(upbeat intro music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a special remote guest coming in. Teresa Carlson, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport, theCUBE alumni, one of the first, let me go back to 2013, Teresa, former AWS. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh my gosh, almost 10 years. That is unbelievable. It's hard to believe so many years of theCUBE. I love it. >> It's been such a great honor to interview you and follow your career. You've had quite the impressive run, executive level woman in tech. You've done such an amazing job, not only in your career, but also helping other women. So I want to give you props to that before we get started. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. I, it's my, it's been my honor and privilege. >> Let's talk about Flexport. Tell us about your new role there and what it's all about. >> Well, I love it. I'm back working with another Amazonian, Dave Clark, who is our CEO of Flexport, and we are about 3,000 people strong globally in over 90 countries. We actually even have, we're represented in over 160 cities and with local governments and places around the world, which I think is super exciting. We have over 100 network partners and growing, and we are about empowering the global supply chain and trade and doing it in a very disruptive way with the use of platform technology that allows our customers to really have visibility and insight to what's going on. And it's a lot of fun. I'm learning new things, but there's a lot of technology in this as well, so I feel right at home. >> You quite have a knack from mastering growth, technology, and building out companies. So congratulations, and scaling them up too with the systems and processes. So I want to get into that. Let's get into your personal background. Then I want to get into the work you've done and are doing for empowering women in tech. What was your journey about, how did it all start? Like, I know you had a, you know, bumped into it, you went Microsoft, AWS. Take us through your career, how you got into tech, how it all happened. >> Well, I do like to give a shout out, John, to my roots and heritage, which was a speech and language pathologist. So I did start out in healthcare right out of, you know, university. I had an undergraduate and a master's degree. And I do tell everyone now, looking back at my career, I think it was super helpful for me because I learned a lot about human communication, and it has done me very well over the years to really try to understand what environments I'm in and what kind of individuals around the world culturally. So I'm really blessed that I had that opportunity to work in healthcare, and by the way, a shout out to all of our healthcare workers that has helped us get through almost three years of COVID and flu and neurovirus and everything else. So started out there and then kind of almost accidentally got into technology. My first small company I worked for was a company called Keyfile Corporation, which did workflow and document management out of Nashua, New Hampshire. And they were a Microsoft goal partner. And that is actually how I got into big tech world. We ran on exchange, for everybody who knows that term exchange, and we were a large small partner, but large in the world of exchange. And those were the days when you would, the late nineties, you would go and be in the same room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And I really fell in love with Microsoft back then. I thought to myself, wow, if I could work for a big tech company, I got to hear Bill on stage about saving, he would talk about saving the world. And guess what my next step was? I actually got a job at Microsoft, took a pay cut and a job downgrade. I tell this story all the time. Took like three downgrades in my role. I had been a SVP and went to a manager, and it's one of the best moves I ever made. And I shared that because I really didn't know the world of big tech, and I had to start from the ground up and relearn it. I did that, I just really loved that job. I was at Microsoft from 2000 to 2010, where I eventually ran all of the U.S. federal government business, which was a multi-billion dollar business. And then I had the great privilege of meeting an amazing man, Andy Jassy, who I thought was just unbelievable in his insights and knowledge and openness to understanding new markets. And we talked about government and how government needed the same great technology as every startup. And that led to me going to work for Andy in 2010 and starting up our worldwide public sector business. And I pinch myself some days because we went from two people, no offices, to the time I left we had over 10,000 people, billions in revenue, and 172 countries and had done really amazing work. I think changing the way public sector and government globally really thought about their use of technology and Cloud computing in general. And that kind of has been my career. You know, I was there till 2020, 21 and then did a small stint at Splunk, a small stint back at Microsoft doing a couple projects for Microsoft with CEO, Satya Nadella, who is also an another amazing CEO and leader. And then Dave called me, and I'm at Flexport, so I couldn't be more honored, John. I've just had such an amazing career working with amazing individuals. >> Yeah, I got to say the Amazon One well-documented, certainly by theCUBE and our coverage. We watched you rise and scale that thing. And like I said at a time, this will when we look back as a historic run because of the build out. I mean as a zero to massive billions at a historic time where government was transforming, I would say Microsoft had a good run there with Fed, but it was already established stuff. Federal business was like, you know, blocking and tackling. The Amazon was pure build out. So I have to ask you, what was your big learnings? Because one, you're a Seattle big tech company kind of entrepreneurial in the sense of you got, here's some working capital seed finance and go build that thing, and you're in DC and you're a woman. What did you learn? >> I learned that you really have to have a lot of grit. You, my mom and dad, these are kind of more southern roots words, but stick with itness, you know. you can't give up and no's not in your vocabulary. I found no is just another way to get to yes. That you have to figure out what are all the questions people are going to ask you. I learned to be very patient, and I think one of the things John, for us was our secret sauce was we said to ourselves, if we're going to do something super transformative and truly disruptive, like Cloud computing, which the government really had not utilized, we had to be patient. We had to answer all their questions, and we could not judge in any way what they were thinking because if we couldn't answer all those questions and prove out the capabilities of Cloud computing, we were not going to accomplish our goals. And I do give so much credit to all my colleagues there from everybody like Steve Schmidt who was there, who's still there, who's the CISO, and Charlie Bell and Peter DeSantis and the entire team there that just really helped build that business out. Without them, you know, we would've just, it was a team effort. And I think that's the thing I loved about it was it was not just sales, it was product, it was development, it was data center operations, it was legal, finance. Everybody really worked as a team and we were on board that we had to make a lot of changes in the government relations team. We had to go into Capitol Hill. We had to talk to them about the changes that were required and really get them to understand why Cloud computing could be such a transformative game changer for the way government operates globally. >> Well, I think the whole world and the tech world can appreciate your work and thank you later because you broke down those walls asking those questions. So great stuff. Now I got to say, you're in kind of a similar role at Flexport. Again, transformative supply chain, not new. Computing wasn't new when before Cloud came. Supply chain, not a new concept, is undergoing radical change and transformation. Online, software supply chain, hardware supply chain, supply chain in general, shipping. This is a big part of our economy and how life is working. Similar kind of thing going on, build out, growth, scale. >> It is, it's very much like that, John, I would say, it's, it's kind of a, the model with freight forwarding and supply chain is fairly, it's not as, there's a lot of technology utilized in this global supply chain world, but it's not integrated. You don't have a common operating picture of what you're doing in your global supply chain. You don't have easy access to the information and visibility. And that's really, you know, I was at a conference last week in LA, and it was, the themes were so similar about transparency, access to data and information, being able to act quickly, drive change, know what was happening. I was like, wow, this sounds familiar. Data, AI, machine learning, visibility, common operating picture. So it is very much the same kind of themes that you heard even with government. I do believe it's an industry that is going through transformation and Flexport has been a group that's come in and said, look, we have this amazing idea, number one to give access to everyone. We want every small business to every large business to every government around the world to be able to trade their goods, think about supply chain logistics in a very different way with information they need and want at their fingertips. So that's kind of thing one, but to apply that technology in a way that's very usable across all systems from an integration perspective. So it's kind of exciting. I used to tell this story years ago, John, and I don't think Michael Dell would mind that I tell this story. One of our first customers when I was at Keyfile Corporation was we did workflow and document management, and Dell was one of our customers. And I remember going out to visit them, and they had runners and they would run around, you know, they would run around the floor and do their orders, right, to get all those computers out the door. And when I think of global trade, in my mind I still see runners, you know, running around and I think that's moved to a very digital, right, world that all this stuff, you don't need people doing this. You have machines doing this now, and you have access to the information, and you know, we still have issues resulting from COVID where we have either an under-abundance or an over-abundance of our supply chain. We still have clogs in our shipping, in the shipping yards around the world. So we, and the ports, so we need to also, we still have some clearing to do. And that's the reason technology is important and will continue to be very important in this world of global trade. >> Yeah, great, great impact for change. I got to ask you about Flexport's inclusion, diversity, and equity programs. What do you got going on there? That's been a big conversation in the industry around keeping a focus on not making one way more than the other, but clearly every company, if they don't have a strong program, will be at a disadvantage. That's well reported by McKinsey and other top consultants, diverse workforces, inclusive, equitable, all perform better. What's Flexport's strategy and how are you guys supporting that in the workplace? >> Well, let me just start by saying really at the core of who I am, since the day I've started understanding that as an individual and a female leader, that I could have an impact. That the words I used, the actions I took, the information that I pulled together and had knowledge of could be meaningful. And I think each and every one of us is responsible to do what we can to make our workplace and the world a more diverse and inclusive place to live and work. And I've always enjoyed kind of the thought that, that I could help empower women around the world in the tech industry. Now I'm hoping to do my little part, John, in that in the supply chain and global trade business. And I would tell you at Flexport we have some amazing women. I'm so excited to get to know all. I've not been there that long yet, but I'm getting to know we have some, we have a very diverse leadership team between men and women at Dave's level. I have some unbelievable women on my team directly that I'm getting to know more, and I'm so impressed with what they're doing. And this is a very, you know, while this industry is different than the world I live in day to day, it's also has a lot of common themes to it. So, you know, for us, we're trying to approach every day by saying, let's make sure both our interviewing cycles, the jobs we feel, how we recruit people, how we put people out there on the platforms, that we have diversity and inclusion and all of that every day. And I can tell you from the top, from Dave and all of our leaders, we just had an offsite and we had a big conversation about this is something. It's a drum beat that we have to think about and live by every day and really check ourselves on a regular basis. But I do think there's so much more room for women in the world to do great things. And one of the, one of the areas, as you know very well, we lost a lot of women during COVID, who just left the workforce again. So we kind of went back unfortunately. So we have to now move forward and make sure that we are giving women the opportunity to have great jobs, have the flexibility they need as they build a family, and have a workplace environment that is trusted for them to come into every day. >> There's now clear visibility, at least in today's world, not withstanding some of the setbacks from COVID, that a young girl can look out in a company and see a path from entry level to the boardroom. That's a big change. A lot than even going back 10, 15, 20 years ago. What's your advice to the folks out there that are paying it forward? You see a lot of executive leaderships have a seat at the table. The board still underrepresented by most numbers, but at least you have now kind of this solidarity at the top, but a lot of people doing a lot more now than I've seen at the next levels down. So now you have this leveled approach. Is that something that you're seeing more of? And credit compare and contrast that to 20 years ago when you were, you know, rising through the ranks? What's different? >> Well, one of the main things, and I honestly do not think about it too much, but there were really no women. There were none. When I showed up in the meetings, I literally, it was me or not me at the table, but at the seat behind the table. The women just weren't in the room, and there were so many more barriers that we had to push through, and that has changed a lot. I mean globally that has changed a lot in the U.S. You know, if you look at just our U.S. House of Representatives and our U.S. Senate, we now have the increasing number of women. Even at leadership levels, you're seeing that change. You have a lot more women on boards than we ever thought we would ever represent. While we are not there, more female CEOs that I get an opportunity to see and talk to. Women starting companies, they do not see the barriers. And I will share, John, globally in the U.S. one of the things that I still see that we have that many other countries don't have, which I'm very proud of, women in the U.S. have a spirit about them that they just don't see the barriers in the same way. They believe that they can accomplish anything. I have two sons, I don't have daughters. I have nieces, and I'm hoping someday to have granddaughters. But I know that a lot of my friends who have granddaughters today talk about the boldness, the fortitude, that they believe that there's nothing they can't accomplish. And I think that's what what we have to instill in every little girl out there, that they can accomplish anything they want to. The world is theirs, and we need to not just do that in the U.S., but around the world. And it was always the thing that struck me when I did all my travels at AWS and now with Flexport, I'm traveling again quite a bit, is just the differences you see in the cultures around the world. And I remember even in the Middle East, how I started seeing it change. You've heard me talk a lot on this program about the fact in both Saudi and Bahrain, over 60% of the tech workers were females and most of them held the the hardest jobs, the security, the architecture, the engineering. But many of them did not hold leadership roles. And that is what we've got to change too. To your point, the middle, we want it to get bigger, but the top, we need to get bigger. We need to make sure women globally have opportunities to hold the most precious leadership roles and demonstrate their capabilities at the very top. But that's changed. And I would say the biggest difference is when we show up, we're actually evaluated properly for those kind of roles. We have a ways to go. But again, that part is really changing. >> Can you share, Teresa, first of all, that's great work you've done and I wan to give you props of that as well and all the work you do. I know you champion a lot of, you know, causes in in this area. One question that comes up a lot, I would love to get your opinion 'cause I think you can contribute heavily here is mentoring and sponsorship is huge, comes up all the time. What advice would you share to folks out there who were, I won't say apprehensive, but maybe nervous about how to do the networking and sponsorship and mentoring? It's not just mentoring, it's sponsorship too. What's your best practice? What advice would you give for the best way to handle that? >> Well yeah, and for the women out there, I would say on the mentorship side, I still see mentorship. Like, I don't think you can ever stop having mentorship. And I like to look at my mentors in different parts of my life because if you want to be a well-rounded person, you may have parts of your life every day that you think I'm doing a great job here and I definitely would like to do better there. Whether it's your spiritual life, your physical life, your work life, you know, your leisure life. But I mean there's, and there's parts of my leadership world that I still seek advice from as I try to do new things even in this world. And I tried some new things in between roles. I went out and asked the people that I respected the most. So I just would say for sure have different mentorships and don't be afraid to have that diversity. But if you have mentorships, the second important thing is show up with a real agenda and questions. Don't waste people's time. I'm very sensitive today. If you're, if you want a mentor, you show up and you use your time super effectively and be prepared for that. Sponsorship is a very different thing. And I don't believe we actually do that still in companies. We worked, thank goodness for my great HR team. When I was at AWS, we worked on a few sponsorship programs where for diversity in general, where we would nominate individuals in the company that we felt that weren't, that had a lot of opportunity for growth, but they just weren't getting a seat at the table. And we brought 'em to the table. And we actually kind of had a Chatham House rules where when they came into the meetings, they had a sponsor, not a mentor. They had a sponsor that was with them the full 18 months of this program. We would bring 'em into executive meetings. They would read docs, they could ask questions. We wanted them to be able to open up and ask crazy questions without, you know, feeling wow, I just couldn't answer this question in a normal environment or setting. And then we tried to make sure once they got through the program that we found jobs and support and other special projects that they could go do. But they still had that sponsor and that group of individuals that they'd gone through the program with, John, that they could keep going back to. And I remember sitting there and they asked me what I wanted to get out of the program, and I said two things. I want you to leave this program and say to yourself, I would've never had that experience if I hadn't gone through this program. I learned so much in 18 months. It would probably taken me five years to learn. And that it helped them in their career. The second thing I told them is I wanted them to go out and recruit individuals that look like them. I said, we need diversity, and unless you all feel that we are in an inclusive environment sponsoring all types of individuals to be part of this company, we're not going to get the job done. And they said, okay. And you know, but it was really one, it was very much about them. That we took a group of individuals that had high potential and a very diverse with diverse backgrounds, held 'em up, taught 'em things that gave them access. And two, selfishly I said, I want more of you in my business. Please help me. And I think those kind of things are helpful, and you have to be thoughtful about these kind of programs. And to me that's more sponsorship. I still have people reach out to me from years ago, you know, Microsoft saying, you were so good with me, can you give me a reference now? Can you talk to me about what I should be doing? And I try to, I'm not pray 100%, some things pray fall through the cracks, but I always try to make the time to talk to those individuals because for me, I am where I am today because I got some of the best advice from people like Don Byrne and Linda Zecker and Andy Jassy, who were very honest and upfront with me about my career. >> Awesome. Well, you got a passion for empowering women in tech, paying it forward, but you're quite accomplished and that's why we're so glad to have you on the program here. President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport. Obviously storied career and your other jobs, specifically Amazon I think, is historic in my mind. This next chapter looks like it's looking good right now. Final question for you, for the few minutes you have left. Tell us what you're up to at Flexport. What's your goals as President, Chief Commercial Officer? What are you trying to accomplish? Share a little bit, what's on your mind with your current job? >> Well, you kind of said it earlier. I think if I look at my own superpowers, I love customers, I love partners. I get my energy, John, from those interactions. So one is to come in and really help us build even a better world class enterprise global sales and marketing team. Really listen to our customers, think about how we interact with them, build the best executive programs we can, think about new ways that we can offer services to them and create new services. One of my favorite things about my career is I think if you're a business leader, it's your job to come back around and tell your product group and your services org what you're hearing from customers. That's how you can be so much more impactful, that you listen, you learn, and you deliver. So that's one big job. The second job for me, which I am so excited about, is that I have an amazing group called flexport.org under me. And flexport.org is doing amazing things around the world to help those in need. We just announced this new funding program for Tech for Refugees, which brings assistance to millions of people in Ukraine, Pakistan, the horn of Africa, and those who are affected by earthquakes. We just took supplies into Turkey and Syria, and Flexport, recently in fact, just did sent three air shipments to Turkey and Syria for these. And I think we did over a hundred trekking shipments to get earthquake relief. And as you can imagine, it was not easy to get into Syria. But you know, we're very active in the Ukraine, and we are, our goal for flexport.org, John, is to continue to work with our commercial customers and team up with them when they're trying to get supplies in to do that in a very cost effective, easy way, as quickly as we can. So that not-for-profit side of me that I'm so, I'm so happy. And you know, Ryan Peterson, who was our founder, this was his brainchild, and he's really taken this to the next level. So I'm honored to be able to pick that up and look for new ways to have impact around the world. And you know, I've always found that I think if you do things right with a company, you can have a beautiful combination of commercial-ity and giving. And I think Flexport does it in such an amazing and unique way. >> Well, the impact that they have with their system and their technology with logistics and shipping and supply chain is a channel for societal change. And I think that's a huge gift that you have that under your purview. So looking forward to finding out more about flexport.org. I can only imagine all the exciting things around sustainability, and we just had Mobile World Congress for Big Cube Broadcast, 5Gs right around the corner. I'm sure that's going to have a huge impact to your business. >> Well, for sure. And just on gas emissions, that's another thing that we are tracking gas, greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact we've already reduced more than 300,000 tons and supported over 600 organizations doing that. So that's a thing we're also trying to make sure that we're being climate aware and ensuring that we are doing the best job we can at that as well. And that was another thing I was honored to be able to do when we were at AWS, is to really cut out greenhouse gas emissions and really go global with our climate initiatives. >> Well Teresa, it's great to have you on. Security, data, 5G, sustainability, business transformation, AI all coming together to change the game. You're in another hot seat, hot roll, big wave. >> Well, John, it's an honor, and just thank you again for doing this and having women on and really representing us in a big way as we celebrate International Women's Day. >> I really appreciate it, it's super important. And these videos have impact, so we're going to do a lot more. And I appreciate your leadership to the industry and thank you so much for taking the time to contribute to our effort. Thank you, Teresa. >> Thank you. Thanks everybody. >> Teresa Carlson, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Flexport. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is International Women's Day broadcast. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro music)

(intro music) >> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (gentle music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. As you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, 'cause you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about Open RAN. You've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests join Dave and me. Abdullah Abuzaid, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellmann, VP Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program guys. >> Thank you. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question, and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. >> Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not a new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long a time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at examples for the Open RAN ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It bring a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers, from this outcome where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify, or run deployment, operation, and lifecycle management and sustain it. >> And who are the customers, by the way? >> Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment, or a seamless cloud experience from Core to RAN, these are the customers we are working with them. >> You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership, and the capabilities that you're enabling, the CSPs with that. >> Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona, when we set together, and started to look at the, you know, the industry, the adoption of Open RAN, and the challenges. And Open RAN brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you desegregate. In the past, you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at Open RAN, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, application, and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges. And the challenges of integration, of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winder River set together and say, "How can we ease this? "How we can make it simpler?" And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market, that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete lifecycle management from the day zero deployment, through the day two operation, everything done through location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application, on top of this infrastructure. >> So what is the, what is the Wind River secret sauce in this, in this mix, for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? >> Yes, absolutely. So Wind River, for many, many don't know, we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years. We specialize high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life. From the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not virtualized, not throughout the fight today, using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into desegregation in cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, "Okay, everything is evolving. Instead of a device that included the application, the hardware, everything fused together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS, okay. It's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment. But we took basically our experience, the same experience that, you know, we used in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer, and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge, that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance, and address all the telco needs. >> So I, Abdullah, maybe you can a answer this. >> Yeah. >> What is the, what does the go-to-market motion look like, considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately. What does that, what does that look like if you're approaching a possible customer who is, who's knocking on the door? >> How does that work? >> Exactly. And this effort is a Dell turnkey sales service offering, or solution offering to our customers. Where Dell, in collaboration with Wind River, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as engineered system, knock door on our customer who are trying to transform to Open RAN or open ecosystem. We can help you to go through that seamless experience, by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero touch provisioning, and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in, in operate, in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. >> Okay. So I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. >> Exactly. >> Okay. So start with Dell, and level one, level two. And if there are complex issues related to the cloud core itself, then Wind River will be on our back supporting us. >> Talk a little bit about a cust, a CSP example that is, is using the technology, and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. >> Vodafone is a great example. We're here in Barcelona. Vodafone is the first ora network in Europe, and it's using our joint solution. >> What are some of the, the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? >> Faster time to market. As you see, they already started to deploy the ORAN in commercial network, and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there. We're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize. So the outcome, it's just simplifying it, and you know, ready to go. Using experience that we have, Wind River is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world. This is with Verizon. We're at the very large scale. We started this deployment in late '20 and '19, the first site. And then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale. We have a lot of experience learning from it, which what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale. Many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade. So the whole day two operation, and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now, and which allowed them... If I, if I look at my engagement with Verizon, started years before we started. And it took quite some time until we got stuff running. And if you look at the Vodafone time schedule, was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment. And I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here by KDI, for example. It's another one moving even faster. So it's accelerating the whole movement to Ora. >> We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week. I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you know, you, you just mentioned two huge names in Telco, Vodafone and Verizon. >> Yep. >> Talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by 7. >> Not exactly. And this, we go back to the challenges in Open ecosystem. Managing multiple vendors at the same time, is a challenge for our customers. And that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by have, by being a trusted partner, working with our customer through all the journey. We started with Dish in their 5G deployment. Also with Vodafone. We're finding the right partners working with them proactively before getting into, in front of the customer to, we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the RAN in particular, we are talking with the 5g. We have ran the simplification, but they still have on the other side, limited resources and skillset can support it. So, bringing a pro, ahead of time engineer system, with a zero touch of provisioning enablement, and sustainable life cycle management, it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improved margins for our customers, and faster business revenue for their end users. >> Solid outcomes. >> And, and what you just just described, justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating, which is the way that Gill referenced it, which I think is great because you're not, you're not, you're not re-aggregating, (laughs) you're reintegrating, and you're creating something that's better. >> Exactly. >> Moving forward. Otherwise, why would you do it? >> Exactly. And if you look at it, the player in the ecosystem, you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers, but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my raci, this is what I'm responsible for. I, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else while we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem to... Let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers, so we make it end-to-end seamless experience, not only on the technical part, but also on the business aspect side of it. >> So, so the partnership, it's about reducing the pen. I will say eliminating it. So this is the, the core of it. And you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great, but if you look at the premises of a 5G network, it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, the ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it. And basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer. And for this, you need a ultra low, reliable low latency communication. You need a 5G network. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you know, we think about, "Well we just have to be connected all the time." But those are some of the emerging technologies that are going to be potentially lifesaving, and, and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So, really great stuff there, but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Wind River? And, and when you're in conversations with prospective CSP's, what is the superpower that you deliver together? I'd love to get both of your perspectives. >> So, if you look at it, number one, customers look at it, last savings and their day-to-day operation. In 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of ORAN. This is still picking up. But there is a mutualization and densification of ORAN. And this is where we're talking on monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase, we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction. Where I want to move not only ORAN, I want to bring the edge at the same side, I want to define the advanced use cases of edge, where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day, 5G as a girl mentioned earlier, is not about a good better phone coverage, or a better speed robot, but what customized SLA's I can deliver. So it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. >> Yeah. >> So yeah. I will say there are two pens. One, it's the technology side. So for an example, energy efficiency. It's a very big pin point. And sustainability. So we work a lot around this, and basically to advance this. So if you look at the integrated solution today, it's very highly optimized for resource consumption. But to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA. So this is one side. The other side, it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better. It's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications. So, it's not just easy to deploy an ORAN network, but it's easy to deploy those applications. >> I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this, in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds (clears throat) the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards ORAN, adopting VRAN, an amazing, you know, a plethora of new services that can be delivered, but will these operators have the appetite to take that, make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon? Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So if you look at the early days or ORAN introduction in particular, most of the entrepreneurs of ORAN and Virtual RAN ran into the challenges of not only the complexity of open ecosystem, but the integration, is like the redos of the work. And that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting it to the customers. Per our result or outcomes we get, we are talking about 30 to 50% savings on the optics. We are talking 110 ROI for our customers, simply because we are reducing the redos, the time spent to discover and explore. Because we've done that rework ahead of time, we found the optimization issues. Just for example, any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors, but how I can bring them together and give, deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize, that's, that's where it brings the value for our customer, and accelerate the deployment and the operation of the network. >> Do you have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? >> Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) >> Absolutely. I would say, we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale. And the data supports performance. It's the same or better than traditional system. And the cost of operation, it's as good or better than traditional. Unfortunately, I can't provide more specific data. But the point is, when something is unknown in the beginning, of course you're more afraid, you take more conservative approach. Now the data starts to flow. And from here, the intention needs to go even better. So more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system, both to operate as well as to build up. But it's definitely the data that we have today says, the, ORAN system is at part, at the minimum. >> So, definite ROI there. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open, but to your point, eliminating them. We appreciate your time and, and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. Live from MWC23. We'll be back after a short break. (outro music)

