive at decisions or conclusions. As a result, you want to be able to classify that and understand it, but you really can't get around it. If you have some form of classification, which is one of the things that we're working on, how do you start to classify these different biases, then you can actually start to recognize them. If you can start to recognize them in data, then you can start to figure out ways to change perception, or at least to surface that these biases are present. We all engage in them. It's just a matter of how do you effectively make people aware that these biases are present, and are present in their data sets. In order to do that, you need a classification system. >> The decision cloud concept that you guys are going down, I love that idea. You take a graph approach, it's like a social graph kind of concept, decision graphing, if you will. It's about collecting 1,000 points, a million points of light, if you will, data points, that you're collecting together to help people make better decision-making, is that right? Did I get that right? How would you describe that decision cloud, or decision graph concept? >> Right, the graph is pretty straightforward. There's a fair amount of complexity, of course, hidden in it, but nonetheless, essentially what you have is, typically for human beings, we or anyone, we really are focused on making a decision. The decision, usually options, a certain amount of criteria, and then also weights or importance that we ascribe to those. The decision cloud is about capturing those options, the criteria, and also those weights. That's the central node around an individual and/or their role within an organization. As a result of that, that's a big deal, because if you can understand how people form their decisions, then you can start to walk that graph, and you can figure out how people or an organization got to where they are. It's the why. The web and technology has been focused on who, what, when, and where, but we still have a very difficult time answering the why. The reason why we have trouble with the why is we really didn't have an ontology or a taxonomy for human decision-making. That has huge implications for the AI and the ML space. It's the reason why if you were to look at any one of the digital assistants and ask a question, and ask for help, it will specifically help you make a decision. There's not a corpus of decision data that those agents can rely on to help to surface a decision. >> Personalized medicine is something I see a lot now. There's a big, big trend towards personalized medicine where the users can be more proactive, less responding to, say, conditions. But you've seen personalization is not a new concept on digital, whether it's personalized recommendation engines and/or other personalization techniques. We see that changing now, certainly as users become in more control of their data. Is that where you guys can bring that new kind of personality behind the data, because bias will drive my selection criteria when I'm making a decision, or might hinder it. This is new ground in data science. How does the role of the person get involved in the decision-making? How do you guys handle that dynamic, because your views might be different than mine. You make different decisions based on different criteria than, maybe, me. Yeah, it's different per person, so you have almost an individualized aspect of it. How do you guys handle that in software? >> What you're really talking about is allowing for human expression, subjectivity, to be part of that algorithmic mix. That's typically missing, so a good example would be in a medical context, using a decision tool to make a treatment choice, maybe around a particular drug regimen, a surgical option, or perhaps a hospice option. Really, for me, it might come down to quality of life, but quality of life is a subjective measure. As a result, it might not even be part of the recommendation engine. Our technology allows for that type of subjective input to be present, and for you to be able to place a level of importance to it. In our world, we can actually, we refer to that as irrationality, as opposed to the rational measures. But irrationality is not bad. It's human. It's a signal, it's not noise. >> How do you know what's signal as you look at, I mean, looking at all kinds of data, there's a lot of factors. Timing, things change over time. Context changes. How do you guys look at that, 'cause this is super important. Something that might be relevant today, irrelevant tomorrow. Not understood today, understood tomorrow. There's timings and context around a lot of things that could be surfaced. Is that part of how you guys work with the decision cloud? >> It really is. I mean, there's that, and it's really interesting that you mention that, because that temporal nature, that dimensionality of time, that's one of the things that human beings aren't good at that computers happen to be very good at. From a machine learning perspective, in terms of being able to train for that temporal sensitivity, that's how we address that. What we're trying to do is we're trying to balance and leverage the strengths of machine learning along with the intrinsic understanding of psychology in coming up with a effective ontology that is represented within a decision set, and merge the two together. >> So much computer science and social science coming together. Our main tagline, 'cause this is really, you're seeing a lot of societal impact. Certainly, the JOBS Act in Washington certainly enabled non-profits to actually invest in mission-driven ventures. You're seeing a spawn of entrepreneurship go on around projects that never would've got funded before. You're seeing a lot of people doing some amazing things. How does data on a global scale, I mean, how different cultures come into play, you need a lot of computing power. What's the