>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, welcome to this Cube Conversation, where we bring some of the best ideas in the industry to the Wikibon, SiliconANGLE communities as a way of catalyzing further conversation about some of the changes, and some of the opportunities that are presented by tech in a world that's digitally transforming. We're being joined today by Bobby Patrick, who's the CMO of a company called UiPath. UiPath is one of the leaders in a technology known as robotic process automation. And we're going to talk about the problems, the solutions, and the directions forward with this, what we regard as a very, very important technology on the rise. Bobby, welcome to the Cube. >> Hi Peter, great to be here. >> So Bobby, let's start with who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself. >> Sure, Bobby Patrick, CMO, UiPath. I was CMO of the cloud business HPE prior, a Cube alumni, I guess we call them, right? And had a history of startups, in SQL space, and open source, and different transformational companies. But I was really intrigued by the idea of software robots over the last six months, and joined UiPath, and it's just been an amazing adventure to see this kind of amazing technology really deliver outcomes for companies faster than I've ever seen happen in tech in my history. >> Well let's talk about that, so, every technology that's going to be successful has to target a problem, a group of people who are trying to solve the problem, and a set of returns. So let's talk about, what is the problem that UiPath and related technologies are actually trying to address? >> Let me start at the macro level first of all. Robotic process automation is instructive trend for digital transformation. For the last three, five, seven years, vendors and companies have said, "I want to go digital." Digital, digital, digital. Right? And going digital's really difficult. Back office processes and front office processes are complex, there's a lot of human interaction involvement in it, and in the past, the way to tackle that would be IT would engage in a significant integration project, an IT project, would purchase equipment, technology, and try to rebuild and redefine the process. Robotic process automation tackles that problem of digital transformation in a very different way. It says forget the idea of going and redoing all of the systems in the data. Let's just take it from the human perspective. Let's see how does a human engage in the process today? And let's completely mimic that human interaction. Let's do that in a way that has complete accuracy, actually higher compliance, and do that in a way that's very simple. And so our technology, which has been built over a number of years, has now perfected the ability to actually replicate and emulate a human user, interacting with multiple systems, something they do every day, in the enter process, move data around, analyze data, look at the data for context, and then execute that process continuously. And that has resulted in an industry that is booming. Forrester said last year it was a $250 million industry, it'll be a $3 billion industry in three years. And UiPath is the fastest growing company in what's called RPA. >> So let me break that down a little bit. So a couple of general principles. The computing industry has always been focused on how we can substitute technology, specifically in the form of programs, for labor. And when we do that, we're able to reduce errors, we're able to speed up the activities, we have derivative opportunities to integrate things we never did before. So let me see if I got this right. What you just described is, instead of trying to substitute for that labor, by creating a net new program that has a whole bunch of static elements, we're actually going to turn these tools and apply them to the question of, how do people do things, let's substitute for the things that people do, start there. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, I mean imagine a contact center in a customer service operation for an airline. They receive an email from a customer that's complaining, about a bad flight, that contact center specialist has to look at a variety of systems to determine your status, what did we give you recently, in two days they will respond. Maybe the person's name is Michelle, and they'll respond in two days, and give you something. Well now, Michelle the software robot can do that exact same thing in a matter of minutes, with complete accuracy, and you can apply machine learning to it, and AI to it, to determine, 95% of the time, if I provide this in this situation, I'll have a happy flier, a happy member. That's what we're talking about here, which is software robots that essentially are perfecting these complex business processes both in the back office and in the front office. Often where lots of documentation's involved, lots of different systems are involved, and a human has to interact between all of those over and over. >> So, RPA, effectively, robotic process automation, effectively provides a means to mimic the work of a person. Because that's where most process engineering is done. Mimic the work of a person, codify it in a way that actually leads to a better business outcome. So that's what it is. Now take us through how does this work? Who are the people involved in the process, what does the technology do for them, how long does it take? Give us a little bit about it. >> So one of the beauties to RPA is that this doesn't require deep engineering talent to be able to build a software robot, and execute it. In fact, some of the breakthroughs in the technology that's been created at UiPath are a studio designer, which looks much like Visio, where you can drag and drop a workflow. Subject matter experts are becoming the next coders, really. Where they can actually design the workflow. There's actually a recorder function that can actually record the user-- >> That's where it starts. It starts with the recorder looking at how people are doing things and picking up that, and turning that in semantics that are meaningful to-- >> Yeah, defining a workflow. Which has exceptions, and handling. I should mention, when you're creating, or you're automating a process, there are really two kinds of robots you're designing. One is one called an attended robot, where along that workflow that robot's going to stop and ask a human a question. It's about a third of the market right now. So the process executes and a human might have to fill in some gaps alone the way. An unattended robot can run in the cloud, or on a VM in an on-premises data center, and execute that process behind the scenes, over and over and over.. So you kind of, you're building one of two. And UiPath supports both attended and unattended robots. But yes, you're designing the workflow, that workflow may interact with a variety of systems, you might receive an email and read the email, the robot reads the email. You might actually log into salesforce.com to find out if they're a customer. You might actually upload the email as a artifact, you might then download some information, put it into a PDF, and send it on. That's an example of a workflow that you're automating end to end. >> So we've got that workflow designed, what are we doing next with it? And who's doing it? >> So this is one of the beauties, too. One of the challenges in IT is projects take a long time. But in RPA-- >> Peter: And they fail. >> And they fail. What's interesting in RPA, what we've proven now, is you can pretty much begin to digitize a process in a matter of weeks. The outcomes are almost immediate. And payback periods are often six months or less. An RPA project almost self-funds itself, which is one reason why I think this is taking off so fast as well. >> So if we want to get a payback period in six months, it means that the whole notion of how fast does it take to get a group up and running on this, becomes crucial. So what is RPA typically, who's it typically targeting? Is it a professional software developer, someone with no technology expertise, business analysts, where-- >> Business analysts, definitely. You're talking line of business. You're talking finance operation. There's a lot of innovation in finance operations. How do I improve my ability to handle invoice reconciliation, and manage purchase orders, and all that paperwork and movement of data. >> So these are people that are familiar with workflows, they're familiar with process design, et cetera, but may not be familiar with coding >> These are subject matter experts. They're not familiar with coding, but they know the process really well. They know what to do when there's an exception, they know what to do in a sequence of events, and so that's why we often say subject matter experts are the next big coders, because they can actually go and learn, in fact UiPath, we have a program called an academy. Academy is on our site, we launched it last April. 35,000 people have been certified already. These are typically business analysts who go get trained, online, self-led, get a diploma, a foundational or an advanced diploma, and are RPA developers, in fact. Now you can go deep. There's C#, you can develop and you can go deep behind it. So I'm not saying there's not some ability to go really deep in certain development. But for the most part, you're a finance operation, you're an HR operation. I'll give you an example of one that just popped up yesterday. A company called West Monroe, they're a consulting firm in Chicago, they announced that they built Rosie the Robot. And Rosie the Robot, with UiPath, is a robot that onboards all their new employees. And they're doing a lot of M and A. They're growing really fast. And onboarding all the employees was a task that required a lot of people to do a very system data intensive process. Now Rosie does all that for them. Very simple example, you can then kind of zoom out and realize that really every process, most processes, have some kind of human interaction repetitiveness to them which a robot can either assist a knowledge worker, or can actually execute that entire process flawlessly. >> Now, we're not talking about technology that's really esoteric, that requires an enormous net new experience in learning from an operations staff. We're talking about technologies that can be targeted specifically to a problem, and end up generating artifacts that are familiar to what's currently in place. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, and I think what's important, so enterprise RPA really addresses two sides. One, the business side, that's trying to digitize a process and automate, maybe for cost savings, but more important than trying to apply AI. And get smarter, right? And so that's the business side. It also addresses the IT side, which is, okay, I've got to secure these robots, how do they scale, how do I manage and govern them, imagine having thousands and thousands of robots. I'll give you another example. NASA. The first robots that NASA launched, the first one, they named George Washington. And George did a-- >> Good name. >> Bunch of work for the finance group, and they got really comfortable with George. They'd walk in in the morning and say, "What has George done for me last night?" Which is awesome. But George was onboarded just like a human worker. Meaning he has to log in to different systems, just like a human worker, and by the way, his password expires every 90 days. So how do they solve that? They created the boss robot. And the boss robot's name? Constitution. Constitution changes George's password every 90 days. That's what's happening here, is you're building out your digital workforce. So IT worries, then, about how do I manage and secure, and scale, so we think about scalability, and big scale is a big challenge, but opportunity that we're focused on, tens of thousands of robots that companies will have. We often say it'll ultimately be one robot per every employee. >> So we have not, or I think you've mentioned the word, or the phrase, "AI" just once. So this is utilizing similar kinds of concept. The attended versus unattended, for example. How you go about training. But I got to believe that there's going to be a roadmap for integrating a whole bunch of these new technologies, that are capable of providing even more degrees of freedom, more functionality, how is RPA and some of these new technologies going to intersect over the course of the next few years? >> This is a really, really important question. So RPA, and enterprise RPA and UiPath, we believe it's a platform. So once you digitize that process, you can then do things with it. We've opened APIs, it's very extensible, you can integrate with a conversation API of Watson, integrate with a chat bot and have the robots do the back end work. At Exxon, they're doing IOT, and deploying sensors left and right, but all the systems in the back end are legacy systems and Excel spreadsheets. So the robots actually are the back end, supporting the deployment of IOT on the front end. So you have this amazing combination. But what people really want to do, then, is they want to look at that process and say, "How do I make it smarter? "How do I improve the productivity over time?" It's great to get that initial bump of perhaps cost savings, when you think about the robot doing, what eight FTEs did, the one robot does. So that's one thing. But the bigger thing is being able to apply data science to the process, looking for ways to mine the process, to think about how can I do the execution better? And that's when we apply machine learning to a process. Where we can actually look, instead of having a rule, in the process that executes, you actually have the experience. Where you say, oh 90% of the time it happens this way. So I'll fill the field in, instead of going and tracking down an empty field. So you can really get smarter, and really improve productivity. Peter, this is all about productivity. GE's a great example of one, that spoke at a conference of ours recently. And the first nine months, they had $25 million of productivity from the robots. The next nine months, $150 million. But this is not about cost-cutting or employees. This is about, actually, hiring. This is about getting smarter in every process. This is about eliminating errors completely. >> Well, productivity is not just a function of the denominator, which is cost. It's also a function of the work that you can perform. And so what you're saying is that utilizing these technologies, while it may displace certain laborious tasks, nonetheless, it's automating and improving the quality of a whole bunch of others, which allows people to go off and do net new things that perhaps are better in service to customers, for example. >> Yeah, one of the fast savings we're seeing from our customers is that they're actually able to use robots to fill the gap of being able to hire new employees. So that, in Japan, here's a great, Japan's almost a unique market. Japan RPA, and UiPath is used on some of the world's largest RPA projects, like SMBC Bank, or Dentsu, the advertising agency, company, there, they're using robots to address two things. One, the decaying population, so robots are filling the gap. And also, two, suicide. There are very high suicide rate because they work these amazing hours every week. Well they're actually using robots to reduce the number of hours, as the robots complement the work of the workforce in Japan. So we're really seeing, interestingly enough, is that robots are actually filling the gaps, and beginning to do work of a workforce that maybe you wish you could hire but you can't hire. So I think that trend is what we're going to see more of in 2018. >> Excellent. So, Bobby, thank you very much for coming on the Cube, here in our Palo Alto studios, and talking to us about RPA, robotic process automation. We heard a little bit about what is it, how does it work, what's the impacts of using it, and obviously, UiPath and yourself as a increasing or emerging force within an important new marketplace for enterprises and users who are trying to increase their productivity. >> Thank you, Peter. >> Once again, this is Peter Burris, in a Cube Conversation with thought leader Bobby Patrick at UiPath. Bobby, again, thanks for coming. >> Bobby: Thank you.

