>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. We are live at MWC 23. This is day two of our coverage, we're giving you four days of coverage, but you already know that because you were here yesterday. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Dave this show is massive. I was walking in this morning and almost getting claustrophobic with the 80,000 people that are joining us. There is, seems to be at MWC 23 more interest in enterprise-class technology than we've ever seen before. What are some of the things that you've observed with that regard? >> Well I've observed a lot of people racing to the highest level messaging about how wonderful it is to have the kiss of a breeze on your cheek, and to feel the flowing wheat. (laughing) I want to hear about the actual things that make this stuff possible. >> Right. >> So I think we have a couple of guests here who can help us start to go down that path of actually understanding the real cool stuff that's behind the scenes. >> And absolutely we got some cool stuff. We've got two guests from Dell. Dave Lincoln is here, the VP of Networking and Emerging the Server Solutions, and Deania Davidson, Director Edge Server Product Planning and Management at Dell. So great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Two Daves, and a Davidson. >> (indistinct) >> Just me who stands alone here. (laughing) So guys talk about, Dave, we'll start with you the newest generation of PowerEdge servers. What's new? Why is it so exciting? What challenges for telecom operators is it solving? >> Yeah, well so this is actually Dell's largest server launch ever. It's the most expansive, which is notable because of, we have a pretty significant portfolio. We're very proud of our core mainstream portfolio. But really since the Supercompute in Dallas in November, that we started a rolling thunder of launches. MWC being part of that leading up to DTW here in May, where we're actually going to be announcing big investments in those parts of the market that are the growth segments of server. Specifically AIML, where we in, to address that. We're investing heavy in our XE series which we, as I said, we announced at Supercompute in November. And then we have to address the CSP segment, a big investment around the HS series which we just announced, and then lastly, the edge telecom segment which we're, we had the biggest investment, biggest announce in portfolio launch with XR series. >> Deania, lets dig into that. >> Yeah. >> Where we see the growth coming from you mentioned telecom CSPs with the edge. What are some of the growth opportunities there that organizations need Dell's help with to manage, so that they can deliver what they're demanding and user is wanting? >> The biggest areas being obviously, in addition the telecom has been the biggest one, but the other areas too we're seeing is in retail and manufacturing as well. And, so internally, I mean we're going to be focused on hardware, but we also have a solutions team who are working with us to build the solutions focused on retail, and edge and telecom as well on top of the servers that we'll talk about shortly. >> What are some of the biggest challenges that retailers and manufacturers are facing? And during the pandemic retailers, those that were successful pivoted very quickly to curbside delivery. >> Deania: Yeah. >> Those that didn't survive weren't able to do that digitally. >> Deania: Yeah. >> But we're seeing such demand. >> Yeah. >> At the retail edge. On the consumer side we want to get whatever we want right now. >> Yes. >> It has to be delivered, it has to be personalized. Talk a little bit more about some of the challenges there, within those two verticals and how Dell is helping to address those with the new server technologies. >> For retail, I think there's couple of things, the one is like in the fast food area. So obviously through COVID a lot of people got familiar and comfortable with driving through. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And so there's probably a certain fast food restaurant everyone's pretty familiar with, they're pretty efficient in that, and so there are other customers who are trying to replicate that, and so how do we help them do that all, from a technology perspective. From a retail, it's one of the pickup and the online experience, but when you go into a store, I don't know about you but I go to Target, and I'm looking for something and I have kids who are kind of distracting you. Its like where is this one thing, and so I pull up the Target App for example, and it tells me where its at, right. And then obviously, stores want to make more money, so like hey, since you picked this thing, there are these things around you. So things like that is what we're having conversations with customers about. >> It's so interesting because the demand is there. >> Yeah, it is. >> And its not going to go anywhere. >> No. >> And it's certainly not going to be dialed down. We're not going to want less stuff, less often. >> Yeah (giggles) >> And as typical consumers, we don't necessarily make the association between what we're seeing in the palm of our hand on a mobile device. >> Deania: Right. >> And the infrastructure that's actually supporting all of it. >> Deania: Right. >> People hear the term Cloud and they think cloud-phone mystery. >> Yeah, magic just happens. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But in fact, in order to support the things that we want to be able to do. >> Yeah. >> On the move, you have to optimize the server hardware. >> Deania: Yes. >> In certain ways. What does that mean exactly? When you say that its optimized, what are the sorts of decisions that you make when you're building? I think of this in the terms of Lego bricks. >> Yes, yeah >> Put together. What are some of the decisions that you make? >> So there were few key things that we really had to think about in terms of what was different from the Data center, which obviously supports the cloud environment, but it was all about how do we get closer to the customer right? How do we get things really fast and how do we compute that information really quickly. So for us, it's things like size. All right, so our server is going to weigh one of them is the size of a shoe box and (giggles), we have a picture with Dave. >> Dave: It's true. >> Took off his shoe. >> Its actually, its actually as big as a shoe. (crowd chuckles) >> It is. >> It is. >> To be fair, its a pretty big shoe. >> True, true. >> It is, but its small in relative to the old big servers that you see. >> I see what you're doing, you find a guy with a size 12, (crowd giggles) >> Yeah. >> Its the size of your shoe. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Its literally the size of a shoe, and that's our smallest server and its the smallest one in the portfolio, its the XR 4000, and so we've actually crammed a lot of technology in there going with the Intel ZRT processors for example to get into that compute power. The XR 8000 which you'll be hearing a lot more about shortly with our next guest is one I think from a telco perspective is our flagship product, and its size was a big thing there too. Ruggedization so its like (indistinct) certification, so it can actually operate continuously in negative 5 to 55 C, which for customers, or they need that range of temperature operation, flexibility was a big thing too. In meaning that, there are some customers who wanted to have one system in different areas of deployment. So can I take this one system and configure it one way, take that same system, configure another way and have it here. So flexibility was really key for us as well, and so we'll actually be seeing that in the next segment coming. >> I think one of, some of the common things you're hearing from this is our focus on innovation, purpose build servers, so yes our times, you know economic situation like in itself is tough yeah. But far from receding we've doubled down on investment and you've seen that with the products that we are launching here, and we will be launching in the years to come. >> I imagine there's a pretty sizeable day impact to the total adjustable market for PowerEdge based on the launch what you're doing, its going to be a tam, a good size tam expansion. >> Yeah, absolutely. Depending on how you look at it, its roughly we add about $30 Billion of adjustable tam between the three purposeful series that we've launched, XE, HS and XR. >> Can you comment on, I know Dell and customers are like this. Talk about, I'd love to get both of your perspective, I'm sure you have a favorite customer stories. But talk about the involvement of the customer in the generation, and the evolution of PowerEdge. Where are they in that process? What kind of feedback do they deliver? >> Well, I mean, just to start, one thing that is essential Cortana of Dell period, is it all is about the customer. All of it, everything that we do is about the customer, and so there is a big focus at our level, from on high to get out there and talk with customers, and actually we have a pretty good story around XR8000 which is call it our flagship of the XR line that we've just announced, and because of this deep customer intimacy, there was a last minute kind of architectural design change. >> Hm-mm. >> Which actually would have been, come to find out it would have been sort of a fatal flaw for deployment. So we corrected that because of this tight intimacy with our customers. This was in two Thanksgiving ago about and, so anyways it's super cool and the fact that we were able to make a change so late in development cycle, that's a testament to a lot of the speed and, speed of innovation that we're driving, so anyway that was that's one, just case of one example. >> Hm-mm. >> Let talk about AI, we can't go to any trade show without talking about AI, the big thing right now is ChatGPT. >> Yeah. >> I was using it the other day, it's so interesting. But, the growing demand for AI, talk about how its driving the evolution of the server so that more AI use cases can become more (indistinct). >> In the edge space primarily, we actually have another product, so I guess what you'll notice in the XR line itself because there are so many different use cases and technologies that support the different use cases. We actually have a range form factor, so we have really small, I guess I would say 350 ml the size of a shoe box, you know, Dave's shoe box. (crowd chuckles) And then we also have, at the other end a 472, so still small, but a little bit bigger, but we did recognize obviously AI was coming up, and so that is our XR 7620 platform and that does support 2 GPUs right, so, like for Edge infrencing, making sure that we have the capability to support customers in that too, but also in the small one, we do also have a GPU capability there, that also helps in those other use cases as well. So we've built the platforms even though they're small to be able to handle the GPU power for customers. >> So nice tight package, a lot of power there. >> Yes. >> Beside as we've all clearly demonstrated the size of Dave's shoe. (crowd chuckles) Dave, talk about Dell's long standing commitment to really helping to rapidly evolve the server market. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Its a pivotal payer there. >> Well, like I was saying, we see innovation, I mean, this is, to us its a race to the top. You talked about racing and messaging that sort of thing, when you opened up the show here, but we see this as a race to the top, having worked at other server companies where maybe its a little bit different, maybe more of a race to the bottom source of approach. That's what I love about being at Dell. This is very much, we understand that it's innovation is that is what's going to deliver the most value for our customers. So whether its some of the first to market, first of its kind sort of innovation that you find in the XR4000, or XR8000, or any of our XE line, we know that at the end of day, that is what going to propel Dell, do the best for our customers and thereby do the best for us. To be honest, its a little bit surprising walking by some of our competitors booths, there's been like a dearth of zero, like no, like it's almost like you wouldn't even know that there was a big launch here right? >> Yeah. >> Or is it just me? >> No. >> It was a while, we've been walking around and yet we've had, and its sort of maybe I should take this as a flattery, but a lot of our competitors have been coming by to our booth everyday actually. >> Deania: Yeah, everyday. >> They came by multiple times yesterday, they came by multiple times today, they're taking pictures of our stuff I kind of want to just send 'em a sample. >> Lisa: Or your shoe. >> Right? Or just maybe my shoe right? But anyway, so I suppose I should take it as an honor. >> Deania: Yeah. >> And conversely when we've walked over there we actually get in back (indistinct), maybe I need a high Dell (indistinct). (crowd chuckles) >> We just had that experience, yeah. >> Its kind of funny but. >> Its a good position to be in. >> Yeah. >> Yes. >> You talked about the involvement of the customers, talk a bit more about Dell's ecosystem is also massive, its part of what makes Dell, Dell. >> Wait did you say ego-system? (laughing) After David just. >> You caught that? Darn it! The talk about the influence or the part of the ecosystem and also some of the feedback from the partners as you've been rapidly evolving the server market and clearly your competitors are taking notice. >> Yeah, sorry. >> Deania: That's okay. >> Dave: you want to take that? >> I mean I would say generally, one of the things that Dell prides itself on is being able to deliver the worlds best innovation into the hands of our customers, faster and better that any other, the optimal solution. So whether its you know, working with our great partners like Intel, AMD Broadcom, these sorts of folks. That is, at the end of the day that is our core mantra, again its retractor on service, doing the best, you know, what's best for the customers. And we want to bring the world's best innovation from our technology partners, get it into the hands of our partners you know, faster and better than any other option out there. >> Its a satisfying business for all of us to be in, because to your point, I made a joke about the high level messaging. But really, that's what it comes down to. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> We do these things, we feel like sometimes we're toiling in obscurity, working with the hardware. But what it delivers. >> Deania: Hm-mm. >> The experiences. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> Deania: Yes. >> Are truly meaningful. So its a fun. >> Absolutely. >> Its a really fun thing to be a part of. >> It is. