>>Um, okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it. We're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have who's the managing director. Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave. We want to bring him in and get commentary while we end up Dave too. Honestly, the story here is cloud city. We are in the cloud city and all, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming >>On. Thank you, John. And very excited to be here. What Juliet. >>Well, we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert in the year. The only thing standing between bunch of LV and all the great stuff. So a lot of people watching. Thanks for coming on, sir. So you guys got some big news, um, first Erickson partners with you guys on 5g platform, deal with Anthem, as well as, uh, open ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge, a Testament to the industry. I see Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you no stranger to large scale. What's the news. Let's tell us why this Erickson news is so important. Let's start with the Erickson announcement. >>Sure. So John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Erickson for the last few months, uh, the partnership to recent retreat, which is very important to the industry is you're actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not been in isolation. You are in fact in the press release that we have already launched something to get the big telecom Italia in Italy, because you will see that also in the past. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSBs monetize 5g and edge, which is the real team at the moment using Google clouds solutions like the edge computing platform and, and POS, and Erikson's cutting edge 5g components, 5g solutions. And if we can onboard these together at the CSP, such as telecom Italia, that creates massive pain to market efficiency. So that's 0.1 because speed and agility is key John, but then point to it also unlocks a lot of edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, so on, which are already starting to launch together with that. Excellent. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuously cloud native innovation that you just highlighted. John, we are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really time created this cloud native application suite or 5g or whatever. >>Talk about the innovations around cloud, because the message we're hearing him this year at mobile world Congress, is that the public cloud is driving the innovation. And, you know, I can be a little bit over the top. So the telcos are slow. They're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there. They're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept cloud native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that encapsulate that older technology and integrated in. So this is not a rip and replace. Someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the tellers. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >>Smart Antone's photo? We believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is when you talk about that containerization and right once and deploy everywhere type architecture that we are trying to do, that's where the cloud native really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5g solutions with the operators, adjust telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to kick it back again and again, but every deployment, as long as your mantra, genetics and working, you shouldn't be able to have the same experience. >>Yeah, I'm John. I talk all the time in the cube about how developers are really going to drive the edge. You're clearly doing that with your distributed cloud, building out a telco cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving. A lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >>So I think David, first of all, it's a fan best six Sigma in how we are looked in at analytics at the edge, right? So we, uh, we have realized that is a very, very, uh, uh, uh, data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned is there something that we can offer to the edge? Why is that so important in the pandemic era, think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously meeting zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products in manufacturing, that's very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Erickson and a Google cloud carrier gives you that edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to our factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run that AI influence thing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >>Great. Thank you for that. And now the other piece of the announcement of course, is the open, open ran. We've been talking about that all weekend and you know, you well, remember when cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. Of course. Now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component, maybe first talk about the open ran piece, why that's important and how security fits? >>Sure. So first of all, open trend is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple. Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time in the radio layer. We believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and dis-aggregating that radio layer. And why is it so important? 80% of the operators spend globally is on radio. 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that. And if the internet synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware standard for software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in VCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and become still really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution. That's about to get larger in 5g and the capital clarity that 5g needs. >>You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware software with openings of Essex is an extremely important cost dimension to every new site finished that the reason we got to exact open brand was you can now run for a lot of API APIs on the radio net, cetera, that then certainly brings a whole developer community on the radio later. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing, yours and mine experiences at the waist level from the self-doubt. And so that really is what is driving us towards this open grind paper. Come on, we go and >>Got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on open source and the innovation. Um, Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of telco, Dr. She's at a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone 14 years ago was launched. Okay. And you think about open and you mentioned proprietary with the 5g and having Iran be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs increase the surface here of infrastructure. Everyone wins because everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry. And open source is driving. That is Android. The playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with the smart phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at telecom? >>Absolutely. John and the parallel and analogy that you raised is photon. Be believed in the telco world and tossed multi cloud as a unifying software development layer. The app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation, whether it's radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the side of pups, same software planning, everywhere that really allows you that whole development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for systems to come on board. >>That's great stuff. And I was just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at mobile world Congress. I'm all. Thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news and Google regulations on the Erickson Anthem platform, a deal as well as the open Ranton Alliance. Uh, congratulations. Good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on the cube featured segment. So >>Watch that in there. Thank you, John. Thank you. Glad >>To be here. Benching director telecom, industry, solicitor, Google, obviously player. He's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology. They got the chops, Dave, and we're going to now bring this Daniel. Russia says here when to bring up on the stage, Bon Jovi is about to go on behind us Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in cloud city. Dave Bon. Jovi's right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of telco. Dr. And yeah, it was great to see she's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you to Mike. Great to see you. Oh, it's great to be there. We're going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote, but thanks for coming by and closing, >>Swinging by. I never closed down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day-to-day at MWC and in cloud city, really starting to get packed. I mean, everyone's coming in the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. Um, I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening all the buzz about cloud city out there in the hallway. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited with how it's going. >>Well, this is awesome. While we got you here, we want to put you to work being the cube analyst for the segment. You just heard Google. Uh, we broke them in for a breaking news segment. So hard news Erickson partnership. We're in the factory, former Erickson booth. They're not even here, it's now the Calco VR booth, but that's a relation. And then open ran again, open source, you got five G you got open source all happening. What's your take on this? >>You see, you know, there's two big. And I, I talked about it, my keynote this morning, and there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it MWC 21. I certainly wanted to make it about the public cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is open ramp, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and, um, I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, >>Well I loved your keynote. We were here, live. Chloe was here filling in for Dave while David was going to do some research and some breaking stories to you are on stage. And we were talking well, he's like, there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, the money is at the middle of the table and it's changing hands if people don't watch it. And then you onstage that this trillions of dollars, this is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You got operators and builders trying to figure out it feels like dev ops is coming in here. Yeah. I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's >>The, yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the public cloud to double your ARPU without massive cap X expenditure. And I think the CSPs is always viewed to get the increase in ARPU. I got to build out the network. I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our poo, why not? We should do that. Absolutely. >>You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave that arrived the way you're going to become driftwood. As John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they were entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the edge. And that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. It's obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have going to have to embrace cloud native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on it. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. Well, I >>Think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And I think we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to now, historically they haven't had this opportunity historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented. It's available. There's developers out there that know it. Um, and so I think that's the big opportunity and this might be the big use case that they've been looking for with 5g and looking forward to 16th. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSS. >>I think that's an important point because you got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay. Those are pretty safe bets, right. Those guys are going to be around. >>I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. I'm like, um, are you guys nuts? If they're safe, right. Safe >>Bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you got to move fast. Yeah. That's the other piece of it. You've got to change your business model. >>Well, you gotta be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? The snowflake trust Amazon, it sure did to get them where they are. Um, but now that's a >>Great example, John. It really is because there's a company that can move fast, but at the same time they compete with the same time they add incremental value. And so yeah, >>Here, the, you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering telcos. Aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new containers. Do we'll help them manage that operational legacy. But if they don't move, they're going to have an asset. That'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building cap backs and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle Love to get your thoughts on this because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, yeah. Then you can, don't have to try and extract the rents out of the cap ex >>Yeah. I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in telco, right there. I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right. Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their, their investment and uh, for your own benefit, it starts to focus. And we heard, um, all talking about it starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us. Right? Yeah. Well, you're >>Talking about that many times they can do, but you're right. If the conversation hasn't has to go beyond, okay, we're just conductivity. It's gotta be ongoing and be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges. Ah, great. Yeah. Tick that box, right? It's those value added services that you're talking about and it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in a creativity in the industry. It's just >>A blank piece of paper for, well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right. We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving of ads and you're like, how did you write Facebook? But you know, who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother, even your telco, you take your phone with you everywhere. Right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide >>A really great, by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Toby and the investment a hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing. And there's a good, there's a whole new chain, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I don't hold that. We're going and we're going to meet tomorrow. I want, I wanna want to leave that to stay >>In the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That it's, that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that apple, Amazon, Google Facebook now trillion dollar evaluations. It's all about the data and the telcos have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >>There's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them and they certainly can't do without. And we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight it's useless. Right? And so to Togi we announced the launch to Togi, I'll get a little to Tokyo plug in there, right. To Toby is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve and would have been solved already. >>But I think the key is leveraging the public cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provides to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue. Right. And you know, we heard some keynotes from GSA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep. It's not fair. That's like right. South complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they are, they're happy to give you more. >>Yeah. And I think that's the message about the assets do, um, well, one thing I will say is this mobile world Congress is that we've been having a lot of fun here in cloud city. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote of spring to your staff, cloud cities. Beautiful. Spectacular here. Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip. So far, >>Number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered and, and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a blind, um, you know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and, and that was really fun, but yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes. The attendance has reduced, um, you know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups and yeah, the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right. The senior leadership teams are in the booth or having meetings, running amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the public cloud. I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off, I think I'm right in the right moment. Awesome. Do you think that, >>Do you think that they'd think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line struggled and then winners. Yeah. Big time tailwind booming. Obviously the zooms of the world telcos did well. They were up and running. Uh, this, this was good. You think we might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >>Yeah. I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation where digital telco we're digitally enabled, but I think the pandemic really tested this. Right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM or do you need to go to a store in person to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver Sims, all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot right. Agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big telemedicine booming. So >>If you were in a digital business during the pandemic in general, you're out of business maybe unless you were telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh, if >>We don't, I mean, I am not kidding. Right. As an ex CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, right. In some country once a month on Tuesday between 10 and two. And I'm like, how are you doing business? Like that? That's like the dark ages. >>Yeah. This is where the crypto guys got it right. With know your customer. Right. >>Because they have the data. Well, there's a lot of things that come in wrong. We don't want to get the whole show on that, but then you have great to have you drop biopsy Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy Patriots fan. We'd love it. Well, >>Yeah. I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi. Right. Um, we knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. Um, that, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging. Like the way things have been done in telco kind of just shattering the glass ceiling and lots of different ways. Right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me. Right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl? Oh, we're punk >>Rock. They're rock and roll. Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten the clash >>Right. Black flag. Right. I'm a little bit old. >>Accessible. Still >>Edgy. Yeah. So really excited to get them here. Um, I've met him before. Um, and so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk. So >>Yeah, it could be inspiration off after you've talked to space, space X and kind to star lake. >>Right. I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites. And >>I think that's really interesting for >>Rural right. In telco. Right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, um, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower. I think, I mean, that's an interesting idea right there. It's exciting. It's exciting. >>He's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming into this issue. Why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, Hey, you're a B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. Yeah. I think eventually the generation shifts >>It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Yeah. Great, >>Great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >>Awesome team. I'm psyched to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership has said. Yeah. >>Cuba's keep us rocking inside the cloud city. The streets of the city are packed in here. All stuff. Great stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. Bon Jovi is here. We've got a shot. A bunch of we do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? Yup. There it is. Okay. He's about to come on stage and uh, we're gonna take a break here. We're gonna take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation! >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, your host for Cloud Native Insight. When we launched this series, one of the things we wanted to talk about was that we're not just using cloud as a destination, but really enabling new ways of thinking, being able to use the innovations underneath the cloud, and that if you use services in the cloud, that you're not necessarily locked into a solution or can't move forward. And that's why I'm really excited to help welcome to the program, I have the co-founders of Vendia. First we have Dr. Tim Wagner, he is the co-founder and CEO of the company, as well as generally known in the industry as the father of Serverless from the AWS Lambda, and his co-founder, Shruthi Rao, she is the chief business officer at Vendia, also came from AWS where she worked on blockchain solutions. Tim, Shruthi, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us in here, Stu. Great to join the show. >> All right, so Shruthi, actually if we could start with you because before we get into Vendia, coming out of stealth, you know, really interesting technology space, you and Tim both learned a lot from working with customers in your previous jobs, why don't we start from you. Block chain of course had a lot of learnings, a lot of things that people don't understand about what it is and what it isn't, so give us a little bit about what you've learned and how that lead towards what you and Tim and the team are doing with Vendia. >> Yeah, absolutely, Stu! One, the most important thing that we've all heard of was this great gravitational pull towards blockchain in 2018 and 2019. Well, I was one of the founders and early adopters of blockchain from Bitcoin and Ethereum space, all the way back from 2011 and onwards. And at AWS I started