>> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. HOLLOWAY ALTO, California It is a cube conversation >> high on Peter Birds and welcome to another cube conversation from our beautiful Palo Alto studios. One of the things that makes a cube so exciting as we get great guest from great companies coming on here and talking about some of their new products that they're trying to get in the marketplace of customers Khun Doom or with their technology. And we've got that today. Eric Herzog, cmon VP of worldwide storage channels that IBM storage. He's here to talk about some new things that IBM is doing that especially relevant to high performance, closer, more down market, branch oriented kinds of applications. Eric, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, Peter. Really appreciate. Very excited to be with Cuba's Always. >> All right, So what? Start Give us the quick business update and IBM, And let's talk about how that inform some of the new announcement. You >> sure? So two thousand eighteen was a great year for IBM storage. Lots of new introductions and portfolio continue with our multi cloudiness. Everything we've doing now for seven years, all about my multi cloud hybrid private, multiple public cloud providers would continue that mantra. You always something very interesting from a storage array system level perspective brought out extensive portfolio around Envy Me the newest high performance protocol, both inside of a storage array and connecting a storage rate into a network fabric for storage. >> Now let's talk about that. Envy me because envy Me has been associate ID a little bit more higher and stuff. Some of the new things you're doing are bringing envy me and related classes of technology flash to a new class of workload. New class of Hugh's case. Tell us about it. >> Absolutely so what we're doing is bringing out the >> brand new >> refresh store wise portfolio. We start with R V seven thousand, which has envy me both inside the array and support for envy him Over Fibre channel. We have our fifty one hundred just below that, also supporting Envy me in the storage system. We're bringing out a new version of our fifty thirty called the fifty thirty at the very entry space are fifty tenny. These solutions all deliver dramatic performance gains but incredible price discounts as well. For example, the fifty ten e is not only twice as fast as the older fifty ten, but it happens to be up to twenty five percent less expensive. More for the money. That's the key watchword in the store. Wai's family. >> So tell us a little bit more about the fifty Tenney. What kind of use you love talking about applications, workload? Use cases? What kinds of applications were close use cases Are we talking about? >> So we've done a couple things. So first of all, we're leading with all flash across the portfolio. Yes, we still sell hybrids and hard drive a ways, and we'LL still do that in the fifty Tenney, for example. So if you're using hard drive, raise backup in archive work loads. Of course. Now, when using all flash arrays in a smaller shop, it could be your primary storage. Herzog's Barn Grill. That might be the great way to go when you're thinking more of the broader enterprises. It's great for edge. So branches of a bank, all of the outlets of a retail location and even a core data center. Not every workload is even not every data set is even so. Certain things need more expensive arrays and other ways you can go with an entry product. Still deliver the availability, the reliability of the performance you need, but you don't need to spend the most amount of money and stories gives you. That breath gives you the right price point the right software, and it even gives you six nines of availability, which is only thirty one seconds of downtime in a full year on an entry product. That's incredible. >> Well, I would think that the fifty thirty he would be especially relevant for some of those scale at work loves. Tell us about that. >> So in the fifty thirty, we can scale out into two note cluster up to thirty two petabytes, but we start small. You could get it at twelve. Same thing two. Ex Performance. Up to thirty percent less money and all of the store West family comes with our award winning Spectrum Virtualized software, which delivers enterprise class data services. Such a snapshot replication data rest, encryption, tearing, migration, et cetera, et cetera, not only for IBM store wise portfolio, but actually could work with over four hundred fifty raise, most of which are not ours. Great value for the money. Great software and bring better performance at a lower price. The fifty thirty and the whole portfolio includes our spectrum virtually software family. >> Now that's important because as we think about that, the relationship between these and other IBM or other products in the portfolio and multi cloud I know there's some work that's being done there tell us a bit about some of the some of the new updates that you've made. How that spectrum family is becoming even more relevant in the multi club so >> well, when you look at the whole family, everything in the spectrum family has heavy clarification in a multi cloud environment. Let's take spectrum protect not new from an announcement perspective of what we're doing and what we're launching on what we're doing from a new perspective. But it's been ableto backup to the cloud for years. In fact, over three hundred fifty cloud providers use spectrum protect as the engine further back. Oppa's a service portfolio Spectrum virtualized Computer Club. But we also have spectrum virtualized for public cloud that allows you to do staff shot replication only for IBM arrays, but for competitive a raise out to a public loud and even supports a rhe air gapping with a snapshot so you don't have to worry about ransomware malware, that's all. With Spectrum Virtualized family are spectrum sale product can automatically tear to the cloud IBM clad object storage could go from on premise toe off premise. So the big thing we've done with all of our portfolio, the software and then the arrays that sit on it when the case of spectrum protect backup is make sure we can work with any and almost every single cloud in the industry. Whether it's a big cloud like IBM Cloud, Amazon or Microsoft or a small cloud provider, you may want to use a local cloud provider depending on where you're located, not use one of the big club fighters. We work with that cloud provider to, But you made >> some made some special for spectrum virtual eyes. I mean spectrum virtualized. You're adding a new brother to the portfolio >> so that spectrum virtualized Republic Cloud. We first brought it out on IBM Cloud only. It now supports a ws. We know customers multi cloud most end users and you guys have written about it extensively at Weeki Bond in the Cube and silicon angle. That and users will not use one public loud. They will have four, five, six different public clouds. So spectrum virtualized republic loud delivers to onsite arrays. All the capability spectrum virtualized for public cloud sits in a V m wear virtualized in stand station out of the public cloud provider. Giving all those enterprise class functionalities and allowing us to move data back and forth to IBM. Cloud allows to move data back and forth to an Amazon cloud not only first store wise but also for again over four hundred fifty Raise that aren't ours using the spectrum virtualized software. So that's a great edition. We had it for IBM Cloud now for Amazon. As Republican Stanley first brought it out last year. It will also be extended to more clouds in the future as well. >> So store rise gonna refresh nooooo spectrum virtualized for public cloud Also getting, you know, adding to the portfolio great stuff. How do you anticipate that customers are gonna respond? >> Well, we've already had a great response for those customers we talked to under a non disclosure agreement. Now we're public with this new portfolio. What's not to like? You get extensive software capably spectrum virtualized with our fifty one hundred store wise and are seven thousand stories. Now get thie Envy Me technology, which is white hot performance technology in the storage injury, except at a much lower price point that when our competitors are brought out. So he brought Andrea me high end technology into the entry price point space, which is great. And we also have a nice portfolio that gives you certain products. Accuse the court data center other pranks that you would use the edge like banking and all the locations or in retail. So you're not going to put the most expensive practice. But you have a great six nines of availability, extensive software, twice the performance, and I said up to twenty five percent or thirty percent less, depending on which of our products than the older product. Bigger, faster, better, cheaper. >> So, Eric, let me be one of first congratulate you thie IBM storage journey since you and Ed Assualt have shown up at IBM or come backto idea in some cases has it's been a great thing to watch. You really refreshed portfolio made some great strides and we're getting great feedback from customers about the effort. So congratulations. >> Great. Thank you. And the new store lives is the latest in that and look for more just like we did in two thousand eighteen. Refresh across the plug. There's more coming in the second half here in other elements of our portfolio. >> Great sea IBM back and relevant in storage World Eric Herds on CMO VP of worldwide store channels, IBM Storage Thanks once again for being on the Cube. >> Thank you, Peter on. >> I'm Peter Burroughs. Thanks for listening until next time. Thanks for participating in this cube conversation.

