(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to the CUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 22, live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin. Dave Nicholson is back with me. Welcome back to the set. We're pleased to welcome William Bell as our next guest. The executive vice president of products at Phoenix NAP. William, welcome to the CUBE. Welcome back to the CUBE. >> Thank you, thank you so much. Happy to be here. >> Talk to us a little, and the audience a little bit about Phoenix NAP. What is it that you guys do? Your history, mission, value prop, all that good stuff. >> Absolutely, yeah. So we're global infrastructures as a service company, foundationally, we are trying to build pure play infrastructure as a service, so that customers that want to adopt cloud infrastructure but maybe don't want to adopt platform as a service and really just, you know, program themselves to a specific API can have that cloud adoption without that vendor lock in of a specific platform service. And we're doing this in 17 regions around the globe today. Yeah, so it's just flexible, easy. That's where we're at. >> I like flexible and easy. >> Flexible and easy. >> You guys started back in Phoenix. Hence the name. Talk to us a little bit about the evolution of the company in the last decade. >> Yeah, 100%. We built a data center in Phoenix expecting that we could build the centralized network access point of Phoenix, Arizona. And I am super proud to say that we've done that. 41 carriers, all three hyperscalers in the building today, getting ready to expand. However, that's not the whole story, right. And what a lot of people don't know is we founded an infrastructure as a service company, it's called Secured Servers no longer exists, but we founded that company the same time and we built it up kind of sidecar to Phoenix NAP and then we merged all of those together to form this kind of global infrastructure platform that customers can consume. >> Talk to us about the relationship with VMware. Obviously, here we are at VMware Explore. There's about seven... We're hearing 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are ready to be back to hear from VMware and it's partner ecosystem. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that we have this huge history with VMware that maybe a lot of people don't know. We were one of the first six, the SPPs in 2011 at the end of the original kind of data center, whatever, vCloud data center infrastructure thing that they did. And so early on, there was only 10 of us, 11 of us. And most of those names don't exist anymore. We're talking, Terramark, Blue Lock, some of these guys. Good companies, but they've been bought or whatnot. And here's plucky Phoenix NAP, still, you know, offering great VMware cloud services for customers around the globe. >> What are some of the big trends that you're seeing in the market today where customers are in this multi-cloud world? You know this... I love the theme of this event. The center of the multi-cloud universe. Customers are in that by default. How do you help them navigate that and really unlock the value of it? >> Yeah, I think for us, it's about helping customers understand what applications belong where. We're very, very big believers both in the right home. But if you drill down on that right home for right applicator or right application, right home, it's more about the infrastructure choices that you're making for that application leads to just super exciting optimizations, right. If you, as an example, have a large media streaming business and you park it in a public called hyperscaler and you just eat those egress fees, like it's a big deal. Right? And there are other ways to do that, right. If you need a... If your application needs to scale from zero cores to 15,000 cores for an hour, you know, there are hyperscalers for that, right. And people need to learn how to make that choice. Right app, right home, right infrastructure. And that's kind of what we help them do. >> It's interesting that you mentioned the concept of being a pure play in infrastructure as a service. >> Yeah. >> At some point in the past, people would have argued that infrastructure as a service only exists because SaaS isn't good enough yet. In other words, if there's a good enough SaaS application then you don't want IaaS because who wants to mess around with IaaS, infrastructures as a service. Do you have customers who look at what they're developing as so much a core of what their value proposition is that they want to own it? I mean, is that a driving factor? >> I would challenge to say that we're seeing almost every enterprise become a SaaS company. And when that transition happens, SaaS companies actually care a lot about the cost basis, efficiency, uptime of their application. And ultimately, while they don't want to be in the data center business anymore, it doesn't mean that they want to pay someone else to do things that they feel wholly competent in doing. And we're seeing this exciting transition of open source technologies, open source platforms becoming good enough that they don't actually have to manage a lot of things. They can do it in software and the hardware's kind of abstracted. But that actually, I would say is a boon for infrastructure as a service, as an independent thing. It's been minimized over the years, right. People talk about hyperscalers as being cloud infrastructure companies and they're not. They're cloud platform companies, right. And the infrastructure is high quality. It is easy to access and scale, right, but it's ultimately, if you're just using one of those hyperscalers for that infrastructure, building VMs and doing a bunch of things yourself, you're not getting the value out of that hyperscaler. And ultimately that infrastructure's very expensive if you look at it that way. >> So it's interesting because if you look at what infrastructure consists of, which is hardware and software-- >> Yeah. >> People who said, eh, IaaS as is just a bridge to a bright SaaS future, people also will make the argument that the hardware doesn't matter anymore. I imagine that you are doing a lot of optimization with both hardware and stuff like the VMware cloud stack that you deploy as a VCPP partner. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> So to talk about that. >> Absolutely. >> I mean, you agree. I mean, if I were to just pose a question to you, does hardware still matter? Does infrastructure still matter? >> Way more than people think. >> Well, there you go. So what are you doing in that arena, specifically with VCPP? >> Yeah, absolutely. And so I think a good example of that, right, so last VMworld in person, 2019, we showcased a piece of technology that we had been working with Intel on for about two years at the time which was Intel persistent memory DC, persistent memory. Right? And we launched the first VMware cloud offering to have Intel DC persistent memory onboard. So that customers with the VMs that needed that technology could leverage it with the integrations in vSphere 6.7 and ultimately in seven more, right. Now I do think that was maybe a swing and a miss technology potentially but we're going to see it come back. And that specialized infrastructure deployment is a big part of our business, right. Helping people identify, you know, this application, if you'd have this accelerator, this piece of infrastructure, this quality of network can be better, faster, cheaper, right. That kind of mentality of optimization matters a lot. And VMware plays a critical role in that because it still gives the customer the operational excellence that they need without having to do everything themselves, right. And our customers rely on that a lot from VMware to get that whole story, operationally efficient, easy to manage, automated. All those things make a lot of difference to our VMware customers. >> Speaking of customers, what are you hearing, if anything, from customers, VMware customers that are your joint customers about the Broadcom acquisition? Are they excited about it? Are they concerned about it? And how do you talk about