(techy music playing) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here at the CUBE, we're in our Palo Alto Studios for a CUBE Conversation. You know, it's kind of when we get a break, we're not at a show. It's a little bit quieter, a little calmer situation so we can have a little bit different kinds of conversations and we're excited to have our next guest and talk about a really important piece of this whole cloud thing, which is not only do you need to turn things on, but you need to also turn them off and that's what gets people in trouble, I think, on the cost comparison. We're joined by Krishna Subramanian, she is the co-founder and COO of Komprise, welcome. >> Thank you, thanks for having me on the show. >> Absolutely, so just real briefly for people that aren't familiar, just give them kind of the overview of Komprise. >> Komprise is the only solution that provides analytics and data management in a single package and the reason we started the company is because customers told us that they're literally drowning in data these days. As data for print continues to grow, a lot of it is in unstructured data and data, you know, what's unique about it is that you never just keep one copy of data because if your data is lost, like if your child's first year birthday picture is lost you wouldn't like that, right? >> Jeff: Do not bring that kind of stuff up in an interview. (laughs) We don't want to talk about lost photographs or broken RAID boxes, that's another conversation, but yes, you do not want to lose those pictures. >> So, you keep multiple copies. >> Right, right. >> And that's what businesses do. They usually keep a DR copy, a few backup copies of their data, so if you have 100 terabytes of data you probably have three to four copies of it, that's 400 terabytes and if 70% of that data hasn't been touched in over six months 280 of your 400 terabytes is being actively managed for no reason. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And Komprise analyzes and finds all that data for you and shows you how much you can save by managing it at lower cost, then it actually moves and archives and reduces the cost of managing that data so you can save 70% or more on your storage. >> Right, so there's a couple components to that that you talked about. So, break it down a little bit more. One is how actively is the data managed, how hot is the data, you know, what type of storage the data is based on, its importance, its relevance and how often you're accessing it. So, one of the big problems, if I heard you right, is you guys figure out what stuff is being managed that way, as active, high value, sitting on flash, paying lots of money, that doesn't need to be. >> That's exactly right, we find that all the cold data on your current storage... We show you how much more you're spending to manage that data than you need to. >> So, how do you do that in an environment where, you know, that data is obviously connected to applications, that data might be in my data center, it could be Amazon or could be at GCP, how do you do that without interfering with my active applications on that data, because even though some of it might be ready for cold storage there might be some of it, obviously, that isn't. So, how do you manage that without impacting my operations? >> That's a great question, because really, you know, data management is like a good housekeeper. You should never know that the housekeeper is there, they should never get in the way of what you're doing, but they keep your house clean, right? And that's kind of what Komprise does for your data, and how do we do that? Well, we do that by being adaptive. So, Komprise connects to your storage just through open protocols. So, we don't make any changes to your environment and our software automatically slows itself down and runs in the background to not interfere with anything active on your storage. So, we are like a good partner to your storage. You don't even know we're there, we're invisible to all the active work and yet we're giving all these important analytics and when we move the data, all the data looks like it's still there, so it's fully transparent. >> Okay, you touched on a couple things. So, one is how do you sit there without impacting it? I think you said you partner with all the big data, or excuse me, all the big storage providers. >> Krishna: Yes. >> You partner with all the three big cloud providers, just won an award at re:Invent, congratulations. >> Krishna: Thank you. >> So, how do you do that, where does your software sit, does it sit in the data center or does it sit at Amazon and how does it interact with other management tools that I might already have in place? >> That's a great question, so Komprise runs as a hybrid cloud service, and essentially there is a console that's running in the cloud, but the actual analysis and data movement is done by virtual machines that are running at the customer's site and you literally just point our virtual machine at any storage you have and we work through standard protocols, through NFS, SMB CIFS, and REST S3, so whether you have NetApp storage or EMC storage or Windows File Servers or Hitachi NAS or you're putting data on Amazon or Azure or Google or an object storage, it doesn't actually matter. Komprise works with all those environments because we are working through open standards, and because we're adaptive we're automatically running in the background, so it's working through open standards and it's non-intrusive. >> Okay, and then if you designate that some percentage of this storage does not need to be in the high, expensive environment, you actually go to the next step and you actually help manage it and move it, so how does that impact my other kind of data management procedures? >> Yes, so it's a great question. So, most of the time you would probably have some DR copy and some backups running on your hot storage, on your flash storage, say, and you don't want to change that and you don't want users to point anywhere else, so what Komprise does is it takes the cold data from all that storage and when it moves that data it's fully transparent. The moved data looks like it's still there on that storage, it's just that the footprint is reduced now, so for 100MB file you just have a one kilobyte link on that storage, and we don't use any stub files, we don't put any agents on the storage, so we don't make any changes to your active environment. It's fully transparent, users and applications think all the data is still there, but the data is now sitting in something lower cost and it's dynamically managed through open standards, just like you and I are talking now and I don't need a translator between us because we both understand English. >> Jeff: Right. >> But maybe if I were speaking Japanese you might need a translator, right? >> Jeff: I would, yeah. (laughs) Yes. >> Krishna: That was just a guess, I didn't know. So, that's kind of how we do it, we work through the open standards and in the past solutions were... We didn't do that, they would have a proprietary protocol and that's why they could only work with some storage and not all, and they would get in the way of all the access. >> But do I want it to look like it looked before if in fact it's ready to be retired into cold storage or Glacier or whatever, because I would imagine there's a reason and I don't know that I necessarily want the app to have access. I would imagine my access and availability of stuff that's in cold storage is very different kind of profile than the hot stuff. >> It depends, you know, sometimes some data you may want to truly archive and never be able to see it live. Like, maybe you're putting it in Glacier, and you can control how the data looks, but sometimes you don't want to interrupt what the applications are doing. You want to just go to a lower cost of storage, like an object storage on-premise. >> Right. >> But you still want the data accessible because you don't want a vague user and application behavior. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so give us a little bit more information on the company. So, you've been around for three years. We talked a little bit before we turned the cameras on, you know, kind of how many people do you have, how many customers, how many rounds of funding have you guys raised? >> Komprise is growing rapidly. We have about 60 people, we have a headquarters in Campbell, California, we also have offices in Bangalore, India. We just hired a new VP of worldwide sales and we're putting field sales teams in different regions, we have over 60 customers worldwide. Our customer base is growing rapidly. Just this last quarter we added about four times the number of customers, and we're seeing customers all the way from general mix and healthcare to big insurance and financial services companies, anywhere where there's data, you know. Universities, all the major research universities are our customers and government institutions, you know, state and local governments, et cetera. So, these are all good markets for us. >> Right, and you said it's a services, like a SAS model, so you charge based on how much data that's under management. >> Yeah, we charge for all the data that's under management and it's a fraction of what you pay to store the data, so our cost is like less than half a penny a gig a month. >> Right, it's pretty interesting, you know, we just got back from AWS re:Invent as well, over 40,000 people, it's bananas. But this whole kind of rent versus buy conversation is really interesting to me, and again, I always go back to Netflix. If anybody uses a massive amount of storage and a massive amount of network and computing where they own like, I don't know, 50% of the Friday night internet traffic, right, in the States is Netflix and they're still on Amazon. I think what's really interesting is that if you... The flexibility of the cloud to be able to turn things on really easily is important, but I think what people often forget is it's also you need to turn it off and so much activity around better managing your investment and the resources at Amazon to use what you need when you need it, but don't pay for what you don't need when you don't, and that seems to be, you know, something that you guys are right in line with and consistent with. >> Yeah, I think that's actually a good way to put it. Yeah, don't pay for data when you don't need to, right? You can still have it but you don't need to pay for it. >> Right, well Krishna, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to stop by and give us the story on Komprise. >> Yeah, thank you very much, thanks for having me. >> All right, pleasure, she's Krishna, I'm Jeff, you're watching the CUBE. We're at Palo Alto Studios, CUBE Conversation, we'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (techy music playing)

(techno music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're having CUBE conversations in the Palo Alto studio. We're getting to the end of the conference season, so it's nice to take a break and do some interviews from the studio instead of from the road. We're excited to have our next guest. He's David Green, he's the CEO of Zero Stack. David, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> Absolutely, great to have you here. So for folks who aren't familiar with Zero Stack, why don't you give them kind of the quick overview. >> Great, so Zero Stack's focus on building a new generation of private cloud infrastructure where IT can simplify their operations through automation, and at the same time, retain control of the environment. We're really trying to deliver that public cloudlike experience to users while giving IT the type of control they want to have. >> But you, just so I understand, so that, right, a lot of pressure, lot of benefits to public cloud, and everybody wants it in a private cloud, right? There's a lot of issues with public cloud that, you know, there's some data that can't be there, this or that, but there's a lot of attributes of public cloud that people just love, so how are you kind of squaring that circle? >> It's interesting, right? In the last 10 years that I've been working on cloud, this has been one of the recurring themes. It's one of the things that I think is so exciting about Zero Stack, right? You talk to a customer, you talk to an IT customer, and they're like, "I love the convenience of the public cloud idea, it's going to be so simple to operate, right? "But, I need to know where my data is. "I'm accountable for security, I'm accountable for cost. "I need to have control of the environment. "Why can't I have these two things together?" And that's what we've tried to merge together. So from an IT standpoint, it's still going to look and feel like that on-premises IT-managed infrastructure they're comfortable with. From a user perspective though, it's going to have that same sort of self service, on demand that they're used to getting from a public cloud. Think of going to a web application that looks and feels like Amazon, being able to pick the resources you want, but have those resources be coming from resources running within your data center. >> Right, right. >> And then be able to add to those resources the tools that you need to be productive in the environment, really very value added for the developer, again, in that infrastructure that's living in your environment. >> And to be clear, you're not replacing that existing infrastructure that's in my environment, you're really offering, I don't know, kind of a cloud virtualization overlay or ... >> The goal is to-- >> Restructures the UI? >> Yes. You use the servers you've got, the storage ya got, the networking you've got, pull those together into a pooled resource, again, back to the idea of a private cloud, pull those resources into a single set of resources that can be accessed for a variety of use cases to support different applications in the environment. >> So what's the impact, cause obviously, if there wasn't a benefit to doing it that way, people wouldn't be doing shadow IT and whipping out the credit card with Amazon. So, when you do this in an enterprise, what are some of the benefits they see? >> I mean, I think there's a couple. One is the radical simplification of operations. From an IT standpoint, running a private cloud is hard. You know, if you hook up your build of the online environments, which is kind of the most typical frame of reference that we see, it's expensive to set up. It's expensive to operate. It's complicated, it's hard to hire the people. We're trying to get away from the burden. That's the first driver we see for people. From a user standpoint, it's really about that speed. How does IT keep up with the demands of its users and move at that same pace, right? So trying to pull together those two sets of benefits into one is really the package that seems to drive our business. >> And that's really hard, right for IT cause IT's just be keeping their lights on, keeping everything running. Now it's a core piece, if not the really strategic piece, of the business. We talked a little bit before they turned the cameras on-- >> Right, right. >> About banking, right, all banking interfaces these days are electronic. There's nobody goes in to talk to the teller and giving them a check. >> Wait a sec, so go back up here. So, remember that IT today was fundamentally built around the back office. It was fundamentally built around stability. Remember the days when a change request was a physical piece of paper with 20 signatures on it, and you ran around the office, right? >> Every now then, not very often. (laughing) >> You were supposed to right? That was the mindset, right? I think in a traditional back-office set of applications, that worked great. But the problem is today, when the business is presenting itself to customers through software and trying to move at the speed of its customers, those old IT mechanisms built around stability just can't keep up. >> Right. >> So that's the gap that we're really trying to bridge with the Zero Stack solution. Preserve that knowledge set, preserve that control, preserve that data sovereignty that IT can bring, that on-premises infrastructures can bring, but at the same time, still operate at a pace and a speed that more dev ops organization is looking for. >> Right, because the pressure on IT >> It's only getting bigger. >> It's only getting more ... >> It's only getting more. >> If you're not using software to find automation, you're falling behind. So, I would imagine there's some second order impacts that have to come out of using a tool like Zero Stack in terms of utilization and those types of things that are probably some great opportunities. >> Essentially, we really want to be the heart. While the solution looks and feels more like they've got interfaces and management, the heart of the solution, in our mind really, is our machine learning capabilities. It's ability to take a set of information from the application layer, from the operations layer, from the infrastructure and from that start to make educated judgements as to how the infrastructure can best be utilized to support the business and to support the applications. So where should work loads be placed? How are we going to plan for capacity? What needs to happen next in the environment? How should we take corrective action? These are all the sorts of things that we can start to do. And again, what we're really trying to do is we're trying to automate some of the mundane tasks that held back IT and slowed down IT operations, and instead, let them focus on the areas where they can be of more value consulting with the business, helping to move things forward, helping to address higher order questions. >> Right, because really that's another huge opportunity for cost savings or efficiency for the