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. We're here in New York City for on the ground coverage for three days, wall-to-wall for Blockchain Week, New York's part of Consensus 2018. Sold out show, we're out in the open. Open (mumbles) to all the cons here. Next guest is Alex Mashinsky, Founder and CEO of Celsius. Seasoned entrepreneur, great debater on stage, great brawl recently at the Milk Institute. We'll talk about that. But more importantly, he's got a great project called Celsius, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> So, I love we just chatted before the camera turned on about some of the things you've done. You've gotten into a little bit of a great heated panel discussion. With someone who actually doesn't even hold cryptocurrency. He's saying it's all bullshit. >> Yes >> Right, so tell about the story. It was written up by Bloomberg, what was this famous brawl in the Milk Institute? >> Yeah, so the Milk Institute, they've been having conferences for the last 25 years and they're trying to combine the making money with doing good in the world, right? So, it's doing well and doing good at the same time. And that's what crypto is all about, right? And so, they had a panel about crypto with me and Nouriel Roubini, who's like Doctor Doom who predicted the last 15 recessions. There were only two, but they were predicted all 15 of them. So, I was telling him, even a broken clock is right twice a day, you know? He was going at me, he was going at the community, he was calling it a scam. And when you don't own any coin and you have not come to an event like this and seen 8,000 people celebrate this innovation, power to the people, then what are you talking about? So, I was there to really defend the community. It wasn't about me or him. >> Yeah, you did a good job. Well, thank you for doing that. Also, you're on a great project. I've been talking about a lot of other things I want to get to in the industry that you have a view and opinion on I would like to get. But your project Celsius. Take a minute to explain that, because I think this highlights really what's going on. I chatted earlier today about token economics. This is a new way, a new infrastructure, a new capability, a new mechanism that's really becoming powerful, of a network effect. >> Yes. >> So, the old world was DNS. 30 years-old stack on ecommerce, search engines, they're not accurate for network effects, a new dynamic, new data source is happening and it's creating new value, new data. >> Yes. >> Talk about Celsius the project and your value proposition. >> Right, so Celsius Network is basically trying to create an algorithmic cloud-based solution that does everything in your best interest. So, you have to think of it as a basket of financial services that do simple things like give you a loan or allow you to earn interest, give you access to a lot of great financial products, insurance and other things, that altogether do everything in your best interest. And what we're doing is we're enabling 100 million new people to come into the cryptocommunity and enabling them to benefit from all these things both for the increase in the value of the coins but also allowing their money to earn money for them. And today, if you think about banks, right? They take your money, right? You make a deposit, they take your money, they'll lend it to me on my credit card, they charge me 25%, they give you 1%. So, they take all that margin that you talked about. They squeeze all of that and keep it to themselves. >> And they're representing two people. It's like a realtor, who do you represent, the buyer or the seller? >> They're a toll collector in the middle, exactly. They're not adding any value. >> So, the new shift is on user value-- >> Exactly. >> And you see real-world examples of this. The whole Facebook debacle, who owns your data, and Mark Zuckerberg was testifying in front of the Senate in Congress, saying, "No, we don't sell your data." But they license the data and they use it. >> They extract all the value from it. >> They don't actually sell the data, true. But they license the shit out of it, to target you. >> They squeeze every last penny out of it. >> This is now obvious to people. >> Yes. >> That problem. >> Yes. >> Talk about the cryptobenefits, where is this shift happening, users, the power to the people, I get the phrase, but where is it happening? The token level-- >> So for example, Yeah, let's take an example, so most of the people here on this floor, they take their coins, they put them in exchanges, they celebrate the fact that the coin went up 50, 100% or whatever, but they don't realize that they leaving a lot of money on the table, because these exchanges do shorting, front-running, all kind of other stuff that should be illegal, but they do it, so they announce these amazing earnings, Binance announced amazing earnings and a lot of that earnings comes from the money that should be given back to you and me. So, if you think about the credit card company giving you two percent back, this is kind of the same thing. We are basically taking all of that earnings and giving it back to the coin-holders and we're saying, "Don't keep your money on exchanges, keep your money in a wallet that represents your best interest." It extracts all that value and gives it back to you. >> And so, what's your value proposition? You know what, you should say, "Use our wallet, use our system." >> Right. >> And then you represent their currency? >> So, we huddle together, we create a giant pool of BTC, a giant pool of ETH, or other coins, and we lend against that. So, we can do loans to the community, we charge nine percent for asset-backed loans, basically, so you need a loan against your crypto. This way you don't have to pay taxes, you can defer your tax, you can get liquidity without triggering all the tax that today you have to-- or you can just earn interest. So, without selling the coins, you can basically generate five to nine percent income that's continuous on top of that appreciation, you still get all the appreciation of the coin, but you're also generating income. >> So, you can bring contextual services around the crypto-holder interest. >> Yeah, so we find people willing to pay that. For example, other crypto-holders who want a loan, and they pay us nine percent, we give five percent to the community. Hedge funds who short BTC or ETH, they pay us ten or 15%, we give most of it back to the community. But the beauty is that the coin-holder doesn't have to do anything. They don't have to move from this account to that account. They don't do transactions. All they have to do is decide if Celsius Network is doing everything in their best interest or not. And the point is is that the next 100 million people that are going to join crypto, they're not speculators or anarchists or libertarians like most of the people here on the floor. They're people who kind of look at all this, saying, "It's too complicated, I don't know what to do, I'm not going to get in at the right time, I'm not going to get out at the right time." They don't have anyone they can trust. >> So, I'm going to be able to ask the Average Joe six-pack question, "Hey that's all fine, I love what you're doing. Come on, sign me up. But wait a minute. If you put all this crypto in one spot, the frickin' hackers are going to get it. >> Right. >> Because, how do you protect me against-- I heard, see, Mt. Gox was in the-- and all this stuff's going on, I'm worried that it's going to get hacked. Even wherever I put it." >> Exactly. And then Nouriel basically asked me the same question. So, in 10 years since BitCoin was created, there hasn't been a single instance of anyone cracking the blockchain itself. All the theft, everything that happened was because we gave somebody our private key and we entrusted them with it, and they screwed up. Mt. Gox, it basically broke into the exchange and so on. So, we keep everything in cold storage. And it's not ours, we have a custodian that is a giant company that is willing to accept all that, keep it in cold storage and we lend against it. We lend against the pull. >> So the private key's going in cold storage? >> Everything is staying in cold storage, which is the safest way to keep your crypto. It's much safer than keeping it on an exchange or keeping it in a different place. >> And it's all through--it's encryption, it's never safe to--a private key's a private key. Right, I mean, we've seen this before. >> Exactly. >> It's not rocket science. >> But even if you keep it in your home, in your safe, that's not as safe as putting it in a facility that is resistant to nuclear attack and has four layers of security and no human can get into the last room. It's a physical connection. >> I've heard this problem, just estate planning, someone dies, where's his cryptokey? >> Exactly. >> Unlocking, say 30 to 100 million dollars' worth of crypto. >> Exactly. >> It's not obvious. Well, the guy was smart, he put it in lock boxes all around the country. Wait a minute, no one knows where they are. >> But as a custodian, if you show us that you are the ultimate heir and you have the legal representation, then we can handle it, right? We can transfer that. But really, you're protecting it against a hacker coming in and stealing it from you. All the legal ramifications still apply. >> So, let's talk about the industry. What do you like about the industry right now, and what do you think that needs more work on, faster, or behavior-wise, what's your general temperature-taking of the current community? A lot of back-end work being done. Some complaints I heard about the demos, where some people say the front end was pretty sucky. >> Yes. >> But I think that's because a lot of back end work's being done. >> Well, this reminds me of 95 through 2000, I wrote some of the original Void protocols and everybody told me it's not going to work, the Internet is too slow, you can't scale, it's not safe. >> Yeah. >> I hear the same arguments again and again. >> Exactly. >> Today a billion people use Void every day and they don't even know who created it or how it works. I go in a room, I do speeches, right? And I ask, "Who here knows how Void works?" Not a single hand goes up. So, we need to get to the point where blockchain and crypto works the same way, no one needs to understand how it works, they just need to use it and trust it. So, the biggest thing I think holding us up right now is actually not technical. Because there's over 130 different blockchains. And some of them solves the scalability issues and security issues. The problem is is that we kind of have the early adopter phase, but we cannot leapfrog into the mass adoption phase. Because we're still at the early phase of