that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that everyone that's in the infrastructure business is doing business with Broadcom, all right. And we've had so many businesses that we've been engaged with that have ultimately been a acquiree. I can say that this one feels different only in the size of the acquisition. VMware carries so much weight. VMware's brand exceeds Broadcom's brand, in my opinion. And I think ultimately, I don't know anything that's not public, right-- >> Well, they rebranded. By the way, on the point of brand, they rebranded their software business, VMware. >> Yeah. I mean, that's what I was going to say. That was the word on the street. I don't know if there's beneficial. Is that a-- >> Well, that's been-- >> But that's the word, right? >> That's what they've said. Well, but when a Avago acquired Broadcom they said, "we'll call ourselves Broadcom." >> Absolutely. Why wouldn't you? >> So yeah. So I imagine that what's been reported is likely-- >> Likely. Yeah, I 100% agree. I think that makes a ton of sense and we can start to see even more great intellectual property in software. That's where, you know, all of these businesses, CA, Symantec, VMware and all of the acquisitions that VMware has made, it's a great software intellectual property platform and they're going to be able to get so much more value out of the leadership team that VMware has here, is going to make a world of difference to the Broadcom software team. Yeah, so I'm very excited, you know. >> It's a lot of announcements this morning, a lot of technical product announcements. What did you hear in that excites you about the evolution of VMware as well as the partnership and the value in it for your customers? >> You know, one of our fastest growing parts of our business is this metal as a service infrastructure business and doing very, very... Using very specific technologies to do very interesting things, makes a big difference in our world and for our customers. So anything that's like smartNICs, disaggregated hypervisor, accelerators as a first class citizen in VMware, all that stuff makes the Phoenix NAP story better. So I'm super excited about that, right. Yeah. >> Well, it's interesting because VCPP is not a term that people who are not insiders know of. What they know is that there are services available in hyperscale cloud providers where you can deploy VMware. Well, you know, VMware cloud stack. Well, you can deploy those VMware cloud stacks with you. >> Absolutely. >> In exactly the same manner. However, to your point, all of this talk about disaggregation of CPU, GPU, DPU, I would argue with it, you're in a better position to deploy that in an agile way than a hyperscale cloud provider would be and foremost, I'm not trying to-- >> No, yeah. >> I'm not angling for a job in your PR department. >> Come on in. >> But the idea that when you start talking about something like metal as a service, as an adjunct or adjacent to a standard deployment of a VMware cloud, it makes a lot of sense. >> Yeah. >> Because there are people who can't do everything within the confines of what the STDC-- >> Yes. >> Consists of. >> Absolutely. >> So, I mean... Am I on the right track? >> No, you are 100% hitting it. I think that that point you made about agility to deliver new technology, right, is a key moment in our kind of delivery every single year, right. As a new chip comes out, Intel chip or Accelerator or something like that, we are likely going to be first to market by six months potentially and possibly ever. Persistent memory never launched in public cloud in any capacity but we have customers running on it today that is providing extreme value for their business, right. When, you know, the discreet GPUs coming from the just announced Flex series GPU from Intel, you're likely not going to see them in public cloud hyperscalers quickly, right. Over time, absolutely. We'll have them day one. Isolate came out, you could get it in our metal as a service platform the morning it launched on demand, right. Those types of agility points, they're not... Because they're hyperscale by nature. If they can't hyperscale it, they're not doing it, right. And I think that that is a very key point. Now, as it comes in towards VMware, we're driving this intersection of building that VCF or VMware cloud foundation which is going to be a key point of the VMware ecosystem. As you see this transition to core based licensing and some of the other things that have been talked about, VMware cloud foundation is going to be the stack that they expect their customers to adopt and deliver. And the fact that we can automate that, deliver it instantaneously in a couple of hours to hardware that you don't need to own, into networks you don't need to manage, but yet you are still in charge, keys to the kingdom, ready to go, just like you're doing it in your own data center, that's the message that we're driving for. >> Can you share a customer example that you think really just shines a big flashlight on the value that you guys are delivering? >> We definitely, you know, we had the pleasure of working with Make-A-Wish foundation for the last seven years. And ultimately, you know, we feel very compelled that every time we help them do something unique, different or what not, save money, that money's going into helping some child that's in need, right. And so we've done so many things together. VMware has stepped up as the plate over the years, done so many things with them. We've sponsored stuff. We've done grants, we've done all kinds of things. The other thing I would say is we are helping the City of Hope and Translational Genomics Research Institute on sequencing single cell RNA so that they can fight COVID, so that they can build cure, well, not cures but build therapies for colon cancer and things like that. And so I think that, you know, this is a driving light for us internally is helping people through efficiency and change. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking for more stories like that. We're looking... If you have a need, we're looking for people to come to us and say, "this is my problem. This is what this looks like. Let us see if we can find a solution that's a little bit different, a little bit out of the box and doesn't have to change your business dramatically." Yeah. >> And who are you talking to within customers? Is this a C level conversation? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say that we would love it to be... I think most companies would love to have that, you know, CFO conversation with every single customer. I would say VPs of engineering, increasingly, especially as we become more API centric, those guys are driving a lot of those purchasing decisions. Five years ago, I would've said director of IT, like director of IT. Now today, it's like VP of engineering, usually software oriented folks looking to deliver some type of application on top of a piece of hardware or in a cloud, right. And those guys are, you know, I guess, that's even another point, VMware's doing so much work on the API side that they don't get any credit for. Terraform, Ansible, all these integrations, VMware doing so much in this area and they just don't get any credit for it ever, right. It's just like, VMware's the dinosaur and they're just not, right. But that's the thing that people think of today because of the hype of the hyperscaler. I think that's... Yeah. >> When you're in customer conversations, maybe with prospects, are you seeing more customers that have gone all in on a hyperscaler and are having issues and coming to you guys saying help, this is getting way too expensive? >> Yeah, I think it's the unexpected growth problem or even the expected growth problem where they just thought it would be okay, but they've suffered some type of competitive pressure that they've had to optimize for and they just didn't really expect it. And so, I think that increasingly we are finding organizations that quickly adopted public cloud. If they did a full digital transformation of their business and then transformation of their applications, a lot of them now feel very locked in because every application is just