the Amazon Managed Blockchain and launched Quantum Ledger Database, two services in the block chain category. What I learned there was, no surprise, there was a gold rush to blockchain from many customers. We, I personally talked to over 1,092 customers when I ran Amazon Managed Blockchain for the last two years. And I found that customers were looking at solving this dispersed data problem. Most of my customers had invested in IoT and edge devices, and these devices were gathering massive amounts of data, and on the flip side they also had invested quite a bit of effort in AI and ML and analytics to crunch this data, give them intelligence. But guess what, this data existed in multiple parties, in multiple clouds, in multiple technology stacks, and they needed a mechanism to get this data from wherever they were into one place so they could the AI, ML, analytics investment, and they wanted all of this to be done in real time, and to gravitated towards blockchain. But blockchain had quite a bit of limitations, it was not scalable, it didn't work with the existing stack that you had. It forced enterprises to adopt this new technology and entirely new type of infrastructure. It didn't work cross-cloud unless you hired expensive consultants or did it yourself, and required these specialized developers. For all of these reasons, we've seen many POCs, majority of POCs just dying on the vine and not ever reaching the production potential. So, that is when I realized that what the problem to be solved was not a trust problem, the problem was dispersed data in multiple clouds and multiple stacks problem. Sometimes multiple parties, even, problem. And that's when Tim and I started talking about, about how can we bring all of the nascent qualities of Lambda and Serverless and use all of the features of blockchain and build something together? And he has an interesting story on his own, right. >> Yeah. Yeah, Shruthi, if I could, I'd like to get a little bit of that. So, first of all for our audience, if you're watching this on the minute, probably want to hit pause, you know, go search Tim, go watch a video, read his Medium post, about the past, present, and future of Serverless. But Tim, I'm excited. You and I have talked in the past, but finally getting you on theCUBE program. >> Yeah! >> You know, I've looked through my career, and my background is infrastructure, and the role of infrastructure we know is always just to support the applications and the data that run business, that's what is important! Even when you talk about cloud, it is the applications, you know, the code, and the data that are important. So, it's not that, you know, okay I've got near infinite compute capacity, it's the new things that I can do with it. That's a comment I heard in one of your sessions. You talked about one of the most fascinating things about Serverless was just the new creativity that it inspired people to do, and I loved it wasn't just unlocking developers to say, okay I have new ways to write things, but even people that weren't traditional coders, like lots of people in marketing that were like, "I can start with this and build something new." So, I guess the question I have for you is, you know we had this idea of Platform as a Service, or even when things like containers launched, it was, we were trying to get close to that atomic unit of the application, and often it was talked about, well, do I want it for portability? Is it for ease of use? So, you've been wrangling and looking at this (Tim laughing) from a lot of different ways. So, is that as a starting point, you know, what did you see the last few years with Lambda, and you know, help connect this up to where Shruthi just left off her bit of the story. >> Absolutely. You know, the great story, the great success of the cloud is this elimination of undifferentiated heavy lifting, you know, from getting rid of having to build out a data center, to all the complexity of managing hardware. And that first wave of cloud adoption was just phenomenally successful at that. But as you say, the real thing businesses wrestle with are applications, right? It's ultimately about the business solution, not the hardware and software on which it runs. So, the very first time I sat down with Andy Jassy to talk about what eventually become Lambda, you know, one of the things I said was, look, if we want to get 10x the number of people to come and, you know, and be in the cloud and be successful it has to be 10 times simpler than it is today. You know, if step one is hire an amazing team of distributed engineers to turn a server into a full tolerance, scalable, reliable business solution, now that's going to be fundamentally limiting. We have to find a way to put that in a box, give that capability, you know, to people, without having them go hire that and build that out in the first place. And so that kind of started this journey for, for compute, we're trying to solve the problem of making compute as easy to use as possible. You know, take some code, as you said, even if you're not a diehard programmer or backend engineer, maybe you're just a full-stack engineer who loves working on the front-end, but the backend isn't your focus, turn that into something that is as scalable, as robust, as secure as somebody who has spent their entire career working on that. And that was the promise of Serverless, you know, outside of the specifics of any one cloud. Now, the challenge of course when you talk to customers, you know, is that you always heard the same two considerations. One is, I love the idea of Lamdba, but it's AWS, maybe I have multiple departments or business partners, or need to kind of work on multiple clouds. The other challenge is fantastic for compute, what about data? You know, you've kind of left me with, you're giving me sort of half the solution, you've made my compute super easy to use, can you make my data equally easy to use? And so you know, obviously the part of the genesis of Vendia is going and tackling those pieces of this, giving all that promise and ease of use of Serverless, now with a model for replicated state and data, and one that can cross accounts, machines, departments, clouds, companies, as easily as it scales on a single cloud today. >> Okay, so you covered quite a bit of ground there Tim, if you could just unpack that a little bit, because you're talking about state, cutting across environments. What is it that Vendia is bringing, how does that tie into solutions like, you know, Lamdba as you mentioned, but other clouds or even potentially on premises solutions? So, what is, you know, the IP, the code, the solution that Vendia's offering? >> Happy to! So, let's start with the customer problem here. The thing that every enterprise, every company, frankly, wrestles with is in the modern world they're producing more data than ever, IMT, digital journeys, you know, mobile, edge devices. More data coming in than ever before, at the same time, more data getting consumed than ever before with deep analytics, supply chain optimization, AI, ML. So, even more consumers of ever more data. The challenge, of course, is that data isn't always inside a company's four walls. In fact, we've heard 80% or more of that data actually lives outside of a company's control. So, step one to doing something like AI, ML, isn't even just picking a product or selecting a technology, it's getting all of your data back together again, so that's the problem that we set out to solve with Vendia, and we realized that, you know, and kind of part of the genesis for the name here, you know, Vendia comes from Venn Diagram. So, part of that need to bring code and data together across companies, across tech stacks, means the ability to solve some of these long-standing challenges. And we looked at the two sort of big movements out there. Two of them, you know, we've obviously both been involved in, one of them was Serverless, which amazing ability to scale, but single account, single cloud, single company. The other one is blockchain and distributed ledgers, manages to run more across parties, across clouds, across tech stacks, but doesn't have a great mechanism for scalability, it's really a single box deployment model, and obviously there are a lot of limitations with that. So, our technology, and kind of our insight and breakthrough here was bringing those two things together by solving the problems in each of them with the best parts of the other. So, reimagine the blockchain as a cloud data implementation built entirely out of Serverless components that have all of the scale, the cost efficiencies, the high utilization, like all of the ease of deployment that something like Lambda has today, and at the same time, you know, bring state to Serverless. Give things like Lambda and the equivalent of other clouds a simple, easy, built-in model so that applications can have multicloud, multi-account state at all times, rather than turning that into a complicated DIY project. So, that was our insight here, you know and frankly where a lot of the interesting technology for us is in turning those centralized services, a centralized version of Serverless Compute or Serverless Database into a multi-account, multicloud experience. And so that's where we spent a lot of time and energy trying to build something that gives customers a great experience. >> Yeah, so I've got plenty of background in customers that, you know, have the "information silos", if you will, so we know, when the unstructured data, you know so much of it is not searchable, I can't leverage it. Shruthi, but maybe it might make sense, you know, what is, would you say some of the top things some of your early customers are saying? You know, I have this pain point, that's pointing me in your direction, what was leading them to you? And how does the solution help them solve that problem? >> Yeah, absolutely! One of our design partners, our lead design partners is this automotive company, they're a premier automotive company, they want, their end goal is to track car parts for warranty recall issues. So, they want to track every single part that goes into a particular car, so they're about 30 to 35,000 parts in each of these cars, and then all the way from manufacturing floor to when the car is sold, and when that particular part is replaced eventually, towards the end of the lifecycle of that part. So for this, they have put together a small test group of their partners, a couple of the parts manufacturers, they're second care partners, National Highway Safety Administration is part of this group, also a couple of dealers and service centers. Now, if you just look at this group of partners, you will see some of these parties have high technology, technology backgrounds, just like the auto manufacturers themselves or the part manufacturers. Low modality or low IT-competency partners such as the service centers, for them desktop PCs are literally the IT competency, and so does the service centers. Now, most of, majority of these are on multiple clouds. This particular auto customer is on AWS and manufactures on Azure, another one is on GCP. Now, they all have to share these large files between each other, making sure that there are some transparency and business rules applicable. For example, two partners who make the same parts or similar parts cannot see each other's data. Most of the participants cannot see the PII data that are not applicable, only the service center can see that. National Highway Safety Administration has read access, not write access. A lot of that needed to be done, and their alternatives before they started using Vendia was either use point-to-point APIs, which was very expensive, very cumbersome, it works for a finite small set of parties, it does not scale, as in when you add more participants into this particular network. And the second option for them was blockchain, which they did use, and used Hyperledger Fabric, they used Ethereum Private to see how this works, but the scalability, with Ethereum Private, it's about 14 to 15 transactions per second, with Hyperledger Fabric it taps out at 100, or 150 on a good day, transaction through, but it's not just useful. All of these are always-on systems, they're not Serverless, so just provisioning capacity, our customers said it took them two to three weeks per participant. So, it's just not a scalable solution. With Vendia, what we delivered to them was this virtual data lake, where the sources of this data are on multiple clouds, are on multiple accounts owned by multiple parties, but all of that data is shared on a virtual data lake with all of the permissions, with all of the logging, with all of the security, PII, and compliance. Now, this particular auto manufacturer and the National Highway Safety Administration can run their ML algorithms to gain intelligence off of it, and start to understand patterns, so when certain parts go bad, or what's the propensity of a certain manufacturing unit producing faulty parts, and so on, and so forth. This really shows you this concept of unstructured data being shared between parties that are not, you know, connected with each other, when there are data silos. But I'd love to follow this up with another example of, you know, the democratization, democratization is very important to Vendia. When Tim launched Lambda and founded the AWS Serverless movement as a whole, and at AWS, one thing, very important thing happened, it lowered the barrier to entry for a new wave of businesses that could just experiment, try out new things, if it failed, they scrap it, if it worked, they could scale it out. And that was possible because of the entry point, because of the paper used, and the architecture itself, and we are, our vision and mission for Vendia is that Vendia fuels the next generation of multi-party connected distributed applications. My second design partner is actually a non-profit that, in the animal welfare industry. Their mission is to maintain a no-kill for dogs and cats in the United States. And the number one reason for over populations of dogs and cats in the shelters is dogs lost, dogs and cats lost during natural disasters, like the hurricane season. And when that happens, and when, let's say your dogs get lost, and you want to find a dog, the ID or the chip-reading is not reliable, they want to search this through pictures. But we also know that if you look at a picture of a dog, four people can come up with four different breed names, and this particular non-profit has 2,500 plus partners across the U.S., and they're all low to no IT modalities, some of them have higher IT competency, and a huge turnover because of volunteer employees. So, what we did for them was came up with a mechanism where they could connect with all 2,500 of these participants very easily in a very cost-effective way and get all of the pictures of all of the dogs in all these repositories into one data lake so they can run some kind of a dog facial recognition algorithm on it and identify where my lost dog is in minutes as opposed to days it used to take before. So, you see a very large customer with very sophisticated IT competency use this, also a non-profit being able to use this. And they were both able to get to this outcome in days, not months or years, as, blockchain, but just under a few days, so we're very excited about that. >> Thank you so much for the examples. All right, Tim, before we get to the end, I wonder if you could take us under the hood a little bit here. My understanding, the solution that you talk about, it's universal apps, or what you call "unis" -- >> Tim: Unis? (laughs) >> I believe, so if I saw that right, give me a little bit of compare and contrast, if you will. Obviously there's been a lot of interest in what Kubernetes has been doing. We've been watching closely, you know there's connections between what Kubernetes is doing and Serverless with the Knative project. When I saw the first video talking about Vendia, you said, "We're serverless, and we're containerless underneath." So, help us understand, because at, you know, a super high level, some of the multicloud and making things very flexible sound very similar. So you know, how is Vendia different, and why do you feel your architecture helps solve this really challenging problem? >> Sure, sure, awesome! You know, look, one of the tenets that we had here was that things have to be as easy as possible for customers, and if you think about the way somebody walks up today to an existing database system, right? They say, "Look, I've got a schema, I know the shape of my data." And a few minutes later I can get a production database, now it's single user, single cloud, single consumer there, but it's a very fast, simple process that doesn't require having code, hiring a team, et cetera, and we wanted Vendia to work the same way. Somebody can walk up with a JSON schema, hand it to us, five minutes later they have a database, only now it's a multiparty database that's decentralized, so runs across multiple platforms, multiple clouds, you know, multiple technology stacks instead of being single user. So, that's kind of goal one, is like make that as easy to use as possible. The other key tenet though is we don't want to be the least common denominator of the cloud. One of the challenges with saying everyone's going to deploy their own servers, they're going to run all their own software, they're going to build, you know, they're all going to co-deploy a Kubernetes cluster, one of the challenges with that is that, as Shruthi was saying, first, anyone for whom that's a challenge, if you don't have a whole IT department wrapped around you that's a difficult proposition to get started on no matter how amazing that technology might be. The other challenge with it though is that it locks you out, sort of the universe of a lock-in process, right, is the lock-out process. It locks you out of some of the best and brightest things the public cloud providers have come up with, and we wanted to empower customers, you know, to pick the best degree. Maybe they want to go use IBM Watson, maybe they want to use a database on Google, and at the same time they want to ingest IoT on AWS, and they wanted all to work together, and want all of that to be seamless, not something where they have to recreate an experience over, and over, and over again on three different clouds. So, that was our goal here in producing this. What we designed as an architecture was decentralized data storage at the core of it. So, think about all the precepts you hear with blockchain, they're all there, they all just look different. So, we use a no SQL database to store data so that we can scale that easily. We still have a consensus algorithm, only now it's a high speed serverless and cloud function based mechanism. You know, instead of smart contracts, you write things in a cloud function like Lambda instead, so no more learning Solidity, now you can use any language you want. So, we changed how we think about that architecture, but many of those ideas about people, really excited about blockchain and its capabilities and the vision for the future are still alive and well, they've just been implemented in a way that's far more practical and effective for the enterprise. >> All right, so what environments can I use today for your solution, Shruthi talked about customers spanning across some of the cloud, so what's available kind of today, what's on the roadmap in the future? Will this include beyond, you know, maybe the top five or six hyper scalers? Can I do, does it just require Serverless underneath? So, will things that are in a customer's own data center eventually support that. >> Absolutely. So, what we're doing right now is having people sign up for our preview release, so in the next few weeks, we're going to start turning that on for early access to developers. That'll be, the early access program, will be multi-account, focused on AWS, and then end of summer, well be doing our GA release, which will be multicloud, so we'll actually be able to operate across multiple clouds, multiple cloud services, on different platforms. But even from day one, we'll have API support in there. So, if you got a service, could even be running on a mainframe, could be on-prem, if it's API based you can still interact with the data, and still get the benefits of the system. So, developers, please start signing up, you can go find more information on vendia.net, and we're really looking forward to getting some of that early feedback and hear more from the people that we're the most excited to have start building these projects. >> Excellent, what a great call to action to get the developers and users in there. Shruthi, if you could just give us the last bit, you know, the thing that's been fascinating, Tim, when I look at the Serverless movement, you know, I've talked to some amazing companies that were two or three people (Tim laughing) and out of their basement, and they created a business, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I got VC funding, and it's usually sub $10,000,000. So, I look at your team, I'd heard, Tim, you're the primary coder on the team. (Tim laughing) And when it comes to the seed funding it's, you know, compared to many startups, it's a small number. So, Shruthi, give us a little bit if you could the speeds and feeds of the company, your funding, and any places that you're hiring. Yeah, we are definitely hiring, lets me start from there! (Tim laughing) We're hiring for developers, and we are also hiring for solution architects, so please go to vendia.net, we have all the roles listed there, we would love to hear from you! And the second one, funding, yes. Tim is our main developer and solutions architect here, and look, the Serverless movement really helped quite a few companies, including us, to build this, bring this to market in record speeds, and we're very thankful that Tim and AWS started taking the stands, you know back in 2014, 2013, to bring this to market and democratize this. I think when we brought this new concept to our investors, they saw what this could be. It's not an easy concept to understand in the first wave, but when you understand the problem space, you see that the opportunity is pretty endless. And I'll say this for our investors, on behalf of our investors, that they saw a real founder market-fit between us. We're literally the two people who have launched and ran businesses for both Serverless and blockchain at scale, so that's what they thought was very attractive to them, and then look, it's Tim and I, and we're looking to hire 8 to 10 folks, and I think we have gotten to a space where we're making a meaningful difference to the world, and we would love for more people to join us, join this movement and democratize this big dispersed data problem and solve for this. And help us create more meanings to the data that our customers and companies worldwide are creating. We're very excited, and we're very thankful for all of our investors to be deeply committed to us and having conviction on us. >> Well, Shruthi and Tim, first of all, congratulations -- >> Thank you, thank you. >> Absolutely looking forward to, you know, watching the progress going forward. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you. >> Thanks, Stu! >> All right, and definitely tune in to our regular conversations on Cloud Native Insights. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and looking forward to hearing more about your Cloud Native Insights! (upbeat electronic music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover virtual experience brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. This is the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, and I'm joined by a couple of guys who were gonna talk through one of HPC ease. Longest partnerships. We've got shells. No Ryan and the Senior director Ecosystem Sales or North America at HP And Dr Rajesh, It's really a Boston. The global head of sales and solutions for the TCS. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >>Yeah, Thank you. >>So, first question for you is I mentioned HP and TCS have been partners for over 30 years. Talk to our audience about the partnership and how it has evolved to where it is today. >>Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. Firstly, you know, I'm pretty excited to be part of this Cube interview with garages. You know, I know him personally for over five years through various interactions globally and this new role for North America. This is our strategy and global system integrator partner. And this is a longstanding partnership between HP and this years has grown multi falls over the last 30 years. Ah, we you know, pretty much enjoyed every single I would say transactions or the business engagements, what we've had so far. And we liberate each other for our internal I T requirements and also to drive joint, go to market initiatives across the world. That's making this a truly 3 60 degree partnership. There is a lot of heritage, a mutual trust and respect between both organizations at all levels and the complimentary offerings. You know what you will hear a lot more in the next couple of questions. Uh, we bring to the table together are very unique and very differentiating to the clients which are >>excellent. Dr. Rajesh, walk us through some of those joint offerings that TCS cloud in h e or delivering. >>Yeah, so far. So far. Thanks. I just want to thank the HP team for giving me the opportunity to up to a larger audience. Andi, This new normal. This is the first time I'm doing an interview like this. Thanks for that experience. Actually, as Jules mentioned, this relationship goes a long way. I am talking about the larger PCs were a long relationship, Andi, specifically on the easiest load we started this journey in a very, very practical way. Five years back it was it was started in a very, very small trial and error basis. We started this relationship RPC explode. But at this point in time after So yes, we have taken this into ah, new norm, actually. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the examples We have a very major retailer in Germany, which we work so that it was a $1,000,000 deals. Our busiest on GHB. Yes, you wanna unique offering to the customer s AP and a space on that is really growing a lot. And that's the one offering I would like to tell the audience that really has picked up and spent on the relationship in the German region. Right now we are trying to take that up, offering across on other other regions also, so that is one of the key offerings that we are doing it. The other offerings are multiple offerings we are doing. But again, I want to highlight the storage as a service offering. Great. It's everybody in the industry today, Andi, we are experimenting that in the initial stages in Australia we started in Australia a small offering. And now we are expanding it in the US geography in a big way. And this year we are going to make that as a unique offering. And we're going to offer they're all over cloud customers as a storage as a service offering. Also multiple other offering, Lisa. But I just thought that I like this tool which are making our business. We're making a lot of business together with these two offerings >>is the, uh, s AP opportunity that you mentioned is that the Hana as a service that TCS is delivered? >>That's correct. So it's ah, it's a service. But the uniqueness of that particular offering is we jointly created the architecture so that the customer can use that, like a database as a service model. Right? So it was It was not available that time in the industry so easily like what we offered at that point in time to do enough years back. We offer that particular said we spoke a summer and interestingly, that particular offering the customer was using s AP themselves as a service initially, and they migrated their to us actually from Maybe that's a reason they bought HP and TCS. There is like a summer on this API and a platform. So that's the That's the interesting story under, >>if we didn't do that just a little bit further, I wanted the audience to understand the impact that this partnership has H p E and TCS delivering Hana as a service or your customers. What are the benefits there than what the customer, as you said was doing previously? >>Yeah, yeah, I think I just want to highlight the three or four points that make that this offering very unique, and that helps the customer number one is associated with model. So the customer has got the complete flexibility off going up and down like a true cloud model, right? And so it is a really a unique proposition at that point in time, where the customer not a story about using less for some time and then using more sometimes so it's kind of a complete, flexible model that we offered at the time. Number two is, it's a complete customization is possible. It is not like a fixed architecture. The architecture is so flexible so that the customer business needs can be met through the architectural changes. So it's not like normally people think that lotus highly standardized architecture, right? So that has gone out, and we were given a flexible architecture for the customer. That is the number two number three, obviously the cost end of the day. There's a business case which we need to make it work right for the customer. So obviously, with the PCs and HP coming together, we were able to do the costarred, want age with a customer that is the third advantage of that. The last, but not the least, is the quality of service it is it is all about. I always used to tell my partners that selling is easy. Delivering it is what it's important it is, which will make the customer to stick with you, right? The were given and delivery quality experience who our customer s so that I think that makes a very unique proposition from a technology perspective from a pricing. But but from an architecture and also from the delivery perspective. So those are the few few things I just thought that I violated. >>Excellent. So a couple of words that you mentioned popped into my mind as really even more well, have a different meeting as we're in summer 2020 flexibility and unique offering chills back to you from a go to market perspective. How is that relationship with HP? And he says, changing in the Koven era. >>Yeah, it's pretty interesting, and I would like to call it an example off. You know, what we see is is that you themselves during the corporate times, you know, it also came in the in the pets close to 90% of the workforce. We're 100% productive. Uh, and, uh, they have a plan to go 75% of the employees, you know, go being remote by 2025. Right? So that's the journey they're taking on. And another thing that you notice there's a lot of the, you know, During the corporate times, many of the customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure. So they wanted their employees to be productive, bi directional and in the other area of focus was like a TCP, you know, how do I kind of make sure on the applications are available to you? The customers and also do their internal organizations. So we've seen a lot off. I would say engagement with that is I could picture team and also the solution team toe address This requirements off the market joint >>when we look at certain things that now might even be more important with this new normal, if you will, that the fact that most companies are still in phase one of this work, everyone works from home trying to get to a phase to that might see some some maybe by function groups coming back to the office and then getting to this third. Maybe it's the new nirvana of some hybrid workforce, where there's gonna be some that come back permanently, and some that Don't and Tony Unirea chose, I saw was quoted last month as saying he thinks that 50% of the workforce will only 50% will come back. So in this new not only hybrid I T environment in which your customers love it now, this new pending hybrid workforce environment how are you addressing some of the concerns together with respect to the network connectivity security, >>I will just take the cost anything. It's a very, very interesting at least when we all ended up in this pandemic in March. We really very, very nervous, actually, because everyone has to operate remotely on we are. We are dealing with the customer data. It's ah, it's very, very important that we have a secure environment to access the information and at the same time maintain the integrity of the data and also the quality off the plate. Those other two primary objective for us. We don't want to compromise on quality. We don't want to compromise on security from a cloud perspective. So the solution we have put in really, I just give you one example there was on the airline Ah, UK based the airline industry airline company which they need that workforce overnight. They want everybody to go remote because you know you cape on. They just put up condition that nobody can work from the office overnight and then terror ports as toe work from home purchases, implement the solution for them on our clothes overnight and make that 1000 employees store from home the next day morning. All of them started working with full quality of services and also with a full security aspect of it, has been taken care ornate on the solution. We are deployed. Very interesting case study on The important thing we have done is use the technology to the port. Use all kinds of technology to make sure that the employees that work from home we took care of the network connectivity. We took our eye off the security aspects off the data from security aspects. We've implemented all the security functions from really APIs. But people, Children stop perspective. Andi, make the workforce enable that. But now you are talking about millions off millions of workers going to work from home. Right? Because it is one example for one company we have done that now the easiest themselves has got more than 400 1000 employees. And we are talking about millions off our pores, going to work from home on going forward. So that is I'm seeing this as a big opportunity. It's not that everybody has are just this at this point in time, I'm seeing this as an opportunity where on the cloud easiest cloud kind off. The solution is going to help them to achieve this. And this is a great opportunity for not only for PCs, but also for HP because the solution we're putting together with the HP is more on the digital or course how we can enable the people to work from home, not compromising on as I mentioned from a security you're in from millions perspective. So I'm seeing this as an opportunity for both the organization, and it's a long way to go is we need to work on this. It's not. We don't have a magic want to make the millions off workers to work from home, but it is going to have all soon and probably in the next step. Yeah, so we may achieve this, impair people off. The workforce is going to go remotely on this list. So that's that. And my take on this >>is so the impact that HP and TCS Herb being able to make for customers who have had to massively transform their entire workforce overnight, as he said, to work from home to talk about some of the new maybe new solutions or new business opportunities that HPC is partnering with TCS shells, we'll start with you in this new era, >>Yeah, so if you look at it, I just taking it again on extension off of the projects. What he just mentioned about the percentage of employees going remote Lisa across industries today. I would say less than 20% of the employees are actually working remote or they have the ability. But the organizations have the ability to support the employees going, and if you have to take it to 50% so you can look at the kind of opportunity we have both as HP and as PCs. So we bring in a lot of best in breed infrastructure from for enabling the employee workforce to know where it is. I would say capacity off workloads and it's all workload specific. And what business does this or when people Pretty easy as we kind of bundle that creating a reference architecture or a giant architect picture addressing the customers by industry word. So because one what suits for one vertical may not be really suiting well for a different world, right? For example, if you take a banking sector are playing, a workstation solution would look very different from somebody's doing remote work in retail, so we kind of continuously engage with the PCs, and that's where both of us have joint lab as well, where our technologies and pieces technologies come together, working on joint solutions and assisting the market in terms of the opportunity lights. And we offer this as part of A C is our digital workplace offerings. >>Are your conversations Dr Additional go to you or your conversations when you're jointly selling, changing in terms of who your audience is? Is this now a C level conversation? Since these leaders and we've heard leaders of Google and Facebook already last month saying Work from home extended still 2021. Is this now at the C suite level, where you guys are helping them really understand how to completely change and digitize their entire way of doing business? >>Absolutely. I think it's a great question, and it's actually the opportunity goes beyond the work from home solution. As you rightly I want to know that it is. It is all about digitization. It is all about digitizing their whole business process. It is not anymore infrastructure. Our application solution. It is more about really finding that business process be defending. The way the business is going to operate in future is the discussion we are having so a lot of these discussions are happening at a very, very high level and with the business team also directly so earlier, you used to interact with the technology partners off our organization. But now we are interacting directly with the head of business are the C level except of the company. And that is the reason the exact reason is Ah, you. If you want your ports to be productive remotely, you can't just offer them on network on. You can't offer them just a solution to work from home. But you need to really find your whole business process you need. You need to digitize your infrastructure. You need to digitize your application. You need to rethink your whole process off. You're operating on it, so that's what I'm seeing. It's not only an opportunity for our players like a business cloud, but it is the opportunity for a bigger opportunity for PCs. And it should be not only in terms off on infrastructure in our cloud business, it goes beyond that. So that is that is the kind of an opportunity we're seeing, especially in the in the sectors of healthcare you're seeing major reforms are happening in the healthcare industry as we speak, and obviously manufacturing is going to go through a lot of changes. Also from that. And retail obviously has gone through a lot of changes already in terms of online, uh, stuff, but know that also going to go through changes in this new era? Yes, >>I have to ask you shelled, talking about redefining? That's a word that we've seen so many years in a row at tech conferences, right, this technology redefining this business or that industry. And now, of course, we're being redefined by an invisible virus. But how? How is the sales process being redefined? Is it a lot more accelerated because businesses have to put together new plans to continue operations? >>Yeah, again, a great question. Is this how you have? You know, I would say it's divided by industry body. It's not a uniform thing by, as not British was saying, every industry has got its own, its own set of challenges and its own set of opportunities, and some of them are really actually doing well even in times like and some of them have seen, Really. I mean, like, travel our transportation or you know some of those industries are, and even hospitality that's kind of affected big time. So our view of you know, the entire sales engagement of the processes we're spending more time on there. We really need to focus and which can help improve the businesses. Right? So the conversation's ready from How do I take the cost out in terms of how can I make a little more investment to get greater returns from the business? So it's like it's completely, I would say, an interesting pain and engaging compositions and decisions are happening. So we, if you look at us from an automatic perspective, the Internet to the sales team is armed with various virtual tools like we know you zoom views Skype using SMS teens. So all the tools available to make sure that we're able to connect with all our partners and customers on do enable joint business together. >>I just want oh, I add to it, Lisa, 111 point. I want bad, Really interesting change I'm seeing on the sales is normally we respond to it. I asked from a customer that is a sales happens. I want this many days. Do it and then what you can do with a solution that is a normal sales process. What I have seen that has changed completely. Yes, we go and tell the customer, Is this what you need Actually, to make you yourself your business? Better? This is the new offerings I'm having good. And this offering is going to help you to solve the problem what you are having today. So we are engaging a different level off sales conversation today with our customers. We know the problem of the customer because we are working with them for many years and we know exactly what they're going through. And we also know what new offerings we are having in this. So we are engaging the discussion with the customer doing that. This is my new offering. This is going to help you to solve this problem. But that is a different angle of sales we have seen nowadays they spend on it. >>The last question shells to you. We started our interview today talking about the HP TCS relationship. You talked about how it's evolved. Last question. You talked to me about H B's strategy. How does it match TCS Alfa Cloud offering. >>Yeah, so again, a great question, Lisa, if you look at our strategy, is to accelerate the enterprises with it. Centric and cloud enable solutions which are workload up, optimized and delivered everything as a service. And whatever you heard from Dr Rogers through this entire conversation was about how do we give as a service model you gave an example of honor. You gave an example off, you know, going how optimizing workloads for video and getting employees to be able to be productive remotely and all of that kind of extremely resonate well with, you know, what we see is confined to price. Cloud offering is bringing to the table for the customer and the underlying platform. You know, we kind of elaborate extensively and closely with the easiest architecture. Seem to have the HP portfolio off. You know, the compute and storage portfolio integrated as part of their offering, and we go together to market, you know, and addressing and kind of an ask service model. 1,000,000,000. >>Excellent. Well, shells Dr. Rajesh, pleasure talking with you both today about what UCS and H e are doing together and some of the ways that you're really helping businesses move forward in these uncertain times, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you for represents. Thanks. Thank >>you. Dr Rajesh. >>My guest. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover virtual experience brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. This is the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, and I'm joined by a couple of guys who were gonna talk through one of HPC ease. Longest partnerships. We've got shells. No Ryan and the senior director Ecosystem sales for North America at HP and Dr Rajesh Boston, the global head of sales and solutions for the TCS. Wow. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. >>So, first question for you, as I mentioned, HP and TCS have been partners for over 30 years. Talk to our audience about the partnership and how it has evolved to where it is today. >>Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. Firstly, you know, I'm pretty excited to be part of this Cube interview with garages. I know. I know him personally for over five years through various interactions globally and this new role for North America. This is our strategy and global system integrator partner. And this is a longstanding partnership between HP and this years has grown multi falls over the last 30 years. We you know, pretty much enjoyed every single I would say transactions or the business engagements, what we've had so far. And we liberate each other for our internal I T requirements and also to drive joint, go to market initiatives across the world. That's making this a truly a 3 60 degree partnership. There is a lot of heritage, a mutual trust and respect between both organizations at all levels and the complimentary offerings. You know what you will hear a lot more in the next couple of questions we bring to the table together are very unique and very differentiating to the clients, which are >>excellent. Dr. Rajesh walk us through some of those joint offerings that TCS cloud in h e or delivering. >>Yeah, so far so far. Thanks. I just want to thank the HP team for giving me the opportunity to off to a larger audience. Andi, This new normal. This is the first time I'm doing an interview like this. Thanks for that experience. Actually, as James mentioned, this relationship goes a long way. I am talking about the larger PCs were a long relationship. Andi, specifically on the easiest flowed. We started this journey in a very, very practical way. Five years back it was it was started in a very, very small trial and error basis. We started this relationship RPC explode. But at this point in time after So yes, we have taken this into, ah, new norm, actually. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the examples We have a very major retailer in Germany, which we work so that it was a multi $1,000,000 deals, our busiest on GHB. He has been a unique offering to the customer s AP, and a space on that is really growing a lot. And that's the one offering I would like to tell the audience that really has picked up and spent on the relationship in the German region. Right now we are trying to take that up, offering across on other other regions also, so that is one of the key offerings that we are doing it. The other offerings are multiple offerings we are doing, but again, I want to highlight the storage as a service offering. Great. It's everybody in the industry today, Andi, we are experimenting that in the initial stages in Australia, we started in Australia a small offering. And now we are expanding it in the US geography in a big way. And this year we are going to make that as a unique offering. And we're going to offer they're all over cloud customers as a storage as a service offering. Also, multiple other offering. Lisa. But I just thought that I like this tool which are making our business. We're making a lot of business together with these two offerings >>is the, uh, s AP opportunity that you mentioned is that the Hana as a service that TCS is delivered? >>That's correct. So it's ah, it's a service. But the uniqueness of that particular offering is be jointly created the architecture so that the customer can use that, like a database as a service model. Right? So it was It was not available that time in the industry so easily like what we offered at that point in time to do enough years back. We offer that particular said we spoke a summer and interestingly, that particular offering the customer was using s AP themselves as a service initially, and they migrated their to us actually from Maybe that's a reason they bought HP and PCs. That is like a summer on this API and a platform. So that's the That's the interesting story under, >>if we didn't do that just a little bit further, I wanted the audience to understand the impact that this partnership has H p E and TCS delivering Hana as a service for your customers. What are the benefits there than what the customer, as you said was doing previously? >>Yeah, yeah, I think I just want to relay the three or four points that make that this offering very unique, and that helps the customer number one is associated with model. So the customer has got the complete flexibility off going up and down like a true cloud model, right? And so it is a really a unique proposition at that point in time, where the customer not a story about using less for some time and then using more sometimes. So it's kind of a complete, flexible model that we offered at the time. Number two is, it's a complete customization is possible. It is not like a fixed architecture. The architecture is so flexible so that the customer business needs can be met through the architectural changes. So it's not like normally people think that lotus highly standardized architecture, right? So that has gone out, and we were given a flexible architecture for the customer. That is the number two number three, obviously the cost end of the day. There's a business case which we need to make it work right for the customer. So obviously, with the PCs and HP coming together, we were able to do the costarred, want age with a customer that is the third advantage of that. The last, but not the least, is the quality of service it is it is all about. I always used to tell my partners that selling is easy. Delivering it is what it's important it is, which will make the customer to stick with you, right? The were given and delivery quality experience who our customer s so that I think that makes a very unique proposition from a technology perspective from a pricing, but from an architecture and also from the delivery perspective. So those are the few few things I just thought that I violated. >>Excellent. So a couple of words that you mentioned popped into my mind as really even more well have a different meeting as we're in summer 2020 flexibility and unique. Offering chills back to you from a go to market perspective. How is that relationship with HP? And he says, changing in the Koven era. >>Yeah, it's pretty interesting, and I would like to call it an example off. You know, what we see is is that you themselves during the corporate times, you know, it also came in the pets close to 90% of the workforce. We're 100% productive. Uh, and, uh, they have a plan to go 75% of the employees, you know, but go being remote by 2025. So that's the journey they're taking on. And another thing that you notice there's a lot of the, you know, During the corporate times, many of the customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure. So they wanted their employees to be productive, bi directional and in the other area of focus was like a TCP, you know, how do I kind of make sure on the applications are available to you, the customers and also do their internal organizations? So we've seen a lot off. I would say engagement with that is I could picture team and also the solution team toe address This requirements off the market jointly >>when we look at certain things that now might even be more important with this new normal, if you will, that the fact that most companies are still in phase one of this work, everyone works from home trying to get to a face to that might see some some maybe by function groups coming back to the office and then getting to this third. Maybe it's the new nirvana of some hybrid workforce, where there's gonna be some that come back permanently, and some that Don't and Tony Unirea chose, I saw was quoted last month as saying, I think that 50% of the workforce will only 50% will come back. So in this new not only hybrid I T environment in which your customers love, but now this new pending hybrid workforce environment, how are you addressing some of the concerns together with respect to the network connectivity security, >>I I'll just take the cost anything. It's a very, very interesting at least when we all ended up in this pandemic in March. We really very, very nervous, actually, because everyone has to operate remotely on we are. We are dealing with the customer data. It's ah, it's very, very important that we have a secure environment to access the information and at the same time maintain the integrity of the data and also the quality off the plate. Those other two primary objective for us. We don't want to compromise on quality. We don't want to compromise on security from a cloud perspective. So the solution we have put in really I just give you one example there was on the airline Ah, UK basically are living in the spirit of the company which they need that workforce overnight. They want everybody to go remote because you know you cape on. They just put up a condition that nobody can work from the office overnight on the entire or ports as toe work from home, PTC is implemented the solution for them on our clothes overnight and make that 1000 employees store from home the next day morning all of them started working with the full quality of services and also with a full security aspect of it has been taken care or made on the solution. We are deployed. Very interesting case study on The important thing we have done is use the technology to the poor. Use all kinds of technology to make sure that the employees that work from home we took care of the network connectivity. We took our eye off the security aspects off the data from security aspects. We've implemented all the security functions from a media perspective. Actually stop perspective, Andi. Make the workforce enable that. But now you are talking about millions off millions of workers going to work from home. Right, Because it is one example for one company we have done that note easiest themselves has got more than 400 1000 employees, and we are talking about millions off work force going to work from home on going forward. So that is, I'm seeing this as a big opportunity. It's not that everybody has are just this. At this point in time, I'm seeing this as an opportunity where on the cloud easiest cloud kind off. The solution is going to help them to achieve this, and this is a great opportunity for not only for PCs but also for HP because the solution we're putting together with the HP is more on the digital or course how we can enable the people to work from home, not compromising on as I mentioned from a security you're in from millions perspective. So I'm seeing this as an opportunity for both the organization, and it's a long way to go is we need to work on this. It's not. We don't have a magic want to make the millions off workers to work from home, but it is going to have all soon and probably in the next step. Yeah, so we may achieve this. Impair people's off. The workforce is going to go remotely on this list. So that's that. And my take on this >>is so the impact that HP and TCS herb being able to make for customers who have had to massively transform their entire workforce overnight, as he said, to work from home to talk about some of the new maybe new solutions or new business opportunities that HPC is partnering with TCS shells, we'll start with you in this new era, >>Yeah, so if you look at it, I just taking it again on extension, offered up by just what you just mentioned about the percentage of employees going Lisa across industries today. I would say less than 20% of the employees are actually working remote or they have the ability. But the organizations have the ability to support the employees going, and if you have to take it to 50% so you can look at the kind of opportunity we have both as HP and as PCs. So we bring in a lot of best in breed infrastructure from for enabling the employee workforce to know where it is. I would say capacity off workloads and it's all workload specific. And what business does is over when people pretty easy as we kind of bundle that creating a reference architecture or a giant architect architecture addressing the customers by industry body. So because one what suits for one vertical may not be really suiting well for a different world, right? For example, if you take a banking sector, our traded workstation solution would look very different from somebody's doing remote in a retail. So we kind of continuously engage with the PCs, and that's where both of us have joint lab as well, where our technologies and pieces technologies come together, working on joint solutions and assisting the market in terms of the opportunity lights. And we offer this as part of A C is our digital workplace offerings. >>Are your conversations Dr Additional go to you or your conversations when you're jointly selling, changing in terms of who your audience is? Is this now a C level conversation? Since these leaders and we've heard leaders of Google and Facebook already last month saying Work from home extended still 2021. Is this now at the C suite level, where you guys are helping them really understand how to completely change and digitize their entire way of doing business? >>Absolutely. I think it's a great question, and it's actually the opportunity goes beyond the work from home solution. As you rightly I want to know that it is. It is all about digitization. It is all about digitizing their whole business process. It is not anymore infrastructure. Our application solution. It is more about really finding that business process be defending. The way the business is going to operate in future is the discussion we are having so a lot of these discussions are happening at a very, very high level on with the business team. Also directly, so earlier you used to interact with the technology partners off our organization. But now we are interacting directly with the head of business are the C level except of the company. And that is the reason the exact reason is Ah, you. If you want your ports to be productive remotely, you can't just offer them on network on. You can't offer them just a solution to work from home, But you need to really find your whole business process you need. You need to digitize your infrastructure. You need to digitize your application. You need to rethink your whole process off. You're operating on it, so that's what I'm seeing. It's not only an opportunity for our players like PCs cloud, but it is the opportunity for a bigger opportunity for PCs and be not only in terms off on infrastructure in our cloud business, it goes beyond that. So that is that is the kind of an opportunity we're seeing, especially in the in the sectors of healthcare you're seeing major reforms are happening in the healthcare industry as we speak on, obviously, manufacturing is going to go through a lot of changes. Also from that. And retail obviously has gone through a lot of changes already in terms of online, uh, stuff, but know that also going to goto changes in this new era? Yes, >>I have to ask you shelled talking about redefining? That's a word that we've seen so many years in a row at tech conferences, right, this technology redefining this business or that industry. And now, of course, we're being redefined by an invisible virus. But how is how is the sales process being redefined? Is it a lot more accelerated because businesses have to put together new plans to continue operations? >>Yeah, again, a great question. Is this how you have? You know, I would say it's divided by industry body. It's not a uniform thing. By, as the British was saying, every industry has got its own, its own set of challenges and its own set of opportunities, and some of them are really actually doing well even in times like and some of them have seen, Really. I mean, like, travel our transportation or, you know, some of those industries are and even hospitality that's kind of affected big time. So our view of you know, the entire sales engagement of the processes we're spending more time on there. We really need to focus and which can help improve the businesses. Right? So the conversation's ready from How do I take the cost out in terms of how can I make a little more investment to get greater returns from the business? So it's like it's a completely I would say, an interesting pain and engaging compositions and decisions are happening. So we, if you look at us from an automatic perspective, the sales team is armed with various virtual tools, like We know you zoom views Skype using SMS teens. So all the tools available to make sure that we're able to connect with all our partners and customers on do enable joint business together. >>I just want oh, I add to it, Lisa, 111 point. I want to ride Really interesting change I'm seeing on the sales is normally we respond to ask from a customer that is a sales happens. I want this many days do it and then what you can do with a solution That is the normal sales process. What I have seen that has changed completely. Yes, we go and tell the customer, Is this what you need Actually, to make you yourself your business? Better? This is the new offerings I'm having good. And this offering is going to help you to solve the problem what you are having today. So we are engaging a different level off sales conversation today with our customers. We know the problem of the customer because we are working with them for many years and we know exactly what they're going through. And we also know what new offerings we are having in this. So we are engaging the discussion with the customer doing that. This is my new offering. This is going to help you to solve this problem. But that is a different angle of sales we have seen nowadays in this. A friend of it, >>the last question shells to you. We started our interview today talking about the HP TCS relationship. You talked about how it's evolved. Last question. You talked to me about H B's strategy. How does it match TCS Alfa Cloud offering? >>Yeah, so again, a great question, Lisa, if you look at our strategy is to accelerate the enterprises with it. Centric and cloud enable solutions which are workload optimized and delivered everything as a service. And whatever you heard from Dr Rogers through this entire conversation was about how do we give as a service model you gave an example of Hana? You give an example off, you know, going optimizing workloads for VD I and getting employees to be able to be productive remotely and all of that kind of extremely resonate well with you know, what pieces are defined to. Price cloud offering is bringing to the table for the customer and the underlying platform. You know, we can have yeah, extensively and closely with the easiest architecture being tohave the HP portfolio off. You know, the compute and storage portfolio integrated as part of their offering, and we go together to market, you know, addressing and kind of an ask service model. 1,000,000,000. >>Excellent. Well, shells Dr Rajesh, pleasure talking with you both today about what UCS and H e are doing together in some of the ways that you're really helping businesses move forward in these uncertain times, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you. For instance. Thanks. >>Thank you. Dr Rajesh. >>My guest. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Dr. Nic Williams, CEO of Stark and Wayne. Dr. Nic, thanks for joining me >> Thank you very much. I think you must've come to the conference from a different direction than I came. >> I'm a local, and I'm trying to get more people to come to the Boston area. We've been doing theCUBE now for, coming up on our ninth year of doing it, and it's only the third time I've done something in this convention center, so please, more tech shows to this area, Boston, the Hynes Convention Center, and things like that. >> There's plenty of tech people. I was at the Nero Cafe, everyone seemed like they were a tech person. >> Oh no, the Seaport region here is exploding. I've done two interviews today with companies here in Boston or Cambridge. There's a great tech scene. For some reason, you and I were joking, it's like, do we really need another conference in Vegas? I mean really. >> Dr. Nic: Right, no, I like the regional. >> But yeah, the weather here is unseasonably cold. It was snowing and sleeting this morning, which is not the Spring weather. >> It is April, it is mid-April, and it's almost snowing outside. >> Alright, so Dr. Nic, first of all, you get props for the T-shirt. You've got Iron Man and Doctor Doom, and we're saying that there is a connection between the superheroes and Stark and Wayne. >> Right, so Stark and Wayne is founded by two fictional superheroes. The best founders are the fictional ones, they don't go to meetings, they're too busy making, you know, films. >> Yes, but everybody knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man, but nobody's supposed to know that Bruce Wayne was Batman. >> Nic: Right, right. >> But I've heard Stark and Wayne mentioned a number of times by customers here at the conference. So, for our audience that doesn't know, what does Stark and Wayne do, and how are you involved in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem? >> So Stark and Wayne, I first found Bosh, I founded Stark and Wayne. Earlier than that I discovered Bosh, six years ago, when it was first released, became like, I claimed to be the world's first evangelist for Bosh, and still probably the number one evangelist. And so Stark and Wayne came out of that. I was VMWare Pivotal's go-to person for standing things up and then customers grew, and you know. Yeah, people want to know who to go to, and when it comes to running Cloud Foundry, that's us. >> Yeah well, there's always that discussion, right? We've got all these wonderful platforms and these things that go together, but a lot of times there's services and people that help to get those up. Pivotal, just had a great discussion with a Pivotal person, talking about the reason they bought Pivotal Labs originally was like, wow, when people got stuck, that's what Pivotal Labs helps with that whole application development, so you're doing similar things with Bosh? >> Correct. No it's, we have our mental model around what it is to run operations of a platform, where you're running complex software, but you have an end user who expects everything just to work. And they never want to talk to you, and you don't want to talk to them. So it's this new world of IT where they get what they want instantly, that's the platform and it has to keep working. >> Dr Nic, is it an unreasonable thing for people to say that, yeah I want the things to work, and it shouldn't go down, and you know-- >> What is shadow IT? Shadow IT is the rebellion against corporate IT, so we want to bring back, well, we want to bring the wonders of public services to corporate environments. >> Okay, so-- >> That's the Cloud Foundry's story. >> Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about your users. We've watched this ecosystem mature since the early days, you know, things are more mature, but what's working well? What are the challenges? What are some of the prime things that have people calling up your team? >> So our scope, our users, or our customers, are people, they're the GEs and the Fords of the world running either as a service or internally large Cloud Foundry installations. And whilst Cloud Foundry is getting better and better, the security model is better, the upgrades seem to be flawless, it does keep getting more complex. You know, you can't just add container to container networking and it not get more complicated, right? So, yeah, trying to keep up-to-date with not just the core, but even the community of projects going on is part of the novelty, but also it's trying to bring it to customers and be successful. >> Yeah, I go to a number of these shows that are open source and every time