from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of the cube insights powered by ETR you know this past week we attended the Dell technologies Industry Analysts event and in this breaking analysis I want to summarize the key takeaways and discuss some of the macro trends in the industry that are affecting Dell I'll also discuss some of the fundamental assumptions that Dell is making in its operating model and I'll talk about some of the challenges that I see for the company going forward and hopefully what is a frank manner now let me start with the event itself it was held in Austin Texas and it's clear that Austin Texas is becoming the epicenter of Dell post-acquisition of EMC it's shifting strongly back to Texas while the legacy of EMC remains what is the most critical part of Dells portfolio thanks to vmware the energy of Dell emanates from its founder Michael Dell the event was attended by about 250 press and analysts over a two-day period it was very well run with strong levels of executive access which is always very important to the analysts and lots of transparency and I thought clarity of message now the number one takeaway on this is Dell in four years the company has gone from irrelevance to a dominant and highly relevant player in the enterprise tech especially the CIOs and it's one of the most amazing transformations of a company that personally I've ever seen and I've seen several there were four other key takeaways for me that I'll show on this first slide of Alex if you bring it up first Michael Dell has put forth a set of moonshot goals for 2030 let me give you some examples by 2030 Dell says that for every product that they sell they're going to recycle an equivalent product by 2030 50 percent of the global workforce of Dell will be women and 40 percent of the managers of people will be women 25 percent of the u.s. workforce will be either Hispanic or African now most tech stories today are negative and this is a great positive message I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this because in there's much more that Dell laid out but kudos for Dell to make for making these initiatives a priority you know particularly the women in tech and the diversity in the minorities I think it's excellent the second takeaway is Dell for Dell is the Dell is being driven by Jeff Clark and this guy is on a mission to simplify the portfolio Dell claims its reduced its product portfolio from 88 platforms down to 20 of that power platforms that powers a new brand now the reality is Dell really hasn't deprecated 68 products many if not most are still around but the RMD energy is all going into the new stuff now the third takeaway was a big announcement around power one power one is Dells new platform for the next generation of converged infrastructure now a lot of people might look at this and say well this is converged infrastructure without Cisco well it is actually and while that's true power one according to Dell is a much more of a developer friendly API and micro services based platform with a lot of automation software built in it's essentially going to be Dells go forward platform for customers that don't want to roll their own infrastructure the expectation or inference that that we took away was that power one will integrate most if not all future storage networking and server products Adela's positioning this as a complement to HCI or hyper-converged infrastructure which comprises VX rail VX flex which is the scale i/o and of course the OEM Nutanix so you can see Dell still got some work to do in terms of streamlining its portfolio and here's my lock of the day is that they'll be phasing out the Nutanix OEM relationship you could take that one to the bank now the fourth takeaway was the Dells cloud strategy is really coming into focus is it a winning strategy I honestly can't say at this point but in my view it's the only option that Dell has and and because of VMware they have a fighting chance Dell is in a much better position than other suppliers that that rely on you know Prem install bases because of VMware VMware is not only Dells piggy bank it is but it also gives Dell strategic levers with with CIOs and partners like for instance AWS now later on I'm going to share some ETR data that will give you some context but the bottom line is that the cloud is having an impact on everyone's business including Dells and I mean let me add the Dells cloud strategy in addition to relying on VMware is completely dependent on the assumptions that the world is going to be hybrid which is a good assumption and that multi cloud is going to evolve from what today I've said as a symptom of multi-vendor to a fundamental priority for CIOs again not a bad assumption but because of VMware adele has more than a fighting chance to compete for share now finally that that adele is going to be able to capitalize on the edge personally I think this is the biggest wildcard what I do think is that developers are going to be a crucial part of the edge and at this point in time Dell and VMware are not really top of mine in the developer community now the event involved keynotes from Michael Dell and other execs including including the CFO it was Tom sweet and and many other breakout sessions you know the normal one-on-ones as well now I don't have time to go into all this but there are some things that I want to share about Jeff Clark's presentation specifically he's the person that took over from David David Gordon a couple years ago he's been at Dell for more than 30 years and he was there when I think it was called pcs limited so a long time he's a trusted operational executive of Michael Dell's I'm very impressed with this guy he doesn't use a cheap prompter when he talks and in fact he has some notes but he's got these facts and figures at the in his head that he rattles off like a staccato pace he's an OBS exec and so let me summarize the his discussion now to bring up this slide the the big picture is the data sphere is gonna grow to 175 zettabytes and half of that is going to be created at the edge of that 30% is gonna require real-time processing now he talked about the mandate for simplification and he called this staying the easy button now in QA I asked him like why did it take you guys so long to figure out something so obvious which is kind of a snarky analyst question not his credit he didn't throw his predecessors under the bus rather what he did is he focused on the future and sit he said you know they shared the figures that I stated earlier about you know taking 88 platforms down to 20 and he focused on the priorities of the future so he didn't say it but I'm gonna say it for him he inherited a very messy portfolio and he had to clean up the crime scene me tell let me tell you what a buyer said about EMC back in 2018 this is from the ETR Venn survey when they go out and they probe you know specific customers and they talk to them this guy says NetApp has done a really good job of advertising and positioning itself within the cloud and within data centers themselves they've got a broad portfolio and I don't want to make comments about NetApp but so just I'm not sure I agree with all this but okay come back to his statements and and they've they've integrated fairly well here's what's relevant what he said was EMC on the other hand is not as well integrated they've got a broad portfolio but it's not necessarily - easy easy to pick and choose from the different categories okay so I agree with that you know look the mega launch product dujour worked for EMC it allowed them to carry on for another five or six years after the downturn but the lack of integration eventually caught up to that minute and it will always you know caught up catch up to large companies who rely on either lots of M&A or spinning out new products with lots of overlap anyway I digress the third thing that Clarke talked about was the big market size and the share gains pcs are a 200 billion dollar market servers are an 80 billion dollar market an external storage is a 26 billion dollar market Della's gains 600 basis points according to Clarke in pcs over the last six years 400 came in the last three years 375 basis points in storage in the past two years now of course what he didn't mention that was after a dismal performance a few years earlier so they had a pretty easy compare but my point is this when you talk to Michael Dell you talked to Tom sweet you talked to Jeff Clark and all the people folks in the company share gains are critical to Dells strategy especially because the cloud is taking so much share of wallet in the enterprise I'll make some other comments on that now finally there are two fundamental beliefs that dell has that i want to share with you one is that they can be a consolidator of these core markets in a downturn deltax they can hold their breath you know so to speak longer than the competitors and of course in an up market they think they can accelerate their leverage points which leads to the second belief that jeff clark talked about which is how dell will deliver differentiation and value so he decided four items there one is they got 40,000 direct sellers so they got a big go-to market presence they got 35,000 service professionals a 66 billion-dollar supply chain and then Dell financial services arm which you know forces Dell to carry a lot of debt but that debt throws off cash and it's not really part of Dells core debt from EMC acquisition now others have that too but but Dells got you know big presents there all right so I want to pivot to the ETR data and let's see how Dell looks in the spending survey and since market share is so important to Dell why don't we take a look at how they're doing so Alex this slide that I'm showing here what each er refers to as market share market share is defined by you TR as vendor citations in the survey excluding replacements so customers that are adding spending the same or spending more as spending less divided by the total number of respondents in the survey so it's a measure of how pervasive the vendor is in the data set what I'm showing in this slide is Dells market share and its three most important business lines namely VMware Delhi MC and Adele's laptop business and I'm showing this from the January 17 survey to October 19 now notice the survey sample overall is 960 for respondents and the three brands they show 800 and said six hundred and twenty two and three hundred and two shared ends within that 964 so there's two points one else doing pretty well I mean I'd say it's better than holding serve and as you can see it's steadily gaining now the second point is that look at the net scores here you know they're okay especially for vmware intel's laptop but Dell EMC for instance specifically their server and storage and networking business you know not so much so there's there's a mixed story here so let me make some comments on the macro and things that I've discussed with with ETR and and my narrative on demand overall some things that I've said you shared with you before as we've discussed in past breaking analyses spending is reverting back to pre eighteen levels but it's not falling off a cliff we're seeing fewer adoptions of new tech and more replacements of old tech so combine this with lower levels of spending and more citations overall we're seeing net score go down relative to previous surveys so here's what we think is happening there's less experimentation going on with the digital initiatives which started you know back in 2016 so you're seeing fewer adoptions of new tech as customers are start placing their bets and they're retiring leggy legacy systems that they were keeping on as a hedge and they're narrowing their spend on the new stuff and unplugging the stuff they don't need anymore and they're going at the serious production mode with the pocs so that means overall spending is softer it's not a disaster but it's lower than expected then coming into this year storage is on the back burner in a lot of accounts because of cloud and the big flash injection that I've talked about giving him more Headroom servers are really soft for Dell especially because they have a tough compared with previous with last year PC is actually pretty good all things being considered so where is the spending action well it's in the cloud now q how many vendors tell me that there's a big rebate repatriation trend happening ie people have cloud remorse and they're all moving back on pram not all but many M say it doesn't happen but