reliant on x hyperscaler forever, or they didn't transform anything and they just migrated and parked it. And the bills that are coming in are just like, whoa like, how is that possible? We are typically never recommending get out of the public cloud. We are just... It's not... If I say the right home for the right application, it's by default saying that there are right applications for hyperscalers. Parking your VMware environment that you just migrated to a hyperscaler, not the right application. You know, I would love you to be with me but if you want to do that, at least go to VMC on AWS or go to OCVS or GCVE or any of those. If that's going to go with a Google or an Amazon and that's just the mandate and you're going to move your applications, don't just move them into native. Move them into a VMware solution and then if you still want to make that journey, that full transformation, go ahead and make it. I would still argue that that's not the most efficient way but, you know, if you're going to do anything, don't just dump it all into cloud, the native hyperscaler stuff. >> Good advice. >> So what do typical implementations look like with you guys when you're moving on premises environments into going back to the VCPP, STDC model? >> Absolutely. Do you have people moving and then transforming and re-platforming? What does that look like? What's the typical-- >> Yeah. I mean, I do not believe that anybody has fully made up their mind if exactly where they want to be. I'm only going to be in this cloud. It's an in the close story, right. And so even when we get customers, you know, we firmly believe that the right place to just pick up and migrate is to a VCPP cloud. Better cost effectiveness, typically better technology, you know service, right. Better service, right. We've been part of VMware for 12 years. We love the technology behind VMC's, now AWS is fantastic, but it's still just infrastructure without any help at all right, right. They're going to be there to support their technology but they're not going to help you with the other stuff. We can do some of those things. And if it's not us, it's another VCPP provider that has that expertise that you might need. So yes, we help you quickly, easily migrate everything to a VMware cloud. And then you have a decision point to make. You're happy where you are, you are leveraging public cloud for a certain applications. You're leveraging VMware cloud offerings for the standard applications that you've been running for years. Do you transform them? Do you keep them? What do you do? All those decisions can be made later. But I stress that repurchasing all your hardware again, staying inside your colo and doing everything yourself, it is for me, it's like a company telling me they're going to build a data center for themselves, single tenant data center. Like no one's doing that, right. But there are more options out there than just I'm going to go to Azure, right. Think about it. Take the time, assess the landscape. And VMware cloud providers as a whole, all 17,000 of us or whatever across the globe, people don't know that group of individuals of the companies is the third or fourth potentially largest cloud in the world. Right? That's the power of the VMware cloud provider ecosystem. >> Last question for you as we wrap up here. Where can the audience go to learn more about Phoenix NAP and really start test driving with you guys? >> Absolutely. Well, if you come to phoenixnap.com, I guarantee you that we will re-target you and you can click on a banner later if you don't want to stay there. (Lisa laughs) But yeah, phoenixnap.com has all the information that you need. We also put out tons of helpful content. So if you're looking for anything technology oriented and you're just, "I want to upgrade to Ubuntu," you're likely going to end up on a phoenixnap.com website looking for that. And then you can find out more about what we do. >> Awesome, phoenixnap.com. William, thank you very much for joining Dave and me, talking about what you guys are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve as the world continues to evolve at a very dynamic pace. We appreciate your insights. >> Absolutely, thank you so much >> For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the CUBE live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Dave and I will be joined by a guest consultant for our keynote wrap at the end of the day in just a few minutes. So stick around. (upbeat 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 back to theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas. Day two of Dell Technologies World. I am Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, my cohost. And we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time the CIO of TGen, Translational Genomics, James Lowey. James, welcome to theCUBE. >> Ah, thank you so much, it's great being here. >> So, genomics, really interesting topic that we want to get into and understand. How are you making IT and digital and workforce transformation real in it, but get give our viewers and overview of TGen. It started out about 16 years ago as a very collaborative effort within Arizona and really grew. Talk to us about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, TGen is a nonprofit biomedical research institute based in Phoenix, Arizona. As you mentioned, we've been around about 16 years. We were, the inception of the institute was really built around bringing biomedical technology into the sate of Arizona. And we're fortunate enough to have a really visionary and gifted leader in Dr. Jeffrey Trent, who is one of the original guys to sequence the human completely for the first time. So I don't know if you get any better street cred than that when it comes to genomics. >> And you mentioned, before we went live, give our viewers an overview of what it took to sequence the human genome in terms of time and money and now, how 15 years later, how fast it can be done. >> Yeah, so, you know we've moved from a point where it costs billions of dollars and took many years to complete the first sequence to today where it takes a little bit over a day and about $3 thousand. So it's really the democratization of the technology is driving clinical application, which, in turn, is going to benefit all of us. >> Yeah, James, genomics is one of those areas, when we talk about there is the opportunity of data, but there's also the challenge of data, because you've got to, I have to imagine, orders of magnitude more data than your typical company does, so talk to us a little bit about the role of data inside your organization. >> Well, data is our lifeblood. I mean, we've been generating terascale then petascale for many years now. And the fact is, is every time you sequence a patient you're generating about 4 terabytes of data for one patient. So if you're doing 100 patients, do the math, or you're doing a thousand patients. We're talking just an immense volume of data. And really, data is what drives us because that information that's encoded in our genome is nothing but data, right? It's turning our analog selves into a digital format that then we can interrogate to come up with better treatments to help patients. >> Can you bring this inside? When you talk about the infrastructure that enables that. You know, what I was teasing out with the last question, it's not just about storing data, you need to be able to access the data, you need to be able to share data. So as the CIO, what's your purview? Give us a little bit of a thumbnail sketch as to what your organization-- >> Oh yeah, yeah, no that's great. You know, so we've been a long time Isilon customer. The scale-out storage is what really has enabled us to be successful. Our partnership with Dell EMC has spanned many years and we're fortunate enough to have enough visibility within the organization to get early access to technologies. And really, that's really important because the science moves faster than the IT. So having things like scale-out, super fast flash, you know, having new Intel processors, all these things are what really enable us to do our job and to be successful. >> How have, you've been with TGen for a long time now, you've been the CIO for about three years. Talk to us about the transformation of the technology and how you've evolved it to not just facilitate digital transformation and IT transformation, but I imagine security transformation with human genetic data is of paramount importance. >> You know, that's a really good point. Security is always on my mind, for obvious reasons because I would say there's nothing more personally identifiable than your genome. There's the laws around these things still have not been totally codified. So we're sitting at a point today where we're still uncertain to how exactly best protect this very, very important data. But to that end, we tend to fail in the closed state of doing things, everything's encrypted. You know, we are big believers in identity management and making sure that the right people have access to the right data at the right time. We've utilized SecureWorks, for instance, for perimeter, logging, and to get their expertise. 