computer science intersection as computer science changes the world that used to be tech geeks with speeds and feeds, and now you have a human element where it's emotional. I want the app to provide value for me, I don't really care about the speeds and feeds of a product. Certainly, that is colliding. What's your view of that intersection of just computer science and social science? >> I think that it's going to become more and more prevalent as the tools get better, right? We're getting a better understanding, like NLP, I can remember 10 years ago where it was largely a bag of words. Well, for some people it probably still is a bag of words. But it's gotten so much better, and so there's so much more that you can do, but a lot of it is still slicing down into, basically, metadata. Moving beyond that, I think that as we start to look at that intersection of psychology and sociology, that becomes really, really important in terms of how the disciplines come together, because they didn't. In computer science, right, the computer scientists never talked to the linguists. Now if you're credible in this space, at least on the edge, you're working with linguists. You're understanding origin. I think that the same is now coming true of psychology. In terms of AI, when we look at it from a psychology standpoint, we're looking at it from the standpoint of needs, human needs, which is the function of psychology, as opposed to when we're looking at decision theory. That's basically understanding how the decision is made. The game theory aspect of it is how those decisions affect other people and the impact that they'll have in the interaction, their reaction to it. It's really the intersection, I think, of those specific disciplines that are going to be the most exciting area of technology going forward. >> And they're not mutually exclusive, either. There's an interplay between decision theory, gamification, and human interaction. >> I mean, the successful companies of the future and of today understand that and are fully incorporating that, and are attempting to embrace it. I think that this is exciting 'cause it's kind of like the new frontier. Anyone that tells you they understand the human mind, you know, boot 'em off the show. >> John: It's complex. >> It's incredibly complex. We don't profess to, but what we can do is we can come up with a taxonomy and an ontology for some form of classification to begin that journey. That's what we've done at Element Data. >> Talk about the wisdom of crowds and how that weaves into it. I know you have some personal stories that you had around your work with a medical school that's well-documented. I think you guys are talking about that. But people tend to care what other people think. Certainly, I noticed that on social media, and people try to think, understand, try to think that they know what I'm thinking, maybe not. There's a lot of that going on around group dynamics and around collective intelligence. Wisdom of the crowds is the big part of the gamification, which does affect decisions, and then, ultimately, how people feel. Everyone likes to be part of a group and be accepted, but also there's more data now coming out of this new dynamic. How is that data being weaved into decision-making? >> John, that's probably a whole show in and of itself, but when you're talking about the wisdom of the crowd, there are a couple things to keep in mind. First, if you look at the germination, if you will, of a particular concept, I mean, people will tend to coalesce around it, and it tends to be around the topic, people's familiarity with it, and a certain perception that they have. If you're far outside of that perception, that's where you start to actually generate this excitement, or I should say, this level of engagement. For instance, if you were to say something controversial, not necessarily expected, you're going to generate more interest. Kids do it all the time on social media, right? They do something dramatic, they say something, they know it's stupid, but they are able to generate a fair amount of interest. Hence, they have a crowd that follows them. In that case, it's kind of the school of fish type of crowd theory. I think that, fundamentally, what you'll see, though, is this rise of data moving in a different direction. I think that if you are able to expose the biases that people have, then they are, if they're aware of them, then they act differently. >> We talked about civil discourse a lot. Certainly, we did during the election process, around how can we have civil discourse amongst ourselves to have a good conversation to surface data, because there wasn't a lot of that going on. But when you get on digital, this notion of weaponizing content and creating memes, you know, we talked on theCUBE, we've said this before. Control the meme, you control the narrative. Control the narrative, you control the conversation. Control the conversation, you control the belief system, and then you own the population. That's kind of the hacker formula. Mind hacking, it's been called. This is actually a new data opportunity, to get that out. It's been arbitraged through the naivety, the newness of the web, or the new social graphs, so we see some people certainly hacking that. How do you turn that into positive data source, because if what you're saying about biases, that should be surfaced quickly so people know what the collective group is thinking. How do we turn that mind hacking gamification into a positive data set? >> I mean, it's interesting, 'cause people refer to it as weaponization, and I refer to it as PSYOPS. It's something that has been done before in a different context, and now we're starting to see it in the data context. The results are chilling, because this isn't a leaflet dropping from the sky that you read. It's really about understanding who you are at an attribute