customer, right? Because the traditional methods were not very efficient, and you had, since they weren't efficient, you had to have a lot of overhead, and you had to, you know, pre-order stuff, and you couldn't flex, so you're now, with your automation and machine learning, helping to better utilize those resources on just the pure infrastructure spending, right? >> Exactly, exactly. And that gives you part of the cost benefit that we see with the Zero Stack solution. By getting better utilization of the infrastructure that you have, we'll able to have a more economical solution going forward. We have customers who are getting a 10X return on their investment by using the Zero Stack solution over other cloud solutions they've looked at, just by getting better intelligence and better automation and better operation clarity about what they're doing. >> So then do you partner then with HP and a lot of the infrastructure providers who talk a lot about hybrid cloud cause clearly, they're invested in keeping a big piece of the cloud inside their walls. >> So in our model, we view ourselves as a software company. So we're going to add that Zero Stack software solution on top of your infrastructure of choice. And so, that could be Dell, that could be HP, that could be Lenovo, ya know, all the kind of leading hardware vendors have been certified to work with our product. We're going to add our software on top to create their cloud infrastructure. Then we're going to add our maturing applications, our user self-service applications on top of that, and that's going to give you the top-to-bottom full stack solution. And that full stack's really important because if you want to be able to take automated actions, you want to be able to optimize infrastructure, you've got to be able to not only interface with the users and meet their demands, but also translate those demands down to actions you're taking on the infrastructure. So we're going to be able to do that full stack top to bottom. >> So just a little bit more background on the company. How big are you, how long you been around, how many people, funding? >> Well, we're a start-up here based in Silica Valley, Mountain View, California. We're a Series B company. We're proud to have our first set of customers working with us right now, actively exercising the products, fantastic big enterprise projects. I'm looking forward to coming back and telling you about it as those finish up. But really, all from the theme of people who are unsatisfied with the solutions they've had available to them in the past and trying to figure out how they're going to move forward with a better, more flexible, easier to operate cloud solution. >> All right, well, David, we look forward to watching the progress and getting an update in a few months. >> Look forward to it. >> All right, David, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I'm Jeff Frick, he's David Greene. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

(upbeat techno music) >> And welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE Conversation in our Palo Alto Studios. We're excited to have our next guest, who is an ABIE award winner from the Grace Hopper Celebration. Would've been competing in early October, we tried to get her on then, schedules didn't mesh so it took us a few months, but we're really excited to have our next guest. She's Mercedes Soria, she is a VP of Software Engineering for Knightscope. Mercedes, welcome. >> Thank you, thank you, I am so happy to be here. >> Absolutely, so, congratulations again on your award of leadership and part of the winnings of that is you got to keynote in front of 18,000 people. So A, What was your impression of Grace Hopper and B, how did you like keynoting in front of 18,000 folks? >> Yes, how was Grace Hopper, it was a huge community of women in technology. I was so excited to be there, everybody was just looking up to women, everybody was trying to help each other. How do you go forward in your career, and I was really focused on STEM careers, which is one of my passions. So I was so glad to be there. And how it was to keynote in front of 18,000 people, so I hadn't done that before, so I can check it off my bucket list, that was one thing. And it was amazing, there were so many women who just clapped and they just kept supporting it and I had to stop several times while I was giving the speech, so it was once in a lifetime opportunity that I'm very grateful for. >> It's an amazing accomplishment, again, congratulations, and it's amazing show, if you haven't been to Grace Hopper, you have to sign up, how fast you say it sold out? >> Mercedes: 25 minutes. >> 25 minutes, oh. Go to anitaborg. or anitab.org now, that's right, they changed the URL, yeah, I'll have to check it out. So let's jump in about Knightscope. So for the people who aren't familiar, go the website, knightscope.com, a bunch of really cool fun stuff, tell us about what Knightscope's all about. >> So Knightscope is a company that is trying to cut the crime cost to the US in half. So most people don't know that the US spends about one trillion dollars a year just to deal with crime in the US, so our goal at Knightscope is to cut that in half with the use of new technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. A group is software plus hardware plus humans, so we take the good things that humans do, which is make strategic decisions, the good things that machines do, which is do the monotonous work and store data for a very long time, and we combine those to try to help with crime. >> Right, so that's a nice explanation. The short answer is, if you go to the website, it's all rolled up into these cool robots that look like C-3PO, and I'm wondering if there's a little man inside there, but we'll get into that later. But I think it's a really interesting concept because you are bringing together many of the hot topics in technology right now, so one of'em just with robotics. You got these robots of various shapes and sizes, but as you said, really, it's the synergy of the robots with the people that give kind of a one plus one makes three effect. How is it, where are those points of intersection, and how does the robot help the human do a better job, and how does the human help the robot do a better job? >> So the robot helps the human because, in this case, security guards have to walk around the same places all day long, right, they have their route, they do that all day long and they get very, very bored, and they get to the point where they don't care anymore and they just scan a badge and then that is the job, right? So that's what the robots do, which is, they don't mind going around the same area all day long, recording data, recording video. That's where the synergy is. Now what the robots, at this point, can do is make a decision in terms of, okay, I have this five things, should I make an alarm to my supervisor and say a guard needs to come. The robot only provides information, so all of that information that we provide is so the human can make a decision on what to do next. >> And does it feed into, I mean obviously these are big security systems that already exist inside these big buildings and these big facilities. Does your robot tie back into those facilities, is it a different layer on top of it, how does it work with the existing security infrastructure that's already in place? >> So the existing security infrastructure is a bit separate at this time. There is a project that we're working on in terms to integrate because there's so many security systems out there, for a start up like us, we need to be very smart in terms of where we spend our resources. So we got to do studies and figure out which were the better senders, the better companies that we need to partner with to do that. But at this point, it's a separate tool, so you open it and all the gear you need is a current browser, you can open it from anywhere in the world, and your security people can look at all the data the machine has collected. >> Right, so the other interesting piece that you're tying together via these machines is really this combination of AI and ML, artificial intelligence, machine learning, but also your background is in user interface, so it can't just be happening in the background because these machines need to do their job, executing through and with people, on the UI side and the security guards and the security infrastructure behind them. So as you've introduced more AI and machine learning into the software components that you can drive the UI, how is that changing the world, how is the UI world changing because now you've got so much more data and so much more kind of compute behind that before it even gets to the actual user that's interfacing with it? >> Yeah so the UI's a little more rich these days, it used to be a webpage and HTML and JavaScript page, and that's all it did, right, but now we have a lot more information that we can provide. For example, we have machine learning algorithms that detect if there's people in an image, so I don't only tell you this is my video, but I also give you a picture of the person that I just saw, and then I tell you, hey, this is what I saw. It makes your experience a lot more incursive. >> Right, and another potential integration point, right obviously with photos in the security system for IDs and passes and all those things. >> Yeah, even face detection at some point as well is very important for us. >> Now you have four different models, why do you have so many models, what's the use cases that would drive you to have four different models? Hard to support four models instead of one as a startup. >> Yeah so our customers have very different needs. Crime doesn't happen just in a shopping mall, crime happens at PG&E offices, it happens at the mall, it happens at different locations, it could be outside, it could be inside, it could be in a hospital, it can be in a parking lot, so what we tried to do was to cover all of those potential places where crime will be. So with that we have four products; we have the K5, which is our first product. It goes into ADA compliant environments like hospitals and data centers, it's a big robot and mainly used for things like a parking lot to detect license plates, to make sure that it's monitoring all the outside. Our second product is the K3 which is a smaller machine, and what it does is mainly goes inside, it can go through a door and it can do things like monitoring who's at the office at night, raising an alert if there was a fire, stuff that happens inside. We have the K7 which goes to outside places where you have things like speed bumps, you have different kind of terrain, gravel or other type. And then the K1 which is our static model that what we're working on that for the future is to have concealed weapon detection at that point, which is something that is very useful for places that have, like for hospitals, when somebody comes in, they want to be able to know if these people are armed. >> Right, I'm just curious if you can share where customers have seen the most impact, the most benefit by using one of your robots. What specific behaviors have just been a game changer when they put in the Knightscope robot? >> Yeah, so I can't tell you the actual customer, that is something >> No, no, that's okay. >> That we can't say, but I would tell you one example. We have, for example, a hospital and this place is open 24/7, obviously the emergency room, and when they will have, it's down in LA, so they will have at least one break-in every week at the parking lot. So we put our machines there and the past seven months that they have been there, they got zero, they got no break-ins. And the nurses now feel safer going to their cars, people feel safer going there at night, so that is one example. We also had an example of a shopping mall where there was a guy who was basically exposing himself and nobody could catch him because he would drive, as soon as he saw a security guard, he would drive out. So we were able to catch that person as well. There are some people to steal merchandise, so they came, they stole something, they left, and the very next day, they come back and they try to sell this back to the mall people, so by seeing who these people are then determining that they came back to the mall, we were able to apprehend them as criminals. >> Right, on the first example, on the parking lot example, does the robot have active deterrents that it can do, can it sound alarms, light lights, to make people feel safer in a parking lot, that's very different than just monitoring things? >> Yeah so what the robot does is, it has a sound that it's all day it's playing that sound, there's a lot of lights, the lights change color based on what's happening around the robot. Another thing that we have that helps a lot of people feel safe, we have a push-to-talk functionality, so if you were feeling something was wrong at night, you can push that button and you can directly talk to the people at the security operation center. They can walk you through what to do, they can follow you while you go to your car, there's different functionality that we have that helps people feel that they're safe outside. >> Right, and on the shoplifting one, it's interesting 'cause lots of stores have cameras, right, that's not a new thing. So what did your system do differently that the regular camera that they had in there before probably would've filmed the person but didn't necessarily wasn't firing off the alert, recognizing they were back again, did somebody go in and manually type in this particular person's a shoplifter. How did you guys take it to a much different level than just kind of a static security cam? >> So the main thing that you should keep in mind for static cameras is there's always black spots, blind spots, there's no way that they can see everything, and mainly you have cameras inside of the shops, you don't have them outside, so what we did is, we not only saw that we not only got the video of the person inside of the shop, but we saw them when they came outside, we saw them when they were moving, all of this is recorded in video and that we can then match them and see the people who were. Another thing that we do that cameras don't do is we can detect your mobile devices, anything that has that's looking for a network, we can identify that device, and that is always for you and that is always for that device, so we can match those devices when they come in. >> You shouldn't have waited this long but one of the most interesting things about the company and what you guys do, and it's highlighted by what you just said, is the way you go to market. People are not buying these robots, right, you offer the robots as a service, so really interesting model and really brings up interesting things like you said where you can do all kinds of software upgrades, you can do hardware upgrades, you can do all types of changes to the actual unit that the customer just benefits, it's a classic SAS model. So how did you get to that stage and how do people like having, now, kind of a simple monthly payment with all the upgrades and constant, I would imagine, a lot of upgrades coming pretty consistently? Pretty interesting way to go to market, how's that received in the market? >> It's very well, people really accepted, especially when it's new technology. We decided from the beginning that we wanted to be, to own the whole technology stack, and even the robot itself because we knew there would be a lot of upgrades, we knew there would be changes and we wanted to serve our customers in the very best way that was possible. So to help people adopt new technology, we help them with how do they perceive it on a daily basis. If you come to somebody and says they want you to buy a hundred thousand dollar robot, uh, you don't know what that's going to be, but if you said, I charge you ten dollars an hour and give you a robot, that not only changes software every other week, it changes hardware every six months, and you have whatever robot will fit your needs the best. People are really accepting of that model, to the point that all the companies are jumping into the same thing. >> It's really interesting because then it begs where you guys will develop as a company, you know, are you are robotics company, are you a software company, are you a software monitoring company, do you become really a security AI company that pulls from lots of different data and lots of different sources? It really opens up a broad range of opportunities for you guys in which you want to go or where you find your most expertise or where the market takes you. Pretty exciting way to go to market. >> Yeah so what we decided to was we wanted to be the Apple of security guards, so what Apple does is they have their software, their hardware, they own all of it, and therefore they have a very loyal following. We want to be that for security guards, so we own the whole environment, we make changes when we wanted to, and then we go to market that way. >> Okay, that's a great story and again it's knightscope.com, they're fun pictures for one, but it's a great story. But before I let you go, Telly would not be happy if I didn't take a few minutes to talk about your journey. How did you get here, VP of Software Engineering? You know, software's eating the world, it's a great place to be, you've got a solutions based system, but really it's a bunch of metal wrapped up with software inside. So how did you get here, and I wonder if you can share a little bit of your journey to become VP of Software Engineering? >> Yeah so I'm an immigrant, I'm not from the US. I was born South America, and when you're in South America and somebody tells you, hey there's an opportunity for you to go study in the US, you take that opportunity. So I came to the US