(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon. theCUBE is live at VMware Explorer. Lisa Martin here in San Francisco with Dave Nicholson. This is our second day of coverage talking all things VMware and it's ecosystem. We're excited to welcome from DXC Technology, James Bion, Hybrid Cloud and Multi Cloud Offering manager to have a conversation next. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much. >> Welcome. >> Talk to us a little bit about before we get into the VMware partnership, what's new at DXC? What's going on? >> So DXC is really evolving and revitalizing into more of a cloud orientated company. So we're already driving change in our customers at the moment. We take them on that cloud journey, but we're taking them in the right way, in a structured mannered way. So we are really excited about it, we're kicking off our Cloud First type, Cloud Right sort of story and helping customers on that journey. >> Yesterday in the keynote, VMware was talking about customers are on this Cloud chaos phase, they want to get to Cloud Smart. You're saying they want to get to Cloud Right. Talk to us about what DXC Cloud Right is, what does it mean? What does it enable businesses to achieve? >> That's a very good question. So DXC has come up with this concept of Cloud Right, we looked at it from a services and outcome. So what do customers want to achieve? And how do we get it successfully? This is not a technology conversation, this is about putting the right workloads at the right place, at the right time, at the right cost to get the right value for your business. It's not about just doing it for the sake of doing it, okay. There's a lot of changes it's not technology only you've got to change how people operate. You've got to work through the organizational change. You need to ensure that you have the right security in place to maintain it. And it's about value, really about value proposition. So we don't just focus on cost, we focus on operations of it, we focus on security of it. We focus on ensuring the value proposition of it and putting not just for one Cloud, it's the right place. Big focus on Hybrid and Multi Cloud solutions in particular, we're very excited about what's happening with VMware Cloud on maybe AWS or et cetera because we see there a real dynamic change for our customers where they can transition across to the right Cloud services, at the right time, at the right place, but minimal disruption to the actual operation of their business. Very easy to move a workload into that place using the same skilled resources, the same tools, the same environment that you have had for many years, the same SLAs. Customers don't want a variance in their SLAs, they just want an outcome at a right price and the right time. >> Right, what are some of the things going on with the VMware partnership and anything you know, here we are at this the event called the theme is "The Center of the Multi Cloud Universe", which I keep saying sounds like a Marvel movie, I think there needs to be some superheroes here. But how is DXC working with VMware to help customers that are in Multi Cloud by default, not by design? >> That's a very good one. So DXC works jointly with VMware for more than a thousand clients out there. Wide diversity of different clients. We go to market together, we work collaboratively to put roadmaps in place for our clients, it's a unified team. On top of that, we have an extremely good VMware practice, joint working VMware team working directly with DXC dedicated resources and we deliver real value for clients. For example, we have a customer experience zone, we have a customer innovation zone so we can run proof of concepts on all the different VMware technologies for customers. If they want to try something different, try and push the boundaries a little bit with the VMware products, we can do that for them. But at the end of the day we deliver outcome based services. We are not there to deliver a piece of software, but a technology which show the customer the value of the service that they've been receiving within that. So we bring the VMware fantastic technologies in and then we bring the DXC managed services which we do so well and we look after our customers and do the right thing for our customers. >> So what does the go-to market strategy look like from a DXC perspective? We say that there are a finite number of strategic seats at the customer table. DXC has longstanding deep relationships with customers, so does VMware and probably over a shorter period of time, the Hyper scale Cloud Providers. How are you approaching these relationships with customers? Is it you bringing in your friends from the cloud? Is it the cloud bringing in their friend DXC? What does it look like? >> So we have relationships with all of them, but were agnostic. So we are the people who bring it all together into that unified platform and services that the customers expect. VMware will bring us certainly to the table and we'll bring VMware to the table. Equally, we work very collaboratively with all the cloud providers and we work in deals together. They bring us deals, we bring them deals. So it works extremely well from that perspective, but of course it's a multi-cloud world these days. We don't just deal with one cloud provider, we'll normally have all of the different services to find the right place for our customers. >> Now, one thing that that's been mentioned from DXC is this idea that Cloud First which has been sort of a mantra that scores you points if you're a CIO lately, maybe that's not the best way to wake up in the morning. Why not saying, Cloud First? >> So we have a lot of clients who who've tried that Cloud First journey and they've aggressively taken on migration of workloads. And now that they've settled in a few of those they're discovering maybe the ROI isn't quite what they expected it was going to be. That transformation takes a long time, a very long time. We've seen some of the numbers around averaging a hundred apps can take up to seven years to transition and transform, that's a long time. It makes you almost less agile by doing the transformation quite ironically. So DXC's Cloud Right program really helps you to ensure that you assess those workloads correctly, you target the ones that are going to give you the best business value, possibly the best return on investment using our Cloud and advisory practice to do that. And then obviously off the back of that we've got our migration teams and our run services and our application modernization factories and our application platforms for that. So DXC Cloud Right can certainly help our customers on that journey and get that sort of Hybrid Multi Cloud solution that suits their particular outcomes, not just one Cloud provider. >> So Cloud Right isn't just Cloud migration? >> No. >> People sometimes confuse digital transformation with Cloud migration. >> Correct. >> So to be clear Cloud Right and DXC has the ability to work with customers on not just, oh, here, this is how we box it up and ship it out, but what makes sense to box up and ship out. >> Correct, and it's all about that whole end to end life cycle. Remember, this is not just a technology conversation, this is an end to end business conversation. It's the outcomes are important, not the technology. That's why you have good partners like DXC who will help you on that technology journey. >> Let's talk about in the dynamics of the market the last couple of years, we saw so many customers in every industry race to the Cloud, race to digitally transform. You bring up a good point of people interchangeably talking about digital transformation, Cloud migration, but we saw the massive adoption of SaaS technologies. What are you seeing? Are you seeing customers in that sort of Cloud chaos as VMware calls it? That you're coming in with the Cloud Right approach saying, let's actually figure out, you may have done this because of the pandemic maybe it was accelerated, you needed to facilitate collaboration or whatnot, but actually this is the right approach. Are you seeing a lot of customers in that situation? >> We are certainly seeing some customers going into that chaos world. Some of them are still in the early stages of their journey and are taking a more cautious step towards in particular, the companies that would die on systems to be up available all the time. Others have gone too far, the other are in extreme are in the chaos world. And our Cloud Right program will certainly help them to pull their chaos back in, identify what workloads are potentially running in the wrong place, get the framework in place for ensuring that security and governance is in place. Ensuring that we don't have a cost spend blowout in particular, make sure that security is key to everything that we do and operations is key to everything we do. We have our own intelligent Platform X, it's called, our service management platform which is really the engine that sits behind our delivery mechanism. And that's got a whole lot of AI analytics engines in there to identify things and proactively identify workload placements, workload repairs, scripting, and hyper automation behind that too, to keep available here and there. And that's really some of our Cloud Right story, it's not just sorting out the mess, it's sorting out and then running it for you in the right way. >> So what does a typical, a customer engagement look like for a customer in that situation? >> So we would obviously engage our client right advisory team and they would come in and sit down with your application owners, sit down with the business units, identify what success needs to look like. They do all the discovery, they'll run it through our engines to identify what workloads are in the right place, should go to the right place. Just 'cause you can do something doesn't mean you should do something and that's an important thing. So we will come back with that and say, this is where I think your cloud roadmap journey should be. And obviously that takes an intuitive process, but we then can pick off the key topics early at the right time and that low hanging fruit that's really going to drive that value for the customer. >> And where are your customer conversations these days? I mean from a Cloud perspective, digital transformation, we're seeing everything escalate up the C-suite? Are you engaging the executives in this conversation so that they really want to facilitate, let's do things the right way that's the most efficient that allows us as a business to do what we're best at? >> So where we've seen programs fail is where we don't have executive leadership and brought in from day one. So if you don't have that executive and business driver and business leadership, then you're definitely not going to be successful. So to answer your question, yes, of course we are, but we also working directly with the IT departments as well. >> So you just brought up an insight executive alignment, critically important. Based on what you've experienced in the real world, contrast that with the sort of message to the world that we hear constantly about Cloud and IT, what would be the most shocking thing that you can share with us that people might not be aware of? It's like what shocks you the most about the disconnect between what everybody talks about and the reality on the ground? Don't name any names of anyone, but give us an example of the like, this is what's really going on. >> So, we certainly are seeing that big sort of move into Cloud quickly, okay. And then the big bill shock comes and just moving a workload across doesn't mean you're in Cloud, it's a transition and transformation to the SaaS and power services, it's where you get your true value out of cloud. So the concept that just 'cause it's in Cloud it's cheap is not always the case. Doing it right in Cloud is definitely going to have some cost value, but it's going to bring other additional values to their business. It's going to give them agility, it's going to give them resilience. So if you look at all three of those platforms cost, agility, and resilience and live across all three of those, then you're definitely going to get the best outcomes. And we've certainly seen some of those where they haven't taken all of those into consideration, quite often it's cost is what drives it, not the other two. And if you can't keep operations up working efficiently then you are in a lot of trouble. >> So Cloud wrong comes with sticker shock. >> It certainly does. >> What's on the horizon for DXC? >> We're certainly seeing a big drive towards apps modernization and certainly help our customers on that journey. DXC is definitely a Cloud company, may that be on Hybrid Cloud, Private Cloud, Public Cloud, DXC is certainly leading that edge and pushing it forward. >> Excellent, James, thank you so much for joining us on the program today talking about what Cloud Right is, the right approach, how you're helping customers really get to that right approach with the people, the processes, and the technology. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily so don't change the channel. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas Lisa Martin live here with David Nicholson. We're at AWS reinvent 2021, this an outstanding event. There's a lot of people here, tens of thousands. And this is probably one of the most important and largest hybrid tech events that we're doing this year with AWS and its massive ecosystem of partners. We're going to be covering this two live sets, two remote studios, over 100 guests on the CUBE at this re-invent and David and I are pleased to welcome Giorgio Vanzini next the vice president and global head of partners and alliances at DXC, Georgia Welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Talk to us about what's going on at DXC, what are you in AWS doing together with what's the scoop? >> Yes Well, some exciting things are happening between AWS and DXC, which is we're really focusing on our customers that we have especially in the banking and capital markets, but also automotive. And then also we were a launch partner today with the AWS mainframe modernization right, and so we're focusing on mainframes as well. So exciting spaces for us to go collaborate and work with AWS, for our customers. >> Talk to me about some of the things you know the last 22 months have been quite challenging, quite dynamic and we've seen such a massive acceleration to the cloud. What have you seen from your perspective? Are you seeing customers in every industry that have really figured we've got to do this now because if we don't, we're going to be out of business? >> Yes, you're absolutely correct. We've seen a dramatic acceleration of people wanting or customers wanting to move to the cloud public and private, and an acceleration of assistance that they were requesting from a global systems integrator. So what we've seen is you know, part of our clouds ride strategy that we have, really understanding what does the customer need from a strategy perspective, from a business value perspective and the technology perspective, and AWS has been a great partner with us to actually accommodate all of these kinds of things and the announcements that you had today, you know, just substantiate kind of that fact as well. >> Can you double click on the Cloud Right approach, talk to us about what that is, why it's important and what are some of the outcomes that it's helping customers to generate? >> Absolutely love to Cloud Right is really DXC's strategy to take the customers on the journey from the mainframe to the cloud, and to customize this because every customer is different. They have different requirements, different environments, different business strategies. So therefore the Cloud Right approach is really customizing it for the customer. What is the right business strategy? What is the right technology strategy? And then migrating them over into the cloud as well. Keeping in mind that again, customers are specific, industries are specific. You know, data requirements are different analytics are different, you know, government requirements are different. So you need to those in mind when you transition customers over into the cloud space. >> Right, from a data residency, data sovereignty and all of the different rules and regulations that are popping up that are kind of similar to GDPR for example, that's a big challenge, but one of the things too that's happening Giorgio is that every company to be competitive these days has to become a data company, right? There's no choice, you've got to be data-driven, you've got to have a data strategy at the core of the business, otherwise there's a competitor in the rear view mirror, who's ready to take your place. >> That is absolutely correct, and so that's part of our Cloud Right strategy is understanding what are the business requirements from the customer? Understanding their competitive edge and migrating them over. Because in many instances, to your point, they have huge reams of data, petabytes of information of data, but really making sense of it, so running the analytics on it and having the business insights. So helping the customers understand that, but then also understanding of like, what are the key business requirements that they have? Which applications to migrate and which not to migrate? >> So I'm curious, you mentioned that you're a launch partner for mainframe modernization. That's sort of one slice of and very important slice of some organization's business and migration strategy to cloud. I'm curious what the DXC blend is between standardized offerings and bespoke services and how you manage that? Do you have a thought about that? Wouldn't it be great to have small, medium and large and have people click on it? >> Yes here's a T-shirt for you, which size are you? Now I'm actually glad you asked me that question because that's exactly going to the core of the Cloud Right strategy, and the Cloud Right really means that it's like, which T-shirt size is correct for you? Right. This is the question that we just addressed which is it has to be bespoke because one size does not fit all. And so understanding the customer requirements of do we need to move the data to the cloud? Or do we move to need a subset to the cloud? Do we need to move part of the business applications and which ones and in which order? Right? And so that's why I think we bring something to the table in the AWS mainframe modernization, which is unique because we have an end to end kind of approach from a planning to implementation, to execution and running as well. So I think DEX is uniquely positioned with our Cloud Right strategy. >> One of the things AWS Giorgio talks about is not being custom but being purpose-built. Talk to me about kind of compare contrast that with bespoke solutions, industry specific, obviously customers have specificities. Do you see a difference there between purpose-built under bespoke or are they aligned from your perspective? >> Yes, I do agree that a to technology layers are definitely common layers, horizontal layers, right Where I think you have bespoken limitations on the business strategy and the business rules. And so you have to understand what business is the customer really in and how to implement the business rules into the technology stack as well, and bringing it all together. So while the technology I think goes horizontal to your point right, you know, compute and storage is the same. Wherever you go the bits are the same, however how they're utilized and how you use them for your customers and your interaction is completely different from customer to customer and industry to industry, as you guys know as well. >> You know, it can be, it can be really disheartening working in this space when you think of 475 different kinds of instances and how important it is to get that right for a customer and how much they don't care. Ultimately they don't want to hear about it, they don't want to know, but they want you to get it right, so that it doesn't matter. So it's this irony of all of the work that people have to do like at DXC to make those details not matter. Any thoughts on that? Do you, are you a dejected because of that at all? >> Well, that is part of the value that we bring, right? >> David: Sure. >> To your point, absolutely the customer doesn't care in quotes, right? Just make it work for us and run it smoothly. On the other hand, we're on the hook to make sure that all the different partners that we have, that we integrate including AWS, right. Run smoothly and coherent and are up, you know, 99.999% of the time obviously right. And so the customers do care about our you know, interaction with them as well while AWS is always there. >> One of the things that we talked about a little bit ago is every industry had to pivot right. Dramatically the last 22 months or so. And we've seen every industry cloud is no longer a nice to have We've got to be able to get there, but you mentioned a focus in banking, and I think automotive, I'd love to get your perspectives on what some of the things are the opportunities that DXC sees in those particular industries, as opportunities to modernize. >> Yes, we latched on to banking and automotive because those are ripe for transition and the customers are willing to take the steps there as well. It doesn't mean that other industries are not relevant like, you know, consumer or retail or you know, technology and, and manufacturing. However, especially in automotive I think we have a unique positioning where we have the majority of the OAMs car manufacturers worldwide as customers, and when you think about AWS, you think about the utilization of the information that comes back from telematics information and customization, right. Petabytes of information that comes back from every device, which is a car and what kind of service you can provide there. So it's an industry you know, we talked about Tesla early on as well, right It's an industry that ripe for software and software updates. very similar you see a lot of things happening in the banking capital market space, where they're moving you know their customer base into new spaces as well. Just think about all the NFTs, those are happening, all the FinTech that's happening, right. So the, the banking capital markets companies have to, you know, have an evolution going on right, and assisting them in this evolution is as part of our strategy. >> So you're responsible for global partnerships and alliances DXC would be considered a large global systems integrator. The world is obviously moving in the direction of cloud. We've got the three big players AWS, and the other two I can't think of their names while I'm sitting here in Vegas right now, how do you balance what you do with those, with a variety of providers, for customers, and are you going to market primarily as DXC with the DXC relationship with the customer? Or in support of those cloud vendors that have essentially technology that if left unimplemented is essentially worthless, right I mean you, you bridge the divide between the technology and the true value of the technology, but are you the primary seat holder at the customer table, or is AWS the primary seat holder? Or is it a little of both? Long-winded question I apologize but I think you understand what I'm saying. It's an interesting world that we live in now. >> It definitely is, and if I wouldn't know you better I would say it's a trick question, but in all seriousness, we really are customer driven just like AWS as well right so, we really are trying to do the right thing for the customer. Hence our Cloud Right strategy, where we don't have a cookie cutter approach or saying just go do the following five things and you're going to be fine. We really want to look at the customer and say, what is important to you? What is the timeframe you're looking at? What is the strategic imperative that you have? What data do you have to move? You know, what system do you have to leave behind? And then do the right thing for the customer literally right. And so in this instance, absolutely you know, in my role AWS plays a huge role as you know is one of our core hyper scaler partners, a very good partner, we love AWS. And so making sure that they're always going to be there as part of that infrastructure is part of our strategy. >> You mentioned, oh sorry Dave >> No, I was just saying it makes sense. >> It does make sense in terms of being customer first, we talk with AWS, you can't kind of have an interview with, with one of their folks without talking about that. We work backwards from the customer first. This customer obsession, it sounds like from a cultural perspective, there's pretty strong alignment there with DXC. >> Exactly right, so I think from that perspective we share the same DNA where we look first to the customer and then say okay, how do we deduct what is right for the customer and implement it that way right, Because in many instances as you know, you mentioned the, the two other hyper scaler that we don't talk about, customers usually don't have a single source kind of approach, right They usually have a dual approach. And so while we have to work with that, there's preferred vendors that we engage with, right. And so clearly AWS is one of our preferred vendors that we engage with. >> Can you share an example? I'd love to know a customer that's taken the Cloud Right approach applied really kind of in a textbook way that you think really shows the value of DXC. Any customers, but even by industry if you don't want to name them, come to mind that really show the value of that approach. >> Yeah, So we, we just concluded a major migration from one of our leading insurance companies, a global big company that you know is similar with my birthplace. But what we really did is a Cloud Right approach of migrating them from their legacy mainframe and virtualized systems that they had, to a cloud approach. And in the process of doing this you know, we reduced their overall operating expenses, their cap X expenses obviously but also reduced their overall budget about 30% reduction by moving them to the cloud. Again during the Cloud Right approach of understanding what exactly to move in, which timeframe and what to leave behind right, Because in many instances, customers don't have an exit strategy. They rush to the cloud, but then leave their you know old legacy behind and like oh, what are you going to do with this? And so you need to have a comprehensive end to end system strategy of like, what do you want to leave behind? When do you want to sunset it? And when do you want to migrate certain things over as well? >> That's got to be quite challenging for I would assume a legacy historied insurance company been around for a long time, lots of data, but culturally very different than the cloud mindset. >> You bring up one of those soft skills, right. Which is the cultural aspect of talking with the customers of how do we migrate you? It's not just, and that's why I said it's not just a business decision or a technology decision. In many instances, you affect people's life as well. When you think about old systems administrators that were working on mainframes. Now if you move everything to the clouds, they become obsolete. So rescaling the workforce and having a comprehensive plan is part of the soft skills right, Where you think more comprehensive about the customer, it's not just technology it's really is the full experience right At 360 what happens to the people? How do we migrate the people? But also setting expectations with top management, for example right of saying, how is this going to change our business? What new opportunities are going to be there? So those are all the soft kind of skills as well. >> One of the things that struck me this morning during the AWS keynote is just all of the innovation that that goes on. But AWS really is a flywheel of the customer and all the opportunities that their customers create for AWS, and the opportunities then that AWS technologies create for the customers across industries I just thought that I just kind of really felt that flywheel this morning when Adam was talking about all of the things that they're revealing, you must feel the same as a partner. >> I do, and I I'm a tech geek, so I'm totally excited about this, and it you know it feeds my soul because I can remember when, you know, when we first had analytics with you know Redshift rights and then customers are coming back and going like, well could we do something that is real time? Because we have requirements in this, and then CAFCA came out right, as a new service and I'm like okay, great right, and so we're really there to embrace you know, every new service that comes out from AWS. Which is fantastic, right I mean the speed and agility that comes out with AWS and we totally embraced that for our customers. >> Awesome, Georgia thank you for joining David and me today talking about what's going on with DXC, your partnership with AWS, Cloud Right, and how you're helping customers get Cloud Right. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you, I appreciate it too, thank you. >> All right. For David Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the leader in global alive tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Diego, California, it's the Cube. Covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome back to Cisco Live from sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and David are joined by a couple of guests from DXC. To my right we've got Jake Sager, principal client executive TMT, Tech Media Telecom. Jake, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you. >> Now we're broadcasting from the sun. And Randy Redman, the director of security services Product Management. Randy welcome. >> Thank you very much. Glad to be here. >> So we're in the definite zone. You can imagine all of the exciting conversations going on behind us here. Guys, I just noticed that DXC, guys have been around for a couple of years IT services company with 25 billion in annual revenue, but you guys were just named, I think it's this morning, number three on CLUS 2019 solution provider list up from number 10 last year. Pretty good momentum. Jake, we'll start with you. What do you see in feed on the street, in the market with respect to digital transformation, what are customers pains and how is the DXC helping knock him out of the park? >> Well, I think you know, DXC has a long legacy history over 60 years of business together from CSC, EDS, and obviously HP heritage. So we've kind of seen it all and seen the business transform from a highly on the ground business to now a lot of things in the cloud. With that obviously customers are looking to do business in different ways. There's a lot of digital disruptors out there. So they're looking to find the new solution that's going to shade off the competition, kind of skirt it, find the newest best thing before they can and find customer driven solutions rather than just cost driven solutions and other things like that. >> So when you say customer driven solution, let's dig into that a little bit more. What does that mean? And how is it actually, how does it manifest? >> Well, I think the customer can be a lot of different things to a lot of different people. In retail, it can be somebody walking into your store and banking, it can be somebody using an app. But what does that end consumer want? What's going to make their life easier and make them go to you versus another company? And that's really what companies need to be looking at. There's no one answer to anything. But it's a lot of thought-lead leadership to try to come up with something brand new, that is not going to be disrupted by the next Airbnb or Uber. >> So you are a CEO, Michael, talks a lot about digital transformation. >> Right. >> Right here in the security side of things. So we going to dig into that a little bit. But in terms of the evolution of digital transformation, generally and specifically, how people are rethinking security as a result, because we often say, what's the difference between a business and a digital business? Well, it's how they use data. Okay, well and that opens up a whole can of worms on security. So what are you seeing in terms of the evolution of the so called digital transformation, but specifically how it's affecting their posture towards security? >> Yeah, absolutely, because in a digital environment, customers are completely rethinking both how their infrastructure is deployed and how their applications are deployed. And so really, it's opening up whole new avenues for security threats to enter their environments. At the same time, there are so many individual security technologies and customers are really struggling with what are the right technology choices to make and then more importantly how to operate them effectively, how to implement appropriate security policies, how to actually monitor effectively for threats across the environment. So digital transformation is changing their business environment, but it's really completely opening up the sphere on the security side of the house. >> So Jake, we were talking and I had asked you what your favorite topics are, you said, smart city, IoT and connected cars. Sounds like a security nightmare. >> Yeah. >> But it's an opportunity as well for you guys. >> Absolutely. >> So you go in, what's the customer conversation like? I mean, pick one or all three, if you can generalize, in terms of I mean, these are all new things, right? It's the Wild West right now. What's customers mindset? Like you said, they don't want to get disrupted. They're looking at new opportunities. What are they looking at? How are you guys helping them? >> Well, it depends industry by industry. You know, when it comes to healthcare, we can help with remote telemedicine, operating medical equipment remotely. But again, that's going to bring in a whole bunch of new security threats, which Randy is going to be more than equipped to talk about. But I think securing that is really a big problem. When you start talking about massive IoT, you're talking about thousands and thousands of sensors out there in a smart city or oil mining gas utility, like they were talking about earlier today. You're talking about tons of different entry points, lots of different vulnerabilities. So that's definitely a huge issue for them. It's also a ton of new data that they don't know how to manage, that they don't know how to make sense out of, through artificial intelligence or other means. So for a company like us that really has strength in security, artificial intelligence, machine learning, as well as a strong background of data center, data lake management, helping them kind of figure out what data to use and how to use it most effectively. That's really where we shine. Cause we're not necessarily the company providing the hardware. We're not the company writing the software. But we're really the glue that integrates it all together, and brings all those multi solutions together. 'Cause in IoT, it's an ecosystem. It's not solution in a box. >> Let's dig into the Smart City concept. It's so fascinating. I've read up on the Las Vegas city of Las Vegas, which is been on the Cube. Done a lot to really transform that city. But to your point take about data, I think Chuck Robbins said this morning in the keynote that organizations are only really getting insight from less than 1% of their data. >> Right. >> It must be one of those where do we start? >> Right. >> So you are talking about working with municipalities on becoming smart cities and being able to apply some of your expertise and AI. Where do you start that conversation? >> Well, I mean, the terms over abused, I think data is a new oil, right? So if you don't know which data you're getting it from and you're only getting 10%, you're not doing a very good job as an oil producer, right? So our company is very good at identifying where the data is. 'Cause a lot of times, that's half the problem, is finding where that data resides, getting it into a place where you can actually ingest it, and then actually analyze it and get something useful out of it. Companies typically don't know where all their data is, they don't know how to analyze it and they definitely don't know how to turn it into something useful. So that's something DXC does across the board. >> What about the partnership with Cisco? So Cisco, obviously, it's got the networks, it's got, you know, packets flying around. It's got to secure those. What's the partnership like? Are you leveraging their products? I'm sure you are. You guys use everybody's products. >> Right. >> What's the partnership like? And what specifically are you doing in the security area Randy? >> Yeah, so in terms of the partnership with Cisco, we're certainly looking in several areas frankly, because right, we're looking with our clients at a solution letter approach, right. And that's one of the things that we like with Cisco is the broad portfolio meshes with our broad portfolio. So certainly key areas of focus for us right now are in the Unified Communication space and how we're helping with collaboration for our clients, but also in the security area, technologies, such as Cisco stealth watch, which is helping provide more visibility to what's happening in networks today. Because more and more our view is that security as we were just talking about, even in the IoT space becomes more of an analytics exercise. It's less about really being able to detect what you already know, it's really about being able to drive detection from the unknown. And so the more data that we can get, the more visibility into network environments the better. >> How do you work with Cisco? 