level, and understanding who you are from a perception level, and really dealing with the psychology, either to incite you or to suppress you. I think it's deeply concerning, but I also think that there are really good opportunities for us to do things that are very positive, one of which, for instance, that immediately comes to mind is the ability to allow people to understand their decision process. If you have a decision cloud, you can actually look at and see your journey, your path along your decision path. That's not something that's readily available in a-- >> The role of the community, too, we've been observing and we're digging into, I'm sure you have at some level, too, the role of community is, look at open source software, it's been a great example of successful consensus within communities. As a way to balance potential over-amplification, or overreaction, or biases that could be checked or balanced together, as an interesting new approach. Do you guys see any of that in the decision cloud where there's new data sources coming in around communities and ecosystems? >> I think that what's interesting about communities is they tend to be self-forming, right? You can try to force people together, but they tend to be self-forming. If people share a particular concept or a belief, then there's a certain amount of attraction. I think that what's interesting is the ability to try to measure that, and to try to figure out how you can then expand that community with different beliefs and different viewpoints, so that you get something that is not so homogeneous, but is more representative. And so, that's something that we hope, we can't necessarily predict it, but we hope that that's something that decision cloud would be able to influence. >> Well, Chuck, it's been great to have you on theCUBE. I want to definitely follow up on some of those deeper conversations. I got to ask you a personal question. How long have you been at this, how did you get here? I mean, you been scratching this itch for how many years? How did you get to this point, because, has it been a lot of research you've been doing, is it other ventures? Tell your story. What's motivating you to get to this point? >> Yeah, basically, the better part of 25 years. My background is both in computer science and behavioral biometrics, so I've always been interested in behavior and classification of behavior, and trying to figure out from the standpoint or the discipline of computer science, how do you effectively really integrate the two. One of the biggest riddles, if you will, which, actually, the code name of our product internally is Conundrum, is how do you solve the conundrum of decision-making? We haven't solved it. I think we have a pretty good understanding of it, but by the same token, that seems to be the last big frontier, the last big open space. That was something that I've pretty much worked my entire career to get to this point, being able to have a phenomenal team to be able to solve this problem. >> Well, we'll check out Element Data, great stuff. It's a systems problem now, you said, it's not one thing. A lot of interplay and a lot of dependencies and a lot of interaction, a lot of data. >> A lot of data. >> A lot of data. Thank you so much for coming on and spending the time. Chuck Davis is the CTO of Element Data. Check him out. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for a CUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching. (dramatic music)

(Upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Orlando Florida, It's theCUBE covering PentahoWorld 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of PentahoWorld, brought to you, of course, by Hitachi Vantara, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost James Kobielius. We're joined by Charles Gaddy, he is the Business Development Manager at Melissa Data. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Great, thank you for having me. >> So tell us, tell our viewers a little bit about Melissa Data and what you do there. >> Well, Melissa is a data quality and identity assurance company, so we have been around for 30 years. And we're a 30 year old start up you might say. Very innovative in what we do, and the way we address our problems. We are the strategic partner for Pentaho as it relates to data quality. So most of our data quality solutions are embedded and available within the Pentaho stack. So my particular role there is to facilitate global sales and alliances, and Pentaho is one of our global alliances. >> Okay, so that's the, it's a strategic alliance, and so what is your relationship now with Hitachi Vantara? >> That's a great question, because now that we're with Hitachi Vantara, one of the things we're focusing on is a strategy around data quality blue prints. Data quality blueprints are something that Pentaho brought in to that relationship, or that new company, right? And it's a powerful way that they sell their solutions, and craft the message around their solutions in a way that sounds less technical and more engaging, I think. And I'll give you a bit of an opinion there, and so we're very excited to be one of the first companies, from a partner perspective, to do a blueprint that's not strictly Pentaho based. >> Is it, you're talking about blueprints, is it a consultative marketing and sales tool? Or is it a solution accelerator template, or a bit of both? >> You stole my thunder, I was going to say I think it's a bit of both actually, yes. The nice thing that I've seen about the other ones they've done and the one that we're crafting is, you're taking a use case, effectively, and you're breaking down what you're bringing to that use case, with a sprinkle of technology, so that they know it is a technical solution, as well as a consultative sale. Then you're telling them about the problem you're going to solve with it, and the expected