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. Is there a favorite customer story that you have that really articulates the value of what Dell is doing, full PowerEdge, at the Edge? >> Its probably one I can't particularly name obviously but, it was, they have different environments, so, in one case there's like on flights or on sea vessels, and just being able to use the same box in those different environments is really cool. And they really appreciate having the small compact, where they can just take the server with them and go somewhere. That was really cool to me in terms of how they were using the products that we built for them. >> I have one that's kind of funny. It around XR8000. Again a customer I won't name but they're so proud of it, they almost kinds feel like they co defined it with us, they want to be on the patent with us so, anyways that's. >> Deania: (indistinct). >> That's what they went in for, yeah. >> So it shows the strength of the partnership that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Of course, the ecosystem of partners, customers, CSVs, telecom Edge. Guys thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Sharing what's new with the PowerEdge. We can't wait to, we're just, we're cracking open the box, we saw the shoe. (laughing) And we're going to be dealing a little bit more later. So thank you. >> We're going to be able to touch something soon? >> Yes, yes. >> Yeah. >> In couple of minutes? >> Next segment I think. >> All right! >> Thanks for setting the table for that guys. We really appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> Alright, our pleasure. >> For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin . You're watching theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage, LIVE in Barcelona, Spain, MWC 23. Don't go anywhere, we will be right back with our next guests. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's first day of coverage of MWC 23 from Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. I'm literally in between two Daves. We've had a great first day of coverage of the event. There's been lots of conversations, Dave, on disaggregation, on the change of mobility. I want to be able to get your perspectives from both of you on what you saw on the show floor, what you saw and heard from our guests today. So we'll start with you, Dave V. What were some of the things that were our takeaways from day one for you? >> Well, the big takeaway is the event itself. On day one, you get a feel for what this show is like. Now that we're back, face-to-face kind of pretty much full face-to-face. A lot of excitement here. 2000 plus exhibitors, I mean, planes, trains, automobiles, VR, AI, servers, software, I mean everything. I mean, everybody is here. So it's a really comprehensive show. It's not just about mobile. That's why they changed the name from Mobile World Congress. I think the other thing is from the keynotes this morning, I mean, you heard, there's a lot of, you know, action around the telcos and the transformation, but in a lot of ways they're sort of protecting their existing past from the future. And so they have to be careful about how fast they move. But at the same time if they don't move fast, they're going to get disrupted. We heard some complaints, essentially, you know, veiled complaints that the over the top guys aren't paying their fair share and Telco should be able to charge them more. We heard the chairman of Ericsson talk about how we can't let the OTTs do that again. We're going to charge directly for access through APIs to our network, to our data. We heard from Chris Lewis. Yeah. They've only got, or maybe it was San Ji Choha, how they've only got eight APIs. So, you know the developers are the ones who are going to actually build out the innovation at the edge. The telcos are going to provide the connectivity and the infrastructure companies like Dell as well. But it's really to me all about the developers. And that's where the action's going to be. And it's going to be interesting to see how the developers respond to, you know, the gun to the head. If you want access, you're going to have to pay for it. Now maybe there's so much money to be made that they'll go for it, but I feel like there's maybe a different model. And I think some of the emerging telcos are going to say, you know what, here developers, here's a platform, have at it. We're not going to charge you for all the data until you succeed. Then we're going to figure out a monetization model. >> Right. A lot of opportunity for the developer. That skillset is certainly one that's in demand here. And certainly the transformation of the telecom industry is, there's a lot of conundrums that I was hearing going on today, kind of chicken and egg scenarios. But Dave, you had a chance to walk around the show floor. We were here interviewing all day. What were some of the things that you saw that really stuck out to you? >> I think I was struck by how much attention was being paid to private 5G networks. You sort of read between the lines and it appears as though people kind of accept that the big incumbent telecom players are going to be slower to move. And this idea of things like open RAN where you're leveraging open protocols in a stack to deliver more agility and more value. So it sort of goes back to the generalized IT discussion of moving to cloud for agility. It appears as though a lot of players realize that the wild wild west, the real opportunity, is in the private sphere. So it's really interesting to see how that works, how 5G implemented into an environment with wifi how that actually works. It's really interesting. >> So it's, obviously when you talk to companies like Dell, I haven't hit HPE yet. I'm going to go over there and check out their booth. They got an analyst thing going on but it's really early days for them. I mean, they started in this business by taking an X86 box, putting a name on it, you know, that sounded like it was edged, throwing it over, you know, the wall. That's sort of how they all started in this business. And now they're, you know, but they knew they had to form partnerships. They had to build purpose-built systems. Now with 16 G out, you're seeing that. And so it's still really early days, talking about O RAN, open RAN, the open RAN alliance. You know, it's just, I mean, not even, the game hasn't even barely started yet but we heard from Dish today. They're trying to roll out a massive 5G network. Rakuten is really focused on sort of open RAN that's more reliable, you know, or as reliable as the existing networks but not as nearly as huge a scale as Dish. So it's going to take a decade for this to evolve. >> Which is surprising to the average consumer to hear that. Because as far as we know 5G has been around for a long time. We've been talking about 5G, implementing 5G, you sort of assume it's ubiquitous but the reality is it is just the beginning. >> Yeah. And you know, it's got a fake 5G too, right? I mean you see it on your phone and you're like, what's the difference here? And it's, you know, just, >> Dave N.: What does it really mean? >> Right. And so I think your point about private is interesting, the conversation Dave that we had earlier, I had throughout, hey I don't think it's a replacement for wifi. And you said, "well, why not?" I guess it comes down to economics. I mean if you can get the private network priced close enough then you're right. Why wouldn't it replace wifi? Now you got wifi six coming in. So that's a, you know, and WiFi's flexible, it's cheap, it's good for homes, good for offices, but these private networks are going to be like kickass, right? They're going to be designed to run whatever, warehouses and robots, and energy drilling facilities. And so, you know the economics I don't think are there today but maybe they can be at volume. >> Maybe at some point you sort of think of today's science experiment becoming the enterprise-grade solution in the future. I had a chance to have some conversations with folks around the show. And I think, and what I was surprised by was I was reminded, frankly, I wasn't surprised. I was reminded that when we start talking about 5G, we're talking about spectrum that is managed by government entities. Of course all broadcast, all spectrum, is managed in one way or another. But in particular, you can't simply put a SIM in every device now because there are a lot of regulatory hurdles that have to take place. So typically what these things look like today is 5G backhaul to the network, communication from that box to wifi. That's a huge improvement already. So yeah, my question about whether, you know, why not put a SIM in everything? Maybe eventually, but I think, but there are other things that I was not aware of that are standing in the way. >> Your point about spectrum's an interesting one though because private networks, you're going to be able to leverage that spectrum in different ways, and tune it essentially, use different parts of the spectrum, make it programmable so that you can apply it to that specific use case, right? So it's going to be a lot more flexible, you know, because I presume the needs spectrum needs of a hospital are going to be different than, you know, an agribusiness are going to be different than a drilling, you know, unit, offshore drilling unit. And so the ability to have the flexibility to use the spectrum in different ways and apply it to that use case, I think is going to be powerful. But I suspect it's going to be expensive initially. I think the other thing we talked about is public policy and regulation, and it's San Ji Choha brought up the point, is telcos have been highly regulated. They don't just do something and ask for permission, you know, they have to work within the confines of that regulated environment. And there's a lot of these greenfield companies and private networks that don't necessarily have to follow those rules. So that's a potential disruptive force. So at the same time, the telcos are spending what'd we hear, a billion, a trillion and a half over the next seven years? Building out 5G networks. So they got to figure out, you know how to get a payback on that. They'll get it I think on connectivity, 'cause they have a monopoly but they want more. They're greedy. They see the over, they see the Netflixes of the world and the Googles and the Amazons mopping up services and they want a piece of that action but they've never really been good at it. >> Well, I've got a question for both of you. I mean, what do you think the odds are that by the time the Shangri La of fully deployed 5G happens that we have so much data going through it that effectively it feels exactly the same as 3G? What are the odds? >> That's a good point. Well, the thing that gets me about 5G is there's so much of it on, if I go to the consumer side when we're all consumers in our daily lives so much of it's marketing hype. And, you know all the messaging about that, when it's really early innings yet they're talking about 6G. What does actual fully deployed 5G look like? What is that going to enable a hospital to achieve or an oil refinery out in the middle of the ocean? That's something that interests me is what's next for that? Are we going to hear that at this event? >> I mean, walking around, you see a fair amount of discussion of, you know, the internet of things. Edge devices, the increase in connectivity. And again, what I was surprised by was that there's very little talk about a sim card in every one of those devices at this point. It's like, no, no, no, we got wifi to handle all that but aggregating it back into a central network that's leveraging 5G. That's really interesting. That's really interesting. >> I think you, the odds of your, to go back to your question, I think the odds are even money, that by the time it's all built out there's going to be so much data and so much new capability it's going to work similarly at similar speeds as we see in the networks today. You're just going to be able to do so many more things. You know, and your video's going to look better, the graphics are going to look better. But I think over the course of history, this is what's happening. I mean, even when you go back to dial up, if you were in an AOL chat room in 1996, it was, you know, yeah it took a while. You're like, (screeches) (Lisa laughs) the modem and everything else, but once you were in there- >> Once you're there, 2400 baud. >> It was basically real time. And so you could talk to your friends and, you know, little chat room but that's all you could do. You know, if you wanted to watch a video, forget it, right? And then, you know, early days of streaming video, stop, start, stop, start, you know, look at Amazon Prime when it first started, Prime Video was not that great. It's sort of catching up to Netflix. But, so I think your point, that question is really prescient because more data, more capability, more apps means same speed. >> Well, you know, you've used the phrase over the top. And so just just so we're clear so we're talking about the same thing. Typically we're talking about, you've got, you have network providers. Outside of that, you know, Netflix, internet connection, I don't need Comcast, right? Perfect example. Well, what about the over the top that's coming from direct satellite communications with devices. There are times when I don't have a signal on my, happens to be an Apple iPhone, when I get a little SOS satellite logo because I can communicate under very limited circumstances now directly to the satellite for very limited text messaging purposes. Here at the show, I think it might be a Motorola device. It's a dongle that allows any mobile device to leverage direct satellite communication. Again, for texting back to the 2,400 baud modem, you know, days, 1200 even, 300 even, go back far enough. What's that going to look like? Is that too far in the future to think that eventually it's all going to be over the top? It's all going to be handset to satellite and we don't need these RANs anymore. It's all going to be satellite networks. >> Dave V.: I think you're going to see- >> Little too science fiction-y? (laughs) >> No, I, no, I think it's a good question and I think you're going to see fragments. I think you're going to see fragmentation of private networks. I think you're going to see fragmentation of satellites. I think you're going to see legacy incumbents kind of hanging on, you know, the cable companies. I think that's coming. I think by 2030 it'll, the picture will be much more clear. The question is, and I think it's come down to the innovation on top, which platform is going to be the most developer friendly? Right, and you know, I've not heard anything from the big carriers that they're going to be developer friendly. I've heard "we have proprietary data that we're going to charge access for and developers are going to have to pay for that." But I haven't heard them saying "Developers, developers, developers!" You know, Steve Bomber running around, like bend over backwards for developers, they're asking the developers to