operation. >> Exactly, is this just evolution or is it something specific? >> Well, the applications that we have today are not things that most of the people on the planet can use. That's what I'm saying, like for example, lending and borrowing is much more attractive than trading coins with each other. >> Yeah, it's like the Web, and Web 1.0, I mean-- >> Exactly. >> Search was the first application, and then everyone went to there, check their stock quotes. >> Looking at travel-- >> Travel, buy your car-- >> Exactly. >> Basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs kind of things. >> Yes. >> So, but that was interesting, because it was a whole new way. And by the way, same arguments I heard in the Web. "It's so slow. A mini-computer's so much faster than this AOL thing at 9600 bot modem." But the apples weren't being compared to other apples. It was replacing direct mail where I used to put stamps on envelopes and mail things. >> That's right, look. The bank gives you one percent. We pay five percent. So, that is a very attractive reason to switch from the bank to Celsius. Also, most people don't realize that the power the bank has is because we make all the deposits there. We stop depositing money there, they will have to pay us five percent, because as the money leaves them, they will have to raise the rates, they're going to have to attract you with more interest. So, it's a win-win, the community wins on the crypto side, and we're forcing the banks to do the right thing. >> Alright, I want to get your opinion, Alex, on ICOs. Did you guys do an ICO? How much did you raise? And what's your general take of the ICO market? I mean, certainly, blockchain, I've said this before, takes inefficiencies and makes them highly efficient, and we know the capital markets are very inefficient, so it's a bubble, okay. I have a choice. Tokens or VC, it's a no-brainer, go tokens. >> So look, I've had coins since 2013, I've invested in over 30 ICOs myself, and then when I couldn't find what Celsius does, I decided to start a new company, this is my eighth company as a founder. And so, I raised a billion dollars on the VC side, I know how that world works, had plenty of exits, and here we went to the community, we excluded all the VCs, we did not take money from a single venture guy because this is all about building the community. So, we just closed our round, about a month ago, we raised $15 million. We had 15,000 people sign up, 95% men. And it just drove me crazy, because half of our company's women, I thought that at least half of the people would be female. And I realized how big the problem is that we do not-- I mean, if you look at the floor here, we do not include the stronger sex. So, she's female, exactly. >> I'm promoting it here. >> I agree, I'm a big supporter too, so, I think when you think about it, if we want to be inclusive and we want this revolution to take hold, we have to solve these problems. What is the killer app, where are the female participants, how do we make it global, how do we make it inclusive, and how do we make the user interface and everything else so simple that you don't have to understand anything to use it every day. >> And what's your vision on how the ICOs are going to trend? >> Right. >> More stability, obviously. It'll level out, the bubble will-- I don't think it'll be a massive pop, I think it's going to be a small squeeze, so I think there's enough community involvement that self-governance will kick, in my opinion, but what's your take on the ICO? >> So, we definitely, this is like a Cambrian explosion. So, we are throwing money at everything. So, we're throwing money at good projects, bad projects, it's like a spray-and-pray mentality of the old days in 95 to 2000, we've seen that before. But from this some great companies are going to be born and I think the winners here are going to be bigger than Google, bigger than Apple, because the market is bigger. Money is the biggest market in the world, right? There's nothing bigger than all the money in the world, by definition. So, it's bigger than advertising, it's bigger than the social networks and it's bigger than Apple and whatever they're making. So, I believe that out of these companies, there are several thousand companies here, 8,000 participants, there were 4,000 ICOs that already took place or that are coming to be and out of that you're going to have your giant winners. And obviously Celsius is hoping to be one of them, but it's whoever builds the biggest community is the one that's going to win. And for us, it's all about giving back everything to the community. >> Your mission is awesome, I love your mission, and I love your expertise, love your experience. I think the community really is great to have you being a champion, being a mentor, I know you're doing a lot of paying it forward, great job. What's your view for the young entrepreneur out there, or someone who's got a growing opportunity that says, "Hey, you know what? I'm actually tailor-made for decentralization, I have a network community, network effect, I have all these great things going on, I want to scale." >> That's a great question because-- >> What's the playbook? >> A lot of people come to me and say, Oh, I'm too late to the game." No one is too late to the game. The experts have a six month experience. So, you talk to most of the people here, this is the first event, this is the first show. So, what I say to a lot of entrepreneurs is that if you pick the right vertical, you can very quickly become the best in the world at it. And I think the first phase of evolution here in the blockchain is all about financial products and financial solutions. I wouldn't go after healthcare, I wouldn't go after-- so like, insurance, or solving financial problems that currently have giant toll collectors who collect all the value, like the banks, or like the financial service providers, the insurance and so on. So, if you can solve those areas, you can scale very quickly, because Interen already has six or seven billion people on it, so now you can just bring them all in and haggle on their behalf in the cryptocommunity. >> I feel like I should lie down on the couch and ask Dr. Alex for some more advice. So, I'm actually going to ask you some specific questions. >> No couch here, man! There's no off switch here. >> I'll pass out, so much action going on. I mean, the vibe here is amazing. So, theCUBE, we're doing an open token model, got a great community, we want to grow and be number one at digital media, covering events with a network effect, video and media. We see token as a great opportunity. What's your advice? You're on our advisory team, what do you tell us to do? >> So, the curation is excellent, I think you guys do a great job at pulling the content. And what's missing in this community is really an automated process that kind of asks the community, "What do you guys believe in?" It's very hard for most people here to figure out which ones of these thousands of projects are trending right now, for example. And we can all vote on our app, for example. If you could create an app that allowed all of us to vote during the show, on what's trending and you had those guys being interviewed instead of me, you would have the killer apps. All of us know what they are and are not, but we should vote on it. >> So, use collective intelligence of the data-- >> Yes. >> And make a content operating system-- >> Exactly, use your metadata that you're already producing to do real-time input and bring those guys here, interview them and ask them about why their projects are hot. Celsius, people ask me all the time, "How do I get involved? How do I get involved? I saw you on Rubena, I saw you on this show." And so, we manage to create a lot of buzz around us and there are a few other projects like that, the community needs to get around the good projects and support them, because when we spend a lot of money on bad projects, we're not giving enough support to the good projects. >> You got to close loop that data, make it a community brand. That's what you're doing, that's what we're trying to do here, covering the events. So, we're going to build a content operating system. >> There we go! >> Run-time assembly, whatever the votes-- >> Let everybody vote in real-time, yes. >> Give me 50 times I see the hashtag-- >> Right, and the size of the name grows based on the adoption. >> You would have to have, like, clips instantly available, you would have to have all the metadata-- >> It's all real-time. >> You'd have to have all that stuff available. >> And the community will post it for you, you just do the final interviews, just bring these guys and say, "Okay, you won number one, number two, number three, and you give them the awards. >> Awesome, I love this conversation, even though we're kind of riffing, having fun. But the point of it is-- >> It's a new start-up let's do an ICO. >> Let's do an ICO, we can (mumbles) with that. No, but this is really fundamental for the entrepreneurs at the tech culture, we're talking about basically dev ops. >> Yes. >> Using cloud computing, we can have unlimited-- >> You can spin it up in a few days. >> You can apply automation, AI, that's your point, trust the software. >> Yes. If you're doing it for the community, they will recognize it and adopt you very quickly. >> They'll apply a human curation layer on top of it. >> With full transparency, you've got to show that you're doing everything for the community, like what we're trying to do, right? We're showing, when we tell you you're going to earn 5.1%, you can dig in and see who's getting paid and why they're getting this much money, what's the allocation, every token that's being given to anyone, all the math behind it is fully transparent, right? >> Final question-- >> Try to ask the bank for that. See what they're saying. >> Transparency? Go find another bank. Final question, your summary of the show. What's your take, was it good? Good vibes? What was the content agenda? What was the most exciting thing you saw, what's your summary of Consensus 2018? >> So, Consensus, when they organized it, they were bragging that 4,000 people are going to show up, and that's why they moved to the Hilton from the Marriott. And