at the macro-level its noise compared to the spending that's happening in the cloud just do the math all you got to do is look at AWS and Microsoft and what they report and compare it to any enterprise company that relies on on-prem selling I mean I don't want to argue about it you believe what you want but I would much prefer to look at the data so let's do that so here's a slide that shows ETR data on customer spending on the cloud so you got a AWS Azure and Google spenders and how their spending patterns have changed over time for dell emc servers so you got six hundred and thirty six cloud accounts 175 to 200 shared dell emc server accounts over the past three periods and yet net scores of 24% down to 16% so look at the gray bar versus the yellow bar gray is October 18 yellow is October 19 okay you get the picture the next slide is the same view for Dell EMC storage the gray bar is last year yellow bar is this year's survey so look at it 22% down to 5% that's not good so storage is getting hit by cloud and that's going to continue all right so let me conclude with some comments in general overall I like to tell strategy you know honestly without VMware I'm probably not gonna fly to Austin this week just being honest but with VMware Dell is far more important to our community so I pay more attention to it I haven't shared many thoughts on Dells financials but I think they have some upside here as they continue to pay down their debt by the way every five billion of dollars that they retire in debt it drops twenty five cents right to earnings per share Dell throws off a lot of cash it's a very well-run company they got an excellent management team we talked about their share gain lever they'll have a public cloud so they got to make on Prem as simple as possible and ideally is cloud like as they can you know the on-premise experience frankly is well behind that of the cloud but but cloud you know getting less simple and it's not cheap so on Prem in my view doesn't have to be exactly cloud it's just got to be good enough now Dell this week also refreshed its on demand pricing but it's good and it's obviously relevant to cloud not have time to go into all the detail but suffice to say that near-term there on-demand stuff it's it's going to be a small factor in their business but longer-term I think it's going to play in it's particularly to the cloud model Dell is also betting on hybrid and multi cloud they have to and but they're up against several competitors Microsoft is the is really strong in this space Microsoft's also a partner of course but you got IBM and Red Hat Cisco Google sort of and some others but VMware it gives Dell an advantage and that is the key the big hole that I see in Dell I'm going to come back to innovation you know Dell spends billions of dollars on R&D I think it's the numbers 20 billion over the last four years so that's good but you know innovation this industry is being delivered delivered by developers no those are the drivers and and it's they're taking advantage of data applying machine intelligence and cloud for scale and Dell is clearly well positioned for the data trend you know could partner for cloud it can certainly play an AI but what it lacks in my opinion is appeal to the developer community and just as Dell has become relevant to CIOs it needs this a similar type of relevance with the devs and that's a different ballgame so it's hopes are leaning on VMware and is of course its acquisition of pivotal but if I were Dell I would not sit back and wait for pivotal and VMware to figure it out here's what I would do if I were Dell I would deploy at least a thousand engineers they got twenty thousand engineers take a thousand or fifteen hundred them and point them toward developing open source tools and build applications and tools around all these hot emerging trends that we hear about multi-cloud multi cloud management edge all the innovations going on at edge autonomous vehicles etc AI workloads machine intelligence machine learning I would open-source that work and make a big commitment to the developer community big contributions and that would build hooks in from my hardware into these tools to make my hardware run better faster cheaper on these systems I want to thank my friend Peter burrows for forgiving me that idea but I think it's a great idea I think it's radical but it makes sense in this world that is really being driven by developers okay this is Dave Volante signing out from this episode of cube insights powered by ETR thanks for watching we'll see you next time

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Dell Technologies world 2019. Brought to you by Dell technology and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with John Furrier. You're watching us on the cube live, from our first day of three days of coverage of Dell technology world 2019. We're pleased to welcome Matt Hausmann, senior consultant in Product Marketing from Dell EMC to the cube. Matt, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. >> Thank you, really appreciate finally getting a chance to get up here with you guys. >> Yeah, so there's only about 15,000 or so people here. Small gathering amongst friends. >> I say, yeah the 15,000 are my closest friends. >> Yes and about 4000 of your closest partners. >> Yes, yeah. >> So this morning kicked off with the keynote, great energy, I think one of my favorite parts was Michael Dell walking out to a queen song that really got me, that got my attention, but a lot of collaboration between the VMware Dell, Dell EMC, Microsoft, great conversations, all talking about digital transformation, which of course, is all made possible in part by data. >> Absolutely. >> There's so much data these days that it's just not possible by humans anymore. Talk to us about the data avalanche, from your perspective in product marketing, what are you seeing? What are you hearing from customers? >> Yeah, so I come from our unstructured data solutions, business, you know, so we really focus and specialized and we're a lot of this data growth is coming from images, audio, video, free text, things like that. We're dealing with that day in and day out. I mean, you hit the nail on the head. I mean, we were basically looking at about 80% of our data is no longer human possible. So to really take advantage of that and move forward of the digital transformation. And that's what we're really seeing new techniques, like artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, are really helping us ask new questions about data and actually get more value from the data. >> Michael Dell said data is the heartbeat of digital transformation on keynote, one of the sound bites I liked how are customers evolved into it, because we saw the big data industry, you know, the Hadoop gone bigger and bigger data warehouses been around for a while, but now data with AI has to be available has to be addressable in new kinds of ways. Where's the customer on that spectrum of the new way to use data? And what is the new way to use data? >> Yeah, I was actually giving a presentation today on data strategy for AI specifically, and the numbers we're looking at about a third of our customers, have dip their toe into AI. So truly, they're realizing there's value in that data, they're realizing these techniques or new techniques are available to them, computes gotten faster, storage, there's been a lot of innovation there. So they can do a lot more with the data than they ever could before. But about a third of our customers have dip their toe and the majority of our customers are talking about doing it today, or in the next couple of years. >> And they want insights, that's a low hanging fruit. Now you got IoT devices with data strategy around IoT, data center on premise activities as data involved. >> Absolutely, I mean, these are all new, you know, basically sources of data for us. So when I look at it from the storage for data perspective, as we just have data coming in from everywhere, and IoT with the low cost sensors and video, this again, is our sweet spot. I mean, data is growing up into the the zettabytes. And now people want to be able to do something with it. >> Unstructured data and structured data is there a different group that you guys aren't wrestling with? Who's got you know, more data? Because object stores great front structured and unstructured data. >> Yeah, I don't think we're wrestling with each other. I think what we're doing is we're figuring out how to deliver an end to end solution for our customers. We've got great products, great innovation on different sides. I mean, I don't want to get too technical interview today. But I mean, as we go through kind of the analytic pipeline for AI, from data preparation, to model development and training and then actually going out and scoring it in real time and doing inference. There's different requirements. So I'd say we're all in the sandbox together and we all have a place and the seat at the table there so. >> Do customers dipping their toe into AI essential to have a partner like Dell EMC and Dell Technologies that understands that's done that as well... >> Sure sure. >> In terms of dipping their toes in have to have a modern IT infrastructure in order to do that. What are some of the things that Delhi MC is doing to infuse AI capabilities into your storage servers, data protection, ec cetera? >> Sure sure. Yeah, I think we're really doing you know, we're bringing a lot of innovation to bring AI to the forefront. So you know, you already mentioned kind of some of the areas there on the storage side, I guess I'd call out one of our products are all flash scale out NAS platform called Isilon. What we're really doing there is trying to simplify this delivery of data for AI. So high, you know, high performance, high bandwidth at massive scale. And then we're partnering with you know, the accelerated compute vendors. The Nvidia, the intel. We're bringing that into our power edge servers delivering 10x delivering 100x performance. And I think the other piece that we're doing is, you know, people have been dipping their toes, that means that we've been doing PLC we've been doing this work for years and years. So we're taking these innovations, we're taking those learnings and we're packaging those up into our ready solutions into our reference architectures really making AI simple, making it accessible. And I think more than anything else is making it faster. So that time to value that we we've thought through all the things you need to think through in that space, and give you a place to start where we can really just start focusing on artificial intelligence on the art of the possible. >> Now I want to get your thoughts on democratization of data. Before that many Cube interviews with other interviews, democratizing data, letting people wrangle it not to being an expert or computer science major. So demography making it easier is one thing. Yeah, you see deep learning trends. In AI, you see machine learning. >> Yeah. >> A machine learning. I mean, it's not democratize yet but it's getting there. How do you see this democratization trend where it's just going to be kind of a natural business practice to deal with either large amounts of streaming data or any data? >> Well, I think that's been going on for a long time actually come from the data warehousing space. We've been talking about that for a decade and maybe 15 years, right as a really a democratizing data, marketizing analytics, be data driven. I think it's really progressed here as Hadoop came on, and the Big Data space, I think that's really paved the way now for artificial intelligence. The analytics software platform that's out there, it's getting easier to use. It's integrated into the full solutions. And it's now optimized. So especially with the advent of GPUs, these tool kits are now optimized for 1, 4, 8, 16 GPUs so you can really, you know, harness the power of the data of the, you know, of the compute to do more with it. So I think that's it's going to continue and I think it's really, it's making easier and simpler. >> Can you give an example of the Cube, I love... I learned so much doing these interviews. But start small get bigger from there always seems to be a best practice. Give a couple examples for people watching on where they can start small with data. I means data can be big too, but I means small but small project scope wise, what's good to get their arms around these data projects? What's a great starting point to get really put the foot in the water and then ultimately full immersion? >> Right, so I guess I wouldn't just start people with a data project. What I would ask them is what's the business problem they're trying to solve? So if they can identify what their need is, so what's my problem? What data do I have available? And then I would go give them a suggestion and maybe what the right solution might be. But I also like what you kind of mentioned the start small and get bigger. So we really focus on the scale outside of it. So, all of the analytic and AI solutions that I work on, you know, we've decoupled compute and storage that was basically mentioned, let you grow either your data or your compute power independently. And so that really lets us right size solution for whatever that business case whatever that use-- >> For flexibility too for the customer, right? >> Absolutely, absolutely cos it's not a one size fits all. That's why I'm hesitant to say hey, this is where you start it's like no tell me what your problem is. Tell me what data you have-- >> It's different for customers, no general purpose answer pretty much really. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And so when we have these flexible platforms, where we've thought through especially in the analytics and AI space, the requirements that you might need to have, we have, you know, partnerships in the space to give you the end to end solution is you can come to us and we can really kind of help your business grow, help direct you where you want to go. >> If you look into your magic crystal ball or ask the magic eight ball, what's the time scale by which customers who are just dipping their toes in really need to get on the AI bandwagon to accelerate their business and not fall behind and actually lose opportunities. Is that 12 months, 24 months, two years, five years? >> Well, I think it's an easy answer. And the answer is now. They should be they should be going out and being creative they should be going out and taking chances. And that's why I look at it right now is, with the innovations we talked to, from you know about compute, about networking, about storage about the analytics software is you have access to more data than you've ever had before. And you have all these tools to do more with it than you ever have before. So now is the right time. And I think we are starting to see some separation of companies already. Those that are going and really embracing AI, and those are kind of putting enough at at arm's length. So I think there's a little bit of a separation, but I don't think it's too late. You might have to rush a little to catch up but now is the right time. Like I said, you've never had more data you've ever had better tools. >> What's the coolest thing you've seen with people using data in a very interesting way? >> So the the coolest thing that I've had first person experience with was actually Sofia the robot. You may have seen her. She's been on Jimmy Fallon. She's done a bunch of keynotes and other things like that. So we had her our magic of AI series two weeks ago in New York City, I got to spend two full days. So Sophia is this humanoid robot, right, she does natural language processing, image detection. She's basically like talking to a real person. So it took me about a half day before, I wasn't just staring at her the whole entire day. (all laugh) This is a little awkward. But I mean, this is really they've taken multiple kind of advanced analytics techniques, AI techniques, and then put them into the kind of the art of the possible. This is where we can get to and I'm not saying every company, every customer, that's a use case that they want to develop. But the fundamental building blocks to build her image detection, natural language processing, right, just about every company out there can take those pieces and then apply it their business. >> So you point the creative opportunities the time is now you can actually solve some of the challenges that could be opportunities, and this cool examples of like the robot, which is great, you know, interesting use case, but there's other you know, business use cases like to drive revenue for instance, or change the business model of a company. >> Right, right. So you know, healthcare is a big space, I think we hear about a lot, but also where we work with customers a lot. So folks that are you know, taking an MRI image, for instance, right? Use image detection to say, hey, what do we have in this image? Hey, maybe you have cancer, use image classification. Well, what what type of cancer do I have? You do that segmentation? Well, how advanced is that cancer? And then you add prediction on top of that, what's the best outcome? What's personalized to me, what's the best treatment. And so we're now able to shrink that down from months or quarters with a lot of guesswork now in the hours and days to give you your personalized, you know, medicine to give you this-- >> That's real value right here. That's a great example of tech for good. >> And when I talk about AI, I always try to bring in the human part of it. >> Yeah. >> I think that, you know, people say AI is magic. Well, at the end of the day, it's some advanced math on a lot of data, right? But the value we're getting, the data that we can actually access there, the questions that we can ask of our data, have a really human impact can help us in our daily lives. And yeah, absolutely, there's going to be a business impact with it as well. >> I think that's a great example also the earlier point about separating compute and storage, because then you can then again, as you said, right size, you can put a data lake out there, if you want, move stuff in and out and deal with it. This is where the value of data, not some static, okay, made an architectural decision. See in 10 years, yeah, it's always fluid. >> So the static is huge, right? If you architect for static, you're not going to be able to deal with the realities of analytics. I'm like 19 years into the data analytic space, the data is always going to grow, the use cases are going to change, they're going to get more complex, and people are going to want it faster. So you really need a flexible architecture that can deal with those nuances and just know that you need to architect for change. >> See, I mentioned when we started, we're here with about 15,000 of our closest friends. What are some of the things that you've heard in your session today that maybe you were surprising to you, insightful, maybe thought thought provoking about how your customers and prospects and partners are looking at AI, especially the human AI collaboration? >> Sure, sure. So in my session, I was kind of surprised people really kind of went into depth with with one of our customer use cases, kind of asking very specifically, you know, what about the outliers and things like that. So what that tells me is that people are really digging into this, and they are trying to figure out how to figure out how to apply it to their business. And so this different than some of the sessions from a couple years ago, where AI was just as, you know, this futuristic thing, as we're having real questions there. And then I was in our emerging technology session this afternoon. And a big part of it was really connected to the trust, the trust between humans and machines, and then also the trust between machines and humans. So, you know, that there's a lot of thought provoking things going on right now. And I think where I've been surprised at is really the acceptance of AI into our lives, right? We all have our cell phones in our pocket. You're no longer lost unless you want to be. You always know where to go out to eat, your car can drive itself. Your house can clean itself, right? We've been slowly accepting these applications. >> For the house part I want to get to that one. I don't have that yet. >> I want that too. >> The zumba, is that the name of the robot? (all laugh) >> Matt, thank you so much for having a lively energetic conversation with John and me about AI. And as you say, the time is now. >> Right. >> We appreciate your time. >> Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me >> Nice to meet you too. >> All right. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Dell technology world's 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (techy music)

(upbeat techno) [Announcer] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 There's over 5000 customers, partners, Netappians, analysts, press here. TheCUBE is here as well, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman back for our second year of covering. We're joined by two guests, one an alumni and one a new guest to theCUBE, Henri Richard EVP a worldwide field and customer operations from NetApp, welcome. >> Good morning. >> Morning. And Kamran Amini, the VP and GM of data center infrastructure from Lenovo, welcome back! >> Glad to be here. >> So guys, Lenovo, NetApp, just about a month ago announced some exciting news, Henri let's start with you, kind of give our viewers who may not be that familiar with the news announcement what this new technology partnership is all about. >> Well, it's a multi-faceted partnership. I think it's important to understand that for us there is a component that has to do with a worldwide engagement of Lenovo around storage solutions that will be infused with NetApp technology. There's a second element, which is the opportunity for us to pull or go to market organization in certain countries, and get to critical mass to cover the needs of customers. And then the last part, the one that's probably the most talked about, is a joint venture in China where we will combine our forces to serve the needs of the very fast-growing Chinese market. >> Alright, yeah. Henri, I was at the Lenovo event where this was announced, want you to give us a little bit about the field engagement, because it really does seem a place where NetApp and Lenovo, there's good synergies there, but there's not a ton of overlap. Maybe explain a little bit from the field engagement. >> That is really one of the reasons we were excited, I think, on both sides to do this agreement. You know, we feel that Lenovo is a fantastic server company, that's demonstrated incredible momentum in the last 12 months. We have ourselves, you know, modestly a pretty nice momentum in the storage business, and in coming together I think we can be stronger in serving the needs of customers that have both compute and storage needs. When we did the analysis of our market coverage, it so happens that there's a lot of places where we're strong and Lenovo can benefit from that, and other places where they're strong, and we can benefit from it, so you're correct in stating that there was not that much overlap. And then lastly, we've put in place a process where our go-to-market organizations are going to combine their strength and help each other in some of accounts where both a strong compute story and a strong storage - needs to be integrated to serve the needs of the customer. >> Let's talk a little bit more, guys, about the impetus from the customers. The keynote this morning, as I was mentioning was jam packed, and we heard a lot, Stu, about the customer experience, and how NetApp is an enabler of customers to harness their data to become data-driven. Kamran, from your perspective, what was some of the customer input that really sort of brought this partnership - and this multi-faceted partnership - together? >> I think as we see customers looking their applications, not only current applications, but emerging applications, data's becoming very critical. And be able to accelerate data and the availability of data is going to be key for them, alright? As you heard earlier this morning, data's gold, right? It's the next oil, as we think about it. So we looked at our customers and at their transforming moving toward machine learning and AI, big data analytics, and it's driving massive amount of data that you have to be able to accelerate and be able to give results back. The partnership was the best of breed here. Looking at a leader partner around all flash and growing massively with their data-management solutions, and us leveraging our server technology and the capability we bring as a data center group, bring the both of best breeds to deliver an end solution for customers is really what we're focused on. And it's all being driven, really, by data, really where we see the acceleration happening in the workload