you come there, it's like, "Well, here's the main things we're talking about "but here's six other projects that come up." How's that impact some of what you were just talking about? But, maybe elaborate as to how you deal with the pace of change, and those big companies, how are they help integrate those into what they're doing, or do they, you know-- >> So my Twitter is different from your Twitter. So my Twitter is 10 years worth of collecting of people who talk about interesting things, putting in a URL, just referencing an idea they're having, so they tend to be the thought leaders. They might be wrong, or like, let's put Docker into production, like, it doesn't make it wrong, but you've got to be wary of people who are too early. And you just start to peace a picture of what's being built, and you start to know which groups and which individuals are machines, and make great stuff, and you sort of track their work. Like HashiCorp, Mitchell Hashimoto, I knew him before HashiCorp, and he is a monster, and so you tend to track their work. >> So your Twitter and my Twitter might be more alike than you think. >> Nic: No maybe, right. >> I interviewed Armon at the Cube-Con show last year. My Twitter blowing up the show was a bunch of people arguing about whether Serverless was going to eradicate this whole ecosystem. >> Well, we can argue about that if you like, I guess. >> But love, one of the things coming into this show, was, you know, how does the whole Kubernetes discussion fit into Cloud Foundry? We've heard at this show, Microsoft, Google, many others, talking about, look, open source communities, they're going to work together. >> Well Windows is going to track things 'cause they think they need to sell them, right? But then Microsoft has Service Fabric, which they've owned and operated internally for 10 years, and so, I think some really interesting products may be built on top of Service Fabric, because of what it is. Whereas, you know, Kubernetes will run things, Service Fabric may build net new projects. And then Cloud Foundry's a different experience altogether, so some people, it's what problems they experienced, comes to the solution they find, and unless you've tried to run a platform for people, you might not think the solution's a platform. You might think it's Kubernetes, but-- >> Yeah, so one of the things we always look at when we talk about platforms, is what do they get stood up for? How many applications do you get to stand up there? What don't they work for? Maybe you could help give us a little bit of color as to what you see? >> I'm pretty good at jamming anything into Cloud Foundry, so I have a pretty small scope of what doesn't fit, but typically the idea of Cloud Foundry is the assumption the user is a developer who has 10 iterations a day. Alright, so they want to deploy, test, deploy, test, and then layer pipelines on top of that. You also get, you're going to get the backend of long, stable apps, but the value is, for many people, is that the deploy experience. And then, you know, but whilst, you're going to get those apps that live forever, we still get to replace the underlying core of it. So you still maintain a security model even for the things that are relatively unloved. Andthis is really valuable, like the nice, clean separation of the security, the package, CVEs, and the base OS, then the apps is part of the-- >> Yeah, absolutely, there's been an interesting kind of push and pull lately. We need to take some of those old applications, and we may need to lift and shift them. It doesn't mean that I can necessarily take advantage of all the cool stuff, and there are some things that I can't do with them when I get them on to that new platform. But absolutely, you need to worry about security, you know, data's like the center of everything. >> If you're lifting and shifting, there probably is no developer looking after it, so it's more of an operator function, and they can put it anywhere they like. They're looking after it now, whereas the Cloud Foundry experience is that developer-led experience that has an operations backend. If you're lifting and shifting, if it fits in Cloud Foundry, great, if it fits in Kubernetes, great. It's your responsibility. >> Yeah, what interaction do you have with your clients, with some of the kind of cultural and operational changes that they need to go through? So thinking specifically, you've go the developers doing things, you know, the operators, whether they're involved, whether that be devops or not, but I'm curious-- >> So the biggest change when it comes to helping people who are running platforms. And I know many people want to talk about the cloud transformation, but let's talk about the operations transformation, is to become a service-orientated group who are there to provide a service. Yes you're internal, yes they all have the same email address that you do, but you're a service-orientated organization, and that is not technology, that is a mental mode. And if you're not service-orientated, shadow IT occurs, because they can go to Amazon and get a support organization that will respond to them, and so you're competing with Amazon, and Google, and you need to be pretty good. >> Yeah, you mentioned that, you know, your typical client is kind of a large, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, the Fortune 1000 type companies, does this sort of-- >> We haven't got Berkshire. We haven't got Berkshire, and so if we're going to go Fortune 5, you know, we'd like, I've read my Warren Buffett biography, I reckon the FA are here to meet him I reckon. >> Right, so one of the questions, is this only for the enterprise? Can it be used for smaller businesses, for newer businesses? >> What's interesting is people think about Cloud Foundry as like, "Oh you run it on your infrastructure." Like, I did a talk in 2014, 15, when Docker was starting to be frothy, was, before you think you want to build your own pass, ring me on the hotline. Like, argue with me about why you wouldn't just use Heroku, or Pivotal Web Services, or IBM Cloud, like a public pass. Please, I beg of you, before you go down any path of running on-prem anything, answer solidly the question of why you just wouldn't use a public service. And yeah, so it really starts at that point. It's like, use someone else's, and then if you have to run your own. So, who's really going to have all these rules? It's large organization that have these, "Oh, no, no, we have to run our own." >> Well doctor, one of the things we've said for a while, is there's lots of things that enterprise suck at, that they need to realize that they shouldn't be doing. So start at the most basic level, there's like five companies in the world that are good at building data centers, nobody else should build data centers, if you're using somebody else that can do that. So as you go up and up the stack, you want to get rid of the undifferentiated lifting, things like that, so-- >> I like to joke that every CIO, the moment they get that job, like that's their ticket to get to build their own data center. It's like, what else was the point of becoming a CIO? I want to build my own data center. >> No, not anymore, please-- >> Not anymore, but you know, plus they've been around a little longer than-- >> So, what is that line? What should companies be able to consume a platform, versus where do they add the value, and do you help customers kind of understand that that-- >> By the time they're talking to us, they're pretty far along having convinced themselves about what they're doing. And they have their rules. They have their isolation rules, their data-ownership rules, and they'll have their level of comfort. So they might be comfortable on Amazon, Google, Azure, or they might still not be comfortable with public cloud, and they want the vSphere, but they still have that notion of we're going to run this ourselves. And most of them it's not running one, because that idea of we need our own, propagates throughout the entire organization, and they'll start wanting their own Cloud Foundry-- >> Look, I find that when I talk to users, we, the vendors, and those that watch the industry, always try to come up with these multi-cloud hybrid cloud-type discussion. Users, have a cloud strategy, and it's usually often siloed just like everything else, and right, they're using-- >> Developers-- >> I have some data service, and it's running on Google-- >> Developers just want to have a nice life. >> Microsoft apps. >> They just want to get their work done. They want to feel like, "Alright this is a great job, "like, I'm respected, I get interesting work, "we get to ship it, it actually goes into production." I think if you haven't ever had a project you've worked on that didn't go into production, you haven't worked long enough. Many of us work on something for it not to be shipped. Get it into production as quick as possible and-- >> So, do you have your, you know, utopian ideal world though as to, this is the step-- >> Oh, absolutely-- >> And this is how it'll be simple. >> Tell developers what the business problems are. Get them as close to the business problems, and give them responsibility to solve them. Don't put them behind layers of product managers, and IT support-- >> But Dr. Nic, the developers, they don't have the budget-- >> Speak for utopian-- >> How do we sort through that, because, right, the developer says they want to do this, but they're not tied to the person that has the budget, or they're not working with the operators, I mean, how do we sort through that? >> How do we get to utopia? >> Stu: Yeah. Well, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, they all solved utopia, right? So, this is, think more like them, and perhaps the CEO of the company shouldn't come from sales, perhaps it should be an IT person. >> Well, yeah, what's the T-shirt for the show? It was like running at scale, when you reach a certain point of scale, you either need to solve some of these things, or you will break? >> Right, alright look, hire great sales organizations, but if you don't have empathy for what your company needs to look like in five years time, you're probably not going to allow your organization to become that. The power games, alright? If everyone assumes that the marketing department becomes the top of the organization, or the, you know, then the good people are going to leave to go to organizations where they might be become CEO one day. >> Alright, Dr. Nic, want to give you the final word. For the people that haven't been able to come to the sessions, check out the environment, what are they missing at this show? What is exciting you the most in this ecosystem? >> Like any conference you go to, you come, the learning is all put online. Your show is put online, or every session is put online. You don't come just to learn. You get the energy. I live in Australia, I work from a coffee shop, my staff are all in America, and so to come and just to get the energy that you're doing the right thing, that you get surrounded by a group of people, and certainly no one walks away from a CF Summit feeling like they're in the wrong career. >> Excellent. Well, Dr. Nic, appreciate you helping us understand the infinity wars of cloud environments here. Stark and Wayne, thanks so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. >> Dr. Nic: Thanks Stu. (electronic music)

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents ... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE. We are here for an exclusive Cube conversations at the Alibaba Cloud conference here in Hangzhou, China. We're here with Dr. Wang, who's the chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee as well as the founder of Alibaba Cloud, here in the new Museum of Inspiration at the event. Thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thank you for coming. >> So before we talk about Alibaba Cloud and all the goodness going on here at the conference, talk about this Museum of Inspiration. It is new, and it has kind of a display theme. You kind of walk through time. What was the motivation and the inspiration for the museum? >> Yeah, I think the keyword for the museum, inspiration, is really the inspiration that started the museum. I would say that there's two, really the artists thinking about that. The first thing is really about when people, people take a lot of things for granted. One of the goals for this museum, it just shows the people they probably see every day. But just let them, just, wow, okay, that's different from what I thought. I think a lot of people take for granted, but it's really a great invention, a great human contribution to the whole society. I think that one thing is really about that people understand why we got here today. So that's the first thing. The other thing is really about science and technology. When people are talking about science and technology, people often will say, whether we can combine science and technology. But I don't think that's the right way to describe the relationship between science and technology. I would say science and technology, really the two sides of the coin. I really want to see, let people to see two sides instead of mixing together and got one thing. So that's two things that's parallel, just like zero and one. They are two things. When they're put together in a computer, amazing things happen. If you mix the zero and the one, like half something, then it's just not that fun. So I really want to make sure it's the museum of science and art instead of the mixture of science and arts. So that's the one thing. The other thing is really about the inspiration of future. Most of the museum is really about the past, to show how we have in the past, and with less on the inspiration to help people to think about the future. This museum is really, when we think about everything over here, we did talk about the past, but we want to make sure people think about the future. That's the whole idea about the museum. >> And the computer industry is fairly young, if you go back to modern computing. But you kind of have a take here about how technology really is embedded in life. Talk more about that impact 'cause that seems to translate to the conference here at Alibaba, that technology isn't just about the speeds and the feeds, it's about the integration into life. >> Yeah, and I think that from this museum we can see actually I trace back the origin of all the technology. When people are talking about the computer technology, I really want to talk about the computing technology. And then we can trace back, see actually the human is the first signal computing device. Our Mother Nature created for us. If you look at the same things differently, you really can see the origin of that. I think in this museum we talk about two really original things. The first is about the nature origin of the Internet. When talking about Internet, people talk about our current technological infrastructure of Internet. When you look at the human history, how is when people walk, you create an Internet for Earth? You can see a lot of things can trace back. Then, with this kind of trace back, you can help us to think about what's going to happen next. The trace of the original idea is actually very important if you're thinking about technology. >> Talk about the story of Alibaba Cloud. That is not, It's new, Amazon has had it for around, early 2000's. But you guys came right after Amazon, 2009. Still young and growing. How does the Alibaba Cloud take the culture of this inspiration? What are some of the design principles of the Alibaba Cloud? >> Actually I would say the Alibaba Cloud is different from the Amazon Cloud. In the sense we have different vision about the future. Unfortunately though, we are put under the same umbrella called cloud computing by media, I will say that. So we are different, in the sense when the Amazon, actually I show great respect to Amazon. When Amazon started cloud computing, they are really talking about the utility. They're talking about how to cut the cost down. So basically, they start with the low cost of IT infrastructure. That's what I understand. When I started Alibaba Cloud, we know that actually cost is important for sure. But we know that actually the computing part is more important than the cost if you're thinking about the big data era. We started with thinking it's the acentric cloud computing. When you look at our first brochure and we put those words over there. That's almost nine years ago. We called it acentric cloud computing. Instead of the IT-centric cloud computing. This actually, it's not just an idea difference. It's actually, eventually, influenced of the underlying technology infrastructure. Our whole underlying technological infrastructure is designed for the data, instead of just for the IT deployment. >> Jack Ma was talking about this industrial revolution, this digital transformation. What strikes me is you guys have that same art and scientist dynamic, art and science coming together, reminds me of the Steve Jobs technology liberal arts thinking that spawns new creativity. Certainly the iPhone is a great example of that as one of the many things. But now the new generation is coming together. You have a big artist focus here at the event. Music festival, not just technology. How is that part of the focus at the event here? What does that mean for new developers? >> I think it's really the crossing behind that. If you're thinking about technology and now e-commerce, what's really the one thing behind that that's really changed the way of peoples' lives? Computing in that sense, computing is not just technology. It's really something that changes the way of life of every people. I think the e-commerce change the way of life of every people. In that sense, they are the same. If you look at the peoples' lives, they won't just live on technology. They won't just live on the arts. They need a life, love means everything. By nature, we have to make sure as consumers, they need something more than just one thing. I think we are very lucky we understand that. If you're thinking about the young people, I will give you a few numbers about this conference about young people. In China, we have a very specific word talking about the young people a couple of years ago. We call the 'badiho'. It basically means the generation born of the '80s. When people talk about 'jodiho', that basically means people born after '90s. And then people talking about the 'leniho' it's basically people born after 2000. I think that most of the visitors for this conference are 'leniho', 'jodiho', and 'badiho'. These are all young, all young people. >> The digital culture. >> It's a digital culture. I would rather use my own word in the book I would say instead of digital. For me, digital generation is already an old generation I would say. I would like to call this the online generation. They do everything online. Even the last generation do a lot of things digital because digital is everywhere. But I want to emphasize it's an online generation. They do everything online. >> Dr. Wang, talk about data. You mentioned that's the key ingredient, the fuel for innovation. That's impacting the city brain project you guys are doing. Talk about the city brain and the role of data and how that's impacting the societal users out there certainly here in China, the traffic is crowded. This is just an example of what else is out there. >> Okay. City brain actually it's, again it means different things based on the perspective. One thing that's probably important is the data. This is first time actually I think instead of using the big data, it's better to using what I call the data results. It's a better word than big data. I think the one fundamental thinking for the city brain is we find a human army. Humans finally realize actually that data results is the most precious resource for the city, instead of land and water supply. Because we already know that the land is limited. The water supply is limited. This is very important. It doesn't view data as a non-essential thing. It's just a part of your IT system. We finally realize that data is part of the city instead of part of your city IT system. I think it's a leap frog thinking, at least for me. When it got to that, and you realize that today all the existing IT systems cannot actually really embrace the data. IT system is just to support the people doing the work they used to do. And then you realize we need an infrastructure to really make the value from the data. Just like we have water supply for the city, then you can use the reservoir. Otherwise, the reservoir is useless for the city. I think city brain is just like a water supply system for the data. The city eventually can consume that. We start thinking it's a new infrastructure for the city just like water supply system, just like power grid, just like any way system. That's how we're thinking about it. This is the first thing. The reason we got to the traffic system is this is the problem every city has around the world. From my yesterday's presentation, I just joked about we build two roads for the city, which is too many. I was thinking a lot of people realize it. That's why Boston had the project. They want to get all the roads under the surface. Under surface. But it's still a road. It's still expensive. You know how much money they spend just to move all the roads. >> The big dig, I remember, that was the-- >> Yes, that's a big dig. I don't think that's, that's good for the transportation system, but I don't think that's the number one way for the growth of the city. I think probably most of the city don't have the money to do that. What the data city brain wants to do whether we can take the resource of data and we can optimize every aspect of the city so we can use less resource to support city growth. When we start with the traffic, it's just to make sure, you know that when we use the data to optimize the traffic lights, the idea behind that actually we use the data to optimize the time. How to just read the time. It's not just lights. And then if you're thinking, when we show the eventually, if you have enough data, then we can have less roads in the city but still got the same. >> So the Internet of Things is the hottest trend. 