then 8,000 people show up, the lines were outside the whole hotel, so it proves that the demand is there. Everybody wants to come and learn about it, they want to know why this is so hot, why this revolution is here to stay, so what I'm taking out of the show is that this innovation is just in its infancy and there's a lot of people who are still yet to join. And the best ideas, the winners, have not yet been decided. So, watch out for all those new ideas that we haven't heard about yet. >> And it's accelerated from other trends. >> Yes, it definitely accelerated. >> Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius, former entrepreneur of multiple startups. See, he knows the old way, he sees the new way, he's been a successful entrepreneur, seasoned community member. Thanks for coming on, we appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. I appreciate it. >> I'm John Furrier here with theCUBE on the ground out in the open, in the community, CUBE coverage here, Blockchain Week 2018 New York. Thanks for watching. (electronic-based music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas It's theCube covering Dell Technologies World 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of the Inaugural Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Getting to the end of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage from two sets I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host John Troyer, and for those of you that haven't attended one of these shows, sometimes like "Oh, you're going to Vegas, this is some boondoggle," but I'm really happy, I've got a customer, one of the Dell EMC employees, here. A lot of stuff goes on. There's learning, there's lotsa meetings, there's, you know, you come here, you kind of, you know, get as much out of it as you can. So, first, Stephen Herzig, who's the Director of Enterprise Systems at the University of Arkansas, >> Correct, yes. >> Stu: You had a busy week so far. >> I have. >> Thank you for joining us >> You bet. >> Stu: Also, Andrew McDaniel, who's the Senior Director of Ready Solutions for VDI with Dell EMC, thank you for joining us-- >> Thanks guys >> Alright, so, Stephen, first of all, give us a little bit about your background and University of Arkansas, I think most people know the Razorbacks-- >> Stephen: That's right, the Razorbacks! >> Talk about your org and your role there. >> Yeah, I'm Director of Enterprise Systems, as you mentioned. We're an R1 University, we have about 27,000 students, about 5,000 faculty and staff in the university. And, so my organization is responsible for maintaining, as I said, all the enterprise systems, essentially everything in the data center on the floor to support all the educational activities. Now there is some distributed or commonly known as shadow IT organizations throughout the university and we work quite closely with them, too. >> Okay, you stamp out all that shadow IT stuff and pull it all back in, right? >> Stephen: (laughs) No, no! No, absolutely not. >> We'll get a, Andrew, before we get into more about the university, tell us a little bit about your role and your org, inside Dell EMC. >> So my organization basically develops the end-to-end VDI solutions that Dell EMC sell globally. So, we work with partners such as VMware and Citrix, to put together the industry leading solutions for VDI. Tested, validated, engineered, to give real good confidence in the solution the customer's going to buy. >> Okay, John and I spent many years looking at these, you know, memes in the industry, all that, you know, but uh, Stephen, before we get into the VDI piece, give us, what are some of the challenges that you're facing in the University? We've had, you know, from an IT standpoint, we know the technology requirements are more than ever. While tuitions go up, budgets are always a challenge. So, when you're talking to your peers, what are the things you're all commiserating about or, you know, working at. >> Yeah, like any IT organization, it's a challenge to do more with less. We're constantly being required to support more systems, more technology, and technology is becoming more and more an integral part of the educational process. We also have students coming from very diverse backgrounds, and so the kinds of computing devices that they're able to bring to the university with them, some can afford high-end, some not, and so, it's a challenge for us to deliver that, the applications to them, no matter what kind of device they happen to bring. >> Alright, so, sounds like VDI is something that fits there-- >> Yes >> Before we get into the actual solution, tell us, what was the struggle you were facing, what led to that, what was there, was there a mandate? How did you get to the solution that you were-- >> Well, really, we were struggling with those challenges We're a very small IT team, and as those things grew, we knew we had to find a way to reduce the number of resources that we're supporting, all the end points, all the machines in the labs, all the machines on faculty and staff desks, and again, like I said, the students bring their own devices, which we had to support as well. >> Alright, so, you ended up choosing a Dell Solution, maybe give us a little bit about that, that process and walk us through the project some. >> Yeah, we really needed a solution. We could not go out and assemble pieces, parts, from a lot of different vendors, and we needed a solution that was tailored to our needs, that fit, VDI is complex by its nature, but some vendors made it really complex. So, we had to find one that was right for our environment, for what we were trying to achieve, and of course, at the right price point. Higher education, we're not flush with cash. >> That's always been really hard, I think that's been the hard thing about VDI, right? It's always been kind of complicated and hard to do, at least back in the day, and then when you did it, half the things didn't work, and the things that didn't work were really weird, and the user was very confused. "This application works, but this one doesn't." And, "where's my cursor?" and "Everything went wonky all of a sudden and I can't login at 9am." I mean, I'm kind of curious, what is necessary maybe, from eye-level in a modern VDI solution stack, that makes it easy? You know, is it the hypervisor, the end clients? >> I think, John, you know we've seen such great advances in the software side of it, right? So, if you look at Horizon, as a broker, VMware Horizon, the advances that they've made in things like protocols, right, so Blast Extreme, for example, one of the big challenges that we've always had, is things like Link or Skype, in a VDI environment. It was, it made a disaster for many customers, right? So, that has been solved by VMware and the advances that they did, above and beyond what was capable in PC over IP. So, that's one of the things. From a hardware perspective, you know, one of the challenges we frequently had in VDI, was poor user experience, right? And it was typically because the graphics requirement for the application could not be delivered by the CPU alone, right, so GPUs, Nvidia, K1, K2's, then it went to the M10, M60's, and moving forward into the P4 and P40's, they've really helped us to improve that user experience, and it's starting to get to a point where GPUs are a standard delivery within any VDI employment. So, you get really good experience moving forward. And as you know, if you can't deliver a good user experience, the project is dead before it even starts. Alright, so that's a big challenge. >> Stephen, do you have any commentary on some of the challenges that we faced before? What was your experience like? >> Yeah, it, that's exactly right. We made the decision early on to include GPU in every session that we served up. And we weren't quite sure, 'cause it is an additional expense, but it was one of the best decisions that we've made. It really does make all the difference. >> Was there something specific from the application or user-base, and how they were using it, that led you to that? >> Well, we are all Windows 10, and Windows 10 just looks better, it runs better, the video, scrolling through a Word document, the text, some are very nuanced, but it makes a big difference in the user experience. And of course, we have higher-end users using CAD programs, things like that, you know, in the School of Engineering, they needed the GPU for what they were doing. >> Andrew, wondering if you could give us, little bit of an update on the stack, So, I think back to, on the EMC side, I watched everything from the Flash on the converge side. On the Dell side, there was the Wyse acquisition of course, EMC and VM were coming together, so, a long journey, but even the first year we did theCube, you know, Dell had some big customers doing large scale, cost-effective VDI, because, had that, you know, to give some of the marketing terms I've heard here, it's end to end, but you add the devices all the way through. So, bring us up to 2018. >> Yeah, so, I guess, you know, one of the challenges that Stephen spoke about is the, previously, the hassle of having to go and buy each of the individual components from multiple different vendors. So, you're buying your storage from one vendor, compute from another, GPUs from another, hypervisor from another, broker from another, and so on. So, it gets very complicated to manage all of that. And so, we had lots of customers who had run into scenarios where, say a BIAS firmware and a driver revision were not compatible, and so we'd run into those kinds of problems that we were talking about earlier on, right? So, I think, you know, bringing all of that together, in Dell Technologies, we can now deliver every single aspect of what you need for a VDI deployment. So, we created a bundle called VDI Complete. It uses vSAN ReadyNodes or VxRail, right? So, hyper-converged, massive from a VDI perspective, and I'll come back to that in a second. It pairs then, Horizon Advanced or Horizon Enterprise, with those base platforms, and the Dell Wyse Thin clients. So, every aspect, true end to end, is delivered by Dell Technologies, and there's simply no other vendor in the market who can do that. So, what that basically does