aspect of it. >> You know, I was listening to the keynote this morning it talked about how customers today, it's a hybrid, multi-cloud world, is what NetApp positioned, and what I actually like is both NetApp and Lenovo are really aware and work with, really, the hyper scalers out there. There's a bunch of years that we kind of - there was this fighting from certain vendors out there, it was like, "Don't go that, that's not the future," you know, "We know what we're telling." Maybe talk a little bit about how that plays into philosophy, how you deal with customers, and how that leads to co engineered solutions that you'll work with together. >> Well, I think that both companies have a history of being good partners in the industry. Let's start there. Secondly, you're right, that some vendors in what we call traditional IT, are still fighting the reality of the hybrid multi-cloud, and I think that that's the path to death. Lenovo doesn't have that position, we certainly don't have that position, and we believe that combining our strength, when we're serving the customer to help them go to the public cloud, to help them leverage both great compute capabilities on prem and the extraordinary innovation that happens in the cloud is the right way to serve the customers. >> No, absolutely. I think that customers are looking to be more agile, all right? As their business evolves, and they're seeing competitive nature in their line of business, agility is becoming more and more important. Everybody also has to fit within a budget, so the hybrid-cloud story is really the path. And today, again, Lenovo is serving six of the top 10 hyper-scalers today from a technology, and we believe the hybrid-cloud story for on prem is the path of the future, where the customer adopt and deploy, to be more agile and reactive to their markets. >> George Kurian talked about, in his keynote this morning, that we seemed to kind of initially address, stand up has a massive install base, a lot of enterprises that were not born in the digital age, so he kind of talked about something that reminded me of what you said, Henri, is, "If customers don't adapt, transform rapidly at scale, they're out of business." So NetApp itself has undergone a very significant transformation, I'd love to understand from both of your perspectives, Henri, we'll start with you. How does the NetApp Lenovo multi-faceted partnership deliver differentiators? Presumably Lenovo has a lot of choices to do a partnership with a cloud storage data management company. What are some of those unique things from NetApp's field? >> So, one of the salient points that George made this morning is that for legacy companies, you know, they have to understand that the fact that they already have data is a huge asset that they need to leverage, right? That's using that data is how they're not going to become disrupted by a new company. Startups have agility, but they don't have the data. So jumping on that opportunity was certainly something we did at NetApp, and we have an application called Active IQ that actually takes a massive data lake of information we get from our systems, and is helping our customers make better usage of our technology. So just an example of our digital transformation. To the point of the relationship with Lenovo, the nice thing about our data fabric strategy is that it is not related to NetApp hardware, it's really all encompassing, it's there to serve the needs of the customer to be able to leverage the value of their data. And so it makes it very easy to partner with us, because really we're not parochial about, how we go about leveraging the technology. >> Yeah, I think what we see is, you know this digital transformation is driving many new use cases. IOT's becoming a big thing, putting edge to the cloud. So, data and our understanding data, and what you can do with data, is going to become more relevant across all lines of business. And that's where we're really focused on, and our transformation as Lenovo it's all around, "How do we address that shift that's happening in the market, where customers are moving away from data being just there to actually leveraging data and being able to create an outcome out of that data so it's going to be effective?" >> Alright, so this was announced about a month ago. Give us a little insight, how's the rollout been going? What's the reaction been from customers, channel partners, and the like? >> So I think channel partners, analysts, and press have been very positive, right? I think as we talked about being frictionless, it's been there, right? I think people see that what we said is actually out there. We're seeing good success in parts of geography worldwide already for the parts that have been shipping as of 09/14. We have our DE series shipping shortly, in early November, and we're going to continue acceleration in our channel partners and our customers. So we're very excited, I think as we saw prior to announcement we were growing triple digits in all flash as Lenovo. I think that with the expanded TAM going from 15% to averaging above 90% on market with the storage portfolio, we're excited here. We're anxious to keep going. >> Yeah, I'll go a little further, I would tell you that I think many channel partners felt hostage to some of the other choices in the industry. And the overwhelming feedback to the announcement of this relationship is, "Thank God, I now have an alternative that is powerful, with great focus on the compute side, great momentum on the storage side, bringing together best of great portfolio, and now I've got choice that I didn't have before." So I think there's a very high level of expectation, excitement, and I expect the momentum with channel partners and distributors to be very high. >> Let's unpack that joint go-to-market GTM strategy a little bit more. Let's talk about it first from the NetApp side. How are you going to market with an image and your partners? The selling motion, how do customers engage? Help us understand that. >> So NetApp is really coming from a very high-touch sales model, you know the beauty of our partnership with Lenovo is they have a velocity model. So for the part of the markets that are really about having velocity, I think it's a perfect marriage. The second thing is, they have a much larger world-wide presence than we do, I mean they've got physical location in many countries where we are not present. So that's expanding the footprint of potential close in service to NetApp customers. And then lastly, you know, the world is evolving very quickly, it's all about the apps, and I am excited about the fact that my go-to-market team rubbing shoulders with the Lenovo team is going to get more intelligent about compute, which is important for us to understand the real needs of the customers. >> Lisa: And Kamran, from your view? >> I mean I think we - And Lenovo serves over 160 countries, as you know, Henri, so we have a very expanded. We serve customers all the way from SMB all the way to very large enterprise like cloud service providers and MSBs. I think the momentum we have based on the park announcement is really provides an alternative solution to the HPE 3PAR and Delhi AMC, right? As Henri stated I think a lot of our channel partners, our disties, our value-added resellers are looking for an alternative route of a solution between the two leading platform solution providers here. And I think we're seeing that momentum, right? I think as of 09/13 when we made the announcement at Transform, we're seeing the excitement and the pull coming from the field and driving it, and of course we of course have a direct sales model, right? Having that high touch with a customer, selling the value prop of this storage solution and entire portfolio we can bring in, and the partnership value that brings in with NetApp here. >> Alright, so what should we expect to see from this partnership in the near future? >> Well, I think, you know, expansion of the product portfolio, particularly in the case of the China JV. One of the mission of that JV will be to design products specifically for the Chinese market, which we all know is very big and growing extremely fast, so that's one aspect that is yet to be seen. And then the second thing is as we collaborate on solving real customer problems, I expect to see a higher level of innovation, as we understand both sides of the equation and how we can bring our technologies together to solve real customer problems. >> The last question for both of you. You both talked about this joint partnership gives both NetApp and Lenovo and your respective install bases choice. What is the one differentiator? Why would a customer choose to go this route versus, as you mentioned, Delhi MC, HPE...? >> So I think you look at where NetApp has had leadership performance in all flash, and Ontap's amazing software, data management software solution. And look at Lenovo, we've been the fastest-growing server provider in the world. We see where we're bleeding in HPC environments, and really driving software to find. So I think customers are looking for, "How do I take the best of breed of things and bring it together? And making sure when you bring it together it is working together." So part of having the relationship of leveraging the NetApp technology is that Lenovo storage portfolio also provides that ability that says, it's a proven technology, the server technologies and the storage are proven. So it doesn't matter if a customer wants to leverage a NetApp technology with a Lenovo server, it is a proven solution for them, and they can depend on the value it's going to deliver. >> From my standpoint, you've got two credible, long term, solid people in the industry, partnering to get best-of-breed solutions with an eye towards being leaning into the cloud, and I think that in two days, IT business with a new wave of IT, if you don't embrace the cloud, the cloud will kill you. And so I think that's our unique differentiation, is that we have two companies that can serve our customers on prem needs, but have a very comprehensive private cloud, public cloud, and on prem strategy. And I think that nobody else can claim that differentiation. >> Henri, Kamran, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting and sharing a little bit more about this exciting partnership. We look forward to hearing news next year! >> It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are live from NetApp Insight 2018, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat techno)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision, 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. This is Veritas Vision, 2017, #Vtas at theCUBE. We like to go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stuart Miniman, my cohost for the week. Alex Sakaguchi is here, he's a senior director of global Cloud solutions marketing at Veritas, and he's joined by Ian Wood who's the head of business practices and media for Veritas. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Ian, I noticed a number of EMEA badges here at the event. It's quite a presence, come a long way. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think we have a great customer base out in EMEA. EMEA for us is Europe, Middle East, and Africa. I know some people get a bit confused with the acronym. We've got a great deal of customers from Europe, the Middle East, and in fact a whole bunch of customers that made it all the way from South Africa and that's one heck of a flight. So showing some good commitment to come out here to our vision conference. We're excited. >> Yeah, that's excellent. What's the narrative like in Europe and how does it compare to the U.S.? Is it equivalent? Is it different? Maybe more of a focus on GDPR, maybe you could summarize. >> Absolutely. Similarities about multi-Cloud is pretty much the same but multi-Cloud or Cloud means different things to different countries. There's a ton of diversity so you can go into Germany, multi-Cloud means something different out in the Middle East as opposed to the U.K. There's a lot of diversity in multi-Cloud but multi-Cloud as a concept is resonating. Customers are understanding that they need a multi-Cloud strategy and that's bubbling up. For them it's not going to be necessarily the big multi-Cloud service providers, they'll have more local Cloud providers that they're looking to include. Spices it up. Then, as you mentioned GDPR is just taking off. It's one of the number one topics on any CIO's agenda right now is GDPR. What do I do? How do I get compliant? How do I make sure by the 25th of May next year I'm ready for GDPR? >> Alright Alex, so what is a multi-Cloud solution? What is it to you guys? >> I think before you get to solution it really takes some understanding and some discussion around what multi-Cloud is. I think we do a lot of ABCs at headquarters, having customers come in and we're kind of on the forefront of that whole multi-Cloud discussion. But many of these customers, many enterprise customers, have multi-Cloud environments meaning that they have lots of different Cloud players: private Cloud, public Cloud, open stack Clouds. Lots of different types of Clouds but they don't have strategies yet. They're in this situation where they've gotten here by virtue of circumstance. The fact that their dev team decides to deploy their resources somewhere. Some other business unit somewhere else or some other engineering team decides to spin up some resources somewhere else and they find themselves in this situation where they have multiple Clouds. Now they're trying to figure out what to do. How do I make a wrapper over that? How do I get some organization? How do I simplify the operations? How do I take a lot of this to production environments from your test dev labs? It's really about enabling those customers, no matter the mix of infrastructure they have, no matter the mix of Cloud providers they decide to employ, giving them the data management capabilities they need to stay in control. The same exact challenges have existed since the beginning of the data center. It's the same problems. >> Alex, you bring up some great points because multi-Cloud for a lot of customers it wasn't the strategy, it's where they are because they just kind of ended up there. Too often in IT it was like I have an application let's spin something up. Then, I spin something else up and I have my temples of excellence for each of them. Things like that and, unfortunately, we've ended up with a lot of that in Cloud. One of the messages I've really liked hearing this week is Veritas is helping customers kind of get their arms around it, not only how do I manage pieces but how do I understand what I have, how do I manage that visibility into a lot of that. >> I think it actually goes back to one step before that because what you're actually talking about is how do I take care of these challenges. That assumes the customer even knows that they have challenges to take care of. What we've found through research, through customer meetings there are many common misconceptions about what a customer's responsibility is from a data management standpoint and what the Cloud provider's responsibility is from an infrastructure as a service provider. That disconnect is where things can go wrong, where they're at increased risk. They think the Cloud provider is offering them some service or some protection or some level of compliance when really, they're not. Part of it is educating the customer. >> And I'd go even further not just infrastructure service but SASS. A lot of customers are like I don't need to worry about back up or security when I'm doing SASS right? That's all taken care of by the platform. >> I had a CIO once come to me it was a fantastic saying he said what I'm doing now is paying the bill for what shadow IT have created. Therefore, there's a shift that shadow IT went rogue deploying Cloud like crazy. IT are now trying to gain control and trying to sort out quite a mess that shadow IT created. >> We've been doing this Cube since 2010 and we started one of the key Cloud shows was the M world. That's where we started. I want to lay out a timeline and you guys, I'm sure I won't get it exactly right but fill in the holes. My argument is we're entering the fifth phase of Cloud. That's how fast things are moving. Phase one was like kick the tires, in 2006, 2007. During the economic downturn, it was a cap-ex to op-x thing. Then, we came out of that and it was like speed. Shadow IT go, go, go, go. Spend, spend, spend. We've got to get to market fast. It was like there was a couple years there 2013, 14, maybe 15 where it was like wow. IT said this is real, we've got to get control. Now there's still a lot of that going on, to your point Ian, but it seems like the next phase that we're about to enter is a deeper level of business integration. Where Cloud is a strategic capability and a platform for these organizations. In seven years, that many phases and they seem to be somewhat distinct. What do you guys think about that? Is that a reasonable timeline? How would you adjust that? >> I would agree generally speaking. The one difference is I think there are many organizations that haven't even gone through stage one. There are other organizations that have gone through that same set of stages multiple times. Think of especially our core set of customers these are large enterprise customers. Many of them grow by acquisition. They inherit the IT environments of whatever company they've acquired. That creates a whole new set of challenges. They might be using different platforms, different Clouds, etc. So really, they kind of go through that process over and over again. What I think is unique is in many cases I think you articulated this in phase one but also in the latter stages, many have looked at, at least in terms of the public Cloud, they've looked at the public Cloud as a way to offset cost, as a low cost alternative. I think what many people find is, it's not. That's not where the value ends. That's not to the extent that they should be looking for value there either. It's really about data agility. It's really about agility of their organizations. It's really about how they can get more from their environments, be more agile, meet their customers' needs better and as they look to accomplish those types of goals then they also realize that hey we need a different set, a different way to manage the resources, manage the applications that sit on those platforms, manage the data that's involved. I think in many cases the cycle repeats itself. I think in many cases they're starting to realize that they need to go beyond even what was typically just sort of a cost argument. I don't know what you're seeing with customers. I know you meet a lot with them. >> Yeah, I think what you mentioned made sense in the phases. I would actually rather look at it as evolution. I think what happens is in the beginning, do I buy or do I rent was the Cloud argument. What happened with that is that's now incremental to I want to drive agility or more security which is incremental to which workload should I go put to the Cloud. I see it as an evolution and I think they're gaining traction and gaining value as you go along. Giving more option and more choice, rather than distinct phases that sort of start end and reboot themselves to something else. It's definitely incremental. >> To that point though, in the earlier stages there was all this fear about the Cloud not being secure. I think we're largely past that. In many cases organizations realize that at least in terms of even SASS players but even public Cloud providers they're way more secure than you can possibly even build your own data center to. They meet all the regulations that you don't have time spin up and manage and adhere to on your own. Having said that, even a lot of the research that we see, security still comes up as the number one concern. Even though people recognize that the Cloud is much more secure than in many cases what they could do on their own. I think we're largely past that for the most part but some of the other areas maybe not so much so. >> Part of that too is this realization that and we've talked about this Stu a lot not necessarily here but on other shows. CIOs realize that they can't just reshape and reform their business and stick it in the public Cloud. Rather, they have to bring the Cloud model to their data. As a result, it creates discontinuities in security practices. I mean, Amazon, it's like here's our security and it's good but it may not be like your private Cloud security so you have to figure that out. That's a challenge for customers. Do you see that? >> Yeah, but it doesn't stop at security. It's really consistency across everything. >> All the edicts of the organization, absolutely. >> For us especially, things like service level agreements. When you're managing SLAs and as an IT organization you're expected to meet certain SLAs but yet your architecture, your environment is one that's distributed. Where you have different pieces of that environment that sit in different platforms, in different Clouds, on prev different technologies. The level of SLA consistency across that is like gone. So how do you ensure things like your business service up time like those SLAs are being met or that you're able to service that or adhere to when you have such a distributed environment and those are challenges that Veritas aims to solve. >> We talked to Mike Palmer earlier and he said a year ago we thought maybe we could just kind of put a thin layer on top and make all the Clouds look the same and when you get into it. Nope. That's not what's going to happen. There's very different reasons and different services. Some of those things, absolutely. It's heterogeneous. How do we focus on the data? How do we help customers through to get the best of why they're buying all these pieces yet get their arms around all of it? >> Yeah, it could be a world of maturity where customers look at a I would say horses for courses. It's an English statement. So look this Cloud provider is going to be just as cheap as anything. Let's go there. That Cloud provider going to be fantastic in analytics like we know who could be pretty good in analytics. That Cloud provider could be good in front office or back office applications. So it's going to be selecting the Cloud providers that provide the best service. That really I think will be the multi-Cloud world. >> So we only have a few minutes left and I want to get into the why Veritas because multi-Cloud is like there's a land grab going on. There's a big opportunity for the vendor community. It's complicated. People are trying to figure out why Veritas. >> A number of reasons. Especially in the enterprise, these are environments that, quite frankly, are too large for many of our closest competitors to even hope to address. These are very, very heterogeneous environments. Lots and lots and lots of data. Multiple types of platforms and Veritas has always been sort of that middle, that heterogeneous layer software defined, software driven provider that enables that sort of layer over all of that stuff basically that sort of disparity and sort of up-level it up to a more simple management capability. That's one. The second thing is and probably this is equally, if not more important is the fact that we're proven to do that. Not just in the multi-Cloud world that we're talking about now but where the customers have come from. What's happening is we're not seeing the customers eliminate the rest of their architecture. They're not eliminating the data centers. They're just adding to it. You can't just provide a solution that only addresses the new, forgets about the old. You have to provide a solution that covers the entirety of the customer's environment. There's not many organizations that can do that and Veritas is one of them that can and that we've built up a level of trust with these enterprise organizations. We're having done that for many, many years. >> Okay. So you just knocked off the upstarts. Well done. Check. But now you're head-to-head with guys like IBM, HPE, Dell, EMC. What's your advantage relative to those guys? Because they're big enough. They can get money, they get breadth. Why you over them? >> I don't know if the appropriate question is Why you over them? Because all of them are here at this conference and there our partners. IBM's a strategic partner for us. >> Dave: Cloud guys though. But there's other parts, okay? >> Certainly, but I think we love these partners. We compete with them in many cases. They also use our technology in other cases. They also partner with us to deliver combined value to our customers. I think it's really not about why us over them. They certainly see the value that we bring to the table and we inevitably... >> Customers have choices, right? How about the evil machine? >> Alex: You're going to press this aren't you? >> I am. I am I've got to press it. No, because people