outcomes after you've solved that problem. So, the first use case is around customer data quality, within online retail, right. So, everything from preventing packages from being misplaced by using address verification, and geocoding in order to improve the quality of address data that you're shipping, all the way through to customer demographics, so you can understand and overlay demographic information about the customers you're targeting online. All of these solutions, we bring the data piece of that, and Pentaho brings the other elements to make that combined blueprint. >> So just in hearing you say those things, I'm thinking back to what we heard on the main stage today, about the potential of the dark side, in the sense of the models maybe being used for nefarious reasons, I mean, how do you guard against that? >> Well, you know, there's that AI component, which was very much of the Skynet comment I believe, and then there's data quality, which, having been around data quality for quite a while, there's a rules based element to that, that isn't necessarily AI based, so you don't necessarily have as much of that dark side to deal with, what you are rightfully pointing out, is the idea that you're using elements of data that represent someone's identity potentially, right. And how do you protect and safeguard that? And our 30 years in the business really gives us an insight on how to protect the data in ways that insure the quality of it, but then also insure that it's not used for nefarious purposes, like you said. >> Okay, so as you know, Pentaho co-founder James Dixon coined the term "the data lake". So how has Melissa partnered and integrated with Pentaho in that way? >> And how does data governance and quality ride upon and leverage the data lake to be effective? >> Okay, so it's a two part question. Looking at it from the perspective of what was described in the data lake, things are going in to the data lake. Well, you can take two approaches to it, I guess. You can try to boil that data lake, which is very challenging, you know. Or you can extract quality information out of it, and so, data quality, whether you're pushing data quality into the lake, or whether you're trying to extract actionable intelligence out of the lake, fits on both sides and gives you that step towards analytics and intelligence that you need. Right, otherwise it's a lake. The other side you mentioned is the governance side of it. So, our components that run, and our services that run as a part of what is offered with Pentaho, give elements of a feature like profiling, so you're able to profile the data as it's moving between these different places, see the anomalies, potentially address the anomalies, if that's something you need to do, or at least be aware of them so you know what's going on, right, and you're constantly monitoring. >> Does that involve AI or machine learning on your end to do that, the anomaly detection within the data lake? >> There's elements of our technology that leverage pieces of that for sure. I wouldn't call it full blown AI from that perspective, but there are some patents and some proprietary technology that we have, that gives us a unique approach on how to profile that data, and how to make that profiled information actionable within Pentaho. >> So, you talked about the retailer use case, and that's how we can make sure the packages are delivered to the right places, and the demographic. What are some other examples of ways that we can use Melissa Data? >> Okay, so as luck would have it, the first blueprint we're doing is the customer one I just mentioned, but we're already talking with Hitachi Vantara about the idea of doing a financial services one, right. And so in that fin tech space, not only would you be able to leverage matching deduplication, which they call more of an identity resolution in that element, but you'd also be able to leverage the elements of data that we bring to bear to say that you are who you say you are. So you bundle those together in a fin tech, or a financial services model, and you've got a different use case from customers and online retail, but you still have a very compelling joint offering as you're pushing data through. >> Which is particularly relevant in light of the Equifax breach, which will haunt us for the rest of our lives, we keep hearing about this. >> Yes, you have to be very careful with the data that you utilize, absolutely. >> One of the terms we keep hearing a lot is future proofing. What does that mean to you at Melissa Data? How do you describe your approach to future proofing your business? >> So, it's interesting because, as I mentioned, we're pretty much a 30 year old start up, so as a function of that, we future proofed ourselves. Because we've evolved and adapted, you have to be nimble, you have to be agile, as well as embracing agile concepts, which, there's two different meanings there, if you will. And so, in looking at that, you want to make sure that you've got the right technology set, and that that technology set can be easily adapted and evolve over time, right. I think those are they key things we've done as a company, with the solutions we've built, and much like, I heard today on the keynote, that Hitachi had focused to do, we've done a very similar thing, because we started in direct marketing, with a database of zip codes. And now we offer matching, and we offer these cloud solutions and identity. So we've had a very similar track to that story you heard earlier. >> You've said it a couple of times, you're a 30 year old start up. How do you stay innovative? I mean, you're a 30 year old start up that now has employees in four locations across the U.S. dealing in huge businesses. How do you keep that start up mentality? The hungry mentality, and the hack-y mentality, I guess I should say too? >> One of the real advantages we've got there, is