is it gives the customer confidence that everything that has been tested can be owned, from a support perspective, by Dell Technologies. Alright, so, if you've got a problem, we're not going to hand you off to another company to go solve that issue, or lay blame with somebody else. It's fully our stack, and as a result, we take full responsibility for it. And that's one of the benefits that we have with customers like University of Arkansas. >> And that was important to us. That single point of contact for support was really important to us. >> Stephen, I wonder if you could talk about, from an operational standpoint, you said, you've got a small team. One of the challenges, at least years ago, was like "Oh, wait! I have the guy that walked around "and did the desktops, now I centralized it, "who owns it, you know, how do we sort through this? "You know, we've got a full stack there. "Simplicity's one of the big messages of HCI," but what was the reality for your team and the roles, how did you change? >> Well one of the first areas, or actually, the first area that we implemented VDI in was in the labs. Hundreds of end points across the campus. And, before VDI, you would walk into the lab, and a certain percentage of the machines would always be down. They needed updating, there was a virus, somebody spilled a coffee on the machine, you know, that kind of thing. After VDI, when you walked into the lab, 100% of the end points were always up, and there was no noise in the lab, except when somebody printed. So, the maintenance required, the resources for my team, and these distributed IT teams was reduced drastically. As a matter of fact, some of the distributed teams had 50% of their resources reduced. That could then go and do more high-value projects and deliver high-value services to their colleges. >> From the student and faculty perspective, it sounds like the uptake has been good, and the satisfaction level high. I mean, user experience is everything with VDI, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, the students came, we installed during spring break, and they came back from spring break, went into the labs with these beautiful new 27-inch monitors, sat down, logged on, and it looked almost the same as before. Which was exactly what we were after. We wanted that same high-quality experience in VDI that they had with a laptop or a desktop. >> The monitors are an important thing to consider, right, 'cause a lot of customers will think about the data center side of VDI, right, so, get lots of compute, good, high-performing storage, good network, and then they put a really poorly designed thin client or an old desktop PC, or something like that, on the end, and wonder why they're not getting good performance, right? So, we just launched yesterday the Dell Wyse 5070. It's the first thin client in the market that can have six monitors attached to it, four of those can be 4K, and two 2K, right? So, it's immense from a display perspective, and this is what our customers are demanding. Especially in financial services, for example, or in automotive design, you know, in CAD labs, for example, you need three or four really good, high-quality screens attached. >> Well, I'm saying, I'll date myself, I wish I had that when I was playing Doom when I was in college in the labs. >> That too! >> That does bring into question, your upgrade and scenarios, moving on to the future, right? You used to have all those janky old PC's that you'd kind of, maybe they'd slide out the back door, maybe they'd get recycled, or whatever, but now it's a different refreshed cycle, and maybe even different use cases. >> Yeah, the lifespan of the endpoints is much longer with the VDI solution. >> John: It's got to be good, yeah. I was curious, you mentioned the converged infrastructure, too, Andrew. I mean, how does that play into it? (muffled) >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, traditionally, a SAN infrastructure was used in VDI, alright? So, for us, that would have been Equallogic Compellent, historically. Now, we're seeing that VDI market almost totally transition to hyperconverged. Alright, so vSAN has really revolutionized VDI, okay? I'd say, you know, a good 30, 35% of all VxRail and vSan deployments that we do, are in the VDI space. So, it's really, and I would say about 90, 95% of our VDI deployments are on hyperconverged rather than a traditional SAN infrastructure. That's really where VDI has moved now. 'Cause it gives customers the ability to scale on demand. Instead of having to go and buy another half-million dollar storage rate, add another thousand users, you can simply add in a couple of more compute nodes with the storage built in. For us, hybrid works very well. So, a hybrid-disc configuration is working very well in most VDI deployments. Some customers require all flash, it depends on the applications and the other kind of performance that they want to get from it. But for a majority of customers, hyperconverged with the hybrid configuration works brilliantly. >> So, Stephen, I want to give you the final word. Sounds like everything went really well, but one of the things we always like to understand, when you're talking with your peers, they said "Hey, what did you learn? "What would you do a little different, "either internally, or configuration-wise, or roll-out," What would you tell your peers? >> Well, when we implemented VDI it was just before VDI Complete came out. So, the work that's done in the VDI Complete solution, we didn't have. So, as we look to the future, and we want to expand, and grow our environment, VDI Complete will be a huge help. Had we had that, it only took us about four months to stand it up, which, considering what we accomplished, was very short time, but, if we had had VDI Complete, that time would've been much more compressed. So, looking to the future, we're looking to expand using VDI Complete. >> Just to, Andrew, maybe you can tie the knot on this bow for us, is sounds like this could, if I've got VDI, I don't have to start brand new, it can fit with existing environments, how does that all work? >> Absolutely, I mean we've got lots of customers who've already done Citrix or VMware deployments, right? Ideally, you want to connect with one broker. So you want to stick with one broker. But, we can bring in a hyperconverged VDI solution into your existing user estate, and merge into that. So, that's pretty common. >> Alright, well, Andrew and Stephen, thank you so much for sharing the story. Really great to always get the customer stories. We're getting towards the end of three days of live coverage here at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, at Dell Technologies World 2018. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCube. (techno music)

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, Dr. Nic Williams, CEO of Stark and Wayne. Dr. Nic, thanks for joining me >> Thank you very much. I think you must've come to the conference from a different direction than I came. >> I'm a local, and I'm trying to get more people to come to the Boston area. We've been doing theCUBE now for, coming up on our ninth year of doing it, and it's only the third time I've done something in this convention center, so please, more tech shows to this area, Boston, the Hynes Convention Center, and things like that. >> There's plenty of tech people. I was at the Nero Cafe, everyone seemed like they were a tech person. >> Oh no, the Seaport region here is exploding. I've done two interviews today with companies here in Boston or Cambridge. There's a great tech scene. For some reason, you and I were joking, it's like, do we really need another conference in Vegas? I mean really. >> Dr. Nic: Right, no, I like the regional. >> But yeah, the weather here is unseasonably cold. It was snowing and sleeting this morning, which is not the Spring weather. >> It is April, it is mid-April, and it's almost snowing outside. >> Alright, so Dr. Nic, first of all, you get props for the T-shirt. You've got Iron Man and Doctor Doom, and we're saying that there is a connection between the superheroes and Stark and Wayne. >> Right, so Stark and Wayne is founded by two fictional superheroes. The best founders are the fictional ones, they don't go to meetings, they're too busy making, you know, films. >> Yes, but everybody knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man, but nobody's supposed to know that Bruce Wayne was Batman. >> Nic: Right, right. >> But I've heard Stark and Wayne mentioned a number of times by customers here at the conference. So, for our audience that doesn't know, what does Stark and Wayne do, and how are you involved in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem? >> So Stark and Wayne, I first found Bosh, I founded Stark and Wayne. Earlier than that I discovered Bosh, six years ago, when it was first released, became like, I claimed to be the world's first evangelist for Bosh, and still probably the number one evangelist. And so Stark and Wayne came out of that. I was VMWare Pivotal's go-to person for standing things up and then customers grew, and you know. Yeah, people want to know who to go to, and when it comes to running Cloud Foundry, that's us. >> Yeah well, there's always that discussion, right? We've got all these wonderful platforms and these things that go together, but a lot of times there's services and people that help to get those up. Pivotal, just had a great discussion with a Pivotal person, talking about the reason they bought Pivotal Labs originally was like, wow, when people got stuck, that's what Pivotal Labs helps with that whole application development, so you're doing similar things with Bosh? >> Correct. No it's, we have our mental model around what it is to run operations of a platform, where you're running complex software, but you have an end user who expects everything just to work. And they never want to talk to you, and you don't want to talk to them. So it's this new world of IT where they get what they want instantly, that's the platform and it has to keep working. >> Dr Nic, is it an unreasonable thing for people to say that, yeah I want the things to work, and it shouldn't go down, and you know-- >> What is shadow IT? Shadow IT is