0bviously machine learning and artificial intelligence are part of that, and the cloud powers this new edge of the network, and the data has to flow. So the question that a lot of technologists who are architecting these solutions ask is how do you make the data go at a very low latency? That takes compute power. That takes a lot of technology. How does Alibaba Cloud think about the architecture? Obviously you have a strategic partner like Intel, Obviously with a lot of compute power. You got to think differently around making the data move. If it's like water, it needs to flow. So real time is really important, but self-driving cars, real time is down to the millisecond, nanosecond. How do you think about that as a technologist? >> I think the, if you go back to the Internet of things, I think it's still the Internet. I would say eventually, if you're thinking about the word cloud computing and people use edge computing and people talking about Internet of things. For me, it's just the computing of the Internet. Cloud computing is the computing of the Internet and edge computing is computing on the Internet. Even the IoT is the computing of the Internet. If you're talking about the data, I think eventually it's really about the data on the Internet. It's not data on the sensor. It's not data on the cloud. Basically it's data on the Internet. I would expect eventually the Internet infrastructure will be improved significantly. It's not an improved cloud. It's not improved edge computing. Or it's improvement of the IoT. But it's really, >> Together. >> it's together. >> So Intel, I was covering them, Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. And obviously five G. You need the mobile overlay, that's super important. You also have the end-to-end inside the cloud. Obviously Intel is a strategic partner. Can you talk about the relationship you have with Intel? And also your philosophy, technically speaking, with the ecosystem? Because it's not just Intel, it's everybody. There's a lot of people here at this event. American companies as well as international companies who are now going to be part of your ecosystem. >> Actually the, we certainly have a very good relationship with Intel. I think we share in some sense the same vision. I think that the number one thing is really about people learning about how important the computing is. For me, the Intel is not that, a chip selling company. Intel is really the provider of computing power. That's what I understand. And we can expect eventually the whole ecosystem is really about who is going to provide the computing power. Who is going to provide the infrastructure to make the data? Instead of just equipment supply, eventually the need for computing, and the need for data, will be the challenge for every company, including Alibaba Cloud. We are not, we are not immune from these challenges. We will feel the same challenge. What we want to do is really make sure that with all these partners, provide enough computing for the next 10 or 20 years. We want to make sure that there's enough data flow for the next 10 years. In that sense, it's not the traditional ecosystem as like you do this and you do that. It's basically how we can work together to really make sure we have the challenge for the data and computing in the next 10 years. >> Yesterday we covered the news that you guys announced 15, building and R&D over the next three years, which is a lot of money. Also it has a very international and global view. Academics with younger folks. Alibaba Cloud is going to be a part of that, I'm assuming. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that intersecting. But the question for you is the cloud world today is moving at very, very fast speed. We're seeing Amazon, for instance, has been the best in terms of new announcements every year. Not one or two, like a ton of announcements, a lot. How are you guys going to continue to keep the pace? To move faster because the city brain is a great project, but it's going to have more evolution. It's going to move fast. How are you guys keeping up with the pace? >> I think the only way, that's not just for the next 10 years. Actually when I started Alibaba Cloud, we take the same philosophy. Actually the user moves very fast than us. If you look at the users in China they move very fast probably than anywhere else around the world. If you use the city brain project, I would say city brain project is basically tell the people, we need the computing power more than any other task. You really can see that. People want you. If you can't satisfy their demand, then somebody else is going to do that. It's not something we want to move fast but >> You have to move fast. >> You have to move fast. That's why the China is special. I want to say China is not just a place for the market. China is the place that pushes you to move faster. That's more important than market size. >> You mentioned data technology and information technology kind of transferring to a new world. Software is also a big part of it. Software you have to compute, obviously with Intel and the relationships you have. But software is growing exponentially. Certainly in open source, we see Cloud Native Foundation here. They'll probably have Linux foundation. Open source is going to grow exponentially. Most of the code will be shipping. But you have more data growing exponentially. Software is eating the world, but data is eating software. That means data is greater than software. If you look at it that way, that's super important. As the new architects, you and I were just talking about how we've in the industry for a while. You certainly have an amazing career from Microsoft now at Alibaba. A new generation of architects and developers are going to create new innovations around this dynamic of data. What's your advice and how do you view that if you are 21 years old again right now and you were going to jump into studies and academic and or field. It's a whole new world. >> I think there's probably two suggestions. Not necessarily for the young generation, but I would say it's just a suggestion for the young generation to push that habit. The first thing you mentioned about the data eats software. Well, I would put it in a different perspective. I would say for the last generation, the last two or three generations, I would say the computer era, we are really talking about the computer software. That's pretty much in everything. For this generation, I would say we are talking about computing plus the data. That box is not important, but the computing power is more important. For the computing era, the box is important. >> There's no box. It's the world, it's the cloud. >> That's one thing. The implication for this, I want the young generation to push is, then we need the new infrastructure. Thinking about the build as a great vision, got to have the computer in every home. That's infrastructure. Today when you are in the computing process data era, the infrastructure is not there. I think the vision for the Alibaba Cloud is make sure that we have this infrastructure for the next 10 or 20 years so the young generation can take advantage of that and to do that innovation and inventions, just like computing in every home. >> That's very important. I think that also speaks to businesses, how enterprises, I remember my first start up, I had to buy all this equipment and put it into the telephone closet. Now, start ups and small businesses don't need IT departments. This has been a big growth area certainly for Alibaba Cloud. But now all businesses might have a small closet, not a big data center. This is going to change the nature of business. So work and play are coming together. This speaks to the Museum of Inspiration theme here where you can have work and play kind of integrate but yet still be separate in that analog digital world. What's your vision on this new dimension of everything doesn't have to be just digital? You can have an analog life and mix it with digital. >> Actually I was always sad. It's not, the world never has just one side. It always has two sides. The difference is which side is important at a particular time. Just like when people talk about digital and analog, the analog will exist forever. It's hard for you to kill. The question is whether you can find the most beauty from the digital at the same time you can most beautiful part of the analog. I would say that the people, just like when talking about software, people still loved the hardware. And people still loved the touch. The digital has to make sure it looks good. Will it work versus it looks good? I would say we want to make sure people live in a world with two sides, instead of just giving them one side of the world. >> You mentioned people still love hardware. I always say, a car drives but there's still an engine, and people like to understand the engine. There's a maker culture in the United States that's been growing over the past two decades. And now even more accelerated is the maker culture because of the edge and how technology has become part of the fabric of life. How do you see that maker culture being enabled by more cloud services? Because anyone can make a skateboard or motorcycle or a computer or a device now. Powering that with the cloud is an opportunity. How do you view that? >> I would say that eventually, if we have the broad definition of a cloud, I would say eventually, everything the maker makes will be part of the cloud. When talking about clouds, we're really talking about Internet, so every hardware, every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. I would say, if you look at the evolution of the Internet, Internet, it's just a backbone at the very beginning. Actually the first revolution the Internet made is really to make sure that every piece of software is a part of Internet. That's how we got the world wide web. I would say when talking about the maker culture, I would say eventually that every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. So Internet won't be complete without the hardware. In that sense, the cloud is a really essential part of that. >> There's some really interesting things happening here in China that I'm excited about. One of them is the nature of the user base and how close you guys are to that. In the US a similar scale but it's kind of spread over a bunch of other cloud providers. But the interesting phenomenon as data grows exponentially, as software grows exponentially in open source, things are becoming more decentralized. Without talking about the whole initial coin offerings, I know China has banned it and Russia's going to ban it. Other countries are putting a clamp down on crypto currency. Putting that aside, there's still blockchain as a potential disruptive enabler. You're seeing decentralization becoming a new architecture dynamic because you have to support the growth of these devices at the edge. Distributive computing has been around for a while, but now a decentralized architecture dynamic exists. How do you steer that technology direction? >> You have to separate from the the distributive architecture versus its physical location. I would say I like the blockchain idea very much. I think eventually it would be part of the Internet. It's not just something that sits on top of the Internet. It would be very fundamental, just like TCP and IP. This is low level, so this would be part of the Internet instead of standing on top of the Internet. Eventually, in that sense, Internet would be very distributed. By thinking that it's nothing, there's no decentralization exists. You still need, even though physically, it's in one place. >> It's almost decentralized, not 100 percent. >> Yeah, yeah. Obviously this would be different. Without Internet, without new software, that basically, just like PC. PC is really in a single box, and we use all software in a box. We distribute architecture. We could have decentralized, but everything actually is distributed. You still cannot trace that. You put like a meeting. A service in a data center. It's actually distributed over this one meeting service. In that sense, it's completely distributed. >> That server list too is a big trend where if you talk about the edge of the network, you got to move compute to the data sometimes. Or have compute on the edge. So this is going to be continued growth, you see that as well right? >> Yes, but I still think, if you use Silicon as a measure for this computing power, I would say if you can see there's more silicon on the edge, but I would say when we put one silicon on the edge, you probably have to put 100 silicons on the cloud. It's still kind of-- >> It's a relationship. >> It's a relationship, just like our body is very important but the brain consumes the most oxygen. >> It's important what's in the cloud then. You got to have the computing, have those ratios. It depends on the architecture. >> Yes, yes. >> Final question for you is as the folks in Silicon Valley, where we're based, and Palo Alto want to know is Alibaba, what it means to them? If you have a chance to say a few things about what Alibaba Cloud is to America, what would you like to say? >> I would say that actually they would just put the cloud computing aside. Just look at what it really means behind that. I think the cloud, we do have an understanding of what the cloud computing really means. At the very beginning actually, I wouldn't call the company a cloud computing company. I would call it a general computing company. It's really a fraction of what's thinking in China. Again, my comment is not just to view China as the market to sell your product. To view China as the place to inspire having a new product. >> And it's a global world now, the world is flat. >> Yes, just like United States, it's not, it's a place inspired. All the people around the world together to have a new idea. I think the people in China just love new things. They love to try new things. It really can shoot your size of your innovation. >> And it's a global collaboration, it's interesting. That phenomenon is going to continue. You've done amazing work here. Congratulations on the Museum of Inspiration and the projects you're working on. Personal question for you. What are you excited about now? We kind of joke about how old we are now, but the young people certainly have a great future ahead of them. But you have a lot of experience and you're steering Alibaba's technology committee across the group as well as being the founder of the cloud. What are you excited about right now, technically speaking? What's the big, or just impact? What's the big wave that you like? >> I think it's very exciting in a couple of things, three things I would say. The first is really about just look at technology itself. Just like when I described my book, it's really, really exciting in your life if you can see the Internet plus the computing and plus data, cause they're together. Just like you have this engine, you have the airplane, a couple of things, they're together wherever. This is a very, very exciting era. This is not just about a technology era. It's an era that all things happen at the same time, so that's very exciting. That's one thing. The second thing as you read about the city around over here, I think the the Alibaba the Hanzo, it's just a very special for Alibaba, but I think it's special for the other company as well. So this place is very special. Just to give you an idea where you are, this area has the most networked river in the past. If you look at the map, it's like Internet. I would say, all the people over here, just their mindset. It's just on an Internet mindset. Even goes back 100, 200 years ago because the river is the only way for them to travel, for the communications-- >> That's the data back then. >> That's exactly my point, see. If you look at the map, so this is very exciting. The other thing about that the Alibaba, for me, the Alibaba you know Alibaba, we have a very broad opinions. You can feel that. From a technology point of view, that basically means it's the place you can touch every aspect of technology. You have a very slight, very-- >> You have a great surface area aperture to look at impact of life. >> So you think about these three things together. It's hard to say the, you better get excited. >> It's a great time to be in technology, isn't it? Entertainment, e-commerce, web services. >> For me, when I work on the city brain project, it's just the beginning of machine learning. A lot of people, they are fighting for like, when people talk about speech recognition, they are fighting for the last one meter for the speech recognition. But if you're talking about city brain, it's the world. The most big AI project. And it's just the beginning. We just start with the one percent. >> It must be a lot of fun. You got a lot of data to work with. You have real life integration. It's super exciting. When are we going to see you in Silicon Valley? >> I appear regularly to Silicon Valley two or three times every year. We'll probably see sometime early next year. >> Thank you very much for the time, appreciate it. >> Thank you for coming to the conference and coming to the museum. >> Thank you very much for your inspiration. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents ... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE. We are here for an exclusive Cube conversations at the Alibaba Cloud conference here in Hangzhou, China. We're here with Dr. Wang, who's the chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee as well as the founder of Alibaba Cloud, here in the new Museum of Inspiration at the event. Thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thank you for coming. >> So before we talk about Alibaba Cloud and all the goodness going on here at the conference, talk about this Museum of Inspiration. It is new, and it has kind of a display theme. You kind of walk through time. What was the motivation and the inspiration for the museum? >> Yeah, I think the keyword for the museum, inspiration, is really the inspiration that started the museum. I would say that there's two, really the artists thinking about that. The first thing is really about when people, people take a lot of things for granted. One of the goals for this museum, it just shows the people they probably see every day. But just let them, just, wow, okay, that's different from what I thought. I think a lot of people take for granted, but it's really a great invention, a great human contribution to the whole society. I think that one thing is really about that people understand why we got here today. So that's the first thing. The other thing is really about science and technology. When people are talking about science and technology, people often will say, whether we can combine science and technology. But I don't think that's the right way to describe the relationship between science and technology. I would say science and technology, really the two sides of the coin. I really want to see, let people to see two sides instead of mixing together and got one thing. So that's two things that's parallel, just like zero and one. They are two things. When they're put together in a computer, amazing things happen. If you mix the zero and the one, like half something, then it's just not that fun. So I really want to make sure it's the museum of science and art instead of the mixture of science and arts. So that's the one thing. The other thing is really about the inspiration of future. Most of the museum is really about the past, to show how we have in the past, and with less on the inspiration to help people to think about the future. This museum is really, when we think about everything over here, we did talk about the past, but we want to make sure people think about the future. That's the whole idea about the museum. >> And the computer industry is fairly young, if you go back to modern computing. But you kind of have a take here about how technology really is embedded in life. Talk more about that impact 'cause that seems to translate to the conference here at Alibaba, that technology isn't just about the speeds and the feeds, it's about the integration into life. >> Yeah, and I think that from this museum we can see actually I trace back the origin of all the technology. When people are talking about the computer technology, I really want to talk about the computing technology. And then we can trace back, see actually the human is the first signal computing device. Our Mother Nature created for us. If you look at the same things differently, you really can see the origin of that. I think in this museum we talk about two really original things. The first is about the nature origin of the Internet. When talking about Internet, people talk about our current technological infrastructure of Internet. When you look at the human history, how is when people walk, you create an Internet for Earth? You can see a lot of things can trace back. Then, with this kind of trace back, you can help us to think about what's going to happen next. The trace of the original idea is actually very important if you're thinking about technology. >> Talk about the story of Alibaba Cloud. That is not, It's new, Amazon has had it for around, early 2000's. But you guys came right after Amazon, 2009. Still young and growing. How does the Alibaba Cloud take the culture of this inspiration? What are some of the design principles of the Alibaba Cloud? >> Actually I would say the Alibaba Cloud is different from the Amazon Cloud. In the sense we have different vision about the future. Unfortunately though, we are put under the same umbrella called cloud computing by media, I will say that. So we are different, in the sense when the Amazon, actually I show great respect to Amazon. When Amazon started cloud computing, they are really talking about the utility. They're talking about how to cut the cost down. So basically, they start with the low cost of IT infrastructure. That's what I understand. When I started Alibaba Cloud, we know that actually cost is important for sure. But we know that actually the computing part is more important than the cost if you're thinking about the big data era. We started with thinking it's the acentric cloud computing. When you look at our first brochure and we put those words over there. That's almost nine years ago. We called it acentric cloud computing. Instead of the IT-centric cloud computing. This actually, it's not just an idea difference. It's actually, eventually, influenced of the underlying technology infrastructure. Our whole underlying technological infrastructure is designed for the data, instead of just for the IT deployment. >> Jack Ma was talking about this industrial revolution, this digital transformation. What strikes me is you guys have