ask us all the time Why Veritas over a company with this large portfolio? I know you don't want to name them but I mean I have an answer but I would... >> I think we look at it as data management, right? Ultimately, multi-Cloud data management's where we sit. That's sort of the category I think we focus in on solving for customer problems and then you go into perhaps the key competitors. I think if I look at the breadth and scale of what we deliver, you narrow it down to a small scale of organizations that compete with us. All of them, especially the EMCs of the world, they have a hardware agenda. Ultimately, at the end of the day, their business is backed on selling hardware and they're going to struggle to get away from that whereas Veritas what we've always sold for is a true software defined or a data management layer which is really what we're going to look at which is Clouding the pages. >> My analysis I would add to that, that you wake up every day thinking about this problem. That's what your company is, old Scott McNeilly, all the wood behind one arrow. They got not only a hardware agenda, they've got a financial agenda, a got to pay off the debt service agenda, a VM ware agenda, a lot of different agendas. They're like the government. Now there's some strengths on the positive side of the ledger but it seems to me in this multi-Cloud world that the focus that you guys have is an advantage because you're designing for that. >> I think we're actually being helped in many regards. Interesting conversation I had a while back about IT. We know information technology, what IT stands for and what has become and evolved over many, many years to be almost like infrastructure technology. I think what we're seeing now is a revert back to the information first. Use any infrastructure you want, it's going to be a combination of a bunch of different things. Who's going to help me get the value out of the information? To your point, that's where Veritas is focused. >> The other thing I'd add is not only do you not have a hardware agenda but you don't have a Cloud agenda. >> Alex: No, yeah. >> Whereas, okay IBM's a partner. They've got a Cloud so that's cool. Take Delhi MC, they don't have a Cloud, a clear agenda even though they won't say it is to keep stuff on prim. You don't care. >> Yeah. >> That is a clear message that I'm hearing here. Again, I see a number of advantages. At the end of the day, it's who's got the better product, who can execute, who can service and deliver. That's what's fun about our industry and you guys have demonstrated that you can do that over a long period of time. Excellent. Good. Thanks for getting into it with me. Guys I'll give you the last word on Vision 2017, each of you a bumper sticker as the trucks are pulling away. >> Vision 2017 has been a fantastic event. It's been true that we've demonstrated that we can exercise in the multi-Cloud world and look at all the Cloud partners that are part of the Veritas world that we're in, in the Vision conference right here. >> I think last thing is you've seen a ton of innovation and product capabilities, technology announced at this conference. What you should probably look forward to in the next six to 12 months before we get to our next Vision conference is the complete maniacal focus and attention given towards a positive and an improved user experience. Across all the products, across all the 360 data management technologies, you're really going to see the UX, and in particular the UIs, improve. >> I love the fact that you guys are transparent about that and you know Mike Palmer. You guys got a spring in your step. The old Veritas mojo looks like it's coming back so congratulations. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. It's theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017. (upbeat music)

live from austin texas it's the cube covering deli MC world 2016 brought to you by delhi MC now here are your hosts dave vellante and stu minimus welcome back to dell emc world at austin texas 2016 this is the cube the worldwide leader in live tech coverage dale skiffington is here sees the chief privacy officer at dell she's joined by nick koo koo koo roo was a vice president of big data practice at mastercard folks welcome to the cube thanks for coming on thank you having us very important topic a privacy security I like to talk to them as two sides of the same coin but Dale why don't you start it off tell us what you guys are talking about here at Delhi MC world thanks well oftentimes you're right privacy and security are two really different topics to talk about and Nick will cover a lot this afternoon about the importance of securing data in order to have a successful big data program but privacy is also a concern to our shareholders and stakeholders and that is privacy deals with what information do you collect what information how do you use that information and who to whom do you should with whom do you share it and that's a little different than securing the data and our regulators and our customers are getting increasingly concerned about those issues and so it requires some governance some thought to be put into those programs and that's what we're going to talk about today and it's interesting Nick because in 2006 when the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure enabled or required organizations to retain and produce electronic material it instantly became the notion that data was a liability and everybody wanted to understand okay when can i delete it when can I get rid of it and then when this big data mean occurred all of a sudden data becomes an asset in a big way even though it's always been an asset we know that but in a bigger way it was almost like a bit flip and it sort of changed the attitude is that a reasonable description and how did that affect how you approached privacy well part of it is is you're absolutely right he became an asset everyone started wanted to monetize the data that they were carrying because there were great nuggets that set inside that data so we started talking about security you know the original he's talked about personally identifiable information right and that's what everyone's at name address phone numbers you know you many email addresses but then it started to turn into as we started to bring other sources of data such as Facebook Twitter all that data that sits out there in social media together we started to realize other pieces of information needed to be secure as well so now you've broaden the way that you want to take look at security because all this unstructured data starts to come in where you can identify people through a picture a photograph through a twitter feed what you want to be able to say is how do I protect them as much as I protect someone's credit card or someone's personally identifiable name address and phone number tell what talk about your role at Adele it's interesting to have a chief privacy officer on a tail and now of course Delhi MC he opens up a whole new can of worms if I could say that yes so together with our chief information security officer who looks at the policies that procedures around securing data my team is responsible for the policies procedures and controls relating to the use of the data so you know in terms of the reason why our session today is called the ethical use of data is because the laws are lagging a little bit in terms of requiring certain things to be put in place about the use they're starting to develop but what each regulator has said in the US and Europe and elsewhere is they've given companies and technology companies a chance to put in good governance in place and they've asked the companies to put in internal review boards and an accountable responsible individuals in those organizations to make good decisions about the use of data and that's what a chief privacy officer helps the organization do develop the governance structure and help with the accountability of the use of decisions around using data so they obviously the big discussion going on like this inside of MasterCard and Nicki we're talking about everybody wants to monetize the data or figure out how data can help them monetize so how do you deal with that you know analytics and you know you guys talk about the creepy factor I always worried the Amazon knows more about me than I do you know what I'm out of something and I'm reordering and my patterns and and that's kind of creepy so how do you deal with that you know part of what we do and my side of the house is we anonymize the data in many cases for that type of analysis so we try to take that personally identifiable information out of the analysis so again I can we call it an autumn is a shin where we actually on the front end say I don't care who you are what I care about is your are your patterns and can I figure out what those patterns are to create affinities so by taking them out front end and anonymizing the data doing the analysis on it and then potentially at the back end our customers re identifying those people that we have anonymized on the front end that makes it a little bit better because it's no longer a creepy factor per se because when you work with someone like Dale and what the usage of that data is in many cases when you do that analysis it's doing it for the good of that person so that person either a gets a healthier lifestyle be gets to see the products and services that they want to see or want to be able to you know purchase or whatever so again for us it's been able to understand how we protect the individual as you look through the entire analysis string and that's what we do on the advisor size with our customers so that's cool but the chief marketing officer he or she lets you identify that individual you know the the customer of one you know that one-to-one personal interaction how do you square that circle well that's actually we work with the marketing team they always say that well we have a population of 5 million in our database and I want to look at all five minutes like yes you can look at all 5 million but anonymize them because most cases you're going to send us your data scientists and there's 20 or 30 data scientists that could be working on these five million to create your campaigns they don't need to know names phone numbers or addresses so secure the data so that you're not carrying identifiable information through the ecosystem only at the very end when you say out of that population of 5 million mr. marketer here's the half a million that have a high propensity to do what you're asking do is when you re identifier so at that particular point you haven't put 5 million people at risk you've actually put half a million people what you want them to do which is the propensity to purchase or the propensity to taking action so again at the end is when you re identify and say these are the number of these are the people we should be sending a mail or two or an email to or so an offer and that narrows the threat correct matrix if I use that term and and reduces the risk very much stuff to the consumer and obviously to the organization yeah and that's why when we work with people like our privacy officers it's what are you trying to do in the analysis so that we can understand that data usage because that becomes important with what the data is that's carried through the analysis phase you may not have to carry gender you may not have to carry ethnic background you may not have to carry and these other markers that could put someone as Anna you can identify someone with so if we can keep those out it's how you're using the data and the analysis at the end and to follow up on that you know so that's the what the privacy office does it works with the business when they are envisioning a particular use of data and application a product that's going to do some of these analytics we work with them to design that product to avoid some of these risks sometimes you can sometimes the answer is we absolutely need that personal information because that's the purpose of that particular project and in those cases then we look at did you have permission from the data subject to do what you want to do with the data and if not does the society good outweigh the risks and can you mitigate those risks in certain ways so that's the balancing act that we do and that's when we decide when it's past that creepy line or when it hasn't because my role within the company is to advocate for the data subject to make sure that their expectations