Upbeat music plays >> Voice Over: TheCUBE presents Ignite 22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Good morning everyone. Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We are live at Palo Alto Networks Ignite. This is the 10th annual Ignite. There's about 3,000 people here, excited to really see where this powerhouse organization is taking security. Dave, it's great to be here. Our first time covering Ignite. People are ready to be back. They.. and security is top. It's a board level conversation. >> It is the other Ignite, I like to call it cuz of course there's another big company has a conference name Ignite, so I'm really excited to be here. Palo Alto Networks, a company we've covered for a number of years, as we just wrote in our recent breaking analysis, we've called them the gold standard but it's not just our opinion, we've backed it up with data. The company's on track. We think to do close to 7 billion in revenue by 2023. That's double it's 2020 revenue. You can measure it with execution, market cap M and A prowess. I'm super excited to have the CEO here. >> We have the CEO here, Nikesh Arora joins us from Palo Alto Networks. Nikesh, great to have you on theCube. Thank you for joining us. >> Well thank you very much for having me Lisa and Dave >> Lisa: It was great to see your keynote this morning. You said that, you know fundamentally security is a data problem. Well these days every company has to be a data company. Grocery stores, gas stations, car dealers. How is Palo Alto networks making customers, these data companies, more secure? >> Well Lisa, you know, (coughs) I've only done cybersecurity for about four, four and a half years so when I came to the industry I was amazed to see how security is so reactive as opposed to proactive. We should be able to stop bad threats, right? as they're happening. But I think a lot of threats get through because we don't have the right infrastructure and the right tooling and right products in there. So I think we've been working hard for the last four and a half years to turn it around so we can have consistent data flow across an enterprise and then mine that data for threats and anomalous behavior and try and protect our customers. >> You know the problem, I wrote this, this weekend, the problem in cybersecurity is well understood, you put up that Optiv graph and it's like 8,000 companies >> Yes >> and I think you mentioned your keynote on average, you know 30 to 40 tools, maybe 50, at least 20, >> Yes. >> from the folks that I talked to. So, okay, great, but actually solving that problem is not trivial. To be a consolidator, I mean, everybody wants to consolidate tools. So in your three to four years and security as you well know, it's, you can't fake security. It's a really, really challenging topic. So when you joined Palo Alto Networks and you heard that strategy, I know you guys have been thinking about this for some time, what did you see as the challenges to actually executing on that and how is it that you've been able to sort of get through that knot hole. >> So Dave, you know, it's interesting if you look at the history of cybersecurity, I call them the flavor of the decade, a flare, you know a new threat vector gets created, very large market gets created, a solution comes through, people flock, you get four or five companies will chase that opportunity, and then they become leaders in that space whether it's firewalls or endpoints or identity. And then people stick to their swim lane. The problem is that's a very product centric approach to security. It's not a customer-centric approach. The customer wants a more secure enterprise. They don't want to solve 20 different solutions.. problems with 20 different point solutions. But that's kind of how the industry's grown up, and it's been impossible for a large security company in one category, to actually have a substantive presence in the next category. Now what we've been able to do in the last four and a half years is, you know, from our firewall base we had resources, we had intellectual capability from a security perspective and we had cash. So we used that to pay off our technical debt. We acquired a bunch of companies, we created capability. In the last three years, four years we've created three incremental businesses which are all on track to hit a billion dollars the next 12 to 18 months. >> Yeah, so it's interesting on Twitter last night we had a little conversation about acquirers and who was a good, who was not so good. It was, there was Oracle, they came up actually very high, they'd done pretty, pretty good Job, VMware was on the list, IBM, Cisco, ServiceNow. And if you look at IBM and Cisco's strategy, they tend to be very services heavy, >> Mm >> right? How is it that you have been able to, you mentioned get rid of your technical debt, you invested in that. I wonder if you could, was it the, the Cloud, even though a lot of the Cloud was your own Cloud, was that a difference in terms of your ability to integrate? Because so many companies have tried it in the past. Oracle I think has done a good job, but it took 'em 10 to 12 years, you know, to, to get there. What was the sort of secret sauce? Is it culture, is it just great engineering? >> Dave it's a.. thank you for that. I think, look, it's, it's a mix of everything. First and foremost, you know, there are certain categories we didn't play in so there was nothing to integrate. We built a capability in a category in automation. We didn't have a product, we acquired a company. It's a net new capability in instant response. We didn't have a capability. It was net new capability. So there was, there was, other than integrating culturally and into the organization into our core to market processes there was no technical integration needed. Most of our technical integration was needed in our Cloud platform, which we bought five or six companies, we integrated then we just bought one recently called cyber security as well, which is going to get integrated in the Cloud platform. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And the thing is like, the Cloud platform is net new in the industry. We.. nobody's created a Cloud security platform yet, so we're working hard to create it because we don't want to replicate the mistakes of the past, that were made in enterprise security, in Cloud security. So it's a combination of cultural integration it's a combination of technical integration. The two things we do differently I think, than most people in the industry is look, we have no pride of, you know of innovations. Like, if somebody else has done it, we respect it and we'll acquire it, but we always want to acquire number one or number two in their category. I don't want number three or four. There's three or four for a reason and there still leaves one or two out there to compete with. So we've always acquired one or two, one. And the second thing, which is as important is most of these companies are in the early stage of development. So it's very important for the founding team to be around. So we spend a lot of time making sure they stick around. We actually make our people work for them. My principle is, listen, if they beat us in the open market with all our resources and our people, then they deserve to run this as opposed to us. So most of our new product categories are run by founders of companies required. >> So a little bit of Jack Welch, a little bit of Franks Lubens is a, you know always deference to the founders. But go ahead Lisa. >> Speaking of cultural transformation, you were mentioning your keynote this morning, there's been a significant workforce transformation at Palo Alto Networks. >> Yeah >> Talk a little bit about that, cause that's a big challenge, for many organizations to achieve. Sounds like you've done it pretty well. >> Well you know, my old boss, Eric Schmidt, used to say, 'revenue solves all known problems'. Which kind of, you know, it is a part joking, part true, but you know as Dave mentioned, we've doubled or two and a half time the revenues in the last four and a half years. That allows you to grow, that allows you to increase headcount. So we've gone from four and a half thousand people to 14,000 people. Good news is that's 9,500 people are net new to the company. So you can hire a whole new set of people who have new skills, new capabilities and there's some attrition four and a half thousand, some part of that turns over in four and a half years, so we effectively have 80% net new people, and the people we have, who are there from before, are amazing because they've built a phenomenal firewall business. So it's kind of been right sized across the board. It's very hard to do this if you're not growing. So you got to focus on growing. >> Dave: It's like winning in sports. So speaking of firewalls, I got to ask you does self-driving cars need brakes? So if I got a shout out to my friend Zeus Cararvela so like that's his line about why you need firewalls, right? >> Nikesh: Yes. >> I mean you mentioned it in your keynote today. You said it's the number one question that you get. >> and I don't get it why P industry observers don't go back and say that's, this is ridiculous. The network traffic is doubling or tripling. (clears throat) In fact, I gave an interesting example. We shut down our data centers, as I said, we are all on Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud and then, you know our internal team comes in, we'd want a bigger firewall. I'm like, why do you want a bigger firewall? We shut down our data centers as well. The traffic coming in and out of our campus is doubled. We need a bigger firewall. So you still need a firewall even if you're in the Cloud. >> So I'm going to come back to >> Nikesh: (coughs) >> the M and A strategy. My question is, can you be both best of breed and develop a comprehensive suite number.. part one and part one A of that is do you even have to, because generally sweets win out over best of breed. But what, how do you, how do you respond? >> Well, you know, this is this age old debate and people get trapped in that, I think in my mind, and let me try and expand the analogy which I tried to do up in my keynote. You know, let's assume that Oracle, Microsoft, Dynamics and Salesforce did not exist, okay? And you were running a large company of 50,000 people and your job was to manage the customer process which easier to understand than security. And I said, okay, guess what? I have a quoting system and a lead system but the lead system doesn't talk to my coding system. So I get leads, but I don't know who those customers. And I write codes for a whole new set of customers and I have a customer database. Then when they come as purchase orders, I have a new database with all the customers who've bought something from me, and then when I go get them licensing I have a new database and when I go have customer support, I have a fifth database and there are customers in all five databases. You'll say Nikesh you're crazy, you should have one customer database, otherwise you're never going to be able to make this work. But security is the same problem. >> Dave: Mm I should.. I need consistency in data from suit to nuts. If it's in Cloud, if you're writing code, I need to understand the security flaws before they go into deployment, before they go into production. We for somehow ridiculously have bought security like IT. Now the difference between IT and security is, IT is required to talk to each other, so a Dell server and HP server work very similarly but a Palo Alto firewall and a Checkpoint firewall Fortnight firewall work formally differently. And then how that transitions into endpoints is a whole different ball game. So you need consistency in data, as Lisa was saying earlier, it's a data problem. You need consistency as you traverse to the enterprise. And that's why that's the number one need. Now, when you say best of breed, (coughs) best of breed, if it's fine, if it's a specific problem that you're trying to solve. But if you're trying to make sure that's the data flow that happens, you need both best of breed, you know, technology that stops things and need integration on data. So what we are trying to do is we're trying to give people best to breed solutions in the categories they want because otherwise they won't buy us. But we're also trying to make sure we stitch the data. >> But that definition of best of breed is a little bit of nuance than different in security is what I'm hearing because that consistency >> Nikesh: (coughs) Yes, >> across products. What about across Cloud? You mentioned Google and Amazon. >> Yeah so that's great question. >> Dave: Are you building the security super Cloud, I call it, above the Cloud? >> It's, it's not, it's, less so a super Cloud, It's more like Switzerland and I used to work at Google for 10 years, not a secret. And we used to sell advertising and we decided to go into pub into display ads or publishing, right. Now we had no publishing platform so we had to be good at everybody else's publishing platform >> Dave: Mm >> but we never were able to search ads for everybody else because we only focus on our own platform. So part of it is when the Cloud guys they're busy solving security for their Cloud. Google is not doing anything about Amazon Cloud or Microsoft Cloud, Microsoft's Azure, right? AWS is not doing anything about Google Cloud or Azure. So what we do is we don't have a Cloud. Our job in providing Cloud securities, be Switzerland make sure it works consistently across every Cloud. Now if you try to replicate what we offer Prisma Cloud, by using AWS, Azure and GCP, you'd have to first of all, have three panes of glass for all three of them. But even within them they have four panes of glass for the capabilities we offer. So you could end up with 12 different interfaces to manage a development process, we give you one. Now you tell me which is better. >> Dave: Sounds like a super Cloud to me Lisa (laughing) >> He's big on super Cloud >> Uber Cloud, there you >> Hey I like that, Uber Cloud. Well, so I want to understand Nikesh, what's realistic. You mentioned in your keynote Dave, brought it up that the average organization has 30 to 50 tools, security tools. >> Nikesh: Yes, yes >> On their network. What is realistic for from a consolidation perspective where Palo Alto can come in and say, let me make this consistent and simple for you. >> Well, I'll give you your own example, right? (clears throat) We're probably sub 10 substantively, right? There may be small things here and there we do. But on a substantive protecting the enterprise perspective you be should be down to eight or 10 vendors, and that is not perfect but it's a lot better than 50, >> Lisa: Right? >> because don't forget 50 tools means you have to have capability to understand what those 50 tools are doing. You have to have the capability to upgrade them on a constant basis, learn about their new capabilities. And I just can't imagine why customers have two sets of firewalls right. Now you got to learn both the files on how to deploy both them. That's silly because that's why we need 7 million more people. You need people to understand, so all these tools, who work for companies. If you had less tools, we need less people. >> Do you think, you know I wrote about this as well, that the security industry is anomalous and that the leader has, you know, single digit, low single digit >> Yes >> market shares. Do you think that you can change that? >> Well, you know, when I started that was exactly the observation I had Dave, which you highlighted in your article. We were the largest by revenue, by small margin. And we were one and half percent of the industry. Now we're closer to three, three to four percent and we're still at, you know, like you said, going to be around $7 billion. So I see a path for us to double from here and then double from there, and hopefully as we keep doubling and some point in time, you know, I'd like to get to double digits to start with. >> One of the things that I think has to happen is this has to grow dramatically, the ecosystem. I wonder if you could talk about the ecosystem and your strategy there. >> Well, you know, it's a matter of perspective. I think we have to get more penetrated in our largest customers. So we have, you know, 1800 of the top 2000 customers in the world are Palo Alto customers. But we're not fully penetrated with all our capabilities and the same customers set, so yes the ecosystem needs to grow, but the pandemic has taught us the ecosystem can grow wherever they are without having to come to Vegas. Which I don't think is a bad thing to be honest. So the ecosystem is growing. You are seeing new players come to the ecosystem. Five years ago you didn't see a lot of systems integrators and security. You didn't see security offshoots of telecom companies. You didn't see the Optivs, the WWTs, the (indistinct) of the world (coughs) make a concerted shift towards consolidation or services and all that is happening >> Dave: Mm >> as we speak today in the audience you will find people from Google, Amazon Microsoft are sitting in the audience. People from telecom companies are sitting in the audience. These people weren't there five years ago. So you are seeing >> Dave: Mm >> the ecosystem's adapting. They're, they want to be front and center of solving the customer's problem around security and they want to consolidate capability, they need. They don't want to go work with a hundred vendors because you know, it's like, it's hard. >> And the global system integrators are key. I always say they like to eat at the trough and there's a lot of money in security. >> Yes. >> Dave: (laughs) >> Well speaking of the ecosystem, you had Thomas Curry and Google Cloud CEO in your fireside chat in the keynote. Talk a little bit about how Google Cloud plus Palo Alto Networks, the Zero Trust Partnership and what it's enable customers to achieve. >> Lisa, that's a great question. (clears his throat) Thank you for bringing it up. Look, you know the, one of the most fundamental shifts that is happening is obviously the shift to the Cloud. Now when that shift fully, sort of, takes shape you will realize if your network has changed and you're delivering everything to the Cloud you need to go figure out how to bring the traffic to the Cloud. You don't have to bring it back to your data center you can bring it straight to the Cloud. So in that context, you know we use Google Cloud and Amazon Cloud, to be able to carry our traffic. We're going from a product company to a services company in addition, right? Cuz when we go from firewalls to SASE we're not carrying your traffic. When we carry our traffic, we need to make sure we have underlying capability which is world class. We think GCP and AWS and Azure run some of the biggest and best networks in the world. So our partnership with Google is such that we use their public Cloud, we sit on top of their Cloud, they give us increased enhanced functionality so that our customers SASE traffic gets delivered in priority anywhere in the world. They give us tooling to make sure that there's high reliability. So you know, we partner, they have Beyond Corp which is their version of Zero Trust which allows you to take unmanaged devices with browsers. We have SASE, which allows you to have managed devices. So the combination gives our collective customers the ability for Zero Trust. >> Do you feel like there has to be more collaboration within the ecosystem, the security, you know, landscape even amongst competitors? I mean I think about Google acquires Mandiant. You guys have Unit 42. Should and will, like, Wendy Whitmore and maybe they already are, Kevin Mandia talk more and share more data. If security's a data problem is all this data >> Nikesh: Yeah look I think the industry shares threat data, both in private organizations as well as public and private context, so that's not a problem. You know the challenge with too much collaboration in security is you never know. Like you know, the moment you start sharing your stuff at third parties, you go out of Secure Zone. >> Lisa: Mm >> Our biggest challenge is, you know, I can't trust a third party competitor partner product. I have to treat it with as much suspicion as anything else out there because the only way I can deliver Zero Trust is to not trust anything. So collaboration in Zero Trust are a bit of odds with each other. >> Sounds like another problem you can solve >> (laughs) >> Nikesh last question for you. >> Yes >> Favorite customer or example that you think really articulates the value of what Palo Alto was delivering? >> Look you know, it's a great question, Lisa. I had this seminal conversation with a customer and I explained all those things we were talking about and the customer said to me, great, okay so what do I need to do? I said, fun, you got to trust me because you know, we are on a journey, because in the past, customers have had to take the onus on themselves of integrating everything because they weren't sure a small startup will be independent, be bought by another cybersecurity company or a large cybersecurity company won't get gobbled up and split into pieces by private equity because every one of the cybersecurity companies have had a shelf life. So you know, our aspiration is to be the evergreen cybersecurity company. We will always be around and we will always tackle innovation and be on the front line. So the customer understood what we're doing. Over the last three years we've been working on a transformation journey with them. We're trying to bring them, or we have brought them along the path of Zero Trust and we're trying to work with them to deliver this notion of reducing their meantime to remediate from days to minutes. Now that's an outcome based approach that's a partnership based approach and we'd like, love to have more and more customers of that kind. I think we weren't ready to be honest as a company four and a half years ago, but I think today we're ready. Hence my keynote was called The Perfect Storm. I think we're at the right time in the industry with the right capabilities and the right ecosystem to be able to deliver what the industry needs. >> The perfect storm, partners, customers, investors, employees. Nikesh, it's been such a pleasure having you on theCUBE. Thank you for coming to talk to Dave and me right after your keynote. We appreciate that and we look forward to two days of great coverage from your executives, your customers, and your partners. Thank you. >> Well, thank you for having me, Lisa and Dave and thank you >> Dave: Pleasure >> for what you guys do for our industry. >> Our pleasure. For Nikesh Arora and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live at MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Palo Alto Ignite 22. Stick around Dave and I will be joined by our next guest in just a minute. (cheerful music plays out)

>> From "theCube" Studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data-driven insights from "theCube" and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> As an independent pure play company, Palo Alto Networks has earned its status as the leader in security. You can measure this in a variety of ways. Revenue, market cap, execution, ethos, and most importantly, conversations with customers generally. In CISO specifically, who consistently affirm this position. The company's on track to double its revenues in fiscal year 23 relative to fiscal year 2020. Despite macro headwinds, which are likely to carry through next year, Palo Alto owes its position to a clarity of vision and strong execution on a TAM expansion strategy through acquisitions and integration into its cloud and SaaS offerings. Hello and welcome to this week's "Wikibon Cube Insights" powered by ETR and this breaking analysis and ahead of Palo Alto Ignite the company's user conference, we bring you the next chapter on top of the last week's cybersecurity update. We're going to dig into the ETR data on Palo Alto Networks as we promised and provide a glimpse of what we're going to look for at "Ignite" and posit what Palo Alto needs to do to stay on top of the hill. Now, the challenges for cybersecurity professionals. Dead simple to understand. Solving it, not so much. This is a taxonomic eye test, if you will, from Optiv. It's one of our favorite artifacts to make the point the cybersecurity landscape is a mosaic of stovepipes. Security professionals have to work with dozens of tools many legacy combined with shiny new toys to try and keep up with the relentless pace of innovation catalyzed by the incredibly capable well-funded and motivated adversaries. Cybersecurity is an anomalous market in that the leaders have low single digit market shares. Think about that. Cisco at one point held 60% market share in the networking business and it's still deep into the 40s. Oracle captures around 30% of database market revenue. EMC and storage at its peak had more than 30% of that market. Even Dell's PC market shares, you know, in the mid 20s or even over that from a revenue standpoint. So cybersecurity from a market share standpoint is even more fragmented perhaps than the software industry. Okay, you get the point. So despite its position as the number one player Palo Alto might have maybe three maybe 4% of the total market, depending on what you use as your denominator, but just a tiny slice. So how is it that we can sit here and declare Palo Alto as the undisputed leader? Well, we probably wouldn't go that far. They probably have quite a bit of competition. But this CISO from a recent ETR round table discussion with our friend Eric Bradley, summed up Palo Alto's allure. We thought pretty well. The question was why Palo Alto Networks? Here's the answer. Because of its completeness as a platform, its ability to integrate with its own products or they acquire, integrate then rebrand them as their own. We've looked at other vendors we just didn't think they were as mature and we already had implemented some of the Palo Alto tools like the firewalls and stuff and we thought why not go holistically with the vendor a single throat to choke, if you will, if stuff goes wrong. And I think that was probably the primary driver and familiarity with the tools and the resources that they provided. Now here's another stat from ETR's Eric Bradley. He gave us a glimpse of the January survey that's in the field now. The percent of IT buyers stating that they plan to consolidate redundant vendors, it went from 34% in the October survey and now stands at 44%. So we fo we feel this bodes well for consolidators like Palo Alto networks. And the same is true from Microsoft's kind of good enough approach. It should also be true for CrowdStrike although last quarter we saw softness reported on in their SMB market, whereas interestingly MongoDB actually saw consistent strength from its SMB and its self-serve. So that's something that we're watching very closely. Now, Palo Alto Networks has held up better than most of its peers in the stock market. So let's take a look at that real quick. This chart gives you a sense of how well. It's a one year comparison of Palo Alto with the bug ETF. That's the cyber basket that we like to compare often CrowdStrike, Zscaler, and Okta. Now remember Palo Alto, they didn't run up as much as CrowdStrike, ZS and Okta during the pandemic but you can see it's now down unquote only 9% for the year. Whereas the cyber basket ETF is off 27% roughly in line with the NASDAQ. We're not showing that CrowdStrike down 44%, Zscaler down 61% and Okta off a whopping 72% in the past 12 months. Now as we've indicated, Palo Alto is making a strong case for consolidating point tools and we think it will have a much harder time getting customers to switch off of big platforms like Cisco who's another leader in network security. But based on the fragmentation in the market there's plenty of room to grow in our view. We asked breaking analysis contributor Chip Simington for his take on the technicals of the stock and he said that despite Palo Alto's leadership position it doesn't seem to make much difference these days. It's all about interest rates. And even though this name has performed better than its peers, it looks like the stock wants to keep testing its 52 week lows, but he thinks Palo Alto got oversold during the last big selloff. And the fact that the company's free cash flow is so strong probably keeps it at the one 50 level or above maybe bouncing around there for a while. If it breaks through that under to the downside it's ne next test is at that low of around one 40 level. So thanks for that, Chip. Now having get that out of the way as we said on the previous chart Palo Alto has strong opinions, it's founder and CTO, Nir Zuk, is extremely clear on that point of view. So let's take a look at how Palo Alto got to where it is today and how we think you should think about his future. The company was founded around 18 years ago as a network security company focused on what they called NextGen firewalls. Now, what Palo Alto did was different. They didn't try to stuff a bunch of functionality inside of a hardware box. Rather they layered network security functions on top of its firewalls and delivered value as a service through software running at the time in its own cloud. So pretty obvious today, but forward thinking for the time and now they've moved to a more true cloud native platform and much more activity in the public cloud. In February, 2020, right before the pandemic we reported on the divergence in market values between Palo Alto and Fort Net and we cited some challenges that Palo Alto was happening having transitioning to a cloud native model. And at the time we said we were confident that Palo Alto would make it through the knot hole. And you could see from the previous chart that it has. So the company's architectural approach was to do the heavy lifting in the cloud. And this eliminates the need for customers to deploy sensors on prem or proxies on prem or sandboxes on prem sandboxes, you know for instance are vulnerable to overwhelming attacks. Think about it, if you're a sandbox is on prem you're not going to be updating that every day. No way. You're probably not going to updated even every week or every month. And if the capacity of your sandbox is let's say 20,000 files an hour you know a hacker's just going to turn up the volume, it'll overwhelm you. They'll send a hundred thousand emails attachments into your sandbox and they'll choke you out and then they'll have the run of the house while you're trying to recover. Now the cloud doesn't completely prevent that but what it does, it definitely increases the hacker's cost. So they're going to probably hit some easier targets and that's kind of the objective of security firms. You know, increase the denominator on the ROI. All right, the next thing that Palo Alto did is start acquiring aggressively, I think we counted 17 or 18 acquisitions to expand the TAM beyond network security into endpoint CASB, PaaS security, IaaS security, container security, serverless security, incident response, SD WAN, CICD pipeline security, attack service management, supply chain security. Just recently with the acquisition of Cider Security and Palo Alto by all accounts takes the time to integrate into its cloud and SaaS platform called Prisma. Unlike many acquisitive companies in the past EMC was a really good example where you ended up with a kind of a Franken portfolio. Now all this leads us to believe that Palo Alto wants to be the consolidator and is in a good position to do so. But beyond that, as multi-cloud becomes more prevalent and more of a strategy customers tell us they want a consistent experience across clouds. And is going to be the same by the way with IoT. So of the next wave here. Customers don't want another stove pipe. So we think Palo Alto is in a good position to build what we call the security super cloud that layer above the clouds that brings a common experience for devs and operational teams. So of course the obvious question is this, can Palo Alto networks continue on this path of acquire and integrate and still maintain best of breed status? Can it? Will it? Does it even have to? As Holger Mueller of Constellation Research and I talk about all the time integrated suites seem to always beat best of breed in the long run. We'll come back to that. Now, this next graphic that we're going to show you underscores this question about portfolio. Here's a picture and I don't expect you to digest it all but it's a screen grab of Palo Alto's product and solutions portfolios, network cloud, network security rather, cloud security, Sassy, CNAP, endpoint unit 42 which is their threat intelligence platform and every imaginable security service and solution for customers. Well, maybe not every, I'm sure there's more to come like supply chain with the recent Cider acquisition and maybe more IoT beyond ZingBox and earlier acquisition but we're sure there will be more in the future both organic and inorganic. Okay, let's bring in more of the ETR survey data. For those of you who don't know ETR, they are the number one enterprise data platform surveying thousands of end customers every quarter with additional drill down surveys and customer round tables just an awesome SaaS enabled platform. And here's a view that shows net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis in provision or presence within the ETR data set on the horizontal axis. You see that red dotted line at 40%. Anything at or over that indicates a highly elevated net score. And as you can see Palo Alto is right on that line just under. And I'll give you another glimpse it looks like Palo Alto despite the macro may even just edge up a bit in the next survey based on the glimpse that Eric gave us. Now those colored bars in the bottom right corner they show the breakdown of Palo Alto's net score and underscore the methodology that ETR uses. The lime green is new customer adoptions, that's 7%. The forest green at 38% represents the percent of customers that are spending 6% or more on Palo Alto solutions. The gray is at that 40 or 8% that's flat spending plus or minus 5%. The pinkish at 5% is spending is down on Palo Alto network products by 6% or worse. And the bright red at only 2% is churn or defections. Very low single digit numbers for Palo Alto, that's a real positive. What you do is you subtract the red from the green and you get a net score of 38% which is very good for a company of Palo Alto size. And we'll note this is based on just under 400 responses in the ETR survey that are Palo Alto customers out of around 1300 in the total survey. It's a really good representation of Palo Alto. And you can see the other leading companies like CrowdStrike, Okta, Zscaler, Forte, Cisco they loom large with similar aspirations. Well maybe not so much Okta. They don't necessarily rule want to rule the world. They want to rule identity and of course the ever ubiquitous Microsoft in the upper right. Now drilling deeper into the ETR data, let's look at how Palo Alto has progressed over the last three surveys in terms of market presence in the survey. This view of the data shows provision in the data going back to October, 2021, that's the gray bars. The blue is July 22 and the yellow is the latest survey from October, 2022. Remember, the January survey is currently in the field. Now the leftmost set of data there show size a company. The middle set of data shows the industry for a select number of industries in the right most shows, geographic region. Notice anything, yes, Palo Alto up across the board relative to both this past summer and last fall. So that's pretty impressive. Palo Alto network CEO, Nikesh Aurora, stressed on the last earnings call that the company is seeing somewhat elongated deal approvals and sometimes splitting up size of deals. He's stressed that certain industries like energy, government and financial services continue to spend. But we would expect even a pullback there as companies get more conservative. But the point is that Nikesh talked about how they're hiring more sales pros to work the pipeline because they understand that they have to work harder to pull deals forward 'cause they got to get more approvals and they got to increase the volume that's coming through the pipeline to account for the possibility that certain companies are going to split up the deals, you know, large deals they want to split into to smaller bite size chunks. So they're really going hard after they go to market expansion to account for that. All right, so we're going to wrap by sharing what we expect and what we're going to probe for at Palo Alto Ignite next week, Lisa Martin and I will be hosting "theCube" and here's what we'll be looking for. First, it's a four day event at the MGM with the meat of the program on days two and three. That's day two was the big keynote. That's when we'll start our broadcasting, we're going for two days. Now our understanding is we've never done Palo Alto Ignite before but our understanding it's a pretty technically oriented crowd that's going to be eager to hear what CTO and founder Nir Zuk has to say. And as well CEO Nikesh Aurora and as in addition to longtime friend of "theCube" and current president, BJ Jenkins, he's going to be speaking. Wendy Whitmore runs Unit 42 and is going to be several other high profile Palo Alto execs, as well, Thomas Kurian from Google is a featured speaker. Lee Claridge, who is Palo Alto's, chief product officer we think is going to be giving the audience heavy doses of Prisma Cloud and Cortex enhancements. Now, Cortex, you might remember, came from an acquisition and does threat detection and attack surface management. And we're going to hear a lot about we think about security automation. So we'll be listening for how Cortex has been integrated and what kind of uptake that it's getting. We've done some, you know, modeling in from the ETR. Guys have done some modeling of cortex, you know looks like it's got a lot of upside and through the Palo Alto go to market machine, you know could really pick up momentum. That's something that we'll be probing for. Now, one of the other things that we'll be watching is pricing. We want to talk to customers about their spend optimization, their spending patterns, their vendor consolidation strategies. Look, Palo Alto is a premium offering. It charges for value. It's expensive. So we also want to understand what kind of switching costs are customers willing to absorb and how onerous they are and what's the business case look like? How are they thinking about that business case. We also want to understand and really probe on how will Palo Alto maintain best of breed as it continues to acquire and integrate to expand its TAM and appeal as that one-stop shop. You know, can it do that as we talked about before. And will it do that? There's also an interesting tension going on sort of changing subjects here in security. There's a guy named Edward Hellekey who's been in "theCube" before. He hasn't been in "theCube" in a while but he's a security pro who has educated us on the nuances of protecting data privacy, public policy, how it varies by region and how complicated it is relative to security. Because securities you technically you have to show a chain of custody that proves unequivocally, for example that data has been deleted or scrubbed or that metadata does. It doesn't include any residual private data that violates the laws, the local laws. And the tension is this, you need good data and lots of it to have good security, really the more the better. But government policy is often at odds in a major blocker to sharing data and it's getting more so. So we want to understand this tension and how companies like Palo Alto are dealing with it. Our customers testing public policy in courts we think not quite yet, our government's making exceptions and policies like GDPR that favor security over data privacy. What are the trade-offs there? And finally, one theme of this breaking analysis is what does Palo Alto have to do to stay on top? And we would sum it up with three words. Ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. And we said this at CrowdStrike Falcon in September that the one concern we had was the pace of ecosystem development for CrowdStrike. Is collaboration possible with competitors? Is being adopted aggressively? Is Palo Alto being adopted aggressively by global system integrators? What's the uptake there? What about developers? Look, the hallmark of a cloud company which Palo Alto is a cloud security company is a thriving ecosystem that has entries into and exits from its platform. So we'll be looking at what that ecosystem looks like how vibrant and inclusive it is where the public clouds fit and whether Palo Alto Networks can really become the security super cloud. Okay, that's a wrap stop by next week. If you're in Vegas, say hello to "theCube" team. We have an unbelievable lineup on the program. Now if you're not there, check out our coverage on theCube.net. I want to thank Eric Bradley for sharing a glimpse on short notice of the upcoming survey from ETR and his thoughts. And as always, thanks to Chip Symington for his sharp comments. Want to thank Alex Morrison, who's on production and manages the podcast Ken Schiffman as well in our Boston studio, Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight they help get the word out on social and of course in our newsletters, Rob Hoof, is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who does some awesome editing, thank you to all. Remember all these episodes they're available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, all you got to do is search "Breaking Analysis" podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and silicon angle.com where you can email me at david.valante@siliconangle.com or dm me at D Valante or comment on our LinkedIn post. And please do check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Valante for "theCube" Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week on "Ignite" or next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) (logo swooshing) >> Good morning and welcome back to Dallas, ladies and gentlemen, we are here with theCUBE Live from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how are you doing? Exciting, day two, feeling good? >> Very exciting. Ready to start off the day. >> Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about Ethernet as the fabric for HPC, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. You all seem all in on Ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >> Yeah, I mean, when you look at Ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC, InfiniBand's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial in their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500, what they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at Ethernet, you kind of look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes, that's a perfect fit for Ethernet in that space and those types of jobs. >> I love that. Pete, you want to elaborate? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the biggest things you find with Ethernet for HPC is that, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you've had old technologies like, ATM, Sonic, Fifty, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward Ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as InfiniBand, Omni-Path, that are out there. But basically, they're single source at this point. So what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind Ethernet. And you see that also the fact that Ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise, is used in the cloud data centers, that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia into enterprise, into cloud service providers, it's much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >> So what's the state of the art for Ethernet right now? What's the leading edge? what's shipping now and what's in the near future? You're with Broadcom, you guys designed this stuff. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Savannah: Right. >> Yeah, so leading edge right now, got a couple things-- >> Savannah: We love good stage prop here on the theCUBE. >> Yeah, so this is Tomahawk 4. So this is what is in production, it's shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 terabytes per second. >> David: Okay. >> Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, InfinBand, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25.6 T. So state of the art right now is what we introduced, We announced this in August, This is Tomahawk 5, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth, out of any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, actually, winds up being a factor of six efficiency. >> Savannah: Wow. >> 'Cause if you want, I can go into that, but... >> Why not? >> Well, what I want to know, please tell me that in your labs, you have a poster on the wall that says T five, with some like Terminator kind of character. (all laughs) 'Cause that would be cool. If it's not true, just don't say anything. I'll just... >> Pete: This can actually shift into a terminator. >> Well, so this is from a switching perspective. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what's the latest in terms of, well, the nicks that are going in there, what speed are we talking about today? >> So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. >> David: Okay. >> Moving to a hundred gig PAM-4. >> David: Okay. >> And we do see a lot of nicks in the 200 gig Ethernet port speed. So that would be four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon, 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end node tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig PAM-4. >> Wow. >> Yeah, that's crazy. >> Yeah, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I want to circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen, where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armando, do you want to go? >> Yeah, well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling you it's 50/50 now. So Ethernet is at the level of 50%, InfinBand's at 50%, right? >> Savannah: Interesting. >> Yeah, and so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, hey, we want to see flexibility and choice and, hey, let's look at Ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we their have switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially MPI. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, hey, I've been InfiniBand but now I want to go Ethernet, there's going to be some learning curves there. And so what we want to do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running and they can actually get some value out the cluster. >> Yeah, Pete, talk about that partnership. what does that look like? I mean, are you working with Dell before the T six comes out? Or you just say what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >> No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. Dell's been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group, within Broadcom, we've then gotten very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, Dell can take it and deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again, in both the hardware and the software. >> So I'm fascinated by... I always like to know like what, yeah, exactly. Look, you start talking about the largest supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be two million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores. Exoflap of performance. What are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the increments in terms of how many... And I know it's a depends answer, but how many nodes can you support in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? Or what does that increment of scale look like today? >> Yeah, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. Where we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig Ethernet ports. >> David: Okay. >> So that would be 128, 400 gig E ports connected to one chip. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the nicks, you can have double that. So in a single hop, you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >> Okay, so this T five, that thing right there, (all laughing) inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what's the form factor look like for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have.. What does that look like? >> It tends to be pizza boxes these days. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towardS pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plug into or interfaced to. These days what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the line card. >> David: Okay. >> So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a 2RU, with 64 OSFP ports. And often each of those OSFP, which is an 800 gig E or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig ports. >> So yeah, in 2RU, and this is all air cooled, in 2RU, you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics and they'll actually deploy 4RU, just so that way they have the phase-space density. So they can plug in 128, say QSFP 112. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you want to have DAK connectivity combined with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >> And Armando, Ethernet isn't necessarily Ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. >> Right. >> I think I have a projector at home that's actually using Ethernet physical connections. But, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center Ethernet, or is this RDMA over converged Ethernet? What Are we talking about? >> Yeah, so RDMA, right? So when you look at running, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on Ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on Ethernet. If you look at NPIs officially, built to, hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand but now what you see with Broadcom, with the great work they're doing, now we can make that work on Ethernet and get same performance, so that's huge for customers. >> Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of Ethernet in HPC in terms of AI and ML, where do you think we're going to be next year or 10 years from now? >> You want to go first or you want me to go first? >> I can start, yeah. >> Savannah: Pete feels ready. >> So I mean, what I see, I mean, Ethernet, what we've seen is that as far as on, starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. >> That's impressive. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Nicely done, casual, humble brag there. That was great, I love that. I'm here for you. >> I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of Ethernet, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any of the networking technology. >> David: More who? (all laughing) >> So I see that, that trajectory is going to continue as far as the switches doubling in bandwidth, I think that they're evolving protocols, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on RDMA, for the supercomputing, the AI/ML workloads. But we do see that as you have a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's going to be doubling a bandwidth over time, evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably going to evolve over time depending on the AI/ML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-packed optics. So right now, this chip is, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. >> How many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that-- >> 9,352. >> I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >> Yeah, so right now, all the SERDES, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we actually we have a version of Tomahawk 4 at 25.6 T that has co-packed optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk 5. >> Nice. >> Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. >> Wow. Cool. >> So I see there's the bandwidth, there's radix's increasing, protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >> Okay, You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only going to chase this one, okay? >> Peter: All right. >> So I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. >> Yeah. >> So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that many optical connections? What's the mapping there? What does that look like? >> So what we've announced for Tomahawk 5 is it would have FR4 optics coming out. So you'd actually have 512 fiber pairs coming out. So basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because-- >> It's miraculous, essentially. >> Savannah: I know. >> Yeah. So a lot of people are going to be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus Ethernet, I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running Ethernet moving forward as HPC which sort of just trails slightly behind super computing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI/ML. What are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running Ethernet in that environment? Is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What are the advantages? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that Ethernet has again, is that the data centers, the networks within enterprises, within clouds right now are run on Ethernet. So now, if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology. So I think one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to Ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use Ethernet, it's going to give you the same performance and actually, in some cases, we've seen better performance than we've seen with Omni-Path, better than in InfiniBand. >> That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I want to make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of Ethernet here in HPC? >> Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at, train a model, okay? So when you go and train a model in AI, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially, you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you want to utilize. But if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the CPU. And essentially, if you're going to do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well, guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal, the bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage, maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed, you want faster, faster, faster. >> It's all about making it faster and easier-- for the users. >> Armando: It is. >> I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas, stakes, there's a lot going on with that. >> Making me hungry. >> I know, exactly. I'm sitting out here thinking, man, I did not have big enough breakfast. How did you come up with the name Tomahawk? >> So Tomahawk, I think it just came from a list. So we have a tried end product line. >> Savannah: Ah, yes. >> Which is a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kind of like the bigger and batter missile, so. >> Savannah: Love this. Yeah, I mean-- >> So do you like your engineers? You get to name it. >> Had to ask. >> It's collaborative. >> Okay. >> We want to make sure everyone's in sync with it. >> So just it's not the Aquaman tried. >> Right. >> It's the steak Tomahawk. I think we're good now. >> Now that we've cleared that-- >> Now we've cleared that up. >> Armando, Pete, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of Ethernet and HCP. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to theCUBE live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us. (soft music)

>>You can put this in a conference. >>Good morning and welcome back to Dallas. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here with the cube Live from, from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how you doing? Exciting. Day two. Feeling good. >>Very exciting. Ready to start off the >>Day. Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >>Having us, >>For having us. I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about ethernet as the fabric for hpc, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. Y'all seem all in on ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >>Yeah. I mean, when you look at ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC and you know, infinite band's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial and their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500. What they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at ethernet, you kinda look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes. That's a perfect fit for ethernet and that space and, and those types of jobs. >>I love that. Pete, you wanna elaborate? Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, one of the biggest things you find with internet for HPC is that, you know, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you know, you've had old technologies like, you know, atm, Sonic, fitty, you know, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as, you know, InfiniBand, omnipath that are out there. Yeah. But basically there's single source at this point. So, you know, what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind ethernet. And you see that also, the fact that ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise is using the cloud data centers that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia, you know, into, you know, into enterprise, into cloud service providers is much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >>So, so what's this, what is, what's the state of the art for ethernet right now? What, you know, what's, what's the leading edge, what's shipping now and what and what's in the near future? You, you were with Broadcom, you guys design this stuff. >>Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. So leading edge right now, I got a couple, you know, Wes stage >>Trough here on the cube. Yeah. >>So this is Tomahawk four. So this is what is in production is shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 tets per second. Okay. Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, infin band, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25 point sixt. So state of the art right now is what we introduced. We announced this in August. This is Tomahawk five. So this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth have, you know, any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, it's actually winds up being a factor of six efficiency. Wow. Cause if you want, I can go into that, but why >>Not? Well, I, what I wanna know, please tell me that in your labs you have a poster on the wall that says T five with, with some like Terminator kind of character. Cause that would be cool if it's not true. Don't just don't say anything. I just want, I can actually shift visual >>It into a terminator. So. >>Well, but so what, what are the, what are the, so this is, this is from a switching perspective. Yeah. When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what, what's, what's the latest in terms of, well, the kns that are, that are going in there, what's, what speed are we talking about today? >>So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. Okay. Moving to a hundred gig pan four. Okay. And we do see a lot of Knicks in the 200 gig ethernet port speed. So that would be, you know, four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon. 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end nodes tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig pan four. Wow. >>Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, >>That is, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I wanna circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen. Where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armand, do you wanna go? >>Yeah, yeah. Well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling it's 50 50 now. So ethernet is at the level of 50%. InfiniBand is at 50%. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, Hey, we want to see, you know, flexibility and choice and hey, let's look at ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we have our switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially mpi. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, Hey, I've been in fbe, but now I want to go ethernet, you know, there's gonna be some learning curves there. And so what we wanna do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running, and they can actually get some value out of the cluster. >>Yeah. Peter, what, talk about that partnership. What, what, what does that look like? Is it, is it, I mean, are you, you working with Dell before the, you know, before the T six comes out? Or you just say, you know, what would be cool, what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >>No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. You know, Dell has been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, you know, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group within Broadcom, we've then gotten, you know, very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, you know, Dell can take it and, you know, deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again in both the hardware and the software. >>So, so I, I'm, I'm just, I'm fascinated by, I I, I always like to know kind like what Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Look, you, you start talking about the largest super supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be 2 million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores, yeah. Ex alop of, of, of, of performance. What are the, what are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the, what are the increments in terms of how many, and I know it, I know it's a depends answer, but, but, but how many nodes can you support in a, in a, in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? What does that increment of scale look like today? >>Yeah, so I think, so this is 51.2 terras per second. What we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig ethernet ports. Okay. So that would be 128, you know, 400 giggi ports connected to, to one chip. Okay. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the Nicks, you can have double that. Okay. So, you know, in a single hop you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >>So, okay, so this T five, that thing right there inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what is, what does that, what's the form factor look like for that, for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have, what does that look >>Like? It tends to be pizza boxes these days. Okay. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towards pizza, pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, you know, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plugged into or interface to these days, what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box, and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the, the line card. >>Okay. >>So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a two R U with 64 OSF P ports. And often each of those OSF p, which is an 800 gig e or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig quarts. Okay. So yeah, in two r u you've got, and this is all air cooled, you know, in two re you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics, and they'll actually deploy a four U just so that way they have the face place density, so they can plug in 128, say qsf P one 12. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you wanna have DAK connectivity combined with, with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >>And, and Armando ethernet isn't, ethernet isn't necessarily ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. Right. I think I have a projector at home that's actually using ethernet physical connections. But what, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center ethernet, or, or is this, you know, RDMA over converged ethernet? What, what are >>We talking about? Yeah, so our rdma, right? So when you look at, you know, running, you know, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on ethernet, if you look at NPI is officially, you know, built to, Hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand, but now what you see with Broadcom and the great work they're doing now, we can make that work on ethernet and get, you know, it's same performance. So that's huge for customers. >>Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a, a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of ethernet in hpc in terms of AI and ml. Where, where do you think we're gonna be next year or 10 years from now? >>You wanna go first or you want me to go first? I can start. >>Yeah. Pete feels ready. >>So I mean, what I see, I mean, ethernet, I mean, is what we've seen is that as far as on the starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. That's >>Impressive. >>Yeah. So nicely >>Done, casual, humble brag there. That was great. That was great. I love that. >>I'm here for you. I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of, of Ethan is like, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory, the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any other networking technology >>More who, >>So, you know, I see that, you know, that trajectory is gonna continue as far as the switches, you know, doubling in bandwidth. I think that, you know, they're evolving protocols. You know, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on rdma, you know, for the supercomputing, the a AIML workloads. But we do see that, you know, as you have, you know, a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the, the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's gonna be doubling a bandwidth over time evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably gonna evolve over time depending on the a AIML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-pack optics. So, you know, right now this chip is all, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. How >>Many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that >>352. >>I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >>Yeah. So we get, so right now, you know, all the thirties, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we have this, actually, we have a version of Hawk four at 25 point sixt that has co-pack optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk five Nice. Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. Wow. Cool. So I see, you know, there's, you know, the bandwidth, there's radis increasing protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's, you know, a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So, you know, a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >>Okay. You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only gonna chase this one. Okay. >>All right. >>So I think of, I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. Yeah. So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that in many optical connections? What's, what's, what's the mapping there? What does that, what does that look like? >>So what we've announced for TAMA five is it would have fr four optics coming out. So you'd actually have, you know, 512 fiber pairs coming out. So you'd have, you know, basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the, the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because >>It's, it's miraculous, essentially. It's, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, a lot of people are gonna be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus versus ethernet. I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running ethernet moving forward as, as hpc, you know, which is sort of just trails slightly behind supercomputing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI ml. What, what are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running ethernet in that environment? Is it, is it connecting, is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What, or what, what are the advantages? >>Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that ethernet has again, is that, you know, the data centers, you know, the networks within enterprises within, you know, clouds right now are run on ethernet. So now if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is, you know, the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology, you know, so I think what, you know, one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your, your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the, the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use ethernet, it's gonna give you the same performance. And actually in some cases we seen better performance than we've seen with omnipath than, you know, better than in InfiniBand. >>That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I wanna make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of ethernet here in hpc? >>Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at train a model, okay, so when you go and train a model in ai, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you wanna utilize, but if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the cpu. And essentially, if you're gonna do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal. The bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage. Maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed you want faster, faster, faster. >>It's all about making it faster and easier. It is for, for the users. I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas Stakes, there's a lot going on with with that making >>Me hungry. >>I know exactly. I'm sitting up here thinking, man, I did not have a big enough breakfast. How do you come up with the name Tomahawk? >>So Tomahawk, I think you just came, came from a list. So we had, we have a tri end product line. Ah, a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kinda like, you know, the bigger and batter missile, so, oh, okay. >>Love this. Yeah, I, well, I >>Mean, so you let your engineers, you get to name it >>Had to ask. It's >>Collaborative. Oh good. I wanna make sure everyone's in sync with it. >>So just so we, it's not the Aquaman tried. Right, >>Right. >>The steak Tomahawk. I >>Think we're, we're good now. Now that we've cleared that up. Now we've cleared >>That up. >>Armando P, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of ethernet N hpc. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to the Cube Live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and Supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us.

>>Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change, just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings with >>You. I, I mean, I'll bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah. Well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing, so for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company. There's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language, because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have a really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment and how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office, be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah. Well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, We'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role work, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I, >>You were, were talking, that's >>What we, you were talking before about myths and you know, the, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, People in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance. We looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where >>You work. And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, I think we think, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing? You know, with our folks. So especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders, we've probably been thinking about a decision or a transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, We're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we sent out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on this change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. Culture. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation in post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I notice there's, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model and doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one of the lists is Dell sap. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool. Top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it and how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewee to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important and then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power a positive thinking, do want to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the see you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>That you might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and you know, paying it forward. But, but so it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our CEOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. It's a culture of respect. You know, high performance, high expectations, accountability, having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years, you always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the Cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Ante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>As we said in our analysis of Dell's future, the transformation of Dell into Dell emc and now Dell Technologies has been one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the technology industry. After years of successfully integrated EMC and becoming VMware's number one distribution channel, the metamorphosis of Dell com culminated in the spin out of VMware from Dell and a massive wealth creation milestone pending, of course the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. So where's that leave Dell and what does the future look like for this technology powerhouse? Hello and welcome to the Cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. My name is Dave Ante and I'll be hosting the program today In conjunction with the Dell Tech Summit. We'll hear from four of Dell's senior executives. Tom Sweet is the CFO of Dell Technologies. He's gonna share his views of the company's position and opportunities and answer the question, why is Dell good long term investment? >>Then we'll hear from Jeff Boudreau was the president of Dell's ISG business unit. He's gonna talk about the product angle and specifically how Dell is thinking about solving the multi-cloud challenge. And then Sam Grow Cot is the senior vice president of marketing's gonna come in the program and give us the update on Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering and a new edge platform called Project Frontier. By the way, it's also Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and we're gonna see if Sam has any stories there. And finally, for a company that's nearly 40 years old, Dell has some pretty forward thinking philosophies when it comes to its culture and workforce. And we're gonna speak with Jen Savira, who's Dell's chief Human Resource officer about hybrid work and how Dell is thinking about the future of work. We're gonna geek out all day and talk multi-cloud and edge and latency, but first, let's talk wallet. Tom Sweet cfo, and one of Dell's key business architects. Welcome back to the cube, >>Dave, it's good to see you and good to be back with you. So thanks for having me, Jay. >>Yeah, you bet. Tom. It's been a pretty incredible past 18 months. Not only the pandemic and all that craziness, but the VMware spin, you had to give up your gross margin binky as kidding, and, and of course the macro environment. I'm so sick of talking about the macro, but putting that aside for a moment, what's really remarkable is that for a company at your size, you've had some success at the top line, which I think surprised a lot of people. What are your reflections on the last 18 to 24 months? >>Well, Dave, it's been an incredible, not only last 18 months, but the whole transformation journey. If you think all the way back maybe to the LBO and forward from there, but, you know, stepping into the last 18 months, it's, you know, I, I think I remember talking with you and saying, Hey, you know, this scenario planning we did at the beginning of this pandemic journey was, you know, 30 different scenarios roughly, and none of which sort of panned out the way it actually did, which was a pretty incredible growth story as we think about how we helped customers, you know, drive workforce productivity, enabled their business model during the all remote work environment. That was the pandemic created. And couple that with the, you know, the, the rise then and the infrastructure spin as we got towards the tail end of the, of the pandemic coupled with, you know, the spin out of VMware, which culminated last November, as you know, as we completed that, which unlocked a pathway back to investment grade within unlocked, quite frankly shareholder value, capital allocation frameworks. It's really been a remarkable, you know, 18, 24 months. It's, it's never dull at Dell Technologies. Lemme put it that way. >>Well, well, I was impressed with you, Tom, before the leverage buyout and then what I've seen you guys navigate through is, is, is truly amazing. Well, let's talk about the challenging macro. I mean, I've been through a lot of downturns, but I've never seen anything quite like this with fed tightening and you're combating inflation, you got this recession looming, there's a bear market you got, but you got zero unemployment, you're rising wages, strong dollar, and it's very confusing. But it spending is, you know, it's somewhat softer, but it's still not bad. How are you seeing customers behave? How is Dell responding? >>Yeah, look, if you think about the markets we play in Dave, and we should start there as a grounding, you know, the, the total market, the core market that we think about is roughly 700 and, you know, 50 billion or so. If you think about our core IT services capability, you couple that with some of the, the growth initiatives that we're driving and the adjacent markets that that, that brings in, you're roughly talking a 1.4 to $1.5 trillion market opportunity, total addressable market. And so from from that perspective, we're extraordinarily bullish on where are we in the journey as we continue to grow and expand. You know, we have, we're number one share in just about every category that we plan, but yet when you look at that, you know, number one share in some of these, you know, our highest share position may be, you know, low thirties and maybe in the high end of storage you're at the upper end of thirties or 40%. >>But the opportunity there to continue to expand the core and, and continue to take share and outperform the market is truly extraordinary. So, so you step back and think about that, then you say, okay, what have we seen over the last number of months and quarters? It's been, you know, really great performance through the pandemic as, as you highlighted, we actually had a really strong first half of the year of our fiscal year 23 with revenue up 12% operating income up 12% for the first half. You know, what we talked about as you, if you might recall in our second quarter earnings, was the fact that we were starting to see softness. We had seen it in the consumer PC space, which is not a big area of focus for us in the sense of our, our total revenue stream, but we started to see commercial PC soften and we were starting to see server demand soften a bit and storage demand was, was holding quite frankly. >>And so we gave a a framework around guidance for the rest of the year as a, of what we were seeing. You know, the macro environment as you highlight it continues to be challenging. You know, if you look at inflation rates and the efforts by central banks across the globe to with through interest rate rise to press down and, and constrain growth and push down inflation, you couple that with supply chain challenges that continue principle, particularly in the ISG space. And then you couple that with the Ukraine war and the, and the energy crisis that that's created. And particularly in Europe, it's a pretty dynamic environment. And, but I'm confident, you know, I'm confident in the long term, but I do think that there is, you know, that there's navigation that we're going to have to do over the coming number of quarters, who knows quite how long, you know, to, to make sure the business is properly positioned and, you know, we've got a great portfolio and you're gonna talk to some of the team LA later on as you think your way through some of the solution capabilities we're driving what we're seeing around technology trends. >>So the opportunities there, there's some short term navigation that we're gonna need to do just to make sure that we address some of the, you know, some of the environmental things that we're seeing right >>Now. Yeah. And as a global company, of course you're converting local currencies back to appreciated dollars. That's, that's, that's another headwind. But as you say, I mean, that's math and you're navigating it. And again, I've seen a lot of downturns, but you know, the best companies not only weather the storm, but they invest in ways they that allow them to cut out, come out the other side stronger. So I wanna talk about that longer term opportunity, the relationship between the core, the the business growth. You mentioned the tam, I mean, even as a lower margin business, if, if you can penetrate that big of a tam, you could still throw off a lot of cash and you've got other levers to turn in potentially acquisitions and software. And, but so ultimately what gives you confidence in Dell's future? How should we think about Dell's future? >>Yeah, look, I, I think it comes down to we are extraordinarily excited about the opportunity over the long term digital transformation continues. I I am on numerous customer and CIO calls every week. Customers are continuing to invest in digital transformation and infrastructure to enable their business model. Yes, maybe it's gonna slow or, or pause or maybe they're not gonna invest quite at the same rate over the next number of quarters, but over the long term the needs are there. You look at what we're doing around the, the growth opportunities that we see, not only in our core space where we continue to invest, but also in the, what we call the strategic adjacencies. Things like 5G and modern telecom infrastructure as our, the telecom providers across the globe open up their, what a cl previous been closed ecosystems, you know, to open architecture. You think about, you know, what we're doing around the edge and the distribution now that we're seeing of compute and storage back to the edge given data gravity and latency matters. >>And so we're pretty bullish on the opportunity in front of us, you know, yes, we will and we're continuing to invest and you know, Jeff Boudreau talk about that I think later on in the program. So I'm excited about the opportunities and you look at our cash flow generation capability, you know, we are in, in, in normal times a, a cash flow generation machine and we'll continue to do so, You know, we've got a negative, you know, CCC in terms of, you know, how do we think about efficiency of working capital? And we look at our, you know, our capital allocation strategy, which has now returned, you know, somewhere in near 60% of our free cash flow back to shareholders. And so, you know, there's lots to, lots of reasons to think about why this, you know, we are a great sort of, I think value creation opportunity and a over the long term that the long term trends are with us, and I expect them to continue to be so, >>Yeah, and you guys, you, you, you do what you say you're gonna do. I mean, I said in my, in my other piece that I did recently, I think you guys put 46 billion on the, on the, on the balance sheet in terms of debt. That's down to I think 16 billion in the core, which that's quite remarking and that gives you some other opportunities. Give us your, your closing thoughts. I mean, you kind of just addressed why Dell is a good long term play, but I'll give you an opportunity to bring us home. >>Hey, Dave. Yeah, look, I, I just think if you look at the good, the market opportunity, the size and scale of Dell and how we think about the competitive advantages that we have, we com you know, if you look at, say we're a hundred billion revenue company, which we were a year, you know, last year, that as we reported roughly 60, 65 billion of that in the client, in in PC space, roughly, you know, 35 to 40 billion in the ISG or infrastructure space, those markets are gonna continue the opportunity to grow, share, grow at a premium to the market, drive, cash flow, drive, share gain is clearly there. You couple that with, you know, what we think the opportunity is in these adjacent markets, whether it's telecom, the edge, what we're thinking around data services, data management, you know, we, and you cut, you put that together with the long term trends around, you know, data creation and digital transformation. We are extraordinarily well positioned. We have the largest direct selling organization in in the technology space. We have the largest supply chain, our services footprint, you know, well positioned in my mind to take advantage of the opportunities as we move forward. >>Well Tom, really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Good to see you again. >>Nice seeing you. Thanks Dave. >>All right. You're watching the Cubes exclusive behind the scenes coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. In a moment, I'll be back with Jeff Boudreau. He's the president of Dell's ISG Infrastructure Solutions Group. He's responsible for all the important enterprise business at Dell, and we're excited to get his thoughts, keep it right there. >>Welcome back to the cube's exclusive coverage of the Dell Technology Summit. I'm Dave Ante and we're going inside with Dell execs to extract the signal from the noise. And right now we're gonna dig into customer requirements in a data intensive world and how cross cloud complexities get resolved from a product development perspective and how the ecosystem fits in to that mosaic to close the gaps and accelerate innovation. And with me now as friend of the cube, Jeff Boudreau, he's the president of the Infrastructure Solutions Group, ISG at Dell Technologies. Jeff, always good to see you. Welcome. >>You too. Thank you for having me. It's great to see you and thanks for having me back on the cube. I'm thrilled to be here. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, so let's talk about what you're observing from customers today. You know, we talk all the time about operating in a data driven multi-cloud world, blah, blah, blah, blah. But what does that all mean to you when you have to translate that noise into products that solve specific customer problems, Jeff? >>Sure. Hey, great question. And everything always starts with our customers. There are motivation, they're top of mind, everything we do, my leadership team and I spend a lot of time with our customers. We're listening, we're learning, we're really understanding their pain points, and we wanna get their feedback in regards to our solutions, both turn and future offerings, really ensure that we're aligned to meeting their business objectives. I would say from these conversations, I'd say customers are telling us several things. First, it's all about data for no surprise going back to your opening. And second, it's about the multi-cloud world. And I'd say the big thing coming from all of this is that both of those are driving a ton of complexity for our customers. And I'll unpack that just a bit, which is first the data. As we all know, data is growing at unprecedented rates with more than 90% of the world's data being produced in the last two years alone. >>And you can just think of that in it's everywhere, right? And so as it as the IT world shifts towards distributed compute to support that data growth and that data gravity to really extract more value from that data in real time environments become inherently more and more hybrid and more and more multi-cloud. Which leads me to the second key point that I've been hearing from our customers, which it's a multi-cloud world, not new news. Customers by default have multiple clouds running across multiple locations that's on-prem and off-prem, it's running at the edge and it's serving a variety of different needs. Unfortunately, for most of our CU customers, multi-cloud is actually added to their complexity. As we've discussed. It's been a lot more of multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And if you really think about our customers, I mean, I, I, I've talking to 'EM all the time, you think about the data complexity, that's the growth and the gravity. >>You think about their infrastructure complexity shifting from central to decentralized it, you think about multi-cloud complexity. So you have these walled gardens, if you will. So you have multiple vendors and you have these multiple contracts that all creates operational complexity for their teams around their processes of their tools. And then you think about security complexity that that dries with the, just the increased tax service and the list goes on. So what are we seeing for our customers? They, what they really want from us, and what they're asking us for is simplicity, not complexity. The immediacy, not latency. They're asking for open and aligned versus I'd say siloed and closed. And they're looking for a lot more agility and not rigidity in what we do. So they really wanna simplify everything. They're looking for a simpler IT and a more agile it. And they want more control of their data, right? >>And so, and they want to extract more of the value to enrich their business or their customer engagements, which all sounds pretty obvious and we've probably all heard it a bunch, but it's really hard to achieve. And that's where I believe, and we believe as Dell that we, it creates a big opportunity for us to really help our customers as that great simplifier of it. We're already doing this today on just a couple quick examples. First is Salesforce. We've supported recently, we've supported their global expansion with a multi-cloud solution to help them drive their business growth. Our solution delivered a reliable and consistent IT experience. We go back to that complexity and it was across a very distributed environment, including more than 60 data centers, 230 countries and hundreds of thousands of customers. It really provided Salesforce with the flexibility of placing workloads and data in an environment based on the right service level. >>Objective things like cost complexity or even security compliance considerations. The second customer A is a big New England Patriot fan. And Dan, Dave, I know you are as well. Oh yeah, this one's near, near data to my heart, it's the craft group. We just created a platform to span all the businesses that create more, I'd say data driven, immersive, secure experience, which is allowing them to capture data at the edge and use it for real time insights for things like cyber resiliency, but also like safety of the facilities. And as being a PA fan like I am, did they truly are meeting us where we are in our seats on their mobile devices and also in the parking lot. So just keep that in mind next time you're there. The bottom line, everything we're doing is really to make it simpler for our customers and to help them get the most of their data. I'd say we're gonna do this, is it through a multi-cloud by design approach, which we talked a lot about with you and and others at Dell Tech world earlier this year, >>Right? And we had Salesforce on, actually at Dell Tech group. The craft group is interesting because, you know, when you get to the stadium, you know, everybody's trying to get, get, get out to the internet and, and, but then the experience is so much better if you can actually, you know, deal with that edge. So I wanna talk about complexity though. You got data, you got, you know, the, the edge, you got multiple clouds, you got a different operating model across security model, different. So a lot of times in this industry we solve complexity with more complexity and it's like a bandaid. So I wanna, I wanna talk to, to how you're innovating around simplicity in ISG to address this complexity and what this means for Dell's long term strategy. >>Sure, I'd love to. So first I, I'd like to state the obvious, which are our investments in our innovations really focused on advancing, you know, our, our our customers needs, right? So we are really, our investments are gonna be targeted. We, we believe customers can have the most value. And some of that's gonna be around how we create strategic partnerships as well connected to what we just spoke about. Much of the complexity of customers have or experiencing is in the orchestration and management of all the data in all these different places and customers, you know, they must be able to quickly deploy and operate across cloud environments. They need to increase their developer productivity, really enabling those developers that do what they do best, which is creating more value for their customers than for their businesses. Our innovation efforts are really focused on addressing this by delivering an open and modern IT architecture that allows customers to run and manage any workload in any cloud anywhere. >>Data lives we're focused on, also focused on consumption based solutions, which allow for a greater degree of simplicity and flexibility, which they're really asking for as well. The foundation for this is our software to define common storage layer, that common storage layer. You can think about this Dave, as our ias if you will. It underpins our data access in mobility across all data types and locations. So you can think private, public, telecom, colo, edge, and it's delivered in a secure, holistic, and consistent cloud experience through Apex. We are making a ton of progress to let you just to be, just to be clear, we've made headway in things like Project Alpine, which you're very well aware of. This is our storage as a service. We announce this back in in January, which brings our unique software IP from our flagship storage platform to all the major public clouds. >>Really delivering the best of both worlds, allowing our customers to take advantage of Dell's enterprise class data services and storage software, such as performance at scale, resiliency, efficiency and security. But in addition to that, we're leveraging the breadth of the public cloud services, right? They're on demand scaling capabilities and access to analytical services. So in addition, we're really, we're, we're on our way to win at the edge as well with Project Frontier, which reduces complexity at the edge by creating an open and secure software platform to help our customers simplify their edge operations, optimize their edge environments and investments, secure that edge environment as well. I believe you're gonna be discussing Project Frontier here with Sam Gro Crop, the very near future. So I won't give up too many more details there. And lastly, we're also scaling Apex, which, oh, well, shifting from our vision, really shifting from vision to reality and introducing several new Apex service offerings, which are coming to market over the next month or so. And the intent is really supporting our customers on their as a service transitions by modernize the consumption experience and providing that flexible as a service model. Ultimately, we're trying to help our customers achieve that multi-cloud by design to really simplify it and unlock the power of their data. >>So some good examples there. I I like to talk about the super Cloud as you, you know, you're building on top of the, you know, hyperscale infrastructure and you got Apex is your cloud, the common storage layer, you call it your is. And that's, that's a ingredient in what we call the super cloud out to the edge. You have to have a common platform there and one of the hallmarks of a cloud company. And as you become a cloud company, everybody's a cloud company ecosystem becomes really, really important in terms of product development and, and innovation. Matt Baker always loves to stress it's not a zero zero sum game. And, and I think Super Cloud recognizes that, that there's value to be built on top of other clouds and, and, and of course on top of your infrastructure so that your ecosystem can add value. So what role does the ecosystem play there? >>For me, it's, it's pretty clear. It's, it's, it's critical. I can't say that enough above the having an open ecosystem. Think about everything we just discussed, and I agree with your super cloud analogy. I agree with what Matt Baker had said to you, I would certain no one company can actually address all the pain points and all the issues and challenges our customers are having on their own, not one. I think customers really want and deserve an open technology ecosystem, one that works together. So not these close stacks that discourages interoperability or stifles innovation and productivity of our, of each of our teams. We del I guess have a long history of supporting open ecosystems that really put customers first. And to be clear, we're gonna be at the center of the multi-cloud ecosystem and we're working with partners today to make that a reality. >>I mean, just think of what we're doing with VMware. We continue to build on our first and best alliances with them in August at their VMware explorer, which I know you were at, we announced several joint engineering initiatives to really help customers more easily manage and gain value from their data and their infrastructure. For multi-cloud specifically, we strength our relationship with VMware and with Tansu as part of that. In addition, just a few weeks ago we announced our partnership with Red Hat to simplify our multi-cloud deployments for managing containerized workloads. I'd say, and using your analogy, I could think of that as our multicloud platform. So that's kind of our PAs layer, if you will. And as you're aware, we have a very long standing and strategic partnership with Microsoft and I'd say stay tuned. There's a lot more to come with them and also others in this multicloud space. >>Shifting a bit to some of the growth engines that my team's responsible for the edge, right? As you think about data being everywhere, we've established partnerships for the Edge as well with folks like PTC and Litmus for the manufacturing edge, but also folks like Deep North for the retail edge analytics and data management. Using your Supercloud analogy, Dave the sa, right? This is our Sasa, we've announced that we're collaborating, partnering with folks like Snowflake and, and there's other data management companies as well to really simplify data access and accelerate those data insights. And then given customers choice of where they'd like to have their IT and their infrastructure, we've we're expanding our colo partnerships as well with folks like eex and, and they're allowing us to broaden our availability of Apex, providing customers the flexibility to take advantage of those as a service offerings wherever it's delivered and where they can get the most value. So those are just some you can hear from me. I think it's critical not only for, for us, I think it's critical for our customers. I think it's been critical, critical for the entire, you know, industry as a whole to really have that open technology ecosystem as we work with our customers on our multi-cloud solutions really to meet their needs. We'll continue to collaborate with whoever customers choose and you know, and who they want us to do business with. So I'd say a lot more coming in that space. >>So it's been an interesting three years for you, just, just over three years now since you've been made the president of the IS isg. And so you had to dig in and, and it was obviously a strange time around the world, but, but you really had to look at, okay, how do we modernize the platform? How do we make it, you know, cloud first, You've mentioned the edge, we're expanding. So what are the big takeaways? What do you want customers and our audience to understand? Just some closing thoughts and if you could summarize. >>Sure. So I'd say first, you know, we discussed we're working in a very fast paced, ever-changing market with massive amounts of data that needs to be managed. It's very complex and our customers need help with that complexity. I believe that Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to help as their multicloud champion. No one else can solve the breadth and depth of the challenges like we can. And we're gonna help our customers move forward when they basically moving from a multi-cloud by default, as we've discussed before, to multicloud by design. And I'm really excited for the opportunity to work with our customers to help them expand that ecosystem as they truly realize the future of it and, and what they're trying to accomplish. >>Jeff, thanks so much. Really appreciate your time. Always a pleasure. Go pats and we'll see you on the blog. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right, you're watching exclusive insight insights from Dell Technology Summit on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. >>Hello everyone, this is Dave Lanta and you're watching the Cubes coverage of the Dell Technology Summit 2022 with exclusive behind the scenes interviews featuring Dell executive perspectives. And right now we're gonna explore Apex, which is Dell's as a service offering Dell's multi-cloud and edge strategies and the momentum around those. And we have news around Project Frontier, which is Dell's vision for its edge platform. And there's so much happening here. And don't forget it's cyber security Awareness month. Sam Grot is here, he's the senior vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, always great to see you. How you doing? >>Always great to be here, Dave. >>All right, let's look at cloud. Everybody's talking about cloud Apex, multi-cloud, what's the update? How's it going? Where's the innovation and focal points of the strategy? >>Yeah, yeah. Look Dave, if you think back over the course of this year, you've really heard, heard us pivot as a company and discussing more and more about how multi-cloud is becoming a reality for our customers today. And when we listen and talk with our customers, they really describe multi-cloud challenges and a few key threads. One, the complexity is growing very, very quickly. Two, they're having a harder time controlling how their users are accessing the various different clouds. And then of course, finally the cloud costs are growing unchecked as well. So we, we like to describe this phenomenon as multi-cloud by design. We're essentially, organizations are waking up and seeing cloud sprawl around their organization every day. And this is creating more and more of those challenges. So of course at Dell we've got a strong point of view that you don't need to build multicloud by by default, rather it's multicloud by design where you're very intentional in how you do multicloud. >>And how we deliver multicloud by design is through apex. Apex is our modern cloud and our modern consumption experience. So when you think about the innovation as well, Dave, like we've been on a pretty quick track record here in that, you know, the beginning of this year we introduced brand new Apex backup services that provides that SAS based backup service. We've introduced or announced project outline, which is bringing our storage software, intellectual property from on-prem and putting it and running it natively in the public cloud. We've also introduced new Apex cyber recovery services that is simplifying how customers protect against cyber attacks. They can run an Amazon Azure, aw, I'm sorry, Amazon, aws, Azure or Google. And then, you know, we are really focused on this multi-cloud ecosystem. We announce key partnerships with SaaS providers such as Snowflake, where you can now access our information or our data from on-prem through the Snow Snowflake cloud. >>Or if needed, we can actually move the data to the Snowflake cloud if required. So we're continuing to build out that ecosystem SaaS providers. And then finally I would say, you know, we made a big strategic announcement just recently with Red Hat, where we're not only delivering new Apex container services, but we announce the strategic partnership to build jointly engineered solutions to address hybrid and multi-cloud solutions going forward. You know, VMware is gonna always continue to be a key partner of ours at the la at the recent VMware explorer we announced new Tansu integration. So, So Dave, I, I think in a nutshell we've been innovating at a very, very fast pace. We think there is a better way to do multi-cloud and that's multi-cloud by design. >>Yeah, we heard that at Dell Technologies world. First time I had heard that multi-cloud by design versus sort of default, which is great Alpine, which is sort of our, what we called super cloud in the making. And then of course the ecosystem is critical for any cloud company. VMware of course, you know, top partner, but the Snowflake announcement was very interesting Red Hat. So seeing that expand, now let's go out to the edge. How's it going with the edge expansion? There's gotta be new speaking of ecosystem, the edge is like a whole different, you know, OT type, that's right, ecosystem, that's telcos what and what's this new frontier platform all about? >>Yeah, yeah. So we've talked a lot about cloud and multi clouds, we've talked about private and hybrid cloud, we've talked about public clouds, clouds and cos, telcos, et cetera. There's really been one key piece of our multi-cloud and technology strategy that we haven't spent a lot of time on. And that's the edge. And we do see that as that next frontier for our customers to really gain that competitive advantage that is created from their data and get closer to the point of creation where the data lives. And that's at the edge. We see the edge infrastructure space growing very, very quickly. We see upwards of 300% year of year growth in terms of amount of data being created at the edge. That's almost 3000 exabytes of data by 2026. So just incredible growth. And the edge is not really new for Dell. We've been at it for over 20 years of delivering edge solutions. >>81% of the Fortune 100 companies in the US use Dell solutions today at the Edge. And we are the number one OEM provider of Edge solutions with over 44,000 customers across over 40 industries and things like manufacturing, retail, edge healthcare, and more. So Dave, while we've been at it for a long time, we have such a, a deep understanding of how our customers are using Edge solutions. Say the bottom line is the game has gotta change. With that growth that we talked about, the new use cases that are emerging, we've got to un unlock this new frontier for customers to take advantage of the edge. And that's why we are announcing and revealing Project Frontier. And Project Frontier in its most simplest form, is a software platform that's gonna help customers and organizations really radically simplify their edge deployments by automating their edge operations. You know, with Project Frontier organizations are really gonna be able to manage, OP, and operate their edge infrastructure and applications securely, efficiently and at scale. >>Okay, so it is, first of all, I like the name, it is software, it's a software architecture. So presumably a lot of API capabilities. That's right. Integration's. Is there hardware involved? >>Yeah, so of course you'll run it on Dell infrastructure. We'll be able to do both infrastructure orchestration, orchestration through the platform, but as well as application orchestration. And you know, really there's, there's a handful of key drivers that have been really pushing our customers to take on and look at building a better way to do the edge with Project Frontier. And I think I would just highlight a handful of 'em, you know, freedom of choice. We definitely see this as an open ecosystem out there, even more so at the Edge than any other part of the IT stack. You know, being able to provide that freedom of choice for software applications or I O T frameworks, operational technology or OT for any of their edge use cases, that's really, really important. Another key area that we're helping to solve with Project Frontier is, you know, being able to expect zero trust security across all their edge applications from design to deployment, you know, and of course backed by an end and secure supply chain is really, really important to customers. >>And then getting that greater efficiency and reliability of operations with the centralized management through Project Frontier and Zero Touch deployments. You know, one of the biggest challenges, especially when you get out to the far, far reach of the frontier is really IT resources and being able to have the IT expertise and we built in an enormous amount of automation helps streamline the edge deployments where you might be deploying a single edge solution, which is highly unlikely or hundreds or thousands, which is becoming more and more likely. So Dave, we do think Project Frontier is the right edge platform for customers to build their edge applications on now and certain, excuse me, certainly, and into the future. >>Yeah. Sam, no truck rolls. I like it. And you, you mentioned, you mentioned Zero trust. So we have Mother's Day, we have Father's Day. The kids always ask When's kids' day? And we of course we say every day is kids' day and every day should be cybersecurity awareness day. So, but we have cybersecurity awareness month. What does it mean for Dell? What are you hearing from customers and, and how are you responding? >>Yeah, yeah. No, there isn't a more prevalent pop of mind conversation, whether it's the boardroom or the IT departments or every company is really have been forced to reckon with the cybersecurity and ransom secure issues out there. You know, every decision in IT department makes impacts your security profile. Those decisions can certainly, positively, hopefully impact it, but also can negatively impact it as well. So data security is, is really not a new area of focus for Dell. It's been an area that we've been focused on for a long time, but there are really three core elements to cyber security and data security as we go forward. The first is really setting the foundation of trust is really, really important across any IT system. And having the right supply chain and the right partner to partner with to deliver that is kind of the foundation in step one. >>Second, you need to of course go with technology that is trustworthy. It doesn't mean you are putting it together correctly. It means that you're essentially assembling the right piece parts together. That, that coexist together in the right way. You know, to truly change that landscape of the attackers out there that are gonna potentially create risk for your environment. We are definitely pushing and helping to embrace the zero trust principles and architectures that are out there. So finally, while when you think about security, it certainly is not absolute all correct. Security architectures assume that, you know, there are going to be challenges, there are going to be pain points, but you've gotta be able to plan for recovery. And I think that's the holistic approach that we're taking with Dell. >>Well, and I think too, it's obviously security is a complicated situation now with cloud you've got, you know, shared responsibility models, you've got that a multi-cloud, you've got that across clouds, you're asking developers to do more. So I think the, the key takeaway is as a security pro, I'm looking for my technology partner through their r and d and their, you mentioned supply chain processes to take that off my plate so I can go plug holes elsewhere. Okay, Sam, put a bow on Dell Technology Summit for us and give us your closing thoughts. >>Yeah, look, I I think we're at a transformative point in it. You know, customers are moving more and more quickly to multi-cloud environments. They're looking to consume it in different ways, such as as a service, a lot of customers edge is new and an untapped opportunity for them to get closer to their customers and to their data. And of course there's more and more cyber threats out there every day. You know, our customers when we talk with them, they really want simple, consistent infrastructure options that are built on an open ecosystem that allows them to accomplish their goals quickly and successfully. And look, I think at Dell we've got the right strategy, we've got the right portfolio, we are the trusted partner of choice, help them lead, lead their, their future transformations into the future. So Dave, look, I think it's, it's absolutely one of the most exciting times in it and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. >>Sam, always fun catching up with you. Appreciate your time. >>Thanks Dave. >>All right. A Dell tech world in Vegas this past year, one of the most interesting conversations I personally had was around hybrid work and the future of work and the protocols associated with that and the mindset of, you know, the younger generation. And that conversation was with Jen Savira and we're gonna speak to Jen about this and other people and culture topics. Keep it right there. You're watching the cube's exclusive coverage of Dell Technology Summit 2022. Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the chief human resource officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings >>With you. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, you know, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah, well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company, there's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid in 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experience is. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have it really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it in the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well yeah, but we also want you to know in the office be so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange, new ever changing world? >>Yeah, well I think, look, one approach doesn't fit all. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies isn't necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>You were, so >>That's what we, you were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture. We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data. And that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so I think we think, and, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I I wanted to switch gears a little bit, talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I ask myself, I'm like, what am I missing? I hope, you know, with our folks, so especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on a change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I noticed there's a, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And they doing so have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, they go, Yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition of rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewing, to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster in the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make the say you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but so i, it, it, my, I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs ev, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect, you know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay. You've been watching a special presentation of the cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out s silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Valante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>>Okay, we're back with Jen Vera, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell, and we're gonna discuss people, culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jen, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to, to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change and just a short amount of time, so I'm excited to, to share some of our learnings with >>You. I, I mean, I bet there has, I mean, post pandemic companies, they're trying, everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and, and what it looks like. You know, last May there was really a theme of flexibility, but depending, we talked about, well, millennial or not young old, and it's just really was mixed, but, so how have you approached the topic? What, what are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? You know, what's working, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to over to you? >>Yeah. Well, you know, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before. Hybrid was a thing, so for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a, a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. You know, March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is, we're such a data driven company. There's so many headlines out there, you know, about all these things that people think could happen will happen, but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, How do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language, because we've been doing this for a while. >>We asked them, Do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were, which is great, but we always know there's nuance right behind that macro level. So we, we asked them a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things. We're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data, asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really, you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive and to have a really healthy business. >>Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. So, but, but there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get, you know, promoted. And so I'm curious, you know, and I've, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we, we want you guys to work the way you wanna work. But then they've, I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office, so, so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and, and, and how do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kinda strange new ever changing world? >>Yeah. Well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fiddle. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. You know, they tell us time and time again, one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really wanna meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. >>So, you know, for, for us, it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't, we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid, but just like if you, you know, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, workout with your leader, what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >>I >>Mean, you talking, So that's >>What we do. You were talking before about myths and you know, I wanna talk about team member performance cuz there's a lot of people believe that if, if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, People in the office have the advantage cuz they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? You know, is there some truth to that? What, what do you think about that? >>Well, for us, you know, we look, again, we just looked at the data. So we said we don't wanna create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really wanna have an inclusive culture, We wanna be outcome driven, we're meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment, Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, it doesn't, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >>And it's personal too, I think, I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office cuz the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, I think we think, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to, to, to you Jen and, and folks at Dell is, you know, whatever works for you, we're we're gonna, we're gonna support. So I, I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and, and very specifically empathic leadership has been said to be, have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study. It was like two thirds the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I, I asked myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing? You know, with our folks. So especially as it relates to, to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >>I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the the value that you bring to the company, then you're not gonna get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting, strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years, and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward, empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible, that you and confident that you can take us forward, but also that, you know, and understand me as a human being. >>And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about is leaders. We've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point, because we've been talking about it for so long, we send out the email, we have the all hands and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is honest change curve where I am. Let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along the journey. >>You know, Jen, in the spirit of myth busting, I mean I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is gonna have a hard time, harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation post isolation economy as they, they could pre covid. But you know, I notice there's, there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes. And, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you know, you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top hundred, But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model. And in doing so, have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who worked for them. >>Number one on the list is Dell sap. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there, certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists like go, yeah, okay, that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in, in, in an industry where there's only two in the top is, is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations, you know, how'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in, in this new world? >>Well thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but you know, it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a, a culture and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really b been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices, that whole ecosystem from recognition rewards to performance evaluation, to interviewee to development. We build it into everything. So it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not, you know, fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that, in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you, if you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, you know, the most special thing about Dell is our culture and our people. And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >>Don't you think too that repetition and, well first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is, is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah, it's not just a poster on the wall, but I remember like, you know, when we're kids, your parents tell you, okay, power positive thinking, do one to others as others, you know, you have others do it to you. Don't make this, you're gonna do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were, >>They might have had a, values >>Were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and, you know, paying it forward. But, but, so I guess my, my point is, and it's kind of a point observation, but I'll turn it into a question, is isn't isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >>I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time and as an HR professional, you know, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture, it's our business leaders, it's our ceo, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and, and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're gonna get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed in, into everything that we do. And I think it's, it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done cuz that's not how things really, really work >>Well. And it's a culture of respect. You know, high performance, high expectations, accountability at having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years. You'd always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time Jen. Again, congratulations on being number one. >>Thank you so much. >>You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of the Cube inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand@thecube.net and you can check out silicon angle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of breaking analysis. This is Dave Ante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.