bend over. And so if a network can, let's say the satellite network is more developer friendly, you know, you're going to see more innovation there potentially. You know, or if a dish network says, "You know what? We're going after developers, we're going after innovation. We're not going to gouge them for all this network data. Rather we're going to make the platform open or maybe we're going to do an app store-like model where we take a piece of the action after they succeed." You know, take it out of the backend, like a Silicon Valley VC as opposed to an East Coast VC. They're not going to get you in the front end. (Lisa laughs) >> Well, you can see the sort of disruptive forces at play between open RAN and the legacy, call it proprietary stack, right? But what is the, you know, if that's sort of a horizontal disruptive model, what's the vertically disruptive model? Is it private networks coming in? Is it a private 5G network that comes in that says, "We're starting from the ground up, everything is containerized. We're going to go find people at KubeCon who are, who understand how to orchestrate with Kubernetes and use containers in microservices, and we're going to have this little 5G network that's going to deliver capabilities that you can't get from the big boys." Is there a way to monetize that? Is there a way for them to be disrupted, be disruptive, or are these private 5G networks that everybody's talking about just relegated to industrial use cases where you're just squeezing better economics out of wireless communication amongst all your devices in your factory? >> That's an interesting question. I mean, there are a lot of those smart factory industrial use cases. I mean, it's basically industry 4.0 use cases. But yeah, I don't count the cloud guys out. You know, everybody says, "oh, the narrative is, well, the latency of the cloud." Well, not if the cloud is at the edge. If you take a local zone and put storage, compute, and data right next to each other and the cloud model with the cloud APIs, and then you got an asynchronous, you know, connection back. I think that's a reasonable model. I think the cloud guys figured out developers, right? Pretty well. Certainly Microsoft and, and Amazon and Google, they know developers. I don't see any reason why they can't bring their model to the edge. So, and that's really disruptive to the legacy telco guys, you know? So they have to be careful. >> One step closer to my dream of eliminating the word "cloud" from IT lexicon. (Lisa laughs) I contend that it has always been IT, and it will always be IT. And this whole idea of cloud, what is cloud? If AWS, for example, is delivering hardware to the edge where it needs to be, is that cloud? Do we go back to the idea that cloud is an operational model and not a question of physical location? I hope we get to that point. >> Well, what's Apex and GreenLake? Apex is, you know, Dell's as a service. GreenLake is- >> HPE. >> HPE's as a service. That's outposts. >> Dave N.: Right. >> Yeah. >> That's their outpost. >> Yeah. >> Well AWS's position used to be, you know, to use them as a proxy for hyperscale cloud. We'll just, we'll grow in a very straight trajectory forever on the back of net new stuff. Forget about the old stuff. As James T. Kirk said of the Klingons, "let them die." (Lisa laughs) As far as the cloud providers were concerned just, yeah, let, let that old stuff go away. Well then they found out, there came a point in time where they realized there's a lot of friction and stickiness associated with that. So they had to deal with the reality of hybridity, if that's the word, the hybrid nature of things. So what are they doing? They're pushing stuff out to the edge, so... >> With the same operating model. >> With the same operating model. >> Similar. I mean, it's limited, right? >> So you see- >> You can't run a lot of database on outpost, you can run RES- >> You see this clash of Titans where some may have written off traditional IT infrastructure vendors, might have been written off as part of the past. Whereas hyperscale cloud providers represent the future. It seems here at this show they're coming head to head and competing evenly. >> And this is where I think a company like Dell or HPE or Cisco has some advantages in that they're not going to compete with the telcos, but the hyperscalers will. >> Lisa: Right. >> Right. You know, and they're already, Google's, how much undersea cable does Google own? A lot. Probably more than anybody. >> Well, we heard from Google and Microsoft this morning in the keynote. It'd be interesting to see if we hear from AWS and then over the next couple of days. But guys, clearly there is, this is a great wrap of day one. And the crazy thing is this is only day one. We've got three more days of coverage, more news, more information to break down and unpack on theCUBE. Look forward to doing that with you guys over the next three days. Thank you for sharing what you saw on the show floor, what you heard from our guests today as we had about 10 interviews. Appreciate your insights and your perspectives and can't wait for tomorrow. >> Right on. >> All right. For Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's day one wrap from MWC 23. We'll see you tomorrow. (relaxing music)

(upbeat music) >> TheCUBE presents UiPath Forward 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Hello and welcome back to TheCUBE's coverage of UiPath Forward 5. We're here in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention Center. This is day two. We're wrapping up Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante. This is the fourth time theCUBE has been at UiPath Forward. And we've seen the transformation of the company from, essentially, what was a really interesting and easy to adopt point product to now one through acquisitions, IPO, has made a number of enhancements to its platform. David Cardenas is here. Deputy Director of Operations for County of Los Angeles, the Department of Public Health. David, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me on guys. Appreciate it. >> So what is your role? What does it have to do with automation? >> So I had been, actually started off in the IT space within the public health. Had served as a CIO previously, but now been moving into broader operations. And I basically manage all of the back office operations for the department, HR, IT, finance, all that. >> So you've had a wild ride in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, I think, like I've been talking earlier, it's just been, the last two years have just been horrendous. It's been a really difficult experience for us. >> Yeah, and I mean, the scars are there, and maybe permanently. But it also had major effects on organizations, on operations that, again, seem to be permanent. How would you describe the situation in your organization? >> So I think it, the urgency that came along with the pandemic response, kind of required us to look at things, you know, differently. We had to be, realize we had to be a lot more nimble than when we were and try to figure out how to enhance our operations. But really look at the core of what we're doing and figure out how it is to be more efficient. So I think we've kind of seen it as an opportunity to really examine ourselves a little bit more deeply and see what things we need to do to kind of, to fix our operations and get things on a better path. >> You know, I think a lot of organizations we talked to say that. But I want to understand how you handle this is, you didn't have time to sit back in the middle of the pandemic. >> Yeah. >> And then as you exit, what I call the isolation economy, people are so burned out, you know? So how do you deal with that organizational trauma? Say, okay now, let's sit back and think about this. Do people, are they eager to do so? Do they have the appetite for it? What's that dynamic like? >> So I think certainly there's a level of exhaustion inside the organization. I can't say that there isn't because it's just been, you know, two years of 24/7/365 kind of work. And that's tough on any organization. But I think what we realize is that there's, you know, we need to move into action quickly 'cause we don't know what's going to come next, right? And we're expecting that this is just a sign of what's to come and that we're just at the start of that stage of, we're just going to see a lot more outbreaks, we're going to see a lot more conditions kind of hitting us. And if we're not prepared for that, we're not going to be able to respond for the, and preserve the health and safety of our citizens, right? So I think we're taking a very active, like, look at these opportunities and see what we've done and say how do we now make the changes that we made in response to the pandemic permanent so that the next time this comes at us, we won't have to be struggling the way that we were to try to figure things out because we'll have such a better foundation in place to be able to move things forward. >> I mean, I've never served in the military, but I imagine that when you're in the military, you're always prepared for some kind of, you know, in your world, code red, right? >> Yeah. >> So it's like this code red culture. And that seems to have carried through, right? People are, you know, constantly aware that, wow. We got caught off guard and we don't want that to happen again. Because that was a big part of the trauma was just the unknown- >> Right. >> and the lack of preparedness. So thinking about technology and its role in helping you to prepare for that type of uncertainty. Can you describe how you're applying technology to prepare for the next unknown? >> So I think, so that first part of what you said, I think the difficulty we've always had in the public health side is that there's the, generally the approach to healthcare is very reactionary, right? Your first interface with the healthcare system is, "I'm going to go see my doctor; I'm going to go to the hospital." The work that we do in public health is to try to do everything we can to keep you out of that, right? So it's broad-based messaging, social media now is going to put us out there. But also, to be able to surveil disease in a different way. And so the holy grail for us in healthcare has always been, at least on the public health side, has been to try to see how can we tap in more actively that when you go see the doctor or when you go to the hospital, how can I get access to that information very, very quickly so that I know, and can see, and surveil my entire county in my jurisdiction and know, oh, there's an outbreak of disease happening in this section of the county. We're 10 million people with, you know, hundreds of square miles inside of LA. There are places where we can see very, you know, specific targets that we know we have to hit. But the data's a little stale and we find out several months after. We need to figure out a way to do that more actively. Technology's going to be our path to be able to capture that information more actively and come up on something a little bit, so we can track things faster and be able to respond more quickly. So that's our focus for all our technology implementations, automation like UiPath has offered us and other things, is around how to gather that information more quickly and put that into action so we can do quick interventions. >> People have notoriously short memories. Please tell me (chuckles) any of the friction that you may have experienced in years past before the pandemic. That those friction points where people are thinking, "Eh, what are the odds?" >> Yeah. "Eh, I've got finite budget, I think I'm going to spend it on this thing over here." Do you, are you able to still ride sort of the wave of mind share at this point when putting programs together for the future? >> So whatever friction was there during the pandemic wiped away. I mean, we had amazing collaboration with the medical provider community, our hospital partners. The healthcare system in LA was working very closely with us to make sure that we were responding. And there is that wave that we are trying to make sure that we use this as an opportunity to kind of ride it so that we can implement all the things that we want. 'Cause we don't know how long that's going to last us. The last time that I saw anything this large was after the anthrax attacks and the bioterrorism attacks that we had after 9/11. >> How interesting. >> Public health was really in lens at that point. And we had a huge infusion of funding, a lot of support from stakeholders, both politically and within the healthcare system. And we were able to make some large steps in movement at that point. This feels the same but in a larger scale because now it touched every part of the infrastructure. And we saw how society really had to react to what was going on in a different way than anyone has ever prepared for. And so now is we think is a time where we know that people are making more investments. And our success is going to be their success in the longterm. >> And you have to know that expectations are now set- >> Extremely high. >> at a completely different level, right? >> Yes, absolutely. >> There is no, "Oh, we don't have enough PPE." >> Correct. >> Right? >> David: Correct. >> The the expectation level is, hey, you should have learned from all of- >> We should have it; we can deliver it, We'll have it at the ready when we need to provide it. Yes, absolutely. >> Okay, so I sort of mentioned, we're, David cubed on theCUBE (all laughing). So three Daves. You spoke today at the conference? >> Actually I'm speaking later actually in the session in an hour or so. >> Oh Okay. My understanding is that you've got this concept of putting humans at the center of the automation. What does that mean? Why is that important? Help us understand that. >> So I think what we found in the crisis is that the high demand for information was something we hadn't seen before, right? We're one of the largest media markets in the United States. And what we really had trouble with is trying to figure out how to serve the residents, to provide them the information that we needed to provide to them. And so what we had traditionally done is press releases, you know, just general marketing campaigns, billboards, trying to send our message out. And when you're talking about a pandemic where on a daily basis, hour-by-hour people wanted to know what was going on in their local communities. Like, we had to change the way that we focused on. So we started thinking about, what is the information that the residents of our county need? And how can we set up an infrastructure to sustain the feeding of that? Because if we can provide more information, people will make their own personal decisions around their personal risk, their personal safety measures they need to take, and do so more actively. More so than, you know, one of us going on camera to say, "This is what you