to study for college, I had a Bachelors in Computer Science and then a Masters in Computer Science. >> Where did you go to school? >> I went to Middle Tennessee State University, and like I said, when somebody tells you, you're going to the US, you don't ask questions, you just go. >> So who made you that offer, how did that come about? >> My university in Ecuador, where I was from, they had an agreement with the university in Tennesee. So they would send students back and forth in an exchange program. >> So you're a good student, they identified you as having great potential and you got picked for that program? >> So 5,000 people apply for 20 spots when I applied. >> Wow. >> So 20 of us came, and out of the 20, the only two people who are staying in the US, my sister and I, we're twins, I have a twin sister. >> 'Cause you ask your sister for support, maybe? Twin sister. >> If I really, it probably had a lot to do with it. And then with technology, I found my way into Knightscope, and Knightscope is a really good company for women in technology specifically, and that is some of the work that I pushed myself to do. Our women in technology numbers are about 25% to 28% of the company which is a huge number for Silicon Valley. So we hire women, we try to mentor them, I myself take time to spend time with them, and then help them get a career that they're excited about. >> And when did you discover your affinity for computer science? It's always a great debate as to when is the best time, or when is the optimal time, or the most popular time for young girls and eventually young women to get involved in STEM? What was your experience? >> So I live with my uncle in Ecuador and my mother, so I always knew I wanted to do something structured, and at the beginning, he was an architect, so I thought I would be an architect, but then I started reading some science fiction books and the closest thing for me to science fiction, making that a reality, was a career in computer science and technology. So that's how I started, and that has led me to, now, Knightscope, and we're doing the most advanced technology that is out there, we're out there with artificial intelligence, we have machine learning, all of the technologies that are out there, robotics, we are using them to put them to use for the greater good. Our job is to keep America safe, and we all are working towards that goal. >> But I think you just want to make something fun that looked like C-3PO. >> It's more like R2-D2 actually, and if you want to see more, go to knightscope.com. >> Okay, and final question. So you're advice, more general advice, to older girls or young women, in terms of what they should do if they want to get into this or why they should consider a career in STEM if they haven't already. >> A career in STEM is very, very rewarding. You're going to be doing sometimes things that nobody else has done ever before. You're out there in front of everything that's happening with technology, and it's actually exciting. When you find other women that do what you want to do, look at people's backgrounds, look at what they've done, look what they're trying to accomplish, and then, make sure that you get into their lives and they'll help you through it. There's a lot of women who would be happy to help out and one of those is me, I'd be glad to help people out. >> Well, Mercedes, thank you so much, again, for spending some time. Congratulations on the award and comin' in and tellin' us your story and educating us more on Knightscope. >> Thank you, and if anybody wants to know, knightscope.com, they can find all about our technology. >> Alright, she's Mercedes, I'm Jeff Frick, we've been having a CUBE conversation in Palo Alto, thanks for watching, we'll catch you next time. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program a guest we've had on a number of times but first time in the role, Nancy Pearson, now the CMO of Openlink. Nancy, thanks for joining us here in the office, and great to see you. >> Great to see you, Stu. >> Alright, so we've had you on in your previous role at a number of big events. Tell us, what led you to Openlink? >> Well, I was really attracted to Openlink because of the position that they hold in the market in terms of being the leader of trading treasury and risk management across multiple industries. And I also took a look at their clients, and they have a pretty impressive client roster, companies and businesses that are really instrumental to the industry, and I wanted to have an impact in that kind of environment, so that's why I looked at Openlink. >> Yeah, Nancy, your whole career, you've been looking at, there's so much change happening in the industry. Digital is more than just a buzzword. What are you seeing today in your clients here at Openlink? >> Yeah, what I see, and going from a large enterprise environment where people jumped on the digital bandwagon fairly early, in many other industries, it's been a little bit of a struggle to understand, what does that really mean for our business? And one of the first things I noticed about coming to Openlink is they really weren't on the digital network. They were doing events, very heavily into email, et cetera, that type of marketing, but it was really important to get them on the digital platform. So that's digital advertising, and to really think about a digital first data driven campaign type approach for demand generation as well. >> And what does digital mean for your customers? >> Well it's really important to them as well. They're modernizing their business. Digital is disrupting their business. So on the side of their health, they have to actually embrace it and understand, what does that mean for my business? What do I need to put in place to be more visible? To understand the new game of engaging the clients in a digital format? I mean, 70% of clients and prospects actually do the investigatory work to actually understand which vendors they're going to be partnering with before they ever actually reach out to that client. So it's really important that you have a very strong website, and that was one of the first things that we started with at Openlink. >> What kind of things do you change to the website to make it more modern, more digital? >> Well we completely redesigned the website from the bottom up. So a new content management system, a totally new designed website with engagement, everything from thought leadership down to rethinking how we actually presented our products, as well as adding personalization. So you're able to really find what you want by your role, by industry, and by even deeper subject matter expertise and areas of focus. >> What's the mindset of your customers? I think a couple years it ago, it was like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to get Netflixed. "I'm going to get disrupted by digital." Is this now a weapon or an opportunity for them, or is it still a mix? >> No, it's definitely an opportunity, because digital levels the playing field for companies. So, it doesn't matter the size of the business, the complexity of the business. The winner is the person that at the end of the day can engage clients through their digital website, and also through Google, through LinkedIn, through all the different mechanisms today where you can engage with personalization. You can see and understand what your clients' needs are, and whoever serves that best is going to be the winner at the end of the day, which is why I say digital really helps create a level playing field. But you have to know how to use the tools. >> Love to hear more about what are your customers doing? How's Openlink helped them? >> So for example, one of the big questions right up front is usually, "How important is digital and social media?" And a lot of large enterprise clients struggle with that. The ones that have learned to use it as a tool really well and targeted can extend their reach triple-fold out in the market, and really get their story out in a way they couldn't previously. So digital and social media is one thing related to awareness and your share voice in the market. But your website, how you design that website through a client journey is really what makes all the difference. It turns opportunity into demand and leads and helps clients take action along the way. So a combination of being on the digital network, having a very strong website, and then modernizing the rest of your marketing tools for personalization. >> Any examples you can give kind of anonymized from your clients? I think most people know the big consumer brand, retail, how they interact. I know I travel a lot and see how the airlines are super responsive, but you've got some pretty specific industries. >> It's true, and we do some very highly targeted marketing. So, for example, knowing where our clients go to get their information. Knowing how to mirror that type of content through even third-party and how we build content on our own website to attract them and have them coming back for more is really the intricacies of how you actually build engagement and how you convert that engagement to leads, annuity. And then client references, story telling. So we really turned our content from pushing out content to telling stories. You'll see that everywhere. You'll see a lot of the very sophisticated players using storytelling. A lot of commercials today are storytelling mode, but we can do that within business, and it's the most powerful marketing you can create. >> Yeah, we in theCUBE, we always talk about extracting the signal from the noise, and you've got to be more personalized. You've got to tell those stories. Otherwise it just becomes noise, and it's tough for people to find something that captures them, and that they're going to want to glom on to. >> And learn from, frankly. >> That's great. Nancy, CMO role, have to imagine it's gone through a lot of changes recently. What are you seeing? Is there various types of roles as CMO? What are you seeing as some of the major changes there? >> I think the CMO role's changed a lot in the last five to seven years. And in particular, it's no longer a push mechanism of your message out into the market. It's establishing that relationship with clients, doing it through your website, doing it where they go on digital and social media. And the message is really important. What is your specific differentiation, and how does that help clients solve their business problems? So for Openlink, we did an effort right up front that really talked about understanding the purpose that we have within our client environments, defining three core messages, that we help clients establish and create a single source of the truth. For risk, and in their business for trading treasury and risk. We also help them solve complex business problems, and we bring expertise that they really can't get otherwise, because Openlink is a very unique solution. It's the leader. A platform that's really extensible across their enterprise for medium-sized businesses to large-sized businesses. So getting that message out and being very specific about it with detail is an important part of getting the value to your clients. >> There's a tough dynamic of, we have the data, but how do I make sure I'm securing that data? The governance risk. A lot of shows this year, GDPR's been a topic that's been popping to make sure that if I've got that data, I need to make sure, oh, if a customer comes to me I can make sure that that's being used in the right ways, not being used into. How's the changing landscape affecting your customers? >> Well, I think data is the new commodity, right. A new economy is being built from data and how you utilize it. So for Openlink, we have a platform that for, whether it's energy companies, airlines, these large enterprises that are data-rich, data-intensive environments, we have a huge opportunity to help them get more value from their data, and creating a single view of that data across the silos of their business gives them the visibility and insight to be able to innovate. And innovation is the name of the game for our clients. Things like getting into cloud, monetizing data and creating new services for different revenue streams. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity, and that's really in the sweet spot of this business. >> Openlink cloud is a new announcement that you had out. >> Nancy: It is. >> How does that impact how you reach your customers, how you market to your customers? >> Well, first of all, we've had a tremendous amount of uptake from the cork lines that we have to move to cloud, and so it's created a lot of opportunity for us. Everyone is needing to modernize and reduce their reliance on cost related to infrastructure, and cloud is in innovation platform. So in our business, this is our innovation platform, and they can build on top of that once they move to that type of an environment and realize some of those cost benefits. The future is innovation as it relates to our Openlink cloud, and we're really excited and really positive about the interest from our clients. And everyone needs to innovate today. Your point up front about disruption, you're either being disrupted or you're disrupting your industry. Those are the choices you have to make today. >> Yeah, right. Do you want to set the menu or be on the menu? (laughter) >> Nancy: Exactly. >> Nancy, you talked about the website. What other changes have you been making to Openlink so far? And love to hear what's on your plate for the next six to 12 months. >> Well, right up front the objective was to make marketing a strategic partner to the CEO and to the leadership. And so we're continuing on that journey. So we rebranded the business and really modernized our logo; as I mentioned, grounded back our message around differentiators from a client perspective, and really being in touch with that; created a foundational website that's best of breed and leading edge; and now what I want to do going into 2018 is really just build on top of that. So how do we create demand? How do we provide more thought leadership and build content in a way that's meaningful to the industry and to our clients to help them increase their own proficiency in the spaces that we serve? And be able to help make them successful as well. >> All right, talk about leveling the playing field, whether you're a hundred year old company, a 25 year old company or a six month old company, what does it mean in today's market? >> It means that you can compete. It means that you can have the same voice, and you don't have to have the same budget. You don't have to have the same sized business. But if you know how to use the tools today, and you know how to create incredible content, you can have an equal voice. >> Nancy Pearson, CMO of Openlink. Great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for sharing with us all the updates. We look forward to tracking the progress of you and Openlink. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live here, day three of three days of coverage of theCUBE at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Paul Gillin and special guest on our day-three opening, Peter Burris, head of research of SiliconANGLE Media, general manager of wikibon.com research. Guys, good to see you on day three. We're goin' strong. I mean, I think I feel great, a lot of activity. So many story lines to talk about. Obviously the big one is the combination, not merger, I slipped yesterday, or acquisition, the combination of equals, Dell, EMC. Some will question did EMC acquire Dell or Dell acquire EMC? Certainly Michael Dell's still captain of the ship. But that's the top story. But a lot of product line conversations. Not a lot of overlap. Peter, you've been at all the analyst sessions. We had David Furrier on yesterday, teasing it up, but I'd like to get you, your perspective and reaction to your thoughts as you look at the giants in the industry. Michael Dell bought EMC for a record 60 billion plus. You've been around the block. You've seen many waves. You've analyzed many generations of the computer industry. What does this actually mean. Where are they, what's your thoughts and reaction? >> So John, I'll give you three different story lines here, right? The meta-picture, the good, and the what the hell's goin' on kind of picture. The first one, the meta-picture is, and SiliconANGLE said this, it was a really well written article, you might have even written it Paul, that there has never really been a successful mega-merger in the tech industry. And historically I think that's because, well here's the bottom line. This one may actually work. And it may actually work nicely. And the reason is is that most of the other mergers or combinations were companies with problems and companies that didn't have problems. Or companies with problems and companies with problems. And if you take a look at Dell and EMC, neither of them had problems. They weren't buying each other's problems. It was a nice combination and complimentary in that EMC had a great consumer business, great channel business, and had a pretty strong financial position. And EMC had a great enterprise business, great, you know-- >> Sales organizations. >> Great sales organization. And they had, they were strong in where the industry's going around how do you handle data and how do you handle storage. So it's got, what we're seeing here is everybody singing out of the same hymnal. I'm not seeing any tension. And that is an indication that this one may actually go well. I think it's a very, very good early sign. >> Paul, you and I were talking on the day one open and also, we kind of hit it a little bit yesterday with David Furrier, talking about this mega-merger. Compare and contrast that to HBE, which is been kind of, being de-positioned by some of the Dell executives. They