the rebellion against corporate IT, so we want to bring back, well, we want to bring the wonders of public services to corporate environments. >> Okay, so-- >> That's the Cloud Foundry's story. >> Yeah, so talk to me a little bit about your users. We've watched this ecosystem mature since the early days, you know, things are more mature, but what's working well? What are the challenges? What are some of the prime things that have people calling up your team? >> So our scope, our users, or our customers, are people, they're the GEs and the Fords of the world running either as a service or internally large Cloud Foundry installations. And whilst Cloud Foundry is getting better and better, the security model is better, the upgrades seem to be flawless, it does keep getting more complex. You know, you can't just add container to container networking and it not get more complicated, right? So, yeah, trying to keep up-to-date with not just the core, but even the community of projects going on is part of the novelty, but also it's trying to bring it to customers and be successful. >> Yeah, I go to a number of these shows that are open source and every time you come there, it's like, "Well, here's the main things we're talking about "but here's six other projects that come up." How's that impact some of what you were just talking about? But, maybe elaborate as to how you deal with the pace of change, and those big companies, how are they help integrate those into what they're doing, or do they, you know-- >> So my Twitter is different from your Twitter. So my Twitter is 10 years worth of collecting of people who talk about interesting things, putting in a URL, just referencing an idea they're having, so they tend to be the thought leaders. They might be wrong, or like, let's put Docker into production, like, it doesn't make it wrong, but you've got to be wary of people who are too early. And you just start to peace a picture of what's being built, and you start to know which groups and which individuals are machines, and make great stuff, and you sort of track their work. Like HashiCorp, Mitchell Hashimoto, I knew him before HashiCorp, and he is a monster, and so you tend to track their work. >> So your Twitter and my Twitter might be more alike than you think. >> Nic: No maybe, right. >> I interviewed Armon at the Cube-Con show last year. My Twitter blowing up the show was a bunch of people arguing about whether Serverless was going to eradicate this whole ecosystem. >> Well, we can argue about that if you like, I guess. >> But love, one of the things coming into this show, was, you know, how does the whole Kubernetes discussion fit into Cloud Foundry? We've heard at this show, Microsoft, Google, many others, talking about, look, open source communities, they're going to work together. >> Well Windows is going to track things 'cause they think they need to sell them, right? But then Microsoft has Service Fabric, which they've owned and operated internally for 10 years, and so, I think some really interesting products may be built on top of Service Fabric, because of what it is. Whereas, you know, Kubernetes will run things, Service Fabric may build net new projects. And then Cloud Foundry's a different experience altogether, so some people, it's what problems they experienced, comes to the solution they find, and unless you've tried to run a platform for people, you might not think the solution's a platform. You might think it's Kubernetes, but-- >> Yeah, so one of the things we always look at when we talk about platforms, is what do they get stood up for? How many applications do you get to stand up there? What don't they work for? Maybe you could help give us a little bit of color as to what you see? >> I'm pretty good at jamming anything into Cloud Foundry, so I have a pretty small scope of what doesn't fit, but typically the idea of Cloud Foundry is the assumption the user is a developer who has 10 iterations a day. Alright, so they want to deploy, test, deploy, test, and then layer pipelines on top of that. You also get, you're going to get the backend of long, stable apps, but the value is, for many people, is that the deploy experience. And then, you know, but whilst, you're going to get those apps that live forever, we still get to replace the underlying core of it. So you still maintain a security model even for the things that are relatively unloved. Andthis is really valuable, like the nice, clean separation of the security, the package, CVEs, and the base OS, then the apps is part of the-- >> Yeah, absolutely, there's been an interesting kind of push and pull lately. We need to take some of those old applications, and we may need to lift and shift them. It doesn't mean that I can necessarily take advantage of all the cool stuff, and there are some things that I can't do with them when I get them on to that new platform. But absolutely, you need to worry about security, you know, data's like the center of everything. >> If you're lifting and shifting, there probably is no developer looking after it, so it's more of an operator function, and they can put it anywhere they like. They're looking after it now, whereas the Cloud Foundry experience is that developer-led experience that has an operations backend. If you're lifting and shifting, if it fits in Cloud Foundry, great, if it fits in Kubernetes, great. It's your responsibility. >> Yeah, what interaction do you have with your clients, with some of the kind of cultural and operational changes that they need to go through? So thinking specifically, you've go the developers doing things, you know, the operators, whether they're involved, whether that be devops or not, but I'm curious-- >> So the biggest change when it comes to helping people who are running platforms. And I know many people want to talk about the cloud transformation, but let's talk about the operations transformation, is to become a service-orientated group who are there to provide a service. Yes you're internal, yes they all have the same email address that you do, but you're a service-orientated organization, and that is not technology, that is a mental mode. And if you're not service-orientated, shadow IT occurs, because they can go to Amazon and get a support organization that will respond to them, and so you're competing with Amazon, and Google, and you need to be pretty good. >> Yeah, you mentioned that, you know, your typical client is kind of a large, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, the Fortune 1000 type companies, does this sort of-- >> We haven't got Berkshire. We haven't got Berkshire, and so if we're going to go Fortune 5, you know, we'd like, I've read my Warren Buffett biography, I reckon the FA are here to meet him I reckon. >> Right, so one of the questions, is this only for the enterprise? Can it be used for smaller businesses, for newer businesses? >> What's interesting is people think about Cloud Foundry as like, "Oh you run it on your infrastructure." Like, I did a talk in 2014, 15, when Docker was starting to be frothy, was, before you think you want to build your own pass, ring me on the hotline. Like, argue with me about why you wouldn't just use Heroku, or Pivotal Web Services, or IBM Cloud, like a public pass. Please, I beg of you, before you go down any path of running on-prem anything, answer solidly the question of why you just wouldn't use a public service. And yeah, so it really starts at that point. It's like, use someone else's, and then if you have to run your own. So, who's really going to have all these rules? It's large organization that have these, "Oh, no, no, we have to run our own." >> Well doctor, one of the things we've said for a while, is there's lots of things that enterprise suck at, that they need to realize that they shouldn't be doing. So start at the most basic level, there's like five companies in the world that are good at building data centers, nobody else should build data centers, if you're using somebody else that can do that. So as you go up and up the stack, you want to get rid of the undifferentiated lifting, things like that, so-- >> I like to joke that every CIO, the moment they get that job, like that's their ticket to get to build their own data center. It's like, what else was the point of becoming a CIO? I want to build my own data center. >> No, not anymore, please-- >> Not anymore, but you know, plus they've been around a little longer than-- >> So, what is that line? What should companies be able to consume a platform, versus where do they add the value, and do you help customers kind of understand that that-- >> By the time they're talking to us, they're pretty far along having convinced themselves about what they're doing. And they have their rules. They have their isolation rules, their data-ownership rules, and they'll have their level of comfort. So they might be comfortable on Amazon, Google, Azure, or they might still not be comfortable with public cloud, and they want the vSphere, but they still have that notion of we're going to run this ourselves. And most of them it's not running one, because that idea of we need our own, propagates throughout the entire organization, and they'll start wanting their own Cloud Foundry-- >> Look, I find that when I talk to users, we, the vendors, and those that watch the industry, always try to come up with these multi-cloud hybrid cloud-type discussion. Users, have a cloud strategy, and it's usually often siloed just like everything else, and right, they're using-- >> Developers-- >> I have some data service, and it's running on Google-- >> Developers just want to have a nice life. >> Microsoft apps. >> They just want to get their work done. They want to feel like, "Alright this is a great job, "like, I'm respected, I get interesting work, "we get to ship it, it actually goes into production." I think if you haven't ever had a project you've worked on that didn't go into production, you haven't worked long enough. Many of us work on something for it not to be shipped. Get it into production as quick as possible and-- >> So, do you have your, you know, utopian ideal world though as to, this is the step-- >> Oh, absolutely-- >> And this is how it'll be simple. >> Tell developers what the