>> From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Is the glass half full or half empty? Well, it depends on how you want to look at it. CIOs are tapping the breaks on spending, that's clear. The latest macro survey data from ETR quantifies what we already know to be true, that IT spend is decelerating. CIOs and IT buyers forecast that their tech spend will grow by 5.5% this year. That's a meaningful deceleration from near year end 2021 expectations. But these levels are still well above historical norms. So while the feel good factor may be in some jeopardy, overall things are pretty good, at least for now. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we update you in the latest macro tech spending data from Enterprise Technology Research, including strategies that organizations are employing to cut costs, and which project categories continue to see the most traction. Now, CIOs were much more optimistic at the end of last year than they are today. Back then they thought their aggregates spend would increase by more than 8%. Of course, at that time the expectation was that the economy was ready to make a semi ordered return to normal, and that didn't happen as you well know. And you can see here the expectation for spending this year is down to 5.5% growth, as we said, and this is based on the most recent ETR CIO and IT buyer survey, which includes more than 1100 responses. So we started the year above 8% then made a meaningful decline into the mid sixes and nine months into the year, we're now in the mid fives, but this is still two to 300 basis points above historical norms for IT spending. And looking ahead to next year, CIOs are expecting accelerated growth edging back up toward that 6% level. Now as noted here, the visibility on this is probably less clear than pre COVID years of course, but the bottom line is digital transformations are continuing to push it spending above historical levels. Now the problem as we know, is earning estimates are coming down and forecasts are being lowered every day. I mean, as the saying goes the first disappointment is rarely the last. Even the semiconductor industry is seeing softness. Just this past week we saw AMD lower its quarterly revenue forecast by more than a billion dollars, as PC demand in the second half has significantly softened. But again, that's relative to some pretty amazing PC growth in the past couple of years thanks to the isolation economy. So we do see CIOs tapping the brakes, and these data points here tell an interesting story. ETR asked respondents about various actions that they're taking and these two stood out. The top line is, "We're accelerating new IT projects," and the bottom line is, "We're freezing IT projects," and you can see the convergence of those two lines, which of course signals the down. But again, these are not alarming data points. If you think about history. If you go back to Q1 2020, for example, just before the pandemic, that top line that was at 12% versus where it is today at 25%. And if you look at project freezes, they were at 22% in Q1 of 2020, which is significantly higher than today. So relatively speaking the spending dynamic is still strong. It just doesn't feel that way because we're coming out of an historic anomaly. Now, ETR asked a follow up question to respondents that indicated that spending would be down this quarter relative to the same quarter last year. So they wanted to better understand the most common actions that organizations would take to save money, and that's what this chart shows. The most common approach is still to consolidate redundant vendors across the lines of business. That was over 30%, as you can see here in the first set of bars. So presumably CIOs now have the latitude to go after so-called shadow projects, shadow IT, and implement standards across the organization via vendor consolidation. As well, there's a big jump in the survey from 14% to 20% of respondents saying that they were going after the Cloud bill, and that relates to the fourth set of bars which is scrutinizing consumption based services. So combined, 45% of respondents are looking at reducing their on demand spend. Now, some of that may be SaaS related, but most of the SaaS spend is committed, so pre-committed, but we do see organizations doing more audits and trying to eliminate or reduce orphaned licenses. Now the last data point that we want to focus on is the technology sectors that are of the highest priority. You can see here on the set of bars on the left while cybersecurity remains the top technology area, even this sector is showing a little bit of softness. What's really notable is the uptick in data related areas, that second set of bars, this category is now the second most cited, taking over from Cloud, which as you can see, remain strong, and of course Cloud continues to be a key component of digital transformations. As we've previously reported, machine learning, AI, and RPA are somewhat more strategic and more discretionary, and they've dropped below the 40% mark in terms of net score in the overall survey. We're not showing that data here, but we covered this in our last Breaking Analysis ahead of our UI path event. Now you have to remember these are the top seven sectors, and there are dozens in the ETR taxonomy, so making this list is goodness from a spending perspective. So even though there's some softness in most of these categories, these are the ones CIOs are most focused on addressing. So the big takeaways of this data are spending targets are coming down to the mid 5% range, but this is meaningfully higher than historical norms. And while CIOs, they are pumping the brakes on projects, they're still moving forward at rates faster than pre COVID levels and they're freezing fewer projects. Remember, this as well, this could be a skill shortage in play, but the slowdown is more likely related to the economic uncertainty. You know, we're seeing the two-sided coin of pay by the drink consumption models, right? You can dial it up as as you need to but you can also dial it down, and that's one of the alluring features of on demand. And we're seeing firms give more scrutiny to the Cloud bill, why wouldn't they? And there's a bit of unsurprising backlash to the flaws in today's SaaS pricing model that locks you in for specified terms. So people, when their term comes up are really going to scrutinize whether or not they have orphan licenses and try to reduce those. And it appears that the real savings can come from eliminating redundant vendors. That seems to be the biggest, you know, number one strategy, and that could favor some of the larger firms, think Oracle, Dell, Salesforce ServiceNow, IBM, HPE, Cisco, and others, you know, they may benefit from having more of larger footprint across the organization. You know, having that one throat to choke, you know one back to pat, as some like to say, but they could benefit those larger companies in least in the near term. Now having said that, we do see an uptick in data related areas as a priority for CIOs, and that could mean companies like Snowflake are in a strong position and can continue to thrive. You know, even though as we reported a couple of weeks ago, virtually all companies and sectors in the ETR data set are showing some softness related to spending a momentum from previous quarters. ETR will have its... will release its results next week and then we'll dig into the specific vendor action relative to previous quarters. So look, it feels like a meaningful slowdown but the sky is by no means falling. There are these kind of out of our control factors like interest rates, and Ukraine, and oil supply, and wages, et cetera, that are creating this uncertainty and causing firms to be more cautious. But generally we remain optimistic as leading tech companies are pretty well managed and have a lot of runway on the balance sheets, and can adjust costs to reflect the uncertain environment and remain flexible in their business models in doing so. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson who's on production and he also manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. Ken Schiffman is also out of our Boston studio as well. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters, and Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at Silicon Angle who posts our Breaking Analysis and does some great editing. So thank you to all. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen all you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante, or feel free to comment on our LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave for the theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (relaxing music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back with Jenn Saavedra, who's the Chief Human Resource Officer of Dell and we're going to discuss people culture and hybrid work and leadership in the post isolation economy. Jenn, the conversations that we had at Dell Tech World this past May around the new work environment were some of the most interesting and engaging that I had personally. So I'm really eager to get the update. It's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. There's been a lot of change in just a short amount of time. So I'm excited to share some of our learnings with you. >> I mean, I bet there has, I mean post pandemic companies, they're trying everybody's trying to figure out the return to work and what it looks like. Last May there was really a theme of flexibility but depending, and we talked about, well, millennial or not, young, old, and it's just really was mixed. So how have you approached the topic? What are your policies? What's changed since we last talked? What's working, what's still being worked? What would you recommend to other companies to... Over to you. >> Yeah, well, this isn't a topic that's necessarily new to Dell technology. So we've been doing hybrid before hybrid was a thing. So for over a decade we've been doing what we called connected workplace. So we have kind of a history and we have some great learnings from that. Although things did change for the entire world. In March of 2020, we went from kind of this hybrid to everybody being remote for a while. But what we wanted to do is we're such a data-driven company. There's so many headlines out there, about all these things that people think could happen will happen but there wasn't a lot of data behind it. So we took a step back and we asked our team members, how do you think we're doing? And we asked very kind of strong language because we've been doing this for a while, we asked them, do you think we're leading in the world of hybrid? And 86% of our team members said that we were which is great, but we always know there's nuance behind that macro level. So we asked 'em a lot of different questions and we just went on this kind of myth busting journey and we decided to test some of those things we're hearing about Culture Willow Road or new team members will have trouble being connected or millennials will be different. And we really just collected a lot of data asked our team members what their experiences. And what we have found is really you don't have to be together in the office all the time to have a strong culture, a sense of connection, to be productive, and to have a really healthy business. >> Well, I like that you were data driven around it with the data business here. But there is a lot of debate around your culture and how it suffers in a hybrid environment, how remote workers won't get promoted. And so I'm curious, and I've seen some like-minded companies like Dell say, Hey, we want you guys to work the way you want to work. But then I've seen them adjust and say, Well, yeah, but we also want you to know in the office week so we can collaborate a little bit more. So what are you seeing at Dell and do you maintain that cultural advantage that you're alluding to in this kind of strange new ever changing world? >> Yeah, well, I think, look, one approach doesn't fiddle. So I don't think that the approach that works for Dell Technologies is necessarily the approach that works for every company. It works with our strategy and culture. It is really important that we listen to our team members and that we support them through this journey. They tell us time and time again one of the most special things about our culture is that we provide flexibility and choice. So we're not a mandate culture. We really want to make sure that our team members know that we want them to be their best and do their best. And not every individual role has the same requirements. Not every individual person has the same needs. And so we really want to meet them where they are so that they can be productive. They feel connected to the team and to the company and engaged and inspired. So, for us it really does make sense to go forward with this. And so we haven't taken a step back. We've been doing hybrid, we'll continue to do hybrid. But just like if you, we talk about not being a mandate. I think the companies that say nobody will come in or you have to come in three days a week, all of that feels more limiting. And so what we really say is, work out with your team, work out with your role, work out with your leader what really makes the most sense to drive things forward. >> I mean, you talk- >> So that's what we do. >> You were talking before about myths and I want talk about team member performance 'cause there's, a lot of people believe that if you're not in the office, you have disadvantages, people in the office have the advantage 'cause they get FaceTime. Is is that a myth? Is there some truth to that? What do you think about that? >> Well, for us, we look, again we just looked at the data. So we said we don't want to create a have and have not culture that you're talking about. We really want to have an inclusive culture, we want to be outcome-driven. We're a meritocracy. But we went and we looked at the data. So pre pandemic, we looked at things like performance, we looked at rewards and recognition, we looked at attrition rates, we looked at sentiment. Do you feel like your leader is inspiring? And we found no meaningful differences in any of that or in engagement between those who worked fully remote, fully in the office or some combination between. So our data would bust that myth and say, you don't have to be in an office and be seen to get ahead. We have equitable opportunity. Now, having said that, you always have to be watching that data and that's something that we'll continue to do and make sure that we are creating equal opportunity regardless of where you work. >> And it's personal too, I think I think some people can be really productive at home. I happen to be one that I'm way more productive in the office 'cause the dogs aren't barking. I have less distractions. And so, yeah, and I think the takeaway that in just in talking to you Jenn and folks at Dell is, whatever works for you we're going to support. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about leadership and very specifically, empathic leadership has been said to have a big impact on attracting talent, retaining talent, but it's hard to have empathy sometimes. And I know I saw some stats in a recent Dell study, it was like two thirds of the people felt like their organization underestimates the people requirements. And I asked myself, I'm like, Hmm, what am I missing with our folks? So especially as it relates to transformation programs. So how can human resource practitioners support business leaders generally, specifically as it relates to leading with empathy? >> I think empathy's always been important. You have to develop trust. You can have the best strategy in the world, right? But if you don't feel like your leader understands who you are, appreciates the value that you bring to the company then you're not going to get very far. So I think empathetic leadership has always been part of the foundation of a trusting strong relationship between a leader and a team member. But if I think we look back on the last two years and I imagine it'll be even more so as we go forward. Empathetic leadership will be even more important. There's so much going on in the world, politically, socially, economically, that taking that time to say you want your team members to see you as credible and confident that you can take us forward, but also that you know and understand me as a human being. And that to me is really what it's about. And I think with regard to transformation that you brought up, I think one of the things we forget about as leaders we've probably been thinking about a decision or transformation for months or weeks and we're ready to go execute, we're ready to go operationalize that thing. And so sometimes when we get to that point because we've been talking about it for so long we send out the email, we have the all hands, and we just say we're ready to go. But our team members haven't always been on that journey for those months that we have. And so I think that empathetic moment to say, Okay, not everybody is on this change curve where I am, let's take a pause, let me put myself in their shoes and really think about how we bring everybody along the journey. >> Jenn, in the spirit of myth busting I mean, I'm one of those people who felt like that a business is going to have a harder time fostering this culture of collaboration and innovation in post isolation economy as they could pre-COVID. But I notice there's an announcement today that came across my desk, I think it's from Newsweek. Yes, and it's the list of top hundred companies recognized for employee motivation, satisfaction. And it was really interesting because you always see, oh, we're the top 10 or the top 100. But this says as a survey of 1.4 million employees from companies ranging from 50 to 10,000 employees. And it recognizes the companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the center of their business model, and in doing so, have earned the loyalty and respect of the people who work for them. Number one on the list is Dell, SAP. So congratulations. SAP was number two. I mean, there really isn't any other tech company on there certainly no large tech companies on there. So I always see these lists, I go, Yeah, okay that's cool, top a hundred, whatever. But top one in an industry where there's only two in the top is pretty impressive. And how does that relate to fostering my earlier skepticism of a culture of collaboration? So first of all, congratulations. How'd you do it? And how are you succeeding in this new world? >> Well, thanks. It does feel great to be number one, but it doesn't happen by accident. And I think while most companies have a culture, and a spouse values, we have ours called the culture code. But it's really been very important to us that it's not just a poster on the wall or words on paper. And so we embed our culture code into all of our HR practices that whole ecosystem, from recognition rewards, to performance evaluation, to interviewee, to development. We build it into everything so it really reflects who we are and you experience it every day. And then to make sure that we're not fooling ourselves, we ask all of our employees, do you feel like the behaviors you see and the experience you have every day reflects the culture code? And 94% of our team members say that in fact it does. So I think that that's really been kind of the secret to our success. If you listen to Michael Dell, he'll always say, "The most special thing about Dell "is our culture and our people." And that comes through being very thoughtful and deliberate to preserve and protect and continue to focus on our culture. >> I don't you think too that repetition and, well, first of all, belief in that cultural philosophy is important. And then kind of repeating, like you said, Yeah it's not just a poster on the wall. But I remember like, when we're kids your parents tell you, okay, power of positive thinking, do unto others as you have others do it to you. You're going to do some dumb things but don't do the same dumb things twice and you sort of fluff it up. But then as you mature you say, Wow, actually those were- >> They might have had a point, right? >> Values were instilled in me and now I'm bringing them forward and paying it forward. But I guess my point is, and it's kind of a point observation but I'll turn it into a question. Isn't consistency and belief in your values really, really important? >> I couldn't agree with you more, right? I think that's one of those things that we talk about it all the time. And as an HR professional, it's not the HR people just talking about our culture. It's our business leaders, it's our CEO, it's our COOs, it's our partners. We share our culture code with our partners and our vendors and our suppliers and everybody, this is important. We say when you interact with anybody at Dell Technologies, you should expect that this is the experience that you're going to get. And so it is something that we talk about that we embed into everything that we do. And I think it's really important that you don't just think it's a one and done 'cause that's not how things really work. >> Well, and it's a culture of respect, high performance, high expectations, accountability, having followed the company and worked with the company for many, many years, you always respect the dignity of your partners and your people. So really appreciate your time, Jenn. Again, congratulations on being number one. >> Thank you so much. >> You're very welcome. Okay, you've been watching a special presentation of theCUBE inside Dell Technology Summit 2022. Remember, these episodes are all available on demand at thecube.net and you can check out siliconangle.com for all the news and analysis. And don't forget to check out wikibon.com each week for a new episode of Breaking Analysis. This is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hey, welcome back everyone. Through the cubes coverage of VMware Explorer, 22, I'm John Fett, Dave ante, formerly world, our 12th year extracting the signal from the noise. A lot of great guests. It's very vibrant right here. The floor's great. The expo halls booming, the keynotes went great. We just had a keynote announce. So our next first guest here on day one is car Capor C co-founder and COO min IO. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for joining us. >>Thank you for having >>Me. You're also angel investor of variety of companies of Q alumnis and been in the valley for a long time. Thanks for coming on sharing. What's going on. So, first of all, obviously VMware still on the wave. They've always been relevant and they've always been part of it. Yes. But as that's changing a lot's going on security data's big conversation. Yeah. And now with their multi-cloud we call super cloud. But their multi-cloud it's it's about hyperscaler participation. Yes. Yes. Cloud universal. Yes. It's clear that VMware has to be successful in every cloud. Okay. And that's really important. And storage is one of it. You guys do that? So talk about how you guys relate with min IO, the vision, how that connects with what's happening here. >>Yeah. So like you already said, right? Most of the enterprises are become data enterprises in itself and storage is a foundation layer of how, and you do need a system that is simple, scalable, and high perform it at scale. Right? So that's where min IO fits into the picture. And we are software defined, open source. So, you know, like VMware has traditionally been focused on enterprise it, but that world is fast changing. They are making a move in terms, developer first approach and min IO, because it's open source. It's simple enough to start, get, start deploying object storage and cloud native applications on top. So that's where we come in. We have around 1.3 million DACA downloads a day. So we own the developer market overall. And that is where I feel the partnership with VMware as they are coming into multi-cloud on their own min IO is a foundational layer. >>So just to elaborate on it, whenever you talk about multi-cloud, there are two pieces to it. One is the compute side and one is on the storage side. So compute Kubernetes takes care of the compute sites. Once you containerize an application, you can deploy it any cloud, but the data has gravity and all the clouds that you see AWS, your Google cloud, they're inherently incompatible with each other. So you need a consistent storage layer with industry standard APIs that you can just deploy it around with your application without a single line of code change. So that's what we >>Do. Oh, so you got a great value proposition, love the story. So just kind of connect on something. So we heard the keynote today. We gotta win the developers. They didn't say that, but they said, they said that they have the ops lockdown, but DevOps is now the new developer. Yes. We've been covering a lot of the poop coupon as you know, and shifting left everyone's in the C I C D pipeline. So developers are driving all the action and it has to be self-service. Absolutely. It has to be high velocity. Can't be slow. Yes. Gotta be fast. So that sounds like you're winning that piece. >>Yes. Yes. And I think more than that, what is most important is it needs to be simple. It needs to get your job done in a very simple and efficient way. And I think that is very important to the developers overall. They don't like complex appliances or complex piece of software. They just want to get their job done and move on the next thing in order to build their application and deploy it successfully. So whatever you do, it needs to be very simple. And of course, you know, it needs to be feature rich and high performant and whatnot that comes with the, with the flow in itself. But I think simplicity is what wins, the developers, hearts and minds overall. >>So object storage always been simple, get put right. Pretty simple, you know, paradigm. Yes. But it was sort of the backwater before, you know, Amazon, you know, launched. Yes. You know, it's cloud. How have you seen object evolve? You mentioned performance. So I presume yes. Yes. You're not just for cheap and deep you're for cheap bin performance. So you could describe that a little bit if you would, >>For, for sure. Like you mentioned, right. When AWS was launched, S3 was the foundation layer. They launched S3 first and then came everything else around it. So object storage is the foundation of any cloud that you go with. And over a period of time, when we started the company back in 20 end of 2014, beginning 2015, it was all about cheap and deep storage. You know, you just get, put it into one basket, but over years, if you see, because the scale of data has increased quite a bit, new applications have emerged as well. That require high performance. That is where we partnered very closely with Intel early on. And I have to give it to them. Intel was the one who convinced us that you need to do high performance. You need to optimize your software with all the AVX five, 12 instruction set and so on. >>So we partnered very closely with them and we were the first one to come up with, you know, you need high performance, object storage and that in collaboration with Intel. So that's something that we take a lot of pride in, in terms of being the leader in that direction of bringing high performance object storage to the market, especially for big data workloads, AI ML, workloads, they're all object first, like even, you know, new age applications like snowflake and data bricks, they are not built on sand or file system. Right. They're all built on object storage rates. So that's where the, you need >>Performance. And I think the, I think the data bricks, snowflake examples. Good. And then you mentioned in 2014, when you started yes. At that time, big data was Hudu and you know, data, legs, data swamp. Yes. Yes. But the ones that were successful, the ones who optimize had the right bets, like you guys. Yeah. Now we're in an era. Okay. I gotta deploy this. So you got great downloads and update from developers. Now we see ops struggling to keep up yes. With the velocity of the development cycle. Yes. And with DevOps driving the cloud native yeah. Security data ops becomes important. Okay. Exactly. Security and data. A lot with storage going on there. Yes. How do you guys see that emerging? Cuz that becomes a lot of the conversations now in the architecture of the ops teams. I want to be supportive in enablement of dev. Yes. Yes. Do you guys target that world too? Or >>Yeah, we, we do target that. So the good thing about object storage is that if you look at the architecture in itself, it's very granular in terms of the controls that it can give to the end user. Right? So you can really customize in terms of, you know, what objects need to be accessible to whom what kind of policies you need to implement on the bucket level, what kind of access controls and provisions that you need to do. And especially like with ransomware attacks and what not, you can enable immutability and so on, so forth. So that's an important part of it. Especially I think the ransomware threats have increased quite a bit, especially with, you know, the macro, you know, situation with war and stuff. So we see that come up quite a bit. And that's where I think, you know, the data IU immutability, the data governance and compliance becomes extremely, extremely important for organizations. So we, we are partnering very closely with a lot of big organizations just for this use case itself. >>So how's it work if I want to build some kind of multi-cloud whatever X, right. Okay. I, I can use S three APIs or Azure blah. Okay. And I, and are all different. Yes. But if I want to use min IO, what's the experience like describe how I go about doing >>So if you've had any experience working with AWS, you don't need to even change a single line of code with us. You can just bring your applications directly onto min IO and it just behaves and act same way transparently what you would've experienced in AWS. Now you can just lift and shift that application and deploy it wherever you need it to be. Whether it is Azure, blah, whether it is Google cloud or even on edge. Like what we are seeing is that data is getting generated outside of public cloud. And most of the data that, you know, the emerging trend is that we see that data gets generated on edge quite a bit, whether it is autonomous cars, whether it is IOT, manufacturing units and so on. And you cannot push all that data back in the central cloud, it's extremely expensive for bandwidth and latency reasons. >>So you need to have an environment that looks and feels exactly what you have experienced at the central cloud on the edge itself. So a lot of our use cases are also getting deployed with Mani on the edge itself, whether it is on top of VMware because of the footprint of that VMware has within all these organizations itself. So we see that emerging quite a bit as well. And then you can tier the data off to any cloud, whether it is mid IO cloud, whether it is AWS, Azure, Google cloud, and so on. So you can have like a true multi-cloud environment. >>So you would follow VMware to the edge and be the object store there, or not necessarily if it's not VMware Kubernetes or whatever. >>Exactly. Exactly. Depending on the skill set that the organization has within, within their setup, if their DevOps savvy Kubernetes is becomes a very natural choice. If they are traditional enterprise, it, VMware is an ideal choice. So yeah. >>So you're seeing a lot of edge action you're saying, and we, >>We, we have seen starting it increasing yes. And >>Are customers. So they're persisting data at the edge. Yes. Yes they >>Are. Okay. >>It's not just the femoral and >>No, they are not because what the cost of putting all the data through bandwidth is extremely expansive to push all the data in central cloud and then process it and then store it. So we see that the data gets persisted on edge cloud as well in terms of processing and only the data that you need for, for the processing through whatever application systems that you, whether it is snowflake or data, bricks and whatnot, you know, you choose what applications from compute side, you want to bring on top of storage. And that can just seamlessly and transparently work. Yeah. >>Maria, you were saying that multi-cloud yeah. Games around Kubernetes. You, yes. That Kubernetes is all about multi-cloud that's the game. >>Yes. >>Yes. Can you explain what you mean by that? Why is multi-cloud a Kubernetes game? >>So multi-cloud has two foundations to it. One is the compute side. Another one is the storage side. Compute Kubernetes makes it extremely simple to deploy any application that is containerized. Once you containerize an application, it's no longer tied to the underlying infrastructure. You can actually deploy it no matter where you go. So Kubernetes makes that task extremely easy. And from storage standpoint, you know, the state of applications need to be held somewhere. You know, it's it, people say it's cloud, but it's computer somewhere. Right? So >>Exactly it's the >>Container. It needs, it needs to be stored somewhere. So that's where, you know, storage systems like man IO come into play where you can just take the storage and deploy it wherever you go. So it gets tightly bound with application itself, just like Kubernetes is for compute. Mano is for storage. >>I saw Scott Johnson, the CEO of Docker in Palo Alto last week did yeah. The spring to his step. So to speak Dockers doing pretty well as a result, they got, you know, starting to see certifications. Yes. So people are really rallying around containers in a more open way. Yes. But that's open source, but it's the Kubernetes, that's the action. Absolutely. That the container's really there now Docker's got a great business. Yes. Right now going yes. With how they're handling. I thought they did a great job. Yeah. But the Docker's now lingua Franco, right? Yes. That's the standard. It >>Is. It is. And I think where Kubernetes really makes it easy is in terms of when the scale is involved. Right. If there are, if the scale is small, it's okay. You can, you can work around it. But Kubernetes makes it extremely simple. If you have the right Kubernetes skill, I just need to put a disclaimer around there because not lot of people are Kubernetes expert, at least not yet. So if you have the expertise, Kubernetes makes the task extremely simple, predictable and automate and automated scale. I think that is what is >>The, so take me through a use case, cuz I've talked to a lot of enterprises, multiple versions, we're lifting and shifting to the cloud, that's kind of the, you know, get started, get your feet wet. Yes. Then there's like, okay, now we're refactoring really doing some native development and they're like, we don't have a staff on Kubernetes. We do a managed service. Yeah. So how does, how do you see that evolution piece taking place? Cause that's a critical adoption component as they start figuring out their Kubernetes relationship yes. To compute yes. How they roll it out. Yes. How do you see that playing out as a big part of this growth for a customer? >>Yeah. So we see a mix, you know, we see organizations that are born within cloud. Like they have just been in mono cloud like AWS. Now they are thinking about two things, right. With the economy being, you know, and the state that it is, they're getting hurt on the margin. Some of the SaaS companies that were born in cloud. So they are now actively thinking in terms of what mode they can do to bring the cost down. So they are partnering with min IO either to, you know, be in a colocation at Equinix, like data centers or go to other clouds to optimize for the compute modes and so on. So that's one thing that we see increasingly amongst enterprise. Second thing that we see is that because you know of that whole multi-cloud and cloud does go down, it's not like it, you know, and it's been evident over the last year or so that, you know, we've seen instances where Amazon was down or Google cloud was down. So they want to make sure that the data is available across the clouds in a consistent way. So with man IO, with the active, active application and so on, you can make the data available across the cloud. So your applications, even if one cloud is down for Dr. Purposes and so on, you can, you know, transparently, move the applications to another cloud and make sure that your business is not affected. So from business continuity reasons as well, the customers are partnering with us. So like I said, it's a mix. >>So the Tansu, you know, 1.3, the application development platform that we heard in the keynotes this morning, critical, you have to have that for cross cloud services. If you don't have a consistent experience, absolutely forget it. I mean it's table stake. Absolutely. But there's a lot of chatter on Twitter. A lot of skepticism that VMware can appeal to developers, some folk John as well chimed in saying, well, you know, it's, don't forget about the op side of the equation as well. They need security and consistency. Yes. What are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of VMware, specifically their customers and, and what do you, what do you, how do you rate their chances in terms of them being able to track the developer crowd, your, your peeps? >>Yeah. So VMware has a very strong hold on enterprise. It, you know, you have to give it to them. I don't come across any organization that does not have VMware, you know, for, with 500,000 customers. Right. Right. So they have done something really right for themselves. And if you have such a strong hold on the customers, it's not that hard to make the transition over to the developer mindset as well. And that is where with VMware partnership with partners like us, they can make, make that jump happen. So we partnered with them very closely for the data persistence layer and they wanted to bring Kubernetes the VMware tan natively to the VSAN interface itself. So we partnered with them, you know, we were their design partner and in, I think, 2020 or something, and we were their launch partner for that platform service. So now through the vCenter itself, you can provision object storage as a service for the developers. So I think they are working in terms of bridging the gap and they have the right mindset. It's all about execution like this. Right. >>They gotta get it >>Justed >>And it's the execution and timing. Exactly. And if they overshoot and the, it shifts over here, you know, this comes up a lot in our conversations. I want to get your reaction to this because I think that's a really great point. You guys are a nice foundational element. Yes. For VMware that plugs into them. That makes everything kind of float for them. Yes. Now we would, we were comparing OpenStack back in the day, how that had so much promise. Yes it did. If you remember, and storage was a big part of that conversation. It, it did. But the one thing that a lot of people didn't factor in on those industry discussions was Amazon was just ramping. Yes. So assuming that the hyper scales aren't stopping, innovating. Yeah. How does the multi-cloud fit with the constant struggles? Cuz abs is not rah multi-cloud cause they're there for the cloud, but customers are using Azure for yeah. Say office productivity teams or whatever, and then they have apps over here and then I'll see on private, private. Right. So hybrids there we get hybrid. Yeah. The clouds aren't changing. Yes. How does that change the dynamics in the market? Because it's a moving train. Some say, >>You know, it is, I would not characterize it like that because you know, AWS strength is that it is AWS, but also that it is not outside of AWS. Right. So it comes with the strengths and weaknesses and same goes for Azure. And same goes for Google cloud where VMware strength lies is the enterprise customers that it has. And I think if they can bridge the gap between the developers, enterprise customers and also the cloud, I think they have a really fair shot at, you know, making sure that the organizations and enterprise have the right experiences in terms of, you know, everyone needs to innovate. There is just no nothing that you can just sit back and relax. Everyone needs to innovate. And I think the good part about VMware is the partnership ecosystem that they have developed over the years and also making sure that their partners are successful along with them. And I think that is, that is going to be a key determining factor in terms of how well and how fast they can execute because nobody can do it alone in, in the enterprise world. So I think that that would be the >>Key, well, gua you're a great guest. Thanks for coming on and sharing you for having perspective on the cube. And obviously you've been on a, this from day 1, 20 15. Yes. I mean that's early and you guys made some great moves. Thank you. In a great position with VMware. Thank you. I like how you're the connective tissue and bridge to developers without a lot of disruption. Right? Real enablement. I think the question is can the VMware customers get there? So congratulations. No, thank you. And we got a couple minutes left. Take a minute to explain what's going on with the company that you co-founded, the team what's going on. Any updates funding very well, well funded. Yeah. How many people do you have? What's new. Are you gonna hire where take a minute to give the plug, give the commercial real quick >>For sure. So we started in 24 15, so it has been like seven, eight years now that we are at it. And I think we've been just very focused with the S3 compatible object storage, being AWS S3 for rest of the world. Like we get characterized at and over the years we've been like now we, we are used 60% in fortune 500 companies in some shape or format. So in terms of the scale and growth, we couldn't be more happier. We are about to touch a billion dollar billion Docker downloads in September. So that's something that we, we are very excited about. And in terms of the funding, we closed the, our series B sometime I think end of December last year and it's a billion dollar valuation and we have great partners in Intel capital and Dell ventures and soft bank. So we couldn't be in a more happier >>Spot. You're a unicorn soon to be decor. Right. >>What's next? Yes. I think, I think what is exciting for us is that the market, we could not be more happier with how the market is coming together with our vision, what we saw in 2015 and how everything is coming together nicely with, from the, the organization, realizing that multi-cloud is the core foundation and strategy of whatever they do next and lot has been accelerated due to COVID as well. Yeah. So in those terms, I think from market and product alignment, we just couldn't be more happier. >>Yeah. We think multi-cloud hybrids here. Steady state multi-cloud is gonna be a reality. Yeah. It becomes super cloud with the new dynamics. And again, David and I were talking last night, storage, networking, compute never goes away, never goes the operating. System's still gonna be out there. Just gonna be looked different and that >>Differently. Yes. I mean, yeah. And like, you know, in 10 years from now, Kubernetes might or might not be there as the foundation for, you know, compute, but storage is something that is always going to be there. People still need to persist the data. People still need a performance data store. People still need something that can scale to hundreds and hundreds of petabytes. So we are here. You bet against data >>As indie gross head once, you know, let chaos rain, rain in the chaos. There you go. Chaos cloud is gonna be simplified. Yeah. That's what innovation looks like. That's, >>That's what it is. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Appreciate thank you for having me more coverage here. I'm John furrier with Dave Alane. Thanks for watching. More coverage. Three days just getting started. We'll be right back.