should do." They can look for themselves and look at the data that's in front of them and be able to make those choices for themselves, right? And so we needed to make sure that everything that we were doing wasn't built around feeding it to our political stakeholders, which are important stakeholders. We needed to make sure that they're aware and are messaging out, and our leadership are aware. But it's what could we give the public to be able to make them have access to information that we were collecting on an every single day basis to be able to make the decisions for their lives. And so the automation was key to that. We were at the beginning of the pandemic just had tons and tons of resources that we were throwing at the problem that was, our systems were slow, we didn't have good ability to move data back and forth between our systems, and we needed a stop-gap solution to really fill that need and be able to make the data cycles to meet the data cycles. We had basically every day had to deliver reports and analytics and dashboards by like 10 o'clock in the morning because we knew that the 12 an hour and the five-hour news cycles were going to hit and the press were going to then take those and message out. And the public started to kind of come in at that same time and look at 10 and 11 o'clock and 12 o'clock. >> Yeah. >> We could see it from how many hits were hitting our website, looking for that information. So when we failed and had a cycle where that data cycle didn't work and we couldn't deliver, the public would let us know, the press would let us know, the stakeholders would let us know. We had never experienced anything like that before, right. Where people had like this voracious appetite for the information. So we needed to have a very bulletproof process to make sure that every single 24 hours we were delivering that data, making it available at the ready. >> Software robots enabled that. >> Exactly. >> Okay. And so how were you able to implement that so quickly within such a traumatic environment? >> So I think, I guess necessity is always the mother of invention. It kind of drove us to go real quickly to look at what we had. We had data entry operations set up where we had dozens and dozens of people whose sole job in life on a 24-hour cycle was to receive medical reports that we we're getting, interview data that's coming from our case interviews, hospitalization data that was coming in through all these different channels. And it was all coming in in various forms. And they were entering that into our systems of record. And that's what we were using, extracts from that system of record, what was using to generate the data analyses in our systems and our dashboards. And so we couldn't rely on those after a while because the data was coming in at such high volume. There wasn't enough data entry staff to be able to fit the need, right? And so we needed to replace those humans and take them out of that data entry cycle, pop in the bots. And so what we started to look at is, let's pick off the, where it is that that data entry cycle starts and see what we could do to kind of replace that cycle. And we started off with a very discreet workload that was focused on some of our case interview data that was being turned into PDFs that somebody was using to enter into our systems. And we said, "Well before you do that," since we can't import into the systems 'cause it wasn't working, the import utilities weren't working. We got 'em into simple Excel spreadsheets, mapped those to the fields in our systems and let the bots do that over and over again. And we just started off with that one-use case and just tuned it and went cycle after cycle. The bots just got better and better to the point where we had almost like 95% success rates on each submission of data transactions that we did every day. >> Okay, and you applied that automation, I don't know, how many bots was it roughly? >> We're now at like 30; we started with about five. >> Okay, oh, interesting. So you started with five and you applied 'em to this specific use case to handle the velocity and volume of data- >> Correct. >> that was coming in. But that's obviously dynamic and it's changed. >> Absolutely. >> I presume it's shifted to other areas now. So how did you take what you learned there and then apply it to other use cases in other parts of the organization? >> So, fortunately for us, the process that was being used to capture the information to generate the dashboards and the analyses for the case interview data, which is what we started with- >> Yeah. >> Was essentially being used the same for the hospitalization data that we were getting and for tracking deaths as they were coming in as well. And so the bots essentially were just, we just took one process, take the same bots, copy them over essentially, and had them follow the very same process. We didn't try to introduce any different workflow than what was being done for the first one so we could replicate quickly. So I think it was lucky for us a lot- >> Dave V.: I was going to say, was that luck or by design? >> It was the same people doing the same analyses, right? So in the end they were thinking about how to be efficient themselves. So they kind of had coalesced around a similar process. And so it was kind of like fortunate, but it was by design in terms of how they- >> Dave V.: It was logical to them. >> Logical to them to make it. >> Interesting. >> So for us to be able to insert the bots became pretty easy on the front end. It's just now as we're trying to now expand to other areas that were now encountering like unique processes that we just can't replicate that quickly. We're having to like now dig into. >> So how are you handling that? First of all, how are you determining which processes? Is it sort of process driven? Is it data driven? How do you determine that? >> So obviously right now the focus still is COVID. So the the priorities scale that we've set internally for analyzing those opportunities really is centered around, you know, which things are really going to help our pandemic response, right? We're expecting another surge that's going to happen probably in the next couple of weeks. That'll probably take us through December. Hopefully, at that point, things start to calm down. But that means high-data volume again; these same process. So we're looking at optimizing the processes that we have, what can we do to make those cycles better, faster, you know, what else can we add? The data teams haven't stopped to try to figure out how else can they turn out new data reports, new data analysis, to give us a different perspective on the new variants and the new different outbreaks and hotspots that are popping up. And so we also have to kind of keep up with where they're going on these data dashboards. So they're adding more data into these reports so we know we have to optimize that. And then there's these kind of tangential work. So for example, COVID brought about, unfortunately, a lot of domestic violence reports. And so we have a lot of domestic violence agencies that we work with and that we have interactions with and to monitor their work, we have certain processes. So that's kind of like COVID-adjacent. But it's because it's such a very critical task, we're looking at how we can kind of help in those processes and areas. Same thing in like in our substance abuse area. We have substance use disorder treatment services that we provide. And we're delivering those at a higher rate because COVID kind of created more of a crisis than we would've liked. And so that's how we're prioritizing. It's really about what is the social need, what does the community need, and how can we put the technology work in those areas? >> So how do you envision the future of automation in your organization and the future of your organization? What does that look like? Paint a picture for us. >> So I'm hoping that it really does, you know, so we're going to take everything that's COVID related in the disease control areas, both in terms of our laboratory operations, in terms of our clinic operations, the way we respond, vaccination campaigns, things of that nature. And we're going to look at it to see what can efficiencies can we do there because it's a natural outgrowth of everything we've done on COVID up to this point. So, you know, it's almost like it's as simple as you're just replicating it with another disease. The disease might have different characteristics, but the work process that we follow is very similar. It's not like we're going to change everything and do something completely different for a respiratory condition as we would for some other type of foodborne condition or something else that might happen. So we certainly see very easy opportunities to just to grow out what we've already done in terms of the processes is to do that. So that's wave one, is really focus on that grow out. The second piece I think is to look at these kind of other general kind of community-based type of operations and see what operations we can do there to kind of implement some improvements there. And then I'm certainly in my new role of, in Deputy Director of Operation, I'm a CIO before. Now that I'm in this operations role, I have access to the full administrative apparatus for the department. And believe me, there's enough to keep me busy there. (Dave V. Laughing) And so that's going to be kind of my third prong is to kind of look at the implement there. >> Awesome. Go ahead, Dave. >> Yeah, so, this is going to be taking a step back, kind of a higher level view. If we could direct the same level of rigor and attention towards some other thing that we've directed towards COVID, if you could snap your fingers and make that happen, what would that thing be in the arena of public health in LA County in particular, or if you want California, United States. What is something that you feel maybe needs more attention that it's getting right now? >> So I think I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I think it's the thing we've been always been trying to get to is how to really become just very intentional about how we share data more actively, right? I don't have to know everything about you, but there are certain things I care about when you go to the doctor for that doctor and that physician to tell me. Our physicians, our healthcare system as you know, is always under a lot of pressure. Doctors don't have the time to sit down and write a form out for me and tell me everything that's going on. During COVID they did because they were, they cared about their patients so much and knew, I need to know what's going on at every single moment. And if I don't tell you what's going on in my office, you'll never know and can't tell us what's going on in the community. So they had a vested interest in telling us. But on a normal day-to-day, they don't have the time for that. I got to replace that. We got to make sure that when we get to, not me only, but everyone in this public health community has to be focused and working with our healthcare partners to automate the dissemination and the distribution of information so that I have the information at my fingers, that I can then tell you, "Here's what's going on in your local community," down to your neighborhood, down to your zip code, your census tracked, down to your neighbors' homes. We'll be able to tell you, "This is your risk. Here are the things that are going on. This is what you have to watch out for." And the more that we can be more that focused and laser-focused on meeting that goal, we will be able to do our job more effectively. >> And you can do that while preserving people's privacy. >> Privacy, absolutely. >> Yeah, absolutely. But if people are informed then they can make their own decisions. >> Correct. >> And they're not frustrated at the systems. David, we got to wrap. >> Sure. >> But maybe you can help us. What's your impression of the, first of all, is this your first Forward? You've been to others? >> This is my first time. >> Okay. >> My first time. >> What's your sort of takeaway when you go back to the office or home and people say, "Hey, how was the show? What, what'd you learn?" What are you going to say? >> Well, from just seeing all the partners here and kind of seeing all the different events I've been able to go to and the sessions there's, you don't know many times I've gone to and say, "We've got to be doing that." And so there's certainly these opportunities for, you know, more AI, more automation opportunities that we have not, we just haven't even touched on really. I think that we really need to do that. I have to be able to, as a public institution at some point our budgets get capped. We only have so much that we're going to receive. Even riding this wave, there's only so much we're going to be able to get. So we have to be very efficient and use our resources more. There's a lot more that we can do with AI, a lot more with the tools that we saw, some of the work product that are coming out at this conference that we think we can directly apply to kind of take the humans out of that, their traditional roles, get them doing higher level work so I can get the most out of them and have this other more mundane type of work, just have the systems just do it. I don't need anybody doing that necessarily, that work. I need to be able to leverage them for other higher level capabilities. >> Well thank you for that. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and really appreciate. Dave- >> It's been great talking to you guys, thank you. >> Dave, you know, I love software shows because the business impact is so enormous and I especially love cool software shows. You know, this first of all, the venue. 3,500 people here. Very cool venue. I like the fact that it's not like booth in your face, booth competition. I mean I love VMware, VMworld, VMware Explore. But it's like, "My booth is bigger than your booth." This is really nice and clean, and it's all about the experience. >> A lot of steak, not as much sizzle. >> Yeah, definitely. >> A lot of steak. >> And the customer content at the UiPath events is always outstanding. But we are entering a new era for UiPath, and we're talking. We heard a lot about the Enterprise platform. You know, the big thing is this company's been in this quarterly shock-lock since last April when it went public. And it hasn't all been pretty. And so new co-CEO comes in, they've got, you know, resetting priorities around financials, go to market, they've got to have profitable growth. So watching that that closely. But also product innovation so the co-CEOs will be able to split that up, split their duties up. Daniel Dines the product visionary, product guru. Rob Enslin, you know- making the operations work. >> Operations execution business, yeah. >> We heard that Carl Eschenbach did the introduction. Carl's a major operator, wanted that DNA into the company. 