business problems are. Get them as close to the business problems, and give them responsibility to solve them. Don't put them behind layers of product managers, and IT support-- >> But Dr. Nic, the developers, they don't have the budget-- >> Speak for utopian-- >> How do we sort through that, because, right, the developer says they want to do this, but they're not tied to the person that has the budget, or they're not working with the operators, I mean, how do we sort through that? >> How do we get to utopia? >> Stu: Yeah. Well, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, they all solved utopia, right? So, this is, think more like them, and perhaps the CEO of the company shouldn't come from sales, perhaps it should be an IT person. >> Well, yeah, what's the T-shirt for the show? It was like running at scale, when you reach a certain point of scale, you either need to solve some of these things, or you will break? >> Right, alright look, hire great sales organizations, but if you don't have empathy for what your company needs to look like in five years time, you're probably not going to allow your organization to become that. The power games, alright? If everyone assumes that the marketing department becomes the top of the organization, or the, you know, then the good people are going to leave to go to organizations where they might be become CEO one day. >> Alright, Dr. Nic, want to give you the final word. For the people that haven't been able to come to the sessions, check out the environment, what are they missing at this show? What is exciting you the most in this ecosystem? >> Like any conference you go to, you come, the learning is all put online. Your show is put online, or every session is put online. You don't come just to learn. You get the energy. I live in Australia, I work from a coffee shop, my staff are all in America, and so to come and just to get the energy that you're doing the right thing, that you get surrounded by a group of people, and certainly no one walks away from a CF Summit feeling like they're in the wrong career. >> Excellent. Well, Dr. Nic, appreciate you helping us understand the infinity wars of cloud environments here. Stark and Wayne, thanks so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. >> Dr. Nic: Thanks Stu. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. (upbeat techno music) (coughs) >> Welcome to Day Two of theCUBE's live coverage of Pentaho World, brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Robert Walsh. He is the Technical Director Enterprise Business Intelligence at ZeniMax. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you, good morning. >> Good to see ya. >> I should say congratulations is in order (laughs) because you're company, ZeniMax, has been awarded the Pentaho Excellence Award for the Big Data category. I want to talk about the award, but first tell us a little bit about ZeniMax. >> Sure, so the company itself, so most people know us by the games versus the company corporate name. We make a lot of games. We're the third biggest company for gaming in America. And we make a lot of games such as Quake, Fallout, Skyrim, Doom. We have game launching this week called Wolfenstein. And so, most people know us by the games versus the corporate entity which is ZeniMax Media. >> Okay, okay. And as you said, you're the third largest gaming company in the country. So, tell us what you do there. >> So, myself and my team, we are primarily responsible for the ingestion and the evaluation of all the data from the organization. That includes really two main buckets. So, very simplistically we have the business world. So, the traditional money, users, then the graphics, people, sales. And on the other side we have the game. That's where a lot of people see the fun in what we do, such as what people are doing in the game, where in the game they're doing it, and why they're doing it. So, get a lot of data on gameplay behavior based on our playerbase. And we try and fuse those two together for the single viewer or customer. >> And that data comes from is it the console? Does it come from the ... What's the data flow? >> Yeah, so we actually support many different platforms. So, we have games on the console. So, Microsoft, Sony, PlayStation, Xbox, as well as the PC platform. Mac's for example, Android, and iOS. We support all platforms. So, the big challenge that we have is trying to unify that ingestion of data across all these different platforms in a unified way to facilitate downstream the reporting that we do as a company. >> Okay, so who ... When it says you're playing the game on a Microsoft console, whose data is that? Is it the user's data? Is it Microsoft's data? Is it ZeniMax's data? >> I see. So, many games that we actually release have a service act component. Most of our games are actually an online world. So, if you disconnect today people are still playing in that world. It never ends. So, in that situation, we have all the servers that people connect to from their desktop, from their console. Not all but most data we generate for the game comes from the servers that people connect to. We own those. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> Which simplifies greatly getting that data from the people. >> Dave: So, it's your data? >> Exactly. >> What is the data telling you these days? >> Oh, wow, depends on the game. I think people realize what people do in games, what games have become. So, we have one game right now called Elder Scrolls Online, and this year we released the ability to buy in-game homes. And you can buy furniture for your in-game homes. So, you can furnish them. People can come and visit. And you can buy items, and weapons, and pets, and skins. And what's really interesting is part of the reason why we exist is to look at patterns and trends based on people interact with that environment. So for example, we'll see America playerbase buy very different items compared to say the European playerbase, based on social differences. And so, that helps immensely for the people who continuously develop the game to add items and features that people want to see and want to leverage. >> That is fascinating that Americans and Europeans are buying different furniture for their online homes. So, just give us some examples of the difference that you're seeing between these two groups. >> So, it's not just the homes, it applies to everything that they purchase as well. It's quite interesting. So, when it comes to the Americans versus Europeans for example what we find is that Europeans prefer much more cosmetic, passive experiences. Whereas the Americans are much things that stand out, things that are ... I'm trying to avoid stereotypes right now. >> Right exactly. >> It is what it is. >> Americans like ostentatious stuff. >> Robert: Exactly. >> We get it. >> Europeans are a bit more passive in that regard. And so, we do see that. >> Rebecca: Understated maybe. >> Thank you, that's a much better way of putting it. But games often have to be tweaked based on the environment. A different way of looking at it is a lot of companies in career in Asia all of these games in the West and they will have to tweak the game completely before it releases in these environments. Because players will behave differently and expect different things. And these games have become global. We have people playing all over the world all at the same time. So, how do you facilitate it? How do you support these different users with different needs in this one environment? Again, that's why BI has grown substantially in the gaming industry in the past five, ten years. >> Can you talk about the evolution of how you've been able to interact and essentially affect the user behavior or response to that behavior. You mentioned BI. So, you know, go back ten years it was very reactive. Not a lot of real time stuff going on. Are you now in the position to effect the behavior in real time, in a positive way? >> We're very close to that. We're not quite there yet. So yes, that's a very good point. So, five, ten years ago most games were traditional boxes. You makes a game, you get a box, Walmart or Gamestop, and then you're finished. The relationship with the customer ends. Now, we have this concept that's used often is games as a service. We provide an online environment, a service around a game, and people will play those games for weeks, months, if not years. And so, the shift as well as from a BI tech standpoint is one item where we've been able to streamline the ingest process. So, we're not real time but we can be hourly. Which is pretty responsive. But also, the fact that these games have become these online environments has enabled us to get this information. Five years ago, when the game was in a box, on the shelf, there was no connective tissue between us and them to interact and facilitate. With the games now being online, we can leverage BI. We can be more real time. We can respond quicker. But it's also due to the fact that now games themselves have changed to facilitate that interaction. >> Can you, Robert, paint a picture of the data pipeline? We started there with sort of the different devices. And you're bringing those in as sort of a blender. But take us through the data pipeline and how you're ultimately embedding or operationalizing those analytics. >> Sure. So, the game theater, the game and the business information, game theater is most likely 90, 95% of our total data footprint. We generate a lot more game information than we do business information. It's just due to how much we can track. We can do so. And so, a lot of these games will generate various game events, game logs that we can ingest into a single data lake. And we can use Amazon S3 for that. But it's not just a game theater. So, we have databases for financial information, account users, and so we will ingest the game events as well as the databases into one single location. At that point, however, it's still very raw. It's still very basic. We enable the analysts to actually interact with that. And they can go in there and get their feet wet but it's still very raw. The next step is really taking that raw information that is disjointed and separated, and unifying that into a single model