>>Hello. Welcome back to our super cloud 22 event. I'm John F host the cue with my co-host Dave ante. Extracting the signal from noise. We're proud to have two amazing cube alumnis here. We got Sanja Putin. Who's now the CEO of cohesive the emo Aaron who's the CTO. Co-founder also former CEO Cub alumni. The father of hyper-converged welcome back to the cube I endorsed the >>Cloud. Absolutely. Is the father. Great >>To see you guys. Thank thanks for coming on and perfect timing. The new job taking over that. The helm Mo it at cohesive big news, but part of super cloud, we wanna dig into it. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having >>Us here. So first of all, we'll get into super before we get into the Supercloud. I want to just get the thoughts on the move Sanjay. We've been following your career since 2010. You've been a cube alumni from that point, we followed that your career. Why cohesive? Why now? >>Yeah, John David, thank you first and all for having us here, and it's great to be at your event. You know, when I left VMware last year, I took some time off just really primarily. I hadn't had a sabbatical in probably 18 years. I joined two boards, Phillips and sneak, and then, you know, started just invest and help entrepreneurs. Most of them were, you know, Indian Americans like me who were had great tech, were looking for the kind of go to market connections. And it was just a wonderful year to just de to unwind a bit. And along the, the way came CEO calls. And I'd asked myself, the question is the tech the best in the industry? Could you see value creation that was signi significant and you know, three, four months ago, Mohit and Carl Eschenbach and a few of the board members of cohesive called me and walk me through Mo's decision, which he'll talk about in a second. And we spent the last few months getting to know him, and he's everything you describe. He's not just the father of hyperconverge. And he wrote the Google file system, wicked smart, built a tech platform better than that second time. But we had to really kind of walk through the chemistry between us, which we did in long walks in, in, you know, discrete places so that people wouldn't find us in a Starbucks and start gossiping. So >>Why Sanjay? There you go. >>Actually, I should say it's a combination of two different decisions. The first one was to, for me to take a different role and I run the company as a CEO for, for nine years. And, you know, as a, as a technologist, I always like, you know, going deep into technology at the same time, the CEO duties require a lot of breadth, right? You're talking to customers, you're talking to partners, you're doing so much. And with the way we've been growing the with, you know, we've been fortunate, it was becoming hard to balance both. It's really also not fair to the company. Yeah. So I opted to do the depth job, you know, be the visionary, be the technologist. And that was the first decision to bring a CEO, a great CEO from outside. >>And I saw your video on the site. You said it was your decision. Yes. Go ahead. I have to ask you, cuz this is a real big transition for founders and you know, I have founder artists cuz everyone, you know, calls me that. But being the founder of a company, it's always hard to let go. I mean nine years as CEO, it's not like you had a, you had a great run. So this was it timing for you? Was it, was it a structural shift, like at super cloud, we're talking about a major shift that's happening right now in the industry. Was it a balance issue? Was it more if you wanted to get back in and in the tech >>Look, I, I also wanna answer, you know, why Sanja, but, but I'll address your question first. I always put the company first what's right for the company. Is it for me to start get stuck the co seat and try to juggle this depth and Brad simultaneously. I mean, I can stroke my ego a little bit there, but it's not good for the company. What's best for the company. You know, I'm a technologist. How about I oversee the technology part in partnership with so many great people I have in the company and I bring someone kick ass to be the CEO. And so then that was the second decision. Why Sanja when Sanjay, you know, is a very well known figure. He's managed billions of dollars of business in VMware. You know, been there, done that has, you know, some of the biggest, you know, people in the industry on his speed dial, you know, we were really fortunate to have someone like that, come in and accept the role of the CEO of cohesive. I think we can take the company to new Heights and I'm looking forward to my partnership with, with Sanja on this. >>It it's we, we called it the splash brothers and >>The, >>In the vernacular. It doesn't matter who gets the ball, whether it's step clay, we shoot. And I think if you look at some of the great partnerships, whether it was gates bomber, there, plenty of history of this, where a founder and a someone who was, it has to be complimentary skills. If I was a technologist myself and wanted to code we'd clash. Yeah. But I think this was really a match me in heaven because he, he can, I want him to keep innovating and building the best platform for today in the future. And our customers tell one customer told me, this is the best tech they've seen since VMware, 20 years ago, AWS, 10 years ago. And most recently this was a global 100 big customers. So I feel like this combination, now we have to show that it works. It's, you know, it's been three, four months. My getting to know him, you know, I'm day eight on the job, but I'm loving it. >>Well, it's a sluman model too. It's more modern example. You saw, he did it with Fred Ludy at service now. Yes. And, and of course at, at snowflake, yeah. And his book, you read his book. I dunno if you've read his book, amp it up, but app it up. And he says, I always you'll love this. Give great deference to the founder. Always show great respect. Right. And for good reason. So >>In fact, I mean you could talk to him, you actually met to >>Frank. I actually, you know, a month or so back, I actually had dinner with him in his ranch in Moana. And I posed the question. There was a number of CEOs that went there and I posed him the question. So Frank, you know, many of us, we grow being deaf guys, you know? And eventually when we take on the home of our CEO, we have to do breadth. How do you do it? And he's like, well, let me tell you, I was never a death guy. I'm a breath guy. >>I'm like, >>That's my answer. Yeah. >>So, so I >>Want the short story. So the day I got the job, I, I got a text from Frank and I said, what's your advice the first time CEO, three words, amp it up, >>Amp it up. Right? Yeah. >>And so you're always on brand, man. >>So you're an amazing operator. You've proven that time and time again at SAP, VMware, et cetera, you feel like now you, you, you wanna do both of those skills. You got the board and you got the operations cuz you look, you know, look at sloop when he's got Scarelli wherever he goes, he brings Scarelli with him as sort of the operator. How, how do you, how are you thinking >>About that? I mean it's early days, but yeah. Yeah. Small. I mean I've, you know, when I was, you know, it was 35,000 people at VMware, 80, 90,000 people at SAP, a really good run. The SAP run was 10 to 20 billion innovative products, especially in analytics and VMware six to 12 end user computing cloud. So I learned a lot. I think the company, you know, being about 2000 employees plus not to mayor tomorrow, but over the course next year I can meet everybody. Right? So first off the executive team, 10 of us, we're, we're building more and more cohesiveness if I could use that word between us, which is great, the next, you know, layers of VPs and every manager, I think that's possible. So I I'm a people person and a customer person. So I think when you take that sort of extroverted mindset, we'll bring energy to the workforce to, to retain the best and then recruit the best. >>And you know, even just the week we, we were announced that this announcement happened. Our website traffic went through the roof, the highest it's ever been, lots of resumes coming in. So, and then lots of customer engagement. So I think we'll take this, but I, I feel very good about the possibilities, because see, for me, I didn't wanna walk into the company to a company where the technology risk was high. Okay. I feel like that I can go to bed at night and the technology risk is low. This guy's gonna run a machine at the current and the future. And I'm hearing that from customers. Now, what I gotta do is get the, the amp it up part on the go to market. I know a little thing or too about >>That. You've got that down. I think the partnership is really key here. And again, nine use the CEO and then Sanja points to our super cloud trend that we've been looking at, which is there's another wave happening. There's a structural change in real time happening now, cloud one was done. We saw that transition, AWS cloud native now cloud native with an kind of operating system kind of vibe going on with on-premise hybrid edge. People say multi-cloud, but we're looking at this as an opportunity for companies like cohesive to go to the next level. So I gotta ask you guys, what do you see as structural change right now in the industry? That's disruptive. People are using cloud and scale and data to refactor their business models, change modern cases with cloud native. How are you guys looking at this next structural change that's happening right now? Yeah, >>I'll take that. So, so I'll start by saying that. Number one, data is the new oil and number two data is exploding, right? Every year data just grows like crazy managing data is becoming harder and harder. You mentioned some of those, right? There's so many cloud options available. Cloud one different vendors have different clouds. There is still on-prem there's edge infrastructure. And the number one problem that happens is our data is getting fragmented all over the place and managing so many fragments of data is getting harder and harder even within a cloud or within on-prem or within edge data is fragmented. Right? Number two, I think the hackers out there have realized that, you know, to make money, it's no longer necessary to Rob banks. They can actually see steal the data. So ransomware attacks on the rise it's become a boardroom level discussion. They say there's a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds or so. Right? So protecting your data has become very important security data. Security has become very important. Compliance is important, right? So people are looking for data management solutions, the next gen data management platform that can really provide all this stuff. And that's what cohesive is about. >>What's the difference between data management and backup. Explain that >>Backup is just an entry point. That's one use case. I wanna draw an analogy. Let's draw an analogy to my former company, Google right? Google started by doing Google search, but is Google really just a search engine. They've built a platform that can do multiple things. You know, they might have started with search, but then they went down to roll out Google maps and Gmail and YouTube and so many other things on that platform. So similarly backups might be just the first use case, but it's really about that platform on which you can do more with the data that's next gen data management. >>But, but you am, I correct. You don't consider yourself a security company. One of your competitors is actually pivoting and in positioning themselves as a security company, I've always felt like data management, backup and recovery data protection is an adjacency to security, but those two worlds are coming together. How do you see >>It? Yeah. The way I see it is that security is part of data management. You start maybe by backing with data, but then you secure it and then you do more with that data. If you're only doing security, then you're just securing the data. You, you gotta do more with the data. So data management is much bigger. So >>It's a security is a subset of data. I mean, there you go. Big TA Sanjay. >>Well, I mean I've, and I, I, I I'd agree. And I actually, we don't get into that debate. You know, I've told the company, listen, we'll figure that out. Cuz who cares about the positioning at the bottom? My email, I say we are data management and data security company. Okay. Now what's the best word that describes three nouns, which I think we're gonna do management security and analytics. Okay. He showed me a beautiful diagram, went to his home in the course of one of these, you know, discrete conversations. And this was, I mean, he's done this before. Many, if you watch on YouTube, he showed me a picture of an ice big iceberg. And he said, listen, you know, if you look at companies like snowflake and data bricks, they're doing the management security and mostly analytics of data. That's the top of the iceberg, the stuff you see. >>But a lot of the stuff that's get backed archive is the bottom of the iceberg that you don't see. And you try to, if you try to ask a question on age data, the it guy will say, get a ticket. I'll come back with three days. I'll UNIV the data rehydrate and then you'll put it into a database. And you can think now imagine that you could do live searches analytics on, on age data that's analytics. So I think the management, the security, the analytics of, you know, if you wanna call it secondary data or backed up data or data, that's not hot and live warm, colder is a huge opportunity. Now, what do you wanna call one phrase that describes all of it. Do you call that superpower management security? Okay, whatever you wanna call it. I view it as saying, listen, let's build a platform. >>Some people call Google, a search company. People, some people call Google and information company and we just have to go and pursue every CIO and every CSO that has a management and a security and do course analytics problem. And that's what we're doing. And when I talk to the, you know, I didn't talk to all the 3000 customers, but the biggest customers and I was doing diligence. They're like this thing has got enormous potential. Okay. And we just have to now go focus, get every fortune 1000 company to pick us because this problem, even the first use case you talk back up is a little bit like, you know, razor blades and soap you've needed. You needed it 30 years ago and you'll need it for 30 years. It's just that the tools that were built in the last generation that were companies formed in 1990s, one of them I worked for years ago are aids are not built for the cloud. So I think this is a tremendous opportunity where many of those, those, those nos management security analytics will become part of what we do. And we'll come up with the right phrase for what the companies and do course >>Sanjay. So ma and Sanja. So given that given that's this Google transition, I like that example search was a data problem. They got sequenced to a broader market opportunity. What super cloud we trying to tease out is what does that change over from a data standpoint, cuz now the operating environments change has become more complex and the enterprises are savvy. Developers are savvy. Now they want, they want SAS solutions. They want freemium and expanding. They're gonna drive the operations agenda with DevOps. So what is the complexity that needs to be abstracted away? How do you see that moment? Because this is what people are talking about. They're saying security's built in, driven by developers. Developers are driving operations behavior. So what is the shift? Where do you guys see this new? Yeah. Expansive for cohesive. How do you fit into super cloud? >>So let me build up from that entry point. Maybe back up to what you're saying is the super cloud, right? Let me draw that journey. So let's say the legacy players are just doing backups. How, how sad is it that you have one silo sitting there just for peace of mind as an insurance policy and you do nothing with the data. If you have to do something with the data, you have to build another silo, you have to build another copy. You have to manage it separately. Right. So clearly that's a little bit brain damaged. Right. So, okay. So now you take a little bit of, you know, newer vendors who may take that backup platform and do a little bit more with that. Maybe they provide security, but your problem still remains. How do you do more with the data? How do you do some analytics? >>Like he's saying, right. How do you test development on that? How do you migrate the data to the cloud? How do you manage it? The data at scale? How do you do you provide a unified experience across, across multiple cloud, which you're calling the super cloud. That's where cohesive goes. So what we do, we provide a platform, right? We have tentacles in on-prem in each of the clouds. And on top of that, it looks like one platform that you manage. We have a single control plane, a UI. If you may, a single pin of glass, if, if you may, that our customers can use to manage all of it. And now it looks, starts looking like one platform. You mentioned Google, do you, when you go to, you know, kind Google search or a URL, do you really care? What happens behind the scenes mean behind the scenes? Google's built a platform that spans the whole world. No, >>But it's interesting. What's behind the scenes. It's a beautiful now. And I would say, listen, one other thing to pull on Dave, on the security part, I saw a lot of vendors this day in this space, white washing a security message on top of backup. Okay. And CSO, see through that, they'll offer warranties and guarantees or whatever, have you of X million dollars with a lot of caveats, which will never paid because it's like escape clause here. We won't pay it. Yeah. And, and what people really want is a scalable solution that works. And you know, we can match every warranty that's easy. And what I heard was this was the most scalable solution at scale. And that's why you have to approach this with a Google type mindset. I love the fact that every time you listen to sun pitch, I would, what, what I like about him, the most common word to use is scale. >>We do things at scale. So I found that him and AUR and some of the early Google people who come into the company had thought about scale. And, and even me it's like day eight. I found even the non-tech pieces of it. The processes that, you know, these guys are built for simple things in some cases were better than some of the things I saw are bigger companies I'd been used to. So we just have to continue, you know, building a scale platform with the enterprise. And then our cloud product is gonna be the simple solution for the masses. And my view of the world is there's 5,000 big companies and 5 million small companies we'll push the 5 million small companies as the cloud. Okay. Amazon's an investor in the company. AWS is a big partner. We'll talk about I'm sure knowing John's interest in that area, but that's a cloud play and that's gonna go to the cloud really fast. You not build you're in the marketplace, you're in the marketplace. I mean, maybe talk about the history of the Amazon relationship investing and all that. >>Yeah, absolutely. So in two years back late 2020, we, you know, in collaboration with AWS who also by the way is an investor now. And in cohesive, we rolled out what we call data management as a service. It's our SaaS service where we run our software in the cloud. And literally all customers have to do is just go there and sign on, right? They don't have to manage any infrastructure and stuff. What's nice is they can then combine that with, you know, software that they might have bought from cohesive. And it still looks like one platform. So what I'm trying to say is that they get a choice of the, of the way they wanna consume our software. They can consume it as a SAS service in the cloud. They can buy our software, manage it themselves, offload it to a partner on premises or what have you. But it still looks like that one platform, what you're calling a Supercloud >>Yeah. And developers are saying, they want the bag of Legos to compose their solutions. That's the Nirvana they want to get there. So that's, it has to look the same. >>Well, what is it? What we're calling a Superlo can we, can we test that for a second? So data management and service could span AWS and on-prem with the identical experience. So I guess I would call that a Supercloud I presume it's not gonna through AWS span multiple clouds, but, but >>Why not? >>Well, well interesting cuz we had this, I mean, so, okay. So we could in the future, it doesn't today. Well, >>David enough kind of pause for a second. Everything that we do there, if we do it will be customer driven. So there might be some customers I'll give you one Walmart that may want to store the data in a non AWS cloud risk cuz they're competitors. Right. So, but the control plane could still be in, in, in the way we built it, but the data might be stored somewhere else. >>What about, what about a on-prem customer? Who says, Hey, I, I like cohesive. I've now got multiple clouds. I want the identical experience across clouds. Yeah. Okay. So, so can you do that today? How do you do that today? Can we talk >>About that? Yeah. So basically think roughly about the split between the data plane and the control plane, the data plane is, you know, our cohesive clusters that could be sitting on premises that could be sitting in multiple data centers or you can run an instance of that cluster in the cloud, whichever cloud you choose. Right. That's what he was referring to as the data plane. So collectively all these clusters from the data plane, right? They stored the data, but it can all be managed using the control plane. So you still get that single image, the single experience across all clouds. And by the way, the, the, the, the cloud vendor does actually benefit because here's a customer. He mentioned a customer that may not wanna go to AWS, but when they get the data plane on a different cloud, whether it's Azure, whether it's the Google cloud, they then get data management services. Maybe they're able to replicate the data over to AWS. So AWS also gains. >>And your deployment model is you instantiate the cohesive stack on each of the regions and clouds, is that correct? And you building essentially, >>It all happens behind the scenes. That's right. You know, just like Google probably has their tentacles all over the world. We will instantiate and then make it all look like one platform. >>I mean, you should really think it's like a human body, right? The control planes, the head. Okay. And that controls everything. The data plane is large because it's a lot of the data, right? It's the rest of the body, that data plane could be wherever you want it to be. Traditionally, the part the old days was tape. Then you got disk. Now you got multiple clouds. So that's the way we think about it. And there on that piece of it will be neutral, right? We should be multi-cloud to the data plane being every single place. Cause it's customer demand. Where do you want your store data? Air gapped. On-prem no problem. We'll work with Dell. Okay. You wanna be in a particular cloud, AWS we'll work then optimized with S3 and glacier. So this is where I think the, the path to a multi-cloud or Supercloud is to be customer driven, but the control plane sits in Amazon. So >>We're blessed to have a number of, you know, technical geniuses in here. So earlier we were speaking to Ben wa deja VI, and what they do is different. They don't instantiate an individual, you know, regions. What they do is of a single global. Is there a, is there an advantage of doing it the way the cohesive does it in terms of simplicity or how do you see that? Is that a future direction for you from a technology standpoint? What are the trade offs there? >>So you want to be where the data is when you said single global, I take it that they run somewhere and the data has to go there. And in this day age, correct >>Said that. He said, you gotta move that in this >>Day and >>Age query that's, you know, across regions, look >>In this day and age with the way the data is growing, the way it is, it's hard to move around the data. It's much easier to move around the competition. And in these instances, what have you, so let the data be where it is and you manage it right there. >>So that's the advantage of instantiating in multiple regions. As you don't have to move the >>Data cost, we have the philosophy we call it. Let's bring the, the computation to the data rather than the data to >>The competition and the same security model, same governance model, same. How do you, how do you federate that? >>So it's all based on policies. You know, this overarching platform controlled by, by the control plane, you just, our customers just put in the policies and then the underlying nuts and bolts just take care >>Of, you know, it's when I first heard and start, I started watching some of his old videos, ACE really like hyperconverged brought to secondary storage. In fact, he said, oh yeah, that's great. You got it. Because I first called this idea, hyperconverged secondary storage, because the idea of him inventing hyperconverge was bringing compute to storage. It had never been done. I mean, you had the kind of big VC stuff, but these guys were the first to bring that hyperconverge at, at Nutanix. So I think this is that same idea of bringing computer storage, but now applied not to the warm data, but to the rest of the data, including a >>Lot of, what about developers? What's, what's your relationship with developers? >>Maybe you talk about the marketplace and everything >>He's yeah. And I'm, I'm curious as to do you have a PAs layer, what we call super PAs layer to create an identical developer experience across your Supercloud. I'm gonna my >>Term. So we want our customers not just to benefit from the software that we write. We also want them to benefit from, you know, software that's written by developers by third party people and so on and so forth. So we also support a marketplace on the platform where you can download apps from third party developers and run them on this platform. There's a, a number of successful apps. There's one, you know, look like I said, our entry point might be backups, but even when backups, we don't do everything. Look, for instance, we don't backup mainframes. There is a, a company we partner with, you know, and their software can run in our marketplace. And it's actually used by many, many of our financial customers. So our customers don't get, just get the benefit of what we build, but they also get the benefit of what third parties build. Another analogy I like to draw. You can tell. And front of analogy is I drew an analogy to hyperscale is like Google. Yeah. The second analogy I like to draw is that to a simple smartphone, right? A smartphone starts off by being a great phone. But beyond that, it's also a GPS player. It's a, it's a, it's a music player. It's a camera, it's a flashlight. And it also has a marketplace from where you can download apps and extend the power of that platform. >>Is that a, can we think of that as a PAs layer or no? Is it really not? You can, okay. You can say, is it purpose built for what you're the problem that you're trying to solve? >>So we, we just built APIs. Yeah. Right. We have an SDK that developers can use. And through those APIs, they get to leverage the underlying services that exist on the platform. And now developers can use that to take advantage of all that stuff. >>And it was, that was a key factor for me too. Cause I, what I, you know, I've studied all the six, seven players that sort of so-called leaders. Nobody had a developer ecosystem, nobody. Right? The old folks were built for the hardware era, but anyones were built for the cloud to it didn't have any partners were building on their platform. So I felt for me listen, and that the example of, you know, model nine rights, the name of the company that does back up. So there's, there's companies that are built on and there's a number of others. So our goal is to have a big tent, David, to everybody in the ecosystem to partner with us, to build on this platform. And, and that may take over time, but that's the way we're build >>It. And you have a metadata layer too, that has the intelligence >>To correct. It's all abstract. That that's right. So it's a combination of data and metadata. We have lots of metadata that keeps track of where the data is. You know, it allows you to index the data you can do quick searches. You can actually, you, we talking about the control plan from that >>Tracing, >>You can inject a search that'll through search throughout your multi-cloud environment, right? The super cloud that you call it. We have all that, all that goodness sounds >>Like a Supercloud John. >>Yeah. I mean, data tracing involved can trace the data lineage. >>You, you can trace the data lineage. So we, you know, provide, you know, compliance and stuff. So you can, >>All right. So my final question to wrap up, we guys, first of all, thanks for coming on. I know you're super busy, San Jose. We, we know what you're gonna do. You're gonna amp it up and, you know, knock all your numbers out. Think you always do. But what I'm interested in, what you're gonna jump into, cuz now you're gonna have the creative license to jump in to the product, the platform there has to be the next level in your mind. Can you share your thoughts on where this goes next? Love the control plane, separate out from the data plane. I think that plays well for super. How >>Much time do you have John? This guy's got, he's got a wealth. Ditis keep >>Going. Mark. Give us the most important thing you're gonna focus on. That kind of brings the super cloud and vision together. >>Yeah. Right away. I'm gonna, perhaps I, I can ion into two things. The first one is I like to call it building the, the machine, the system, right. Just to draw an analogy. Look, I draw an analogy to the us traffic system. People from all walks of life, rich, poor Democrats, Republicans, you know, different states. They all work in the, the traffic system and we drive well, right. It's a system that just works. Whereas in some other countries, you know, the system doesn't work. >>We know, >>We know a few of those. >>It's not about works. It's not about the people. It's the same people who would go from here to those countries and, and not dry. Well, so it's all about the system. So the first thing I, I have my sights on is to really strengthen the system that we have in our research development to make it a machine. I mean, it functions quite well even today, but wanna take it to the next level. Right. So that I wanna get to a point where innovation just happens in the grassroots. And it just, just like >>We automations scale optic brings all, >>Just happens without anyone overseeing it. Anyone there's no single point of bottleneck. I don't have to go take any diving catches or have you, there are people just working, you know, in a decentralized fashion and innovation just happens. Yeah. The second thing I work on of course is, you know, my heart and soul is in, you know, driving the vision, you know, the next level. And that of course is part of it. So those are the two things >>We heard from all day in our super cloud event that there's a need for an, an operating system. Yeah. Whether that's defacto standard or open. Correct. Do you see a consortium around the corner potentially to bring people together so that things could work together? Cuz there really isn't no stand there. Isn't a standards bodies. Now we have great hyperscale growth. We have on-prem we got the super cloud thing happening >>And it's a, it's kind of like what is an operating system? Operating system exposes some APIs that the applications can then use. And if you think about what we've been trying to do with the marketplace, right, we've built a huge platform and that platform is exposed through APIs. That third party developers can use. Right? And even we, when we, you know, built more and more services on top, you know, we rolled our D as we rolled out, backup as a service and a ready for thing security as a service governance, as a service, they're using those APIs. So we are building a distributor, putting systems of sorts. >>Well, congratulations on a great journey. Sanja. Congratulations on taking the hem. Thank you've got ball control. Now you're gonna be calling the ball cohesive as they say, it's, >>It's a team. It's, you know, I think I like that African phrase. If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you wanna go far, you go together. So I've always operated with the best deal. I'm so fortunate. This is to me like a dream come true because I always thought I wanted to work with a technologist that frees me up to do what I like. I mean, I started as an engineer, but that's not what I am today. Right? Yeah. So I do understand the product and this category I think is right for disruption. So I feel excited, you know, it's changing growing. Yeah. No. And it's a, it requires innovation with a cloud scale mindset and you guys have been great friends through the years. >>We'll be, we'll be watching you. >>I think it's not only disruption. It's creation. Yeah. There's a lot of white space that just hasn't been created yet. >>You're gonna have to, and you know, the proof, isn't the pudding. Yeah. You already have five of the biggest 10 financial institutions in the us and our customers. 25% of the fortune 500 users, us two of the biggest five pharmaceutical companies in the world use us. Probably, you know, some of the biggest companies, you know, the cars you have, you know, out there probably are customers. So it's already happening. >>I know you got an IPO filed confidentially. I know you can't talk numbers, but I can tell by your confidence, you're feeling good right now we are >>Feeling >>Good. Yeah. One day, one week, one month at a time. I mean, you just, you know, I like the, you know, Jeff Bezos, Andy jazzy expression, which is, it's always day one, you know, just because you've had success, even, you know, if, if a and when an IPO O makes sense, you just have to stay humble and hungry because you realize, okay, we've had a lot of success in the fortune 1000, but there's a lot of white space that hasn't picked USS yet. So let's go, yeah, there's lots of midmarket account >>Product opportunities are still, >>You know, I just stay humble and hungry and if you've got the team and then, you know, I'm really gonna be working also in the ecosystem. I think there's a lot of very good partners. So lots of ideas brew through >>The head. Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on our super cloud event and, and, and also doubling up on the news of the new appointment and congratulations on the success guys. Coverage super cloud 22, I'm sure. Dave ante, thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more segments after this break.