25% of Cisco's revenue is they called services. So, where do they leave off? I mean they're a product company. You guys are a services firm, but they have services. >> Right. >> How do you interact with them? You don't compete, I presume. At least there's maybe some overlap. But, where do they leave off and you guys pick up? >> Yeah, so certainly, we're not competing with Cisco from a services perspective. We're certainly relying on Cisco services for hardware and professional support around their technology. We're really there to provide overall solution design, architecture installation and we'll leverage Cisco professional services where that's appropriate. And then we provide managed services on the back end as well. >> So you're saying their role is to make sure it's architected properly and it's working, in the way it's promised. Your role is to say it my way and you can correct me is help the customer figure out how to apply those technologies to create business value. >> Well, exactly and also typically in a client solution. Cisco maybe one of several technologies that are involved in a broader solutions-- >> you got to make it all work together tomorrow-- >> And part of our role is to act as that integrator to bring the core Cisco elements with the DXC services and-- >> So your jobs getting harder and harder and harder. >> Fully it is. It's a security perspective. >> Dave: As a consumer things are getting easier, right? Oh, yeah, Google, Facebook, Instagram is so easy. But the back end with, you know, cloud and DevOps, the pace of change. How have you seen that affect your business? How are you dealing with that rapid change? >> Yeah, so I think that from a couple of perspectives here. One is that it's changing how we go about the process in terms of developing services and capabilities for our clients. Just as Agile has taken over actually in the application space, It's really driving how we think about actually developing offerings now around getting technology out into the market more quickly, evolving and growing capability from there. And so really, it's all about how we get proof of value for our clients quickly by getting technology into their hands as quickly as possible. >> Lisa: So let's talk about some of these waves of innovation Cisco was talking about this morning. Talking about this explosion of 5G, Wi-Fi 6 being able to have this access that works really well indoors outdoors, how that's changing even Jake you know, consumer demand. What opportunities, and Jake I'll start with you, what opportunities and some of the things that Cisco was talking about with respect to connectivity, AI with GPUs being everywhere, edge mobile, architectures becoming so a Morpheus opportunity for DXC to help customers really not just integrate the technologies but to excel and accelerate themselves to define new services, new business models. What's your differentiation point there? >> I mean, our main differentiation point from DXC is agnostic to the technology. We really specialize in being vendor agnostic, finding the best of breed companies out there and integrating it into our portfolio and offering it to our clients. If our client wants Azure, we're not going to try to sell them on Google Cloud. If they want one or the other, we're going to be hand in hand with the customer either way. With these new technologies that come around, it's just going to open the doors for so many new types of business, so many more disruptive businesses. No matter what comes along our goal is to have that portfolio in hand, which Cisco rounds out to be able to offer to our over 6000 enterprise clients. So we need to be able to manage every shape, size, variety, industry, anything you can think of. >> What's the trend? Is the trend, yeah, we want as you say, okay, we'll make it make it work for you or is the trend like, you guys figure it out. We're not sure what the right fit is. How much of that is going on? >> I'd say you probably see 50 50. (Jake laughs) >> I think we're seeing a lot of that. Certainly as clients are migrating applications to the cloud. They may be starting with a particular cloud platform, but clients are really frankly fairly agnostic in terms of the cloud platform they're migrating to. They're taking advantage of more and more SAS applications. So one of the trends that we're definitely seeing is how to address client security concerns in a hybrid cloud environment because that's more and more what we expect the future to be, even if clients are focusing on a particular cloud platform as their starting point today. >> So as data is traversing the network and one of the one of the things that I heard this morning from Chuck Robbins keynote was that the common denominator as all of these changes and waves in innovation are coming is the network. Data is traversing the network. Given that is a given and there's only going to be more and more data and more connected devices, more mobile data traffic. Randy question for you. How can DXC, how can you help customers leverage your expertise and say security and AI, as you mentioned, to extract more value from their data and allow them to become far more secure as the it's no longer acceptable, you can't just simply put a firewall around a perimeter that has so many a Morpheus points? >> Yeah and absolutely. And as we mentioned, with all of the data that's available today, it really becomes more of an analytics problem. And one of the investments that the DXC is making is specifically in our security platform that allows us to ingest data from pretty much any infrastructure data source and be able to leverage capabilities to provide analytics, machine learning and automation on top of that, to help clients leverage the power of the data and specifically from a security perspective, not just drive detection, because that's interesting. The question I get from clients is well now, what do I do about it? >> Right. >> And we're leveraging investment, our platform automation is actually to begin to take automated actions on behalf of our clients in order to solve security problems. >> Excellent, guys. Well, thank you so much, Jake, and Randy for stopping by the Cube and talking with Dave and me about what you guys are doing at DXC. The next time we'll have to talk about connected cars. >> Sure. >> Thank you. >> Alright. For Dave Vellante I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube live from Cisco Live in sunny San Diego. Thanks for watching. (techy music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to Vegas! Lisa Martin with John Furrier. You're watching us on theCUBE live. The end of Day One of our three days of coverage of Dell Technologies World. Can you hear the music? The party's already getting started. We have more content to bring you. Please welcome a couple of guests from DXE Technology, Kevin Johnston, Chief Sales and Revenue Officer, Cloud and Platform Service. Kevin, it's great to have you. >> Thank you very much. Glad to be here. >> Our pleasure. We've got Graham Stringer, Managing Director of Workplace and Mobility for DXE Americas. >> Thank you. Good to be here as well. >> Yeah, you waited just in time for the concert, guys! >> We did. >> Just in time. Here we go. >> All right, so, Kevin, let's go ahead and start with you. Give our audience and understanding of DXE. What you guys do, who you are, all that good stuff. >> Yeah, okay. That's great. So DXE was formed two years ago as a result of the merger of legacy HP Enterprise Services Business and CSC. DXE was formed really for the purpose of helping our large enterprise clients accelerate their digital transformation. So we're about a $22 billion IT services company, really aligned with our partners helping our clients transform digitally. >> And you guys were on the cloud early, too. There's a lot of devops going on. >> Yep. >> You guys had your hands in all the clouds. >> We have. >> What's your take on, here at Dell Technologies World, Microsoft's partnering with VMware? >> Yeah, so we would share a lot of beliefs with Dell Technology and VMware in particular, in that multi-cloud is a real thing. And we see multi-cloud, especially for the large enterprise clients, really being an answer for quite some number of years to come. We also believe that a large percentage of application portfolios will migrate to cloud. Whether it's private clouds or public clouds, and that there's a lot of work to be done to transform those applications to really take advantage of cloud native features. >> So last year's theme of Dell Technologies World was Make It Real, 'It' being digital transformation, security transformation, IT transformation, and workforce workplace automation. Graham, I'd love to get your perspectives on workplace mobility and some of the things that were announced this morning with Unified Workspace, Workspace ONE, and recognizing, hey, for our customers to transform digitally successfully, we've got to make sure that their are people are successful, and their people are highly distributed. What are some of the things that you heard this morning that are exciting, aligning with some of the trends that you're seeing in the workplace? >> Well the big trend that we're seeing is the role that HR is now playing in digital transformation of the workplace. If you go back two, three, four years, it was very IT centric. Conversations were predominantly with the CIO. We're now seeing 30, 40% of organizations or more engaging at the HR level. We did a recent project with one of the big retailers in the industry and right out of the bat, this chief HR officer was engaged right from the get-go. They want to know that their employees are going to experience work very differently. So that's one of the big trends we're seeing emerging. >> When did this shift happen? When was this going on? Past year, two years? Because this is a shift. >> I would say the shift has definitely happened the last couple of years. Millennials are having a huge impact. You're getting quite the cross-pollination of a lot of different generations. Millennials are now having an enormous impact. If you look at outlets like Glassdoor, millennials want to know when they go to an organization can I bring my own device? Am I going to have a great workplace experience? And you can't stick with a very traditional, legacy way of delivering IT where everything was shift left and you got to a point where everybody hated each other. >> That's a problem for productivity. >> Yes, a very big problem for productivity, absolutely. >> Talk about some of the challenges that customers have overcome with digital transformation, as it starts to become less of a buzz word and actually more of a reality and strategic imperative that has some visibility at the unit economics and value. >> Yeah, I think every large enterprise client we talk to has a digital transformation agenda of some sort and at some varying place along the path to trying to adopt a new business model or adapt to a different business process, so the challenges that we see with these clients in general is how do we scale? So I have legacy IT that won't disappear overnight and I have all the possibilities of digitally enabling or bringing new digital technologies that enable these processes or models. So this is a challenge: how to enable digital at scale where traditional and digital have to live together for some period of time. >> And it's not just a tech challenge, it's culture, too. How far has tech come because you've mentioned containers with legacy? That has been a great message to IT is I can put a container around it and hold onto it for a little while longer, I don't have to kill it, and make the changes to cloud-native. >> For the tech guys, there's been a lot of fun things and containers probably is the bridge for legacy apps into cloud for sure. For the rest of the folks, for the normal people, the way work gets done and the way to rethink how to do work in the mix of IT or technology into business is just different. >> Graham's point is beautiful because the expectation of the employee or the worker whether they're in the firm or outside the firm, outside in or inside out, however they look at it, is the new experience they want. So the expectations are changing. What's the biggest thing, we saw some stats on stage about remote working, three places, two places, I mean, hell, I'm always on the road. What is some of the expectations that you're seeing? Obviously millennials and some of the older folks. >> They want to see IT delivered in the way they want to receive it. That's one of the biggest trends we're seeing. So for Millennials, my son's kind of in that age category, right, they love to text. To pick up a phone for a younger generation is a little bit foreign. You go and deal with baby boomers, they want to be dealt with in a much different manner. So you've got that whole change, and then you've got the whole notion now of work is changing; where do I work, the ability to basically work 24/7, wherever I want, however I want, using whatever device that I want. And that of course is now creating a whole new set of challenges for IT, particularly around security. >> But employee experience is absolutely fundamental to a business' success; their ability to delight costumers, their ability to deliver outcome, so it's really pretty core. Talk to us about those conversations that you're having with customers. Are they understanding how significant that employee experience is to bottom line business outcomes differentiation? >> Very much so. We're working right now with a large manufacturing firm and they're doing not just an inside out, but outside in, so they're actually coming to watch. It's part of a workplace strategy to look at it from the outside as well. In other words, how can our client take innovation to their suppliers, their customers, to demonstrate that they understand it? So that's extremely exciting when we see that they're not just focused on their own employees and the experience germane to them. >> One thing I might add is that maybe less so from a user experience per say, but the individuals as an employee. So the shift to digital and the skill shift that's required to go with that is really probably the most monumental change that all of us technology companies and the business part of our large enterprise clients is dealing with. Whether it's a skills gap or whether it's a culture gap, this idea of just simply waterfall to agile and the way to think about that or silo versus end-to-end as just simple ways to think differently about how to go faster. So the experience, how you recruit, whose going to make it, who can be trained, and then where you need to be able to source the new talent from as well. >> I totally agree with you. We do hundreds of shows a year, this is our tenth year doing theCUBE, that is the number one things that we hear over and over again from practitioners and customers and from people working. It's not the check, you can always get a check solution, it's the cultural and the skills gap. Both are huge problems. >> And this is part of the digital at scale point. So we'll hire something in the neighborhood of six to eight thousand digital skills people. We're just about to close on active position of Luxoft, an agile devops digital company. We'll bring another 13,000 in. But if you think about the normal large enterprise and what you need to do to be able to have the university networks and to be able to really source that scale in order to effect the transformations that business need to make to stay competitive. >> And the other point, the engagements have changed too. I'm sure you guys have seen your end but every IT or CIO we talk to says, "I outsourced everything decades ago and now I've got a couple guys running the show. Now I need to have a hundred x more people coding and building core competency." That's still going to need to engage people in the channel or our service providers but they need to build core talent in house. It's swinging back and they don't know what to do. (laughter) Is that why they call you guys? Is that how you guys get involved? >> We'll help train. We'll help clients think through what does an IT or business organization need to look like profile wise, skill wise, operating model wise, and in many cases it's I have my digital model but I still have my traditional model that needs to coexist with it and then here's where the opportunities are for people to develop career paths and progress. >> Kevin, talk about the sweet spot of your engagements that you're doing right now. Where's the heart of your business? Is it someone whose really hurting, needs an aspirin, they've got a headache, is it a problem? Is it an opportunity? Is it a growth issue? Where do you see the spectrum of your engagements? >> We kind of find clients in one of three spots normally. "Hey, I know I need to do something but I'm not sure what it is, can you help me figure out to get started?" So more design thinking, problem solving. We have other clients at the other end of the spectrum who are, "Hey, I've got this figured out. I need a partner to help me execute it's scale. And I know the model that I want to do, I know the business reason for doing it." And then we have a lot of folks that are in the middle, which is, "I've started, I've got a few hundred AWS accounts. I got private clouds sitting idle. Someone help me." Or, "I've got security issues, compliance issues." >> So they're in the middle of the journey and they just need a little reboot or a kickstart. >> They need help scaling. >> They ran out of gas. (laughter) >> And how are you working with Dell Technologies and their companies, Dell EMC, if they were to do that? >> The partnership with Dell Technologies, VMware, are really center to how we go to market. DXE is one of the top few partners largest in the ecosystem. The breadth of our portfolios are extremely complementary, whether it's things like device as a service or multi- and hybrid cloud, or pivotal and devops. So the breadth of the portfolios max up really well which makes it the impact potential for our clients even more important. Dell Technology broadly is really one of the few partners that we're shoulder-to-shoulder going with to the market as well. >> Awesome. Great stuff. What's the biggest learnings you guys can share with the audience that you gathered over your multiple engagements holistically across your client base? That's learnings, that could be a best practice, or just either some scar tissue or revelations or epiphanies. Share some experience here. >> I think one of the big learnings we're seeing is the shift now to very much business outcome driven decision making. If you go back to your point about the big ITO outsourcing days, that was all about just strictly driving cost out, and that's why you got to that point where everybody was left hating each other. Now it's about business outcomes. You've got the impact of Millennials, you've got organizations wanting to create a new and better experience for the employees and they're coming to us to say, "How do we accomplish that?" We've got an organization we're working with right now, they're trying to elevate themselves to be one of the top 50 best places to work for in the US. How do they arrive at that? For them, that's their barometer and so it's not about driving costs out, it's really achieving that overall experience and enhance a business outcome. >> So they're betting on productivity gains from morale and happy workers. >> Right. And also they're recognizing the downstream impact on their customers, productivity, the level of employee engagement, right? I mean those are the things that the organization knows that if they hit on those, I mean the sky's the limit. >> Right. Anything on your end? Learnings? >> Yeah, I would say the "don't understand the talent" challenge. The ability to pivot from here's the way we all know and are familiar with doing things to the new way. There will be a big talent challenge. The other thing is the operating model from an IT standpoint. Traditional IT operating model operates at a particular speed, cloud operates at a different speed. And the tools, the talents, the skills that go with that are just completely different. And then I think the last thing is just it seems maybe surprising, but compliance at scale and at speed. So security and regulatory compliance, we see that falling over all the time. >> Great practice you guys. I've been following you guys for many years, you've got a great organization, lots of smart people there we've interviewed many times. My final question is a tech question: what technologies do you guys like that you think is ready for prime time or almost ready for prime time worth having customer keep focusing on and which one's a little more over hyped and out of reach at the moment? >> I'll take a stab at that. If you look at today's Wall Street Journal, Deloitte talks to I believe the figure they quoted was roughly 25% of organizations are doing AI in some form already, PoC or at least are committing to it in terms of strategy. We're seeing that inside DXE as well. AI is now being incorporated into our workplace offerings. The potential for that is enormous, it's real. The technology in the last couple of years, particularly with cloud computing, has really enabled it. When you look at platforms like Watson, these are capabilities that just weren't there 10, 12, 15 years ago, and now the impact that it can have on the workplace, help lines, chats, chatbots, and so forth, is enormous and it's real. Five, 10 years ago it definitely was not in it's maturity. >> Okay, over hyped. >> What's over hyped? I don't know, what comes to mind for you? >> Or maybe I'll rephrase it differently: not yet ready for prime time, but looks good on the fairway but not yet known. . . >> I think for me through workplace, IoT has still got a ways to go. AI and analytics is definitely there. IoT I would say is a little bit behind. I'm sure that Kevin has cloud and platform thoughts. >> Yeah, I would say from an over hyped standpoint, we've seen a lot of companies, large enterprises, legacy application portfolios think they're going to refactor all their applications and cloud native everything. So it feels that people are now kind of getting past that point, but we still see that idea a lot. I think the opportunity that is really in front of us, and you kind of called out, containers. Legacy applications into cloud feel like a remaining frontier for the large enterprise. We think containers and the idea of autonomous, continue optimization, financial performance, is a way to make apps run in cloud financially and performance wise in a way that we don't see a lot of companies fully solving for that yet. >> Awesome. >> A lot of work to do, a lot of opportunity. Kevin, Graham, thank you so much for sharing some of your time and thoughts and insights with John and me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> Very good. >> Thank you. >> We appreciate it. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, and you've been watching theCUBE live from Vegas. Day One of our coverage of Dell Technologies World is now in the books. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the cube's coverage here at IBM Think 2018. We are in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay, for IBM Think. Six shows are coming into one packed house. We have two great guests here, Brian Wallace, who's the CTO of Insurance for DXC technologies, and we have, Bala, The Bala, but goes by Bala, banking and capital markets CTO for DXC technologies. Guys, welcome to the cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It's our pleasure, yeah, thanks. >> So, the innovation sandwich, I'm calling it IBM strategy. You've got in the middle, the meat, is data. And the bread is blockchain and AI. Two really fundamental technologies powered by cloud and a variety of other things. Obviously, AI is disrupted, we know what that looks like. Block Chain now emerging as a viable infrastructure enabler that's creating token economics, a lot of cool things, certainly on the banking side, seeing a lot of controversy. Block Chain really is driving it. You guys are out on the front lines. You're doing a lot crowd chats, been following your digital transformation story that you guys have been putting out there. Really you're on this. So, what's the conversations like that you guys are having with block chain and AI; Share? >> Bala: So, let me begin with a couple of quick points on block chain. DXC has done some fantastic work around the world leveraging both the trust capability that block chain brings to bear in financial banking industry use cases, like KYC for instance, institutional KYC in particular, but also, in simplification of entire value chains such as lending. And we're doing very interesting work in lending where not only are we looking at the up-front origination process of lending but also the downstream securitization. Which is where the tokenization of principle and interest payments and those type of things happen. >> John: Energy too? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So there are a number of these creating type use cases that follow into securitization. And with that, we're doing some very interesting work. >> John: Bala, talk about the globalization because one of the things we're seeing in the US a shrinking middle class, but outside the US in emerging markets, a growing middle class. Thanks to mobile technology, thanks to data, thanks to block chain, you're seeing, you know, countries that "hey, we have infrastructure but we don't have the core and modern infrastructure but you throw in a decentralized capability, You've got all these capabilities, and the killer app in all this is money. You're in, that's your vertical. >> Bala: Yes. >> That's your industry. The killer app is money and marketplaces. Your thoughts? >> Bala: I think, the beauty of what these technologies are doing, is for the first time creating financial inclusion to happen and the very first case of where financial inclusion is enabled, is in payments. So, when we open up the banking system predominantly from a payment perspective, which is what things like blockchain and others enable, if we succeed in doing that, then for the first time we've enabled, that's 2 billion people unbanked or underbanked-2 billion. >> John: Yeah. >> Bringing them into this financial system allows for. >> And some people are discriminated against too because they don't have a track record. Banks can't handle some of the things that others are now filling the void with crypto and blockchain. >> Bala: Right, or they can't service them profitably. But for the first time now, you're looking at the economics that cloud, and AI, and blockchain, these technologies bring, not just into banking and capital markets areas but into insurance and I'd love to have my colleague, Brian, talk with the insurance cases are enabled as well. >> John: Brian, insurance- go. >> Yeah, so it's a slightly different dynamic. There it's the, if you think about the fundamental pattern of blockchain it's around eliminating a central or a middle-man or a central, you know, gatekeeper, if you will. And the entire insurance industry is largely made up of middle-men, right? You've got people with risk at one end and you've got sources of capital at the other end and everybody's playing a role between a broker, and a carrier, and a re-insurer. In sort of facilitating that management and that transfer of risk. >> John: So you've got to extract some efficiencies out of that. Business model opportunity. >> So efficiencies, there's a lot of conversations around efficiencies, around automation, but interestingly, it's around the disruptive business model, right? The technology is mildly interesting but it's the new business models that blockchain will enable. >> John: Yeah, I see banking picking up. The early adopter on blockchain but I see, maybe it lagging a bit in insurance but I definitely see some opportunity there. But short term, data is driving insurance because, you know, I don't have a Tesla but my friend has a Tesla. The insurance company will know exactly who is rolling through those stop signs. They know everything that he's doing, All the data is there, so AI becomes really the low hanging fruit for insurance in that industry. Do you agree with that? Comment, reaction? >> Brian: Yeah, and we're just at the beginning, right? Because as you say, data is the asset that we manage. So we have a lot of data in terms of transactional data, the traditional operational data. What we're discovering, and what we're sort of licking our lips over almost is all of this new unstructured data, whether it's sensor data, behavioral data, and you're right, 'cause the challenge that we had around automation and cognitive computing, if you will. We're here at IBM with the Watson tech, was enough data, and the consistency and quality of that data. So we have that now, and we're making tremendous strides around in particular here, with the Watson brand, and the Watson cognitive. >> John: You know, one of the things I wish, was Dan Hutches was here, he's not, he's the CTO in charge. You've guys have been doing all these crowd chats our software that we wrote. That's pretty interesting. I've personally enjoyed all the conversations and give a shout out to Dan and you guys for really great conversation. You guys know what you're talking about. It's clear in the data you guys are taking an outside-in approach and collaborating. But your topics are on target. You're talking about digital transformation kind of holistically, but then you start to dive down into specific use cases. So, Bala, what is the favorite, or the most popular digital disruptive topic that's being discussed within DXC and your clients and in the marketplace? >> So, at the outset, within DXC, as digital transformation takes hold with our customers and we aim to be the premier provider of that enablement, what we've realized ourselves is that we provide a lot of services to our clients across many industries but there are commonalities across what we provide in terms of service delivery. And so it made sense for us to, number one: look at the commonalities and create a platform that was common across industries, across offerings that we bring to the marketplace. That commonality is what we call internally, and externally now, as bionics. And it's a platform that we are bringing forward that for the first time ties together what we are talking about both here at this event but also with our clients. Ties together intelligence, orchestration, and automation which are the fundamental, >> John: It's called bionics? >> Bionics. And internally we call it platform DXC upon which all of our offerings and services are brought to market. >> John: Well there's disruption going on in your business. So, I want to talk about, double-down on that for a second. I'm seeing a trend, certainly in the public sector market where the use cases are well enough defined. So you're seeing automatic code generation becoming a real part of the delivery process. Now, what that's going to do is essentially, think of provisioning and configuration management in cloud. If you could apply actual process code that you've done before in the commonalities, this is going to change the delivery timeframe. So you're looking at essentially auto-provisioning software. Not just like, configuration management resources. No, I'm saying here's a value chain, here's a block chain, here's some AI, just configure it like a LEGO block, push. That could take months to deliver the old way. >> Bala: Right. >> Your thoughts to that? Are you guys on that? Do you guys see that as something that's going to be an opportunity for you? Some companies, I've seen, Global system integrator, is being disrupted by this, cause they don't have this. New SI's, new system integrators, are thinking this way and that's a DevOps mindset. Are you prepared for that, do you see it coming? And what's your answer to that? >> So we saw that coming about 3 and a half plus years ago. And our shift away from being a pure SI began then. And so we are an SI, but we are a service integrator rather than a systems integrator. And we began that trend in our journey, 3 plus years ago. And the reason we began that trend was what you pointed out. Today, infrastructure is delivered as a code. So not even as a service but as a code, and so imagine provisioning infrastructure and all the capabilities that ride on it, just as code. And that's where this is headed. In that model, we become provider and provisioner of services, rather than just a system. >> John: And the cost structure is completely changed because the services, Amazon has proven, and now IBM is following suit with their power platform and other things, that you can actually have the kind of compute but it's a catalog of services. So this is going to change the price competitiveness. So you know, big bids, that used to be billions of dollars, you guys can compete. I mean, am I seeing it right? >> Brian: That transition's already, that ship's sailed, so to speak, in terms of the large outsourcing deals the large, where there's apps or infrastructure, it's all moving to digital transformation consumption based commercial models. And it's really bionics that Bala mentioned a minute ago, that is our answer to the threat you described a minute ago. It's really about automating and digitizing and building intelligence into the entire, if you will, build, deliver, operate value chain of our business. >> John: Talk about the multi-vendor, multi-choice, technology-choice, as your customers and people in general on this journey of digital transformation. They have to make, they used to make technology decisions. Now they're making business logic decisions around how to reconfigure their value chains to optimize for new efficiencies and extract away inefficiencies. Blockchain is a great example, AI is another, automation is in the middle, all the cloud. So you have now business logic as the risk, technology not so much because infrastructure as code has proven that you can have server-less, you can have all kinds of coolness that can be managed in an agile way. So the business model aspect is key. How are you guys dealing with that, cause I know you're here at the IBM Think Show, their partner. I see you at the Amazon shows. We see you guys everywhere. So you're horizontally scaling. By design, is that what customers want? What is the DXC view on this? >> So our value proposition has always had partners as the key element of what we do. And so if you look at what we do, you can look at it from two perspectives. One, proprietary ways of thinking, proprietary systems are long since gone. >> And waterfall methodologies, gone, dead. >> Yes, those are all long since gone. >> If you're still doing that, note to self: you're going to be out of business. >> Exactly, so we've actually hinged a lot of what we do on our offerings, our capabilities, and so on around openness, around open source, and so forth. So that's number one. Number Two: In this world, it's no longer about just DXC or just IBM or just somebody, one person bringing everything to our clients. It's about how do you engage proactively and build co-innovation and co-services with our partners and bring that to our clients. >> I mean, IBM just announced that a deal with Google. They've got tensorflow and their deal. So you have all kinds of melting pot. Okay, let's talk about blockchain again. Go back to my favorite topic. So, if you look up that stack, you've got blockchain, you've got cryptocurrency, protocols, and what-not, mentioned securitization, you've got security tokens, you've got utility tokens. You can almost see where this is going. And then you've got on top of that, what's coming, is a mass in-migration of decentralized application developers. Okay, kind of cloud plus. You know, they know cloud, they know DevOps, infrastructure as code, but they're looking at it from a decentralization standpoint, different makeup. And you see, ICOs, initial coin offerings, I think this is an application of you know, inefficiencies around capital markets but that's, you know, put that aside for a second. But blockchain, crypto currency, and decentralized applications, how do you guys see that trend? What are you guys doing? Are you integrating it in? You mentioned token economics, you're in the banking field. Your thoughts on that? >> Bala: Sure, on the blockchain front, as I mentioned to you, there are a number of platforms that are out there. There is the R3 Corda platform. There's a platform that JPMorgan initiated that we're leveraging as well. >> John: Yeah, so they pooh-poohed Bitcoin but then they're back in the game again. (laughter) >> Bala: Yes, that's right. And then there is the Hyperledger Fabric as well. So these platforms are going to take their course of evolution and we are working across all of those platforms. Now, the more interesting thing that you mentioned is people and skills. What we've find today in the marketplace is with our clients is a dramatic shortage of skills in these areas. And so internally, what we have done at DXC is actually open our own service delivery to a vast pool of developers that you talked about earlier as being freelance, independent folks. We open our entire service delivery to them as well. And we look at that global talent pool for our own service delivery. >> Using community as a way to scale. >> Bala: Using communities, yes. And that's exactly what we're doing in our talent process. It's not just about our people, our employees, but our partners as well as what exists in the open marketplace. >> Brian, talk about the insurance area as a way to tease out other trends. Specifically, the question is What is the biggest things that people know they're walking into? What's the tail-wind that they see, that's going to give them hope? And then, What's the head-winds? What are the blockers? And what should they be aware of? What are some of the marketplace dynamics that translate into other industries? >> Brian: Well, let's start with the obvious blocker is legacy debt, right? So you talked about the risk of all that business knowledge, that domain expertise, that's all today encapsulated in existing, what you may call legacy systems, right? So that's the head-wind by far. The tail-wind is that unlike, say 15 years ago, and we were in the last sort of, dot-com boom, when it was all about the front office and customer experience, the customer is way ahead of us. So culturally, the customer is challenging industry to catch up. So that's the tail-wind in my mind. And the real opportunity is to think about it in terms of a dual agenda. So think about it in terms as progressively, simultaneously building new digital capability, whilst ultimately beginning to unbundle and tackle that legacy debt. And I think customers now are starting to see a path forward. We're in the market in both banking and insurance with digital platforms, with industry resource models, API fabrics that can go back in, modernize legacy systems. So there's a real fast time to market. >> And it changes your engagement with clients. It's not a one and done, you're sticking through the service layer. >> Brian: Oh it's a journey, but the difference, I think, between DXC and a lot of other people is that we are in the market, in production, with real assets. And you can show that journey. So it just becomes a conversation around what's your pain point? Where are you starting from? Where do you want to go? >> And you're bringing the community in to help on the delivery side, everyone wins. >> Brian: And that community is a combination of three things. That's our own employees, obviously within the industry, and within our offerings that know banking, that know insurance. It's all of the DXC people in the horizontals. Because we're bringing everything now. These platforms encapsulate infrastructure, security, service management, analytics, mobility, all of that is built into these platforms. And then, it's going out into our partner community. And then, it's going out into the open community. And we're tapping into all of those. >> John: Brian and Bala, thanks so much. 2 power CTOs here on the Cube, having a CTO conversation around how scale, cloud, AI, blockchain, new technologies are enabling new business models at a faster pace of change, with a lower cost structure, and more time to value. Again, it's all about the value creation. The killer app is money and marketplaces and community. Guys, thanks so much for sharing. I'm John Furrier here at IBM Think 2018 Cube Studios. More after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Servicenow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by Servicenow. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Alante with my cohost Jeff Frick. Mark Toludo is here with Patrick Stonelake, cofounders of Fruition Partners now, a DXC company. Welcome to the Cube, Mark you were one of the first SIs that we ever met in the Servicenow ecosystem, acquired by CSC and now the spin merge with HBE, explain it all, how'd you get here? >> Yeah well that's great so we really grew up in the Servicenow ecosystem, right. That's where really Fruition became really what it was and is. CSC came 2015 so they came, acquired us, we became Fruition Partners with CSC brand. CSC then did an acquisition of UXC, a very large SI out of Australia and with that was Keystone, probably now the largest Servicenow system in the greater Australia so they came into our practice as the Fruition Partners Australia brand. We then went out under CSC and did another acquisition in mainland Europe Aspediens. They covered Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. And so now they're the Fruition Europe end. So we still have this Fruition practice inside of CSC at the time and then the HP enterprise services so that's only the EDS group, the services group, not the hardware or software group. So then they choose to spin merge with CSC and form DXC. So we're still the Servicenow practice Fruition Partners DXE technologies company so all the Servicenow, everything you're seeing, that's what we're enabling for customers. >> Now Patrick, how did that all affect the go to market? >> It enables us to be more global right. Part of the reasons why we acquired these companies and continue to look to do so is our customers are demanding from us a very consistent, boots on the ground experience, multiple languages, but all running the same methodologies, running the same accelerators and getting them to the finish line at the same time. So DXC and the kind of checkbook and influence of DXC has really helped us do our part in consolidating that market. But what I think we've really just started to scratch the surface of is how we can empower DXC as you know kind of become the engine that runs the nine major offerings of DXC and start to get service now into support of those offerings, modernize them, make them more efficient, and make them more attractive to customers. >> You guys were early on, you know we've talked about this in the past, kind of placed your bets, paid off. Is this sort of work flow automation the next big thing? It seems now that everybody's glomming onto it. >> Yessir. >> Is it and why now? And where do you see it going? >> So we see this, as Patrick mentioned, DXC has nine service offering families, right and that includes like big data, cyber, vertical applications, certainly the outsourcing business is still significant. But what we're seeing is Servicenow is this workflow backbone middleware that kind of connects us all. So we have the DXC offering family leads coming to us and saying listen we understand that Servicenow can do ITOP for a business process orchestration, we understand it has a SECOPS component, so now we have an ISECOPS offering. So they're seeing that Servicenow is kind of the glue to bring together these various offerings and it helps us go from our traditional relationship with the IT department to now branching out into HR, into security, into that CSM space. Even in the business process automation space, that can be claims process. The total business functions that are automated by this work flow, it's not just the work flow itself, it's that the work flow ties into the other silos so that it's not just email, it's actually intelligent email, intelligent routing. So we see it as the glue to keep all these offerings together. >> And then you guys are starting to build solutions on top of a Servicenow platform and go to market with the solution, versus you already have Servicenow, we're going to be a kind of typical consultant and help you do best practices, et cetera. >> Exactly, you know it's kind of a combination of the two. But I think the best way to think about it is that Servicenow is doing its best to be as horizontal across the enterprise as possible, right? Security is a really excellent example of a place where Servicenow is a natural fit, you connect the cycle with security and IT. But one of the things that we're looking to do is to bring the industry expertise of DXC to some of these Servicenow enabled solutions. Mark talked about our ISECOP solution, which is horizontal managed security services. But we debuted yesterday that we're going to be working with Servicenow and their catalyst program around a healthcare splinter of ISECOPs because there are all kinds of uniquely healthcare provider oriented security concerns that the actual thought leadership and the knowledge of the cyber consultants at DXC really bring a lot to the table. So we could build a solution in conjunction with Servicenow. They rely on us for the industry expertise, and they just keep that security piece humming and up to date and locked in with the rest of the platform. >> You know we have another offering, just to add to that, is out of Europe, one of the consulting groups said environmental health and employee health and safety in manufacturing plants. They said listen there's a product out there in the marketplace, can you do something better or different using the Servicenow platform? So we actually took that subject matter expertise from DXC consulting experience, we've married that with our Servicenow expertise and we actually have another product that we're going to market with. It's an employee health and safety, for manufacturing plants, for slip and fall, for any environmental concerns, any of the safety issues that they have. But that's really combining industry and vertical expertise with Servicenow. >> And that shows somebody might not even know they're buying Servicenow, right. (crosstalk) >> You're essentially OEMing the platform. >> That's what we would like to get to. >> You're not there yet. >> I think there's a lot of, we have a lot of we sell a stand alone on top of a Servicenow platform and it gets built. Tony Beller who's the new GP Alliances coming in with a lot of force, environment experience, and I think he's really charging with some of the bigger partners like us to really lock down that OEM because I think that's where we get a lot of leverage for Servicenow and our customers essentially want to consume as they need it and that makes a lot of sense. >> And are you reselling Servicenow in that solution offering so that they don't have a separate relationship with Servicenow, it's all integrated into that. >> Exactly, yup. >> Correct. >> And do you guys use Servicenow internally? >> We do, yeah. Ourselves we've been big drinkers of the champagne as they say for a really long time. We have a number of systems we use to run our professional services organization. But DXC, particularly in the area of asset management, some of the real ROI driven pieces of IT is taking a very hard look at the successes they've had there and trying to figure out how we can enable that success in the rest of the organization. Purchasing, project management, you know, these are things that I think we're going to do internally and then start to share results with our customers. >> Well we also have something called My Order Style, so there actually is how we do manage service provider outsourcing relationships that's built on Servicenow. And we do that internally as well, so basically when we get support or when we need support for our equipment, whatever, worldwide, that's being logged and tracked in Servicenow. >> And in Servicenow you clearly have very strong messaging around we start with IT, IT service management and then ITOM and then moving into the lines of business. How rapidly are you seeing that in your customer base? And maybe add a little color to that. >> I think we're trying to accelerate that. >> Yeah. >> I think what we're seeing is a shift as infrastructure goes to the cloud, as the IT department moves away from being the T of technology and more the information side, that they're starting to realize this role as more of a service management organization because oftentimes the applications that they're supporting are coming from a third party if it's Servicenow, if it's Work Bay, if it's Sales Force, but they can be the glue that holds it together. They can worry about the releases, the data hierarchy, but it's that IT as they are reinventing themselves. They see themselves going out towards those other departments towards HR, towards CSM, towards field service and saying we actually have a solution we want to bring to you. >> I got to ask you guys, as a consultancy, complexity is your friend. You know when things are chaotic it's like call you guys and solve the problem, but at the same time, you hear from a lot of Servicenow customers, we're trying to minimize the customization, custom modifications. >> Patrick: Yes. >> Mark: Right. >> Is that antithetical to the way you guys typically do things? >> It shouldn't be I don't think. I mean we don't want to do as much work as possible in one project, we want to deliver value over the course of many, many transactions that are shorter in duration. And so the more we can stick to the configurable aspect of Servicenow, the better off we're going to be and the better off our customers are going to be. They'll take releases more smoothly and so forth. And what you can do with configuration and app scoping is really, it's a whole other level than what it was five years ago so we're actually starting to fulfill that promise. >> And so if you can build value on top of the platform using the platform, >> That's the point, yeah. >> Those functions beget the advantage of the upgrade. >> Yeah I would look at this and say when Fruition really got going is when we really embraced Servicenow, not just the technology, but the methodology. Because we knew a lot of other service providers, they want a two year project, they want that SAP three year whatever it was. But we embraced the methodology and said that if we can't show results in four to five months using this technology, we're not going to be invited back. But look at today, we have 400 customers worldwide, about 70 percent of those make up our annual bookings again for the next project and the next project because they see value in these increments and we're delivering that. So I would rather not elongate projects, they need to see things very fast. >> Awesome, guys congratulations, I love your story, and Mark you got to present to the financial analyst group yesterday so well done. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Keep right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest right after this.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the program, and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization, that's cybersecurity. You know, survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me to discuss this critical topic area, are Jim Shook, who's the Global Director of Cybersecurity and Compliance Practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on cloud and infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks Dave, great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart, they adapt to everything that we do. So we're seeing more and more, kind of living off the land. They're not necessarily deploying malware, makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think though, Dave, we've adapted and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's, let's protect as much as possible so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can, but then let's have the ability to adapt to, and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful. So we're recognizing that we can't be perfect a hundred percent of the time against a hundred percent of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So Andrew, you know, I like what Jim was saying, about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. But, and as Jim was saying, you can't be perfect. But, so given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like when you look at an attack if it were to occur, right? How you get that copy of data back into production, and not only that but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe seem to be data or an active directory or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails that you can protect it, and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and, where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put in a yellow sticky? No, it's got to be, you got to be somewhere safe, right? So you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. So, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy but actually identifying what that golden crown jewel data, let's call it, actually entails as one aspect of it and then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated? That's the other portion of it. >> You know, if I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, you know, cybersecurity was kind of a checkoff item. And then as you got toward the middle part of the decade and I'd say clearly by 2016 it, security became a boardroom issue. It was on the agenda, you know, every quarter at the board meetings. So, compliance is no longer the driver, is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation or data, you know, or money, et cetera. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean the, you know, bad actors are good at what they do. These losses by organizations, tens, hundreds of millions into the billions sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly, if they're larger organizations, but that's also on the table too. So you can't just rely on, oh, we need to do, you know, A, B, and C because our regulators require it. You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business and then come up with the strategy from there. >> You know, Jim, staying with you, one of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for a resilience capability, but that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see the backup is a target, the bad actors want to take it out or corrupt it or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So, the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure. You've already got it in place, let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then, as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure which commonly we might say a cyber vault, although there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others, and that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this is, prior to the pandemic, they, you know, had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place but they felt like they weren't business resilient and they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So, Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We take a position that to be cyber resilient it includes operational resiliency, it includes understanding at the C-level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown jewel data but also how to recover it in real-time. So DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution, since we architect these specific each client needs, right? When we look at what client data entails, their recovery point objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration. But when we architect these out we look at not only how to protect the data but how to alert and monitor for attacks in real-time. How to understand what we should do when a breaches in progress. Putting together with our security operations centers a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client. And then being able to cleanse and remediate so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect and recover, and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep 'em out, to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> You know, this discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO, I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery 'cause it was too risky or, you know, maybe they tested it on, you know, July 4th or something like that. But I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could, you know, double click on recovery, how hard is it to test that recovery and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So it depends, right, on the industry vertical, what kind of data, again. Financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours. In some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple days. We do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy, but it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about. It's not on the technology of how the data gets protected it's focused on the recovery, that's all that we want to do. And so the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is you have to think about different scenarios. So, there are scenarios where the attack might be small, it might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly-based, like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. The regulatory environment, we call those attacks severe but plausible. So you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure but you can test some things with the infrastructure. Others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise or walk through what that looks like to really get that recovery kind of muscle memory so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down what are those critical applications? What do we need? What's most important? What has to come back first? And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense, understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCUBE, especially lately is around, you know, IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, you know, traditionally operations technologies have been air-gapped often by design. But as businesses, increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0 and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're, you know, driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, et cetera. So, a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah, so bad actors can come in many forms. We've seen instances of social engineering, we've seen, USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IOT devices is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So, when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually it's not dissimilar from what we've been talking about, where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IOT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your business is, right? So when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front-end protection but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what data entails to put in the vault from an IOT perspective is just as critical as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the key points there, everything is interconnected. So even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them or controlling theM, SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly but there was uncertainty around that and the IT systems hadn't been secured so that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked but the outcome was the same that the business couldn't operate. So, you really have to take all of those into account. And I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services and then the applications and data, and other components that support those and drive those and making sure those are protected, you understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean you made the point, I mean, you're right, the adversary is highly capable, they're motivated 'cause the ROI is so, it's so lucrative. It's like this never ending battle that cybersecurity pros, you know, go through. It really is kind of frontline, sort of technical heroes, if you will. And so, but sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of cyber from the good guys' perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave, so that focus. I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be a hundred percent capable every single time and let's figure that out, right? That's real world stuff. So, just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time. And of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities but there's a lot more information sharing, there's a lot more focus from the business side of the house and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah, to add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You brought up a point earlier, it used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now as we have been in the market for a while we continue to mature the offerings, it's further education for not only the business itself but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected and continue to be evolved and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check the box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right guys, we got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a really important topic. Keep up the good work, appreciate it. >> Thanks Dan. >> Thank you. >> All right, thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time. Really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and infrastructure services both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to the Cube. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model and really think about transforming your business particularly the operating model. So my first question Jim is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well, there are really three aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social and governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation and that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience and I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation and resilience. >> So, thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate everybody's sort of concerned and there's not great visibility on the macro. So Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mind today. I think everybody really, you know understands the innovation and agility piece at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because, you know, prior to the pandemic people you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow, my business might not be that resilient. So Jay, my question to you is what are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? >> You know, priority is often an overused term in digital transformation, you know people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But, you know, with DXC'S philosophy not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized for instance, in many cases you can run applications, you know in your own data center or on-prem or in other environments in a hybrid environment or multi-cloud environment and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint, and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the bring the things to the business that the clients are you know, that their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera, trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And we advocate for, you know there's not a single answer to that. We'd like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So let's talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We always talk about people process and technology, technology oftentimes CIOs will tell us, well, that's the easy part, We'll figure that out whether it's true or not but I agree, people and process are sometimes the tough ones. So Jay, why don't you start, what do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? >> Well, I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from, you know, the standards that are being built by, you know best in class models, and there's many people that have gone on, you know cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a, you know, there's a change management aspect that you'd need to look at with the, you know, with the environments, there's a, you know, there's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people, you know, to deliver with the, you know, with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of, you know there's a lot of different elements. It's not just a this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that, you know, we're being, you know as much of a consultative advocate for the client, for, you know, where they want to go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients, you know and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked, you know across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own, you know their own challenges if you would. So they need advocacy to help, you know bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through you know, technology advances, which, you know Jim's really good at doing for us. >> Yeah. Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is, thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want, and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments, are really important to get maximizing your business return on a journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You know, mentioned multi-cloud just then we had in January 17th we had our Supercloud two event and Supercloud is basically, it's really what multi-cloud should have been, I'd like to say. So it's just creating a common experience across clouds, and you guys were talking about, you know there's different governance, there's different security there's different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event, in talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table and what is DXC's, you know, unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great. >> I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC given the size and the history of the company. I can use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're, on the edge. They're, you know, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now and they've really brought, you know a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there's somebody who could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscaler activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said, listen, not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment, and they'd like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know both private and public, you know to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and, and what's, you know what's the best optimal running environment, you know for us to be able to bring, you know the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know, and, you know the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah. You know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not a zero sum game. And I think, you know, you're right Jay, I think initially people felt like, oh wow, it is a zero sum game, but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it super cloud or Uber cloud or multi-cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction and I've, you know, look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. >> Help us figure this out Jim (all laughing) >> Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table, and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners, to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now. Even predates, you know, the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know, you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition, Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments at the right time and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach but a cloud right approach, where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include mainframe, it might include an on-premises infrastructure, it could include private cloud, public cloud and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah, Jay, please. It's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, but chime in here. >> And now if you were speaking still specifically to Dell here, like they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership they put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in, you know, arm in arm in front of clients. And it's not, you know, it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship, we do regular QBR meetings, we have regular executive touchpoint meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client with the partners, you know, in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there and, you know, continue to show a lot of support, you know, both for them, you know there's other OEM partners of course in the market there's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, kind of over the years, taking your arrows, you know, over decades, and you know, that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on the cube right back. (upbeat music)

>> Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Valante and in this session, we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for Smart Factories. And with me are, Todd Edmunds,the Global CTO of Smart Manufacturing Edge and Digital Twins at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (chuckles) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee, who's the Vice President, General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Nice to be here. >> Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, Smart Factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain, what is Industry 4.0 all about and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah. Sure, Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while and it's gone by multiple different names, as you said. Industry 4.0, Smart Manufacturing, Industrial IoT, Smart Factory. But it all really means the same thing, its really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So, being much more efficient, implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so, we really look at that by saying, okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time? So it's really not- it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this, not as a one-of, two-of individual Use Case point of view but instead they're saying, we really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this. Not to just enable one or two Use Cases, but enable many many Use Cases across the spectrum. I mean, there's tons of them out there. There's Predictive maintenance and there's OEE, Overall Equipment Effectiveness and there's Computer Vision and all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor, but it needs to be done in a little bit different way and really to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in Smart Factory or Industry 4.0 or however you want to call it. And truly transform, not just throw an Industry 4.0 Use Case out there but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future or you don't and fade into history. Like, 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000. Right? And so, really that's a key thing and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah. So, Aditi, it's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So, is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely. Though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation. What we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right? For example, improving the downtime or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments or improving the quality of products, right? So, I think these are lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So, Aditi, I wonder if I could stay with you and maybe this is a bit esoteric but when I first first started researching IoT and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, well, there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem. I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, Aerospace Defense companies the firms building out critical infrastructure actually had kind of an incumbent advantage and a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV somebody now they're building homes with 3D printers. It like blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive. But, so- But they got to continue, the incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well-capitalized. They're pretty good businesses, very good businesses but there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will, or this transformation that we're talking about. So, my question is, how are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing in the the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for Greenfield Factories, right? That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies, with the new connectivities, right? For the machines, for example, Industrial IoT having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at Edge versus Cloud type of technologies, right? Those are all getting built in the Greenfield Factories. However, for the Install-Based Factories, right? That is where our customers are looking at how do I modernize these factories? How do I connect the existing machine? And that is where some of the challenges come in on the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security because now you are connecting the factories to each other. So, cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right? So, there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way. So, perhaps they start with the innovation program and then they look at the business case and they scale it up, right? >> Todd, I'm glad you did brought up security, because if you think about the operations technology folks, historically they air-gaped the systems, that's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, 'Hey, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligence.' So, that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It absolutely is, Dave. And, you know, you can no longer just segment that because really to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IoT and Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory but then you got to put data back in the factory. So, no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So, you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the Cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of Cloud all the way down to the Edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does. Because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the Cloud the broader the attack surface is. So, what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from kind of that hybrid right ones run anywhere on the factory floor down to the Edge. And one of the things we're seeing too, is to help distinguish between what is the Edge and bridge that gap between, like, Dave, you talked about IT and OT and also help what Aditi talked about is the Greenfield Plants versus the Brownfield Plants that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those. It's great to kind of start to delineate what does that mean? Where's the Edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about really two Edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an Industrial Edge that sits... or some people call it a Far Edge or a Thin Edge, sits way down on that plant, consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity. The hard stuff about how do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it? And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another Edge evolving above that, which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself; that helps figure out where we're going to run this? Does it connect to the Cloud? Do we run Applications On-Prem? Because a lot of times that On-Prem Application it needs to be done. 'Cause that's the only way that it's going to work because of security requirements, because of latency requirements performance and a lot of times, cost. It's really helpful to build that Multiple-Edge strategy because then you kind of, you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new Applications, new Use Cases and become the foundation for DXC'S expertise and Applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, its.. so yeah. How long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that we're- you know, like I said at the beginning, this is not new. Smart Factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been, it's people have been trying to implement the Holy Grail of Smart Factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch or quite a bit of a switch to where the enterprises and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and they have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So, instead of deploying a computer here and a Gateway there and a Server there, I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see Servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a PC in a closet somewhere running a critical production application. So, we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table, much louder voice at the table to say, we've been doing this enterprise all the time. We know how to really consolidate, bring Hyper-Converged Applications, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure to really accelerate these kind of applications. Really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that Smart Factory and start to bring that same capabilities down into the Mac on the factory floor. That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement, you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily and you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So, we're seeing manufacturers that first Use Case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way when that- Think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that what you've done in that one factory and then set. Let's make that across all the factories including the factory that we're in, then across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat. Almost like cookie cutter. >> Got it. Thank you. >> Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, Data, Integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely. Lot different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right? Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is important. But the digital skillsets like IoT, having a skillset in in different Protocols for connecting the machines, right? That experience that comes with it. Data and Analytics, Security, Augmented Virtual Reality Programming. Again, looking at Robotics and the Digital Twin. So, the... It's a lot more connectivity software, data-driven skillsets that are needed to Smart Factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are recruiting these types of resources with these skill sets to accelerate their Smart Factory implementation, as well as consulting firms like DXC Technology and others. We recruit, we train our talent to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to Industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC to bring these to market? >> Yeah, Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership and we work very closely together to create solutions, to create strategies and how we are going to jointly help our clients, right? So, areas that we have worked closely together is Edge Compute, right? How that impacts the Smart Factory. So, we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at Vision Technologies. How do we use that at the Edge to improve the quality of products, right? So, we have several areas that we collaborate in and our approaches that we want to bring solutions to our client and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent and the right level of security. So, we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question. Kind of similar but different, you know. Why Dell, DXC, pitch me? What's different about this partnership? Where are you confident that you're going to be to deliver the best value to customers? >> Absolutely. Great question. You know, there's no shortage of Bespoke Solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual Use Cases and do these things and just, and that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is we do the optimization of the engineering of those previously Bespoke Solutions upfront, together. The power of our scalable enterprise grade structured industry standard infrastructure, as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And Dell's infrastructure and our, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that scalable infrastructure to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's again, not just one individual solutions it's all of the solutions that not just drive Use Cases but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, you're right. The partnership has gone, I mean I first encountered it back in, I think it was 2010. May of 2010. We had guys both on the, I think you were talking about converged infrastructure and I had a customer on, and it was actually the manufacturing customer. It was quite interesting. And back then it was how do we kind of replicate what's coming in the Cloud? And you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation and love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on "The Cube."

