>>Hi there. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John Farah, your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California in our studios for cube conversation and remotely drew showcase VP of product management at Dell technologies. This segment is about autonomous operations and moving beyond the hype into practice reality of what's going on in automation. Drew, thank you for coming on this cube conversation >>And great job. Thanks John. >>So, uh, uh, automation, autonomous operation, everyone sees the Tesla's a self-driving cars. We even heard words like self-driving store self-driving data center, self-driving cloud. It's kind of a buzz word. It's been hyped up a lot, but it's becoming much more of a reality as people start to think about how to automate a way the, the manual undifferentiated tasks and move the value into either writing better software or into operations. This is kind of a hot topic. Uh, why, why is it so hot right now? What's your take? >>Yeah, I think the answer to this lies really in the digital transformation that every company is having to embrace right now. And I use the word company, but everything I described here would apply to public entities as well. I have plenty of conversations with governments and universities and so forth. And the leverage that cost share that I've heard used before. If you're not a technology company and you don't think you need to become one, you're not going to be around for very long because every business to business, business to consumer, even consumer to consumer interaction is becoming digitized. And so, you know, making all those connections, digital based takes human talent. And that's really at the core of why this is a hot topic. You know, anybody who's going to try and hire that talent right now, or who's actively trying is going to tell you the competition is fierce. >>It's a sellers market, so to speak in terms of getting capable it talent. And so this topic of automation and autonomous operations has an incredibly pragmatic component to it because you can't hire your way through digital transformation. Uh, if you're an element of your strategy is going to have to involve making that talent more efficient. And so along with good business processes, automation is going to be a prerequisite to make any progress on your digital transformation within a finite set up of it talent. So, you know, to your question, why is it a hot topic? I, you know, look at every entities, digital transformation is going to dependent on, >>You know, you've been around, uh, seeing a lot of ways of innovation come and go. You know, every one has its own kind of like unique characteristics. Now we're seeing with this transformation, this digital transformation, a lot of things kind of coming together. So it's always been the classic people, process technologies, you know, the three kind of areas people talk about, but if you look at what cloud and now edge and distributed computing is bringing into the equation, companies are identifying competitive advantages to processes that can be software enabled or defined or automated and where their workflows are, the IP of company. So this is kind of like a new revelations. Like, I mean, Ross has always been great with your manufacturing, whatever that was in place, but now the scale of that in digital with the apps out there, this has been a big focus of the modernization of applications. What's your, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, no, no, very much so it's, um, you bring up an excellent point kind of all the focus and attention that corporations have given to these other processes for time now that you know, this, this whole, um, you know, online, digital digitize, modern operations model, if it's flowing into that as well. And you know, it's, you know, at the end of the day to, to the, some of the points that you made here, you know, are, are you and your whatever business or entity that you're supporting, you know, are you pushing out the lovers levels of features and capabilities that your internal customers or your external customers need at the pace and velocity that you need to that's, that's where competition is going to take place. That's where business is going to be won or lost. And so I think seeing an indexing of the processes around that and our customers starting to think more about that is critical. Just as much to your point, as you know, uh, you know, the, this technology strategy. Um, and, and how are you going to engage, you know, your customers through a, uh, uh, a modern, you know, digitize processes is important for the factory as the factory line for Ford motor company is in terms of how they're going to be interfacing with their customers. So, um, yeah, very, very timely. And certainly top of mind. >>Yeah. And a lot of CEO's and customers that you work with. I know you guys are having a lot of conversations. We've talked with you guys in the past, across all of Dale, actually Dell technologies, and it's the same conversation. It's distributed computing and automation, AI machine linear, all factoring in workflows becoming competitive advantage. Now we're into this autonomous phase, which is like self running or healing or all these new, new stuff. When customers think about this, and we've heard CEOs talk about strategies, don't touch the white hot core until you get to