don't actually call 'em out by name, but HP Enterprise is taking a different approach. They're taking a, you know, smaller is better approach. Obviously, Michael Dell has a complete different philosophy. We're still going to analyze that as well. We've got HPE Discover coming up as well. Thoughts on the compare and contrast, guys, reaction to the strategies of HPE, smaller, faster, as they say. Or Dell, bigger, more powerful. >> I think both are viable strategies. It's just a matter of if they can pull it off. I mean, HP, you talk about bad mergers, Peter, I mean you think of HP Compact, HP Autonomy, this is a company that has had a terrible track record of big mergers. Although they've had some successful ones certainly. >> By the Meg Whitman inherited those. >> Yes. >> Prior to Meg Whitman coming on board. >> Oh she was a board member for some of them. >> Okay, so she was at the table. Now, we don't know, okay but your thoughts, continue. >> But Dell, clearly going the other direction. They, I mean, they're building sort of an IBM-like model, the way IBM was in the '80s when it dominated every market that it played in. And it played at even more markets than Dell does now. So I think that the model makes sense. I think Peter's absolutely right, I'm not sensing any tension at this conference. There seems to be, the most important thing is there seems to be a lot of communication going on. The executives are spending a lot of time with each other and they're talking a lot to the people. And when you look back, and I live, and Peter, you remember the DEC, you know, the fiasco with DEC being purchased by Compaq. That was clearly a takeover. And that was Compaq came in, took over the company and didn't tell anybody anything. And the DEC people were living in the dark and it was clear that they had no value to the acquiring company. That, clearly, they're not making those mistakes here. >> For the younger, for the younger audience, DEC is Digital Equipment Corporation which was a behemoth winner in the micro, mini-computer era and then now defunct company. >> Except the one, one thing I'd add to that, Paul, is that, and this is why, it's why this first sign is so important. That they are seem to be, that executives here seem to be collaborating and working together. DEC had been one of those mini-computer companies dominated by an OEM business, which means you had a common set of components and then everybody was competing for customers with how you put those components together. So there was, it was a, it was a maelstrom of internal competition at DEC. When Compaq got ahold of DEC, that DEC sense of internal competition took over Compaq. And then when Compaq, when HP acquired Compaq, that maelstrom and internal competition took over HP. >> They didn't know what they were getting into. >> We used to call it the red-blue wars and it was ugly. And that's not happening here. That's a first sign. >> Yeah, I would agree Peter. I want to get your thoughts to all that. I would agree that this is, I've been tryin' to sniff out where the wind's blowin' on this for a year and to my knowledge, and my insight and sources, it's not going bad at all. It's going great. The numbers are performing, they're winning some deals, but let's compare to HP because I asked Mark Heard at their Oracle media event last week, cause they were touting number one in every market. So I said, "Well, there's a digital transformation "going on, a whole new way to do business "for the next 33 years, "not looking back at the past 33 years." Which metrics are you using? Everyone's claiming to be number one at something. So, the question is, maybe HP does have it right. Maybe their strategy will work. What are the, what are going to be those metrics for this next generation? If cloud becomes the connective tissue to data, value of data, and that apps are going to be very agile. Maybe this decentralized approach from HP might be a better strategy for the growth. Thoughts. >> Well, look, let's, so let's, I want to get back to the, what's good about what we're seeing and some other things that probably need to be worked on, but, but here's what I'd say, John. And this is what Wikibon believes. That customers is always going to be the most important metric. So, the first metric is, is HP gaining customers? Is HP losing customers? Is Dell gaining customers? Or is Dell losing customers? That's the number one most important metric. Always will be as far as I'm concerned. But the second one is, and this, and I'll pre-say something I'm going to talk about in a little bit. The second one is, I'll call it data under management. If we think about, if we think about this notion of data as an asset, data as a source of value, how much does HP, through it's customers, how much data does, does HP have under management? How much data does Dell/EMC have under management? And I think that's going to be an important way of thinking about the intensity of the relationships, which relationships are going to steer towards which types of environments. Is it going to be a procurement relationship or a real strategic relationship? By procurement, I mean, it's fundamentally focused on driving cost out of the deal. Strategic, I mean it's fundamentally focused by jointly creating value. So this notion of data under management, to me, is going to be something we're going to be talking about in five years. >> So, Bill Schmarzo, friend of both of ours, was, came by the set before we came on here and he's the dean of big data as coined by theCUBE but now he's takin' on it his own, like he's actually a dean now teaching big data. We are talking about some of the research that you're doing and taking a stand on, it's important, I want to put a plug in for the Wikibon research team that you're leading, is the business value of data. >> Peter: Oh absolutely. >> And that you're looking at data as a valuation mechanism, not an accounting, compliance thing. And this is something, I think, is way ahead of the curve. So props to you guys for puttin' the stake in the ground. To your point, the new metric might just be the valuation of how they use data, whether that's customer data, product services data, application development concepts to reconfiguring how they do business. >> And it's the reconfigure that's the smart, that's the absolutely right word. So, from our perspective John, the difference between a business and a digital business is a business uses data one way, a digital business uses data another way. A business uses data as an, something to just handle coordination and administration. >> Paul: Bookkeeping. >> Yeah, exactly. A digital business uses data as a strategic asset to differentiate how to engage to markets. That's where the industry's going, and that's what we want to talk about. >> And by the way, in previous business constructs or business books people have, might have read over the years certainly, you know, the Peter Druckers and so on, management consultants, never actually factored data into the value chains of-- >> Oh they did, they did, they did. They just didn't actually, so Drucker, for example did. >> John: Digital data? >> Oh, he talked about information and the role that information played. >> John: I stand corrected. >> Herbert Simon talked about this kind of stuff 50 years. Unfortunately it all got lost when we went through things like, jeez, you know, there was a very famous economist who said in the late 80s, "Information technology "shows up everywhere but in the productivity numbers." So, you old guys would-- >> I remember that, I remember that quote. >> So, the idea ultimately is we now have to get very discrete and very specific about what that means. And that's a challenge. But let's come back to, let's come back to at least what we think is really working here, if I may. >> John: Absolutely, go ahead. >> So the first thing is, at a more tactical level, number one is the Hyperconvert story is exciting. And it's starting to come together. And again, I'm not, we're not seeing tension between the folks that are selling servers and the folks that are doing Hyperconversion. Both are introducing new technology that are going to create new opportunities for customers, and they're not as, as, as your good friend Michael Dell said, a couple times over the past year, here in theCUBE, "We are not going to "artificially constrain any of our businesses." And, as Amazon said at re:Invent, "If you're going to do it at scale, "eventually you're going to put in hardware." And he wants to demonstrate that all this great software stuff that's happening, that ultimately Dell's going to be the leader at designing these new capabilities into the hardware and he wants to show how that's going to show up in all his product lines. >> That's a great point. I think the most interesting dynamic I've been seeing out of the interviews we've been doing the last two days is that the problem Dell has to struggle with now, and it'll be interesting to watch how they, how they figure this out, is all of their, used to be called the Federation, now they're called the Strategic Business Alliances I think. The, you know, the VMwares, the RSAs, the Pivotals, how are they going to make sense of those in the context of this bigger whole? On the one hand, they've got some competing priorities here. Dell has a very strong relationship with Microsoft, VMware is a competitor to Microsoft. So you got to figure out how to get those, how to make sense of those different alliances. Pivotal is potentially a competitor to Microsoft. >> Potentially? >> Well, Microsoft is in the pass business, yeah. >> No, it is yeah, it's going to compete. >> So you've got a, you've got some paradoxes here in the businesses that Dell has acquired. They really still, I sense they still haven't made sense of what they're going to do with them. >> Yeah, great point. I mean, first of all, you guys are pros and we have a historical view here of the collective intelligence of all of us old guys here. We've seen a lot of ways. But Rob Hof wrote an article on SiliconANGLE, our Editor-in-Chief Rob Hof, who's also an industry veteran and journalist himself. After the Oracle media event, and the headline reads, "In Oracle's Cloud Pitch to Enterprises, "an Echo of a Bygone Tech Era." And his point with this story is, I want to get your reaction to this, cause I think we're seeing a trend here, you guys are teasing out here. We're kind of going back down to the old tech days. You were the Editor-in-Chief of Computerworld back in the day with the mainframe world and then the minis. Seeing Marius Haas on here using words like "Single pain of glass." "One throat to choke." "End to end." We're almost seeing the bygone era coming back again where maybe they might have the rights to it. Certainly Oracle saying, "Hey, you know, "reorganize our sales force." So the question. Is the cloud the de-centralized mainframe. Is it now the new centralized, with edge, intelligent edge, is that, are we going back to the old ways, in a way, not fully but, unifying the sales forces. >> So, the computing industry-- >> Thoughts. >> Has been been on an inexorable march to greater utilization of public infrastructure. What an economist would say is we've always found ways to reduce asset specificities. I buy something, and I apply it to one purpose. I can't apply it to another purpose. Software changes that. Commodity pricing and hardware changes that. Public infrastructure changes that. So we're going to continue to see that inexorable march to the use of public infrastructure or somethin' that looks like public infrastructure. And that's going to continue. And the industry's always been very, very good at that. That does not mean, however, that we're going to have one supplier. So what we're seeing is a lot of FUD right now. Amazon FUD, Dell FUD, Oracle FUD. There is a real tension in the model and the real tension is, more than likely, the future is going to be composites of services operating on multiple different cloud-like instances, including on premise. And who's going to offer the best end-to-end control plane? >> Paul, I want to get your thoughts. Cause you remember goin' back to the days, IBM had SNA network stack, DEC had DECnet, we had, they had propietary stacks. Cloud, Azure stack, this stack, that. Are we seeing this again? Your thoughts. >> Well I think Peter's absolutely right but the variable, and you're right, we are seeing this again. We're seeing a trend of return to simplicity. Because what IT organizations have been wrestling with for the last 20 years is everything is just getting more complex. There's more vendors, there's more piece parts, and they've got to fit them all together, and it sucks. And so they want someone to simplify this. Now, cloud vendors simplify it on one level. But software-defined, on another level. We've been talking here about software defined storage, about software-defined networking, massive virtualization. And that's on an open source or at least an open API-based model. Which I think is the twist here. Are we going back to the days of IBM? Yeah. But IBM, But the IBM may actually be software-defined. >> Or five different companies that look like IBM. >> I know what you're saying Paul, and I'm not going to disagree with you. But here's the opposite-- >> But you disagree with him. >> No, no, but no I'm not going to, I'm going to put a slightly different spin on it. It used to be that the most valuable asset in an IT organization was the mainframe. And the entire organization was organized and the interactions with the business were organized and put in place to handle the value of that mainframe. We are not going back to a day where the IT organization, the way business uses IT is organized around the mainframe as an asset. Or even around the provision of infrastructure as an asset. We are going to start seeing organization and frameworks that are fundamentally built around this idea of data as an asset. And that is going to be a lot more complex with a lot more buyers and a lot more opportunities for differentiation creating value. So we will see more complexity in IT at the software and the use case level, less complexity at the infrastructure levels. >> Which is why machine learning and automation gets a lot of hype, but to Paul, I'm going to get your point and tie Peter's point together and introduce Jeff Bezos' comment last week on NDC. He mentioned that most things take 10 years to bake out in terms of getting things right. Ten year kind of horizon. Kind of an order of magnitude. But he says, "All these startups say they have "disruptive technology, it's not their technology that's "disruptive, it's what's the customer is disrupted." So we're talkin' about customers being disrupted. It's not some company having disruptive technologies. >> And disrupting. >> So are we saying that customers are being disrupted by reconfiguring their businesses, hence with the mainframe disrupted, a new way to do things, we're seeing clouded-data as a new way to do things. So, that's causing some reconfiguration and disruption, allows them to say, "Shit, just when I thought it was simple "it got more complex." >> But the disruptive element is the data as Peter says. >> I mean the machines are becoming, the machines are already a commodity. The, with open source, the platforms are a commodity. What's disruptive is how you use the data in different ways. And to your point Peter, yes, it's going to be a much more complex world. >> Peter: Much more. >> Because there's a lot more data and there's a lot more things we can do with data. >> And data can, that's exactly right. We can do so much more with data. So again, let's go back to the fundamental metric that at least I suggested. Who gets more customers? There are going to be more buyers of this stuff in five years than there are today. More buyers in the sense that within an organization, there's going to be more people involved in the decision and there's going to be more businesses. Because if this stuff actually works, the transaction costs are going to go down and you can then organize your businesses, institutionalize how you do work differently so you can have more partnerships. All that means that fundamentally, what we're talkin' about here is going to lead to greater complexity in business, greater opportunity therefore, but what I've always said, and I don't know if you've heard this Paul, but I know you have John, and I've said it on theCUBE. That the fundamental demarcation is that the first 50 years of this industry featured known process, unknown technology. And what do you we focus on? The technology. What's the next 50 years? Unknown process, known technology. What are we going to focus on? How to build that software, how to handle those data assets. What are we going to focus less attention on? The technology. What does everybody want to talk about at this show? >> The technology. >> Technology. That's a disconnect. So going to one of the things that we now have to think about from a DELL/EMC standpoint is where's the story about how Dell is going to appreciate the value of your data assets over time. We need more of that. >> And let me point out, you now, you didn't mention IBM but one company that is doing that well right now, they aren't getting the business benefit for it yet, is IBM. Where they are really taking, they are not technology, I mean they don't talk about power aid anymore. They talk about Watson, they talk about what you can do with analytics, they talk about a smarter planet. They haven't been able to turn this into a successful business yet but they're doing, I think, exactly what you're talking about. >> Well the product, they have some product challenges. I mean, so let's get back down to the customer thing. I like that angle. You got to have the customer, you got to have the products that customers will be buying. That's the value, exchange that customers will value and then hence by your service or product. Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger, when they did the Amazon deal, VMware. Jassy, Andy Jassy CEO of AWS said to me, "We are customer focused." So I believe that you're right on this 100%. Whoever can get the customers. And this is not about who's the better stack, if the customers like it, they're going to buy it. >> And very importantly, John, they are going to invest in it to make it valuable in their business. And that's what you want. You want to see your customers become a centerpiece of value-creation in your ecosystem. >> And I think Amazon Web Services proves that the dark horse could come out of nowhere and be the behemoth that they are because they served the customers. >> So that's the second thing that I'm missing at this show. And I know, I think I know why, is where is the additional details, even a little bit more, about VMware and AWS. Now, I know that they're going to wait for the VMware World, that's the story. >> They showed a little preview in the keynote, it's still baking out. >> Yeah, but it would be nice to have a little bit more. >> That's one of those tough relationships they need to manage, right? >> Yeah, exactly right. >> I mean VMware and IBM also have an alliance. They are allied with their foes now through the acquisition. The point about, about the value of data, you know, I think Amazon has done a good job of building platforms that are very flexible for customers to use but they abstract a lot of the underlying complexity. >> Alright, so with the data, I want to just double-down on that for a second and get your reaction, thoughts on, obviously, one of the themes here is IOT and we heard Michael Dell saying it's going to be centralized, pushed out to the edge, you got in research from Wikibon intellegent edge. You and David Floy and the rest of the team doing some real amazing work at Wikibon.com. Check it out, subscription required. What's the edge strategy? What does that actually mean for IT practitioners out there? It's, certainly we heard from Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of Dell said, "Most CIOs are conservative "and don't usually jump on these waves." They missed mobile, they missed some other waves. His mandate was, CIOs, don't miss the IOT wave. So what is the IOT, this edge of the network thing mean for a CIO. >> Well, the first thing is in hardcore circumstances, many CIOs aren't even involved in the edge. So if you take a look, if you go into where a lot of the edged domains are really crucial, you see a plant manager that's more responsible for what's going on in the edge than the CIO. The CIO is handling the corporate systems. The plant manager is handling what's actually happening at the edge. The operational technology stuff. So the first thing is we're going to see a slow circling of the IT and OT organizations about who's going to win-- >> OT meaning Operational Technology. >> Operational Technology. Just as we saw a slow circling back in the 1990s when TCPIP came in, and blew away DEC and blew away everybody, and started blowing away the TELECOM divisions, or TELECOM's functions within side large enterprises. >> So you think that IOT is going to be as disruptive as TCPIP was in standardizing in the network layer. >> Oh absolutely, absolutely. It's going to be, it's going to have an enormous impact because there's so many new sources. The data is going to have, how to think about it, and that was the second point I was going to make, John, is we do not currently have architectural standards in place for thinking about how this stuff is going to come together. And it's something that David Furrier and I and the Wikibon team are working on and I hope to come up with, I hope to come out with some research, actually probably next month, on what we call automation zones or data zones or probably edge zones. Which is, how do, just we think about security zones today, how do we think about edge zones. Where the edge zone is defined by a moment, an automation moment, cannot have data outside of that zone. And that needs to become an architectural principle where OT and IT can work together and say, "What data has to be in that zone? "I'll make sure my data gets there, "you make sure you're data gets there. "We'll figure out how control happens, "and that's how we drive this thing forward." >> Well, just to give you a prop here on theCUBE here is, Wikibon was right about Flash, they were right about Hyperconvergence and convergent infrastructure. Big bets early on that were kind of like, people were like, "What?" And certainly Vstand, ServiceStand although some people will disagree with this. >> They were right about the edge. >> Now you're right about, I think you're right on, way right on the edge and you're way right on value of data. >> Yeah. >> I think those are two stands that you're taking that will be-- >> And let's give great props to David Furrier who was a catalyst for thinking many of these things through. >> Alright Paul, final word from you. Obviously, you know, as a veteran, you've covered it all. Okay, what's your take? I mean, what's the, how's the wind blowing, what's your instinct tell you of what's happening. >> I think it's generally good, but it's hard to tell from conferences. As you know John, the reason most conferences are so boring is that there's no tension, there's no conflict. It's all good, it's all everybody's happy and everybody's doin' a great job. That's the very same thing that we're seeing here. >> Rah rah, Kool-aid injection. >> One thing I can't help notice is on the keynote, if you look at the keynote agenda for the three days, there's not a single customer on the, on the keynote agenda. Which I think is a problem. Or I don't think that says good things about where Dell is really focusing it's message right now. You want to have, at most big company conferences, there's lots and lots of customers who come up on stage. I think Dell is still thinking about, I mean it's a technology-focused company. They're thinking about technology integration right now. >> So speeds and feeds. >> Yeah, you hear a lot of speeds and feeds. >> Everybody wants to be the most important thing in the enterprise, and they still want hardware to be the most important thing. >> Well, I think I mean, I would agree with you 100%, but I just think, just, in this acquisition, I mean, sorry, merger of equals, they have a lot of herding cats going on right now. There's a lot of herding of portfolio and not a lot of overlap but I can see them kind of making room on the stage for that. But I do agree, I mean, customers do tell the best story. >> And in the long run, that's, as Peter said, that is what is going to make the difference. Are the customers happy? >> Guys, amazing exchange. Thanks so much, Peter, for comin' out and takin' some time out of your busy schedule to come on theCUBE and share your insight. The daily on-cue Paul, as always, we're havin' another three days. Third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. Great commentary, great analysis, more live coverage from day three of Dell/EMC World 2017. We'll be right back, stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. This is the Cube Silicon Angle's flagship program where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is our eighth year of covering EMC World, but now called Dell EMC World. I'm John Furrier, your co-host on our set one and with my co-host Paul Gillin this week as well as Kieth Townshend and John Walls and Rebecca Knight on set two. Double barrel shotgun of content here at Dell EMC World with you. Thanks for joining us for three days of wall to wall coverage. Paul, so much to talk about here this week. Digital transformation, little bit boring theme, it's being played out in real time. But this is a historic moment because one, the Cube started at EMC World in 2010, eight years ago. But, this is the first official EMC World where it's Dell EMC World, kind of a mini event in Austin, but since Michael Dell took over, or I'm sorry, merger of equals, a combination. >> Paul: Combination, as they call it. >> (chuckling) Combination. This is the first instantiation of EMC World as Dell EMC World. Jeremy Burton's now the CMO of Dell Technologies which is the holding company for all the companies. It's the same EMC World flair, now the integrated content. Notable absent Cube alumni and executives from EMC. We'll talk about that in the EMC Mafia segment shortly, but (chuckling) your thoughts because now Michael Dell's puttin' the rubber to the road. Kind of nothing earth shattering in his keynote, but certainly private company, all guns blaring, smiling and dialing, he's got the swagger on stage. >> Well, Michael is nothing if not an optimist. He's always good at seeing a brighter future, and at his keynote this morning, as you said it was blissfully free of content, but it did talk a lot about digital transformation which is of course the buzzword of the year in the IT industry. Little surprised that Dell adopted the same buzzword that HP and Cisco and all these other big companies are adopting. What happened in the keynote is less interesting than how the mood changes here, and this is the coming out party for Dell EMC. Yeah, there was a conference last October, a month after the merger, but this is really, things have finally settled out, now six months later and it's a chance for customers and for the partners to get a sense of how well this is all working out. >> And one of the things I'm watching is how the story's unfolding 'cause now you're starting to see the big companies, certainly in the consolidation side of the business market of infrastructure and data center and enterprise IT, it's a consolidating mature market. It is transforming, there is a cloud story requirement, there are new software requirements, software defined data center, as well as new growth opportunities, so what I'm looking at is what is the story? What is Michael packaging and how does that compare to the competition? We're going to hear from HPE at HPE Discover coming up, the Cube will be covering that for the seventh consecutive year. We're seeing Amazon's story playing out in real time. Oracle's story, everyone's got their story. And it's certainly digital transformation but what's interesting is Michael's got the packaging. He's packaging it up, your thoughts. >> And Michael kind of dissed the cloud this morning, actually in his presentation. He said, you can't have a successful business, or your business is not going to grow as quickly if you're 100% cloud based. He was very much making a pitch for data center infrastructure. Really not surprising coming from Michael. One thing that will be a sub-theme here I think is how this merger is working out, and as we wrote on Silicon Angle this week, if you go back to the history of big mega mergers, particularly in the hardware industry, going back to Burroughs Sperry, DEC Compaq, HP Compaq, Wellfleet Synoptics and NCR AT&T. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Pretty much all disasters, and we really haven't seen a merger anywhere near this scale between two IT companies that has worked well. All indications are now that they're doing the right things, they even have some people on board with Dell EMC who went through some of those mergers. But it's going to be interesting to see how they break a pattern that has been decidedly negative. >> Great point, I loved your post by the way, and I would add that interesting observation, at least from my perspective is, as we sit down with these billionaires and interview them one-on-one on the Cube is, you look at Amazon, Andy Jasse and Jeff Bezos, Bezos in particular. Larry Ellison and Michael Dell, you have essentially captains of industry at the helm. Michael Dell is no spring chicken, but he's also not over the hill either, he's 51 years old. >> Paul: He's a kid relative to most leaders in this industry. >> You know, you hear Jeff Bezos talk and I was watching his talk in DC just this week, he's saying we're taking the long view. If you look at Amazon.com's CEO, Bezos, look at Michael Dell, look at what Ellison's doing, they're all playing the long game card. Now I don't know if that's a hedge against we don't have our story right, or give us more time to bake out our stuff, but I think what's different about Dell Technologies is, Michael's 33 years into the business, one trillion dollars later in sales and he's young, so I think that is a wild card. Ellison's still running the show, Bezos is still running the show, Dell's certainly running the show. I think the wild card on this is the fact that you got a strong founder, and a privately held company. >> And Ellison, it's questionable how long Ellison will be able to run the show, I mean he is over 70 at this point. Dell certainly will be around for a long time. You have to take a long term strategy. If you're not Amazon, you have to take a long term strategy 'cause what other choice do you have? You've lost in the short term, so it's not surprising to hear these guys going that way. I'll be interested to hear from Michael and from his team about the cloud and how they really design and differentiate its strategy. I think IBM has staked its position in cloud out pretty well. Even HPE has got a differentiated position. HPE of course has the configurable hardware, that's a point that Dell I think has to come back on, and the big question is software. John, as you pointed out the other day, VMware is worth more than HPE, by a substantial margin at this point. They've got this huge asset in VMware, not to mention Virtuestream and Pivotal and the other good software assets they acquired. What are they going to do with them? Are they just going to let 'em go free like Michael has done in the past, or are they going to try to mold these into some kind of coordinated whole? >> Well, great point one is on the HPE valuation thing market cap, VMware's actually worth more on market cap and public markets than HPE. Interesting, but not significant in my mind yet, but it does point to the fact that Michael Dell's rhetoric on stage today, he didn't take any shots at HP. Last year he took a big shot at HPE. It's been his rival from day one. I used to work at HP when he was just a mail order company selling white boxes and then he grew that business, obviously the rest is history, but no shot at HP because VMware has to work with HP. Right, (chuckling) so that's interesting. Two is, on the software side, Dell is a hardware company, let's face it. But they have more software now than they've ever had before so that is a good point, we're going to be getting into this date software defined data center to find out how much they actually have. A couple core themes that I see already popping out of the keynote, one, Pivotal. Pivotal and Cloud Foundry's instrumental in the keynotes. NSX was mentioned, Pat Gelsinger's going to be on tomorrow. NSX is VMware's secret play. If you look at what NSX is doing with the Amazon public cloud deal that they did recently this year, NSX could be the real lever in that intellectual property, that lock in, that kind of differentiation. The cloud is not a place, it's a way of doing IT is another message we heard all day today. To me, and your point about bashing cloud, I actually think that's a stake in the ground to kind of hold the line, because they have no cloud strategy. Now, their cloud strategy is kind of hand waiving right now with multi-cloud, which I buy, but multi-cloud is still a fantasy in my mind. Latencies are too low, there just isn't the kind of plumbing yet in place on the clouds for multi-cloud, but certainly hybrid-cloud I think will be multi-cloud roll, so those are the key things and then I'm going to ask Michael directly. You blew 60 billion dollars on this deal. Is there any cash left for M&A? >> Paul: Acquisitions, yeah. >> M&A right now is hot market, you can do some nice tuck ins, fill in the white spaces on the products. Get those software assets and really start cobbling together a growth strategy. There's no doubt in my mind, Paul, that they're going to win the mature, classic business school move of consolidated market. Own the consolidated market, and try to get a growth strategy. To me, that's going to be the big question. What is Dell Technologies and Dell EMC's growth strategy? >> And you would have to think it's either through M&A, perhaps an acquisition of HPE if the valuation continues to go down. Or it's in software It's a good point you made about VMware. Vmware also has a strategic alliance with IBM, so if you're Michael Dell, it's hard to give a compelling keynote speech these days because you can't really offend anybody. His companies now are in cahoots with all these other firms, and of course dissing the cloud is even dangerous because Cloud Foundry is such a critical part of the Pivotal strategy. I think it's an important point, you've got a company that is almost trying to reassemble the old IBM, the old IBM of the '80s which dominated every segment that was important Dell is almost doing that now, I mean the only piece they really don't have is networking. To make a big play, to become the mongo IT company in the world, can they raise the kind of funds for that? >> Yeah, and we're also going to talk about the cloud transition as well as what I'm calling the EMC mafia, folks that have been on the Cube and big executives at EMC. We'll get to that in a minute, but I just want to talk about that cloud play, because you're right, the growth strategy has to come from software. I just don't see the cloud growth yet for these guys, although Michael, in the hallway, conversations are growth in the cloud is doing really well for EMC, not sure. But on the growth