>> If you really want to make an impact to your business, it takes more than just moving your workloads into the cloud. So-called lift and shift is fine to reduce data center footprints and associated costs, but to really drive change, you don't want to simply "pave the cow path," as the saying goes. Rather, you need to think about the operating model, and that requires more comprehensive systems thinking. In other words, how will changes in technology affect business productivity? Or, you know what? Even flip that. What changes in my business process could lower cost, cut elapse times, and accelerate time to market, increase user productivity, and lower operational risks? And what role can technology play in supporting these mandates through modernization, automation, machine intelligence, and business resilience? And that's what we're here to discuss today. Welcome to Driving Business Results with Cloud Transformation, made Possible by Dell and DXC. My name is Dave Vellante, and today we're going to zoom out and explore many aspects of cloud transformation that leading organizations are acting on today. Yeah, sure, we're going to look at optimizing infrastructure, but we'll also dig deeper into cloud considerations, governance, compliance, and security angles, as well as the impact of emerging opportunities around edge and Industry 4.0. Our focus will be on how to remove barriers and help you achieve business outcomes. And to do this, our program features the long-term partnership between Dell and DXC. And we bring to this program six experts in three separate sessions, who are working directly with top organizations in virtually every industry to achieve high impact results. We're going to start with a conversation about cloud, the cloud operating model, and transforming key aspects of your infrastructure. And then we'll look into governance, security, and business resilience. And in our third session, we'll discuss exciting transformations that are occurring in smart manufacturing and facilities innovations. So let's get right into it with our first session. Enjoy the program. (bright music) Hello, and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for Cloud and Infrastructure Services, and Jay Dowling, Americas Sales Lead for Cloud and Infrastructure Services, both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today. Welcome to theCube. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, "Look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeros to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift." You really got to think about modernizing, the application portfolio. You got to think about your business model, and really think about transforming your business, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is, What role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well, there are really three aspects that the, the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeros. One is cost optimization, and that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social, and governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation. And that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment, which the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience. And I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience, to be able, to be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these three aspects, cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. >> So, so thank you for that. So Jay, I got to ask you, in the current climate, everybody's, you know, concerned, and there's not great visibility on the macro. So, Jim mentioned cost optimization. That seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are consolidating redundant vendors and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mind today. I think everybody really, you know, understands the innovation and, and, and agility piece, at least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. And then the business resilience piece is really interesting because, you know, prior to the pandemic people, you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, "Wow, my business might not be that resilient." So Jay, my question to you is, What are you hearing when you talk to customers? What's the priority today? >> Yeah, the priority is an often overused term of digital transformation. You know, people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients and what their branding is. And what we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that. But, you know, with DXC's philosophy, not everything goes to, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases, you can run applications, you know, in your own data center, or on-prem, or in other environments, in a hybrid environment, or multi-cloud environment, and, and still be very optimized from a cost spend standpoint and also put yourself in position for modernization and for be able to do the, bring the things to the business that the clients are, you know, that their clients are looking for, like the CMO and the CFO, et cetera. Trying to use IT as a lever to drive business and to drive, you know, business acceleration and drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it. And, and we advocate for, you know, there's not a single answer to that. We like to evaluate clients' environments and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model, you know, so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So if, let's talk about some of the, the barriers to realizing value in, in a context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility, and, and, and resilience. But there's a business angle, and there's a technical angle here. 'Cause we always talk about people, process, and technology. Technology, oftentimes, CIOs will tell us, "Well, that's the easy part. We'll figured that out," whether it's true or not. But I agree, people and process is sometimes the tough one. So Jay, why don't you start. What do you see as the barriers, particularly from a business standpoint? >> I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are, that are out there in the market from, you know, the, the standards that are being built by, you know, best in class models. And, and there's many people that have gone on, you know, cloud journeys and been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a, you know, there's a change management aspect that you'd need to look at with the, you know, with the environments. There's a, you know, there's a skillset set environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people, you know, to deliver with the, you know, with the tools and the skills and the, and the models that that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now? There's just a lot of, you know, there's a lot of different elements. It's not just a, "This price is better," or, "This can operate better than one environment over the other." I think we like to try to look at things holistically and make sure that, you know, we're being, you know, as much of a consultative advocate for the client, for where they want to go, what their destiny is, and based on what we've learned with other clients. You know, and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked, you know, across such a broad spectra of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own, you know, their own challenges, if you would. So they need, they need advocacy to help, you know, bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through, you know, technology advances, which, you know, Jim's really good at doing for us. >> Yeah, Jim, is, is it, is it a, is the big barrier a skills issue, you know, bench strength? Are there other considerations from your perspective? >> Well, we, we've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of, of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change in moving to cloud when it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And, and we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to, to determine which providers you want. And it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation, "I want to move everything, and I want to move it all at once." That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy and timing your investments are really important to get at maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your cost savings, and, and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You know, mentioned multi-cloud just then. We had, in January 17th, we had our Supercloud 2 event. And Supercloud is basically, it's really multi, what multi-cloud should have been, I, I like to say. So it's this creating a common experience across clouds. And you guys were talking about, you know, there's different governance, there's different security, there's different pricing. So, and, and one of the takeaways from this event in talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is, you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you could talk about your partnership strategy, what do partners bring to the table, and what is, what is DXC's, you know, unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great. >> I, you know, we've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC, given the size and, and the history of the company. I could use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology, right? They're a great, you know, partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just a storage and compute play anymore. They're, they're on the edge. They're, you know, they're, they've got intelligence in their networking devices now. And they've really brought, you know, a lot of value to us as a partner. And, you know, there, there's somebody, you could look at Dell technology as somebody that might, you know, have a victim, you know, effect because of all the hyperscale activity and all the cloud activity. But they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and say, "Listen, not all things are destined for cloud, or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment." And they like to be part of those discussions to see how they can, you know, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, you know, both private and public, you know, to clients. And let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and, and what's, you know, what's the best optimal running environment, you know, for us to be able to bring, you know, the greatest value to the business with speed, with security, with, you know. And, you know, the things that they want to keep closest to the business are often things that you want to kind of, you know, keep on your premise or keep in your own data center. So they're, they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced us well, partners with us well in the market. And, and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate, you know, their support of our strategy, and, and we like to also compliment their strategy and work, you know, work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah, you know, Jim, Matt Baker, who's the head of strategic planning at Dell talks about, "It's not a zero sum game." And I think, you know, you're right, Jay. I think initially people felt like, "Oh wow, it's, it is a zero sum game." But it's clearly not, and this idea of of, whether you call it supercloud or ubercloud or multicloud, clearly Dell is headed in in that direction. And I, you know, look at some of their future projects. There's their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint, Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to, you know, end to end? I wonder if you could help, you know, us understand that. >> Help us figure this out, Jim, here. (group laughing) >> Glad to expand on that. One of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table. And we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customers changing needs over time. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now. Even predates, you know, the, the name DXC and that, that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to, "What's unique?" You know, you hear a lot about partnerships. You guys got a lot of competition. Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I think, go ahead, Jim. >> I would say our unique approach, we call it cloud right. And that, that approach is making the right investments, at the right time, and on the right platforms. And our partners play a, play a key role in that. So we, we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective, and even a security and governance perspective. And, and the right approach might include mainframe. It might include an on-premises infrastructure. It could include private cloud, public cloud, and SaaS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah, Jay, please. >> If you were... >> That is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. Chime in here. (Jay chuckles) >> And now, if you were speaking specifically to Dell here, like they, they also walk the talk, right? They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground that their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell in, you know, arm in arm in front of clients. And it's not, you know, it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really a true partnership. They, they, they've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO. We've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QBR meetings. We have regular executive touchpoint meetings. It's really important that you keep a high level of intimacy with the client, with the partners, you know, and, and the, and the GSI community. And I, I've been with several GSIs, and, and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell technology. I'm really extremely impressed on, on the engagement level that we've had there and, you know, continue to show a lot of support, you know, both for them. You know, there's other OEM partners, of course, in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients, but this has been a particularly strong element for us in our partnership and in our go-to-market strategy. >> Well, I think too, just my observation, is a lot of it's about trust. You guys have both earned the trust, the kind of, over the, over the years taking your arrows, you know, of over decades. And, and you know, that just doesn't happen overnight. So guys, I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting cloud right, isn't it? >> That's right. (chuckles) (Dave chuckles) >> Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Dave, thank you. >> Jay, Jim, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on theCube. Be right back. (upbeat guitar music) (keyboard clicks) Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Vellante, and in this session we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for smart factories and with me are Todd Edmunds, the Global CTO of Smart Manufacturing Edge and Digital Twins at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (Todd chuckles) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee who's the Vice President, General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. Great to be here. >> Nice to be here. So, Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, smart factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain like what is Industry 4.0 all about, and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while. And it's got, it's gone by multiple different names, as you said, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart factory, but it all really means the same thing. Its really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So being much more efficient, implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so we really look at that by saying, "Okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time?" So it's really not, it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this not as a one-off, two-off, individual use case point of view. But instead they're saying, "We really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this, not to just enable one or two use cases, but enable many, many use cases across the spectrum." I mean, there's tons of them out there. There's predictive maintenance, and there's OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, and there's computer vision. And all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor. But it needs to be done in a little bit different way. And, and, and really, to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in smart factory, or Industry 4.0, or however you want to call it, and truly transform. Not just throw an Industry 4.0 use case out there, but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. You know, I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future, or you don't and fade into history like 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000, right? And so really that's a key thing, and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah so, Aditi, that's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely. Though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation, what we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right? For example, improving the downtime, you know, or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments, or improving the quality of products, right? So I think these are a lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So Aditi, I wonder if I could stay with you. And maybe this is a bit esoteric. But when I first started researching IoT and, and, and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, you know, while there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem, I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, aerospace defense companies, the firms building out critical infrastructure, actually had kind of an incumbent advantage in a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV, somebody now they're building homes with 3D printers. Its like, blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive, but, so, but they got to continue. The incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well capitalized. They're pretty good businesses, very good businesses. But there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will, or this transformation that we're talking about. So my question is, How are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing and the, the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for greenfield factories, right? That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies, with the new connectivities, right, for the machines. For example, industrial IoT, having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at edge versus cloud type of technologies, right? Those are all getting built in the greenfield factories. However, for the install-based factories, right, that is where our customers are looking at, "How do I modernize these factories? How do I connect the existing machine?" And that is where some of the challenges come in on, you know, the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security, right, because now you are connecting the factories to each other, right? So cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right? So there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way, right? So perhaps they start with the innovation program, and then they look at the business case, and they scale it up, right? >> Todd, I'm glad Aditi brought up security. Because if you think about the operations technology, you know, folks, historically, they air gapped, you know, the systems. That's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, "Hey, we got to, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligent." So that's, that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It, it, it absolutely is Dave. And, and you know, you can no longer just segment that because really, to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IoT and Industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory. But then you got to put data back in the factory. So no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of cloud all the way down to the edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the cloud, the broader the attack surface is. So what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from a, kind of that, that hybrid, you know, "write once, run anywhere" on the factory floor down to the edge. And one of the things we're seeing, too, is to help distinguish between what is the edge, and that, and, and bridge that gap between, like Dave, you talked about IT and OT. And also help that, what Aditi talked about, is the greenfield plants versus the brownfield plants that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those. Is, it's great to kind of start to delineate. What does that mean? Where's the edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about really two edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an industrial edge that sits, or some people call it a far edge or a thin edge, sits way down on that plan. It consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity. The hard stuff about, "How do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it?" And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another edge evolving above that, which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself that helps figure out where we're going to run this. Does it connect to the cloud? Do we run applications on-prem? Because a lot of times that on-prem application is, is, needs to be done because that's the only way that its going to, it's going to work because of security requirements, because of latency requirements, performance, and a lot of times cost. It's really helpful to build that multiple edge strategy because then you kind of, you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware, into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new applications, new use cases, and become the foundation for DXC's expertise and applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the, the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, it, it, it's, (chuckles) it, it, so. Yeah, how long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what, you know, what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that, in that we're, you know, like I said at the beginning, we, this is not new. Smart factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been, it's, people have been trying to implement the holy grail of smart factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch, or quite a bit of a switch, to where the enterprise and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So instead of deploying a computer here, and a gateway there, and a server there, I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a, or a PC in a closet somewhere running a critical production application. So we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table, much louder voice at the table to say, "We've been doing this at enterprise all the time. We, we know how to really consolidate, bring hyper-converged applications, hyper-converged infrastructure, to really accelerate these kind of applications, really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that smart factory, and start to bring that same capabilities down into the, on the factory floor." That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement, you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily. And you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So we're seeing manufacturers, yeah, that first use case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way, when that, think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that, what you've done in that one factory, and then set. Let's that, make that across all the factories, including the factory that we're in, but across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat, almost like a cookie cutter. >> Got it. Thank you. Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these, to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, data, integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean definitely, a lot. Different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right? Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is, is important. But the, the digital skillset sets like, you know, IoT, having a skillset in different protocols for connecting the machines, right, that experience that comes with it, data and analytics, security, augmented virtual reality programming. You know, again, looking at robotics and the digital twin. So you know, it's a lot more connectivity software, data driven skillsets that are needed to smart factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are, you know, recruiting these types of skill, resources with these skillsets to, you know, accelerate their smart factory implementation, as well as consulting firms like DXC Technology and others. We, we, we recruit. We, we train our talent to, to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to Industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC, to, to bring these to market? >> Yeah, Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership. You know, and we work very closely together to, to create solutions, to create strategies, and how we, we are going to jointly help our clients, right? So areas that we have worked closely together is edge compute, right, how that impacts the smart factory. So we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at vision technologies, you know. How do we use that at the edge to improve the quality of products, right? So we have several areas that we collaborate in. And our approach is that we, we want to bring solutions to our client, and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent, and the right level of security. So we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question, kind of similar but different. You know, why Dell DXC? Pitch me. What's different about this partnership? You know, where do you, are you confident that, you know, you're going to be, deliver the best value to, to customers? >> Absolutely. Great question. You know, there's no shortage of bespoke solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual use cases and do these things. And just, and, and, and that's, that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is, we do the optimization, the optimization of the engineering of those previously bespoke solutions upfront, together, right? The power of our scalables, enterprise-grade, structured, you know, industry standard infrastructure, as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global, trusted, trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And, and Dell's infrastructure, and our, what, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that, at that scalable infrastructure, to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's again, not just one individual solutions, it's all of the solutions that not just drive use cases, but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, the, you're right, the partnership has gone, I mean, I first encountered it back in, I think it was 2010, May of 2010, we had you, you guys both on theCube. I think you were talking about converged infrastructure. And I had a customer on, and it was, actually a manufacturing customer, was quite interesting. And back then it was, "How do we kind of replicate what's coming in the cloud?" And, and you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation, and love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> It was a pleasure speaking with you. >> I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on theCube. (bright music) Welcome back to the program and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization. That's cybersecurity. You know, survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me to discuss this critical topic area are Jim Shook, who's the Global Director of Cybersecurity and Compliance Practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on Cloud and Infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome. Good to have you. >> Thanks Dave. Great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface, and, and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart. They adapt to everything that we do. So we're seeing more and more kind of living off the land. They're not necessarily deploying malware. Makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think though, Dave, we've, we've adapted, and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's, "Let's protect as much as possible, so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can. But then, let's have the ability to adapt to and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful." So we're recognizing that we can't be perfect a hundred percent of the time against a hundred percent of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So Andrew, you know, I like what Jim was saying about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. But, and, and as Jim is saying, you, you can't be perfect. But, so given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like. When you look at an attack, if it were to occur, right, how you get that copy of data back into production. And not only that, but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe CMBD data, or an active directory, or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails so that you can protect it and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put on a yellow sticky? No, it's got to be, (chuckles) you got to be somewhere safe, right? So you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. You, so, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy, but actually identifying what that golden crown jewel data, let's call it, actually entails is one aspect of it. And then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated, that's the other portion of it. >> You know, if I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, you know, cybersecurity was kind of a checkoff item. And as you got toward the middle part of the decade, and I'd say clearly by 2016, it, security became a boardroom issue. It was on the agenda, you know, every quarter at the board meetings. So compliance is no longer the driver, is, is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation or data, you know, it's, or money, et cetera. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean the, you know, the bad actors are good at what they do. These losses by organizations, tens, hundreds of millions into the billions sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to, to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly on, if they're larger organizations. But that's also on the table, too. So you can't just rely on, "Oh we need to do, you know, A, B and C because our regulators require it." You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business, and then come up with a strategy from there. >> You know, Jim, staying with you, one of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for resilience capability. But that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities, and, and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see, the backup is a target. The bad actors want to take it out, or corrupt it, or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful, and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure. You've already got it in place. Let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure, which commonly we, we might say a cyber vault. Although, there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others, and that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this, is prior to the pandemic, they, you know, had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place, but they felt like they weren't business resilient. And they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We, we take a position that to be cyber resilient, it includes operational resiliency. It includes understanding at the C level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then, how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown jewel data, but also how to recover it in real time. So DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution since we architect these specific to each client needs, right, when we look at what client data entails, their recovery point, objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration. But when we architect these out, we look at not only how to protect the data, but how to alert and monitor for attacks in real time, how to understand what we should do when a breach is in progress, putting together with our security operations centers, a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client, and then being able to cleanse and remediate so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect, and recover, and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep them out to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> You know, this, this discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO. I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery 'cause it was too risky. Or, you know, maybe they tested it on, you know, July 4th or something like that. But, but it, I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could, you know, double click on recovery? How hard is it to, to, to test that recovery, and, and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So it depends, right, on the industry vertical, what kind of data. Again, a financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours. In some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple of days. We do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy. But it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about. It's not on the technology of how the data gets protected. It's focused on the recovery. That's all that we want to do. And so the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is, you have to think about different scenarios. So there are scenarios where the attack might be small. It might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly based like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. The regulatory environment, we call those attacks severe but plausible. So you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure, but you can test some things with the infrastructure. Others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise or walk through what that looks like to really get that, that recovery kind of muscle, muscle memory so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down, "What are those critical applications? What do we need, what's most important? What has to come back first?" And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense. Understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to, how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCube, especially lately, is around, you know, IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, you know, traditionally, operations technologies have been air gapped, often by design. But as businesses, increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0, and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're, you know, driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, et cetera. So a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah, so bad actors, you know, can come in many forms. We've seen instances of social engineering. We've seen, you know, a USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IoT device is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually, it's not dissimilar from what we've been been talking about where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IoT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your, your business is, right? So when, when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front end protection, but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what what data entails to put in the vault from an IoT perspective is just as critical as as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the, the key points there. Everything is interconnected. So even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them, or controlling them, SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly. But there was uncertainty around that, and the IT systems hadn't been secured. So that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked, but the outcome was the same that the business couldn't operate. So you really have to take all of those into account. And I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services, and then the applications and data and other components that support those and drive those, and making sure those are protected. You understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean, you made the point. I mean, you're right. The adversary is highly capable. They're motivated 'cause the ROI is so, it's so lucrative. It's like this never ending battle that cybersecurity pros, you know, go through. It really is kind of frontline sort of technical heroes, if you will. And so, but sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of, of cyber from the good guy's perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave. So that, that focus, I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be hundred percent capable every single time, and let's figure that out, right? That's, that's real world stuff. So just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time. And of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities. But there's a lot more information sharing. There's a lot more focus from the business side of the house and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah, to, to add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You, you brought up a point earlier. It used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now, as we have been in the market for a while, we continue to mature the offerings. It's further education for not only the business itself, but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected and continue to be evolved and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check the box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right, guys, we got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a, on a really important topic. Keep up the good work. Appreciate it. >> Thanks Dan. >> Thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time, really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there. (bright music) Okay, we hope you enjoyed the program and learned some things about cloud transformation and modernizing your business that will inspire you to action. Now if you want to learn more, go to the Dell DXC partner page shown here, or click on the URL in the description. Thanks for watching everybody and on behalf of our supporters, Dell and DXC, good luck. And as always, get in touch if we can be of any assistance. (bright music)

>> Welcome back to the program, and we're going to dig into the number one topic on the minds of every technology organization. That's cybersecurity. Survey data from ETR, our data partner, shows that among CIOs and IT decision makers, cybersecurity continues to rank as the number one technology priority to be addressed in the coming year. That's ahead of even cloud migration and analytics. And with me, to discuss this critical topic area, are Jim Shook, who's the global director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Andrew Gonzalez, who focuses on cloud and infrastructure consulting at DXC Technology. Gents, welcome, good to have you. >> Thanks, Dave. Great to be here. >> Thank you. >> Jim, let's start with you. What are you seeing from the front lines in terms of the attack surface and how are customers responding these days? >> It's always up and down and back and forth. The bad actors are smart, they adapt to everything that we do, so, we're seeing more and more kind of living off the land, they're not necessarily deploying malware, makes it harder to find what they're doing. And I think, though, Dave, we've adapted and this whole notion of cyber resilience really helps our customers figure this out. And the idea there goes beyond cybersecurity, it's let's protect as much as possible, so we keep the bad actors out as much as we can, but then let's have the ability to adapt to and recover to the extent that the bad actors are successful. So, we're recognizing that we can't be perfect 100% of the time against 100% of the bad actors. Let's keep out what we can, but then recognize and have that ability to recover when necessary. >> Yeah, thank you. So, Andrew, I like what Jim was saying about living off the land, of course, meaning using your own tooling against you, kind of hiding in plain sight, if you will. And as Jim was saying, you can't be perfect, but so, given that, what's your perspective on what good cybersecurity hygiene looks like? >> Yeah, so you have to understand what your crown-jewel data looks like, what a good copy of a recoverable asset looks like when you look at an attack, if it were to occur, right? How you get that copy of data back into production. And not only that, but what that golden image actually entails. So, whether it's networking, storage, some copy of a source code, intellectual property, maybe SIM2B data, or an Active Directory, or DNS dump, right? Understanding what your data actually entails, so that you can protect it, and that you can build out your recovery plan for it. >> So, and where's that live? Where's that gold copy? You put in a yellow sticky? You know, it's got to be somewhere safe, right? So, you have to think about that chain as well, right? >> Absolutely. Yeah. So, a lot of folks have not gone through the exercise of identifying what that golden copy looks like. Everyone has a DR scenario, everyone has a DR strategy, but actually identifying what that golden crown-jewel data, let's call it, actually entails is one aspect of it, and then where to put it, how to protect it, how to make it immutable and isolated, that's the other portion of it. >> If I go back to sort of earlier part of last decade, cybersecurity was kind of a check-off item, and then as you got toward the middle part of the decade, and I'd say clearly by 2016, security became a boardroom issue, it was on the agenda every quarter at the board meetings. So, compliance is no longer the driver is my point. The driver is business risk, real loss of reputation, or data, or money, etc. What are the business implications of not having your cyber house in order today? >> They're extreme, Dave. I mean, the bad actors are good at what they do, these losses by organizations tens, hundreds of millions into the billions, sometimes, plus the reputational damage that's difficult to really measure. There haven't been a lot of organizations that have actually been put out of business by an attack, at least not directly, if they're larger organizations. But that's also on the table too. So, you can't just rely on, oh, we need to do A, B and C because our regulators require it. You need to look at what the actual risk is to the business, and then come up with the strategy from there. >> Jim, staying with you. One of the most common targets we hear of attackers is to go after the backup corpus. So, how should customers think about protecting themselves from that tactic? >> Well, Dave, you hit on it before, right? Everybody's had the backup and DR strategies for a long time going back to requirements that we had in place for physical disaster or human error. And that's a great starting point for a resilience capability. But that's all it is, is a starting point. Because the bad actors will, they also understand that you have those capabilities, and they've adapted to that. In every sophisticated attack that we see, the backup is a target, the bad actors want to take it out, or corrupt it, or do something else to that backup so that it's not available to you. That's not to say they're always successful, and it's still a good control to have in place because maybe it will survive. But you have to plan beyond that. So, the capabilities that we talk about with resilience, let's harden that backup infrastructure, you've already got it in place, let's use the capabilities that are there like immutability and other controls to make it more difficult for the bad actors to get to. But then, as Andrew said, that gold copy, that critical systems, you need to protect that in something that's more secure, which commonly we might say a cyber vault, or there's a lot of different capabilities for cyber vaulting, some far better than others. And that's some of the things that we focus on. >> You know, it's interesting, but I've talked to a lot of CIOs about this prior to the pandemic, they had their, as you're pointing out, Jim, they had their DR strategy in place, but they felt like they weren't business-resilient, and they realized that when we had the forced march to digital. So, Andrew, are there solutions out there to help with this problem? Do you guys have an answer to this? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm glad you brought up resiliency. We take a position that to be cyber resilient, it includes operational resiliency, it includes understanding at the C level what the implication of an attack means, as we stated, and then how to recover back into production. When you look at protecting that data, not only do you want to put it into what we call a vault, which is a Dell technology that is an offline immutable copy of your crown-jewel data, but also how to recover it in real time. So, DXC offers a, I don't want to call it a turnkey solution, since we architect these specific to each client needs, right? When we look at what client data entails, their recovery point, objectives, recovery time objectives, what we call quality of the restoration, but, when we architect these out, we look at not only how to protect the data, but how to alert and monitor for attacks in realtime. How to understand what we should do when a breach is in progress. Putting together with our security operations centers a forensic and recovery plan and a runbook for the client. And then being able to cleanse and remediate, so that we can get that data back into production. These are all services that DXC offers in conjunction with the Dell solution to protect and recover and keep bad actors out. And if we can't keep 'em out, to ensure that we are back into production in short order. >> This discussion we've been having about DR kind of versus resilience, and you were just talking about RPO and RTO, I mean, it used to be that a lot of firms wouldn't even test their recovery, 'cause it was too risky, or maybe they tested it on July 4th or something like that, but I'm inferring that's changed. I wonder if we could double-click on recovery, how hard is it to test that recovery, and how quickly are you seeing organizations recover from attacks? >> So, it depends, right? On the industry vertical, what kind of data, again, financial services client compared to a manufacturing client are going to be two separate conversations. We've seen it as quickly as being able to recover in six hours, in 12 hours, in some instances we have the grace period of a day to a couple days, we do offer the ability to run scenarios once a quarter where we can stand up in our systems, the production data that we are protecting to ensure that we have a good recoverable copy. But it depends on the client. >> I really like the emphasis here, Dave, that you're raising and that Andrew's talking about, it's not on the technology of how the data gets protected, it's focused on the recovery. That's all that we want to do. And so, the solution with DXC really focuses on generating that recovery for customers. I think where people get a little bit twisted up on their testing capability is you have to think about different scenarios. So, there are scenarios where the attack might be small, it might be limited to a database or an application. It might be really broadly based, like the NotPetya attacks from a few years ago. In the regulatory environment we call those attacks severe but plausible. So, you can't necessarily test everything with the infrastructure, but you can test some things with the infrastructure, others, you might sit around on a tabletop exercise, or walk through what that looks like to really get that recovery kind of muscle memory, so that people know what to do when those things occur. But the key to it, as Andrew said before, have to focus down what are those critical applications. What do we need? What's most important? What has to come back first? And that really will go a long way towards having the right recovery points and recovery times from a cyber disaster. >> Yeah, makes sense. Understanding the value of that data is going to inform you how to respond and how to prioritize. Andrew, one of the things that we hear a lot on theCUBE, especially lately, is around IOT, IIOT, Industry 4.0, the whole OT security piece of it. And the problem being that, traditionally, operations technologies have been air gapped, often by design, but as businesses increasingly they're driving initiatives like Industry 4.0, and they're connecting these OT systems to IT systems. They're driving efficiency, preventative maintenance, etc. So, a lot of data flowing through the pipes, if you will. What are you seeing in terms of the threats to critical infrastructure, and how should customers think about addressing these issues? >> Yeah. So, bad actors can come in many forms, we've seen instances of social engineering, we've seen USB stick dropped in a warehouse. That data that is flowing through the IOT device is as sensitive now as your core mainframe infrastructure data. So, when you look at it from a protection standpoint, conceptually, it's not dissimilar from what we've been talking about, where you want to understand, again, what the most critical data is. Looking at IOT data and applications is no different than your core systems now, right? Depending on what your business is, right? So, when we're looking at protecting these, yes, we want firewalls, yes, we want air gap solutions, yes, we want front end protection, but we're looking at it from a resiliency perspective. Putting that data, understanding what data entails to put in the vault from an IOT perspective is just as critical as it is for your core systems. >> Jim, anything you can add to this topic? >> Yeah, I think you hit on the key points there. Everything is interconnected. So, even in the days where maybe people thought the OT systems weren't online, oftentimes the IT systems are talking to them, or controlling them SCADA systems, or perhaps supporting them. Think back to the pipeline attack of last year. All the public testimony was that the OT systems didn't get attacked directly, but there was uncertainty around that, and the IT systems hadn't been secured. So, that caused the OT systems to have to shut down. It certainly is a different recovery when you're shutting them down on your own versus being attacked, but the outcome was the same, that the business couldn't operate. So, you really have to take all of those into account, and I think that does go back to exactly what Andrew's saying, understanding your critical business services, and then the applications and data, and other components that support those and drive those, and making sure those are protected, you understand them, you have the ability to recover them if necessary. >> So guys, I mean, you made the point, I mean, you're right. The adversary is highly capable, they're motivated, 'cause the ROI is so lucrative. It's like this never-ending battle that cybersecurity pros go through, it really is kind of frontline sort of technical heroes, if you will. But sometimes it just feels daunting. Why are you optimistic about the future of cyber from the good guys' perspective? >> I think we're coming at the problem the right way, Dave, so that focus, I'm so pleased with the idea that we are planning that the systems aren't going to be 100% capable every single time and let's figure that out, right? That's real-world stuff. So, just as the bad actors continue to adapt and expand, so do we. And I think the differences there, the common criminals, it's getting harder and harder for them. The more sophisticated ones, they're tough to beat all the time, and, of course, you've raised the question of some nation states and other activities, but there's a lot more information sharing, there's a lot more focus from the business side of the house, and not just the IT side of the house that we need to figure these things out. >> Yeah. To add to that, I think furthering education for the client base is important. You brought up a point earlier, it used to be a boardroom conversation due to compliance reasons. Now, as we have been in the market for a while, we continue to mature the offerings, it's further education for not only the business itself, but for the IT systems and how they interconnect, and working together so that these systems can be protected, and continue to be evolved, and continue to be protected through multiple frameworks as opposed to seeing it as another check-the-box item that the board has to adhere to. >> All right, guys. We got to go. Thank you so much. Great conversation on a really important topic. Keep keep up the good work. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching. Stay tuned for more excellent discussions around the partnership between Dell Technologies and DXC Technology. We're talking about solving real-world problems, how this partnership has evolved over time, really meeting the changing enterprise landscape challenges. Keep it right there.

>> Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Vellante and in this session we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for smart factories and with me are Todd Edmunds, the global CTO of Smart Manufacturing, Edge and Digital Twins, at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (Todd laughs) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee, who's the Vice President General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Well- >> Nice to be here. >> Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, smart factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain, like, what is Industry 4.0 all about and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah, sure Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while and it's got, it's gone by multiple different names. As you said, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart factory. But it all really means the same thing. It's really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So being much more efficient. Implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so we really look at that by saying, "Okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time"? So it's really not, it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this, not as a one-off, two off individual use case point of view, but instead they're saying, "We really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this." Not to just enable one or two use cases, but enable many, many use cases across the spectrum. I mean, there's tons of 'em out there. There's predictive maintenance and there's OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, and there's computer vision. And all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor, but it needs to be done in a little bit different way. And really to to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in smart factory, or Industry 4.0, or however you want to call it. And truly transform. Not just throw an Industry 4.0 use case out there, but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. You know, I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future or you don't and fade into history like 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000, right. And so really that's a key thing and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah, so Aditi, that's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely, though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation. What we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right. For example, improving the downtime, you know, or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments or improving the quality of products, right. So I think these are lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So Aditi, one, if I could stay with you and maybe this is a bit esoteric, but when I first started researching IoT and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, you know, while there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem, I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, aerospace defense companies, the firms building out critical infrastructure, actually had kind of an incumbent advantage and a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV, somebody now, they're building homes with 3D printers. It like blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive. But. So, but they got to continue, the incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well capitalized. They're pretty good businesses. Very good businesses. But there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will. Or there's transformation that we're talking about. So my question is how are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing in the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for greenfield factories, right. That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies with the new connectivities, right, for the machines, for example. Industry IoT, Having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at edge versus cloud type of technologies, right. Those are all getting built in the greenfield factories. However, for the install-based factories, right, that is where our customers are looking at how do I modernize, right. These factories. How do I connect the existing machine? And that is where some of the challenges come in on, you know, the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security, right, because now you are connecting the factories to each other, right. So cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right. So there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way, right. So perhaps they start with the innovation program. And then they look at the business case and they scale it up, right. >> Todd, I'm glad Aditi brought up security because if you think about the operations technology, you know folks, historically they air gapped, you know, the systems. That's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, "Hey, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligent." So that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It absolutely is Dave. And, you know, you can no longer just segment that because really to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IOT and industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory but then you got to put data back in the factory. So no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of cloud all the way down to the edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the cloud, the broader the attack surface is. So what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from, kind of, that hybrid, you know, write once, run anywhere on the factory floor down to the edge. And one of things we're seeing too is to help distinguish between what is the edge and that. And bridge that gap between, like Dave, you talked about IT and OT, and also help that what Aditi talked about is the greenfield plants versus the brownfield plants, that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those, is it's great to kind of start to delineate. What does that mean? Where's the edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about, really, two edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an industrial edge that sits, or some people call it a far edge or a thin edge, sits way down on that plant. Consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity, the hard stuff, about how do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it? And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another edge evolving above that which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself that helps figure out where we're going to run this. Is... Does it connect to the cloud? Do we run applications on-prem? Because a lot of times that on-prem application is needs to be done because that's the only way it's going to work. Because of security requirements. Because of latency requirements, performance, and a lot of times, cost. It's really helpful to build that multiple edge strategy because then you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware, into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new applications, new use cases, and become the foundation for DXC's expertise in applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, it... So, yeah, how long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what, you know, what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that we're, you know, like I said at the beginning, this is not new smart factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been... It's people have been trying to implement the holy grail of smart factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch or quite a bit of a switch, to where the enterprise and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So instead of deploying a computer here and a gateway there and a server there. I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a PC in a closet somewhere running a a critical production application. So we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table. Much louder voice at the table to say, "We've been doing this enterprise all the time. We know how to really consolidate, bring hyper-converged applications, hyper-converged infrastructure, to really accelerate these kind of applications. Really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that smart factory." And start to bring that same capabilities down into the Mac on the factory floor. That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily. And you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So we're seeing manufacturers... Yeah, that first use case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way, when that... Think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that what you've done in that one factory and then set. Let's that, make that across all the factories including the factory that we're in, but across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat almost like a cookie cutter. >> Got it, thank you. Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, data, integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely. Different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right. Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is important. But the digital skillsets, like, you know, IoT. Having a skillset in different protocols for connecting the machines, right. That experience that comes with it. Data and analytics, security, augmented virtual reality, programming. You know, again, looking at robotics and the digital twin. So, you know, it's a lot more connectivity software data-driven skillsets that are needed to smart factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are, you know, recruiting these types of resources with these skillsets to, you know, accelerate their smart factory implementation as well as consulting firms like DXC technology and others. We recruit. We train our talent to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC, to bring these to market? >> Yeah, I... Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership, you know, and we work very closely together to create solutions, to create strategies, and how we are going to jointly help our clients, right. So. Areas that we have worked closely together is edge compute, right. How that impacts the smart factory. So we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at vision technologies, you know. How do we use that at the edge to improve the quality of products, right. So we have several areas that we collaborate in and our approach is that we want to bring solutions to our client and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent, and the right level of security. So we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question. Kind of similar but different. You know, why Dell DXC? Pitch me. What's different about this partnership? You know, where are you confident that, you know, you're going to deliver the best value to customers? >> Absolutely, great question. You know, there's no shortage of bespoke solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual use cases and do these things and just... And that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is we do the optimization of the engineering of those previously bespoke solutions upfront, together. Right. The power of our scalables, enterprise grade, structured, you know, industry standard infrastructure as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And Dell's infrastructure and our, what, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that scalable infrastructure to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's, again, not just one individual solutions. It's all of the solutions that not just drive use cases but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, you're right. The partnership has gone... I mean, I first encountered it back in, I think, it was 2010, May of 2010. We had you guys both on the queue... I think we were talking about converged infrastructure and I had a customer on, and it was actually manufacturing customer. Was quite interesting. And back then it was how do we kind of replicate what's coming in the cloud? And you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation. And love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> It was a pleasure speaking with you. >> I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on theCUBE.

>> Hello and welcome to what is sure to be an insightful conversation about getting business results with cloud Transformation. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with James Miller, Chief Technologist for cloud and Infrastructure Services and Jay Dowling, America's Sales Lead for cloud and Infrastructure Services, both with DXC Technology. Gentlemen, thanks for your time today, welcome to The Cube. >> Great, thanks for having us. >> Thank you, Dave, appreciate it. >> So let's get right into it. You know, I've talked to a lot of practitioners who've said, look, if you really want to drop zeros, like a lot of zeroes to the bottom line, you can't just lift and shift. You really got to think about modernizing, the application portfolio, you got to think about your business model, and really think about transforming your business, particularly the operating model. So my first question, Jim, is what role does the cloud play in modernization? >> Well there are really 3 aspects that the cloud plays in modernization. You mentioned multiple zeroes. One is cost optimization. And that can be achieved through business operations, through environmental, social, in governance. Also being more efficient with your IT investments. But that's not the only aspect. There's also agility and innovation. And that can be achieved through automation and productivity, speed to market for new features and functions, improvements in the customer experience, and the capability to metabolize a great deal more data in your environment. Which, the end result is an improvement in releasing of new things to the field. And finally, there's resilience. And I'm not really talking about IT resilience, but more of business resilience. To be able to handle operational risk, improve your securities and controls, deal with some of the talent gap that's in the industry, and also protect your brand reputation. So modernization is really about balancing these 3 aspects. Cost optimization, agility and innovation, and resilience. >> So, thank you for that, so, Jay, I got to ask you, the current climate, ever body's sort of concerned, and there's not great visibility on the macro. So, Jim mentioned cost optimization, that seems to be one of the top areas that customers are focused on. The two I hear a lot are, consolidating redundant vendors, and optimizing cloud costs. So that's, you know, top of mine today. I think everybody really, you know, understands the innovation and agility piece. At least at a high level, maybe realizing it is different. >> Sure >> And then the business resilience piece is really interesting, because, you know, prior to the pandemic, people, you know, they had a DR strategy, but they realized, wow my business may not be that resilient. So, Jay, my question to you is, what are you hearing when you talk to customers, what's the priority today? >> You know, the priority is an often overused term of digital transformation. You know, people want to get ready for next generation environments, customer experience, making sure they're improving, you know, how they engage with their clients, and what their branding is. What we find is a lot of clients don't have the underlying infrastructure in place today to get to where they want to get to. So cloud becomes an important element of that, but, you know, with DXC's philosophy, not everything necessarily needs to go to cloud to be cost optimized, for instance. In many cases you can run applications, you know, in your own data center, or on Pram or, in other environments, in the hybrid environment or multi cloud environment, and still be very optimized from a cost/spend standpoint. And also put yourself in position for modernization and be able to bring the things to the business that the clients are, you know their clients are looking for like the CMO and the CFO etc. trying to use IT as a leverage to drive business and to drive business acceleration and to drive profitability, frankly. So there's a lot of dependency on infrastructure, but there's a lot of elements to it and we advocate for, you know, there's not a single answer to that. We like to evaluate clients, environments, and work with them to get them to an optimal target operating model so that they can really deliver on what the promises are for their departments. >> So, lets talk about some of the barriers to realizing value in the context of modernization. We talked about cost optimization, agility, and resilience. But there's a business angle and there's a technical angle here. We already talked about people, process, and technology. Technology oftentimes CIO's will tell us 'Well that's the easy part. We'll figure that out.' Whether it's true or not; but I agree. People and process is sometimes the tough one. So Jay, why don't you start. What do you see as the barriers particularly from a business standpoint? I think people need to let their guard down and be open to the ideas that are out there in the market from the standards that are being built by Best in Class models. And there's many people who that have got on cloud juries have been very successful with it. There's others that have set high expectations with their business leaders that haven't necessarily met the goals that they need to meet, or maybe haven't met them as quickly as they promised. So there's a change management aspect that you need to look at with the environments. There's a skillset environment that they need to be prepared for. Do they have the people to deliver with the tools and the skills and the models that they're putting themselves in place for in the future versus where they are now. There's just a lot of different elements. It's not just that this price is better or this can operate better than one environment over the other. I think we like to try and look at things holistically and make sure that we're being as much of a consultative advocate for the client for where they want to go, what their destiny is and based on what we've learned with other clients and we can bring those best practices forward because we've worked across such a broad spectrum of clients versus them being somewhat contained and sometimes can't see outside of their own challenges, if you would. So they need advocacy to help bring them to the next level. And we like to translate that through technology advances which Jim is really good at doing for us. >> Yeah Jim, is the big barrier a skills issue? You know, bench strength? Are their other considerations from your perspective? >> We've identified a number of factors that inhibit success of customers. One is thinking it's only a technology change; in moving to cloud. When it's much broader than that. There are changes in governance, changes in process that need to take place. The other is evaluating the other cloud providers on their current pricing structure and performance. And we see pricing and structure changing dramatically every few months between the various cloud providers. And you have to be flexible enough to determine which providers you want; and it may not be feasible to just have a single cloud provider in this world. The other thing is a big bang approach to transformation. I want to move everything and I want to move it all at once. That's not necessarily the best approach. A well thought out cloud journey and strategy, and timing your investments are really important to maximizing your business return on the journey to the cloud. And finally, not engaging stakeholders early and continuously. You have to manage expectations in moving to cloud on what business factors will get affected, how you will achieve your costs savings, and how you will achieve the business impact over the journey and reporting out on that with very strict metrics to all of the stakeholders. >> You mentioned multi-cloud just then. On January 17th we had our Super Cloud 2 event. And Super Cloud is basically what multi-cloud should have been I like to say. So it's creating a common experience across clouds. You guys were talking about you know, there's different governance, different securities, different pricing. So, and one of the takeaways from this event and talking to customers and practitioners and technologists is you can't go it alone. So I wonder if you'd talk about your partnership strategy? What do partners bring to the table? What is DXC's unique value? >> I'd be happy to lead with that if you'd like. >> Great >> We've got a vast partner ecosystem at DXC, given the size and the history of the company. I use several examples. One of the larger partners in my particular space is Dell Technology. They're a great partner for us across many different areas of the business. It's not just storage and compute play anymore. They're on the edge. They've got intelligence in their networking devices now. And they've really brought a lot of value to us as a partner. You can look at Dell Technology as somebody that might have a victim effect because of all of the hyper-scaling activity and all of the cloud activity but they've really taken an outstanding attitude with this and said listen not all things are destined for cloud or not all things would operate better in a cloud environment. And they like to be apart of those discussions to see how they can, how we can bring a multi-cloud environment, both private and public to clients and let's look at the applications and the infrastructure and what's the best optimal running environment for us to be able to bring the greatest value to the business with speed, with security and the the things that they want to keep close to the business are often things that you want to keep on your premise or keep in your own data centers. So they're an ideal model of somebody that's resourced this well, partnered in this well in the market and we continue to grow that relationship day in and day out with those guys. And we really appreciate their support of our strategy and we like to also compliment their strategy and work together hand in hand in front of our clients. >> Yeah you know Jim, Matt Baker who's the Head of Strategic Planning at Dell talks about it's not zero-sum game and I think you're right Jay. I think initially people felt like oh wow, it is a zero-sum game but it's clearly not. And this idea of whether you call it Super Cloud or Uber Cloud or Multi Cloud, clearly Dell is headed in that direction. Look at some of their future projects, their narrative. I'm curious from a technology standpoint Jim, what your role is. Is it to make it all work? Is it to end to end? Wondering if you could help us understand that. >> Help us figure it out Jim, here. >> Glad to expand on that. Well, one of my key roles is developing our product roadmap for DXC offerings. And we do that roadmap in conjunction with our partners where we can leverage the innovation that our partners bring to the table and we often utilize engineering resources from our partners to help us jointly build those offerings that adapt to changes in the market and also adapt to many of our customer's changing needs overtime. So my primary role is to look at the market, talk to our customers, and work with our partners to develop a product roadmap for delivering DXC products and services to our clients so that they can get the return on investment on their technology journeys. >> You know, we've been working with these two firms for a while now; pre-dates the name DXC and that transformation. I'm curious as to what's, how you would respond to what's unique. You know you hear a lot about partnerships, you guys got a lot of competition. Dell has a lot of competition. What's specifically unique about this combination? >> I think- go ahead Jim >> I would say our unique approach is, we call it cloud right. And that approach is making the right investments, at the right time, and on the right platforms. And our partners play a key role in that. So we encourage our customers to not necessarily have a cloud first approach, but a cloud right approach where they place the workloads in the environment that is best suited from a technology perspective, a business perspective, and even a security and governance perspective. And the right approach might include main frame, it might include and on-premises infrastructure it could include private cloud, public cloud and SAS components all integrated together to deliver that value. >> Yeah Jay please. Let me tell you, this is a complicated situation for a lot of customers. But, chime in here. >> Yeah if you're speaking specifically to Dell here like, they also walk the talk right. They invest in DXC as a partnership. They put people on the ground. Their only purpose in life is to help DXC succeed with Dell, arm in arm, in front of clients. And it's not a winner take all thing at all. It's really a true partnership. They've brought solution resources. We have an account CTO, we've got executive sponsorship. We do regular QVR meetings. We have regular executive touch-point meetings. It's really important that you keep high level of intimacy with the clients, with the partners in the GSI community. And I've been with several GSI's and this is an exceptional example of true partnership and commitment to success with Dell Technology. I'm really extremely impressed on the engagement level that we've had there, and continue to show a lot of support both for them. And there's other OEM partners of course in the market. There's always going to be other technology solutions for certain clients, but this has been a particularly strong element for us and our partnership and our go-to-market strategy. >> Well I think too, just my observation is a lot of it is about trust. You guys have both earned the trust over the years. Ticking your arrows over decades, and that just doesn't happen overnight. Guys I appreciate it. Thanks for your time. It's all about getting Cloud Right, isn't it? >> That's right. Thank you Dave. Appreciate it very much. >> Thank you >> Jay, great to have you on. Keep it right there for more action on The CUBE. We'll be right back.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual event. Of course, when we talk about Cloud Native we talk about Kubernetes there's a lot that's happening to modernize the infrastructure but a very important thing that we're going to talk about today is also what's happening up the stack, what sits on top of it and some of the new use cases and applications that are enabled by all of this modern environment and for that we're going to talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning or AI and ML as we tend to talk in the industry, so happy to welcome to the program. We have two first time guests joining us from Red Hat. First of all, we have Abhinav Joshi and Tushar Katarki they are both senior managers, part of the OpenShift group. Abhinav is in the product marketing and Tushar is in product management. Abhinav and Tushar thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Stu, we're glad to be here. >> Thanks Stu and glad to be here at KubeCon. >> All right, so Abhinav I mentioned in the intro here, modernization of the infrastructure is awesome but really it's an enabler. We know... I'm an infrastructure person the whole reason we have infrastructure is to be able to drive those applications, interact with my data and the like and of course, AI and ML are exciting a lot going on there but can also be challenging. So, Abhinav if I could start with you bring us inside your customers that you're talking to, what are the challenges, the opportunities? What are they seeing in this space? Maybe what's been holding them back from really unlocking the value that is expected? >> Yup, that's a very good question to kick off the conversation. So what we are seeing as an organization they typically face a lot of challenges when they're trying to build an AI/ML environment, right? And the first one is like a talent shortage. There is a limited amount of the AI, ML expertise in the market and especially the data scientists that are responsible for building out the machine learning and the deep learning models. So yeah, it's hard to find them and to be able to retain them and also other talents like a data engineer or app DevOps folks as well and the lack of talent can actually stall the project. And the second key challenge that we see is the lack of the readily usable data. So the businesses collect a lot of data but they must find the right data and make it ready for the data scientists to be able to build out, to be able to test and train the machine learning models. If you don't have the right kind of data to the predictions that your model is going to do in the real world is only going to be so good. So that becomes a challenge as well, to be able to find and be able to wrangle the right kind of data. And the third key challenge that we see is the lack of the rapid availability of the compute infrastructure, the data and machine learning, and the app dev tools for the various personas like a data scientist or data engineer, the software developers and so on that can also slow down the project, right? Because if all your teams are waiting on the infrastructure and the tooling of their choice to be provisioned on a recurring basis and they don't get it in a timely manner, it can stall the projects. And then the next one is the lack of collaboration. So you have all these kinds of teams that are involved in the AI project, and they have to collaborate with each other because the work one of the team does has a dependency on a different team like say for example, the data scientists are responsible for building the machine learning models and then what they have to do is they have to work with the app dev teams to make sure the models get integrated as part of the app dev processes and ultimately rolled out into the production. So if all these teams are operating in say silos and there is lack of collaboration between the teams, so this can stall the projects as well. And finally, what we see is the data scientists they typically start the machine learning modeling on their individual PCs or laptops and they don't focus on the operational aspects of the solution. So what this means is when the IT teams have to roll all this out into a production kind of deployment, so they get challenged to take all the work that has been done by the individuals and then be able to make sense out of it, be able to make sure that it can be seamlessly brought up in a production environment in a consistent way, be it on-premises, be it in the cloud or be it say at the edge. So these are some of the key challenges that we see that the organizations are facing, as they say try to take the AI projects from pilot to production. >> Well, some of those things seem like repetition of what we've had in the past. Obviously silos have been the bane of IT moving forward and of course, for many years we've been talking about that gap between developers and what's happening in the operation side. So Tushar, help us connect the dots, containers, Kubernetes, the whole DevOps movement. How is this setting us up to actually be successful for solutions like AI and ML? >> Sure Stu I mean, in fact you said it right like in the world of software, in the world of microservices, in the world of app modernization, in the world of DevOps in the past 10, 15 years, but we have seen this evolution revolution happen with containers and Kubernetes driving more DevOps behavior, driving more agile behavior so this in fact is what we are trying to say here can ease up the cable to EIML also. So the various containers, Kubernetes, DevOps and OpenShift for software development is directly applicable for AI projects to make them move agile, to get them into production, to make them more valuable to organization so that they can realize the full potential of AI. We already touched upon a few personas so it's useful to think about who the users are, who the personas are. Abhinav I talked about data scientists these are the people who obviously do the machine learning itself, do the modeling. Then there are data engineers who do the plumbing who provide the essential data. Data is so essential to machine learning and deep learning and so there are data engineers that are app developers who in some ways will then use the output of what the data scientists have produced in terms of models and then incorporate them into services and of course, none of these things are purely cast in stone there's a lot of overlap you could find that data scientists are app developers as well, you'll see some of app developers being data scientist later data engineer. So it's a continuum rather than strict boundaries, but regardless what all of these personas groups of people need or experts need is self service to that preferred tools and compute and storage resources to be productive and then let's not forget the IT, engineering and operations teams that need to make all this happen in an easy, reliable, available manner and something that is really safe and secure. So containers help you, they help you quickly and easily deploy a broad set of machine learning tools, data tools across the cloud, the hybrid cloud from data center to public cloud to the edge in a very consistent way. Teams can therefore alternatively modify, change a shared container images, machine learning models with (indistinct) and track changes. And this could be applicable to both containers as well as to the data by the way and be transparent and transparency helps in collaboration but also it could help with the regulatory reasons later on in the process. And then with containers because of the inherent processes solution, resource control and protection from threat they can also be very secure. Now, Kubernetes takes it to the next level first of all, it forms a cluster of all your compute and data resources, and it helps you to run your containerized tools and whatever you develop on them in a consistent way with access to these shared compute and centralized compute and storage and networking resources from the data center, the edge or the public cloud. They provide things like resource management, workload scheduling, multi-tendency controls so that you can be a proper neighbors if you will, and quota enforcement right? Now that's Kubernetes now if you want to up level it further if you want to enhance what Kubernetes offers then you go into how do you write applications? How do you actually make those models into services? And that's where... and how do you lifecycle them? And that's sort of the power of Helm and for the more Kubernetes operators really comes into the picture and while Helm helps in installing some of this for a complete life cycle experience. A kubernetes operator is the way to go and they simplify the acceleration and deployment and life cycle management from end-to-end of your entire AI, ML tool chain. So all in all organizations therefore you'll see that they need to dial up and define models rapidly just like applications that's how they get ready out of it quickly. There is a lack of collaboration across teams as Abhinav pointed out earlier, as you noticed that has happened still in the world of software also. So we're talking about how do you bring those best practices here to AI, ML. DevOps approaches for machine learning operations or many analysts and others have started calling as MLOps. So how do you kind of bring DevOps to machine learning, and fosters better collaboration between teams, application developers and IT operations and create this feedback loop so that the time to production and the ability to take more machine learning into production and ML-powered applications into production increase is significant. So that's kind of the, where I wanted shine the light on what you were referring to earlier, Stu. >> All right, Abhinav of course one of the good things about OpenShift is you have quite a lot of customers that have deployed the solution over the years, bring us inside some of your customers what are they doing for AI, ML and help us understand really what differentiates OpenShift in the marketplace for this solution set. >> Yeah, absolutely that's a very good question as well and we're seeing a lot of traction in terms of all kinds of industries, right? Be it the financial services like healthcare, automotive, insurance, oil and gas, manufacturing and so on. For a wide variety of use cases and what we are seeing is at the end of the day