'Cause one of the things I've learned in my tenure as CIO is that it's really all about the people and they're what drive your success. And so I'm fortunate enough to have a team that's amazing. These folks are some of the best people in their field and really do a great job at helping us, protect the data, get access to the data, as well as thinking about what the next iteration is going to look like. >> When you look at, just as a whole, the security and data protection, you think about everybody, if they get those home kits, or things like that, how has that evolved the last few years? I'm curious if that impacts your business. >> Well, I think it does impact our business insofar as it creates awareness. And you know, I think it's really fantastic when I attend a cocktail party or something and people come up and ask, say, "You know, should I get the 23andMe Ancestry?" And they're really engaged and interested and wanting to learn about these things. And I think that's going to spur questions to be asked when they go in to be treated by a physician. Which is really important. I think, I'm a believer that we should own our own data, especially our genomic data, because what's more personal than that? And so we have a lot of challenges ahead, I think, in IT in particular, in protecting, storing, and providing that data to patients. >> Just a quick followup, I'm sure you secure stuff. What's the cocktail answer for that? If, you know, should I get that? Can I trust this company? Is my insurance company and everybody else going to get that? What do you advise the average consumer? >> I would say read the terms of use agreement very carefully. >> so the theme of the event, James, make it real. You know, few things are more real than our own data, our own genomes, what does that theme mean to you from an application perspective? How are you making digital transformation real? And things like the alliance with City of Hope to impact disease study and cures? What is that reality component to you? >> Yeah, it has, you know, I really like the make it real theme, and I think it's something that we are doing every day. I think it just speaks to, you know, taking technology, applying it for meaningful use, to actually make a difference, and to do something that has real impact. And I think that at TGen, I've been empowered to build systems that can do that, that can help our scientists and ultimately help patients. You mentioned City of Hope. We're, our alignment with them is amazing. They have just hired a Chief Digital Officer as they go through a digital transformation of their own. And you know, we're on board in striving to help them go through this process because, as you might be aware, everything's about the data. And that's where we have to focus. >> James, if you go back, you talked about your scale-out architecture with Isilon. How do you report back to the business as to the results you're doing? What are the, do you have any hero metrics or things that you point out that says this is why we're successful. This is why we've made the right decision. This is why we should be doing this in the future. >> Well, I think we're especially fortunate that we can measure our success in people's lives. So, meeting a kid who's in full remission from brain cancer who was treated using drugs that were derived from being sequenced and run through our labs and then our computational infrastructure and having them say thank you, I think is pretty much a metric that I don't know how you can beat that. >> Talk about making it real. That's where it's really impactful. I'd love to understand your thoughts as you continue to evolve your transformation as a company. We've heard a lot about emerging technologies and what Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, is doing to enable organizations and customers to be able to realize what's possible with artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT. What are your thoughts about weaving in those emerging technologies to make what TGen delivers even more impactful. >> Well you just said three of my favorite things that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about. You know, artificial intelligence is going to be absolutely, is required to interrogate the vast amounts of data that are being created. I mean, this is all unstructured data, so you have to have systems that can store and present that data in such a way that you're going to be able to do something meaningful. IoT is another area where we're spending a lot of time and energy in what we believe is like quantitative medicine. So basically taking measurements all the time to see about changes and then using that to hopefully gain insight into treatment of diseases. You know, machine learning and some of these technologies are also absolutely going to be critical, especially when we start building out drug databases and being able to match the patient with the drug. >> Yeah, James, bring us inside to your organization a little bit. What kind of skill sets do you have to have to architect, operate, a theme of this show, they've got Andy McAfee, who's from MIT, we've spoken to, it's about people and machines. You can't have one without the other. You need to be able to marry those two. How does an organization like yours get ready for that and move forward? >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I think the technology enables the people, and you have to have the right people to help make the decisions and what technologies you get and apply. And I think that the skill sets that we look for is generally people who have a broad view of the world. You know, people who are particular experts, at least in the IT side are of limited use, because we need people to be able to switch gears quickly and to think about problems holistically. So I'd say most of the IT folks are working several different disciplines and are really good at that. On the scientific side it's a little different. We're looking for data scientists all the time. So if anybody's watching and wants to come work for a great place, TGen, look us up. Because that's really where we're headed. You know, we have a lot of biologists, we have a lot of molecular biologists, we have people who do statistics, but it's not quite the same as data science. So that's kind of the new area that we're really focused on. >> All right, so James, one of the things I always love to ask when I get a CIO here is, when you're talking to your peers in the industry, how do you all see the role of the CIO changing? What are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing? >> So, yeah, it's a great question. I think the role's changing towards being empowered in the business. And I think that as that has to be part of the transformation. Is you have to be aligned completely with what your objectives are. And we're fortunate, you know, we are. And I feel very lucky to have a boss and a boss's boss who both understand the importance and the value that we bring to the organization. I also see that in the industry, especially in healthcare, a need for folks who are focused beyond just the EMR and daily IT things, to