strategy, Pivotal, Boo-Mee, Vmware, Virtuestream, and Software Converge Infrastructure are interesting plays, so I think that's where we have to look here. I still think there's a lot of holes in the product line. To me that's important. Now, trends so far, and what we're expecting to hear at the show is, some of my notes Paul, I'll share with you, and get your reaction on. All flash arrays are going to be big, continuing to grow that. Hyperconverge VX rail, we heard that on stage today, claiming to be number one. Power edge 14G. Again, back to speeds and feeds, (chuckling) you know. Storage. Storage is the bread and butter of EMC and now Dell EMC I still think is going to be a real critical beachhead that they going to continue to expand, storage is not going away. Obviously the ice lawn all flash is coming out, and then SSD's, data protection in the cloud. You're starting to see them going where their roots are. Cloud stuff is coming out of the data domain, kind of their core storage first, make sense strategy wise, while they buy their time to fill in the cloud. >> Well, it's a good point about storage. They have a comfortable lead in storage. According to the latest IDC figures, they're a good 15 points ahead of their next biggest competitor. They have a comfortable lead in the hyper converge infrastructure. Four different product lines in that area. These are beachheads that they have to shore up. They have to be sure that their market share doesn't erode in those areas. The question is where does the growth come from? You look at a company that's going through a very similar transition right now, Cisco, which has finally really bought in to software defined networking and is remaking its company around it. That company is having to change the whole culture in response to a technology trend. Now the same thing's going on in the data center. Everything's being remade as virtualized and Vmware is at the center of that, so Michael Dell has the asset to be able to lead that conversion, but are they psychologically going to get there? >> Great point. One, I would agree with you that the whole Cisco example proves the same channel that Dell EMC is. Can they move up the stack? In this case, they're hardware guys, can they add software. Cisco, they're transforming themselves to be more cloud native. The classic move's happening. Cisco have been trying to move up the stack for over a generation. They're plumbing guys, they're networking guys. These guys are hardware guys. Can they get the DNA to truly become software providers, not in the sense of selling software, just providing a software fabric that's going to be the key differentiators, because digital transformation is about IT transformation. That is certainly the reality, what we're seeing when you start to peel back the onions. And that to me is going to be the big discussion because as David Gooldun said on stage, apps provide the value. As the enterprises build more apps, you got to have a platform, you got to have a cohesive horizontal end to end software fabric, and the question is, do they have it? >> Well, they certainly have the foundation for it, I mean they have Pivotal, there's a whole developer community around Pivotal. Dell itself doesn't have a developer community, nor does EMC but they have elements of that to build upon. The interesting thing about the conversion to software, about software defined infrastructure, is that it requires thinking from an application perspective and that's not something hardware companies have ever been inclined to do. So, how does Michael Dell make that transition, has he made it himself, is there other leadership he's going to have to bring in who are going to make it for him? The whole leadership of the Dell EMC company right now is ex-Dell and EMC people, it's hardware guys. >> I'm going to put pressure on Dell, the question on software. But you wrote a two part series on SiliconAngle.com, worth checking out, getting a lot of viral buzz around open source and the value of open source, because if you look at say Cisco for instance, what they're doing with the cloud native strategy, they have actually pivoted and Chuck Robbins, the CEO has acknowledged, actually re-tweeted one of my tweets the other day, with as we were talking about this new program called DevNet Create. They're taking the developer program from Cisco and moving it into an open community model, which basically is the toe in the water for saying, we have to figure out open source. All the critical, big vendors that are transforming from called the old guard, as Amazon calls 'em, Amazon Web Services, Andy Jasse. Dell's an old guard guy, but still young, but they got to get to open source. What are you finding is the success parameters there because you got to play in the open source, be a contributing member. Again, back to the DNA of the culture, and two, there's real value there. >> Well, there's no question that open source has won when it comes to infrastructure. I mean, the biggest IT companies in the world which are Google and Facebook, are both built on open source platforms. Game over. This is where IT infrastructure is headed. Cisco, interesting case because they are an infrastructure company, and they are being eroded, their traditional market is being eroded by open source, they've chosen to embrace it through their developer community. Cisco is one company I would never bet against. They're such a great company. If anyone's going to make the transition, they will. Open source is still an infrastructure play. I don't see open source in the applications area being a major driver, but Dell is an infrastructure company, so you have to assume that everything they're doing in managing, in securing storage and servers is going to be under pressure from open source at some point. They have to embrace that as Cisco is doing. >> Paul, we had thought leader chat with some experts on our digital panel, software crowd chat, everyone knows crowdchat.net, check it out. And comment and conversation was taking place among the influential folks saying, what is a software company? You go back to the web, shrink wrapped, download software, to now fully SAS based and Saas now platform, what is a software company? So, the question was, is Facebook a software company? Or are they an app company? Which begs the question, you have to be a software company, but it's not the classic software company category, business model. You need software (chuckling) to run stuff, so you can be a hardware guy, like Michael Dell, and have Dell Technologies. You can be a network company like Cisco, but you've got to be a software company in the new way. >> Well, I spoke to a Forester analyst in writing that piece on open source who had a great point, he said Facebook and Google are two big successful software companies, neither of which makes. >> Any money. >> Any money, a little bit in Google's case licensing software. They created business models that have nothing to do with the traditional software model, but that have leveraged their expertise in the software that they've developed. And maybe that is the business model, ultimately the business model is building software in order to do something else with it that customers will pay for. >> I think you're on to something. I think your post illuminates that. I think that this is going to be one of those things where in the history books of the tech generation, as we're on our whatever wave of open source generation, this is it, it's not about the business model of the software, it's how the software's being used in the business model of the transformation. That is really really key. Paul, I want to just talk about, really quickly about my observation at EMC. A little bit of editorial moment here. Because, Dell took over. Dell EMC. We've interviewed now eight years, pretty much all the executives at EMC over the years, but there's an EMC mafia developing. There's a lot of people who have left EMC, that we know, we're friends with. Guy Churchwood, CJ DeSai, Josh Conn, Rich DePellatano, Brian Gallagher, BJ Jenkins, Sanjay Murchandani, and many more have left because of the consolidation. Certainly you can't, EMC's going to get consolidated down, but no major layoffs but still enough that some eagles have flown from the nest, as they say and are running other companies. So you have this EMC culture out there of very sales oriented, very customer centric, now running other companies, and I want to give a shout out to all those EMC alumni and mafia out there. Good luck on your new ventures, but the impact here to Dell is a mashup of the two cultures. What's your observation, what's your reaction of that. Have you heard anything? I have some thoughts, but I want to get your reaction because okay, some eagles fly away, you still got the worker bees inside EMC, and now Dell coming together. Thoughts on the culture clash. >> Well, I live in Boston, and so I've been through the acquisition of Prime Computer, through EMC acquiring Data General, through the DEC acquisition by Compaq. All of which were disasters, and all of which where the cultural issues were much bigger than the technology issues. So, I think that that is something that Dell has to be front and center for Michael Dell, is how do you mash up these two cultures. As you pointed out, EMC, very aggressive, take no prisoners, enterprise-oriented sales force. Their sales people make a lot of money. I used to live in a neighborhood where everyone was EMC salespeople. >> John: Buying new houses. >> They were making a million dollars a year. And you've got Dell with its direct model, with its channeled model, and without a particularly strong roots in enterprise sales force and how do you coordinate those. It's not surprising to see people leaving. Of course, in the early days after an acquisition, choices get made, people get promoted and moved in new positions. Those who lose out tend to leave the company. But, I think the sales issue would be something to delve into too. Does Dell want to adopt EMC's sales style, or the other way around? Or is there some way that they can live both in harmony? >> You know, I follow a lot of companies in Silicon Valley as well, I'm out there on the west coast, left coast, as they say. Where all the crazy ones are, as they say. But I got to say, there's been some shrinkage on EMC, but for the most part, I haven't really heard any really negative horror stories. Actually, it's been going pretty well, and I think you bring up an issue of effectiveness with the sales folks. Dell's an efficiency guy, right so you got effectiveness and efficiency coming together. But I think they've handled it well. I really haven't heard any real horror stories. Again, I think that has to do with the founder being actively involved, they're a private company, so they have some room. And I think they've invested in making that happen, so I think generally, props to EMC folks and for the Dell folks on the acquisition. Still not clear the woods yet, it's going to surely be in the products and the revenue, but for the most part, we're going to unpack that. So Paul. >> But you can't, I just wanted to jump in just quickly. You can't minimize customer touch, and EMC was always a high touch company. Outstanding service, they put people on a plane in the middle of the night, charter a private jet in the middle of the night to get someone on site at a customer to fix a problem. As you mentioned, Dell is an efficiency company. That's not a very efficient way to operate. Can they absorb the best of EMC and the best of Dell at the same time? >> Yeah, well we'll certainly tell, I mean they got a lot of competition, Michael Dell saying on stage. (mumbling) startups, essentially what's he's saying is Amazon, there in my opinion, although that's not probly what he really meant but that's my interpretation. But I'm expecting to see the same old EMC world with a twist, and that is, we're doin' good, the messaging's out there, we're going to see how the products compare vis a vis the competition. I'm interested in Vmware piece. Paul, what are you looking forward to? >> I'm looking forward to hearing how this is all going, how this company is culturally, what kind of a cultural chimera they're putting together here that's going to make sense, that the market is going to understand. I also want to hear how they're going to differentiate in cloud, internet of things, we just heard a little bit about that this morning. That's something where I think you're seeing Cisco. The way Cisco's dealing with the cloud these days is to say, don't worry about it, it's all going IOT. It's all going to distributed intelligent devices, the cloud is already history, is what they're saying. So, does Dell have a similar differentiated position on that. I'm least interested in hearing about the new products because it's speeds and feeds. But really, how is this company going to dominate an industry, how is it going to get over some of the speed bumps that we've been talking about for the last 20 minutes that have foiled so many merger attempts in the past. >> One of the tell signs that I look at a conference when I see a lot of AI washing. The good news is, there's not a lot of AI being talked about here, 'cause usually that's just lipstick on the pig, as they say. Except for the case of Google and Amazon Web Services, they do have some AI story, with some real products to back it up. For the most part, you're not seeing EMC glob on the whole machine learning, rah rah. They did talk about it but it wasn't like a big theme. I think they really talked about the packaging of the value. Of the brands together, comments around costs for public cloud, nice little ding there. I'm going to dig into the story. I'm going to really test the story, and I'm going to look at the customer traction. I really want to see who they have on stage, I really want to hear who's really going down the road, how that growth strategy, 'cause I think they're going to win the data consolidation market pretty handily, and the question between HPE and Dell, for instance, 'cause that's really to me the two big horses on the track. Who's going to win the growth. Who's going to be able to lock in their beachhead on the core market, traditional market, and have access to the growth of what cloud will bring and IOT and among other things. >> I think at this point, HP has a better story in that area with their configurable infrastructure, with their pay as you go on site model, really interesting models. I was at HP World in Europe in December, and I came away from that feeling like these guys have some unique talking points here. At least they have a strategy that I think I understand and that is different. Dell is still working through this huge merger and that's a big catch. >> Bottom line is, Dave Donatelli, who's an executive at Oracle told me, he also was an EMC executive, and HPE. The business of provisioning servers and storage (laughing) is not going to be the growth strategy. Now, it might be a component of the overall business model, like software, but ultimately, that business is in decline, and that's a fact. Okay, this is the Cube, bringing you all the coverage of the kickoff from day one at Dell EMC World 2017. Our eighth year, three days of wall to wall coverage. We have two sets, the blue set and the white set. Go to SiliconAngle.tv to find the coverage, also go on Twitter, follow us on the Cube, I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin, kickin' off Dell EMC World 2017, back with more, stay with us after this short break. (atmospheric instrumental music)