like all these deployments are focused on helping improve the customer experience, be able to automate the business processes and then be able to help them increase the revenue, serve their customers better, and also be able to save costs. If you go to openshift.com/ai-ml it's got like a lot of customer stories in there but today I will not touch on three of the customers we have in terms of the different industries. The first one is like Royal Bank of Canada. So they are a top global financial institution based out of Canada and they have more than 17 million clients globally. So they recently announced that they build out an AI-powered private cloud platform that was based on OpenShift as well as the NVIDIA DGX AI compute system and this whole solution is actually helping them to transform the customer banking experience by being able to deliver an AI-powered intelligent apps and also at the same time being able to improve the operational efficiency of their organization. And now with this kind of a solution, what they're able to do is they're able to run thousands of simulations and be able to analyze millions of data points in a fraction of time as compared to the solution that they had before. Yeah, so like a lot of great work going on there but now the next one is the ETCA healthcare. So like ETCA is one of the leading healthcare providers in the country and they're based out of the Nashville, Tennessee. And they have more than 184 hospitals as well as more than 2,000 sites of care in the U.S. as well as in the UK. So what they did was they developed a very innovative machine learning power data platform on top of our OpenShift to help save lives. The first use case was to help with the early detection of sepsis like it's a life-threatening condition and then more recently they've been able to use OpenShift in the same kind of stack to be able to roll out the new applications that are powered by machine learning and deep learning let say to help them fight COVID-19. And recently they did a webinar as well that had all the details on the challenges they had like how did they go about it? Like the people, process and technology and then what the outcomes are. And we are proud to be a partner in the solution to help with such a noble cause. And the third example I want to share here is the BMW group and our partner DXC Technology what they've done is they've actually developed a very high performing data-driven data platform, a development platform based on OpenShift to be able to analyze the massive amount of data from the test fleet, the data and the speed of the say to help speed up the autonomous driving initiatives. And what they've also done is they've redesigned the connected drive capability that they have on top of OpenShift that's actually helping them provide various use cases to help improve the customer experience. With the customers and all of the customers are able to leverage a lot of different value-add services directly from within the car, their own cars. And then like last year at the Red Hat Summit they had a keynote as well and then this year at Summit, they were one of the Innovation Award winners. And we have a lot more stories but these are the three that I thought are actually compelling that I should talk about here on theCUBE. >> Yeah Abhinav just a quick follow up for you. One of the things of course we're looking at in 2020 is how has the COVID-19 pandemic, people working from home how has that impacted projects? I have to think that AI and ML are one of those projects that take a little bit longer to deploy, is it something that you see are they accelerating it? Are they putting on pause or are new project kicking off? Anything you can share from customers you're hearing right now as to the impact that they're seeing this year? >> Yeah what we are seeing is that the customers are now even more keen to be able to roll out the digital (indistinct) but we see a lot of customers are now on the accelerated timeline to be able to say complete the AI, ML project. So yeah, it's picking up a lot of momentum and we talk to a lot of analyst as well and they are reporting the same thing as well. But there is the interest that is actually like ramping up on the AI, ML projects like across their customer base. So yeah it's the right time to be looking at the innovation services that it can help improve the customer experience in the new virtual world that we live in now about COVID-19. >> All right, Tushar you mentioned that there's a few projects involved and of course we know at this conference there's a very large ecosystem. Red Hat is a strong contributor to many, many open source projects. Give us a little bit of a view as to in the AI, ML space who's involved, which pieces are important and how Red Hat looks at this entire ecosystem? >> Thank you, Stu so as you know technology partnerships and the power of open is really what is driving the technology world these days in any ways and particularly in the AI ecosystem. And that is mainly because one of the machine learning is in a bootstrap in the past 10 years or so and a lot of that emerging technology to take advantage of the emerging data as well as compute power has been built on the kind of the Linux ecosystem with openness and languages like popular languages like Python, et cetera. And so what you... and of course tons of technology based in Java but the point really here is that the ecosystem plays a big role and open plays a big role and that's kind of Red Hat's best cup of tea, if you will. And that really has plays a leadership role in the open ecosystem so if we take your question and kind of put it into two parts, what is the... what we are doing in the community and then what we are doing in terms of partnerships themselves, commercial partnerships, technology partnerships we'll take it one step at a time. In terms of the community itself, if you step back to the three years, we worked with other vendors and users, including Google and NVIDIA and H2O and other Seldon, et cetera, and both startups and big companies to develop this Kubeflow ecosystem. The Kubeflow is upstream community that is focused on developing MLOps as we talked about earlier end-to-end machine learning on top of Kubernetes. So Kubeflow right now is in 1.0 it happened a few months ago now it's actually at 1.1 you'll see that coupon here and then so that's the Kubeflow community in addition to that we are augmenting that with the Open Data Hub community which is something that extends the capabilities of the Kubeflow community to also add some of the data pipelining stuff and some of the data stuff that I talked about and forms a reference architecture on how to run some of this on top of OpenShift. So the Open Data Hub community also has a great way of including partners from a technology partnership perspective and then tie that with something that I mentioned earlier, which is the idea of Kubernetes operators. Now, if you take a step back as I mentioned earlier, Kubernetes operators help manage the life cycle of the entire application or containerized application including not only the configuration on day one but also day two activities like update and backups, restore et cetera whatever the application needs. Afford proper functioning that a "operator" needs for it to make sure so anyways, the Kubernetes operators ecosystem is also flourishing and we haven't faced that with the OperatorHub.io which is a community marketplace if you will, I don't call it marketplace a community hub because it's just comprised of community operators. So the Open Data Hub actually can take community operators and can show you how to run that on top of OpenShift and manage the life cycle. Now that's the reference architecture. Now, the other aspect of it really is as I mentioned earlier is the commercial aspect of it. It is from a customer point of view, how do I get certified, supported software? And to that extent, what we have is at the top of the... from a user experience point of view, we have certified operators and certified applications from the AI, ML, ISV community in the Red Hat marketplace. And from the Red Hat marketplace is where it becomes easy for end users to easily deploy these ISVs and manage the complete life cycle as I said. Some of the examples of these kinds of ISVs include startups like H2O although H2O is kind of well known in certain sectors PerceptiLabs, Cnvrg, Seldon, Starburst et cetera and then on the other side, we do have other big giants also in this which includes partnerships with NVIDIA, Cloudera et cetera that we have announced, including our also SaaS I got to mention. So anyways these provide... create that rich ecosystem for data scientists to take advantage of. A TEDx Summit back in April, we along with Cloudera, SaaS Anaconda showcased a live demo that shows all these things to working together on top of OpenShift with this operator kind of idea that I talked about. So I welcome people to go and take a look the openshift.com/ai-ml that Abhinav already referenced should have a link to that it take a simple Google search might download if you need some of that, but anyways and the other part of it is really our work with the hardware OEMs right? And so obviously NVIDIA GPUs is obviously hardware, and that accelerations is really important in this world but we are also working with other OEM partners like HP and Dell to produce this accelerated AI platform that turnkey solutions to run your data-- to create this open AI platform for "private cloud" or the data center. The other thing obviously is IBM, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is based on OpenShift that has been around for some time and is seeing very good traction, if you think about a very turnkey solution, IBM Cloud Pak is definitely kind of well ahead in that and then finally Red Hat is about driving innovation in the open-source community. So, as I said earlier, we are doing the Open Data Hub which that reference architecture that showcases a combination of upstream open source projects and all these ISV ecosystems coming together. So I welcome you to take a look at that at opendatahub.io So I think that would be kind of the some total of how we are not only doing open and community building but also doing certifications and providing to our customers that assurance that they can run these tools in production with the help of a rich certified ecosystem. >> And customer is always key to us so that's the other thing that the goal here is to provide our customers with a choice, right? They can go with open source or they can go with a commercial solution as well. So you want to make sure that they get the best in cloud experience on top of our OpenShift and our broader portfolio as well. >> All right great, great note to end on, Abhinav thank you so much and Tushar great to see the maturation in this space, such an important use case. Really appreciate you sharing this with theCUBE and Kubecon community. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> Okay thank you and thanks a lot and have a great rest of the show. Thanks everyone, stay safe. >> Thanks you and stay with us for a lot more coverage from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual edition I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (soft upbeat music plays)

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: Good morning ladies and gentlemen. This is Lenovo Transform. Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappin. (upbeat instrumental) >> Alright, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go. I was out the back having a chat. A bit faster than I expected. How are you all doing this morning? (crowd cheers) >> Good? How fantastic is it to be in New York City? (crowd applauds) Excellent. So my name's Rod Lappin. I'm with the Data Center Group, obviously. I do basically anything that touches customers from our sales people, our pre-sales engineers, our architects, et cetera, all the way through to our channel partner sales engagement globally. So that's my job, but enough of that, okay? So the weather this morning, absolutely fantastic. Not a cloud in the sky, perfect. A little bit different to how it was yesterday, right? I want to thank all of you because I know a lot of you had a lot of commuting issues getting into New York yesterday with all the storms. We have a lot of people from international and domestic travel caught up in obviously the network, which blows my mind, actually, but we have a lot of people here from Europe, obviously, a lot of analysts and media people here as well as customers who were caught up in circling around the airport apparently for hours. So a big round of applause for our team from Europe. (audience applauds) Thank you for coming. We have some people who commuted a very short distance. For example, our own server general manager, Cameron (mumbles), he's out the back there. Cameron, how long did it take you to get from Raleigh to New York? An hour-and-a-half flight? >> Cameron: 17 hours. >> 17 hours, ladies and gentleman. That's a fantastic distance. I think that's amazing. But I know a lot of us, obviously, in the United States have come a long way with the storms, obviously very tough, but I'm going to call out one individual. Shaneil from Spotless. Where are you Shaneil, you're here somewhere? There he is from Australia. Shaneil how long did it take you to come in from Australia? 25 hour, ladies and gentleman. A big round of applause. That's a pretty big effort. Shaneil actually I want you to stand up, if you don't mind. I've got a seat here right next to my CEO. You've gone the longest distance. How about a big round of applause for Shaneil. We'll put him in my seat, next to YY. Honestly, Shaneil, you're doing me a favor. Okay ladies and gentlemen, we've got a big day today. Obviously, my seat now taken there, fantastic. Obviously New York City, the absolute pinnacle of globalization. I first came to New York in 1996, which was before a lot of people in the room were born, unfortunately for me these days. Was completely in awe. I obviously went to a Yankees game, had no clue what was going on, didn't understand anything to do with baseball. Then I went and saw Patrick Ewing. Some of you would remember Patrick Ewing. Saw the Knicks play basketball. Had no idea what was going on. Obviously, from Australia, and somewhat slightly height challenged, basketball was not my thing but loved it. I really left that game... That was the first game of basketball I'd ever seen. Left that game realizing that effectively the guy throws the ball up at the beginning, someone taps it, that team gets it, they run it, they put it in the basket, then the other team gets it, they put it in the basket, the other team gets it, and that's basically the entire game. So I haven't really progressed from that sort of learning or understanding of basketball since then, but for me, personally, being here in New York, and obviously presenting with all of you guys today, it's really humbling from obviously some of you would have picked my accent, I'm also from Australia. From the north shore of Sydney. To be here is just a fantastic, fantastic event. So welcome ladies and gentlemen to Transform, part of our tech world series globally in our event series and our event season here at Lenovo. So once again, big round of applause. Thank you for coming (audience applauds). Today, basically, is the culmination of what I would classify as a very large journey. Many of you have been with us on that. Customers, partners, media, analysts obviously. We've got quite a lot of our industry analysts in the room. I know Matt Eastwood yesterday was on a train because he sent a Tweet out saying there's 170 people on the WIFI network. He was obviously a bit concerned he was going to get-- Pat Moorhead, he got in at 3:30 this morning, obviously from traveling here as well with some of the challenges with the transportation, so we've got a lot of people in the room that have been giving us advice over the last two years. I think all of our employees are joining us live. All of our partners and customers through the stream. As well as everybody in this packed-out room. We're very very excited about what we're going to be talking to you all today. I want to have a special thanks obviously to our R&D team in Raleigh and around the world. They've also been very very focused on what they've delivered for us today, and it's really important for them to also see the culmination of this great event. And like I mentioned, this is really the feedback. It's not just a Lenovo launch. This is a launch based on the feedback from our partners, our customers, our employees, the analysts. We've been talking to all of you about what we want to be when we grow up from a Data Center Group, and I think you're going to hear some really exciting stuff from some of the speakers today and in the demo and breakout sessions that we have after the event. These last two years, we've really transformed the organization, and that's one of the reasons why that theme is part of our Tech World Series today. We're very very confident in our future, obviously, and where the company's going. It's really important for all of you to understand today and take every single snippet that YY, Kirk, and Christian talk about today in the main session, and then our presenters in the demo sections on what Lenovo's actually doing for its future and how we're positioning the company, obviously, for that future and how the transformation, the digital transformation, is going ahead globally. So, all right, we are now going to step into our Transform event. And I've got a quick agenda statement for you. The very first thing is we're going to hear from YY, our chairman and CEO. He's going to discuss artificial intelligence, the evolution of our society and how Lenovo is clearly positioning itself in the industry. Then, obviously, you're going to hear from Kirk Skaugen, our president of the Data Center Group, our new boss. He's going to talk about how long he's been with the company and the transformation, once again, we're making, very specifically to the Data Center Group and how much of a difference we're making to society and some of our investments. Christian Teismann, our SVP and general manager of our client business is going to talk about the 25 years of ThinkPad. This year is the 25-year anniversary of our ThinkPad product. Easily the most successful brand in our client branch or client branch globally of any vendor. Most successful brand we've had launched, and this afternoon breakout sessions, obviously, with our keynotes, fantastic sessions. Make sure you actually attend all of those after this main arena here. Now, once again, listen, ask questions, and make sure you're giving us feedback. One of the things about Lenovo that we say all the time... There is no room for arrogance in our company. Every single person in this room is a customer, partner, analyst, or an employee. We love your feedback. It's only through your feedback that we continue to improve. And it's really important that through all of the sessions where the Q&As happen, breakouts afterwards, you're giving us feedback on what you want to see from us as an organization as we go forward. All right, so what were you doing 25 years ago? I spoke about ThinkPad being 25 years old, but let me ask you this. I bet you any money that no one here knew that our x86 business is also 25 years old. So, this year, we have both our ThinkPad and our x86 anniversaries for 25 years. Let me tell you. What were you guys doing 25 years ago? There's me, 25 years ago. It's a bit scary, isn't it? It's very svelte and athletic and a lot lighter than I am today. It makes me feel a little bit conscious. And you can see the black and white shot. It shows you that even if you're really really short and you come from the wrong side of the tracks to make some extra cash, you can still do some modeling as long as no one else is in the photo to give anyone any perspective, so very important. I think I might have got one photo shoot out of that, I don't know. I had to do it, I needed the money. Let me show you another couple of photos. Very interesting, how's this guy? How cool does he look? Very svelte and athletic. I think there's no doubt. He looks much much cooler than I do. Okay, so ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, it gives me great honor to obviously introduce our very very first guest to the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, our chairman and CEO, Yuanqing Yang. or as we like to call him, YY. A big round of applause, thank you. (upbeat techno instrumental) >> Good morning everyone. Thank you, Rod, for your introduction. Actually, I didn't think I was younger than you (mumbles). I can't think of another city more fitting to host the Transform event than New York. A city that has transformed from a humble trading post 400 years ago to one of the most vibrant cities in the world today. It is a perfect symbol of transformation of our world. The rapid and the deep transformations that have propelled us from the steam engine to the Internet era in just 200 years. Looking back at 200 years ago, there was only a few companies that operated on a global scale. The total value of the world's economy was around $188 billion U.S. dollars. Today, it is only $180 for each person on earth. Today, there are thousands of independent global companies that compete to sell everything, from corn and crude oil to servers and software. They drive a robust global economy was over $75 trillion or $1,000 per person. Think about it. The global economy has multiplied almost 450 times in just two centuries. What is even more remarkable is that the economy has almost doubled every 15 years since 1950. These are significant transformation for businesses and for the world and our tiny slice of pie. This transformation is the result of the greatest advancement in technology in human history. Not one but three industrial revolutions have happened over the last 200 years. Even though those revolutions created remarkable change, they were just the beginning. Today, we are standing at the beginning of the fourth revolution. This revolution will transform how we work (mumbles) in ways that no one could imagine in the 18th century or even just 18 months ago. You are the people who will lead this revolution. Along with Lenovo, we will redefine IT. IT is no longer just information technology. It's intelligent technology, intelligent transformation. A transformation that is driven by big data called computing and artificial intelligence. Even the transition from PC Internet to mobile Internet is a big leap. Today, we are facing yet another big leap from the mobile Internet to the Smart Internet or intelligent Internet. In this Smart Internet era, Cloud enables devices, such as PCs, Smart phones, Smart speakers, Smart TVs. (mumbles) to provide the content and the services. But the evolution does not stop them. Ultimately, almost everything around us will become Smart, with building computing, storage, and networking capabilities. That's what we call the device plus Cloud transformation. These Smart devices, incorporated with various sensors, will continuously sense our environment and send data about our world to the Cloud. (mumbles) the process of this ever-increasing big data and to support the delivery of Cloud content and services, the data center infrastructure is also transforming to be more agile, flexible, and intelligent. That's what we call the infrastructure plus Cloud transformation. But most importantly, it is the human wisdom, the people learning algorithm vigorously improved by engineers that enables artificial intelligence to learn from big data and make everything around us smarter. With big data collected from Smart devices, computing power of the new infrastructure under the trend artificial intelligence, we can understand the world around us more accurately and make smarter decisions. We can make life better, work easier, and society safer and healthy. Think about what is already possible as we start this transformation. Smart Assistants can help you place orders online with a voice command. Driverless cars can run on the same road as traditional cars. (mumbles) can help troubleshoot customers problems, and the virtual doctors already diagnose basic symptoms. This list goes on and on. Like every revolution before it, intelligent transformation, will fundamentally change the nature of business. Understanding and preparing for that will be the key for the growth and the success of your business. The first industrial revolution made it possible to maximize production. Water and steam power let us go from making things by hand to making them by machine. This transformed how fast things could be produced. It drove the quantity of merchandise made and led to massive increase in trade. With this revolution, business scale expanded, and the number of customers exploded. Fifty years later, the second industrial revolution made it necessary to organize a business like the modern enterprise, electric power, and the telegraph communication made business faster and more complex, challenging businesses to become more efficient and meeting entirely new customer demands. In our own lifetimes, we have witnessed the third industrial revolution, which made it possible to digitize the enterprise. The development of computers and the Internet accelerated business beyond human speed. Now, global businesses have to deal with customers at the end of a cable, not always a handshake. While we are still dealing with the effects of a digitizing business, the fourth revolution is already here. In just the past two or three years, the growth of data and advancement in visual intelligence has been astonishing. The computing power can now process the massive amount of data about your customers, suppliers, partners, competitors, and give you insights you simply could not imagine before. Artificial intelligence can not only tell you what your customers want today but also anticipate what they will need tomorrow. This is not just about making better business decisions or creating better customer relationships. It's about making the world a better place. Ultimately, can we build a new world without diseases, war, and poverty? The power of big data and artificial intelligence may be the revolutionary technology to make that possible. Revolutions don't happen on their own. Every industrial revolution has its leaders, its visionaries, and its heroes. The master transformers of their age. The first industrial revolution was led by mechanics who designed and built power systems, machines, and factories. The heroes of the second industrial revolution were the business managers who designed and built modern organizations. The heroes of the third revolution were the engineers who designed and built the circuits and the source code that digitized our world. The master transformers of the next revolution are actually you. You are the designers and the builders of the networks and the systems. You will bring the benefits of intelligence to every corner of your enterprise and make intelligence the central asset of your business. At Lenovo, data intelligence is embedded into everything we do. How we understand our customer's true needs and develop more desirable products. How we profile our customers and market to them precisely. How we use internal and external data to balance our supply and the demand. And how we train virtual agents to provide more effective sales services. So the decisions you make today about your IT investment will determine the quality of the decisions your enterprise will make tomorrow. So I challenge each of you to seize this opportunity to become a master transformer, to join Lenovo as we work together at the forefront of the fourth industrial revolution, as leaders of the intelligent transformation. (triumphant instrumental) Today, we are launching the largest portfolio in our data center history at Lenovo. We are fully committed to the (mumbles) transformation. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Thanks YY. All right, ladies and gentlemen. Fantastic, so how about a big round of applause for YY. (audience applauds) Obviously a great speech on the transformation that we at Lenovo are taking as well as obviously wanting to journey with our partners and customers obviously on that same journey. What I heard from him was obviously artificial intelligence, how we're leveraging that integrally as well as externally and for our customers, and the investments we're making in the transformation around IoT machine learning, obviously big data, et cetera, and obviously the Data Center Group, which is one of the key things we've got to be talking about today. So we're on the cusp of that fourth revolution, as YY just mentioned, and Lenovo is definitely leading the way and investing in those parts of the industry and our portfolio to ensure we're complimenting all of our customers and partners on what they want to be, obviously, as part of this new transformation we're seeing globally. Obviously now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado once again, to tell us more about what's going on today, our announcements, obviously, that all of you will be reading about and seeing in the breakout and the demo sessions with our segment general managers this afternoon is our president of the data center, Mr. Kirk Skaugen. (upbeat instrumental) >> Good morning, and let me add my welcome to Transform. I just crossed my six months here at Lenovo after over 24 years at Intel Corporation, and I can tell you, we've been really busy over the last six months, and I'm more excited and enthusiastic than ever and hope to share some of that with you today. Today's event is called "Transform", and today we're announcing major new transformations in Lenovo, in the data center, but more importantly, we're celebrating the business results that these platforms are going to have on society and with international supercomputing going on in parallel in Frankfurt, some of the amazing scientific discoveries that are going to happen on some of these platforms. Lenovo has gone through some significant transformations in the last two years, since we acquired the IBM x86 business, and that's really positioning us for this next phase of growth, and we'll talk more about that later. Today, we're announcing the largest end-to-end data center portfolio in Lenovo's history, as you heard from YY, and we're really taking the best of the x86 heritage from our IBM acquisition of the x86 server business and combining that with the cost economics that we've delivered from kind of our China heritage. As we've talked to some of the analysts in the room, it's really that best of the east and best of the west is combining together in this announcement today. We're going to be announcing two new brands, building on our position as the number one x86 server vendor in both customer satisfaction and in reliability, and we're also celebrating, next month in July, a very significant milestone, which will we'll be shipping our 20 millionth x86 server into the industry. For us, it's an amazing time, and it's an inflection point to kind of look back, pause, but also share the next phase of Lenovo and the exciting vision for the future. We're also making some declarations on our vision for the future today. Again, international supercomputing's going on, and, as it turns out, we're the fastest growing supercomputer company on earth. We'll talk about that. Our goal today that we're announcing is that we plan in the next several years to become number one in supercomputing, and we're going to put the investments behind that. We're also committing to our customers that we're going to disrupt the status quo and accelerate the pace of innovation, not just in our legacy server solutions, but also in Software-Defined because what we've heard from you is that that lack of legacy, we don't have a huge router business or a huge sand business to protect. It's that lack of legacy that's enabling us to invest and get ahead of the curb on this next transition to Software-Defined. So you're going to see us doing that through building our internal IP, through some significant joint ventures, and also through some merges and acquisitions over the next several quarters. Altogether, we're driving to be the most trusted data center provider in the industry between us and our customers and our suppliers. So a quick summary of what we're going to dive into today, both in my keynote as well as in the breakout sessions. We're in this transformation to the next phase of Lenovo's data center growth. We're closing out our previous transformation. We actually, believe it or not, in the last six months or so, have renegotiated 18,000 contracts in 160 countries. We built out an entire end-to-end organization from development and architecture all the way through sales and support. This next transformation, I think, is really going to excite Lenovo shareholders. We're building the largest data center portfolio in our history. I think when IBM would be up here a couple years ago, we might have two or three servers to announce in time to market with the next Intel platform. Today, we're announcing 14 new servers, seven new storage systems, an expanded set of networking portfolios based on our legacy with Blade Network Technologies and other companies we've acquired. Two new brands that we'll talk about for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, a new set of premium premiere services as well as a set of engineered solutions that are going to help our customers get to market faster. We're going to be celebrating our 20 millionth x86 server, and as Rod said, 25 years in x86 server compute, and Christian will be up here talking about 25 years of ThinkPad as well. And then a new end-to-end segmentation model because all of these strategies without execution are kind of meaningless. I hope to give you some confidence in the transformation that Lenovo has gone through as well. So, having observed Lenovo from one of its largest partners, Intel, for more than a couple decades, I thought I'd just start with why we have confidence on the foundation that we're building off of as we move from a PC company into a data center provider in a much more significant way. So Lenovo today is a company of $43 billion in sales. Absolutely astonishing, it puts us at about Fortune 202 as a company, with 52,000 employees around the world. We're supporting and have service personnel, almost a little over 10,000 service personnel that service our servers and data center technologies in over 160 countries that provide onsite service and support. We have seven data center research centers. One of the reasons I came from Intel to Lenovo was that I saw that Lenovo became number one in PCs, not through cost cutting but through innovation. It was Lenovo that was partnering on the next-generation Ultrabooks and two-in-ones and tablets in the modem mods that you saw, but fundamentally, our path to number one in data center is going to be built on innovation. Lastly, we're one of the last companies that's actually building not only our own motherboards at our own motherboard factories, but also with five global data center manufacturing facilities. Today, we build about four devices a second, but we also build over 100 servers per hour, and the cost economics we get, and I just visited our Shenzhen factory, of having everything from screws to microprocessors come up through the elevator on the first floor, go left to build PCs and ThinkPads and go right to build server technology, means we have some of the world's most cost effective solutions so we can compete in things like hyperscale computing. So it's with that that I think we're excited about the foundation that we can build off of on the Data Center Group. Today, as we stated, this event is about transformation, and today, I want to talk about three things we're going to transform. Number one is the customer experience. Number two is the data center and our customer base with Software-Defined infrastructure, and then the third is talk about how we plan to execute flawlessly with a new transformation that we've had internally at Lenovo. So let's dive into it. On customer experience, really, what does it mean to transform customer experience? Industry pundits say that if you're not constantly innovating, you can fall behind. Certainly the technology industry that we're in is transforming at record speed. 