our CEO and founder has always innovated. From the first company before Melissa, all the way up through today, he's always been one to say we need to try that next thing, right. Pentaho, five or six years ago, was that next thing that he and our VP of strategy said we should try, and now I'm sitting here with you today. There's a top down, bottom up approach, if that makes sense to you, because if you have an idea, you can bring that idea forward as well. >> You consider the next thing, and Hitachi Vantara's been saying that in spades today here at this event, it's also a Wikibon research focus, the Edge, Edge computing, Edge analytics, data, machine data coming from Edge devices, how is Melissa Data, in partnership with Pentaho, moving towards this Edge to outcome frame of reference, or frame for building innovative solutions, where does that fit with your roadmap going forward? >> So our perspective on that, much like when we first engaged with them, data was going into the data lake, let's just get it all in there, get it all in there, get it all in there, get it all in there, right. Well, eventually you have to make that data actionable. You're going to have a reverse scenario with the Edge. There's a lot of data, small amounts, small chunks, that are going to be everywhere, I think it was talked about being on cell phones, and everywhere else. The idea that you can extend the reach of data quality along with the reach of analytics, to actually make sure you're getting the best data you can, to feed those microanalytics, to feed that, that's a critical part that we see as potential. >> Looking ahead, what are some of the problems that you want to solve, just sort of in the next year, the next five years, what are some of the things that you're thinking about and keeping you up at night right now. >> We're doing some very interesting things with globally unique identifiers, I'll call them that, not a GUID in that sense, but the idea that every address on the planet could be indexed, right. And then the idea beyond that was every email and every phone and every identity around that could be indexed. Then when you're dealing with a massive amount of indexes, becomes a lot faster and a lot easier to match, to dedupe, to do other data quality tasks. So, it's one of the projects that our CEO is very interested in, is this sort of indexing or massive indexing table concept. And so that's one of the things I know we're very focused on as an organization, and how that can feed all of our other technologies. >> How would that work, I mean, I know it's a research process in motion, but >> And keep in mind I am the head of global sales and alliances, so don't bust out all the too technical a question. (laughter) >> Yeah, so this is identity resolution at a massive scale, does it involve an internet of things, almost like a, slap me on the wrist, a graph, a social graph of you and all the identities you may have running on various Edge devices? You meaning a user. >> I think there is the potential for pieces. >> Remember, I'm a geek here so. >> Yeah, yeah there's a potential for pieces of that to be used in that way. Like an example we got approached about was, someone who wanted to have a cookie that represented the address that they just captured from this particular interaction on the web, right. Well, imagine if you could use this table of addresses that was indexed, right, to get that number back, and you just store that number constantly with that cookie, you'd never have to store that address data again, you could match that index against other indexes, and the uses go on and on and on. >> James: Right. >> So it's not complete in any way, so I wouldn't want to venture to answer the implete part of your question, but the idea that you can represent things with a series of numbers is how the internet got started, effectively, right, so you could look at something similar. >> Right. >> So you're here at PentahoWorld, and you said you're a biz dev manager, what is your, what do you hope to take away from it? I mean, are you talking? >> You mean outside of business? (laughter) >> Get some deals done, exactly. But what are you learning, what are you hearing, are you sharing best practices, and how do you do that here? >> Well, we're pretty tightly connected into different elements of what is now Hitachi Vantara, right, so we work with their office in Singapore, we work with them engaged all over the world, on many different fronts, and so it's nice to be here one, so you can literally put some faces with some names, right. And as you look at some of their different initiatives, like cyber security that I've seen, over there somewhere, and some of the other initiatives they've got going, they march a bit in lock step with what we're doing, and the nice thing about being here, is the ability to sort of reconcile that and see and talk about how we can go forward together with those elements, if that makes sense. >> James: Right. >> Absolutely. Well Charles, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it's been a great talking to you. >> James: Yeah absolutely. >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of PentahoWorld in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Hey welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at Node Summit 2017 in Downtown San Francisco. 