are being met by Del I wonder if we can unpack another use case which is fraud detection which is advanced so rapidly in the last 10 years it used to be six months and you find maybe something happened you had a look at your own statements and now you're getting texts and very proactive but certainly a lot of information has to be accessible but it's very narrow in terms of the individual can you talk about that using yeah the one thing that we find from our customers are the people we work with when you talk about fraud people don't mind that you're watching because you're reducing their liability you're reducing someone from stealing that credit card from them or being able to run up charges so when you talk about protecting someone protecting someone's digitalpersona their wallet they're willing to give and take a little bit on what information they provide to you they don't mind that you know that Pam in austin texas today and then someone's trying to charge in you know guitar at the same day they understand that it's not a privacy issue but i want to ask you about the pendulum is kind of swung like I said it used to be it would take forever to find out if there was some kind of fraud and then it became like this flawed of false positives and and and it seems to be getting better and presumably it's because a big data analytics but I wonder if you could talk absolutely our fraud teams matter of fact at mastercard we work very hard to reduce the false positives because that creates a bad experience for both the user as well as the issue of that card right so what we try to do all the times you can continue to do learning machine learning the artificial intelligence how to reduce that as you also look at people's patterns is this person a professional traveler or always traveling so that goes into the algorithm which are take a look at a false positive around fraud do they buy these types of goods with their credit cards so going you start to look at the protection and you start to add those rules into it and you start to actually reduce it it's all about learning it's not just one and done those algorithms have to be constantly updated in real time in some cases so that you're constantly in a learning phase you're building models and iterating those models and that's always a challenge but I'd love to talk about that if we have time but but I wanted to ask you Dale talk about deep learning Michael was talking a lot about machine learning and deep learning and part of his visionary discussion this morning what's the role of transparency how do you guide your constituents in terms of transparency what are the guidelines how transparent when to be trans Aaron yeah that's a great question and you know transparency was where the privacy profession lived 10 years ago it was all about giving the consumers notice about why you're collecting the data and using it consistent with that notice and being very visible with privacy statements and you know there's lots of laws around that now where you have to give specific notices the problem with big data is the power of it is using the data in ways that you didn't envision when you collected the data and that is the dilemma for privacy and big data and that's where the privacy community is trying to develop some tools for organizations to do a balancing act of okay the consumer didn't know that when they gave you that data it was going to be used for this purpose but they're not it's good its tangential to that use so that would be an acceptable use but if it's going to so surprised the consumer that you're using the data for you really need to go back and get reap Reaper missioned and in some countries it's an opt-in permission I'm going to mix Pam law spam and do not call laws seem trivial doesn't it you were mentioning off camera that I think it's your CISO is participates in public policy through the Obama administration is that as that was it you say so it's part of our DNA is security and securing the data our CEOs made a tremendous commitment to make sure that we can apply our best practices into and help the community understand how to make sure the data is secure because that's a digital persona we consider ourselves to be stewards of data not owners of data someone has entrusted us with that we want to make sure that we're constantly contributing back how to make sure it's secure and used right as we take a look at that how about regional nuances local laws haha describe sort of what you're seeing there how you address those complexities yeah so a good example is the new European regulation that's going into effect may of 2018 that has a new specific requirement about profiling automated decision that's used for marketing purposes you have to have an opt-in for using that data companies are going to struggle with how to implement that but nonetheless it's a new law and that law has four percent of annual revenue as a potential penalty Wow so it may get this straight you have to opt-in to be automated profiled automated profiling where it's going to be used for certain types of purposes decisions and you know what they're really trying to avoid is the things that the Obama administration came out with a big data report as well discrimination decisions that are made about insurance and credit etc that are automated decisions and then marketing decisions on those you know with that data the law now requires very specific opt-in and and transparency boy that's going to be tricky yeah the other thing for us is which was just described as working with people is the ability to tag that data as it's being brought in so as you think a big day that ingestion that tagging of that data and carrying the metadata what types of data needs to be tagged what types of data you have to be watching out for was it an opt-in versus an opt-out all that adds into understanding the power of what big data can do to protect both the individual and the company from being able to do something wrong with information so the nice part is with big data you can do that so again we're working with our customers and with the privacy officers understand how you do your data classifications what data needs to be tagged and then to be able to follow that full lineage through the entire ecosystem and obviously that has to be done at the point of creation correct otherwise it's it's not going to scale and and technology helps you solve that problem and that's been a challenge for years but it's a day where that actually works now yeah there's a lot of great partners and we're here at you know Dell world WMC world and they're here as well to help on that ingestion of data as it's coming in to start to tag it and to start to index and catalog it if that's the power of what big data can help you with because before you had to do it individually now you can actually use the tools you can use AI to actually understand about that information coming in to do that tagging to create that lineage it's very very important and very powerful especially as we start looking at what's coming down the road till you get involved in in helping guide solutions is that sir we have a process that is called the privacy impact assessment process and it's in the life cycle development of our products and services so much like the security reviews that are done when we when we commercialize a product we now are interjecting ourselves with a privacy review so if that project or product development or application is intending to use big data analytics as part of it we will we will help guide the business whether they need to build in opt-in consents what it is that what do they want to do with the product and what kinds of things are from a compliance perspective there do they need to build in so that we are at the table with our business partners all right we got a rep and Nick I'll give you the last word to mean so festive as the big data analytics I'll call you a visionary you know what's the future hold where's your focus in the next you know near the midterm you know under stay right with the ethics world and and probably always tell people what we're asking now is just because you have the data doesn't mean you have to use the data just because you have that information you've got to become a parent and start to be able to put some parameters around how that data is use so people in the privacy world you need to bring them to the table so again just because you have it doesn't mean you should be using it and now it's better to be a parent then just let people run crazy right Nick Goodell thanks very much for coming too i love this conversation is fascinating thank you for working do all right keep right to everybody will be back this is dell emc world from Austin Texas this is the cube right back

live from New York it's the cube covering riverbed disrupt watch you buy riverbed now here are your hosts day volante and Stu minimus welcome back to the Big Apple everybody this is riverbed disrupts we've got a special guest Steve de plusieurs with us the man behind many men and women at enterprise strategy group founder head chief chief analyst senior analyst Steve's great to see you thanks for coming off thanks for having me I appreciate it I'm you doing fellas it was good we were photobombing video bombing us today and here you are that was not intentional I didn't know the exact configuration in the camera almost always live it's all right and that ended up now you're in front of the camera how the right time this is not a bomb so what's doing these days what's what's happening on that's a ridiculous question citing you ah somewhat less ridiculous and still very open to interpretation I give me a path to head down and we can't I let's start with the with Delhi MC you've got a great blog on that you know the history was good really enjoyed that it's EMC success is because you left right so I'm not exactly sure it's a 50-50 between my crackers coming in and making everything that we sold actually work because not much really good I gotta say a lot of people are really positive people who know both dell and emc are actually really positive about the the marriage here but we nuts i don't think so i think from day one I saw I'll give you a quick anecdote hopefully quick tell me to shut up if not here's the parallel in two thousand Joe Tucci comes in and at that particular run emc and at that particular time EMC was really good about bringing in some outsider and spitting them out the DNA and the antibodies were just awful in that culture in that for an outsider to come in and be able to survive in there and they went through a bunch of senior managers senior executive vice-presidents yada yada yada that nobody lasted and 2g came in and I'd never met the man or and he had no business to have any idea who I was for example and for whatever reason I was able to get an audience with him very early on and I sat down with him and the first question I asked him only question I asked him and I wasn't looking nice like you I was disrespectful and he could conceive of me as disrespectful and I said what are you going to do about mo Shay because at the time as many of us that are old enough to know mo Shay was king of the of the hill over there he owns symmetrix and and he was untouchable Harry Dixon and Mo Shay were the two untouchable human beings within that emc culture and Joe looked me right in the eye and didn't skip a beat at all and said he's either going to play nice in the sandbox or he's gone and it wasn't six weeks later that ostensibly he was gone and I couldn't believe and so I knew right that in there I knew without knowing the man that this guy was a little bit different and everybody within the EMC antibody sort of climate said nope he's not gonna last six months he's not going to last and but I you know you look somebody in the eye and you see that and so I saw a lot of the similarities in this deal so you guys have been around forever I've been around forever you know Michael Michaels a straight-shooting guy Michael's doesn't have a go or vanity pretense or he doesn't do things for the wrong reasons he said something very very interesting to me about a year before the MC deal which was or a couple years before when he was talking about I think it was three power at the time when he's in the bidding war with Dave Donatelli at HP / 3 part and I don't remember the exact context of the comment but he talked about Dell spending money and he said you know I treat it like it's my own money because it