42% of business leaders or CIOs say that digital first is their top priority, but less than 50% actually admit that they have a strategy to get there. So people are looking for a partner to keep pace with that innovation and change, and that's really what we're driving to at Lenovo. So today we're announcing a set of plans to take another step function in customer experience, and building off of our number one position. Just recently, Gartner shows Lenovo as the number 24 supply chains of companies over $12 billion. We're up there with Amazon, Coca-Cola, and we've now completely re-architected our supply chain in the Data Center Group from end to end. Today, we can deliver 90% of our SKUs, order to ship in less than seven days. The artificial intelligence that YY mentioned is optimizing our performance even further. In services, as we talked about, we're now in 160 countries, supporting on-site support, 50 different call centers around the world for local language support, and we're today announcing a whole set of new premiere support services that I'll get into in a second. But we're building on what's already better than 90% customer satisfaction in this space. And then in development, for all the engineers out there, we started foundationally for this new set of products, talking about being number one in reliability and the lowest downtime of any x86 server vendor on the planet, and these systems today are architected to basically extend that leadership position. So let me tell you the realities of reliability. This is ITIC, it's a reliability report. 750 CIOs and IT managers from more than 20 countries, so North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America, Africa. This isn't anything that's paid for with sponsorship dollars. Lenovo has been number one for four years running on x86 reliability. This is the amount of downtime, four hours or more, in mission-critical environments from the leading x86 providers. You can see relative to our top two competitors that are ahead of us, HP and Dell, you can see from ITIC why we are building foundationally off of this, and why it's foundational to how we're developing these new platforms. In customer satisfaction, we are also rated number one in x86 server customer satisfaction. This year, we're now incentivizing every single Lenovo employee on customer satisfaction and customer experience. It's been a huge mandate from myself and most importantly YY as our CEO. So you may say well what is the basis of this number one in customer satisfaction, and it's not just being number one in one category, it's actually being number one in 21 of the 22 categories that TBR talks about. So whether it's performance, support systems, online product information, parts and availability replacement, Lenovo is number one in 21 of the 22 categories and number one for six consecutive studies going back to Q1 of 2015. So this, again, as we talk about the new product introductions, it's something that we absolutely want to build on, and we're humbled by it, and we want to continue to do better. So let's start now on the new products and talk about how we're going to transform the data center. So today, we are announcing two new product offerings. Think Agile and ThinkSystem. If you think about the 25 years of ThinkPad that Christian's going to talk about, Lenovo has a continuous learning culture. We're fearless innovators, we're risk takers, we continuously learn, but, most importantly, I think we're humble and we have some humility. That when we fail, we can fail fast, we learn, and we improve. That's really what drove ThinkPad to number one. It took about eight years from the acquisition of IBM's x86 PC business before Lenovo became number one, but it was that innovation, that listening and learning, and then improving. As you look at the 25 years of ThinkPad, there were some amazing successes, but there were also some amazing failures along the way, but each and every time we learned and made things better. So this year, as Rod said, we're not just celebrating 25 years of ThinkPad, but we're celebrating 25 years of x86 server development since the original IBM PC servers in 1992. It's a significant day for Lenovo. Today, we're excited to announce two new brands. ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. It's an important new announcement that we started almost three years ago when we acquired the x86 server business. Why don't we run a video, and we'll show you a little bit about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. >> Narrator: The status quo is comfortable. It gets you by, but if you think that's good enough for your data center, think again. If adoption is becoming more complicated when it should be simpler, think again. If others are selling you technology that's best for them, not for you, think again. It's time for answers that win today and tomorrow. Agile, innovative, different. Because different is better. Different embraces change and makes adoption simple. Different designs itself around you. Using 25 years of innovation and design and R&D. Different transforms, it gives you ThinkSystem. World-record performance, most reliable, easy to integrate, scales faster. Different empowers you with ThinkAgile. It redefines the experience, giving you the speed of Cloud and the control of on-premise IT. Responding faster to what your business really needs. Different defines the future. Introducing Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. (exciting and slightly aggressive digital instrumental) >> All right, good stuff, huh? (audience applauds) So it's built off of this 25-year history of us being in the x86 server business, the commitment we established three years ago after acquiring the x86 server business to be and have the most reliable, the most agile, and the most highest-performing data center solutions on the planet. So today we're announcing two brands. ThinkSystem is for the traditional data center infrastructure, and ThinkAgile is our brand for Software-Defined infrastructure. Again, the teams challenge themselves from the start, how do we build off this rich heritage, expanding our position as number one in customer satisfaction, reliability, and one of the world's best supply chains. So let's start and look at the next set of solutions. We have always prided ourself that little things don't mean a lot. Little things mean everything. So today, as we said on the legacy solutions, we have over 30 world-record performance benchmarks on Intel architecture, and more than actually 150 since we started tracking this back in 2001. So it's the little pieces of innovation. It's the fine tuning that we do with our partners like an Intel or a Microsoft, an SAP, VMware, and Nutanix that's enabling us to get these world-record performance benchmarks, and with this next generation of solutions we think we'll continue to certainly do that. So today we're announcing the most comprehensive portfolio ever in our data center history. There's 14 servers, seven storage devices, and five network switches. We're also announcing, which is super important to our customer base, a set of new premiere service options. That's giving you fast access directly to a level two support person. No automated response system involved. You get to pick up the phone and directly talk to a level two support person that's going to have end-to-end ownership of the customer experience for ThinkSystem. With ThinkAgile, that's going to be completely bundled with every ThinkAgile you purchase. In addition, we're having white glove service on site that will actually unbox the product for you and get it up and running. It's an entirely new set of solutions for hybrid Cloud, for big data analytics and database applications around these engineered solutions. These are like 40- to 50-page guides where we fine-tuned the most important applications around virtual desktop infrastructure and those kinds of applications, working side by side with all of our ISP partners. So significantly expanding, not just the hardware but the software solutions that, obviously, you, as our customers, are running. So if you look at ThinkSystem innovation, again, it was designed for the ultimate in flexibility, performance, and reliability. It's a single now-unified brand that combines what used to be the Lenovo Think server and the IBM System x products now into a single brand that spans server, storage, and networking. We're basically future-proofing it for the next-generation data center. It's a significantly simplified portfolio. One of the big pieces that we've heard is that the complexity of our competitors has really been overwhelming to customers. We're building a more flexible, more agile solution set that requires less work, less qualification, and more future proofing. There's a bunch of things in this that you'll see in the demos. Faster time-to-service in terms of the modularity of the systems. 12% faster service equating to almost $50 thousand per hour of reduced downtime. Some new high-density options where we have four nodes and a 2U, twice the density to improve and reduce outbacks and mission-critical workloads. And then in high-performance computing and supercomputing, we're going to spend some time on that here shortly. We're announcing new water-cooled solutions. We have some of the most premiere water-cooled solutions in the world, with more than 25 patents pending now, just in the water-cooled solutions for supercomputing. The performance that we think we're going to see out of these systems is significant. We're building off of that legacy that we have today on the existing Intel solutions. Today, we believe we have more than 50% of SAP HANA installations in the world. In fact, SAP just went public that they're running their internal SAP HANA on Lenovo hardware now. We're seeing a 59% increase in performance on SAP HANA generation on generation. We're seeing 31% lower total cost to ownership. We believe this will continue our position of having the highest level of five-nines in the x86 server industry. And all of these servers will start being available later this summer when the Intel announcements come out. We're also announcing the largest storage portfolio in our history, significantly larger than anything we've done in the past. These are all available today, including some new value class storage offerings. Our network portfolio is expanding now significantly. It was a big surprise when I came to Lenovo, seeing the hundreds of engineers we had from the acquisition of Blade Network Technologies and others with our teams in Romania, Santa Clara, really building out both the embedded portfolio but also the top racks, which is around 10 gig, 25 gig, and 100 gig. Significantly better economics, but all the performance you'd expect from the largest networking companies in the world. Those are also available today. ThinkAgile and Software-Defined, I think the one thing that has kind of overwhelmed me since coming in to Lenovo is we are being embraced by our customers because of our lack of legacy. We're not trying to sell you one more legacy SAN at 65% margins. ThinkAgile really was founded, kind of born free from the shackles of legacy thinking and legacy infrastructure. This is just the beginning of what's going to be an amazing new brand in the transformation to Software-Defined. So, for Lenovo, we're going to invest in our own internal organic IP. I'll foreshadow: There's some significant joint ventures and some mergers and acquisitions that are going to be coming in this space. And so this will be the foundation for our Software-Defined networking and storage, for IoT, and ultimately for the 5G build-out as well. This is all built for data centers of tomorrow that require fluid resources, tightly integrated software and hardware in kind of an appliance, selling at the rack level, and so we'll show you how that is going to take place here in a second. ThinkAgile, we have a few different offerings. One is around hyperconverged storage, Hybrid Cloud, and also Software-Defined storage. So we're really trying to redefine the customer experience. There's two different solutions we're having today. It's a Microsoft Azure solution and a Nutanix solution. These are going to be available both in the appliance space as well as in a full rack solution. We're really simplifying and trying to transform the entire customer experience from how you order it. We've got new capacity planning tools that used to take literally days for us to get the capacity planning done. It's now going down to literally minutes. We've got new order, delivery, deployment, administration service, something we're calling ThinkAgile Advantage, which is the white glove unboxing of the actual solutions on prem. So the whole thing when you hear about it in the breakout sessions about transforming the entire customer experience with both an HX solution and an SX solution. So again, available at the rack level for both Nutanix and for Microsoft Solutions available in just a few months. Many of you in the audience since the Microsoft Airlift event in Seattle have started using these things, and the feedback to date has been fantastic. We appreciate the early customer adoption that we've seen from people in the audience here. So next I want to bring up one of our most important partners, and certainly if you look at all of these solutions, they're based on the next-generation Intel Xeon scalable processor that's going to be announcing very very soon. I want to bring on stage Rupal Shah, who's the corporate vice president and general manager of Global Data Center Sales with Intel, so Rupal, please join me. (upbeat instrumental) So certainly I have long roots at Intel, but why don't you talk about, from Intel's perspective, why Lenovo is an important partner for Lenovo. >> Great, well first of all, thank you very much. I've had the distinct pleasure of not only working with Kirk for many many years, but also working with Lenovo for many years, so it's great to be here. Lenovo is not only a fantastic supplier and leader in the industry for Intel-based servers but also a very active partner in the Intel ecosystem. In the Intel ecosystem, specifically, in our partner programs and in our builder programs around Cloud, around the network, and around storage, I personally have had a long history in working with Lenovo, and I've seen personally that PC transformation that you talked about, Kirk, and I believe, and I know that Intel believes in Lenovo's ability to not only succeed in the data center but to actually lead in the data center. And so today, the ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile announcement is just so incredibly important. It's such a great testament to our two companies working together, and the innovation that we're able to bring to the market, and all of it based on the Intel Xeon scalable processor. >> Excellent, so tell me a little bit about why we've been collaborating, tell me a little bit about why you're excited about ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile, specifically. >> Well, there are a lot of reasons that I'm excited about the innovation, but let me talk about a few. First, both of our companies really stand behind the fact that it's increasingly a hybrid world. Our two companies offer a range of solutions now to customers to be able to address their different workload needs. ThinkSystem really brings the best, right? It brings incredible performance, flexibility in data center deployment, and industry-leading reliability that you've talked about. And, as always, Xeon has a history of being built for the data center specifically. The Intel Xeon scalable processor is really re-architected from the ground up in order to enhance compute, network, and storage data flows so that we can deliver workload optimized performance for both a wide range of traditional workloads and traditional needs but also some emerging new needs in areas like artificial intelligence. Second is when it comes to the next generation of Cloud infrastructure, the new Lenovo ThinkAgile line offers a truly integrated offering to address data center pain points, and so not only are you able to get these pretested solutions, but these pretested solutions are going to get deployed in your infrastructure faster, and they're going to be deployed in a way that's going to meet your specific needs. This is something that is new for both of us, and it's an incredible innovation in the marketplace. I think that it's a great addition to what is already a fantastic portfolio for Lenovo. >> Excellent. >> Finally, there's high-performance computing. In high-performance computing. First of all, congratulations. It's a big week, I think, for both of us. Fantastic work that we've been doing together in high-performance computing and actually bringing the best of the best to our customers, and you're going to hear a whole lot more about that. We obviously have a number of joint innovation centers together between Intel and Lenovo. Tell us about some of the key innovations that you guys are excited about. >> Well, Intel and Lenovo, we do have joint innovation labs around the world, and we have a long and strong history of very tight collaboration. This has brought a big wave of innovation to the marketplace in areas like software-defined infrastructure. Yet another area is working closely on a joint vision that I think our two companies have in artificial intelligence. Intel is very committed to the world of AI, and we're committed in making the investments required in technology development, in training, and also in R&D to be able to deliver end-to-end solutions. So with Intel's comprehensive technology portfolio and Lenovo's development and innovation expertise, it's a great combination in this space. I've already talked a little bit about HPC and so has Kirk, and we're going to hear a little bit more to come, but we're really building the fastest compute solutions for customers that are solving big problems. Finally, we often talk about processors from Intel, but it's not just about the processors. It's way beyond that. It's about engaging at the solution level for our customers, and I'm so excited about the work that we've done together with Lenovo to bring to market products like Intel Omni-Path Architecture, which is really the fabric for high-performance data centers. We've got a great showing this week with Intel Omni-Path Architecture, and I'm so grateful for all the work that we've done to be able to bring true solutions to the marketplace. I am really looking forward to our future collaboration with Lenovo as we have in the past. I want to thank you again for inviting me here today, and congratulations on a fantastic launch. >> Thank you, Rupal, very much, for the long partnership. >> Thank you. (audience applauds) >> Okay, well now let's transition and talk a little bit about how Lenovo is transforming. The first thing we've done when I came on board about six months ago is we've transformed to a truly end-to-end organization. We're looking at the market segments I think as our customers define them, and we've organized into having vice presidents and senior vice presidents in charge of each of these major groups, thinking really end to end, from architecture all the way to end of life and customer support. So the first is hyperscale infrastructure. It's about 20% on the market by 2020. We've hired a new vice president there to run that business. Given we can make money in high-volume desktop PCs, it's really the manufacturing prowess, deep engineering collaboration that's enabling us to sell into Baidu, and to Alibaba, Tencent, as well as the largest Cloud vendors on the West Coast here in the United States. We believe we can make money here by having basically a deep deep engineering engagement with our key customers and building on the PC volume economics that we have within Lenovo. On software-defined infrastructure, again, it's that lack of legacy that I think is propelling us into this space. We're not encumbered by trying to sell one more legacy SAN or router, and that's really what's exciting us here, as we transform from a hardware to a software-based company. On HPC and AI, as we said, we'll talk about this in a second. We're the fastest-growing supercomputing company on earth. We have aspirations to be the largest supercomputing company on earth, with China and the U.S. vying for number one in that position, it puts us in a good position there. We're going to bridge that into artificial intelligence in our upcoming Shanghai Tech World. The entire day is around AI. In fact, YY has committed $1.2 billion to artificial intelligence over the next few years of R&D to help us bridge that. And then on data center infrastructure, is really about moving to a solutions based infrastructure like our position with SAP HANA, where we've gone deep with engineers on site at SAP, SAP running their own infrastructure on Lenovo and building that out beyond just SAP to other solutions in the marketplace. Overall, significantly expanding our services portfolio to maintain our number one customer satisfaction rating. So given ISC, or International Supercomputing, this week in Frankfurt, and a lot of my team are actually over there, I wanted to just show you the transformation we've had at Lenovo for delivering some of the technology to solve some of the most challenging humanitarian problems on earth. Today, we are the fastest-growing supercomputer company on the planet in terms of number of systems on the Top 500 list. We've gone from zero to 92 positions in just a few short years, but IDC also positions Lenovo as the fast-growing supercomputer and HPC company overall at about 17% year on year growth overall, including all of the broad channel, the regional universities and this kind of thing, so this is an exciting place for us. I'm excited today that Sergi has come all the way from Spain to be with us today. It's an exciting time because this week we announce the fastest next-generation Intel supercomputer on the planet at Barcelona Supercomputer. Before I bring Sergi on stage, let's run a video and I'll show you why we're excited about the capabilities of these next-generation supercomputers. Run the video please. >> Narrator: Different creates one of the most powerful supercomputers for the Barcelona Supercomputer Center. A high-performance, high-capacity design to help shape tomorrow's world. Different designs what's best for you, with 25 years of end-to-end expertise delivering large-scale solutions. It integrates easily with technology from industry partners, through deep collaboration with the client to manufacture, test, configure, and install at global scale. Different achieves the impossible. The first of a new series. A more energy-efficient supercomputer yet 10 times more powerful than its predecessor. With over 3,400 Lenovo ThinkSystem servers, each performing over two trillion calculations per second, giving us 11.1 petaflop capacity. Different powers MareNostrum, a supercomputer that will help us better understand cancer, help discover disease-fighting therapies, predict the impact of climate change. MareNostrom 4.0 promises to uncover answers that will help solve humanities greatest challenges. (audience applauds) >> So please help me in welcoming operations director of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, Sergi Girona. So welcome, and again, congratulations. It's been a big week for both of us. But I think for a long time, if you haven't been to Barcelona, this has been called the world's most beautiful computer because it's in one of the most gorgeous chapels in the world as you can see here. Congratulations, we now are number 13 on the Top500 list and the fastest next-generation Intel computer. >> Thank you very much, and congratulations to you as well. >> So maybe we can just talk a little bit about what you've done over the last few months with us. >> Sure, thank you very much. It is a pleasure for me being invited here to present to you what we've been doing with Lenovo so far and what we are planning to do in the next future. I'm representing here Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I am presenting high-performance computing services to science and industry. How we see these science services has changed the paradigm of science. We are coming from observation. We are coming from observation on the telescopes and the microscopes and the building of infrastructures, but this is not affordable anymore. This is very expensive, so it's not possible, so we need to move to simulations. So we need to understand what's happening in our environment. We need to predict behaviors only going through simulation. So, at BSC, we are devoted to provide services to industry, to science, but also we are doing our own research because we want to understand. At the same time, we are helping and developing the new engineers of the future on the IT, on HPC. So we are having four departments based on different topics. The main and big one is wiling to understand how we are doing the next supercomputers from the programming level to the performance to the EIA, so all these things, but we are having also interest on what about the climate change, what's the air quality that we are having in our cities. What is the precision medicine we need to have. How we can see that the different drugs are better for different individuals, for different humans, and of course we have an energy department, taking care of understanding what's the better optimization for a cold, how we can save energy running simulations on different topics. But, of course, the topic of today is not my research, but it's the systems we are building in Barcelona. So this is what we have been building in Barcelona so far. From left to right, you have the preparation of the facility because this is 160 square meters with 1.4 megabytes, so that means we need new piping, we need new electricity, at the same time in the center we have to install the core services of the system, so the management practices, and then on the right-hand side you have installation of the networking, the Omni-Path by Intel. Because all of the new racks have to be fully integrated and they need to come into operation rapidly. So we start deployment of the system May 15, and we've now been ending and coming in production July first. All the systems, all the (mumbles) systems from Lenovo are coming before being open and available. What we've been installing here in Barcelona is general purpose systems for our general workload of the system with 3,456 nodes. Everyone of those having 48 cores, 96 gigabytes main memory for a total capacity of about 400 terabytes memory. The objective of this is that we want to, all the system, all the processors, to work together for a single execution for running altogether, so this is an example of the platinum processors from Intel having 24 cores each. Of course, for doing this together with all the cores in the same application, we need a high-speed network, so this is Omni-Path, and of course all these cables are connecting all the nodes. Noncontention, working together, cooperating. Of course, this is a bunch of cables. They need to be properly aligned in switches. So here you have the complete presentation. Of course, this is general purpose, but we wanted to invest with our partners. We want to understand what the supercomputers we wanted to install in 2020, (mumbles) Exascale. We want to find out, we are installing as well systems with different capacities with KNH, with power, with ARM processors. We want to leverage our obligations for the future. We want to make sure that in 2020 we are ready to move our users rapidly to the new technologies. Of course, this is in total, giving us a total capacity of 13.7 petaflops that it's 12 times the capacity of the former MareNostrum four years ago. We need to provide the services to our scientists because they are helping to solve problems for humanity. That's the place we are going to go. Last is inviting you to come to Barcelona to see our place and our chapel. Thank you very much (audience applauds). >> Thank you. So now you can all go home to your spouses and significant others and say you have a formal invitation to Barcelona, Spain. So last, I want to talk about what we've done to transform Lenovo. I think we all know the history is nice but without execution, none of this is going to be possible going forward, so we have been very very busy over the last six months to a year of transforming Lenovo's data center organization. First, we moved to a dedicated end-to-end sales and marketing organization. In the past, we had people that were shared between PC and data center, now thousands of sales people around the world are 100% dedicated end to end to our data center clients. We've moved to a fully integrated and dedicated supply chain and procurement organization. A fully dedicated quality organization, 100% dedicated to expanding our data center success. We've moved to a customer-centric segment, again, bringing in significant new leaders from outside the company to look end to end at each of these segments, supercomputing being very very different than small business, being very very different than taking care of, for example, a large retailer or bank. So around hyperscale, software-defined infrastructure, HPC, AI, and supercomputing and data center solutions-led infrastructure. We've built out a whole new set of global channel programs. Last year, or a year passed, we have five different channel programs around the world. We've now got one simplified channel program for dealer registration. I think our channel is very very energized to go out to market with Lenovo technology across the board, and a whole new set of system integrator relationships. You're going to hear from one of them in Christian's discussion, but a whole new set of partnerships to build solutions together with our system integrative partners. And, again, as I mentioned, a brand new leadership team. So look forward to talking about the details of this. There's been a significant amount of transformation internal to Lenovo that's led to the success of this new product introduction today. So in conclusion, I want to talk about the news of the day. We are transforming Lenovo to the next phase of our data center growth. Again, in over 160 countries, closing on that first phase of transformation and moving forward with some unique declarations. We're launching the largest portfolio in our history, not just in servers but in storage and networking, as everything becomes kind of a software personality on top of x86 Compute. We think we're very well positioned with our scale on PCs as well as data center. Two new brands for both data center infrastructure and Software-Defined, without the legacy shackles of our competitors, enabling us to move very very quickly into Software-Defined, and, again, foreshadowing some joint ventures in M&A that are going to be coming up that will further accelerate ourselves there. New premiere support offerings, enabling you to get direct access to level two engineers and white glove unboxing services, which are going to be bundled along with ThinkAgile. And then celebrating the milestone of 25 years in x86 server compute, not just ThinkPads that you'll hear about shortly, but also our 20 million server shipping next month. So we're celebrating that legacy and looking forward to the next phase. And then making sure we have the execution engine to maintain our position and grow it, being number one in customer satisfaction and number one in quality. So, with that, thank you very much. I look forward to seeing you in the breakouts today and talking with many of you, and I'll bring Rod back up to transition us to the next section. Thank you. (audience applauds) >> All right, Kirk, thank you, sir. All right, ladies and gentlemen, what did you think of that? How about a big round of applause for ThinkAgile, ThinkSystems new brands? (audience applauds) And, obviously, with that comes a big round of applause, for Kirk Skaugen, my boss, so we've got to give him a big round of applause, please. I need to stay employed, it's very important. All right, now you just heard from Kirk about some of the new systems, the brands. How about we have a quick look at the video, which shows us the brand new DCG images. >> Narrator: Legacy thinking is dead, stuck in the past, selling the same old stuff, over and over. So then why does it seem like a data center, you know, that thing powering all our little devices and more or less everything interaction today is still stuck in legacy thinking because it's rigid, inflexible, slow, but that's not us. We don't do legacy. We do different. Because different is fearless. Different reduces Cloud deployment from days to hours. Different creates agile technology that others follow. Different is fluid. It uses water-cooling technology to save energy. It co-innovates with some of the best minds in the industry today. Different is better, smarter. Maybe that's why different already holds so many world-record benchmarks in everything. From virtualization to database and application performance or why it's number one in reliability and customer satisfaction. Legacy sells you what they want. Different builds the data center you need without locking you in. Introducing the Data Center Group at Lenovo. Different... Is better. >> All right, ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause, once again (mumbles) DCG, fantastic. And I'm sure all of you would agree, and Kirk mentioned it a couple of times there. No legacy means a real consultative approach to our customers, and that's something that we really feel is differentiated for ourselves. We are effectively now one of the largest startups in the DCG space, and we are very much ready to disrupt. Now, here in New York City, obviously, the heart of the fashion industry, and much like fashion, as I mentioned earlier, we're different, we're disruptive, we're agile, smarter, and faster. I'd like to say that about myself, but, unfortunately, I can't. But those of you who have observed, you may have noticed that I, too, have transformed. I don't know if anyone saw that. I've transformed from the pinstripe blue, white shirt, red tie look of the, shall we say, our predecessors who owned the x86 business to now a very Lenovo look. No tie and consequently a little bit more chic New York sort of fashion look, shall I say. Nothing more than that. So anyway, a bit of a transformation. It takes a lot to get to this look, by the way. It's a lot of effort. Our next speaker, Christian Teismann, is going to talk a lot about the core business of Lenovo, which really has been, as we've mentioned today, our ThinkPad, 25-year anniversary this year. It's going to be a great celebration inside Lenovo, and as we get through the year and we get closer and closer to the day, you'll see a lot more social and digital work that engages our customers, partners, analysts, et cetera, when we get close to that birthday. Customers just generally are a lot tougher on computers. We know they are. Whether you hang onto it between meetings from the corner of the Notebook, and that's why we have magnesium chassis inside the box or whether you're just dropping it or hypothetically doing anything else like that. We do a lot of robust testing on these products, and that's why it's the number one branded Notebook in the world. So Christian talks a lot about this, but I thought instead of having him talk, I might just do a little impromptu jump back stage and I'll show you exactly what I'm talking about. So follow me for a second. I'm going to jaunt this way. I know a lot of you would have seen, obviously, the front of house here, what we call the front of house. Lots of videos, et cetera, but I don't think many of you would have seen the back of house here, so I'm going to jump through the back here. Hang on one second. You'll see us when we get here. Okay, let's see what's going on back stage right now. You can see one of the team here in the back stage is obviously working on their keyboard. Fantastic, let me tell you, this is one of the key value props of this product, obviously still working, lots of coffee all over it, spill-proof keyboard, one of the key value propositions and why this is the number one laptop brand in the world. Congratulations there, well done for that. Obviously, we test these things. Height, distances, Mil-SPEC approved, once again, fantastic product, pick that up, lovely. Absolutely resistant to any height or drops, once again, in line with our Mil-SPEC. This is Charles, our producer and director back stage for the absolute event. You can see, once again, sand, coincidentally, in Manhattan, who would have thought a snow storm was occurring here, but you can throw sand. We test these things for all of the elements. I've obviously been pretty keen on our development solutions, having lived in Japan for 12 years. We had this originally designed in 1992 by (mumbles), he's still our chief development officer still today, fantastic, congratulations, a sand-enhanced