that they can use in a much more performant way. In that first step, the analysts have the burden of a lot of the ETL work, to manipulate the data, to transform it, to make it useful. Which they can do. They should be doing the analysis, not the ingesting the data. And so, the progression from there into our warehouse is the next step of that pipeline. And so in there, we create these models and structures. And they're often born out of what the analysts are seeing and using in that initial data lake stage. So, they're repeating analysis, if they're doing this on a regular basis, the company wants something that's automated and auditable and productionized, then that's a great use case for promotion into our warehouse. You've got this initial staging layer. We have a warehouse where it's structured information. And we allow the analysts into both of those environments. So, they can pick their poison in respects. Structured data over here, raw and vast over here based on their use case. >> And what are the roles ... Just one more follow up, >> Yeah. >> if I may? Who are the people that are actually doing this work? Building the models, cleaning the data, and shoring data. You've got data scientists. You've got quality engineers. You got data engineers. You got application developers. Can you describe the collaboration between those roles? >> Sure. Yeah, so we as a BI organization we have two main groups. We have our engineering team. That's the one I drive. Then we have reporting, and that's a team. Now, we are really one single unit. We work as a team but we separate those two functions. And so, in my organization we have two main groups. We have our big data team which is doing that initial ingestion. Now, we ingest billions of troves of data a day. Terabytes a data a day. And so, we have a team just dedicated to ingestion, standardization, and exposing that first stage. Then we have our second team who are the warehouse engineers, who are actually here today somewhere. And they're the ones who are doing the modeling, the structuring. I mean the data modeling, making the data usable and promoting that into the warehouse. On the reporting team, basically we are there to support them. We provide these tool sets to engage and let them do their work. And so, in that team they have a very split of people do a lot of report development, visualization, data science. A lot of the individuals there will do all those three, two of the three, one of the three. But they do also have segmentation across your day to day reporting which has to function as well as the more deep analysis for data science or predictive analysis. >> And that data warehouse is on-prem? Is it in the cloud? >> Good question. Everything that I talked about is all in the cloud. About a year and a half, two years ago, we made the leap into the cloud. We drunk the Kool-Aid. As of Q2 next year at the very latest, we'll be 100% cloud. >> And the database infrastructure is Amazon? >> Correct. We use Amazon for all the BI platforms. >> Redshift or is it... >> Robert: Yes. >> Yeah, okay. >> That's where actually I want to go because you were talking about the architecture. So, I know you've mentioned Amazon Redshift. Cloudera is another one of your solutions provider. And of course, we're here in Pentaho World, Pentaho. You've described Pentaho as the glue. Can you expand on that a little bit? >> Absolutely. So, I've been talking about these two environments, these two worlds data lake to data warehouse. They're both are different in how they're developed, but it's really a single pipeline, as you said. And so, how do we get data from this raw form into this modeled structure? And that's where Pentaho comes into play. That's the glue. If the glue between these two environments, while they're conceptually very different they provide a singular purpose. But we need a way to unify that pipeline. And so, Pentaho we use very heavily to take this raw information, to transform it, ingest it, and model it into Redshift. And we can automate, we can schedule, we can provide error handling. And so it gives us the framework. And it's self-documenting to be able to track and understand from A to B, from raw to structured how we do that. And again, Pentaho is allowing us to make that transition. >> Pentaho 8.0 just came out yesterday. >> Hmm, it did? >> What are you most excited about there? Do you see any changes? We keep hearing a lot about the ability to scale with Pentaho World. >> Exactly. So, there's three things that really appeal to me actually on 8.0. So, things that we're missing that they've actually filled in with this release. So firstly, we on the streaming component from earlier the real time piece we were missing, we're looking at using Kafka and queuing for a lot of our ingestion purposes. And Pentaho in releasing this new version the mechanism to connect to that environment. That was good timing. We need that. Also too, get into more critical detail, the logs that we ingest, the data that we handle we use Avro and Parquet. When we can. We use JSON, Avro, and Parquet. Pentaho can handle JSON today. Avro, Parquet are coming in 8.0. And then lastly, to your point you made as well is where they're going with their system, they want to go into streaming, into all this information. It's very large and it has to go big. And so, they're adding, again, the ability to add worker nodes and scale horizontally their environment. And that's really a requirement before these other things can come into play. So, those are the things we're looking for. Our data lake can scale on demand. Our Redshift environment can scale on demand. Pentaho has not been able to but with this release they should be able to. And that was something that we've been hoping for for quite some time. >> I wonder if I can get your opinion on something. A little futures-oriented. You have a choice as an organization. You could just take roll your own opensource, best of breed opensource tools, and slog through that. And if you're an internet giant or a huge bank, you can do that. >> Robert: Right. >> You can take tooling like Pentaho which is end to end data pipeline, and this dramatically simplifies things. A lot of the cloud guys, Amazon, Microsoft, I guess to a certain extent Google, they're sort of picking off pieces of the value chain. And they're trying to come up with as a service fully-integrated pipeline. Maybe not best of breed but convenient. How do you see that shaking out generally? And then specifically, is that a challenge for Pentaho from your standpoint? >> So, you're right. That why they're trying to fill these gaps in their environment. To what Pentaho does and what they're offering, there's no comparison right now. They're not there yet. They're a long way away. >> Dave: You're saying the cloud guys are not there. >> No way. >> Pentaho is just so much more functional. >> Robert: They're not close. >> Okay. >> So, that's the first step. However, though what I've been finding in the cloud, there's lots of benefits from the ease of deployment, the scaling. You use a lot of dev ops support, DBA support. But the tools that they offer right now feel pretty bare bones. They're very generic. They have a place but they're not designed for singular purpose. Redshift is the only real piece of the pipeline that is a true Amazon product, but that came from a company called Power Excel ten years ago. They licensed that from a separate company. >> Dave: What a deal that was for Amazon! (Rebecca and Dave laugh) >> Exactly. And so, we like it because of the functionality Power Excel put in many year ago. Now, they've developed upon that. And it made it easier to deploy. But that's the core reason behind it. Now, we use for our big data environment, we use Data Breaks. Data Breaks is a cloud solution. They deploy into Amazon. And so, what I've been finding more and more is companies that are specialized in application or function who have their product support cloud deployment, is to me where it's a sweet middle ground. So, Pentaho is also talking about next year looking at Amazon deployment solutioning for their tool set. So, to me it's not really about going all Amazon. Oh, let's use all Amazon products. They're cheap and cheerful. We can make it work. We can hire ten engineers and hack out a solution. I think what's more applicable is people like Pentaho, whatever people in the industry who have the expertise and are specialized in that function who can allow their products to be deployed in that environment and leverage the Amazon advantages, the Elastic Compute, storage model, the deployment methodology. That is where I see the sweet spot. So, if Pentaho can get to that point, for me that's much more appealing than looking at Amazon trying to build out some things to replace Pentaho x years down the line. >> So, their challenge, if I can summarize, they've got to stay functionally ahead. Which they're way ahead now. They got to maintain that lead. They have to curate best of breed like Spark, for example, from Databricks. >> Right. >> Whatever's next and curate that in a way that is easy to integrate. And then look at the cloud's infrastructure. >> Right. Over the years, these companies that have been looking at ways to deploy into a data center easily and efficiently. Now, the cloud is the next option. How do they support and implement into the cloud in a way where we can leverage their tool set but in a way where we can leverage the cloud ecosystem. And that's the gap. And I think that's what we look for in companies today. And Pentaho is moving towards that. >> And so, that's a lot of good advice for Pentaho? >> I think so. I hope so. Yeah. If they do that, we'll be happy. So, we'll definitely take that. >> Is it Pen-ta-ho or Pent-a-ho? >> You've been saying Pent-a-ho with your British accent! But it is Pen-ta-ho. (laughter) Thank you. >> Dave: Cheap and cheerful, I love it. >> Rebecca: I know -- >> Bless your cotton socks! >> Yes. >> I've had it-- >> Dave: Cord and Bennett. >> Rebecca: Man, okay. Well, thank you so much, Robert. It's been a lot of fun talking to you. >> You're very welcome. >> We will have more from Pen-ta-ho World (laughter) brought to you by Hitachi Vantara just after this. (upbeat techno music)