is because it is it whereas he what he was alluding to as others are spending stockholders money and it's not really it and but so that was just a sort of an interesting look into into into the guy there so when this deal happened these are not to strangers right they've been together they've been married and divorced if you will and have had a relationship for a long time they know each other and so when it sort of happened you like oh boy you know and you on paper you can see the synergies and a lot of people i think i'm certainly not unique everybody saw the synergies is not a lot of overlap really what you worry about in a deal like that is cultural other other chiefs of the generals going to be able to get along or are they going to beat the hell out of each other and backstab and and do what happens in every one of these deals it seems like and they didn't write though they really didn't interesting that you know thou MCS a private company kind of a bummer for those who live in Massachusetts good but I kind of a there's a good days that a bummer why is that a bummer well because CMC the brand emc is gonna be gone right just like the walk go up with your private yeah crime and wagon oh let's hope that doesn't happen well we'll see we'll see it's dell technologies it's there's already Delia me logos up on the building from that standpoint it's okay you're right about it too it's hard not sure after yeah of course ok but this backdrop of companies going private obviously riverbed now click BMC many many many other space this new private equity game plan veritas right exactly right used to be private equity put it in some financial guy suck all the money out sure the carcass for yeah whatever's left and now they're saying why should the VCS have all the fun I mean riverbed got taken out for 13.6 billion think at some point to an IPO they're gonna be 10 billion plus a year from now J right I mean eight ten billion maybe I probably 70th I mean that's a nice return as a nitrile Michael Dell returns so I think that you bring up a very fascinating point that I think is gonna happen more often than less and the at the I'm not that smart but fundamentally having that microscope and that's spotlight on you in 90 day increments dealing with no disrespect 26 year old MBAs that have never had a real job that their only interest is squeezing that any per share regardless of what the human impact or what the long-term impact of a company is is the wrong way to do business it's it's our way it's our system but it's the wrong fundamental way to do business you your dad's probably told you just like I did no no you you you spend less than you make it's right if we're not the government we can't print our own money you spend less than you make and and you you honor your debts and all these other things i think the privatization aspect and all of this stuff is just going to keep going because these companies are good companies and they you take the handcuffs on them they don't care what Wall Street thinks for a certain period of time years certain period of time and when they're ready to come back exactly right they go from three billion dollars to ten billion dollars because they were able to do the right things not because they only cared about squeezing the coffee budget to make another you know point ten cents a share yeah Steve so you know market shares in competition and enterprise tech you know seemed for a long time you know nothing change storage industry was very entrenched you know we've seen market share shifting a lot i'll bring it back to you know where to show called disrupt here you know there's been a leader in the networking world for most of my career here um why are you know enterprises you know open to you no more change they're doing cloud there you know looking at some of the things like riverbeds talking about it's a great question so at first i would say they're not they're not open to it nobody and there are two fundamental reasons one is i hate to say it but human beings are lazy I'm one of them the devil I know is easier than the devil I don't yeah most people don't like change no to do not like change whatsoever so the really reason that anybody changes any of this stuff is because one they have to it just doesn't work anymore nobody buys something that's better because it's better they buy it because they have to buy it yeah why'd you buy that Tesla yeah what well that's a terrible example I'm an idiot and I just bought it because it was way better all right sorry now but where we are at some inflection points right now so it doesn't matter why the change occurred right so I could still I think maybe a different answer is I could buy a horse but it's still a valid mode of transportation it just makes me a complete ass if if I do right but it's technically a valid mode of transportation so we I can still go on do that path I people get into a habit of over a course of years and sometimes decades this is just the way we did it this is the way we do it its way I was trained this is way I will train the next guy I'm gonna walk in in the morning and smash myself on the hand with a hammer in the head every day why I don't know it doesn't feel good why do you keep doing it because that's the way we do it type of stuff so it change tends to be some you need some macro external function to force a change VMware had ESX for 10 years before they became VMware as we know them in 10 years why did that happen because it was a nice to have it was the smarter thing to do it only happened when the data center ran out of power and cooling when I couldn't physically fit any more stuff in there and I still had to do a job that's when people went well those guys in the corner are running this cool stuff that emulates pretty much any environment you want to you doing them people at oh oh that's interesting and now you're an idiot if you don't run vmware just as an example right and so I think that it's the same sort of thing we get hub-and-spoke spine and leaf yatta yatta yatta whatever the networking terminology is that we had to do that had a place and and in time but you would never probably architect something like that today if you started from a clean piece of paper and I'm not picking on just Cisco I'd take the longer you're going to keep giving me a buck I'm gonna take your buck right it's because they do answer to shareholders so they're sort of at a catchment they could they could and they will eventually react to the market that says stop doing it that way because it's the wrong way to do HP HP e oh how about a go in the opposite direction of del super interesting well they will will will Dells ability to sell through EMC change the dynamic in the server market well they surpass HP ok so my personal bet if I had to bet right now I would say yes the answer is yes and here's the reason why you could you had three sort of mega companies in in what really to HP and IBM and then you had dell as the it sounds stupid to say but of the wannabe to those guys intel's grown up and now they're on equal playing field but so h IBM took one path IBM said I'm kind of getting it out of the infrastructure business and I'm gonna get into the third platform all in the higher value or what I presume to be eventually higher value plays there but there's no value in commodity hardware etc etc analytics baby yeah you got it whatever automotive yeah and ok let's very good for them and I made a lot of big bets right eight feet went exactly the other way let's just strictly you know we might have paid 10 billion for autonomy but we're gonna sell our 30 billion dollars and in software assets for less money because it is distractive and they so they split the two companies into printers assess your losses and go and don't get me wrong but those are Burger King makes money right Burger King makes money they follow McDonald's around and I'm this is not a good analogy but the only one I can kind of think of on the top of my head being number two and profitable is not a bad business and so as such they don't have to support each feed is enough to support a full stack of all of this other stuff that's really complicated and hard and really big company things so they're divesting themselves of it so makes essentially being her own PE firm she's stripping it before somebody else strips it and taking what she can get in the coffers and in a sufficient yeah starting it again what about riverbed give you a book give us your bumper sticker and then we get a rep all right so they I am I I'm probably the wrong person to ask and for the following reasons number one am not deep enough but number two is I love these guys since literally their inception and i will tell a quick story in that sense i was meeting their primary venture capitalist at the time a guy named chris chevy from light speed and i went to that that greek place in palo alto that I can never member the name of and I was meeting he he called me on the way over he said hey I'm running a little late with a guy do you mind if somebody joins us I said no and it was Jerry and in so I walk in and I'm this kid and there's Jerry and his jeans and doesn't care about anything type of thing oh great so what do you do he said oh well crank chris said why we just funded seed funded him my gosh all this terrific what's what's the company doing I swear to god he went not exactly sure yet thinking about a networking thing you know some paraphrasing Dudley they gave him money and he didn't know what they were gonna do and I was like oh my god what a great bet that worked out of any of your people really really well so I love riverbed I've loved them ever since I love Jerry is not only a character in a human being but it's a great company that is done you know again taking on Goliath really hard to take on Goliath and Cisco's about its Goliath as they come and these guys have just kicked by well you've taken on Goliath in a pretty entrenched business so I said last question last question what's new with ESG you guys are rocking you got a bunch of people working for you and just keep growing and love to see it new areas hit the security or to virtually you know every part of IT your customers love you what's what's new with you guys I'm my current personal passion and we're we're driving more I think interesting stuff the normal is insecurity because it is the wild wild west so I'm a storage guy I'm boring box kind of guy i understood that stuff 25 years ago securities fascinating to me because it is the storage business kind of 25 years ago only an order of magnitude if not bigger so there are 1500 companies not 150 trying to wannabes and and there's zero clear winners in any of these senses they riverbed brought up Palo Alto today great company but there are hundreds of different vectors that are all sort of attempting in one way or another to do the same thing but it's a it's a horse race where all the horses are running in different directions looks like a Monty Python look kind of scared two ready go hmm everywhere and so I I personally find that intriguing and fascinating also because the bigger they are the harder they fall so we'll go from 1,500 to 150 and we'll go from almost a trillion invested too oh boy a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money but from that certainly some players are going to rise tremendously and the other thing I'd really find interesting is this is we're no longer in the era of the boring box we really aren't and I and that's good for everybody in i.t except people that really love the boring box and so there's always hard a school of hard knocks right people are going to lose jobs and and it's unfortunate that respect and they'll come clinging to that Titanic but at the end of the day what's on the other side is crazy stuff you know it's great that the iphone we forget is it's seven years old or something it's eight years old we act like it's a you know we've had it forever but no no I had a bag phone when i was with the MC and i thought it was really cool at a thousand dollars a minute to be calling my friend who had a bag phone cuz you couldn't call anybody else cuz no one else at a bank what wasn't that long ago so anyway them all right well big buddy could be interesting to see picking winners in the security space but some gradual ations on all your success okay thank you very much for coming to the cubes great time guys thank you so much all right keep right to everybody will be back to wrap riverbed disrupt right after this