the edges first, put your toe in the water, different approaches to tackling autonomous operators. What sort of, um, strategies and results should customers expect as they go in and start jumping into the, into the, into the pool, if you will, you know, as they start, >>I'm glad you asked this question because the subject of automation gets lumped in with a lot of topics with similar, you know, buzzwords of AI and machine learning and self-healing, and self-driving while these technologies like that make autonomous operations. In reality, we run the risk of having the underlying technology, dominate the discussion, and that's not where it needs to go in, in, in my discussions with customers, they don't care if the underlying technology is machine learning or deep learning, you know, it doesn't really matter. They want to see tangible out. So, and so when we talk about the kind of results to expect, there's some pretty simple questions to ask is, you know, that I, you know, I engage with any CIO or any company, a person in an it operations capacity is, is my, is my team spending, you know, how much time is my team spending on updates or the updates taking place within tighten up windows? >>Is my team getting the root cause of issues faster? Is my team closing out tickets faster is my business deploying more applications per week, per month, per year. These are the kinds of things that really matter. I mean, this is where the rubber meets the road on this, and, you know, the way we approach this is as we deliver more capabilities and features in this space of autonomy, we're constantly engaging our customers in a before and after state to understand if we really moved the needle. And so we, we, we do collect data on this front to see if we are delivering tangible results. And you know, what we've seen just in the past year is when we do this and do it right, we're seeing issue resolution times dropping like 50 to 90%. We're seeing time spent on admin tasks reduced by like 85%. We're seeing operations cost dropped by a third, you know, applications being pushed out, almost doubling. So these are, these are the real benefits, right? If you, if you can free up and pull the human component out of some of these, you know, necessary, but not necessarily, um, you know, value added tasks, uh, in your day to day operations, this is the kind of results customers can see. >>I want to ask you about your recent event hosted by mark Hamill, but about the framework you guys announced. But before that, I want to ask you, I got your here about supply chain. I mean, honestly, Dell made, made its bones in supply chain and innovation going back to the early days, Michael's book is awesome and he talks about being successful. Um, but you started to hear words like software supply chain is starting to hear words like the word supply chain is now becoming lingua franca in business, not just on moving goods here and there. Digital supply chains are emerging and it's impacting developers because they have to secure them. And there's also mindset of an operational mindset, our systems thinking, uh, with as well as design thinking, but mainly systems thinking. So this is not for the, you know, supply chain geeks out there. This is like hitting me. And she, this notion of supply chain doesn't promise operations hit to the core of this. >>Yeah. It, um, yes, it should, because ideally what you're doing is your autonomous operations strategy is contemplating the fact that that supply chain is going to be fluid. Like, you know, and, and so, you know, just think about the, the, the, you know, the, the, the underlying infrastructure and the choices that you have being, um, on, um, on bare metal on VM, based on container-based, there's different distributions within that. We then start to think about, you know, how I might orchestrate that then the different platforms that we have there around configuration management or application orchestration, um, you're right. That supply chain does become pretty complex. And so, um, us as a, as a provider to customers that are having to do with that software supply chain, um, you, what we need to be cognizant of is the fact that, you know, we can't dictate that always, we have to assume there's going to be changes in there. And so that certainly does influence our approach and trying to make that as, um, you know, friendly to a heterogeneous environment that we know is going to change going forward. Awesome. >>And we're going to see more of that kind of thinking and apply into the people skill, skill development, and also software automation to offload that. But okay. Back to the event you guys had mark Hamill, who's, I'm a huge fan of star wars. Uh, the kid I master, um, represents the old guard, you know, let's do it now, looking at the cloud. Um, you guys announced that that event, this autonomous operations framework, could you talk about what that is and why is it important? >>Yeah, so to begin with, you know, if you had told me when I was watching mark Hamill as a child in a movie theater, that he would one day help me do my job, I would have gone insane. But anyways, um, that, that aside that, that autonomous operations framework, it's built around six levels of automation. And we can talk, take the cue from the society of automotive engineers and work that they had done around autonomous cars, but we believed that