'Cause they got to keep product innovation. And I want to, I want to see R&D spending, stay relatively high. >> Product innovation, but under the heading of platform. And that's the key thing is just not being that tool set. The positioning has been, I think, accurate that, you know, over history, we started with these RPA tools and now we've moved into business process automation and now we're moving into new frontiers where, where truly, AI and ML are being leveraged. I love the re-infer story about going in and using natural national (chuckles) national, natural language processing. I can't even say it, to go through messaging. That's sort of a next-level of intelligence to be able to automate things that couldn't be automated before. So that whole platform story is key. And they seem to have made a pretty good case for their journey into platform as far as I'm concerned. >> Well, yeah, to me again. So it's always about the customers, want to come to an event like this, you listen to what they say in the keynotes and then you listen to what the customers say. And there's a very strong alignment in the UiPath community between, you know, the marketing and the actual implementation. You know, marketing's always going to be ahead. But, we saw this a couple of years ago with platform. And now we're seeing it, you know, throughout the customer base, 10,000+ customers. I think this company could have, you know, easily double, tripled, maybe even 10x that. All right, we got to wrap. Dave Nicholson, thank you. Two weeks in a row. Good job. And let's see. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Check out thecube.net; wikibon.com has the research. We'll be on the road as usual. theCUBE, you can follow us. UiPath Forward 5, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're out and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>The cube is back at Vemo 2022. I was happy to be live. Dave ante, Dave Nicholson and Dave Russell three Daves. Dave is the vice president of enterprise strategy at Veeam. Great to see you again, my friend. Thanks for coming >>On. Uh, it's always a pleasure. And Dave, I can remember your name. I can't remember >>Your name as well. <laugh> so wow. How many years has it been now? I mean, add on COVID is four years now. >>Yeah, well, three, three solid three. Yeah, Fallon blue. Uh, last year, Miami little secret. We're gonna go there again next year. >>Okay, so you joined Veeam >>Three. Oh, me four. Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah. Four is four, right? Okay. Wow. >>Um, time flies, man. >>Interesting. What your background, former analyst analyze your time at Veeam and the market and the changes in the customer base. What, what have you seen? What are the big takeaways? Learnings? >>Yeah. You know, what's amazing to me is we've done a lot more research now, ourselves, right? So things that we intuitively thought, things that we experienced by talking to customers, and of course our partners, we can now actually prove. So what I love is that we take the exact same product and we go down market up market. We go across geographies, we go different verticals and we can sell that same exact product to all constituencies because the differences between them are not that great. If it was the three Dave company or the 3m company, what you're looking for is reliable recovery, ease of use those things just transcend. And I think there used to be a time when we thought enterprise means something very different than mid-market than does SMB. And certainly your go to market plans are that way, but not the product plans. >>So the ransomware study, we had Jay buff on earlier, we were talking about it and we just barely scratched the surface. But how were you able to get people to converse with you in such detail? Was it, are you using phone surveys? Are you, are, are you doing web surveys? Are you doing a combination? Deep >>Dives? Yeah. So it was web based and it was anonymous on both ends, meaning no one knew VE was asking the questions. And also we made the promise that none of your data is ever gonna get out, not even to say a large petroleum company, right. Everything is completely anonymized. And we were able to screen people out very effectively, a lot of screener questions to make sure we're dealing with the right person. And then we do some data integrity checking on the back end. But it's amazing if you give people an opportunity, they're actually very willing to tell you about their experience as long as there's no sort of ramification about putting the company or themselves at risk. >>So when I was at IDC, we did a lot of surveys, tons of surveys. I'm sure you did a lot of surveys at Gartner. And we would look at vendor surveys like, eh, well, this kind of the questions are rigged or it's really self-serving. I don't sense that in your surveys, you you've, you've always, you've still got that independent analyst gene. Is that, I mean, it's gotta be, is it by design? Is it just happen that ransomware is a topic that just sort of lends itself to that. Maybe you could talk about your philosophy there. >>Yeah. Well, two part answer really, because it's definitely by design. We, we really want the information. I mean, we're using this to fuel or inform our understanding of the market, what we should build next, what we should message next. So we really want the right data. So we gotta ask the right questions. So Jason, our colleague, Julie, myself, we work really hard on trying to make sure we're not leading the witness down a certain path. We're not trying to prove our own thesis. We're trying to understand what the market really is thinking. And when it comes to ransomware, we wanna know what we don't know, meaning we found a few surprises along the way. A lot of it was confirmational, but that's okay too. As long as you can back that up, cuz then it's not just Avenger's opinion. Of course, a vendor that says that they can help you do something has data that says, they think you uni have a problem with this, but now we can actually point to it and have a more interesting kind of partnership conversation about if you are like 1000 other enterprises globally, this may be what you're seeing. >>And there are no wrong answers there. Meaning even if they say that is absolutely not what we're seeing. Great. Let's have that conversation that's specific to you. But if you're not sure where to start, we've got a whole pool of data to help guide that conversation. >>Yeah. Shout out to Julie Webb does a great job. She's a real pro and yes. And, and really makes sure that, like you say, you want the real, real answers. So what were some of the things that you were excited about or to learn about? Um, in the survey again, we, we touched just barely touched on it in 15 minutes with Jason, but what, what's your take? Well, >>Two that I'd love to point out. I mean, unfortunately Jason probably mentioned this one, you know, only 19% answered when we said, did you pay the ransom? And only 19% said, no, I didn't pay the ransom. And I was a hundred percent successful in my recovery. You know, we're in Vegas, one out of five odds. That's not good. Right? That's a go out of business spot. That's not the kind of 80 20 you want to hear. That's not exactly exactly. Now more concerning to me is 5% said no ransom was asked for. And you know, my phrase on that is that's, that's an arson event. It's not an extortion event. Right. I just came to do harm. That's really troubling. Now there's a huge percentage there that said we paid the ransom about 24% said we paid the ransom and we still couldn't restore the data. So if you add up that 24 in that five, that 29%, that was really scary to me. >>Yeah. So you had the 19%. Okay. That's scary enough. But then you had the wrecking ball, right? Ah, we're just gonna, it's like the mayhem commercial. Yes. Yeah. See ya. Right. Okay. So <laugh>, that's, that's wild. So we've heard a lot about, um, ransomware. The thing that interests me is, and we've had a big dose of ransomware as analysts in these last, you know, 12, 18 months and more. But, but, but it's really escalated. Yeah. Seems like, and by the way, you're sharing this data, which is amazing. Right. So I actually want to dig in and steal some of the, the data. I think that's cool. Right? Definitely. You gave us a URL this morning. Um, so, but you, your philosophy is to share the data. So everybody sees it, your customers, your prospects, your competitors, but your philosophy is to why, why are you sharing that data? Why don't you just keep it to yourself and do it quietly with customers? >>Yeah. You know, I think this is such a significant event. No one vendor's gonna solve it all. Realistically, we may be tied for number one in market share statistically speaking, but we have 12.5%. Right. So we're not gonna be able to do greater good if we're keeping that to ourselves. And it's really a notion of this awareness level, just having the conversation and having that more open, even if it's not us, I think is gonna be beneficial. It speaks to the value of backup and why backup is still relevant this day and age. >>I dunno if you're comfortable answering this, but I'll ask anyway, when you were a Gartner analyst, did you get asked about ransomware a lot? >>No. >>Very rarely or never. >>Almost never. Yeah. And that was four years ago. Literally. Like it >>Was a thing back then, right? I mean it wasn't of course prominent, but it was, it was, I guess it wasn't that >>20 16, 20 17, you know, it's, it's interesting because at a couple of levels you have the, um, the willingness of participants to share their stories, which is a classic example of people coming together to fight a common fo. Yeah, yeah. Right. In the best of times, that's what happens. And now you're sharing that information out. One of the reasons why some would argue we've gotten to this place is because day zero exploits have been stockpiled and they haven't been shared. So you go to, you know, you go, you go through the lineage that gets you to not pet cat as an example. Yes. And where did it come from? Hey, it was something that we knew about. Uh, but we didn't share it. Right. We waited until it happened because maybe we thought we could use it in, in some way. It's, it's an, it's an interesting philosophical question. I, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know where, if that's, uh, the third, it's the one, the third rail you don't want to touch, but basically we're, we are, I guess we're just left to sort through whatever, whatever we have to sort through in that regard. But it is interesting left to industry's own devices. It's sharing an openness. >>Yeah. You know, it's, I almost think it's like open source code. Right? I mean, the promise there is together, we can all do something better. And I think that's true with this ransomware research and the rest of the research we do too. We we've freely put it out there. I mean, you can download the link, no problem. Right. And go see the report. We're fine with that. You know, we think it actually is very beneficial. I remember a long time ago, it was actually Sam Adams that said, uh, you know, Hey, there's a lot of craft brewers out there now, you know, is, are you as a craft brewery now? Successful? Are you worried about that? No. We want every craft brewery to be successful because it creates a better awareness. Well, an availability market, it's still Boston reference. >>What did another Boston reference? Yes. Thank you, >>Boston. And what <laugh>. >>Yeah. So, you know, I, I, I feel like we've seen these milestone, you know, watershed events in, in security. I mean, stucks net sort of yeah. Informed us what's possible with nation states, even though it's highly likely that us and Israel were, were behind that, uh, the, the solar winds hack people are still worried about. Yes. Okay. What's next. Even, even something now. And so everybody's now on high alert even, I don't know how close you guys followed it, but the, the, uh, the Okta, uh, uh, breach, which was a fairly benign incident. And technically it was, was very, very limited and very narrow in scope. But CISOs that I talked to were like, we are really paranoid that there's another shoe to drop. What do we do? So the, the awareness is way, way off the charts. It begs the question. What's next. Can you, can you envision, can you stay ahead? It's so hard to stay ahead of the bad guys, but, but how are you thinking about that? What this isn't the end of it from your standpoint? >>No, it's not. And unfortunately it's because there's money to be made, right? And the barrier to entry is relatively low. It's like hiring a Hitman. You know, you don't actually have to even carry out the bad act yourself and get your own hands dirty. And so it's not gonna end, but it it's really security is everyone's responsibility. Veeam is not really a full time security company, but we play a role in that whole ecosystem. And even if you're not in the data center as an employee of a company, you have a role to play in security. You know, don't click that link, lock the door behind you, that type of thing. So how do you stay ahead of it? I think you just continually keep putting a focus on it. It's like performance. You're never gonna be done. There's always something to tune and to work on, but that can be overwhelming. So the positive I try to tell someone is to your point, Dave, look, a lot of these vulnerabilities were known for quite some time. If you were just current on your patch levels, this could have been prevented, right? You could have closed that window. So the thing that I often say is if you can't do everything and probably none of us can do something and then repeat, do it again, try to get a little bit better every period of time. Whether that's every day, every quarter, what case may be, do what you can. >>Yeah. So ransomware obviously very lucrative. So your job is to increase the denominator. So the ROI is lower, right? And that's a, that's a constant game, right? >>Absolutely. It is a crime of opportunity. It's indiscriminate. And oftentimes non-targeted now there are state sponsored events to your point, but largely it's like the fishermen casting the net out into the ocean. No idea with certainty, what's gonna come back. So I'm just gonna keep trying and trying and trying our goal is to basically you wanna be the house on the neighborhood that looks the least inviting. >>We've talked about this. I mean, any, anyone can be a, a, a ransomware as to go in the dark web, ransomware's a service. Oh, I gotta, I can put a stick into a server and a way I go and I get some Bitcoin right. For it. So, so that's, so, so organizations really have to take this seriously. I think they are. Um, well you tell me, I mean, in your discussions with, with, with customers, >>It's changed. Yeah. You know, I would say 18 months ago, there was a subset of customers out there saying vendors, crying Wolf, you know, you're trying to scare us