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage here. New York city for AWS Amazon web services summit 2022. I'm John furrier, host of the cube with Dave ante. My co-host. We are breaking it down, getting an update on the ecosystem. As the GDP drops, inflations up gas prices up the enterprise continues to grow. We're seeing exceptional growth. We're here on the ground floor. Live at the Summit's packed house, 10,000 people. Eric Bradley's here. Chief STR at ETR, one of the premier enterprise research firms out there, partners with the cube and powers are breaking analysis that Dave does check that out as the hottest podcast in enterprise. Eric. Great to have you on the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate the collaboration always. >>Yeah. Great stuff. Your data's amazing ETR folks watching check out ETR. They have a unique formula, very accurate. We love it. It's been moving the market. Congratulations. Let's talk about the market right now. This market is booming. Enterprise is the hottest thing, consumers kind of in the toilet. Okay. I said that all right, back out devices and, and, and consumer enterprise is still growing. And by the way, this first downturn, the history of the world where hyperscalers are on full pumping on all cylinders, which means they're still powering the revolution. >>Yeah, it's true. The hyperscalers were basically at this two sun system when Microsoft and an AWS first came around and everything was orbiting around it. And we're starting to see that sun cool off a little bit, but we're talking about a gradient here, right? When we say cool off, we're not talking to shutdown, it's still burning hot. That's for sure. And I can get it to some of the macro data in a minute, if that's all right. Or do you want me to go right? No, go go. Right. Yeah. So right now we just closed our most recent survey and that's macro and vendor specific. We had 1200 people talk to us on the macro side. And what we're seeing here is a cool down in spending. We originally had about 8.5% increase in budgets. That's cool down is 6.5 now, but I'll say with the doom and gloom and the headlines that we're seeing every day, 6.5% growth coming off of what we just did the last couple of years is still pretty fantastic as a backdrop. >>Okay. So you, you started to see John mentioned consumer. We saw that in Snowflake's earnings. For example, we, we certainly saw, you know, Walmart, other retailers, the FA Facebooks of the world where consumption was being dialed down, certain snowflake customers. Not necessarily, they didn't have mentioned any customers, but they were able to say, all right, we're gonna dial down, consumption this quarter, hold on until we saw some of that in snowflake results and other results. But at the same time, the rest of the industry is booming. But your data is showing softness within the fortune 500 for AWS, >>Not only AWS, but fortune 500 across the board. Okay. So going back to that larger macro data, the biggest drop in spending that we captured is fortune 500, which is surprising. But at the same time, these companies have a better purview into the economy. In general, they tend to see things further in advance. And we often remember they spend a lot of money, so they don't need to play catch up. They'll easily more easily be able to pump the brakes a little bit in the fortune 500. But to your point, when we get into the AWS data, the fortune 500 decrease seems to be hitting them a little bit more than it is Azure and GCP. I >>Mean, we're still talking about a huge business, right? >>I mean, they're catching up. I mean, Amazon has been transforming from owning the developer cloud startup cloud decade ago to really putting a dent on the enterprise as being number one cloud. And I still contest that they're number one by a long ways, but Azure kicking ass and catching up. Okay. You seeing people move to Azure, you got Charlie bell over there, Sean, by former Amazonians, Theresa Carlson, people are going over there, there there's lift over at Azure. >>There certainly is. >>Is there kinks in the arm or for AWS? There's >>A couple of kinks, but I think your point is really good. We need to take a second there. If you're talking about true pass or infrastructure is a service true cloud compute. I think AWS still is the powerhouse. And a lot of times the, the data gets a little muddied because Azure is really a hosted platform for applications. And you're not really sure where that line is drawn. And I think that's an important caveat to make, but based on the data, yes, we are seeing some kinks in the armor for AWS. Yes. Explain. So right now, a first of all caveat, 40% net score, which is our proprietary spending metric across the board. So we're not like raising any alarms here. It's still strong that said there are declines and there are declines pretty much across the board. The only spot we're not seeing a decline at all is in container, spend everything else is coming down specifically. We're seeing it come down in data analytics, data warehousing, and M I, which is a little bit of a concern because that, that rate of decline is not the same with Azure. >>Okay. So I gotta ask macro, I see the headwinds on the macro side, you pointed that out. Is there any insight into any underlying conditions that might be there on AWS or just a chronic kind of situational thing >>Right now? It seems situational. Other than that correlation between their big fortune 500, you know, audience and that being our biggest decline. The other aspect of the macro survey is we ask people, if you are planning to decline spend, how do you plan on doing it? And the number two answer is taking a look at our cloud spend and auditing it. So they're kind say, all right, you know, for the last 10 years it's been drunken, sail or spend, I >>Was gonna use that same line, you know, >>Cloud spend, just spend and we'll figure it out later, who cares? And then right now it's time to tighten the belts a little bit, >>But this is part of the allure of cloud at some point. Yeah. You, you could say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna dial it down. I'm gonna rein it in. So that's part of the reason why people go to the cloud. I want to, I wanna focus in on the data side of things and specifically the database. Let, just to give some context if, and correct me if I'm, I'm a little off here, but snowflake, which hot company, you know, on the planet, their net score was up around 80% consistently. It it's dropped down the last, you know, quarter, last survey to 60%. Yeah. So still highly, highly elevated, but that's relative to where Amazon is much larger, but you're saying they're coming down to the 40% level. Is that right? >>Yeah, they are. And I remember, you know, when I first started doing this 10 years ago, AWS at a 70%, you know, net score as well. So what's gonna happen over time is those adoptions are gonna get less and you're gonna see more flattening of spend, which ultimately is going to lower the score because we're looking for expansion rates. We wanna see adoption and increase. And when you see flattening a spend, it starts to contract a little bit. And you're right. Snowflake also was in the stratosphere that cooled off a little bit, but still, you know, very strong and AWS is coming down. I think the reason why it's so concerning is because a it's within the fortune 500 and their rate of decline is more than Azure right >>Now. Well, and, and one of the big trends you're seeing in database is this idea of converging function. In other words, bringing transaction and analytics right together at snowflake summit, they added the capability to handle transaction data, Mongo DB, which is largely mostly transactions added the capability in June to bring in analytic data. You see data bricks going from data engineering and data science now getting into snowflake space and analytics. So you're seeing that convergence Oracle is converging with my SQL heat wave and their core databases, couch base couch base is doing the same. Maria do virtually all these database companies are, are converging their platforms with the exception of AWS. AWS is still the right tool for the right job. So they've got Aurora, they've got RDS, they've got, you know, a dynamo DV, they've got red, they've got, you know, going on and on and on. And so the question everybody's asking is will that change? Will they start to sort of cross those swim lanes? We haven't seen it thus far. How is that affecting the data >>Performance? I mean, that's fantastic analysis. I think that's why we're seeing it because you have to be in the AWS ecosystem and they're really not playing nicely with others in the sandbox right now that now I will say, oh, Amazon's not playing nicely. Well, no, no. Simply to your point though, that there, the other ones are actually bringing in others at consolidating other different vendor types. And they're really not. You know, if you're in AWS, you need to stay within AWS. Now I will say their tools are fantastic. So if you do stay within AWS, they have a tool for every job they're advanced. And they're incredible. I think sometimes the complexity of their tools hurts them a little bit. Cause to your point earlier, AWS started as a developer-centric type of cloud. They have moved on to enterprise cloud and it's a little bit more business oriented, but their still roots are still DevOps friendly. And unless you're truly trained, AWS can be a little scary. >>So a common use case is I'm gonna be using Aurora for my transaction system and then I'm gonna ETL it into Redshift. Right. And, and I, now I have two data stores and I have two different sets of APIs and primitives two different teams of skills. And so that is probably causing some friction and complexity in the customer base that again, the question is, will they begin to expand some of those platforms to minimize some of that friction? >>Well, yeah, this is the question I wanted to ask on that point. So I've heard from people inside Amazon don't count out Redshift, we're making, we're catching up. I think that's my word, but they were kind of saying that right. Cuz Redshift is good, good database, but they're adding a lot more. So you got snowflake success. I think it's a little bit of a jealousy factor going on there within Redshift team, but then you got Azure synapse with the Synap product synapse. Yep. And then you got big query from Google big >>Query. Yep. >>What's the differentiation. What are you seeing for the data for the data warehouse or the data clouds that are out there for the customers? What's the data say, say to us? >>Yeah, unfortunately the data's showing that they're dropping a little bit whose day AWS is dropping a little bit now of their data products, Redshift and RDS are still the two highest of them, but they are starting to decline. Now I think one of the great data points that we have, we just closed the survey is we took a comparison of the legacy data. Now please forgive me for the word legacy. We're gonna anger a few people, but we Gotter data Oracle on-prem, we've got IBM. Some of those more legacy data warehouse type of names. When we look at our art survey takers that have them where their spend is going, that spends going to snowflake first, and then it's going to Google and then it's going to Microsoft Azure and, and AWS is actually declining in there. So when you talk about who's taking that legacy market share, it's not AWS right now. >>So legacy goes to legacy. So Microsoft, >>So, so let's work through in a little context because Redshift really was the first to take, you know, take the database to the cloud. And they did that by doing a one time license deal with par XL, which was an on-prem database. And then they re-engineered it, they did a fantastic job, but it was still engineered for on-prem. Then you along comes snowflake a couple years later and true cloud native, same thing with big query. Yep. True cloud native architecture. So they get a lot of props. Now what, what Amazon did, they took a page outta of the snowflake, for example, separating compute from storage. Now of course what's what, what Amazon did is actually not really completely separating like snowflake did they couldn't because of the architecture, they created a tearing system that you could dial down the compute. So little nuances like that. I understand. But at the end of the day, what we're seeing from snowflake is the gathering of an ecosystem in this true data cloud, bringing in different data types, they got to the public markets, data bricks was not able to get to the public markets. Yeah. And think is, is struggling >>And a 25 billion evaluation. >>Right. And so that's, that's gonna be dialed down, struggling somewhat from a go to market standpoint where snowflake has no troubles from a go to market. They are the masters at go to market. And so now they've got momentum. We talked to Frank sluman at the snowflake. He basically said, I'm not taking the foot off the gas, no way. Yeah. We, few of our large, you know, consumer customers dialed things down, but we're going balls to the >>Wall. Well, if you look at their show before you get in the numbers, you look at the two shows. Snowflake had their summit in person in Vegas. Data bricks has had their show in San Francisco. And if you compare the two shows, it's clear, who's winning snowflake is blew away from a, from a market standpoint. And we were at snowflake, but we weren't at data bricks, but there was really nothing online. I heard from sources that it was like less than 3000 people. So >>Snowflake was 1900 people in 2019, nearly 10,000. Yeah. In 2020, >>It's gonna be fun to sort of track that as a, as an odd caveat to say, okay, let's see what that growth is. Because in fairness, data, bricks, you know, a little bit younger, Snowflake's had a couple more years. So I'd be curious to see where they are. Their, their Lakehouse paradigm is interesting. >>Yeah. And I think it's >>And their product first company, yes. Their go to market might be a little bit weak from our analysis, but that, but they'll figure it out. >>CEO's pretty smart. But I think it's worth pointing out. It's like two different philosophies, right? It is. Snowflake is come into our data cloud. That's their proprietary environment. They're the, they think of the iPhone, right? End to end. We, we guarantee it's all gonna work. And we're in control. Snowflake is like, Hey, open source, no, bring in data bricks. I mean data bricks, open source, bring in this tool that too, now you are seeing snowflake capitulate a little bit. They announce, for instance, Apache iceberg support at their, at the snowflake summit. So they're tipping their cap to open source. But at the end of the day, they're gonna market and sell the fact that it's gonna run better in native snowflake. Whereas data bricks, they're coming at it from much more of an open source, a mantra. So that's gonna, you know, we'll see who look at, you had windows and you had apple, >>You got, they both want, you got Cal and you got Stanford. >>They both >>Consider, I don't think it's actually there yet. I, I find the more interesting dynamic right now is between AWS and snowflake. It's really a fun tit for tat, right? I mean, AWS has the S three and then, you know, snowflake comes right on top of it and announces R two, we're gonna do one letter, one number better than you. They just seem to have this really interesting dynamic. And I, and it is SLT and no one's betting against him. I mean, this guy's fantastic. So, and he hasn't used his war chest yet. He's still sitting on all that money that he raised to your point, that data bricks five, their timing just was a little off >>5 billion in >>Capital when Slootman hasn't used that money yet. So what's he gonna do? What can he do when he turns that on? He finds the right. >>They're making some acquisitions. They did the stream lit acquisitions stream. >>Fantastic >>Problem. With data bricks, their valuation is underwater. Yes. So they're recruiting and their MNAs. Yes. In the toilet, they cannot make the moves because they don't have the currency until they refactor the multiple, let the, this market settle. I I'm, I'm really nervous that they have to over factor the >>Valuation. Having said that to your point, Eric, the lake house architecture is definitely gaining traction. When you talk to practitioners, they're all saying, yeah, we're building data lakes, we're building lake houses. You know, it's a much, much smaller market than the enterprise data warehouse. But nonetheless, when you talk to practitioners that are actually doing things like self serve data, they're building data lakes and you know, snow. I mean, data bricks is right there. And as a clear leader in, in ML and AI and they're ahead of snowflake, right. >>And I was gonna say, that's the thing with data bricks. You know, you're getting that analytics at M I built into it. >>You know, what's ironic is I remember talking to Matt Carroll, who's CEO of auDA like four or five years ago. He came into the office in ma bro. And we were in temporary space and we were talking about how there's this new workload emerging, which combines AWS for cloud infrastructure, snowflake for the simple data warehouse and data bricks for the ML AI, and then all now all of a sudden you see data bricks yeah. And snowflake going at it. I think, you know, to your point about the competition between AWS and snowflake, here's what I think, I think the Redshift team is, you know, doesn't like snowflake, right. But I think the EC two team loves it. Loves it. Exactly. So, so I think snowflake is driving a lot of, >>Yeah. To John's point, there is plenty to go around. And I think I saw just the other day, I saw somebody say less than 40% of true global 2000 organizations believe that they're at real time data analytics right now. They're not really there yet. Yeah. Think about how much runway is left and how many tools you need to get to real time streaming use cases. It's complex. It's not easy. >>It's gonna be a product value market to me, snowflake in data bricks. They're not going away. Right. They're winning architectures. Yeah. In the cloud, what data bricks did would spark and took over the Haddo market. Yeah. To your point. Now that big data, market's got two players, in my opinion, snow flicking data, bricks converging. Well, Redshift is sitting there behind the curtain, their wild card. Yeah. They're wild card, Dave. >>Okay. I'm gonna give one more wild card, which is the edge. Sure. Okay. And that's something that when you talk about real time analytics and AI referencing at the edge, there aren't a lot of database companies in a position to do that. You know, Amazon trying to put outposts out there. I think it runs RDS. I don't think it runs any other database. Right. Snowflake really doesn't have a strong edge strategy when I'm talking the far edge, the tiny edge. >>I think, I think that's gonna be HPE or Dell's gonna own the outpost market. >>I think you're right. I'll come back to that. Couch base is an interesting company to watch with Capella Mongo. DB really doesn't have a far edge strategy at this point, but couch base does. And that's one to watch. They're doing some really interesting things there. And I think >>That, but they have to leapfrog bongo in my >>Opinion. Yeah. But there's a new architecture emerging at the edge and it's gonna take a number of years to develop, but it could eventually from an economic standpoint, seep back into the enterprise arm base, low end, take a look at what couch base is >>Doing. They hired an Amazon guard system. They have to leapfrog though. They need to, they can't incrementally who's they who >>Couch >>Base needs to needs to make a big move in >>Leap frog. Well, think they're trying to, that's what Capella is all about was not only, you know, their version of Atlas bringing to the cloud couch base, but it's also stretching it out to the edge and bringing converged database analytics >>Real quick on the numbers. Any data on CloudFlare, >>I was, I've been sitting here trying to get the word CloudFlare out my mouth the whole time you guys were talking, >>Is this another that's innovated in the ecosystem. So >>Platform, it was really simple for them early on, right? They're gonna get that edge network out there and they're gonna steal share from Akamai. Then they started doing exactly what Akamai did. We're gonna start rolling out some security. Their security is fantastic. Maybe some practitioners are saying a little bit too much, cuz they're not focused on one thing or another, but they are doing extremely well. And now they're out there in the cloud as well. You >>Got S3 compare. They got two, they got an S3 competitor. >>Exactly. So when I'm listening to you guys talk about, you know, a, a couch base I'm like, wow, those two would just be an absolute fantastic, you know, combination between the two of them. You mean >>CloudFlare >>Couch base. Yeah. >>I mean you got S3 alternative, right? You got a Mongo alternative basically in my >>Opinion. And you're going and you got the edge and you got the edge >>Network with security security, interesting dynamic. This brings up the super cloud date. I wanna talk about Supercloud because we're seeing a trend on we're reporting this since last year that basically people don't have to spend the CapEx to be cloud scale. And you're seeing Amazon enable that, but snowflake has become a super cloud. They're on AWS. Now they're on Azure. Why not tan expansion expand the market? Why not get that? And then it'll be on Google next, all these marketplaces. So the emergence of this super cloud, and then the ability to make that across a substrate across multiple clouds is a strategy we're seeing. What do you, what do you think? >>Well, honestly, I'm gonna be really Frank here. The, everything I know about the super cloud I know from this guy. So I've been following his lead on this and I'm looking forward to you guys doing that conference and that summit coming up from a data perspective. I think what you're saying is spot on though, cuz those are the areas we're seeing expansion in without a doubt. >>I think, you know, when you talk about things like super cloud and you talk about things like metaverse, there's, there's a, there, there look every 15 or 20 years or so this industry reinvents itself and a new disruption comes out and you've got the internet, you've got the cloud, you've got an AI and VR layer. You've got, you've got machine intelligence. You've got now gaming. There's a new matrix, emerging, super cloud. Metaverse there's something happening out there here. That's not just your, your father's SAS or is or pass. Well, >>No, it's also the spend too. Right? So if I'm a company like say capital one or Goldman Sachs, my it spend has traditionally been massive every year. Yes. It's basically like tons of CapEx comes the cloud. It's an operating expense. Wait a minute, Amazon has all the CapEx. So I'm not gonna dial down my budget. I want a competitive advantage. So next thing they know they have a super cloud by default because they just pivoted their, it spend into new capabilities that they then can sell to the market in FinTech makes total sense. >>Right? They're building out a digital platform >>That would, that was not possible. Pre-cloud >>No, it wasn't cause you weren't gonna go put all that money into CapEx expenditure to build that out. Not knowing whether or not the market was there, but the scalability, the ability to spend, reduce and be flexible with it really changes that paradigm entire. >>So we're looking at this market now thinking about, okay, it might be Greenfield in every vertical. It might have a power law where you have a head of the long tail. That's a player like a capital one, an insurance. It could be Liberty mutual or mass mutual that has so much it and capital that they're now gonna scale it into a super cloud >>And they have data >>And they have the data tools >>And the tools. And they're gonna bring that to their constituents. Yes, yes. And scale it using >>Cloud. So that means they can then service the entire vertical as a service provider. >>And the industry cloud is becoming bigger and bigger and bigger. I mean, that's really a way that people are delivering to market. So >>Remember in the early days of cloud, all the banks thought they could build their own cloud. Yeah. Yep. Well actually it's come full circle. They're like, we can actually build a cloud on top of the cloud. >>Right. And by the way, they can have a private cloud in their super cloud. Exactly. >>And you know, it's interesting cause we're talking about financial services insurance, all the people we know spend money in our macro survey. Do you know the, the sector that's spending the most right now? It's gonna shock you energy utilities. Oh yeah. I was gonna, the energy utilities industry right now is the one spending the most money I saw largely cuz they're playing ketchup. But also because they don't have these type of things for their consumers, they need the consumer app. They need to be able to do that delivery. They need to be able to do metrics. And they're the they're, they're the one spending right >>Now it's an arms race, but the, the vector shifts to value creation. So >>It's it just goes back to your post when it was a 2012, the trillion dollar baby. Yeah. It's a multi-trillion dollar baby that they, >>The world was going my chassis post on Forbes, headline trillion dollar baby 2012. You know, I should add it's happening. That's >>On the end. Yeah, exactly. >>Trillions of babies, Eric. Great to have you on the key. >>Thank you so much guys. >>Great to bring the data. Thanks for sharing. Check out ETR. If you're into the enterprise, want to know what's going on. They have a unique approach, very accurate in their survey data. They got a great market basket of, of, of, of, of data questions and people and community. Check it out. Thanks for coming on and sharing with. >>Thank you guys. Always enjoy. >>We'll be back with more coverage here in the cube in New York city live at summit 22. I'm John fur with Dave ante. We'll be right back.