we needed something distinct for, for it. And, you know, it starts off with level zero, which is no automation, look at your there's a human doing absolutely everything. And you progress up through five subsequent levels of operator assisted, partial automation, conditional automation, level five, being full autonomy. There's a set of expectations with each of these. And look as you progress up the level of involvement of humans in the decision, and the reaction is decreased each and every step, and some might say, well, so what all you did is document a framework. >>Well, it's important to both our customers and then our internal teams that have to deliver this. And let me just elaborate on that a little bit. Why it's important to customers is that automation implies trust. As, as, as you know, you as my infrastructure provider Dell, do I trust you to automate something that is typically involved my own team, assessing what it is the problem to be and determining the remediation action. Am I willing to hand over the keys to that to you? Uh, you have to earn that and you earn that by progressing up through these different levels. And, you know, if I can't trust you with, you know, conditional automation, I'm not going to trust you with full autonomy. So the customer is, you know, there's a, there's a psychology that's involved here that they have to progress through these levels. And so you have to be deliberate, I'd say as well, you need to recognize that not all customers are going to progress through that at the same pace. >>So it's important that when we think about how we're going to provide this, yeah, we want to have an option for the highest level of autonomy as possible, but that doesn't mean all customers are going to be ready. So we need to think about, you know, how do you provide the N minus one and minus two levels of capabilities. So we're meeting customers where they are in terms of their comfort and, and embracing this idea of autonomous. And then, you know, for us internally, that's the customer's perspective for us. Then this is a, a great set of guideposts for our teams to think about how we advance. And so when we have a feature, um, that, that we're deploying and making available, let's say it's sort of a workload contention feature, right? We then think about that about, okay, how do we start to advance up through the different levels here? We know workload contention is an important problem, but how do we start to take the human out of that equation in a methodical way to advance them through these levels? So we give a suite of options to our customers to do without that. >>True. Talk to me about your reaction with customers. Cause I know there's a spectrum of customers that are leaning in, some are putting the toe in the water, so to speak somewhat more information, some are just looking at the architecture of how they're going to scale post COVID and then have a growth strategy for their business, what feedback you're getting, where are, how would you put the customer's mindset? Um, and, and can you describe the makeup of the customer profile for >>Yeah. You know, I would say, um, you know, there, you know, when we were talking about these six levels, there, there were about halfway up in general. If you, if you ask me to kind of do the bell curve, right. And in terms of comfort level, and we'll, we'll call it like partial or conditional automation there where it's like, you know, in general, it's like, okay, we, we, we know we need to take some of the humans out of this, but why don't we start by, you know, you recommending what the remediation is. I'll take a look at it and decide if I want to implement it or recommend the remediation and give me a button I can click to, to, to act upon it. So there's still some level of human checks and balances in there, but we've taken a lot of the grunt work out of it, so to speak, um, to do it. >>But that's where they are. They, they certainly aspire to move up again, back to this resource crunch, competing for talent than I can't keep hiring people to keep up with the work here and what they want to do is work with us to, okay, so how do I evolve this to start to prove it then? And this is where we can kind of go back to some of these things of the machine learning and so forth, where it's up to us as we think about how we design the systems around this is how can we start to observe how customers are responding to our recommendations? Are they always taking on, are they modifying them so we can get smarter in terms of what it is we're going to suggest and what we're just we're going to automate so that we're doing it around their values, not necessarily ours, that's a really important component here. This value based approach that we need to embrace, because, you know, you know, what, what might be considered an acceptable set of circumstances for a financial services company? You know, it might not be for a manufacturing company. And so that's something that we need to take into account in the overall design. >>Yeah. And also to your point earlier about meeting them where they are, is super important. And I think what's interesting, I've been watching over the past five Dell technology worlds, um, the tradition transition of Dell becoming much stronger and, and, and cohesive in each element of the end to end mix if you will, of hybrid. Um, and that's