into making a purchase decision or move off of something that we're working with. Now. I think that's almost inverted. Now what we see is people are saying, look, my boss or my boss's boss's boss, and the security team are knocking on my door asking, what are we gonna do? What's our response? You know, how prepared are we? What kind of things do we have in place? What does our backup practice do to support ransomware? The good news though, going back to the awareness side is I feel like we're evangelizing this a little less as an industry. Meaning the security team is well aware of the role that proper backup and availability can play. That was not true. A handful of years ago. >>Well, that's the other thing too, is that your study showed the closer the practitioner was to the problem. Yes. The more problems there were, that's an awareness thing. Yes. That's not a, that's not, oh, just those guys had visibility. I wanna ask you cuz you've You understand from an application view, right. There's only so much Veeam can do. Um, and then the customer has to have processes in place that go beyond just the, the backup and recovery technology. So, so from an application perspective, what are you advising customers where you leave off and they really have to take over this notion of shared responsibility is really extending beyond cloud security. >>Yeah. Uh, the model that I like is interestingly enough, what we see with Caston in the Kubernetes space. Mm-hmm <affirmative> is there, we're selling into two different constituencies, potentially. It's the infrastructure team that they're worried about disaster recovery. They're worried about backup, but it's the app dev DevOps team. Hey, we're worried about creating the application. So we're spending a lot of focus with the casting group to say, great, go after that shift, left crowd, talk to them about a data availability, disaster recovery, by the way you get data movement or migration for free with that. So migration, maybe what you're first interested in on day one. But by doing that, by having this kind of capability, you're actually protecting yourself from day two issues as well. >>Yeah. So Let's see. Um, what haven't we hit on in this study? There was so much data in there. Uh, is that URL, is that some, a private thing that you guys shared >>Or is it no. Absolutely. >>Can, can you share the >>URL? Yeah, absolutely. It's V E E so V two E period am so V with the period between the E and the a forward slash RW 22. So ransomware 22 is the research project. >>So go there, you download the zip file, you get all the graphics. Um, I I'm gonna dig into it, uh, maybe as early as this, this Friday or this weekend, like to sort of expose that, uh it's you guys obviously want this, I think you're right. It's it's it's awareness needs to go up to solve this problem. You know, I don't know if it's ever solvable, but the only approach is to collaborate. Right. So I, I dunno if you're gonna collaborate with your head-to-head competitors, but you're certainly happy to share the data I've seen Dave, some competitors have pivoted from data protection or even data management to security. Yes. I see. I wonder if I could run a premise by, I see that as an adjacency to your business, but not sort of throwing you into the security bucket. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah. You know, certainly respect everything other competitors are doing, you know, and some are getting very, you know, making some good noise and getting picked up on that. However, we're unapologetically a backup company. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we're a backup company. First. We're worried about security. We're worried about, you know, data reuse and supporting shift, left types of things, but we're not gonna apologize for being in the backup availability business, not, not at all. However, there's a role that we can play. Having said that that we're a role. We're a component. If you're in the secondary storage market, like backup or archiving. And you're trying to imply that you're going to help prevent or even head off issues on the primary storage side. That might be a little bit of a stretch. Now, hopefully that can happen that we can go get better as an industry on that. >>But fundamentally we're about ensuring that you're recoverable with reliability and speed when you need it. Whether we're no matter what the issue is, because we like to say ransomware is a disaster. Unfortunately there's other kind of disasters that happen as well. Power failures still happen. Natural issues still occur, et cetera. So all these things have to be accounted for. You know, one of our survey, um, data points basically said all the things that take down a server that you didn't plan on. It's basically humans at the top human error, someone accidentally deleted something and then malicious humans, someone actually came after you, but there's a dozen other things that happened too. So you've gotta prepare for all of that. So I guess what I would end up with saying is you remember back in the centralized data centers, especially the mainframe days, people would say, we're worried about the smoking hole or the smoking crater event. Yeah. Yeah. The probability of a plane crashing into your data bunker was relatively low. That was when it got all the discussion though, what was happening every single day is somebody accidentally deleted a file. And so you need to account on both ends of the spectrum. So we don't wanna over rotate. And we also, we don't want to signal to 450,000 beam customers around the world that we're abandoning you that were not about backup. That's still our core >>Effort. No, it's pretty straightforward. You're just telling people to back up in a way that gives them a certain amount of mitigation yes. Or protection in the event that something happens. And no, I don't remember anything about mainframe. He does though though, much older than me >>EF SMS. So I even know what it stands for. Count key data don't even get me started. So, and, and it wasn't thank you for that answer. I didn't mean to sort of a set up question, but it was more of a strategy question and I wish wish I could put on your analyst hat because I, I feel, I'll just say it. I feel as though it's a move to try to get a tailwind. Maybe it's a valuation play. I don't know. But I, I, it resonated with me three years ago when everybody was talking data management and nobody knew what that meant. Data management. I'm like Oracle. >>Right. >>And now it's starting to become a little bit more clear. Um, but Danny Allen stuff and said, it's all about the backup. I think that was one of his keynote messages. So that really resonated with me cuz he said, yeah, it starts with backup and recovery. And that's what, what matters most to these customers. So really was a strategy question. Now maybe it does have valuation impact. Maybe there's a big market there that can be consolidated. You know, uh, we, this morning in the analyst session, we heard about your new CEO's objectives of, you know, grabbing more market share. So, and that's, that's an adjacency. So it's gonna be interesting to see how that plays out far too many security vendors. As, as we know, the backup and recovery space is getting more crowded and that is maybe causing people to sort of shift. I don't know, whatever right. Or left, I guess, shift. Right. I'm not sure, but um, it's gonna be really interesting to watch because this has now become a really hot space after, you know, it's been some really interesting momentum in certain pockets, but now it's everywhere it's coming ubiquitous. So I'll give you the last word Dave on, uh, day one, VEON 20, 22. >>Yeah. Well boy, so many things I could say to kind of land the plane on, but we're just glad to be back in person. It's been three years since we've had a live event in those three years, we've gone from 300,000 customers to 450,000 customers. The release cadence, even in the pandemic has been the greatest in the company's history in 2020, 2021, there's only about three dozen software only companies that have hit a billion dollars and we're one of them. And that, you know, that mission is why hasn't changed and that's why we wanna stay consistent. One of the things Danny always likes to say is, you know, we keep telling the same story because we're not wanting to deviate off of that story and there's more work to be done. And to honors point, you know, Hey, if you have ambitious goals, you're gonna have to look at spreading your wings out a little bit wider, but we're never gonna abandon being a backup. Well, >>It's, it's clear to me, Dave on was not brought in to keep you steady at a billion. I think he's got a site set on five and then who knows what's next? Dave Russell, thanks so much for coming back in the cube. Great to >>See always a pleasure. Thank you. >>All right. That's a wrap for Dave one. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson will be backed tomorrow with a full day of coverage. Check out Silicon angle.com for all the news, uh, youtube.com/silicon angle. You can get these videos. They're all, you know, flying up Wiki bond.com for some of the research in this space. We'll see you tomorrow.

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>No, that, that you guys. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone. Live here on the floor in Las Vegas with Dell tech world 2022 cube coverage. I'm John for, with Dave Volante, Allison Ducey, chief marketing officer executive vice president of Dell technologies. Welcome back to the queue. Thanks for coming back on. Hey Allison. >>Hey. Hi guys. It's so good to see you. I am just so delighted to be on the cube and so delighted to see you both live and in person. >>So three years ago was the last physical event. A lot of virtual, a lot of, probably some scar tissue to share there, but give us the quick highlights here. The, the show format what's new, what's different. >>So I think one of the things I talked to my team about a lot is we've learned so much over the past couple of years. It's really important as we go forward to carry the best of what we've learned over the last two years, combined with the best of in person experiences that I know we all missed. So things that really people wanna do in person training, connection, the birds of the feather sessions and taking the technology and communications skills that we've developed over the last two years and making the event better as well. So, you know, Dave and I were talking about how do you extend the reach of the event beyond just three days? How do you engage with the global audience? Not all of whom are back to traveling all of the time. And so we think the impact of this event is the biggest and best that it's ever been. And it's not about going back to 2019. It's about the best of the last couple of years and the human connection. I think we've all been missing. >>So I remember last time here, here, we, we asked, we're coming up to state with Ashton Kucher and I told you about my man crush. And now you bring a on Matthew, which was an amazing interview. I mean, I don't really, no, I mean, I love his work, but wow. What a thoughtful and intelligent individual, and you obviously did a great job, you know, carrying that interview. So tremendous. I mean, you, you know him, right? He's like in your >>He's, he's an Austin Guy. He's really committed it to Austin. He's really committed to the university of Texas. We've done a number of things with him together. So we do know him and still, that was probably the most in depth conversation that we'd ever had with him. And it was so much >>Fun. Let me wait. So, okay. So I gotta make you laugh. So at the, after you were done, you said, okay, let's open it up for audience questions. Now I was really intimidated even though I to get up in front of the audience and ask questions, but I didn't know what to ask him. And I figured there'd be a long line of people asking the question. >>There was not. >>So I saw that and I'm like, I don't know what to ask 'em. So I texted my wife and my daughter who love 'em. They're like, all right. All right. And so my wife texted me a question, but it was too late. The, the session had ended. So I'm gonna ask you her question and ask you what, how you think he would've responded and we can >>Refine it. Okay. I'll give it a whirl. Your >>Question was, he's a big proponent of showing up. Okay. I didn't know this. You could ask him about if the definition for him of showing up has changed over time and how does he stay motivated to always show up? And I was like, wow, what a great question. >>That is a great question. And I will tell you as the interviewer, I think lots of people were sort of intimidated. One, one woman even said, this is making me nervous, but here's my question. So as the interviewer, I was looking out at the sea of nobody asking questions, doing scrambling in my head, trying to come up with some more questions, cuz I had already asked all my questions. So I wish you'd been able to get to the stage, uh, get to the mic and ask that question. But here's what I think he would've said. Who knows? Maybe he'll send me a note if I get it wrong. I think he would've said something along the lines of, it's always about being intentional about what's happening in your life at that moment. <affirmative> and so, as he thought about some there's an example he uses in his book. >>I don't remember the name of the movie where he kind of very early in his career where he kind of just winged it and he got to the set and he realized because he was, he thought he was getting over rehearsed. And so he thought I need to go back to the natural moment. And he realized the script was in Spanish and he said, I need six minutes. How is he gonna memorize script in six minutes in Spanish? And I think that was just an interesting example of when he realized that there's a synchronicity between being your natural self and being intentional and being really thoughtful about where you are and what you're doing at that moment. So I think that that intentionality spans his career. It's the moment of interest inspection about where you are in your life and doing brave things like leaving behind a safe, but no longer fulfilling romantic comedy career. So that's what I think he would've said. And >>Bringing that to the moment is where he gets his inspiration. >>I think so. Yeah. >>Yeah. So he's very impressive guy. I didn't read the book yet. It's green light is >>Green lights. Green lights >>Is able the book. So >>I recommend it and I didn't listen to it. I read it. I'm a reader, but I've had many, many, many people tell me that they listen to it. He narrates the book himself. So I think there's some benefit there because you get it truly in his voice. >>Yeah. That's always fun. Yeah. >>Speaking of in the moment, this event has got two things going on in the format you mentioned, but also the content. It