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage. We're wrapping up day two, John furrier and Dave ante. We got some friends and colleagues, longtime friends, Crawford Del Pret is the president of IDC. Matt Eastwood is the senior vice president of infrastructure and cloud guys. Thanks for coming on spending time. Great to you guys. >>That's fun to do it. Awesome. >>Cravin I want to ask you, I, I think this correct me if I'm wrong, but this was your first physical directions as, as president. Is that true or did you do one in 2019? >>Uh, no, we did one in 20. We did, we did one in 20. I was president at the time and then, and then everything started, >>Well, how was directions this year? You must have been stoked to get back together. Yeah, >>It was great. I mean, it was actually pretty emotional, you know, it's, it's a community, right? I mean, we have a lot of customers that have been coming to that event for a long, long time and to stand up on the stage and look out and see people, you know, getting a little bit emotional and a lot of hugs and a lot of bringing people together. And this year in Boston, we were the first event really of any size that kind of came back. And when I kind of didn't see that coming in terms of how people, how ready people were to be together. Cause >>When did you did it April >>In Boston? Yeah, we did it March in March. Yeah, it was, it was, it was, it was a game day decision. I mean, we were, we had negotiated it, we were going back and forth and then I kind of made the call at the last minute, say, let's go and do it. And in Santa Clara, I felt like we were kind of opening up the crypt at the convention center. I mean, all the production people said, you know what? You guys were really the first event to be back. And attendance was really strong. You know, we, we, we got over a thousand. It was, it was really good. >>Good. It's always a fun when I was there. It was, it's a big deal. You guys prepare for it. Yeah. Some new faces up on the stage. Yeah. So, so Matt, um, you've been doing the circuit. I take it like, like all top analysts, super busy. Right. This is kind of end of the spring. I mean, I know it's summer, right. That's right. But, um, how do you look at, at discover relative some, some of the other events you've been at? >>So I think if you go back to what Crawford was just talking about our event in March, I mean, March was sort of the, the reopening and there was, I think people just felt so happy to be, to be back out there. You still get a little bit at, at these events. I mean, cuz for each, each company it's their first time back at it, but I think we're starting to get down what these events are gonna feel like going forward. Um, and it, I mean, there's good energy here. There's been a good attendance. I think the, the interest in getting back live and having face to face meetings is clearly strong. >>Yeah. I mean, this definitely shows that hybrids, the steady state, both events cloud. Yeah. Virtualization remotes. So what are you guys seeing with that hybrid mode? Just from a workforce, certainly people excited to get back together, but it's gonna continue. You're starting to see that digital piece. How is that impacting some of the, some of the customers you're tracking, who's winning and who's losing, coming out of the pandemic. What's the big picture look like? >>Yeah. I mean, if you, if you take a look at hybrid work, um, people are testing many, many, many different models. And I think as we move from a pandemic to an em, we're gonna have just waves and waves and waves of people needing that flexibility for a lot of different reasons, whether they have, uh, you know, preexisting conditions, whether they're just not comfortable, whether they have people who can't be vaccinated at home. So I think we're gonna be in this hybrid work for a long, long time. I do think though that we are gonna transition back into some kind of a normal, um, and I, and I think the big difference is that I think leaders back in the day, a long time ago, when people weren't coming into work, it was kind of like, oh, I know nothing's going on there. People aren't getting worked. And I think we're over that stage. Yeah. I think we're now into a stage where we know people can be productive. We know people can effectively work from home and now we're into the reason to be in the office. And the reason to be in the office is that collaboration, it's that mentoring it's that, you know, think about your 25 year old self. Do you wanna be staring at a windshield all day long and not kind of building those relationships? People want face to face, it's difficult. They want face >>To face and I would, and you guys had a great culture and it's a young culture. How are you handling it as an executive in terms of, is there a policy for hybrid or >>Yeah, so, so, so at IDC, what we did is we're in a pilot period and we've kind of said that the summertime is gonna be a pilot period and we've asked people, we're actually serving shocker, we're >>Serving, >>But we're, but we're, but, but we're actually asking people to work with their manager on what works for them. And then we'll come up with, you know, whether you are in, out of the office worker, which will be less than two days a hybrid worker, which will be three days or, uh, in, in the office, which is more than three days a week. And you know, we all know there's, there's, there's limitation, there's, there's, there's variability in that, but that's kind of what we're shooting for. And we'd like to be able to have that in place in the fall. >>Are you pretty much there? >>Yeah, I am. I, I am there three days a week. I I, Mondays and Fridays, unless, >>Because you got the CEO radius, right? Yeah. >><laugh>, <laugh> >>The same way I'm in the office, the smaller, smaller office. But so, uh, let's talk a little bit about the, the numbers we were chatting earlier, trying to squint through you guys are, you know, obviously the gold standard for what the market does, what happened in, you know, during the pandemic, what happened in 2021 and what do you expect to happen in, in 2022 in terms of it spending growth? >>Yeah. So this is, this is a crazy time, right? We've never seen this. You and I have a long history of, uh, of tracking this. So we saw in, in, in, in 2020, the market decelerated dramatically, um, the GDP went down to a negative like it always does in these cases, it was, you know, probably negative six in that, in that, in that kind of range for the first time, since I've been tracking it, which goes back over 30 years, tech didn't go negative tech went to about just under 3%. And then as we went to 2021, we saw, you know, everything kind of snap back, we saw tech go up to about 11% growth. And then of course we saw, you know, GDP come back to about a 4%, you know, ki kind of range growth. Now what's I think the story there is that companies and you saw this anecdotally everywhere companies leaned into tech, uh, company. >>You know, I think, you know, Matt, you have a great statistic that, you know, 80% of companies used COVID as their point to pivot into digital transformation, right. And to invest in a different way. And so what we saw now is that tech is now where I think companies need to focus. They need to invest in tech. They need to make people more productive with tech and it played out in the numbers now. So this year what's fascinating is we're looking at two Fastly different markets. We've got gasoline at $7 a gallon. We've got that affecting food prices. Uh, interesting fun fact recently it now costs over $1,000 to fill an 18 Wheeler. All right. Based on, I mean this just kind of can't continue. So you think about it, don't put the boat >>In the wall. Yeah. Yeah. >>Good, good, good, good luck. It's good. Yeah, exactly. <laugh> so a family has kind of this bag of money, right? And that bag of money goes up by maybe three, 4% every year, depending upon earnings. So that is sort of sloshing around. So if food and fuel and rent is taking up more gadgets and consumer tech are not, you know, you're gonna use that iPhone a little longer. You're gonna use that Android phone a little longer. You're gonna use that TV a little longer. So consumer tech is getting crushed, you know, really it's very, very, and you saw it immediately and ad spending, you've seen it in meta. You've seen it in Facebook. Consumer tech is doing very, very it's tough enterprise tech. We haven't been in the office for two and a half years. We haven't upgraded whether that be campus wifi, whether that be, uh, servers, whether that be, uh, commercial PCs, as much as we would have. So enterprise tech, we're seeing double digit order rates. We're seeing strong, strong demand. Um, we have combined that with a component shortage and you're seeing some enterprise companies with a quarter of backlog. I mean, that's, you know, really unheard at higher >>Prices, which >>Also, and therefore that drives that >>Drives. It shouldn't be that way. If there's a shortage of chips, it shouldn't be that way, >>But it is, but it is, but it is. And then you look at software and we saw this, you know, we've seen this in previous cycles, but we really saw it in the COVID downturn where, uh, in software, the stickiness of SaaS means that you just, you're not gonna take that stuff out. So the, the second half of last year we saw double digit rates in software surprise. We're seeing high single digit revenue growth in software now, so that we think is gonna sustain, which means that overall it demand. We expect to be between five and 6% this year. Okay, fine. We have a war going on. We have, you know, potentially, uh, a recession. We think if we do, it'll be with a lower case, R maybe you see a banded down to maybe 4% growth, but it's gonna grow this. >>Is it, is it both the structural change of the disruption of COVID plus the digital transformation yeah. Together? Or is it, >>I, I think you make a great point. Um, I, I, I think that we are entering a new era for tech. I think that, you know, Andrew's famous wall street journal oped 10 years ago, software is even world was absolutely correct. And now we're finding that software is, is eing into every nook and cranny people have to invest. They, they know disruptors are coming around every single corner. And if I'm not leaning into digital transformation, I'm dead. So >>The number of players in tech is, is growing, >>Cuz there's well, the number of players in tech number >>Industry's coming >>In. Yeah. The industry's coming in. So I think the interesting dynamic you're gonna see there is now we have high interest rates. Yeah. Which means that the price of funding these companies and buying them and putting data on is gonna get higher and higher, which means that I think you could, you could see another wave of consolidation. Mm-hmm <affirmative> because tech large install based tech companies are saying, oh, you know what? I like that now >>4 0 9 S are being reset too. That's another point. >>Yeah. I mean, so if you think about this, this transformation, right. So it's all about apps, absent data and differentiating and absent data. What the, the big winner the last couple years was cloud. And I would just say that if this is the first potential recession that we're talking about, where the cloud service providers. So I think a cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a destination, but for these cloud service providers, they've actually never experienced a slowdown. So how, and, and if you think about the numbers, 30% of, of the typical it budget is now quote, unquote cloud and 30% of all expenditures are it related. So there's a lot of exposure there. And I think you're gonna see a lot of, a lot of focus on how we can rationalize some of those investments. >>Well, that's a great point. I want to just double click on that. So yeah, the cloud did well during the pandemic. We saw that with SAS, have you guys tracked like the Tams of what got pulled forward? So the bit, a big discussion about something that pulled forward because of the pandemic, um, like zoom, for instance, obviously everyone's using zoom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Was there fake Tams? There was one, uh, couple analysts who were pointing out that some companies were hot during the pandemic will go away that that Tam doesn't really exist, but there's some that got pulled forward early. That's where the growth is. So is there a, is there a line between the, I call fake Tam or pulled forward TA that was only for the pandemic situationally, um, devices might be like virtual event, virtual event. Software was one, I know Hoppin got laid a lot of layoffs. And so that was kind of gone coming, coming and going. And you got SAS which got pulled forward. Yep. And it's not going away, but it's >>Sustaining. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, but, but it's sustaining, um, you know, I definitely think there was a, there was a lot of spending that absolutely got pulled forward. And I think it's really about CEO's ability to control expectations and to kind of message what it, what it looks like. Um, you know, I think I look, I, I, I think virtual event platforms probably have a role. I think you can, you can definitely, you know, raise your margins in the event, business, significantly using those platforms. There's a role for them. But if you were out there thinking that this thing was gonna continue, then you know, that that was unrealistic, you know, Dave, to, to your point on devices, I'm not necessarily, you know. Sure. I think, I think we definitely got ahead of our expectations and things like consumer PCs, those things will go back to historical growth >>Rates. Yeah. I mean, you got the install base is pretty young right now, but I think the one way to look at it too, is there was some technical debt brought in because people didn't necessarily expect that we'd be moving to a permanent hybrid state two years ago. So now we have to actually invest on both. We have to make, create a little bit more permanency around the hybrid world. And then also like Crawford's talking about the permanency of, of having an office and having people work in, in multiple modes. Yeah. It actually requires investment in both the office. And >>Also, so you're saying operationally, you gotta run the company and do the digital transformation to level up the hybrid. >>Yeah. Yeah. Just the way people work. Right. So, so, you know, you basically have to, I mean, even for like us internally, Crawford was saying, we're experimenting with what works for us. My team before the pandemic was like one third virtual. Now it's two third virtual, which means that all of our internal meetings are gonna be on, on teams or zoom. Right. Yeah. They're not gonna necessarily be, Hey, just coming to the office today, cuz two thirds of people aren't in the Boston area. >>Right. Matt, you said if you see cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a place. I remember when you were out, I was in the, on the, on the, on the zoom when, when first met Adam Celski yeah. Um, he said, you were asking him about, you know, the, the on-prem guys and he's like, nah, it's not cloud. And he kind of was very dismissive of it. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna get your take on, you know, what we're seeing with as Azure service GreenLake, apex, Cisco's got their version. IBM. Fewer is doing it. Is that cloud. >>I think if it's, I, I don't think all of it is by default. I think it is. If I actually think what HPE is doing is cloud, because it's really about how you present the services and how you allow customers to engage with the platform. So they're actually creating a cloud model. I think a lot of people get lost in the transition from, you know, CapEx to OPEX and the financing element of this. But the reality is what HPE is doing and they're sort of setting the standard. I think for the industry here is actually setting up what I would consider a cloud model. >>Well, in the early days of, of GreenLake, for sure it was more of a financial, you >>Know, it was kind of bespoke, right. But now you've got 70 services. And so you can, you can build that out. But >>You know, we were talking to Keith Townsend right after the keynote and we were sort of UN unpacking it a little bit. And I, I asked the question, you know, if you, if you had to pin this in terms of AWS's maturity, where are we? And the consensus was 2014 console filling, is that fair or unfair? >>Oh, that's a good question. I mean, um, I think it's, well, clouds come a long way, right? So it'd be, I, I, I think 20, fourteen's probably a little bit too far back because >>You have more modern tools I Kubernetes is. Yeah. >>And, but you also have, I would say the market still getting to a point of, of, of readiness and in terms of buying this way. So if you think about the HP's kind of strategy around edge, the core platform as a, as a service, you know, we're all big believers in edge and the apps follow the data and the data's being created in new locations and you gotta put the infrastructure there. And for an end user, there's a lot of risk there because they don't know how to actually plan for capacity at the edge. So they're gonna look to offload that, but this is a long term play to actually, uh, build out and deploy at the edge. It's not gonna happen tomorrow. It's a five, 10 year play. >>Yeah. I mean, I like the operating model. I'd agree with you, Matt, that if it's, if it's cloud operations, DevSecOps and all that, all that jazz it's cloud it's cloud operating and, and, and public cloud is a public cloud hyperscaler on premise. And the storage folks were presented. That's a single pane of glass. That's old school concepts, but cloud based. Yep. Shipping hardwares, auto figures. Yeah. That's the kind of consumption they're going for now. I like it. Then I, then they got the partner led thing is the partner piece. How do you guys see that? Because if I'm a partner, there's two things, wait a minute, am I at bottleneck to the direct self-service? Or is that an enabler to get more cash, to make more money? If I'm a partner. Cause you see what Essentia's doing with what they do with Amazon and Deloitte and et C. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, right? Like they've a channel partner, I'm making more cash. >>Yeah. I mean, well, and those channel partners are all in transition too. They're trying to yeah. Right. Figure out. Right, right. Are they, you know, what are their managed services gonna look like? You know, what kind of applications are they gonna stand up? They're they're not gonna just be >>Reselling, bought a big house in a boat. The box is not selling. I wanna ask you guys about growth because you know, the big three cloud, big four growing pick a number, I dunno, 30, 35% revenue big. And like you said, it's 30% of the business now. I think Dell's growing double digits. I don't know how much of that is sustainable. A lot of that is PCs, but still strong growth. Yep. I think Cisco has promised 9% >>In, in that. Right, right. >>About that. Something like that. I think IBM Arvin is at 6%. Yep. And I think HPE has said, Hey, we're gonna do three to 4%. Right. Which is so really sort of lagging and which I think a lot of people in wall street is like, okay, well that's not necessarily so compelling. Right. What does HPE have to do to double that growth? Or even triple that growth. >>Yeah. So they're gonna need, so, so obviously you're right. I mean, being able to show growth is Tanem out to this company getting, you know, more attention, more heat from, from investors. I think that they're rightly pointing to the triple digit growth that they've seen on green lake. I think if you look at the trailing, you know, 12 month bookings, you got over, you know, 7 billion, which means that in a year, you're gonna have a significant portion of the company is as a service. And you're gonna see that revenue that's rat being, you know, recognized over a series of months. So I think that this is sort of the classic SAS trough that we've seen applied to an infrastructure company where you're basically have to kind of be in the desert for a long time. But if they can, I think the most important number for HPE right now is that GreenLake booking snow. >>And if you look at that number and you see that number, you know, rapidly come down, which it hasn't, I mean off a very large number, you're still in triple digits. They will ultimately start to show revenue growth, um, in the business. And I think the one thing people are missing about HPE is there aren't, there are a lot of companies that want to build a platform, but they're small and nobody cares. And nobody let's say they throw a party and nobody comes. HP has such a significant installed base that if they do build a platform, they can attract partners to that platform. What I mean by that is partners that deliver services on GreenLake that they're not delivering. They have the girth to really start to change an industry and change the way stuff is being built. And that's the be they're making. And frankly, they are showing progress in that direction. >>So I buy that. But the one thing that concerns me is they kind of hide the ball on services. Right. And I, and I worry about that is like, is this a services kind of just, you know, same wine, new bottle or, >>Or, yeah. So, so I, I, I would argue that it's not about hiding the ball. It's about eliminating confusion of the marketplace. This is the company that bought EDS only to spin it off <laugh>. Okay. And so you don't wanna have a situation where you're getting back into services. >>Yeah. They're the only one >>They're product, not the only ones who does, I mean, look at the way IBM used to count and still >>I get it. I get it. But I think it's, it's really about clarity of mission. Well, I point next they are in the Ts business, absolutely. Point of it. It's important prop >>Drive for them at the top. Right. The global 50 say there's still a lot of uniqueness in what they want to buy. So there's definitely a lot of bespoke kind of delivery. That's still happening there. The real promise here is when you get into the global 2000 and yeah. And can start them to getting them to consume very standardized offers. And then the margins are, are healthy >>And they got they're what? Below 30, 33, 30 3%. I think 34% last quarter gross margin. Yeah. That that's solid. Just compare that with Dell is, I don't know. They're happy with 20, 21% of correct. You get that, which is, you know, I I'll come back. Go ahead. I want, I wanna ask >>Guys. No, I wanna, I wanna just, he said one thing I like, which was, I think he nailed it. They have such, um, big install base. They have a great channel. They know how to use it. Right. That's a real asset. Yeah. And Microsoft, I remember when their stock was trading at 26 when Baltimore was CEO. Yep. What they did with no, they had office and windows, so a little bit different. Yep. But similar strategy, leverage our install base, bring something up to them. That's what you're kind of connecting the >>Absolutely. You have this velocity, uh, machine with a significant girth that you can now move to a new model. They move that to a new model. To Matt's point. They lead the industry, they change the way large swath the customers buy and you will see it in steady revenue growth over time. Okay. So I just in that, well, >>So your point is the focus and there the right it's the right focus. And I would agree what's >>What's the other move. What's their other move, >>The problem. Triple digit booking growth off a number that gets bigger >>Inspired. Okay. >>Whats what's the scoreboard. Okay. Now they're go at the growth. That's the scoreboard. What are the signals? Are you looking at on the scoreboard Crawford and Matt in terms of success? What are the benchmarks? Is it ecosystem growth, number of services, triple growth. Yeah. What's the, what are some of the metrics that you guys are gonna be watching and we should be watching? >>Yeah. I mean, I dunno if >>You wanna jump in, I mean, I think ecosystem's really critical. Yeah. You want to, you want to have well and, and you need to sell both ways like HPE needs to be selling their technology on other cloud providers and vice versa. You need to have the VMs of the world on, you know, offering services on your platform and, and kind of capturing some, some motion off that. I think that's pretty critical. The channel definitely. I mean, you have to help and what you're gonna see happen there is there will be channel partners that succeed in transforming and succeeding and there'll be a lot that go away and that some, some of that's, uh, generational there'll be people that just kind of age outta the system and, and just go home. >>Yeah. Yeah. So I would argue it's, it's, it's, it's gonna be, uh, bookings growth rate. It's gonna be retention rate of the, of, of, of the customers, uh, that they have. And then it's gonna be that, that, um, you know, ultimately you're gonna see revenue, um, growth, and which is that revenue growth is gonna have to be correlated to the booking's growth for green lake cross. >>What's the Achilles heel on, on HPE. If you had to do the SWAT, what's the, what's the w for HPE that they really need to pay >>Attention to. I mean, they, they need to continue their relentless focus on cost, particularly in the, in the core compute, you know, segment they need to be, they need to be able to be as cost effective as possible while the higher profit dollars associated with GreenLake and other services come in and then increase the overall operating margin and gross margin >>Picture for the, I mean, I think the biggest thing is they just have, they have to continue the motion that they've been on. Right. And they've been consistent about that. Mm-hmm, <affirmative> what you see where others have, have kind of slipped up is when you go to, to customers and you present the, the OPEX as a service and the traditional CapEx side by side, and the customers put in this position of trying to detangle what's in that OPEX service, you don't wanna do that obviously. And, and HP has not done that, but we've seen others kind of slip up. And, but >>A lot of companies still wanna buy CapEx. Right. Absolutely liquid. And, and I think, >>But you shouldn't do a, you shouldn't do that bake off by putting those two offers out. You should basically ascertain what they want to do. >>What's kind of what Dell does. Right. Hey, how, what do you want? We got this, we got >>This on one hand, we got this, the, we got that, right. Uh, the two hand sales rep, no, this CapEx. Thing's interesting. And if you're Amazon and Azure and, and GCP, what are they thinking right now? Cause remember what, four years ago outpost was launched, which essentially hardware. Yeah. This is cloud operating model. Yep. Yeah. They're essentially bringing outpost. This is what they got basically is Amazon and Azure, like, is this ABL on the radar for them? How would you, what, what are they thinking in your mind if we're on, if we're in their office, in their brain trust, are they laughing? Are they like saying, oh, they're scared. Is this real threat >>Opportunity? I, I, I mean, I wouldn't say they're laughing at all. I, I would say they're probably discounting a little bit and saying, okay, fine. You know, that's a strategy that a traditional hardware company is moving to. But I think if you look underneath the covers, you know, two years ago it was, you know, pretty basic stuff they were offering. But now when you start getting into some, you know, HPC is a service, you start getting into data fabric, you start getting into some of the more, um, sophisticated services that they're offering. And, and I think what's interesting about HP. What my, my take is that they're not gonna go after the 250 services the Amazon's offering, they're gonna basically have a portfolio of services that really focus on the core use cases of their infrastructure set. And, and I think one of the danger things, one, one of the, one of the red flags would be, if they start going way up the stack and wanting to offer the entire application stack, that would be like a big flashing warning sign, cuz it's not their sweet spot. It's not, not what they have. >>So machine learning, machine learning and quantum, okay. One you can argue might be up the stack machine learning quantum should be in their wheelhouse. >>I would argue machine learning is not up the stack because what they would focus on is inference. They'd focus on learning. If they came out and said, machine learning all the way up to the, you know, what a, what, what a drug discovery company needs to do. >>So they're bringing it down. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, no, I think they're focusing on that middle layer, right? That, that, that data layer. And I think that helping companies manage their data make more sense outta their data structure, their data that's core to what they wanna do. >>I, I feel as though what they're doing now is table stakes. Honestly, I do. I do feel like, okay, Hey finally, you know, I say the same thing about apex, you >>Know, we finally got, >>It's like, okay guys, the >>Party. Great. Welcome to the, >>But the one thing I would just say about, about AWS and the other big clouds is whether they might be a little dismissive of what's truly gonna happen at the edge. I think the traditional OEMs that are transforming are really betting on that edge, being a huge play and a huge differentiator for them where the public cloud obviously have their own bets there. But I think they were pretty dismissive initially about how big that went. >>I don't, and I don't think anybody's really figured out the edge yet. >>Well, that's an, it's a battleground. That's what he's saying. I think you're >>Saying, but on the ecosystem, I wanna say up the stack, I think it's the ecosystem. That's gotta fill that out. You gotta see more governance tools and catalogs and AI tools and, and >>It immediately goes more, it goes more vertical when you go edge, you're gonna have different conversations and >>They're >>Lacking. Yeah. And they, but they're in there though. They're in the verticals. HP's in the, yeah, >>For sure. But they gotta build out an ego. Like you walk around here, the data, the number of data companies here. I mean, Starburst is here. I'm actually impressed that Starburst is here. Cause I think they're a forward thinking company. I wanna see that times a hundred. Right. I mean, that's >>You see HP's in all the verticals. That's I think the point here, >>So they should be able to attract that ecosystem and build that, that flywheel that's the, that's the hallmark of a cloud that marketplace. >>Yeah, it is. But I think there's a, again, I go back to, they really gotta stay focused on that infrastructure and data management. Yeah. >>But they'll be focused on that, but, but their ecosystem, >>Their ecosystem will then take it up from there. And I think that's the next stage >>And that ecosystem's gotta include OT players and communications technologies players as well. Right. Because that stuff gets kind of sucked up in that, in that edge play. Do >>You feel like HPE has a, has a leg up on that or like a little, a little bit of a lead or is it pretty much, you know, even raced right now? >>I think they've, I think the big infrastructure companies have all had OEM businesses and they've all played there. It's it's, it's also helping those OT players actually convert their own needs into more of a software play and, and not so much of >>Physical. You've been, you've been following and you guys both have been following HP and HPE for years. They've been on the edge for a long time. I've been focused on this edge. Yeah. Now they might not have the product traction that's right. Or they might not develop as fast, but industrial OT and IOT they've been talking about it, focused on it. I think Amazon was mostly like, okay, we gotta get to the edge and like the enterprise. And, and I think HP's got a leg up in my opinion on that. Well, I question is can they execute? >>Yeah. I mean, PTC was here years ago on stage talking >>About, but I mean, you think about, if you think about the edge, right. I mean, I would argue one of the best acquisitions this company ever did was Aruba. Right. I mean, it basically changed the whole conversation of the edge changed the whole conversation. >>If >>Became GreenLake, it was GreenLake. >>Well, it became a big department. They gave a big, but, but, but I mean, you know, I mean they, they, they went after going selling edge line servers and frankly it's very difficult to gain traction there. Yeah. Aruba, huge area. And I think the March announcement was when they brought Aruba management into. Yeah. Yeah. >>Totally. >>Last question. Love >>That. >>What are you guys saying about the, the Broadcom VMware acquisition? What's the, what are the implications for the ecosystem for companies like HPE and just generally for the it business? >>Yeah. So >>You start. Yeah, sure. I'll start, I'll start there. So look, you know, we've, you know, spent some time, uh, going through it spent some time, you know, speaking, uh, to the, to the, to the folks involved and, and, and I gotta tell you, I think this is a really interesting moment for Broadcom. This is Broadcom's opportunity to basically build a different kind of a conversation with developers to, uh, try to invest in. I mean, just for perspective, right? These numbers may not be exact. And I know a dollar is not a dollar, but in 2001, anybody, remember what HP paid for? Compact >>8,000,000,020, >>So 25 billion, 25 billion. Wow. VMware just got sold for 61 billion. Wow. Okay. Unbill dollars. Okay. That gives you a perspective. No, again, I know a dollar is not a dollar 2000. >>It's still big numbers, >>2022. So having said that, if you just did it to, to, to basically build your DCF model and say, okay, over this amount of time, I'll pay you this. And I'll take the money out of this period of time, which is what people have criticized them for. I think that's a little shortsighted. I, yeah, I think this is Broadcom's opportunity to invest in that product and really try to figure out how to get a seat at the table in software and pivot their company to enterprise software in a different way. They have to prove that they're willing to do that. And then frankly, that they can develop the skills to do that over time. But I do believe this is a, a different, this is a pivot point. This is not >>CA this is not CA >>It's not CA >>In my, in my mind, it can't be CA they would, they would destroy too much. Now you and I, Dave had some, had some conversations on Twitter. I, I don't think it's the step up to them sort of thinking differently about semiconductor, dying, doing some custom semi I, I don't think that's. Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. I think I, I think this is really about, I got two aspiration for them pivoting the company. They could >>Justify the >>Price to the, getting a seat at the adults table in software is, >>Well, if, if Broadcom has been squeezing their supplies, we all hear the scutle butt. Yeah. If they're squeezing, they can use VMware to justify the prices. Yeah. Maybe use that hostage. And that installed base. That's kind of Mike conspiracy. >>I think they've told us what they're gonna do. >><laugh> I do. >>Maybe it's not like C what's your conspiracy theory like Symantec, but what >>Do you think? Well, I mean, there's still, I mean, so VMware there's really nobody that can do all the things that VMware does say. So really impossible for an enterprise to just rip 'em out. But obviously you can, you can sour people's taste and you can very much influence the direction they head in with the collection of, of providers. One thing, interesting thing here is, was the 37% of VMware's revenues sold through Dell. So there's, there's lots of dependencies. It's not, it's not as simple as I think John, you you're right. You can't just pull the CA playbook out and rerun it here. This is a lot more complex. Yeah. It's a lot more volume of, of, of distribution, but a fair amount of VMware's install >>Base Dell's influence is still there basically >>Is in the mid-market. It's not, it's not something that they're gonna touch directly. >>You think about what VMware did. I mean, they kept adding new businesses, buying new businesses. I mean, is security business gonna stay >>Networking security, I think are interesting. >>Same >>Customers >>Over and over. Haven't done anything. VMware has the same customers. What new >>Customers. So imagine simplifying VMware. Right, right. Becomes a different equation. It's really interesting. And to your point, yeah. I mean, I think Broadcom is, I mean, Tom Crouse knows how to run a business. >>Yeah. He knows how to run a business. He's gonna, I, I think it's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be an efficient business. It's gonna be a well run business, but I think it's a pivot point for >>Broadcom. It's amazing to me, Broadcom sells to HPE. They sell it to Dell and they've got a market cap. That's 10 X, you know? Yes. Yeah. All we gotta go guys. Awesome. Great conversation guys. >>A lot. Thanks for having us on. >>Okay. Listen, uh, day two is a, is a wrap. We'll be here tomorrow, all day. Dave ante, John furrier, Lisa Martin, Lisa. Hope you're feeling okay. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching the cube, your leader in enterprise tech, live coverage.