been a big boost. Um, and so as customers go, okay, I still got to get better. So they get, they're taking this way. And some, some customers, you know what I need to do more, but you guys are running these companies with your technology. So it's not like as easy, it's not a clean sheet of paper. In some cases, it is when you have new projects, they go cloud native and they just ended, they deploy, uh, and they have an edge and all that good stuff. But in terms of making autonomous operations real in terms of your roadmap, as you guys evolve, um, how close are you to having that secret formula? Or do you have the secret formula now? What is it? >>Yeah, so the short answer is, you know, do we have the, the, the secret sauce that we do? And, but that doesn't mean we're done like, so, so back to the framework, like nobody in the industry is at full autonomy. So let's just be really honest. There it's a, it's an aspirational north star that we, we all have to make progress to, but you know, what that means is you can take something that has a level of autonomy today. And let's take something like workload contention analysis that I brought up earlier, where, you know, we can identify where we've got workloads competing for shared resources that need to be redistributed. You know, today we flagged that contention and let the customer determine remediation. So, Hey, we're, we're letting you know you've got a problem. Um, you know, they're going to determine that remediation based upon their first hand knowledge of the environment and applying the values that they have to determine the best path, but, you know, our task is then to gain insight on that and how our customers are choosing to remediate, translate those into rule-based decisions for an explicit outcome that kind of advances you up one step, moving beyond rules. >>You start to understand more generalized outcome sot. That's a conditional automation. And then you move beyond that to get to a service level based objective, which would be high autonomy. So you're there, but this, this framework clearly calls out like this is a journey like there's no, you never really get to the end, so to speak. And that's fine, right? That, that Nirvana of full autonomy, we all should aspire to it, but we are going to be very, very deliberate in terms of how we take things like this and advance them up through the framework to make it more real. And again, give customers choice as they're willing to progress up through that trust will be there with an option for them when they, when they want to stay back with where they are, because that's where their comfort is. We'll be able to meet them there. >>Yeah. And I think also that be fair to anyone who may look at this as, you know, kind of like maybe future every, every customer you have is different operationally. I mean, you have, again, you mentioned financial FinTech, they're huge. If financial services area versus say, you know, classic enterprise, I mean, it could be insurance or whatever, a lot of legacy, and now new technologies coming in, this is all part of the, the opportunity is to kind of bring that together. Um, and it's not going to switch. >>Yeah, it is. And I'll just, you know, the one last plug for why I feel great about doing this as Dell technologies is I think about the, the breadth of what we cover in that environment, you know, with the, the breadth of our portfolio and the level of insights that we can have by kind of contemplating all the impacts across that typology that we span. Um, it's super exciting in terms of kind of what we can really unlock here in terms of value from an end date >>Drew. It's great to chat with you. I have one quick, more important question. Most important question is, did you get a selfie with mark Hamill Come on in every star wars? I mean, I'm a huge star wars fan, of course, star wars, star Trek are all on the same tier. Yeah. >>Uh, no, sorry. I missed out. I was, I was virtual for that one. So, um, although I probably could have done a screenshot on zoom or something like that and claimed it. So, but the >>Well great to have you on the queue. Thanks for your insight. I think this is a great area. Autonomous operations are moving beyond the hide, was seeing evidence in it. You seeing us the on clean sheet of paper, Greenfield opportunities, and then as it comes into the white hot core enterprise, um, even more trust is needed. Even more reliability track record you guys doing great work. Thank you so much for sharing on the cube. Great. Thank you, John. Okay. This is the cube. I'm Sean for your host for this cube conversation. Thanks for watching.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back in Del Technologies world. All the action. Fifteen thousand people here. You watching the Cube? The leader in live tech coverage? My name is Dave. Along time here with my co host student, um, in Walter Wall coverage. Drew Schulke is here Vice president of networking product Management at Del Technologies. Good to see you, Drew. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Text coming on. So we're talking networking. It's been an exploding business for you guys. I mean, it's one of the really shining stars of of the portfolio. We're gonna talk a little bit about why, but go back a little bit. Talk about some of the trends and networking over the past several years. Obviously, cloud is changing the way people are looking at networks here, this multi cloud thing, What's going on? >> Well, I think we won the clock back five years ago because that's what I think. We have this seminal moment in networking where we as at the time Della now Delhi emcee took an unprecedented step to say we wanted to segregate the networking stack, for We want the hardware discussion in the software discussion around networking to be distinct on DH. It wasn't, you know, novel for the network at the time, but for the rest of the industry, if you think about the way storage and servers and virtual ization head of all, not really novel. So we were really kind of playing catch up from a networking perspective, and that really opened up a whole new era of covering for us in terms of what we were doing as a networking vendor. You also look at what some of the big hyper scale companies were trying to do with their own networks. And there was this great synergy to put together this cloud computing era networking stack that was fundamentally different than what we've seen for the past twenty years. And we've just seen a massive wave of adoption and moving to this open this aggregated and software to find network ever since. >> So stools up more of a networking guy than I am, he explained to me years ago. Dave, with the Clouds Network's gonna flatten Travis going to go east west, not so much north south, he would draw the diagrams. What did that mean from a from a product perspective for you guys. >> What a member of a proper perspective for us is that we wanted to focus on to your point. This modern networking design, which is you're going to talk about the fabrics. It's all about the fabrics, which is the way we put together that network in the data center to facilitate all that east West traffic. And done correctly, it can scale toe on a massive scale. This is what all the biggest hyper skills air out there running today to support their cloud data centers, which have thousands of servers and thousands of switch, is behind it. So it's a proven model. It could be very, very effective, and ultimately, just in terms of its approach and architecture, the total cost of ownership is significantly lower than what we saw you for the previous twenty years. And then >> just true. It's really interesting, you know, that the challenger of Time is absolutely these distributed systems and it is dis aggregating. At the same time, customers are looking forward to be simplified and, you know, if you can pull things together on DH you look at You know, what I heard on the stage this morning is a lot of the cloud messaging was it was Del Plus Veum wear and partners there to put together that entire solution from a customer. I can't say OK, well, let me get a box and lend me light, load some operating system and take all these other pieces. I can't be building the stack and putting all of these pieces together. So explain how while you're dis aggregating at the end of the day, this is going to be simpler for customers. And operationally, it's something that they shouldn't have to touch too much >> so But by desegregating way, let the software guys do with the software guys do, which is software and software is a powerful tool when it comes to the network that was never really fully tapped until we opened up the switch and allowed it to be, you know, agnostic to the software that was running on top of it. So let me bring up a case in point. Big switch, A big partner of ours who had a big announcement a couple days ago where we're actually entering into an OM agreement. They've got a strong presence here, you know, through their software in that fabric that very, very large and complex fabric. They've done a great job in terms of making that fabric appear to be much simpler than it really is. And it's all about the way you present it in terms of this complexity and how do we manage that? And so our mission in working with companies like big switches to bring a level of simplicity Teo to a piece of the data center that, quite frankly, for the longest time has been thriving on complexity, where people kind of got paid by understanding how complex things were. And it really doesn't have to be that way. Software can be powerful. Software can make lives easier. Software could be an integral part of that transformation story, and networking is no different when it comes to that. >> So you got some hard news? Att, the show today We talked about that. >> Yeah, so a couple of things we have going on. So for one today, we announced a new branding of our networking hardware portfolio. So given that we are powering some of the biggest data centers in the world. We are embracing the power adjective here and going with the power switch brand of networking switches S o joining some of our fellow Delhi and see product lines with that with that power theme on it, I think it's a great transition. And so we're really excited about that. You know, we're going to have some nice themes around flipping the switch from a power perspective, open networking, which a lot of our customers are already doing today. So it's a big one that we have today. Another one that we have is we're announcing a couple of new, actually a new power switches in that portfolio. Some twenty five gigs switches that we're bringing to market really focused on a hyper converge software to find storage use