(upbeat music) [Narrator] Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE, covering Oracle Modern Customer Experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. >> Welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas here at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern Customer Experience conference, their second year. This is the CUBE, Silicon ANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com. Our next guest is Jack Berkowitz who's the Vice President of Products and Data Science at Oracle. Well, great to have you on the CUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot. >> Appreciate it. Love talking to the product guys, getting down and dirty on the products. So, AI is hot this year. It's everywhere. Everyone's got an AI in their product. What is the AI component in your product? >> Well, what we're working on is building truly adaptive experiences for people. So, we have a whole bunch of different techniques and technologies all of it comes together essentially to create a system that amplifies peoples capabilities. That's really the key thing. Two real important components. First of all, it's all about data. Everybody talks about it. Well, what we've put together is, in terms of consumers, is the largest collection of consumer data in the Oracle data cloud. So we take advantage of all that consumer data. We also have a lot of work going on with collecting business data, both Oracle originated data as well as partner data. We're bringing that all that together and it sets the context for the AI. Now on top of that we have not just the latest trends in terms of machine learning or neural networks or things like that, but we're borrowing concepts from advertising, borrowing concepts from hedge funds so that we can make a real-time system. It's all about real-time. >> You mentioned neural networks. A lot of stuff conceptually in computer science has been around literally for decades. What is, from your definition - obviously cloud creates a lot of data out there now, but what is AI these days? Because everyone now is seeing AI as a mainstream term. Even the word metadata, since Snowden's thing, is now a mainstream term. Who would have thought metadata and AI would be talked about at kitchen tables? >> Yeah. >> What is AI from your perspective? >> Yeah, from my perspective it's really about augmenting folks. It's really about helping people do things. So maybe we'll automate some very manual tasks out, right, that will free up people to have more time to do some other things. I don't think it's about replacing people. People are creative. We want to get people back to being creative and people are great at problem solving so let's get them that information. Let's get them aid so they can get back to it. >> And give them options. >> Give them options, exactly. Exactly. You know, if you can free up somebody from having to manipulate spreadsheets and all this other stuff so they can just get the answer and get on with things, people are happier. >> So Oracle is using first-person data and third-person data to build these capabilities, right? >> Jack: Yeah, exactly. >> How is that going to play out? How is Oracle going to go to a customer and say we will appropriately utilize this third-person data in a way that does not undermine your first-person rights or value proposition? >> That's a great question. So, privacy and respect has been sort of the principle we've been driving at here. So there's the mechanics of it. People can opt in. People can opt out. There's all the mechanics and the regulatory side of it but it's really about how do you use these things so that it doesn't feel creepy. How do you do this in a subtle way so that somebody accepts the fact that that's the case? And it's really about the benefit to the person as to whether or not they're willing to make that trade-off. A great example is Waze. Waze I use all the time to get around San Francisco traffic. You guys probably use it as well. Well, guess what? If you really think about it, Waze knows what time I leave the house in the morning, what time I come home. Uber knows that once a month I leave at 2:00 on a Sunday and come back a week later. So, as long as you think about that, I'm getting a benefit from Waze I'm happy to have that partnership with them in terms of my data and they respect it and so therefore it works. >> And that comes back to some of the broader concepts of modern customer experience. It is that quid pro quo that I'll take a little data from you to improve the service that I'm able to provide as measured by the increasing value customer experience that's provided. >> Yeah, that's right. I used to live in London and in London there's these stores where you can go in and that sales guy has been there for like twenty years and you just develop a relationship. He knows you. He knows your kids, and so sure enough, stationary store or whatever it is and he gives you that personal experience. That's a relationship that I've built. That really all we're trying to do with all of this. We're trying to create a situation where people can have relationships again. >> And he's prompted with history of knowing you, just give you a pleasant surprise or experience that makes you go wow. And that's data driven now. So how do you guys do that? Cause this is something that, you know, Mark Heard brought up in his keynote that every little experience in the world is a data touchpoint. >> Jack: Yeah. >> And digital, whatever you're doing, so how do you guys put that in motion for data because that means data's got to be freely available. >> Data's got to be freely available. One of the big things that we brought to bear with the Suite X is that the data is connected and the experiences are connected so really we're talking about adding that connected intelligence on top of that data. So, it's not just the data. In fact we talked about it last night. It's not just the data even from the CX systems from service, but even the feed of what inventory's going on in real-time. So I can tell somebody if something's broken, hey, tell you what. This store has it. You can go exchange it, in real-time. Instead of having to wait for a courier or things like that. So it is that data being connected and the fact that our third-party data, you know this consumer data, is actually connected as well. So we bring that in on the fly with the appropriate context so it just works. >> So one of the new things here is the adaptive intelligence positioning products. What is that and take a minute to explain the features of how that came to be and how it's different from the competition. >> Okay, great. So the products are very purposeful built apps that plug in and amplify Oracle cloud apps and you can actually put in a third-party capability if you happen to have it. So that's the capability and it's got the decision science and machine learning and the data. >> Peter: So give me an example of a product. >> So a product is adaptive intelligence offers which we were showing here. It gives product recommendations, gives promotions, gives content recommendations on websites but also in your email. If you go into the store you get the same stuff and we can then go and activate advertising campaigns to bring in more people based on those successful pick ups of products or promotions. Its a great example. Very constrained use case addressed? >> Peter: Fed by a lot of different data. >> Fed by a lot of different data. The reason why they're adaptive is because they happen in real-time. So this isn't a batch mode thing. We don't calculate it the day before. We don't calculate it a week before or every three hours. It's actually click by click for you, and for you, reacting and re-scoring and re-balancing. And so we can get a wisdom of the crowds going on and an individual reaction, click by click, interaction by interaction. >> This is an important point I think that's nuanced in the industry. You mentioned batch mode which talks about how things are processed and managed to real-time and the big data space is a huge transition whether you're looking at hadoop or in memory or at all the architectures out there from batch data lakes to data in motion they're calling it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So now you have this free flowing scalable data layers, if you will, every where, so being adaptive means what? Being ready? Being ... >> Being ready is the fundamental principle to getting to being adaptive. Being adaptive is just like this conversation. Being able to adjust, right? And not giving you the same exact answer seven times in a row because you asked me the same question. >> Or if it's in some talking point database you'd pull up from a FAQ. >> Peter: So it adapts to context. >> It's all about adapting to context. If the concepts change, then the system will adopt that context and adapt it's response. >> That's right. And we were showing last night, even in the interaction, as more context is given, the system can then pick that up and spin and then give you what you need? >> The Omni Channel is a term that's not new but certainly is amplified by this because now you have a world certainly with multiple clouds available to customers but also data is everywhere. Data is everywhere and channels are everywhere. >> Data is everywhere. And being adaptive also means customizing something at a point and time >> Exactly. and you might not know what it is up until seconds or near real-time or actually real-time. >> Real time, right? Real human time. 100 milliseconds. 150 milliseconds, anywhere in the world, is what we're striving for. >> And that means knowing that in some database somewhere you checked into a hotel, The Four Seasons, doing a little check in the hotel and now, oh, you left your house on Uber. Oh, you're the CEO of Oracle. You're in a rental car. I'm going to give you a different experience. >> Jack: Yeah. >> Knowing you're a travel warrior, executive. That's kind of what Mark Heard was trying to get to yesterday. >> Yeah, that's what he's getting to. So it's a bit of a journey, right? This is not a sprint. So there's been all this press and you think, oh my god, if I don't have ... It's a journey. It's a bit of a marathon, but these are the experiences that are happening. >> I want to pick up on 150 milliseconds is quite the design point. I mean human beings are not able to register information faster than about 80 milliseconds. >> Jack: Yeah, yeah. So you're talking about two brain cycles coming back to that. >> Jack: Yeah. >> I mean it's an analogy but it's not a bad one. >> Jack: No. >> 150 milliseconds anywhere in the world. That is a supreme design point. >> And it is what we're shooting for. Obviously there's things about networks and everything that have to be worked through but yeah, that responsiveness, but you're seeing that responsiveness at some of the big consumer sites. You see that type of responsiveness. That's what we want to get to. >> So at the risk of getting too technical here, how does multiple cloud integration or hopping change that equation? Is this one of the reasons it's going to drive customers to a tighter relationship with Oracle because it's going to be easier to provide the 150 millisecond response inside the Oracle fabric? >> Yeah, you nailed it. And I don't want to take too many shots at my competitors, but I'm going to. We don't have to move data. I don't have to move my data from me to AWS to some place else, right, Blue Mix, whatever it happens to be. And because we don't have to move data, we can get that speed. And because it's behind the fabric, as you put it, we can get that speed. We have the ability to scale the data centers. We have the data centers located where we need them. Now your recommendations, if you happen to be here today, they're here. They may transition to Sydney if you're in Australia to be able to give you that speed but that is the notion to have that seamless experience for you, even for travelers. >> That's a gauntlet. You just threw down a gauntlet. >> Jack: I did. Yeah. >> And that's what we're going to go compete against. Because what we're competing is on the experience for people. We're not competing on who's got the better algorithm. We're competing on that experience to people and everything about that. >> So that also brings up the point of third-party data because to have that speed certainly you have advantages in your architecture but humans don't care about Oracle and on which server. They care about what's going on on their phone, on their mobile. >> Jack: That's right. >> Okay, so the user, that requires some integration. So it won't be 100 percent Oracle. There's some third-party. What's the architecture, philosophy, guiding principles around integrating third-party data for you guys. Because it's certainly part of the system. It's part of the product, but I don't think it's ... >> So there's third=party data which could be from data partners or Oracle originated data through our Oracle data cloud or the 1500 licensed data partners there and there's also third-party systems. So for example if somebody had Magento Commerce and they wanted to include that into our capability. On the third party systems, we actually have built this around an API architecture or infrastructure using REST and it's basically a challenge I gave my PMs. I said look, I want you to test against the Oracle cloud system. I want you to test against the Oracle on-prem system and I want you to find the leading third-party system. I don't care if it's sales force or anybody else and I want you to test against that and so as long as people can map to the REST APIs that we have, they can have inter-operation with their systems. >> I mean the architectural philosophy is to decouple and make highly cohesive elements and you guys are a big part of that with Oracle as a component. >> Jack: That's right. >> But I'm still going to need to get stuff from other places and so API is a strategy and microservices are all going to be involved with that. >> Yeah, and actually we deployed a full microservice architecture so behind the scenes on that offers one, 19 microservices interplaying and operating. >> But the reality is this is going to be one of the biggest challenges that answers faces is that how we bridge, or how we gateway, cloud services from a lot of different providers is a non-trivial challenge. >> Jack: That's right. >> I remember back early on in my career when we had all these mini computer companies and each one had their own proprietary network on the shop floor for doing cell controllers or finance or whatever it might be and when customers wanted to bring those things together the mini computer companies said, yeah, put a bridge in place. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And along came TCPIP and Cisco and said forget that. Throw them all out. It wasn't the microprocessor that couldn't stick to those mini computer companies. It was TCPIP. The challenge that we face here is how are we going to do something similar because we're not going to bridge these things. The latency and the speed, and you hit the key point, where is the data, is going to have an enormous impact on this. >> That's right. And again, the investments we have been making with the CX Cloud Suite will allow us to do that. Allow us to take advantage with a whole bunch of data right away and the integration with the ODCs, so we couldn't probably have done this two or three years ago because we weren't ready. We're ready now. And now we can start to build it. We can start to take it now up to the next level. >> And to his point about the road map and TCPIP was interesting. We're all historians here. We're old enough to remember those days, but TCPIP standardized the OSI model which was a fantasy of seven layers of open standards if you remember. >> Jack: Seven layers, yep, whew. >> Peter: See we still talk about it. >> What layer are you on? >> But at the time, the proprietary was IBM and DEC owned the network stacks so that essentially leveled off there so the high-water mark was operating at TCPIP. Is there an equivalent analog to that in this world because IF you can almost take what he said and say take it to the cloud and say look at some point in this whatever stack you want to call it, if it is a stack, there has to be a moment of coalescing around something for everybody. And then a point of differentiation. >> So yeah, and again I'm just going to go back - and that's a great question by the way and it's - I'm like thinking this through as I say it, but I'm going to go right back to what I said. It's about people. So if I coalesce the information around that person, whether that person is a consumer or that person's a sales guy or that person's working on inventory management or better yet disaster relief, which is all those things put together. It's about them and about what they need. So if I get that central object around people, around companies then I have something that I can coalesce and share a semantic on. So the semantic is another old seven layer word. I didn't want to say it today but I can have ... >> Disruptive enabler. >> So then what you're saying is that we need a stack, and I use that word prohibitively, but we need a way of characterizing layer seven application so that we have ... >> Or horizontal >> Either way. But the idea is that we need to get more into how the data gets handled and not just how the message gets handled. >> Jack: That's right. >> OSI's always focused on how the message got handled. Now we're focused on how the data gets handled given that messaging substraight and that is going to be the big challenge for the industry. >> Jack: Yeah. >> Well, certainly Larry Ellis is going to love this conversation, OSI, TCPIP, going old school right here. >> Jack: Like you said, we're all old and yeah, that's what we grew up in. >> Yeah, but this is definitely ... >> Hey, today's computers and today's notions are built on the shoulders of giants. >> Well the enabling that's happening is so disruptive it's going to be a 20 or 30 year innovation window and we're just at the beginning. So the final question I have for you Jack is summarize for the folks watching. What is the exciting things about the AI and the adaptive intelligence announcements and products that you guys are showing here and how does that go forward into the future without revealing any kind of secrets on Oracle like you're a public company. What's the bottom line? What's the exciting thing they should know about? >> I think the exciting thing is that they're going to be able to take advantage of these technologies, these techniques, all this stuff, without having to hire a thousand data scientists in a seven month program or seven year program to take advantage of it. They're going to be able to get up and running very, very quickly. They can experiment with it to be able to make sure that it's doing the right thing. From a CX company, they can get back to doing what they do which is building great product, building great promotions, building a great customer service experience. They don't have to worry about gee, what's our seven year plan for building AI capabilities? That's pretty exciting. It lets them get back to doing what they do which is to compete on their products. >> And I think the messaging of this show is really good because you talk about empowerment, the hero. It's kind of gimmicky but the truth is what cloud has shown in the world is you can offload some of those mundane stuff and really focus on the task at hand, being creative or building solutions, or whatever you're doing. >> Yeah. Mark was talking about it. You have this much money to spend, what's my decision to spend it on. Spend it on competing with your products. >> All right, Jack Berkowitz live here inside the CUBE here at Oracle's Modern Customer Experience, talking about the products, the data science, AI's hot. Great products. Thanks for joining us. Appreciate it. Welcome to the CUBE and good job sharing some great insight and the data here. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)