really start looking beyond maybe where you're comfortable. I know that I stretch my boundaries, and I think that in order to be successful as a CIO I think that's what you're going to have to do. I think you're going to have to push the envelope. You're going to have to look for new technologies and new ways to make a difference. >> So last question, big impact that TGen has made to the state of Arizona. I read on LinkedIn that you like building high-performance teams. What are some of the impacts that this has made for Arizona but also maybe as an example for other states to look to be inspired to set up something similar? >> That's really a great question. I think, you know, Arizona made an investment, and the way that it's easy to measure. So if you come down to the TGen building and realize that that building was the first building that is now surrounded by buildings, including a full-on cancer center, that's all in downtown Phoenix. And it's almost the if you build it they will come, but it's not just the infrastructure, it really is about the people and identifying the right folks to come in and help build that, to invest in them and to provide basically the opportunity for success. You know, Arizona has really been fortunate, I think, in being able to build out this amazing infrastructure around biotechnology. And you know, but we're just getting going. I mean, we are, we've only been doing this for about 16 years and I look forward to the next 16. >> Well thanks so much, James, for stopping by and talking about how you're applying technologies, not just from Dell EMC but others as well to make transformation real, to make it real across IT, digital, workforce, security, and doing something that's really literally has the opportunity to save lives. Thanks so much. >> Well thank you very much, it's been a pleasure. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are live day two of Dell Technologies World. We'll be back after a lunch break. We'll see you then.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Interconnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Interconnect 2017 from Las Vegas everybody, this is the Cube the leader in live tech coverage. Bina Halmann is here, she's a Cube alumn and the vice president of offering management for storage and software defined at IBM and she's joined by Tahir Ali, who's the director of Enterprise Architecture at the City of Hope Medical Center. Folks, welcome to the Cube- >> Tahir: Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much for coming on. >> Bina: Thanks for having us. >> So Bina we'll start with you been on the cube a number of times. >> Yes. >> Give us the update on what's happening with IBM and Interconnect. >> Yeah, no it's a great show. Lots of exciting announcements and such. From an IBM perspective storage we've been very busy. Filling out our whole flash portfolio. Adding a complete set of hybrid cloud capabilities to our software defined storage. It's been a great 2016 and we're off to a great start in 2017 as well. >> Yeah [Inaudible] going to be here tomorrow >> That's right. so everbody's looking forward to that. So Tahir, let's get into City of Hope. Tell us about the organization and your role. >> Sure, so City of Hope if one of the forty seven comprehensive cancer centers in the nation. We deal with cancer of course, HIV, diabetes and other life threatening diseases. We are maybe 15 to 17 miles east of Los Angeles. My role in particular, I'm a Director of Enterprise Architecture so all new technologies, all new applications that land on City of Hope, we go through all the background. See how the security is going to be, how it's going to implement in our environment, if it's even possible to implement it. Making sure we talk to our business owners, figure out if there's a disaster recovery requirement if they have a HA requirement, if it's a clinical versus a non-clinical application. So we look at a whole stack and see how a new application fits into the infrastructure of City of Hope. >> So you guys to a lot of research there as well or? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> So we are research, we are the small EDU and we are the medical center so- >> So a lot of data. >> A whole lot of data. Data just keeps coming and keeps coming and it's almost like never ending stream of data. Now with the data it's not only just data- Individual data is also growing. So a lot of imaging that happens for cancer research, or cancer medical center, gets bigger and bigger per patient as the three dimensional imaging is here. We look at resolution that is so much more today than it used to be five years. So every single image itself is so much bigger today than it used to be five years ago. Just a sheer difference in the resolution and the dimensions of the data. >> So what are the big drivers in your industry, and how is it affecting the architecture that you put forward? >> Right, so I think that a couple of huge things that are maybe two or three huge conversion points, or the pivot points that we see today. One of them is just the data stream as I mentioned earlier. The second is because a lot of the PHI and hipaa data that we have today- Security is a huge concern in a lot of the healthcare environment. So those two things, and it's almost like a catch 22. More data is coming in you have to figure out where you're going to put that data. But at the same time you got to make sure every single bit is secured enough. So there's a catch 22 where its going, where you have to make sure that data keeps coming and you keep securing the same data. Right so, those two things that we see pivoting the way we strategize around our infrastructure. >> It's hard, they're in conflict in way, >> Tahir: Absolutely. >> Because you've got to lock the data up but then you want to provide accessibilty... >> Tahir: Absolutely. >> as well. So paint a picture of your infrastructure and the applications that it's supporting. >> Right, so our infrastructure is mainly in-house, and our EMR is currently off-prem. A lot of clinical and non-clinical also stay in-house with us in our data center on-prem. Now we are kind of starting to migrate to cloud technologies more and more, as just things are ballooning. So we are in that middle piece where some of our infrastructure in in-house, slowly we are migrating to cloud. So we are at like at a hybrid currently. And as things progress I think more and more is going to go to the cloud. But for a medical center security is everything. So we have to be very careful where our data sits. >> So Bina when you hear that from a client >> Bina: Mm-hmm (affirmative) >> how do you respond? And you know, what do you propose? >> Bina: Yeah. >> How does it all... >> Yeah well- >> come about. >> You know as we see clients like Tahir, and some of the requirements in these spaces. Security is definitely a key factor. So as we develop our products, as we develop capabilities we ensure that security is a number one focus area for us. Whether it's for the on-prem storage, whether it's for the data that's in motion from moving from the on-prem into the cloud, and secure completely all the way through where the client has the control on the security, the keys et cetera. So a lot goes into making sure as we architect these solutions for our clients, that we focus on security. And of course some of the other requirements, industry specific requirements, are all also very important and we focus in on those as well. Whether it's regulatory or compliance requirements, right. >> So from a sort of portfolio standpoint what do you guys do when there's all kinds of innovations over that last four or five years coming in with flash, we heard about object stores this morning, we got cloud, you got block, you've got file, what are you guys doing? >> So we do a lot of different things, so from having filers in-house to doing block storage from- And the worst thing now these days with big data is, as the data is growing the security needs are growing but the end result with the researchers and our physicians the data availability needs to be fast. So now comes a bigger catch 22, where the data is so huge