case wherein a great many cases. There's a small cluster that small in size in terms of number of nodes but has a high degree of bandwidth that's required to make it perform. So we've introduced a couple of small poor count twenty five gigs switches as well at the show s so very excited about those being the first to flagship power switch switches that we're bringing to the >> market drops Really interesting. I mean, I worked a DMC and when we worked on some of the package solutions, there was storage networking pieces. But, you know, networking in general, You know, I I had advocated for years. We need to be ableto bundle this together. You want to be able to have that easy button so that I can freakin figure and put everything fainting together there. You can explain that. You know, people think HD either are like, Oh, isn't that have networking all bundled in? How is it tied together? But yet, you know, usually these air kind of separate peace, sis, >> I say, Up until a few months ago, networking was on afterthought from an HD eye perspective. And that's an interesting statement, not just from a deli and see perspective, but leading up to that few months ago. We've been working heavily, for example, with VX rail team, because while hyper convergence has a great story line around collapsing computing storage together in the value prop, there was really, really compelling that working was this kind of well, it's just going to sort of work. But if you took a You know, some deep conversations with customers around problems they saw on deployment and areas where they might be holding themselves back in terms of performance. Of those systems, networking was a common thing. And so for us, it was a no brainer to sit down with the X rail team and say, You know, how do we, you know, force the best practice in terms of the network and just automate the heck out of it? And so what we did is develop a deep set of integrations with the extra manager, where Roos ten operating system can do a handshake with the extra manager and take the number of steps to deploy and Hcea Network and reduce it by ninety six percent. So that's pretty compelling in terms of automation, and we're doing it in such a way that it's always going to be that best practice every time. So there's no guessing on Did I do it correctly? I'm not gonna have a performance issue. Why not just automate that and make it really seem with so great advancements? They're excited about even taking that further with them in additional work down the road next year. >> One of things we're hearing from executives, Adele certainly heard it from From Jeff Clark. Uh, in the analyst breakout this morning is alignment across the portfolio of del companies. Obviously, VM wears a linchpin of your multi cloud strategy. Uh, you can't talk with V M, where executives talked to them without hearing about NSX. So what do you doing with regard to NSX and NSX integration? >> Yeah, great question. So great think. Restoring that we have about NSX is in terms of what it's expecting of what we call the underlay or the physical network that's actually powering the network is they wanted to be fabric based. They wanted to be good at transport and easy to manage. And so a lot of the work that we've been trying to do with them is how do we present that network into an NSX environment so that that physical in virtual network come together in a seamless way? So that's an area that we were spending a lot of time with him. Another area you'LL be moving beyond NSX into other elements that fall within their networking and security business unit is what they're doing at the wide area network. So another big announcement that we have coming out today that I'm really excited to talk about is we've been teaming up with the fellow Claude business within VM Where to deploy what we're calling the s t win. Uh, EJ powered by v m. Where? So this is going to be a turnkey appliance coming preloaded with the fellow cloud software on it running on our new virtual edge products, which is a portfolio of products we added to the networking portfolio about a year ago. And what we believe it's going to go do is enable you know, a significant transformation story of customers that wanna shift to this software to find land. And the economics behind this way don't have enough time in the interview. You need to go into it. But the savings that customers can gain moving to a software defined when strategy just in the transport costs alone with a wider network are compelling. >> Yes, s so just, you know, put a point on that. When when we've looked at multi cloud Esti win is one of those areas that you know, customers said, Oh, this is a real enabler I can't really do multi cloud. I can have a bunch of pieces, but if I want to tie together, if I want to really do anything, they're SD wins. Enablement plain kind of why that is, >> yeah, because ATT the end of the day Look, you're you're sitting there on your call that an end point device and think about the traffic pattern that you're generating as an employee of some of that traffic is going to public Cloud A. Someone's going to public copy. Someone's going to a centralized data center. These traffic patterns, they're becoming more complex. They're carrying more and more traffic as we crank up the band with in terms of what we're trying to support. And so our customers, when they look