800 people hanging out at the Mission Bay Conference Center talking about development and really monumental growth curve. One of the earlier presenters have one project last year. I think 15 this year, 22 in development and another 75 toy projects. The development curve is really steep. IBM's here, Microsoft, Google, all the big players so there is a lot of enterprise momentum as well and we're happy to have our next guest. Who's really started this show and one of the main sponsors of the show He's Charles Beeler. He's a general partner at Rally Ventures. Charles great to see you. >> Good to be back. Good to see you. >> Yeah, absolutely. Just kind of general impression. You've been doing this for a number of years I think when we talked earlier. Ryan Dawles interview from I don't even know what year it is I'd have to look. >> 2012, January 2012. >> 2012. It's still one of our most popular interviews of all the thousands we've done on the theCUBE, and now I kind of get it. >> Right place, right time but it was initially a lot. In 2011, we were talking about nodes. Seemed like a really interesting project. No one was really using it in a meaningful way. Bryan Cantrell from Joint. I know you all have talked before, walked me through the Hello World example on our board in my office, and we decided let's go for it. Let's see if we can get a bunch of enterprises to come and start talking about what they're doing. So January 2012, there were almost none who were actually doing it, but they were talking about why it made sense. And you fast forward to 2017, so Home Away was the company that actually had no apps. Now 15, 22 in development like you were mentioning and right now on stage you got Twitter talking about Twitter light. The breath and it's not just internet companies when you look at Capital One. You look at some of the other big banks and true enterprise companies who are using this. It's been fun to watch and for us. We do enterprise investing so it fits well but selfishly this community is just a fun group of people to be around. So as much as this helps for our rally and things. We've always been in awe of what the folks around the node community have meant to try to do, and it did start with Ryan and kind of went from there. It's fun to be back and see it again for the fifth annual installment. >> It's interesting some of the conversations on stage were also too about community development and community maturation and people doing bad behavior and they're technically strong. We've seen some of these kind of growing pains in some other open source communities. The one that jumps out is Open Stack as we've watched that one kind of grow and morph over time. So these are good. There's bad problems and good problems. These are good growing pain problems. >> And that's an interesting one because you read the latest press about the venture industry and the issues are there, and people talk more generally about the tech industry. And it is a problem. It's a challenge and it starts with encouraging a broad diverse group of people who would be interested in this business. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And getting into it and so the node community to me is always been and I think almost any other out source community could benefit at looking at not just how they've done it, but who the people are and what they've driven. For us, one of the things we've always tried to do is bring a diverse set of speakers to come and get engaged. And it's really hard to go and find enough people who have the time and willingness to come up on stage and it's so rewarding when you start to really expose the breath of who's out there engaged and doing great stuff. Last year, we had Stacy Kirk, who she runs a company down in L.A. Her entire team pretty much is based in Jamaica brought the whole team out. >> Jeff: Really? >> It was so much fun to have whole new group people. The community just didn't know, get to know it and be in awe of what they're building. I thought the electron conversation. They were talking about community, that was Jacob from GitHub. It's an early community though. They're trying to figure it out. On the Open Stack side, it's very corporate driven. It's harder to have those conversations. In the node community, it's still more community driven and as a result they're able to have more of the conversation around how do we build a very inclusive group of people who can frankly do a more effective job of changing development. >> Jeff: Right, well kudos to you. I mean you open up the conference in your opening remarks talking about the code of conduct and it's kind of like good news bad news. Like really we have to talk about what should basically be. It's common sense but you have to do it and that's part of the program. It was Woman Attack Wednesday today so we've got a boat load of cards going out today with a lot of the women and it's been proven time and time again. That the diversity of opinions tackling any problem is going to lead to a better solution and hopefully this is not new news to anybody either. >> No and we have a few scholarship folks from Women who code over here. We've done that with them for the last few years but there are so many organizations that anyone who actually wants to spend a little time figuring out how can I be apart of the, I don't know if I'd call it solution but help with a challenge that we have to face. It's Women who code. It's Girls who code. It's Black girls code and it's not just women. There's a broad diverse set of people we need to engage. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> We have a group here, Operation Code who's working with Veterans who would like to find a career, and are starting to become developers and we have three or four sponsored folks from Operation Code too. And again, it's just rewarding to watch people who are some of the key folks who helped really make node happen. Walking up to some stranger who's sort of staring around. Hasn't met anybody. Introduce himself say, "Hey, what are you interested in "and how can I help?" And it's one of the things that frankly brings us back to do this year after year. It's rewarding. >> Well it's kind of interesting piece of what node is. Again we keep hearing time and time again. It's an easy language. Use the same language for the front end or the back end. >> Yep. >> Use a bunch of pre-configured model. I think Monica from Intel, she said that a lot of the codes they see is 2% is your code and everything you're leveraging from other people. And we see in all these tech conferences that the way to have innovation is to label more people to contribute. That have the tools and the data and that's really kind of part of what this whole ethos is here. >> And making it. Just generally the ethos around making it easier to develop and deploy. And so when we first started, Google was nowhere to be found and Microsoft was actually already here. IBM wasn't here yet and now you look at those folks. The number of submissions we saw for talk proposals. The depth of engagement within those organizations. Obviously Google's got their go and a bunch of it but node is a key part of what they're doing. Node and I think for both IBM and also for Google is the most deployed language or the most deployed stack in terms of what they're seeing on their Cloud, Which is why they're here. And they're seeing just continued growth, so yeah it drives that view of how can we make software easier to work with, easier to put together, create and deploy and it's fun to watch. Erstwhile competitors sitting comparing notes and ideas and someone said to me. One of the Google folks, Miles Boran had said. Mostly I love coming to this because the hallway chatter here is just always so fascinating. So you go hear these great talks and you walk out and the speakers are there. You get to talk to them and really learn from them. >> I want to shift gears a little. I always great to get a venture capitalist on it. Everybody wants to hear your thoughts and you see a lot of stuff come across your desk. As you just look at the constant crashing of waves of innovation that we keep going through here and I know that's apart of why you live here and why I do too. And Cloud clearly is probably past the peak of the wave but we're just coming into IoT and internet of things and 5G which is going to be start to hit in the near future. As you look at it from an enterprise perspective. What's getting you excited? What are some of the things that maybe people aren't thinking about that are less obvious and really the adoption of enterprises of these cutting edge technologies. Of getting involved in open source is really phenomenal thing of environment for start ups. >> Yeah and what you're seeing as the companies, the original enterprises that were interested in nodes. You decided to start deploying. The next question is alright this worked, what else can we be doing? And this is where you're seeing the advent of first Cloud but now how people are thinking about deployment. There's a lot of conversation here this week about ServerList. >> Jeff: Right, right. We were talking about containers. Micro services and next thing you know people are saying oh okay what else can we be doing to push the boundaries around this? So from our perspective, what we think about when we think about when we think of enterprise and infrastructure and Dev Ops et cetera is it is an ever changing thing. So Cloud as we know it today is sort, it's done but it's not close to being finished when you think about how people are making car-wny apps and deploying them. How that keeps changing, questions they keep asking but also now to your point when you look at 5G. When you look at IoT, the deployment methodology. They're going to have to change. The development languages are going to change and that will once again result in further change across the entire infrastructure. How am I going to go to place so I would say that we have not stopped seeing innovative stuff in any of those categories. You asked about where do we see kind of future things that we like. Like NEVC, if I don't say AI and ML and what are the other ones I'm suppose to say? Virtual reality, augmented reality, drones obviously are huge. >> It's anti drones. Drone detection. >> We look at those as enabling technology. We're more interested from a rally perspective and applied use of those technologies so there's some folks from GrowBio here today. And I'm sure you know Grail, right they raise a billion dollars. The first question I asked the VP who is here. I said, did you cure cancer yet? 'Cause it's been like a year and a half. They haven't yet, sorry. But what's real interesting is when you talk to them about what are they doing. So first they're using node but the approach they're taking to try to make their software get smarter and smarter and smarter by the stuff they see how they're changing. It's just fundamentally different than things people were thinking about a few years ago. So for us, the applied piece is we want to see companies like a Grail come in and say, here's what we're doing. Here's why and here's how we're going to leverage all of these enabling technologies to go accomplish something that no one has ever been able to do before. >> Jeff: Right, right. And that's what gets us excited. The idea of artificial intelligence. It's cool, it's great. I love talking about it. Walk me through how you're going to go do something compelling with that. Block chain is an area that we're spending, have been but continue to spend a lot of time looking right now not so much from a currency perspective. Just very compelling technology and the breath of our capability there is incredible. We've met in the last week. I met four entrepreneurs. There are three of them who are here talking about just really novel ways to take advantage of a technology that is still just kind of early stages, from our perspective of getting to a point where people can really deploy within large enterprise. And then I'd say the final piece for us and it's not a new space. But kind of sitting over all of this is security. And as these things change constantly. The security needs are going to change right. The foot print in terms of what the attack surface looks like. It gets bigger and