but at the same time they want that all of that very quickly on their fingertips. So now what do you do? That's where we bring in a lot of the flash to upfront it. 10 to 12 percent of our infrastructure has flash in the front, this way all the rendering, or all the rights that happen or- First land on the flash. So everybody who writes, feels like it's a very quick write. But there's a petabytes and petabytes behind the scene that could be on-prem, it could be on the cloud, but they don't need to know that. Its, everything lands so fast that it looks like it's just local and fast. So there's a lot of crisscross that is happening, and started maybe four five years ago with the speed of data is not going to be slow. The size of data increasing like crazy and then security is becoming a bigger and bigger concern as you know. Maybe every month or month and a half there's a breach somewhere that people have to deal with. So we have to handle all of that in one shot. So you know, it's more than just infrastructure itself. There's policies, there's procedures, there's a lot that goes around. >> So when you think about architecting, obviously you think about workloads and- >> Tahir: Of Course. >> what the workload requirement is, it's no a one size fits all. >> Tahir: Right right. >> So where do you start, do you start with- >> Tahir: Sure. >> Sort of, you know a conversation with the business? >> Sure, sure. >> How much money do you got? >> So we don't really deal with the money at all. We provide the best possible solution for that business requirement. So the conversation happens, "tell us what you're looking for." "We're looking for a very fast XYZ." "Okay tell us what exactly you need." "Here's the application, we want it available all the time, "and this is how it's going to look like, "it can't be down because our patients are depending on it". So on and so forth. We take that, we talk to our vendors. We look at exactly how it's architected. If it's- Let's just say it's three-tiered. There's a web, there's an app and then there's a database. You already know by default that if it's a database it's going to go on a high transactional IO where either it's a flash or a very fast spinning disc with a lot of spindles. From there you get the application. Could be a virtual machine, could not be a virtual machine. From there you get to a web tier. Web tiers are usually always on a virtual infrastructure. Then you realize if you want to put it on a DMZ so people from outside can get to it, or it's only for internal use. Then you draw the entire architecture diagram out. Then you price it out, you said "Okay if you want this to be "always on, maybe you need a database that is always on." Right, or you need a database that replicates 24/7. That has a cost associated to that. If you have an application- If wanted two application maybe it's a costier application it could be HA it could not be HA, so there's a cost to that. Web servers are kind of, you know cheaper tier of virtual machines. And then there's a architecture diagram, all the requirements are met in there. And there's a cost associated to that, saying business unit here is how much it's going to cost and this is what you will have. >> Okay so that's where the economics, >> Exactly >> comes into play. Okay this is what your requirements are >> Yep. >> This is, based on that what we would advise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And then essentially it's can you afford it. >> Right right. (laughs) If you want to buy a house that is a three bedrooms and three bathrooms in Palo Alto, versus a six bedrooms and then seven bathrooms in Palo Alto it's going to be a financial impact that you might not like. (laughs) So it's one of those, right. So what you want has a financial impact on your end solution and that's what we provide. We don't force somebody to get something. We just give them- Hey how many kids do you have? Four kids, then maybe you need a five bedroom house. Right so we kind of do that. >> Is it common discussion? >> Yeah it is, it is. And that's, as you know, some of the things we do focus on. Right, as we- In addition to the security aspect of it of course, is around the automation, around driving in the efficiencies. Because at the end of the day, you know, whether as capital expands or operational expands you want to optimize for both of those. And that's where as we architect the solutions, develop the offerings, we ensure that we build-in capabilities, whether it's storage efficiency capabilities like virtualization, or de-dupe or compression. But as well as this automated tiering. Tiering off from flash to lower tier, whether it's on-prem lower, slower- >> Tahir: Could be a disc. >> speed disc or tape or even off to the cloud, right. And being able to do that, provide that I think addresses many of our clients' needs. That's a common requirement that we do hear. >> And as mentioned 10 to 12 percent of it if flash. >> Tahir: Right. >> The rest, you know ninety percent or so is something else. That's economics, correct? >> Right so- >> And how do you see that changing? >> So I think the percentage won't really change. I think the data size will change. So you have to just think about things, just in generality. Just what you do today. You know when you take a picture, maybe you look at it the first three days, even if you have a phone. After three days, maybe you look at it maybe once every two months. After three months, guess what? You will always never look at them. They're kind of moved away from even your memory banks in your head. Then you say, "Oh I was looking through it". And then maybe once in awhile you look at it. So you have to look at the behavior. A lot of the applications have the same behavior, where the new data is required right away. The older the data gets, the more archival state it gets. It gets warmer and then it gets colder. Now, as a healthcare institute we have to devise something that is great financially, also has the security, and put away in a way where we can pull it without having pain to put it back. So that's where the tiering comes to play. Doesn't matter how we do it. >> And your planning assumption is that the cost disparity between flash and other forms of storage will remain. That other- >> So- >> forms will remain cheaper. >> Right, so we are hoping, but I think the hybrid model of flash- So once you do a hybrid with flash and disc, then it becomes a little more economically suitable for a lot of the people. They do the same thing, they do tiering, but they make it look like a bigger platform. So it's like, "We can give you a petabyte "but it's going to look like flash." It doesn't work like that. They might have 300 terabyte of flash, 700- but it's so integrated quickly, that they can pull it and push it. Then there's a read-aheads write-aheads that takes that advantage to make it look like it. That will drop your pricing. The special sauce that transfer the data between slower and flash discs. >> Two questions for you. >> Sure. >> What do you look for in a supplier? And what drives you nuts about a supplier, that you don't want a supplier to do? >> Sure. So personally speaking, this is just my personal opinion. A stable environment a tried and true vendor is important. Somebody who has a core competency of doing this for a longer term is what I personally look at. There's a lot of new players who come in, they stay for a couple of years, they explode, somebody takes them over or they just kind of vanish. Or certain people outside of their core competency. So if Toyota started to make- Because they wanted to save money they said, "Hey Toyota from now on will make "the tires that are called Toyota." But Toyota is not a tire company. Other companies, Bridgestone and Michelin's have been making tires for a very long time. So the core competency of Toyota is building the cars and not the tires. So when I see these people, or the vendors saying, "Okay I can give you this this this this and this and that and the security and that. Maybe three out of those five things are not their core competency. So I start to wonder if the whole stack is worth it because there's