at that, how did they bring order to that? And if you don't have a software to find approach where you could bring some level of centralization of policy and end the invisibility of all those end points, it's going to become unruly, which, which is what it's become for a great many customers. So it's very rare that I come across the customer that doesn't want to have an ston conversation to your point Because the pain points air, their traffic continues to grow. The multi cloud story means I have to direct it to several different clouds, including my own, including the others. And I gotta have an effective way to go do that. >> What is this? Flip the switch mean? >> Flip the switch. Yeah, great. So you'LL see some people walking around with flip the switch shirts. So in commemoration of our power switch brand that we're announcing today, uh, you know, we want to encourage our customers to flip the switch to open networking to embrace the modern network design that we've been talking about for the past five years that a great many of our customers have been flipping the switch to. So we've been consistently growing about to exit the market in the data center space with what we've been doing with this open networking approach, and we want to crank it up even higher. So we're inviting all our customers toe flip the switch, overto open networking. So >> give us the bottom line. Why? Del Networking summarized it for >> I don't know, working because we're going to be the company that's gonna have the conversation around a modern network that's going to enable you to be a software to find and live in that multi cloud world. Full stop. That's it. Everything we do from the lowest piece of hardware, every piece of software that we work to, the partners that we partner with are all about enabling that journey. And it's a really simple strategy. >> Awesome, Drew. Thanks so much for coming to Cuba. Great. Have appreciated. All right. Keep it right there, buddy. Back with our next guests. Right after this short break, David. Dante was too many men right back.

>> Robert: It feels like we're talking because it's boring TV. Tech people love tech. Consumers love the benefit of tech. No consumer opens up their iphone and says oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my iphone. >> What's it been like, being on the Shark Tank? >> You know filming is fun and hanging out is fun and it's fun to be a celebrity at first. Your head gets really big and you get really good tables at restaurants. >> Who says tech isn't got a little pizazz. >> Voiceover: More skin in the game. In charge of his destiny, Robert Herjavec is Cube Alumni. Live from Santa Clara, California, it's the Cube covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux foundation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We're at the open networking summit 2017 in Santa Clara, California. I think it's the fourth year of the conference. We've been coming for a long time. It's pretty amazing, a lot of transformation is happening as this project moves from the conversational to the testing to actual. A lot of deployments being talked about in the keynotes. So happy to have Scott Raynovich joining me again. >> Pleasure as always, thank you. >> Did you have a good night last night? >> Excellent. >> Alright, super. Super guest Drew Schulke, he is the vice president of converged networking at Dell EMC. Drew, Welcome. >> Thanks, thanks for having us. >> You've been busy at this show. You're doing panels, you're doing keynotes, they're working you. >> It's been a bit of a whirlwind going on thus far. Yeah, I had a keynote talk on economic and organizational impacts of open networking, which went really, really well. A lot of great questions from the audience, really insightful questions on that. Have met with folks like yourself, some other folks in the media, some analysts, talking to some customers which is always nice to have. We'll close it out tomorrow with one of the keynotes. A panel discussion on the role of open source and moving to 5G where I'll be participating with some folks from Intel and Ericsson. I'm looking forward to that, but yeah, definitely a whirlwind week. >> So before we get into some of the specifics, just your general impressions as to how this thing has evolved over time. Impressions of this show this year. >> Yeah, great question. I think the thing that struck me the most this year was the amount of customers coming in and actually talking about putting a lot of the things we've been talking about at this summit for several years into production environments and seeing results out of it. Some great keynotes last night by some folks, Amadeus in the travel industry and talking about their journey actually moving things into production, I thought was fabulous. Which gives people a vision of what really is possible and moving these out of the theoretical and here's the vision, the strategy into here's how you can actually get things done and getting into results. Ultimately, when you put things into production, that's how you ultimately learn and refine things over time. It's a great move forward for us. >> Awesome, so on the economics and organizational impact of open networking, your keynote. What are some of those really key economic drivers that you outlined in that conversation? >> Yeah, great question. You can kind of break it into a capex