bigger. It gets more complex and the unfortunate reality of simplifying the development process is you also sometimes sort of move out the security thought process from a developer perspective. From a deployment perspective, you assume I've heard companies say well we don't need to worry about security because we keep our stuff on Amazon. As a security investor, I love hearing that. As a user of some of those solutions it's scares me to death and so we see this constant evolution there. And what's interesting you have, today I think we have five security companies who are sponsoring this conference. The first few years, no one even wanted to talk about security. And now you have five different companies who are here really talking about why it matters if you're building out apps and deploying in the Cloud. What you should be thinking about from a security perspective. >> Security is so interesting because to me, it's kind of like insurance. How much is enough? And ultimate you can just shut everything down and close it off but that's not the solution. So where's the happy medium and the other thing that we hear over and over is it's got to be baked in all the layers of the cake. It can't just be the castle and moat methodology anymore. >> Charles: Absolutely. >> How much do you have? Where do you put it in? But where do you stop? 'cause ultimately it's like a insurance. You can just keep buying more and more. >> And recognize the irony of sitting here in San Francisco while Black Hat's taking place. We should both be out there talking about it too. (laughing) >> Well no 'cause you can't go there with your phone, your laptop. No, you're just suppose to bring your car anymore. >> This is the first year in four years that my son won't be at DEF CON. He just turned seven so he set the record at four, five and six as the youngest DEF CON attendee. A little bitter we're not going this year and shout out because he was first place in the kid's capture the flag last year. >> Jeff: Oh very good. >> Until he decided to leave and go play video games. So the way we think about the question you just asked on security, and this is actually, I give a lot of credit to Art Covella. He's one of our venture partners. He was the CEO at our safe for a number of years. Ran it post DMC acquisition as well is it's not so much of a okay, I've got this issue. It could be pay it ransom or whatever it is. People come in and say we solve that. You might solve the problem today but you don't solve the problem for the future typically. The question is what is it that you do in my environment that covers a few things. One, how does it reduce the time and energy my team needs to spend on solving these issues so that I can use them? Because the people problem in security is huge. >> Right. >> And if you can reduce the amount of time people are doing automated. What could be automated task, manual task and instead get them focused on hired or bit sub, you get to cover more. So how does it reduce the stress level for my team? What do I get to take out? I don't have unlimited budget. That could be buying point solutions. What is it that you will allow me to replace so that the net cost to me to add your solution is actually neutral or negative, so that I can simplify my environment. Again going back to making these work for the people, and then what is it that you do beyond claiming that you're going to solve a problem I have today. Walk me through how this fits into the future. They're not a lot of the thousands of-- >> Jeff: Those are not easy questions. >> They're not easy questions and so when you ask that and apply that to every company who's at Black Hat today. Every company at RSA, there's not very many of that companies who can really answer that in a concise way. And you talk to seesos, those are the questions they're starting to ask. Great, I love what you're doing. It's not a question of whether I have you in my budget this year or next. What do I get to do in my environment differently that makes my life easier or my organization's life easier, and ultimately nets it out at a lower cost? It's a theme we invest in. About 25% of our investments have been in the securities space and I feel like so far every one of those deals fits in some way in that category. We'll see how they play out but so far so good. >> Well very good so before we let you go. Just a shout out, I think we've talked before. You sold out sponsorship so people that want to get involved in node 2018. They better step up pretty soon. >> 2018 will happen. It's the earliest we've ever confirmed and announced next year's conference. It usually takes me five months before >> Jeff: To recover. >> I'm willing to think about it again. It will happen. It will probably happen within the same one week timeframe, two week timeframe. I actually, someone put a ticket tier up for next year or if you buy tickets during the conference the next two days. You can buy a ticket $395 for today. They're a $1000 bucks. It's a good deal if people want to go but the nice thing is we've never had a team that out reaches the sponsors. It's always been inbound interest. People who want to be involved and it's made the entire thing just a lot of fun to be apart of. We'll do it next year and it will be really fascinating to see how much additional growth we see between now and then. Because based on some of the enterprises we're seeing here. I mean true Fortune 500, nothing to do with technology from a revenue perspective. They just used it internally. You're seeing some really cool development taking place and we're going to get some of that on stage next year. >> Good, well congrats on a great event. >> Thanks. And thanks for being here. It's always fun to have you guys. >> He's Charles Beeler. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE, Node Summit 2017. Thanks for watching. (uptempo techno music)