notebook, he'd love that. All right, let's get back out front and on with the show. Watch the coffee. All right, how was that? Not too bad (laughs). It wasn't very impromptu at all, was it? Not at all a set up (giggles). How many people have events and have a bag of sand sitting on the floor right next to a Notebook? I don't know. All right, now it's time, obviously, to introduce our next speaker, ladies and gentlemen, and I hope I didn't steal his thunder, obviously, in my conversations just now that you saw back stage. He's one of my best friends in Lenovo and easily is a great representative of our legendary PC products and solutions that we're putting together for all of our customers right now, and having been an ex-Pat with Lenovo in New York really calls this his second home and is continually fighting with me over the fact that he believes New York has better sushi than Tokyo, let's welcome please, Christian Teismann, our SVP, Commercial Business Segment, and PC Smart Office. Christian Teismann, come on up mate. (audience applauds) >> So Rod thank you very much for this wonderful introduction. I'm not sure how much there is to add to what you have seen already back stage, but I think there is a 25-year of history I will touch a little bit on, but also a very big transformation. But first of all, welcome to New York. As Rod said, it's my second home, but it's also a very important place for the ThinkPad, and I will come back to this later. The ThinkPad is thee industry standard of business computing. It's an industry icon. We are celebrating 25 years this year like no other PC brand has done before. But this story today is not looking back only. It's a story looking forward about the future of PC, and we see a transformation from PCs to personalized computing. I am privileged to lead the commercial PC and Smart device business for Lenovo, but much more important beyond product, I also am responsible for customer experience. And this is what really matters on an ongoing basis. But allow me to stay a little bit longer with our iconic ThinkPad and history of the last 25 years. ThinkPad has always stand for two things, and it always will be. Highest quality in the industry and technology innovation leadership that matters. That matters for you and that matters for your end users. So, now let me step back a little bit in time. As Rod was showing you, as only Rod can do, reliability is a very important part of ThinkPad story. ThinkPads have been used everywhere and done everything. They have survived fires and extreme weather, and they keep surviving your end users. For 25 years, they have been built for real business. ThinkPad also has a legacy of first innovation. There are so many firsts over the last 25 years, we could spend an hour talking about them. But I just want to cover a couple of the most important milestones. First of all, the ThinkPad 1992 has been developed and invented in Japan on the base design of a Bento box. It was designed by the famous industrial designer, Richard Sapper. Did you also know that the ThinkPad was the first commercial Notebook flying into space? In '93, we traveled with the space shuttle the first time. For two decades, ThinkPads were on every single mission. Did you know that the ThinkPad Butterfly, the iconic ThinkPad that opens the keyboard to its size, is the first and only computer showcased in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, right here in New York City? Ten years later, in 2005, IBM passed the torch to Lenovo, and the story got even better. Over the last 12 years, we sold over 100 million ThinkPads, four times the amount IBM sold in the same time. Many customers were concerned at that time, but since then, the ThinkPad has remained the best business Notebook in the industry, with even better quality, but most important, we kept innovating. In 2012, we unveiled the X1 Carbon. It was the thinnest, lightest, and still most robust business PC in the world. Using advanced composited materials like a Formula One car, for super strengths, X1 Carbon has become our ThinkPad flagship since then. We've added an X1 Carbon Yoga, a 360-degree convertible. An X1 Carbon tablet, a detachable, and many new products to come in the future. Over the last few years, many new firsts have been focused on providing the best end-user experience. The first dual-screen mobile workstation. The first Windows business tablet, and the first business PC with OLED screen technology. History is important, but a massive transformation is on the way. Future success requires us to think beyond the box. Think beyond hardware, think beyond notebooks and desktops, and to think about the future of personalized computing. Now, why is this happening? Well, because the business world is rapidly changing. Looking back on history that YY gave, and the acceleration of innovation and how it changes our everyday life in business and in personal is driving a massive change also to our industry. Most important because you are changing faster than ever before. Human capital is your most important asset. In today's generation, they want to have freedom of choice. They want to have a product that is tailored to their specific needs, every single day, every single minute, when they use it. But also IT is changing. The Cloud, constant connectivity, 5G will change everything. Artificial intelligence is adding things to the capability of an infrastructure that we just are starting to imagine. Let me talk about the workforce first because it's the most important part of what drives this. The millennials will comprise more than half of the world's workforce in 2020, three years from now. Already, one out of three millennials is prioritizing mobile work environment over salary, and for nearly 60% of all new hires in the United States, technology is a very important factor for their job search in terms of the way they work and the way they are empowered. This new generation of new employees has grown up with PCs, with Smart phones, with tablets, with touch, for their personal use and for their occupation use. They want freedom. Second, the workplace is transforming. The video you see here in the background. This is our North America headquarters in Raleigh, where we have a brand new Smart workspace. We have transformed this to attract the new generation of workers. It has fewer traditional workspaces, much more meaning and collaborative spaces, and Lenovo, like many companies, is seeing workspaces getting smaller. An average workspace per employee has decreased by 30% over the last five years. Employees are increasingly mobile, but, if they come to the office, they want to collaborate with their colleagues. The way we collaborate and communicate is changing. Investment in new collaboration technology is exploding. The market of collaboration technology is exceeding the market of personal computing today. It will grow in the future. Conference rooms are being re-imagined from a ratio of 50 employees to one large conference room. Today, we are moving into scenarios of four employees to one conference room, and these are huddle rooms, pioneer spaces. Technology is everywhere. Video, mega-screens, audio, electronic whiteboards. Adaptive technologies are popping up and change the way we work. As YY said earlier, the pace of the revolution is astonishing. So personalized computing will transform the PC we all know. There's a couple of key factors that we are integrating in our next generations of PC as we go forward. The most important trends that we see. First of all, choose your own device. We talked about this new generation of workforce. Employees who are used to choosing their own device. We have to respond and offer devices that are tailored to each end user's needs without adding complexity to how we operate them. PC is a service. Corporations increasingly are looking for on-demand computing in data center as well as in personal computing. Customers want flexibility. A tailored management solution and a services portfolio that completes the lifecycle of the device. Agile IT, even more important, corporations want to run an infrastructure that is agile, instant respond to their end-customer needs, that is self provisioning, self diagnostic, and remote software repair. Artificial intelligence. Think about artificial intelligence for you personally as your personal assistant. A personal assistant which does understand you, your schedule, your travel, your next task, an extension of yourself. We believe the PC will be the center of this mobile device universe. Mobile device synergy. Each of you have two devices or more with you. They need to work together across different operating systems, across different platforms. We believe Lenovo is uniquely positioned as the only company who has a Smart phone business, a PC business, and an infrastructure business to really seamlessly integrate all of these devices for simplicity and for efficiency. Augmented reality. We believe augmented reality will drive significantly productivity improvements in commercial business. The core will be to understand industry-specific solutions. New processes, new business challenges, to improve things like customer service and sales. Security will remain the foundation for personalized computing. Without security, without trust in the device integrity, this will not happen. One of the most important trends, I believe, is that the PC will transform, is always connected, and always on, like a Smart phone. Regardless if it's open, if it's closed, if you carry it, or if you work with it, it always is capable to respond to you and to work with you. 5G is becoming a reality, and the data capacity that will be out there is by far exceeding today's traffic imagination. Finally, Smart Office, delivering flexible and collaborative work environments regardless on where the worker sits, fully integrated and leverages all the technologies we just talked before. These are the main challenges you and all of your CIO and CTO colleagues have to face today. A changing workforce and a new set of technologies that are transforming PC into personalized computing. Let me give you a real example of a challenge. DXC was just formed by merging CSE company and HP's Enterprise services for the largest independent services company in the world. DXC is now a 25 billion IT services leader with more than 170,000 employees. The most important capital. 6,000 clients and eight million managed devices. I'd like to welcome their CIO, who has one of the most challenging workforce transformation in front of him. Erich Windmuller, please give him a round of applause. (audience applauds). >> Thank you Christian. >> Thank you. >> It's my pleasure to be here, thank you. >> So first of all, let me congratulation you to this very special time. By forming a new multi-billion-dollar enterprise, this new venture. I think it has been so far fantastically received by analysts, by the press, by customers, and we are delighted to be one of your strategic partners, and clearly we are collaborating around workforce transformation between our two companies. But let me ask you a couple of more personal questions. So by bringing these two companies together with nearly 200,00 employees, what are the first actions you are taking to make this a success, and what are your biggest challenges? >> Well, first, again, let me thank you for inviting me and for DXC Technology to be a part of this very very special event with Lenovo, so thank you. As many of you might expect, it's been a bit of a challenge over the past several months. My goal was really very simple. It was to make sure that we brought two companies together, and they could operate as one. We need to make sure that could continue to support our clients. We certainly need to make sure we could continue to sell, our sellers could sell. That we could pay our employees, that we could hire people, we could do all the basic foundational things that you might expect a company would want to do, but we really focused on three simple areas. I called it the three Cs. Connectivity, communicate, and collaborate. So we wanted to make sure that we connected our legacy data centers so we could transfer information and communicate back and forth. We certainly wanted to be sure that our employees could communicate via WIFI, whatever locations they may or may not go to. We certainly wanted to, when we talk about communicate, we need to be sure that everyone of our employees could send and receive email as a DXC employee. And that we had a single-enterprise directory and people could communicate, gain access to calendars across each of the two legacy companies, and then collaborate was also key. And so we wanted to be sure, again, that people could communicate across each other, that our legacy employees on either side could get access to many of their legacy systems, and, again, we could collaborate together as a single corporation, so it was challenging, but very very, great opportunity for all of us. And, certainly, you might expect cyber and security was a very very important topic. My chairman challenged me that we had to be at least as good as we were before from a cyber perspective, and when you bring two large companies together like that there's clearly an opportunity in this disruptive world so we wanted to be sure that we had a very very strong cyber security posture, of which Lenovo has been very very helpful in our achieving that. >> Thank you, Erich. So what does DXC consider as their critical solutions and technology for workplace transformation, both internally as well as out on the market? >> So workplace transformation, and, again, I've heard a lot of the same kinds of words that I would espouse... It's all about making our employees productive. It's giving the right tools to do their jobs. I, personally, have been focused, and you know this because Lenovo has been a very very big part of this, in working with our, we call it our My Style Workplace, it's an offering team in developing a solution and driving as much functionality as possible down to the workstation. We want to be able, for me, to avoid and eliminate other ancillary costs, audio video costs, telecommunication cost. The platform that we have, the digitized workstation that Lenovo has provided us, has just got a tremendous amount of capability. We want to streamline those solutions, as well, on top of the modern server. The modern platform, as we call it, internally. I'd like to congratulate Kirk and your team that you guys have successfully... Your hardware has been certified on our modern platform, which is a significant accomplishment between our two companies and our partnership. It was really really foundational. Lenovo is a big part of our digital workstation transformation, and you'll continue to be, so it's very very important, and I want you to know that your tools and your products have done a significant job in helping us bring two large corporations together as one. >> Thank you, Erich. Last question, what is your view on device as a service and hardware utility model? >> This is the easy question, right? So who in the room doesn't like PC or device as a service? This is a tremendous opportunity, I think, for all of us. Our corporation, like many of you in the room, we're all driven by the concept of buying devices in an Opex versus a Capex type of a world and be able to pay as you go. I think this is something that all of us would like to procure, product services and products, if you will, personal products, in this type of a mode, so I am very very eager to work with Lenovo to be sure that we bring forth a very dynamic and constructive device as a service approach. So very eager to do that with Lenovo and bring that forward for DXC Technology. >> Erich, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to work with you, today and going forward on all sides. I think with your new company and our lineup, I think we have great things to come. Thank you very much. >> My pleasure, great pleasure, thank you very much. >> So, what's next for Lenovo PC? We already have the most comprehensive commercial portfolio in the industry. We have put the end user in the core of our portfolio to finish and going forward. Ultra mobile users, like consultants, analysts, sales and service. Heavy compute users like engineers and designers. Industry users, increasingly more understanding. Industry-specific use cases like education, healthcare, or banking. So, there are a few exciting things we have to announce today. Obviously, we don't have that broad of an announcement like our colleagues from the data center side, but there is one thing that I have that actually... Thank you Rod... Looks like a Bento box, but it's not a ThinkPad. It's a first of it's kind. It's the world's smallest professional workstation. It has the power of a tower in the Bento box. It has the newest Intel core architecture, and it's designed for a wide range of heavy duty workload. Innovation continues, not only in the ThinkPad but also in the desktops and workstations. Second, you hear much about Smart Office and workspace transformation today. I'm excited to announce that we have made a strategic decision to expand our Think portfolio into Smart Office, and we will soon have solutions on the table in conference rooms, working with strategic partners like Intel and like Microsoft. We are focused on a set of devices and a software architecture that, as an IoT architecture, unifies the management of Smart Office. We want to move fast, so our target is that we will have our first product already later this year. More to come. And finally, what gets me most excited is the upcoming 25 anniversary in October. Actually, if you go to Japan, there are many ThinkPad lovers. Actually beyond lovers, enthusiasts, who are collectors. We've been consistently asked in blogs and forums about a special anniversary edition, so let me offer you a first glimpse what we will announce in October, of something we are bring to market later this year. For the anniversary, we will introduce a limited edition product. This will include throwback features from ThinkPad's history as well as the best and most powerful features of the ThinkPad today. But we are not just making incremental adjustments to the Think product line. We are rethinking ThinkPad of the future. Well, here is what I would call a concept card. Maybe a ThinkPad without a hinge. Maybe one you can fold. What do you think? (audience applauds) but this is more than just design or look and feel. It's a new set of advanced materials and new screen technologies. It's how you can speak to it or write on it or how it speaks to you. Always connected, always on, and can communicate on multiple inputs and outputs. It will anticipate your next meeting, your next travel, your next task. And when you put it all together, it's just another part of the story, which we call personalized computing. Thank you very much. (audience applauds) Thank you, sir. >> Good on ya, mate. All right, ladies and gentlemen. We are now at the conclusion of the day, for this session anyway. I'm going to talk a little bit more about our breakouts and our demo rooms next door. But how about the power with no tower, from Christian, huh? Big round of applause. (audience applauds) And what about the concept card, the ThinkPad? Pretty good, huh? I love that as well. I tell you, it was almost like Leonardo DiCaprio was up on stage at one stage. He put that big ThinkPad concept up, and everyone's phones went straight up and took a photo, the whole audience, so let's be very selective on how we distribute that. I'm sure it's already on Twitter. I'll check it out in a second. So once again, ThinkPad brand is a core part of the organization, and together both DCG and PCSD, what we call PCSD, which is our client side of the business and Smart device side of the business, are obviously very very linked in transforming Lenovo for the future. We want to also transform the industry, obviously, and transform the way that all of us do business. Lenovo, if you look at basically a summary of the day, we are highly committed to being a top three data center provider. That is really important for us. We are the largest and fastest growing supercomputing company in the world, and Kirk actually mentioned earlier on, committed to being number one by 2020. So Madhu who is in Frankfurt at the International Supercomputing Convention, if you're watching, congratulations, your targets have gone up. There's no doubt he's going to have a lot of work to do. We're obviously very very committed to disrupting the data center. That's obviously really important for us. As we mentioned, with both the brands, the ThinkSystem, and our ThinkAgile brands now, highly focused on disrupting and ensuring that we do things differently because different is better. Thank you to our customers, our partners, media, analysts, and of course, once again, all of our employees who have been on this journey with us over the last two years that's really culminating today in the launch of all of our new products and our profile and our portfolio. It's really thanks to all of you that once again on your feedback we've been able to get to this day. And now really our journey truly begins in ensuring we are disrupting and enduring that we are bringing more value to our customers without that legacy that Kirk mentioned earlier on is really an advantage for us as we really are that large startup from a company perspective. It's an exciting time to be part of Lenovo. It's an exciting time to be associated with Lenovo, and I hope very much all of you feel that way. So a big round of applause for today, thank you very much. (audience applauds) I need to remind all of you. I don't think I'm going to have too much trouble getting you out there, because I was just looking at Christian on the streaming solutions out in the room out the back there, and there's quite a nice bit of lunch out there as well for those of you who are hungry, so at least there's some good food out there, but I think in reality all of you should be getting up into the demo sessions with our segment general managers because that's really where the rubber hits the road. You've heard from YY, you've heard from Kirk, and you've heard from Christian. All of our general managers and our specialists in our product sets are going to be out there to obviously demonstrate our technology. As we said at the very beginning of this session, this is Transform, obviously the fashion change, hopefully you remember that. Transform, we've all gone through the transformation. It's part of our season of events globally, and our next event obviously is going to be in Tech World in Shanghai on the 20th of July. I hope very much for those of you who are going to attend have a great safe travel over there. We look forward to seeing you. Hope you've had a good morning, and get into the sessions next door so you get to understand the technology. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (upbeat innovative instrumental)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live in Las Vegas. This is the Cube's coverage, exclusive coverage, of Hewlett Packard Enterprise HPE Discover 2017. And I'm John Furrier, co-founder SiliconAngle Media with my co-founder David Latte and also cohost. Our next guest is Alastair Winner, vice president HPE point next portfolio. Welecome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Alastair: Thank you. Great to be here. >> So, okay, Pointnext Portfolio, Pointnext, new presence, take a minute, Alastair just explain Pointnext, how everything fits together. I know it's a little bit redundant for you but let's that start that off. >> Sure, no, I'd be delighted to explain. So, as you're aware the company has gone though a number of transformations and transitions. One of which was the spin merge of enterprise services to CSC, now DXC technology, we're, they're here on the show floor, so great partner of ours. But of course that created a lot of noise in the market and confusion honestly with our customers as to whether or not HPE was in the services business or not. So, the idea of the rebranding was to make it very clear, service is critically important. It's like the third part of our company strategy. So we have Hybrid IT, IT Edge and the expertise to make it happen and that expertise is HPE Pointnext. And the branding was chosen deliberately not to, to sort of replicate what you'd find in other traditional vendors. We don't talk about services in our brand. And Pointnext is literally to help our customers point at what's next in their digital transformation journey. So, that's where the brand comes from. >> David: So what's the brand promise? For Pointnext? >> I mean for us, it's about giving customers access to our expertise and we talk about really, a complete life cycle of a experience. So, previously we had consulting and support. Those terms have gone now. So we're looking clearly end to end of customer's experience and really starting with the outcome they're looking for, and having advisory, professional and operation services that connect those things together to deliver the, deliver the outcome. >> And what is the spin merge made up of? HPE Services and was it, the CSC combo? >> So we had a very significant, really IT outsourcing business, which was called enterprise services that was the previous EDS business. So yeah, that spun out and joined to CSC to become DXC Technology. >> How should customers look at you vis a vis HPE and the Enterprise partners? Obviously there, there the combination, how do you guys, where' the lines, where do you guys shake hands, where's the handoff, what are some of the engagements, like share with us some of the day to day tactical execution of your, of the portfolio? >> So I guess, we're still relatively new in terms of the brand and we're trying to really connect the dots internally to ensure that we present to our customers a seamless experience. I guess one of the things that the spin merge has enabled us to do is to engage much more actively with systems integrators and other consulting companies where perviously it was quite challenging to do so. So, with the likes of PWC and KMPG and Wipro and so previously we had, I mean they were interested in buying our technology. But from a services point of view, there was always some conflict. Now we have clarity, right? So, so part of our strategy is to really ensure we're engaging very actively with systems integrators. And likewise, we're also working very actively with our reseller partners. So, clearly HP has a long history of partnering and.. >> John: Channel. >> And as we call it it channel. And our channel partners are also going through a transformation because selling hardware is no longer a sustainable business for them in the long term. So, really helping them to transform their business from being product led to services led. I guess, I mean, the other thing we're really focused on is you know what are the solution areas. What are the business outcomes that we as an organization can really focus on because as you know digital transformation is huge, I mean it's a, you know.. >> Well, I'm glad you brought that up about the decline in the service, from a business model stand point, but we were saying in our opening, on our editorial segment that, you know a lot of people get hung up on that, but in reality, the numbers are all pointed to massive growth. Wikibon just put out a seminal report around true private cloud at a twenty to fifty billion dollar opportunity, market TAM. So, that's just private cloud. That's just. >> Yes. >> Cloud liking your infrastructure on PRAM. That's not including Hybrid Cloud. So when you factor in true private cloud, which is current state, situation, with Hybrid Cloud and then now, the, what I call the kind of the long reaching but viable vision of multicloud, >> Yep. those are really key dots that are connection for customers. So, okay margins of hardware might shift to places but the services, whether its IOT, an app integration, really it's a the center of this. >> It absolutley is at the center of it. And of course, I mean there is still clearly value from our products and our product innovation. But the way we present that value to our customers has to, has to change. And you're quite right, many of the customers, in fact the majority of the customers I talked to really view private cloud as their principal delivery vehicle, internally. IT view as their principal delivery vehicle. What we're doing through solutions like flexible capacity is enabling an IT team, to you know, to align the supply and demand of IT through an opex model rather than a capex model and really helping them right size the environment. So they can manage the fluctuations that they see because with digital there are, you know, there are many many more, the frequency of change is much a, much more... >> So the dollars are shifting to services, certainly the Edge but you brought up channel. This is a huge opportunity because now channel is reconfiguring both at the global systems integrator side as well as what was traditionally as VARS and VABS and ISBs, >> Yes. as they get closer to the customer. So you guys are kind of the glue layer between what was once HBE, get some training, speeds and feeds, to much more solution oriented. And trends there that you can highlight that should be notable for customers in around how the services is leading some of that change at the front lines? >> Well, I mean, you're absolutely right and I would say you know for us it's about outcomes, looking. We're not trying to sell the customers something. We're looking for an outcome that customer needs and then translating that into, into a chain of technology, people and process changes that they need to implement. And there I mean there are many examples on the show floor actually of services-led solutions. You know, we have the intelligent spaces cube for example where we're helping customers to manage, very valuable real estate in their, in their property, you know where you're always looking for spaces to meet your colleagues. When you turn up you want it to be digitally enabled. You know, we can combine all of these great technologies whether you know that HP or partner ISV technology into a solution. And then present it to the customer as a service. So you consume it as you use it as oppose to buying all the pieces, having to integrate together yourself, you'll own and operate, that's clearly the model, that, that's the model of the past. >> Alastair, the CIO's in our community, if I could summarize, they're telling us, I got to run the business, I got legacy systems that I have to manage, I have to grow the business. I have new apps. Maybe some of those are IOT, certainly many of them are data oriented, AI, big data, whatever you want to call it. And then I have to transform the business. So that's their digital transformation, >> Alastair: Yes. >> certainly their IT transformation, their hybrid component. So is that a valid way, to sort of look at the business, and then how specifically is Pointnext helping in those three broad areas? >> So, I would, I would completely agree. In fact the way we think about our portfolio is one of accelerating what's next. So this, you know this digital transformation, this change, and how do we accelerate and make customers much more agile in addressing the business requirements. Because, you know IT and the business are really synonymous now with each other. It's not a, it's not a back office anymore. It's the way the customer engages with their customers, with their employees, with their partners. I mean it is the interface now in which we work. So, we're all about accelerating. How can we accelerate that. And then, you're absolutely right the majority of our customers have an existing in store bays. The have many layers of, or previous generations of technology. You know it's, it's homogenous, it's complex. You know there, there are different ways of managing all of these assets. And the way we help there is really by simplifying. So we're encouraging our customers to work with us, allow us to manage the complexity, which frees up resources and money for them to then to go in and invest in the accelerate, accelerating what's next. So we're doing, for example, activities like, we call it operational support service. So we're monitoring and managing remotely the assets of the company that the IT team would have historically have done. You know, you go into like a mission control center and see all the, you know, all the lights, monitors. I mean we can do that for a customer. You know, the customer doesn't have to do that anymore. And the resources that frees up, they can go in and invest in the, in the, in their digital transformation. >> So that's not outsourcing, per se. >> No. >> You're certainly managing infrastructure on behalf of your customer. They on the assets, it's on their books? >> So, so we can do it traditional, you know capex model where it's on their books. Or we can include it inside a flexible capacity arrangement where, they're, you know they're actually paying per use. And that experience is part of the, of the solution. So we can integrate it into a pay per use model. >> I mean it seems like one of the things that HP services has done over the last several years, is sort of envision and reimagine that entire services experience and try to make it as cloud like as possible. >> Yes. >> I mean you got a head of that, I mean this has been, I don't know, three, four five years in the making. So, kind of give us an update that's gone and then, you know on a scale of one to 10, how far did you get? Are you at a five, a six, a nine? And what's new from here? >> So it's a great question. So, I'd probably give us a six, we're probably at a six I would say. So the, the offer itself, so flexible capacity, is, you know we've had in them market for five years now so yeah, we know how to do this. And it's very successful. We've never lost a customer. We have net promoter scores in the high 90's, so yeah, where we have landed it, customers love it right? So, we know it's very successful. And really what we now need to do as a company is sort of amplify that model as our principal go to market. Okay, so we're a product company, we sell products. So, there's a pivot that we're approaching I would say where we need to you know, use that as really being the lead, the lead model. So, I think, I think a solution designed for IT, where IT consume units of IT, we've got that nailed, right? I think, I think it's great. But flexible capacity doesn't address every customer's requirement. So for an enterprise customer, it works really nicely. For a tier two, tier three service provider, it works very nicely. We've got a whole tranche of customers, who really don't have the scale to benefit from flexible capacity that still want insights into their utilization, and their capacity. So we're actually, as part of our Gen 10 launch, we introducing something called HPE Capacity Care Service. So we're sort of extracting the secret source from flexible capacity. We're not actively managing the capacity on behalf of the customer, but we're giving the customer the assets to do it themselves. So that will be available by the end of this calendar year, so we're very excited about that. And the other thing we're doing is actually, to move away from selling units of IT service, like virtual machine containers or cause, and actually trying to focus on outcomes. So were starting to talk about things like back up as service, big data as service with Hadoop. So, again, really trying to create a platform that the customer can consume and all the complexity is abstracted and we present it as a service. So, we're at the early stages there. We've got very big aspirations for that. We think that's the way that our customers will want to buy from us. You know, they don't want the pieces, they want, they want the platform, the want an outcome as a service. >> Alastair, great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for sharing. My final question for you, to end the segment is pretend I'm a CXO, CIO, CDO, CSO, whatever, CEO, Alastair, bottom line me. How are you going to make IT easier for me and simpler? Go. >> So, I'm going to make it easier by ensuring that we present you with our expertise. We're going to create an environment though which you can consume IT. And we're going to accelerate your digital transformation. >> Alright. Accelerate change, obviously congeeled economies here. There's no doubt about it. It's got a little cloud flavor, hybrid cloud, multi cloud. It's theCUBE bringing you all the data here from HPE Discover. More live action for three days of exclusive coverage with theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (light techno music)