going to be some weakness because they don't have the core competency. That's what I look at. What drives me crazy is, every single time somebody comes to meet with me they want to sell me everything and the kitchen sink under one umbrella. And the answer is one single pane of glass to manage everything. Life is not that easy, I wish it was but it really is not. (laughs) So those two things are- >> Selling the fantasy right. Now Bina we'll give you the last word. Interconnect, give us your final thoughts. What should we know about what's going on in software-defined and IBM storage. >> Yeah you know lots of announcements at Interconnect. You heard, as you talked about, cloud optic storage we've got great new pricing models and capabilities and overall software-defined storage. We're continuing to innovate, continue add capabilities like analytics and you'll see us doing more and more on cognitive. Cognitive storage management to get more out of the data, help clients get more and more information and value out of their data. >> What's the gist of the new pricing models, just um- >> Flexible pricing model depending on how the both hybrid as well as the three tiered on-prem and in between. But really cold as well as a flexible pricing model where depending on how you use the data you know you get consistent pricing so between on-prem and in the cloud. >> So more cloud-like pricing >> Yes, exactly. >> Great. >> Yep. >> Easier consumption, excellent. Well Bina Tahir thanks very much for coming to the cube. >> Yes yes thank you. >> Dave: Pleasure having you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Dave: You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest and a wrap, right after this short break. Right back. (upbeat music)

>> Presenter: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2016. Brought to you by Oracle. Now, here's your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> Welcome back, everyone. We are here live in San Francisco, for three days of wall-to-wall coverage of Oracle OpenWorld 2016. The big story, Oracle moving through the cloud. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My cohost this week, Peter Burris, head of Research at SiliconANGLE Media, General Manager of Wikibon Research. Our next guest is Ashish Mohindroo, who is the Vice President of Oracle Cloud on the good old market side. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks John, same here. >> John: We have a mutual friend from Prasada. (laughter) Say hello. >> Hi Prakash! >> John: Prakash! He's good. Okay, entrepreneurs are all moving to the cloud, obviously it's a green field for them. But Oracle is a big company, this is clearly the mandate, this isn't cloud washing. People are saying oh they're cloud washing, but not really, Oracle is putting the effort in, we've been watching and documenting it. Obviously some critical analysis that's due here and there but for the most part, the progression is good, they're moving to the cloud. Can you give us an update because SaaS business, everyone sees that, knows that, the Platform as a Service, last year, was the big push, a lot of progress, so give us a quick one minute overview of what's the update on PaaS, Platform as a Service, and what's different this year about Infrastructure as a Service. >> Definitely, well thanks John, I think you hit the nail on the head with the fact that Oracle is the biggest secret in the industry, being the biggest cloud company, right, the most exciting cloud company in the valley. What we've really done is if you look at our numbers, we just announced our Q1 earnings, our business SaaS and PaaS business grew about 77%. It's the fastest growing SaaS and PaaS growth rate in the industry, compared to any other vendor, including Amazon, including Microsoft, and if you compare that to the Q4 numbers, where we grew at 66%, that was again faster than Amazon and Microsoft. So the market is expanding and Oracle is the fastest growing business in there. In addition to that-- >> John: By revenue or by percentage growth? >> By percentage growth. So we're close to about a $4 billion run rate on SaaS and PaaS as of Q1 FY17. >> That's across all the different, as a service? >> It's primarily SaaS, PaaS infrastructure and overall cloud revenue for us. >> John: Okay, got it. >> A big chunk of that is attributed to SaaS and PaaS. Now I want to give you some other statistics in terms of the size of our cloud business. You know there are about 98 million plus daily active users on a cloud. In addition, we do about 50 billion plus transactions a day on Oracle Cloud, right, so the massive scale, but we are operating across 195 different countries and growing, we have 19 plus regional data centers, I mean expanding more into China and Middle East, so the growth and the pace and the expansion of the business is massive and we believe that this market is growing at such an unprecedented rate that Oracle is well positioned to take advantage of that and really provide and end-to-end offerings to our customers. >> Larry Ellison in his key note last night and Rob Hope, our Editor in Chief at SiliconANGLE, who runs our editorial, grabbed the head line, his quote was Amazon, talking to Amazon, Amazon, your lead is over. Okay, what does that mean? What does that mean? Saying that your lead is over in the sense that we're closing the gap or enjoy it while you have it, we're coming after you? >> A number of things. One is that we're really making new exciting announcements into the infrastructure of the service play market. So you're going to hear within the next couple of days in terms of new offerings. We today announced the fact that we expanded our infrastructure's service capabilities from virtualized environments to also bare metal, which is something that Amazon doesn't offer. And the advantage of that is that companies can now run more high performance applications on bare metal service, versus being bothered by having to share that capacity to compute space with other applications and other customers. The other big thing what Oracle is doing is providing an end-to-end offering. So if you think about it, right, Amazon started out being with a compute layer. They said look, if you want to spin up a server, and just have to compute capacity, storage capacity, great, you don't need to invest in that, you don't need to buy it on premise, you can go to us. What customers are really looking for is yes, you can spin up a server, then what do you do next? You got to be able to build an application, you got to be able to scale that application, monitor that application, integrate that application, run analytics on that, and then at some point, do an end-of-life. So you want to have a complete application life cycle and management so you need an integrated capabilities. Today if you look at the public cloud offerings, you got to piece that together for multiple vendors. Even in Amazon, they provide you the basic services, but then you have to go to their partners to kind of fill in those pieces, manage multiple contracts, worry about integration, Oracle is providing an end-to-end capability. So today we also announced 19 plus additional services on our PaaS layer, from databases to integration, to IOT, so we are really providing you everything you need to not only get your data center moving towards the cloud but also your application development, integration, and management capabilities, that have not been available in the market today from a single vendor. So Oracle, with Larry, what he was really claiming was the market is up for grabs, we are the only vendor providing everything from end-to-end and we are going to be aggressively competing in the core infrastructure space with our new expanded offerings. >> What do you think Oracle's biggest advantage is? >> Sorry? >> What do you think Oracle's biggest advantage in the cloud is? I mean, you talked about the size of it, what do you think, fundamentally, is going to set Oracle apart from everybody else in the cloud? >> So part of that is the comprehensive nature of our offerings. From IAS to PaaS to SaaS. There's no other vendor that has that breadth. Customers are