is right on point. And a lot of the execs came in Michael and the COOs were both on the cube, interesting poll position you guys have for this. Now you got the marketing angle going on here. How do you throttle this next? What's next? How does it evolve? You got the content, you got the new format, Dell tech world plus digital now combined. What's next? >>I think, I mean, so obviously we are clearly in an inflection point in the technology industry and we've talked a lot about separating the hype from the reality of the day to day of what our customers are doing in their businesses and the problems they're trying to solve. But if you look at what makes us really, uh, I think special and unique is if the, the last number of years we've continued to show up and deliver for our customer tumors, we were there with them over the course of the pandemic. We helped them get their remote workforce up and running and now we're helping them lean into their data center challenges. And I think, for example, the snowflake announcement from earlier this week, this ability to have the best of both worlds and to have your data on premises whilst also benefiting from Snowflake's capabilities. I think that's just a good example of the kind of thing you'll see us do more of, and this intentionality that we're trying to bring to an incredibly complex and fragmented world. So that's what we're doing from a business. And then from a marketing perspective, I think it's just about this stretchy steady drumbeat. It's no longer one moment in time. It is all the moments in time while it's also keeping people's attention. Yeah. Not boring them to death with four hour keynotes. It's >>It's interesting. You know, we, we've been watching you guys for a long time, as you know, and it's interesting. You have such a big story. Now you have the story at the industry positioning of where it is for growth. You also got product innovation, right? Balancing the, the product innovation, which is still evolving. You got edges exploding, the snowflake deal with the new product use cases. There's still the need for the, the nerds, right. So to speak. And then you got the industry leadership, which is happening. So you've got balancing that. How do you thread that needle? How do you tie it all together? How what's, how do you think about that? What's your thought >>Of the things I think is at its simplest. It's not just about what we do. It's also about who we are as a company and you have to do both, right. We have to talk about where we're innovating in our products and our solutions. And it's also really important for us to tell the world who we are and how we show up in the world. And if you think about it, another one of the announcements from this week that I'm really proud of are our solar hubs. And that's a build off of the, uh, solar learning labs working with 25 communities around the world, underserved in terms of access to technology. And so it's, you have to do both sometimes I think in the past we've been just talking about our products cuz we're engineers at heart. And we're proud of that and not talking enough about who we are. I think some companies talk too much about who they are and you're like, well, what do you do exactly? So, you know, the question always is how do you do that? And so there's a believability gap. What we're always striving for is that combination of what we do, who we are. >>So you know, that what we do is really important and there's obviously a lot of very difficult and contentious social issues. Yes. And, and kind of a of follow up there is, is, you know, what's your philosophy on how to handle those? It's presumably what you do, not what you, you say. I mean, you gotta say things as well, and they're gonna be more, you know, we're hearing about it, reading about it, others that are gonna be down the road, how what's your philosophy on how to handle those? >>The first thing is we try to be really thoughtful about what conversations or actually relevant to us. One of the things I watch many companies do is comment on anything, anything, and everything. They sort of run into the fray of the moment and they over comment. And frankly, then I think they don't stand for anything because they're constantly chasing a press cycle, which is pretty vicious and pretty short lived. So we don't think that that serves us. What we do is we look at almost every issue you can imagine. And ahead of time, ahead of time, have the conversation about where are we going to engage? What are the issues that we stand for? And we've got much more intentional, even on our ESG and CSR front, around taking our moonshot goals and making them more practical so that we can be really thoughtful and intentional. Because as you know, at the moment of time, when a crisis hits you, haven't done that work ahead of time. You're probably responding. And you can see that sometimes without naming any names, because everybody knows some of these players are without my even having to say it, someone responding or flip flopping it's cuz they haven't thought about it ahead of time. >>Yeah. And a lot of that comes from the top and the CEO won't stop on Twitter. But so that to me ties in. Yeah. So it ties into the concept of trust. Going back to some of the keynote messages that we heard from Michael you've earned trust in a lot of ways you were there during the pandemic, you know, your products work, et cetera, et cetera, but the way in which you act builds trust doesn't it. And that we've in, I think came across in, in the keynotes. Why such a big theme on trust? I mean you see apple with privacy, doing certain things really doubling down on trust. Can you talk about that? >>I mean, I think it's because it is core to who we are and if you look at the hype cycle around technology, the hype cycle, around companies who can have kind of a moment in the sun and then you find out actually that their business practices weren't very good or they weren't really delivering on the innovation that they were claiming. So they were probably overclaiming at times it has always been core to who we are. What I think we're doing now is just being much more intentional about how important it is to show up that way. That's why I come back to, it's not just what we do, it's who we are and that's why customers choose us. And you hear some of the customer case studies like U S a a like CVS that we use a lot at the moment in time where they needed help managing through the pandemic. We delivered with a consistency that not everybody could provide. And I think provides us the room and the space to really lean into this trust conversation. I >>Love, I love the high level flag. You guys are flying at ESG stores. You're getting in immersed in issues that you're solving for yourselves. So you can understand them and have good positions, but also on digital. Now you have other ways to drive the business. We just started a discord server week before for Dell tech world and already got 8,000 members. And the only thing they really care about about Dell tech world here is what's the monitors, where's the speeds and speeds. Right? They want the speeds and these they're gamers, right? So there's omnichannels everywhere. Right? You have, that's hard, right? So is it a top down? Let, let things fly. Is there intentionality around execution to drive business value? >>I think that, I mean, one of the things that I would say for the company and for its leadership for me personally, is we're generally pretty intentional about most things that we do. I always have an expression that I, I, I don't like to reward a Smith fireman. If the building is on fire, I'm gonna ask you, why is the building on fire? Not, you know, I'll say, are you okay? But then I'll say, why is the building on fire? So the reason I use that analogy is we are pretty intentional about most things that we do. And then you also have to re leave room for innovation because it is a completely different product experience to build an alien where than it is to build server. And yet there's certain standards around how we think about our commitment to environmental goals and sustainability that's consistent. Yeah. So that's the balance that we're always looking for, >>You know, in the isolation economy, we, we learned that we didn't know what was coming next. Yeah. And now in the post isolation economy, we, we learned, you referenced this. We're not going back to 29 team, a rinse and repeat of of 2019 is not gonna work. So I know it's early. You haven't really had much time to think about it, but what have you learned from this event? We were surprised by how many people showed up. What else? >>I was a little surprised by how many people showed up in the fi. And we got a lot of people show up in the final register in the final week or so. I mean, one of the things I think we knew this, but I think we had to learn it a little bit. The hard way. Yeah. Was maybe you don't need four days of two hour keynotes, you know, maybe, maybe people can't absorb that much information. And so I think we've gotten a lot tighter on our messaging and delivering of the keynotes and then allowing people, the space to engage in other that are really important to them, like their own training. They, a lot of people come to this, this event for their own professional development. We should be proud of that and celebrate it. And one of the expressions I use a lot is let's get our inner geek back and provide people the opportunity to do that. And even with our own employees, one of the things that we've seen is just how happy they are to see each our, so leave space for that. >>The face to face matters. It's really valuable in some say, it's the scarce resource now. Yeah. And the digitals augmentation, what have you learned as the standards are, ER, there's no standards they're emerging in real time. What what's popping out as go to, that's gonna evolve as de facto standard digital event kind of hybrid. I >>Think I, I think the short and easy answer is that hybrid Brit evolves as the standard. I don't think anybody sort of like the cloud. Um, I don't think anybody is questioning that you can have the best of both. I think, um, you know, if I taking it out of the realm of events, we are very committed to a hybrid work environment. Just as an example. And this conversation about many companies say you can have flexibility as long as you're here on Tuesday. Well, that's not actually flexibility. That's just pretend flexibility. And so being intentional about, you know, you obviously have to have the conversation with your leader, but we, we are saying, figure out what works for you and work that way. And the reason I went, I took it from events to that example is because that's just one of the many examples of how we're all trying to figure it out. And it's intentionality, it's honesty, it's trust, you know, maybe your job is something that needs to be in person. Great. Then go do it in person. Maybe it's not then don't but have the conversation. So that's, that's how the conversation is sort of >>Maybe it event native, which is the old model. Yeah. Yeah. Hybrid events is there multi-event Daves club super event, >>Multi, multi hybrid events. >><laugh> >>And there actually we do take this show on the road with the Dell tech forum. So it is multi hybrid event. >>By the way you mentioned the team, how excited the team was. I thought it was a great touch at the end of the, of day one keynote to bring all the team members out. That was a really powerful moment, >>You know, to be honest, I loved it when I saw it on paper, I thought this could either be great or so cheesy. I'll be like climbing under my tour and I loved it. And, but even that was a risk where I thought that's fine. Try it. And if it, if it doesn't work, like it's fine, >>Go bigger, go home if they >>Exactly. So I think you see us trying to lean into those moments a little bit more and be willing to take that risk and see what happens. >>Allison always great to have you on the cube. I love your insight. Love your perspective. Final question for you. What are you into these days? What are you watching personally in the industry or in, in your life as we evolve into this next chapter of the generational of the cultural shift? >>I mean the biggest thing that I'm really thinking about is this question of hybrid work and what does it mean to build connection with our employees, with our customers, with our partners, with our broader ecosystem, whilst also having the freedom and flexibility that the last two years have brought us. I mean, I think you guys know, I, I have an odd personal life. I kind little bit of a digital Noma myself and you know, I, in a let's >>Extend the segment, let's >>Go down and in years for past I would not, um, have been able to maintain my life and my job. And that's the power of technology. You just have to look for the downside, which is maybe people need more connection too. So that's an unanswered question. >>Yeah. I knew fabrics are more urging my minds. Very clear. Yeah. Allison, great to have you on again. Pleasure having, Thanks for having us here in the queue. We really >>Appreciate it. We always love having you at Dell tech world. And it's great to see you personally. Thanks >>Executive vice president CMO Dell technologies here in the queue. I'm John for Dave LAN. We'll be right back with more after this break.