that same art and scientist dynamic, art and science coming together, reminds me of the Steve Jobs technology liberal arts thinking that spawns new creativity. Certainly the iPhone is a great example of that as one of the many things. But now the new generation is coming together. You have a big artist focus here at the event. Music festival, not just technology. How is that part of the focus at the event here? What does that mean for new developers? >> I think it's really the crossing behind that. If you're thinking about technology and now e-commerce, what's really the one thing behind that that's really changed the way of peoples' lives? Computing in that sense, computing is not just technology. It's really something that changes the way of life of every people. I think the e-commerce change the way of life of every people. In that sense, they are the same. If you look at the peoples' lives, they won't just live on technology. They won't just live on the arts. They need a life, love means everything. By nature, we have to make sure as consumers, they need something more than just one thing. I think we are very lucky we understand that. If you're thinking about the young people, I will give you a few numbers about this conference about young people. In China, we have a very specific word talking about the young people a couple of years ago. We call the 'badiho'. It basically means the generation born of the '80s. When people talk about 'jodiho', that basically means people born after '90s. And then people talking about the 'leniho' it's basically people born after 2000. I think that most of the visitors for this conference are 'leniho', 'jodiho', and 'badiho'. These are all young, all young people. >> The digital culture. >> It's a digital culture. I would rather use my own word in the book I would say instead of digital. For me, digital generation is already an old generation I would say. I would like to call this the online generation. They do everything online. Even the last generation do a lot of things digital because digital is everywhere. But I want to emphasize it's an online generation. They do everything online. >> Dr. Wang, talk about data. You mentioned that's the key ingredient, the fuel for innovation. That's impacting the city brain project you guys are doing. Talk about the city brain and the role of data and how that's impacting the societal users out there certainly here in China, the traffic is crowded. This is just an example of what else is out there. >> Okay. City brain actually it's, again it means different things based on the perspective. One thing that's probably important is the data. This is first time actually I think instead of using the big data, it's better to using what I call the data results. It's a better word than big data. I think the one fundamental thinking for the city brain is we find a human army. Humans finally realize actually that data results is the most precious resource for the city, instead of land and water supply. Because we already know that the land is limited. The water supply is limited. This is very important. It doesn't view data as a non-essential thing. It's just a part of your IT system. We finally realize that data is part of the city instead of part of your city IT system. I think it's a leap frog thinking, at least for me. When it got to that, and you realize that today all the existing IT systems cannot actually really embrace the data. IT system is just to support the people doing the work they used to do. And then you realize we need an infrastructure to really make the value from the data. Just like we have water supply for the city, then you can use the reservoir. Otherwise, the reservoir is useless for the city. I think city brain is just like a water supply system for the data. The city eventually can consume that. We start thinking it's a new infrastructure for the city just like water supply system, just like power grid, just like any way system. That's how we're thinking about it. This is the first thing. The reason we got to the traffic system is this is the problem every city has around the world. From my yesterday's presentation, I just joked about we build two roads for the city, which is too many. I was thinking a lot of people realize it. That's why Boston had the project. They want to get all the roads under the surface. Under surface. But it's still a road. It's still expensive. You know how much money they spend just to move all the roads. >> The big dig, I remember, that was the-- >> Yes, that's a big dig. I don't think that's, that's good for the transportation system, but I don't think that's the number one way for the growth of the city. I think probably most of the city don't have the money to do that. What the data city brain wants to do whether we can take the resource of data and we can optimize every aspect of the city so we can use less resource to support city growth. When we start with the traffic, it's just to make sure, you know that when we use the data to optimize the traffic lights, the idea behind that actually we use the data to optimize the time. How to just read the time. It's not just lights. And then if you're thinking, when we show the eventually, if you have enough data, then we can have less roads in the city but still got the same. >> So the Internet of Things is the hottest trend. 0bviously machine learning and artificial intelligence are part of that, and the cloud powers this new edge of the network, and the data has to flow. So the question that a lot of technologists who are architecting these solutions ask is how do you make the data go at a very low latency? That takes compute power. That takes a lot of technology. How does Alibaba Cloud think about the architecture? Obviously you have a strategic partner like Intel, Obviously with a lot of compute power. You got to think differently around making the data move. If it's like water, it needs to flow. So real time is really important, but self-driving cars, real time is down to the millisecond, nanosecond. How do you think about that as a technologist? >> I think the, if you go back to the Internet of things, I think it's still the Internet. I would say eventually, if you're thinking about the word cloud computing and people use edge computing and people talking about Internet of things. For me, it's just the computing of the Internet. Cloud computing is the computing of the Internet and edge computing is computing on the Internet. Even the IoT is the computing of the Internet. If you're talking about the data, I think eventually it's really about the data on the Internet. It's not data on the sensor. It's not data on the cloud. Basically it's data on the Internet. I would expect eventually the Internet infrastructure will be improved significantly. It's not an improved cloud. It's not improved edge computing. Or it's improvement of the IoT. But it's really, >> Together. >> it's together. >> So Intel, I was covering them, Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. And obviously five G. You need the mobile overlay, that's super important. You also have the end-to-end inside the cloud. Obviously Intel is a strategic partner. Can you talk about the relationship you have with Intel? And also your philosophy, technically speaking, with the ecosystem? Because it's not just Intel, it's everybody. There's a lot of people here at this event. American companies as well as international companies who are now going to be part of your ecosystem. >> Actually the, we certainly have a very good relationship with Intel. I think we share in some sense the same vision. I think that the number one thing is really about people learning about how important the computing is. For me, the Intel is not that, a chip selling company. Intel is really the provider of computing power. That's what I understand. And we can expect eventually the whole ecosystem is really about who is going to provide the computing power. Who is going to provide the infrastructure to make the data? Instead of just equipment supply, eventually the need for computing, and the need for data, will be the challenge for every company, including Alibaba Cloud. We are not, we are not immune from these challenges. We will feel the same challenge. What we want to do is really make sure that with all these partners, provide enough computing for the next 10 or 20 years. We want to make sure that there's enough data flow for the next 10 years. In that sense, it's not the traditional ecosystem as like you do this and you do that. It's basically how we can work together to really make sure we have the challenge for the data and computing in the next 10 years. >> Yesterday we covered the news that you guys announced 15, building and R&D over the next three years, which is a lot of money. Also it has a very international and global view. Academics with younger folks. Alibaba Cloud is going to be a part of that, I'm assuming. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that intersecting. But the question for you is the cloud world today is moving at very, very fast speed. We're seeing Amazon, for instance, has been the best in terms of new announcements every year. Not one or two, like a ton of announcements, a lot. How are you guys going to continue to keep the pace? To move faster because the city brain is a great project, but it's going to have more evolution. It's going to move fast. How are you guys keeping up with the pace? >> I think the only way, that's not just for the next 10 years. Actually when I started Alibaba Cloud, we take the same philosophy. Actually the user moves very fast than us. If you look at the users in China they move very fast probably than anywhere else around the world. If you use the city brain project, I would say city brain project is basically tell the people, we need the computing power more than any other task. You really can see that. People want you. If you can't satisfy their demand, then somebody else is going to do that. It's not something we want to move fast but >> You have to move fast. >> You have to move fast. That's why the China is special. I want to say China is not just a place for the market. China is the place that pushes you to move faster. That's more important than market size. >> You mentioned data technology and information technology kind of transferring to a new world. Software is also a big part of it. Software you have to compute, obviously with Intel and the relationships you have. But software is growing exponentially. Certainly in open source, we see Cloud Native Foundation here. They'll probably have Linux foundation. Open source is going to grow exponentially. Most of the code will be shipping. But you have more data growing exponentially. Software is eating the world, but data is eating software. That means data is greater than software. If you look at it that way, that's super important. As the new architects, you and I were just talking about how we've in the industry for a while. You certainly have an amazing career from Microsoft now at Alibaba. A new generation of architects and developers are going to create new innovations around this dynamic of data. What's your advice and how do you view that if you are 21 years old again right now and you were going to jump into studies and academic and or field. It's a whole new world. >> I think there's probably two suggestions. Not necessarily for the young generation, but I would say it's just a suggestion for the young generation to push that habit. The first thing you mentioned about the data eats software. Well, I would put it in a different perspective. I would say for the last generation, the last two or three generations, I would say the computer era, we are really talking about the computer software. That's pretty much in everything. For this generation, I would say we are talking about computing plus the data. That box is not important, but the computing power is more important. For the computing era, the box is important. >> There's no box. It's the world, it's the cloud. >> That's one thing. The implication for this, I want the young generation to push is, then we need the new infrastructure. Thinking about the build as a great vision, got to have the computer in every home. That's infrastructure. Today when you are in the computing process data era, the infrastructure is not there. I think the vision for the Alibaba Cloud is make sure that we have this infrastructure for the next 10 or 20 years so the young generation can take advantage of that and to do that innovation and inventions, just like computing in every home. >> That's very important. I think that also speaks to businesses, how enterprises, I remember my first start up, I had to buy all this equipment and put it into the telephone closet. Now, start ups and small businesses don't need IT departments. This has been a big growth area certainly for Alibaba Cloud. But now all businesses might have a small closet, not a big data center. This is going to change the nature of business. So work and play are coming together. This speaks to the Museum of Inspiration theme here where you can have work and play kind of integrate but yet still be separate in that analog digital world. What's your vision on this new dimension of everything doesn't have to be just digital? You can have an analog life and mix it with digital. >> Actually I was always sad. It's not, the world never has just one side. It always has two sides. The difference is which side is important at a particular time. Just like when people talk about digital and analog, the analog will exist forever. It's hard for you to kill. The question is whether you can find the most beauty from the digital at the same time you can most beautiful part of the analog. I would say that the people, just like when talking about software, people still loved the hardware. And people still loved the touch. The digital has to make sure it looks good. Will it work versus it looks good? I would say we want to make sure people live in a world with two sides, instead of just giving them one side of the world. >> You mentioned people still love hardware. I always say, a car drives but there's still an engine, and people like to understand the engine. There's a maker culture in the United States that's been growing over the past two decades. And now even more accelerated is the maker culture because of the edge and how technology has become part of the fabric of life. How do you see that maker culture being enabled by more cloud services? Because anyone can make a skateboard or motorcycle or a computer or a device now. Powering that with the cloud is an opportunity. How do you view that? >> I would say that eventually, if we have the broad definition of a cloud, I would say eventually, everything the maker makes will be part of the cloud. When talking about clouds, we're really talking about Internet, so every hardware, every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. I would say, if you look at the evolution of the Internet, Internet, it's just a backbone at the very beginning. Actually the first revolution the Internet made is really to make sure that every piece of software is a part of Internet. That's how we got the world wide web. I would say when talking about the maker culture, I would say eventually that every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. So Internet won't be complete without the hardware. In that sense, the cloud is a really essential part of that. >> There's some really interesting things happening here in China that I'm excited about. One of them is the nature of the user base and how close you guys are to that. In the US a similar scale but it's kind of spread over a bunch of other cloud providers. But the interesting phenomenon as data grows exponentially, as software grows exponentially in open source, things are becoming more decentralized. Without talking about the whole initial coin offerings, I know China has banned it and Russia's going to ban it. Other countries are putting a clamp down on crypto currency. Putting that aside, there's still blockchain as a potential disruptive enabler. You're seeing decentralization becoming a new architecture dynamic because you have to support the growth of these devices at the edge. Distributive computing has been around for a while, but now a decentralized architecture dynamic exists. How do you steer that technology direction? >> You have to separate from the the distributive architecture versus its physical location. I would say I like the blockchain idea very much. I think eventually it would be part of the Internet. It's not just something that sits on top of the Internet. It would be very fundamental, just like TCP and IP. This is low level, so this would be part of the Internet instead of standing on top of the Internet. Eventually, in that sense, Internet would be very distributed. By thinking that it's nothing, there's no decentralization exists. You still need, even though physically, it's in one place. >> It's almost decentralized, not 100 percent. >> Yeah, yeah. Obviously this would be different. Without Internet, without new software, that basically, just like PC. PC is really in a single box, and we use all software in a box. We distribute architecture. We could have decentralized, but everything actually is distributed. You still cannot trace that. You put like a meeting. A service in a data center. It's actually distributed over this one meeting service. In that sense, it's completely distributed. >> That server list too is a big trend where if you talk about the edge of the network, you got to move compute to the data sometimes. Or have compute on the edge. So this is going to be continued growth, you see that as well right? >> Yes, but I still think, if you use Silicon as a measure for this computing power, I would say if you can see there's more silicon on the edge, but I would say when we put one silicon on the edge, you probably have to put 100 silicons on the cloud. It's still kind of-- >> It's a relationship. >> It's a relationship, just like our body is very important but the brain consumes the most oxygen. >> It's important what's in the cloud then. You got to have the computing, have those ratios. It depends on the architecture. >> Yes, yes. >> Final question for you is as the folks in Silicon Valley, where we're based, and Palo Alto want to know is Alibaba, what it means to them? If you have a chance to say a few things about what Alibaba Cloud is to America, what would you like to say? >> I would say that actually they would just put the cloud computing aside. Just look at what it really means behind that. I think the cloud, we do have an understanding of what the cloud computing really means. At the very beginning actually, I wouldn't call the company a cloud computing company. I would call it a general computing company. It's really a fraction of what's thinking in China. Again, my comment is not just to view China as the market to sell your product. To view China as the place to inspire having a new product. >> And it's a global world now, the world is flat. >> Yes, just like United States, it's not, it's a place inspired. All the people around the world together to have a new idea. I think the people in China just love new things. They love to try new things. It really can shoot your size of your innovation. >> And it's a global collaboration, it's interesting. That phenomenon is going to continue. You've done amazing work here. Congratulations on the Museum of Inspiration and the projects you're working on. Personal question for you. What are you excited about now? We kind of joke about how old we are now, but the young people certainly have a great future ahead of them. But you have a lot of experience and you're steering Alibaba's technology committee across the group as well as being the founder of the cloud. What are you excited about right now, technically speaking? What's the big, or just impact? What's the big wave that you like? >> I think it's very exciting in a couple of things, three things I would say. The first is really about just look at technology itself. Just like when I described my book, it's really, really exciting in your life if you can see the Internet plus the computing and plus data, cause they're together. Just like you have this engine, you have the airplane, a couple of things, they're together wherever. This is a very, very exciting era. This is not just about a technology era. It's an era that all things happen at the same time, so that's very exciting. That's one thing. The second thing as you read about the city around over here, I think the the Alibaba the Hanzo, it's just a very special for Alibaba, but I think it's special for the other company as well. So this place is very special. Just to give you an idea where you are, this area has the most networked river in the past. If you look at the map, it's like Internet. I would say, all the people over here, just their mindset. It's just on an Internet mindset. Even goes back 100, 200 years ago because the river is the only way for them to travel, for the communications-- >> That's the data back then. >> That's exactly my point, see. If you look at the map, so this is very exciting. The other thing about that the Alibaba, for me, the Alibaba you know Alibaba, we have a very broad opinions. You can feel that. From a technology point of view, that basically means it's the place you can touch every aspect of technology. You have a very slight, very-- >> You have a great surface area aperture to look at impact of life. >> So you think about these three things together. It's hard to say the, you better get excited. >> It's a great time to be in technology, isn't it? Entertainment, e-commerce, web services. >> For me, when I work on the city brain project, it's just the beginning of machine learning. A lot of people, they are fighting for like, when people talk about speech recognition, they are fighting for the last one meter for the speech recognition. But if you're talking about city brain, it's the world. The most big AI project. And it's just the beginning. We just start with the one percent. >> It must be a lot of fun. You got a lot of data to work with. You have real life integration. It's super exciting. When are we going to see you in Silicon Valley? >> I appear regularly to Silicon Valley two or three times every year. We'll probably see sometime early next year. >> Thank you very much for the time, appreciate it. >> Thank you for coming to the conference and coming to the museum. >> Thank you very much for your inspiration. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on AWS. It's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred Wurden, VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan Bharadwaj, who's the VP and General Manager of Cloud Solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on the showcase. >> Great to be here. >> Great. Thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. >> We've been covering this VMware cloud on AWS since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. What's this mean? And the press were not really on board with the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for AWS and it continues two years later and I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to re:Invent, which is only a couple weeks away Feels like tomorrow. But as we prepare, a lot going on. Where are we with the evolution of the solution? >> I mean, first thing I want to say is October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of IT. When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy came together to announce this. And I think John, you were there at the time I was there. It was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017 year after that at VMworld, back when we called it VMworld. I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we built a service offering now five years old. Pretty remarkable journey. In the first years we tried to get across all the regions, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. In the second year, we started going really on enterprise great features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretched Clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using vSAN and NSX-T across to AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nines of availability that applications started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward, all kinds of integration with AWS Direct Connect, Transit Gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. Along the way, Disaster Recovery, we punched out two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our Outposts partnership. We were up on stage at re:Invent, again, with Pat and Andy announcing AWS Outposts and the VMware flavor of that, VMware Cloud and AWS Outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >> That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And this has been the theme for AWS, man, since I can remember from day one, Fred. You guys do the heavy lifting as you always say for the customers. Here, VMware comes on board. Takes advantage of the AWS and just doesn't miss a beat. Continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, vSphere, and these are big workloads on AWS. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >> Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's evolving quickly and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the customers. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and responding to what customers want. So pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to while at VMC. >> That's a great value proposition. We've been talking about that in context to anyone building on top of the cloud. They can have their own supercloud, as we call it, if you take advantage of all the CapEx and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and continues to make in performance IaaS and PaaS, all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options in the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered. What are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >> Yeah. I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion. Right from day one we were the early adopters of the AWS Nitro platform. The reinvention of EC2 back five years ago. And so we have been having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software-defined data center, compute storage networking on EC2, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally on AWS EC2 global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us, what customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service. And this was somewhat new to VMware. But we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top. So we took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud in AWS. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the Log4j debacle. Industry was just going through that. Favorite proof point from customers was before they could even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying, we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean, these are large banks. Many other customers around the world were super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >> Narayan, that's a great point. The whole managed service piece brings up the security. You kind of teasing at it, but there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera more bits than ever before and at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's going to be a zero-day vulnerability out there. It happens. We saw one with Fortinet this week. This came out of the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me, we see the value when we talk to customers on theCUBE about this. It was a real easy understanding of what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS. But the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >> Well, what's interesting about this is that it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like SAP, we'll go end-to-end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies. So from availability and reliability standpoint, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're going to go help the customer resolve that. It works really well. >> On the VMware side, what's been the feedback there? What are some of the updates? >> Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we work phenomenal backend relationship with AWS. Customers call VMware for the service or any issues. And then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The key management that we jointly do. All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution, do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with the VMware Cloud in AWS. We're presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >> You had mentioned, I've got list here of some of the innovations. You mentioned the stretch clustering, getting the geos working, advanced network, Disaster Recovery, FedRAMP, public sector certifications, Outposts. All good, you guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in? What's on the list this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the new things, the list of accomplishments? People want to know what's next. They don't want to see stagnant growth here. They want to see more action as cloud continues to scale and modern applications cloud native. You're seeing more and more containers, more and more CI/CD pipelining with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new? What's the new innovations? >> Absolutely. And I think as a five year old service offering, innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explore. First of all, our new platform i4i.metal. It's isolate based. It's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally and separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS FSx with NetApp ONTAP, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well. And the second storage offering called VMware Cloud Flex Storage. VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex Compute where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware Cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vCPU memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, top of ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in the industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud DR solution. A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Northstar. Our ability to have layer four through layer seven, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers is sort at the heart of our (faintly speaking). >> The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better faster, networking more options there. The Flex Compute is interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the resource-defined versus hardware-defined? Because this is what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource-defined versus hardware-defined. What does that mean? >> Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware-defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software-defined data centers. And so that's been super successful. But customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally. Lower the cost even more. And so this is the part where resource-defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request before fiber machines, five containers. It's size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. That's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other. They can go back to that host based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >> It's cloud flexibility right there. I like the name. Fred, let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind, let's get into some of the, we have some time. I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on theCUBE is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they start consuming higher level services. That adoption next level happens and because it's in the cloud. So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple use cases? >> Sure. Well, there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that like you said, as there's more and more bits, you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the i4 and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS. So there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with Textract or any other really cool service that has monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their current app base in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >> Narayan, what's your perspective from the VMware side? 'Cause you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where it's being rolled out 'cause you now have a lot of hybrid too. So what's your take on what's happening in with customers? >> I mean, it's been phenomenal. The customer adoption of this and banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production-grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so I have a couple of really good examples. S&P Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS Markit, big conglomeration now. Both customers were using VMware Cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated 1000 workloads to VMware Cloud and AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology. And the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B. The lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware Cloud and AWS. So that's one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe, but constantly entering new markets with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap. >> It's great to see. I mean, the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. Congratulations. >> One of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there and this is a big part of it here. >> It's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issue is another one. You see that constraints. I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security. I mean, I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013 and at that time people were saying, the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on-premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot, the stay current on the isolation there is hard. So I think the security and supply chain, Fred, is another one. Do you agree? >> I absolutely agree. It's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them more efficiently. And then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is the only P1. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >> And Narayan, your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better. All right, final question. I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I want to end with a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a new modern shift. We're seeing another inflection point. We've been documenting it. It's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is, what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What's changed for the better and what's still the same thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >> I'll tackle it. Businesses are complex and they're often unique, that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine managed services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about, that's elastic. You could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that. That's my take, Narayan. >> You got a lot of platform to compete on. With Amazon, you got a lot to build on. Narayan, your side. What's your answer to that question? >> I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constantly (faintly speaking). I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that production quickly and efficiently. I think we are seeing, we are at the very start of that sort of journey. Of course, we have invested in Kubernetes, the means to an end, but we're so much more beyond that's happening in industry and I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >> Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on solving these complexities with distractions, whether it's higher level services with large scale infrastructure. At your fingertips, infrastructure as code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen and Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and AWS getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> This is theCUBE and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation, VMware Cloud on AWS. Jointly engineered solution bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Thanks Peter. We're back for the deep dive. Beth Phalen is joining us again and Ruya Barret who's the vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's data protection division. Thanks guys for coming on. Ruya let me start with you. Why are customers, what are they telling you in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort and collaboration we've been putting in place and so did Yang Ming with Vmware. So whether that's integration into vCenter or vSphere, or vRealize operations manager, vRealize automation or vCloud director. All of this work, all of this engineering effort and engineering hours is really to do two things deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers. >> What do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware, whereas 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated, whether you're going directly from storage, to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing hypervisor direct to application storage. So it really is to automate and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels. So automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy Cloud is for the admins and users. It really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know, very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing the backups and restores so our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the V admins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So when you talk about power, is that performance? You've referenced performance but is it just performance or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three-fold. It's power in making sure that you have a single powerful solution that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow as needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on premise or in the Cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection and more importantly restores, is critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency we have the best source side deduplication technology in the market. That, coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> All right. I want to bring Beth Phalen into the conversation. Beth, let's talk about Cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the Cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true. It's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing Cloud into their IT environment. They have to know where their data is and how is it protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here. For a long time we've had our hyper Cloud extensions. You can do Cloud tearing directly from data domain, and now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud AWS customer so that you can use that for your Cloud DR configuration, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with Vmotion if you choose to, and that's great for customers who don't want to have a second site, but do want to have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great work with VMware with VCloud director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy. It's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection, and so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks and your data protection tasks from one UI in the cloud director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing. Comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement. The IDPA DP4400. Ruya, what's it all about? Explain it. >> Absolutely. So what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance turn key, purpose built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-size customers. It's really to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-size customers. It's all-inclusive in terms of capabilities so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, Cloud disaster recovery and Cloud long-term retention. All at your fingertips, all included, as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UIs. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful data protection to mid-size customers at the lowest cost to protect, and we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, I wonder if you could talk about the motivation for this product. Why did you build it and why is it relevant for mid-size customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection. We're known for our world class, best in the class, best in the world dedu capabilities, and what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that served enterprise customers for all of these years and then we're making that accessible to mid-size customers, and there are so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this we've created a product that a mid-size company may have a small IT staff. Like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection. Now they can have what we bring to the market with best in class data protection. >> I want to follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple? What does it mean for customers? >> I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy two times faster than traditional data protection. Simple means easier to manage with modern HTML five interfaces that include the data protection, day to day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easier to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add at 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So when I hear powerful and I hear mid-size customers I'm thinking, okay I want to bring enterprise class data protection down to the mid-size organization. Is that what it means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> If I'm an IT admin, I want to make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible, and so we have the broadest support matrix in the industry. I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection of my different applications, that's key. That's one thing. The other thing is I want to be able to scale. I don't want to have to be forced to bring in new products. With this, you have a logical five terabytes on prim. You can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the Cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalabililty. >> Petabytes, sorry, Petabytes. >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> Of course, yes. What am I thinking? And then, last but not least, it's just performance. It runs on a 14G powered server. You're going to get the efficiency. You can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So all of those things come together for power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this sort of IT operations person. What does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah absolutely. So first, you're going to get your weekends back, right? So the product is just faster. We talked about it's simpler. You're not going to have to get a PhD on how to do data protection to be able to do your business. You're going to enable your V admins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that sound mind that data protection is just happening, it works. We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses with the most stringent service level requirements. It's just going to work, and by the way, you're going to look like a hero because with this 2U appliance, you're going to be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center. So your boss is going to think you're just a super hero. >> Petabytes. >> Exactly. Petabytes, exactly. So it's tremendous for the IT user and also the business user. >> Wait, wait, what about the boss? What about the line of business? What does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO I really want to think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel, and my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't want to overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business. You need it, but you don't want to overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement. The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind and the trust that this is just going to work, then I'm going to be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario, and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm going to rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much. Don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session. So you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook and ask any question. All right, let's take a look at the product and then we're going to come back and get the analysts' perspective. Keep it right there. (electronic music)