looking for a single throat to choke, in some ways, or a single vendor to deal with for a majority of the services, so we have a big advantage there. The second is our application ecosystem. If you look at the number of customers we have, the size of our offerings from ERP to CRM, to ACM, you can see that we provide everything, there's an economy around that, so customers want to build extensions, they want to integrate through these applications, and they really want to drive their business to one primary vendor, so Oracle has that advantage. The other stuff as we look at the cloud environment today, only 6% of all workloads are running on public infrastructure. That's growing at about 50% year over year. Now, 90% plus of workloads are still relying on on-premise environments, where do you think those are running on? Those are primarily running on Oracle infrastructures, whether it's Oracle databases, Oracle metalware, or also on-premise Oracle applications. So we believe customers want to have the same enterprise-grade capabilities on the cloud, which we've been working on for 40 years, now we learn from that experience, we learned from what our competitors have done over the last ten years, we bring that together to our new cloud infrastructure, PaaS and SaaS offerings. So from a technology perspective, the breadth perspective, and the customer experience perspective, we believe Oracle has a tremendous advantage, which is kind of hard to close a gap for it in terms of other competitors. >> The declining revenue on licenses, and the earnings call was pointed out, some color was given by Mark Heard on that but the growth in cloud was higher than the decline in on-prem licenses. And then Larry came over the top and said well, Microsoft has been moving all their customers to the cloud, we really haven't moved our people over. And then Mark Heard said we're in the long game, I'm kind of playing at that I want to get to a question, which is interesting, the database is very sticky. You guys have an in to all of your applications so it seems to me that the core of the show here is talking about infrastructure as a service, seem to be table stays low cost, high performance, comodotize the IaaS, and then move your customers over. Is that the strategy, is that just the timing? Am I over-reading into this thing, is it a conspiracy theory? >> What it is actually is that customers want high-quality, high-performance capabilities in the cloud, right? They've been used to building their own data centers. There's a reason for that. They could choose the infrastructure that they wanted, the servers that they wanted, the stories they wanted, the compute capacity they really needed, and they want the same experience on the public cloud. But cost was a big factor. So if you look at Amazon, it's very easy to get started but as your application scales, the cost starts to ramp, accelerate really fast, and customers are very wary of that fact that is this really a cost benefit for me in the long run to move to Amazon. One example is a company like Dropbox. That was in the news that brought back the infrastructure from Amazon to in-house, right? Couple of things for that, one was they wanted a better infrastructure and secondly they wanted to lower the costs. With Oracle, what we are saying is cost is a big factor for you to move to the cloud. We're going to take that away. We're going to make sure that you're getting the best performance, the best infrastructure, at the lowest cost possible in the industry, then we're going to give you capabilities to brace moving to the cloud, to migrate to the cloud. You're not going to say only build cloud-native applications in the cloud, but how do you take all these critical business applications, the core infrastructure that you're running today, and be able to transition that to the cloud, so we have new capabilities that we're introducing and infrastructures to servers, called Ravello Cloud Service, for example, that can literally do a lift and shift of all your V-Ems, of virtualized environment workloads, to the cloud. You don't have to rewrite them, you don't have to reconfigure them, all it does is simply point and click and you got them moving there. Nobody in the industry has that native cability coming with us. So we understand the challenges that other companies are going through, and we're giving them the capabilities and a path to move there. On top of that, Oracle went through a similar transition, so we learned a lot from our own internal transition. We went from on-premise systems to actually moving our internal systems to the Oracle Cloud. So we understood the pain, the challenges, and the opportunities that provided us to get that and we bring that same experience back to our customers. >> And as my final question for you, if you could take a minute and explain kind of what you do at Oracle but mainly, what going on in the field. As you guys take this to the customers, what are some of the things you're working on, do you have any events coming up, what's your road map for activities, and how are customers are engaging with Oracle? >> Very good questions, so my responsibility is go to market for Oracle Cloud, so especially for IaaS and PaaS. What we're noticing with our customers is every single conversation that we engage in, any size customer, whether it's a Fortune 500 customer, mid-size, or even a small company, they're all interested in either building out new applications in the cloud, migrating to the cloud, or really retiring their entire data center, and then moving all the workloads into the cloud. So we are noticing the tremendous amount of interest. They're all figuring out strategies of how do you get there. A lot of interest in hybrid clouds. So customers are going to start with new applications, up their applications in the cloud, but they'll still want to retain, because of regulatory compliance, security purposes, some applications in-house, so they want to know how do you kind of built out these hybrid cloud capabilities where you can have the same business model of subscription, metered offerings, within their own data center, and at the same time have the same flexibility to move to the cloud. So for that, we got to introduce our Oracle Cloud machine, or cloud customer capabilities that gives them that option, the flexibility to decide and move at their own pace. >> John: So a lot of education. >> Sorry? >> So you're doing a lot of education. >> Tremendous amount of education, we're actually going to be doing about a 50 plus city roadshow with our Cloud Days and Cloud World, close to OpenWorld. We're doing a lot of virtual-- >> So Cloud World is going to continue, we did the Cloud World in DC with theCUBE there, that was great. You going to do more of those regionally? >> We're going to do a global tour starting in October. We're actually going to be covering AMIA, APAC, North America, and even Latin America and South America so we're going across the world, going to different countries, I think we're covering about 50 plus countries in those events and basically spreading the word out and engaging with every kind of customer to educate them on Oracle and also give them a-- >> So big tent events in regions and then city events, satellite events to hub and spoke off those kinds of activities. >> Absolutely, yes. And doing a lot on the virtual as well, online. >> Yeah. Any virtual reality, walk into an Oracle database with my headset, look at this scheme, it's all screwed up! >> Ashish: That will be the next time around, we aren't there yet for that one. >> Thanks so much for sharing your insight and good luck with your activities, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks John, thanks man. >> Alright, we are here live at Oracle OpenWorld and if you want to join the conversation, go to Twitter and check out the hashtag #thecube, go to siliconangle.com and check out the research at wikibon.com and of course, go to siliconangle.tv, I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris live here in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld 2016. In fact, there's more after this short break. (techno music)