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020 the virtual experience. I'm your host Stu Miniman. I'm really happy to be joined on the program two of our CUBE alumni, we have the Daves from Hewlett Packard labs. Sitting in the screen next to me is Dave Husak he is a fellow and general manager for the Cloudless Initiative. And on the other side of the screen, we have Dave Larson, vice president and CTO of the Cloudless Initiative. Dave and Dave, thank you so much for joining us again. >> Delighted to be here. >> All right, so specifically we're going to be talking a bit about security, obviously, you know, very important in the cloud era. And as we build our native architect, you know, Dave Husak, I guess, why don't you set the stage for us a little bit, of you know, where security fits into, you know, HPE overall and, you know, the mission that you know, last year a lot of buzz and discussion and interest around Cloudless. So just put that as a start and then we'll, get into a lot of discussion about security. >> Right yeah, last year we did, you know, launch the initiative and, you know, we framed it as, it composed of three components, one of which in fact, the most important aspect of which it was the trust fabric Cloudless Trust Fabric, which was you know, built on the idea of intrinsic security for all workload end points, right. And this is a theme that you see playing out, you know, a year later playing out, I think across the industry. You hear that language and that, you know, that kind of idea of being promoted in the context of zero trust, you know, new capabilities being launched by VMware and other kinds of runtime environments, right. And you know, the way I like to say it is that we have entered an era of security first in IT infrastructure. It's no longer going to be practical to build IT infrastructure and then, you know, have products that secure it, right. You know, build perimeters, do micro-segment or anything like that. Workload end points need to be intrinsically secure. And you know, the upshot of that really at this point is that all IT infrastructure companies are security companies now. The you know it, acknowledge it, like it or not, we're all security companies now. And so, you know, a lot of the principles applying in the Cloudless Trust Fabric are those zero trust principles are based on cryptographic, workload, identity, leverage unique aspects of HPs products and infrastructure that we've already been delivering with hardware and Silicon root of trust built into our reliance servers and other capabilities like that. And you know, our mission, my mission is to propel that forward and ensure that HP is, you know, at the forefront of securing everything. >> Yeah, excellent definitely, you know love the security first discussion. Every company we've talked to absolutely security is not only a sea level, but you know, typically board level discussion, I guess my initial feedback, as you would say, if every company today is a security company, many of them might not be living up to the expectation just yet So Dave Larson, let's say, you know, applications are, you know, at the core of what we've look at it in cloud native. It's new architectures, new design principles. So give us some, what is HPE thoughts and stuff, how security fits into that, and what's different from how we might've thought about security in the past the applications? Well, I think Dave touched on it, right? From a trust fabric perspective, we have to think of moving to something where the end points themselves, whether their workloads or services are actually intrinsically secure and that we can instantiate some kind of a zero trust framework that really benefits the applications. It really isn't sufficient to do intermediate inspection. In fact, the real, the primary reason why that's no longer possible is that the world is moving too encryption everywhere. And as soon as all packets are encrypted in flight, not withstanding claims to the contrary, it's virtually impossible to do any kind of inference on the flows to apply any meaningful security. But the way we see it is that the transition is moving to a modality where all services, all workloads, all endpoints can be mutually attested, cryptographically identified in a way that allows a zero trust model to emerge so that all end points can know what they are speaking to on the remote end and by authorization principals determine whether or not they're allowed to speak to those. So from a HPE perspective, the area where we build is from the bottom up, we have a Silicon root of trust in our server platform. It's part of our ILO five Integrated lights out baseboard management controller. We can actually deliver a discreet and measurable identity for the hardware and projected up into the workload, into the software realm. >> Excellent, Ty I heard you mentioned identity makes me think of the Cytel acquisition that the HPE made early this year, people in the cloud native community into CubeCon you know, SPIFFE of course, is a project that had gotten quite a bit of attention. Can give us a little bit as to how that acquisition fits into this overall discussion we were just having? >> Oh yeah, so we acquired Cytel into the initiative, beginning of this year. As you, understand Stu, right. Cryptographic identity is fundamental to zero trust security because we're no longer, like Dave pointed out we're no longer relying, on intermediary devices, firewalls, or other kinds of functions to manage, you know, authorize those communications. So the idea of building cryptographic identity into all workload endpoints, devices and data is sort of a cornerstone of any zero trust security strategy. We were delighted to bring the team on board. Not only from the standpoint that they are the world's experts, original contributors, and moderators and committers in the stewardship of SPIFFE and SPIRE the two projects in the CNCF. But you know, the impact they're going to have on the HPs product development, hardware and software is going to be outsized. And it also, you know, as a, I'll have to point this out as well, you know, It is the, this is the most prominent open source project that HP is now stewarding, right. In terms of its acceptance, of SPIFFE and SPIRE, or both poised to be I have an announcement here shortly, probably. But we expect they're going to be promoted to the incubating phase of CNCF maturity from the Sandbox is actually one of the first Sandbox projects in the CNCF. And so it's going to join that Pantheon of know, you know, top few dozen out of I think 1,390 projects in the CNCF. So like you pointed out Stu you know, SPIFFE and SPIRE are right now, you know, the world's leading candidate as, you know, sort of the certificate standard for cryptographic workload endpoint identity. And we're looking at that as a very fundamental enabling technology for this transformation, that the industry is going to go through. >> Yeah, it's really interesting if we pull on that open source thread a little bit more, you know, I think back to earlier in my career, you know, 15, 20 years ago, and if you talk to a CIO, you know, security might be important to them, but they keep what they're building and how their IT infrastructure, is something that they keep very understood. And if you were a vendor supplying to them, you had to be under NDA to understand, because that was a differentiation. Now we're talking about lifting cloud, we're talking about open source, you know, even when I talked to the financial institutions, they're all talking amongst themselves the how do we share best practices because it's not, am I secure? It's we all need to be secure. I wonder if you can comment a little bit on that trend, you know, how the role of open source. Yeah, this is an extension of Kerckhoffs's principle, right? The idea that a security system has to be secure, even if you know the system, right. That's it's only the contents of the ease in the communication letter, that are important. And that is playing out, at the highest level in our industry now, right. So it is, like I said, cryptographic identity and identity based encryption are the cornerstones of building a zero trust fabric. You know, one of the other things is, cause you mentioned that, we also observed is that the CNCF, the Apache foundation. The other thing that's, I think a contrast to 15 years ago, right back 15, 20 years ago, open source was a software development phenomenon, right. Where, you know, the usual idea, you know, there's repositories of code, you pull them down, you modify them for your own particular purposes and you upstream this, the changes and such, right. It's less about that now. It is much more a model for open source operations than it is a model for open source development. Most of the people that are pulling down those repositories unless they are using them, they're not modifying them, right. And as you also, I think understand, right. The framework of the CNCF landscape comprehensive, right? You can build an entire IT infrastructure operations environment by you know, taking storage technologies, security technologies, monitoring management, you know, it's complete, right. And it is, you know, becoming really, you know, a major operational discipline out there in the world to harness all of that development harness, the open source communities. Not only in the software, not only in the security space, but I think you know comprehensively and that engine of growth and development is I think probably the largest, you know manpower and brainpower, and you know, operational kind of active daily users model out there now, right. And, it's going to be critical. I think for the decade, this decade that's coming. That the successful IT infrastructure companies have to be very tightly engaged with those communities in that process, because open source operations is the new thing. It's like, you know DevOps became OpsDev or something like that is the trend. >> Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up you know I think about the DevOps movement, really fused security, it can't be a bolt on it can't be an afterthought. The mantra I've heard over the last few years, is security is everyone's responsibility. Dave Larson, you know, the question I have for you is, how do we make sure, you know, policy is enforced you know, even I think about an organization everyone's responsible for it, you know, who's actually making sure that things happen because, you know, if everybody's looking after it, it should be okay. But, you know, bring us down a little bit from the application standpoint. >> Well, I would say, you know, first of all, you have to narrow the problem down, right? The more we try to centralize security with discreet appliances, that's some kind of a choke point, the explosion, the common editorial explosion of policy declaratives that are necessary in order to achieve that problem to achieve the solution becomes untenable, right? There is no way to achieve the right kind of policy enforcement unless we get as close to the actual workloads themselves, unless we implement a zero trust model where only known and authorized end points are allowed to communicate with each other, you know. We've lived with a really unfortunate situation in the internet at large, for the last couple of decades where an IP address is both a location and an identifier. This is problem because that can be abused. it's something that can be changed. It's something that is easily spoofed, and frankly the nature of that element of the way we connect applications together is the way that almost virtually all exploits, get into the environment and cause problems. If we move to a zero trust model where the individual end points will only speak with only respond to something that is authorized and only things that are authorized and they trust nothing else, we eliminate 95 to 99% of them problem. And we are in an automated stance that will allow us to have much better assurance of the security of the connections between the various endpoints and services. >> Excellent, so, you know, one of the questions that always comes up, some of the pieces we're talking about here are open source. You talk about security and trust across multiple environments. How does HPE differentiate from, you know, everything else out there and, you know, how are you taking the leadership position? I'd love to hear both of your commentary on that. >> Yeah, well, like I said, initially, the real differentiation for us is that HPE was the market leader for industry standard servers, from a security perspective. Three years ago in our ProLiant gen 10 servers, when we announced them, they had the Silicon root of trust and we've shipped more than a million and a half servers into the market with this capability that is unique in the market. And we've been actively extending that capability so that we can project the identity, not just to the actual hardware itself, but that we can bind it in a multi-factor sense, the individual software components that are hosted on that server, whether it's the operating system, a hypervisor, a VM, a container framework, or an actual container, or a piece of it code from a serverless perspective. All of those things need to be able to be identified and we can bring a multi-factor identity capability to individual workloads that can be the underpinning for this zero across connection capability. >> Great and David, anything you'd like to add there? >> No, like what he said I think HP is uniquely positioned you know, the depth and the breadth of our installed base of platforms that are already zero trust ready, if you will, right. Coupled with the identity technology that we're developing in the context of the Cytel acquisition and David, my work in a building, the cloudless trust fabric, you know, are the, like I said, the cornerstones of these architectures, right? And HP has a couple of unfair advantages here you know, okay breadth and depth of our, the customer base and the installed base of the system is already put out there. While the world is transitioning, you know, inevitably to these, you know, these kinds of security architectures, these kinds of IT infrastructure architectures, HP has a, you know, a leadership team position by default here that we can take advantage of. And our customers can reap the benefits of without, well, you know, without you know, rebuilding forklift upgrading, or otherwise, you know, it is, yeah as Dave talked about, you know, a lot will change, right. There's more to do, right? As we move from, you know, IP addresses and port numbers, as identities for security, because we know that perimeter security, network security like that is busted, right. It is, you know, every headline making, you know, kind of advanced persistent threat kind of vulnerabilities it's all at the root of all those problems, right. There are technologies like OPA, right you know, policy has to be reframed in the context of workload identity, not in network identity know. Like call this legal sort of the microsegmentation fallacy, right. You know that, you know, perimeters are broken, not a valid security strategy anymore. So the answer can't be, let's just draw smaller perimeters, especially since we're now filling them up with evermore, you know, dynamic evanescent kind of workload endpoints, you know, containers coming and going at a certain pace. And serverless instances, right. All of those things springing up and, and being torn down, you know, on, you know, very short life cycle that's right. It is inconceivable that traditional, you know perimeter based micro-segmentation based security frameworks can keep up with the competent tutorial explosion and the pace with which we are going to be where, you know, orchestration frameworks are going to be deploying these end points. There are, you know, there's a lot more to do, you know, but this is, the transformation story. This is of the 2020s, you know, infrastructure, IT infrastructure school is very different in two, five, 10 years from now than it does today. And you know that's you know we believe HP has, like I said, a few unfair advantages to lead the world in terms of those transformations. >> Excellent, well, appreciate the look towards the future as well as where we are today. Dave and Dave, thanks so much for joining. Thank you, Stu. >> Thanks, dude, pleasure. >> All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage. HPE Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)