and an opex discussion. On the capex side, what we've seen is this whole open networking model is built on merchant silicon and the commoditization of hardware, which may sound like okay, that's a bad thing. Well no, it's really, really good because what it's doing is it's allowing all of us to take the benefits of huge volume and scale that's going on. From the biggest cloud providers down to the enterprise, as we move into this hardware model that's based upon merchant silicon and more standard network designs that are capable of supporting multiple OS's, we all benefit from the economies of scale that go in that. We can amortize R&D investments over a larger number of things. That's all goodness, so there's a huge tailwind on the capex side. On the opex side, as we start to disaggregate the network stack and focus on the individual layers, it creates a different operational model that allows for a high degree of automation. One of the things that we brought up in the session was contrasting a study from 2013 where the typical enterprise network admin was controlling about 300 ports. That was the breadth of support that they had back in 2013. That same year, Facebook came out and said an individual operator can support up to 20,000 servers. It's not like they're just super humans. What happened in there was a level of automation. That's a key ingredient of our open networking strategy, is driving that automation. That's where you get true economies of scale on the opex side. Those are the main points on that one. >> Jeff: Yeah, good ones. >> So Drew, one of the themes we've seen here is that the Linux foundation has done a good job of consolidating some of the open source technology and putting them in the same place so we can all track them and figure out what's going to happen. You just told us about Dell donating some of your code to the Linux foundation. >> Drew: Correct. >> Why don't you explain how you made that decision and what you think it's going to do for your customers. >> Yeah absolutely, as a little bit of context, what we see happening in terms of networking software is one, it's become decoupled from the hardware. That's already done right now. But even when we start to look at the software side, we think there's more disaggregation possible. We can peel apart the layers of what currently is a network operating system today and create a based operating system upon which several different companies can come in and put in what at that point becomes applications on top of it to do things like an L2, L3 stack, or to do MLAG, or tapping, or anything like that. It creates an ecosystem similar to what we had with servers 20 years ago, where I've got an operating system that basically keeps the box running. Then I've got applications which are really the magic on top of it. That's sort of the context. What we donated was that base OS. We've worked on something called OS 10. We have an open edition of it which you can go out to the web and download for free today and start playing around with it. It's an unmodified Linux kernel currently based on the Debian distribution which we believe will serve as a solid foundation for that evolving network and ecosystem going forward. Linux foundation agreed with that and accepted our donation of that to be the foundation of the open switch project, which was talked a little bit about at this particular summit as well. We couldn't be happier to be working with the Linux foundation on the open switch project. Look forward to getting even more of the ecosystem working on that with someone like the Linux foundation behind it to build a very, very capable stack which ultimately benefits all of our customers at the end. >> Where will we see this code go into? What types of products and what markets? Is it NFE for telecom? Is it cloud servers? Where are we going to see this stuff? >> The wonderful thing about it is the answer is all of the above. That's the flexibility of it. Think of it as this way, which is maybe you have a telecom network that's focused on something like MPLS. A company that has a lot of good IP around MPLS can then write an application that can run on that base operating system giving the customer the ability to pick that specific application without having to worry about dragging on an operating system and hardware that may not be what they want. That's the telecom use case. Maybe it's a big cloud provider that has some very specific needs around an L2, L3 stack. Maybe they even have their own IP around that that they want to build on top of this OS. We've really opened up the degrees of freedom in that space across all of those industries. I certainly think where we see the early adopters and starting from that OS 10 base solution today, will be more in the telco service provider and in the cloud space, just because of the level of scale and what it is that they can benefit out of this level of flexibility. >> Excellent. >> There had to be some detractors before you open sourced this. I'm just curious, the conversation in the room about should we or should we not open source this project and take it out to the Linux foundation? What was ultimately the decision that pushed it out the door? >> Yeah, we had been working with some other open source based projects for a couple of years already, so there was a comfort level internally. But what we saw, I think going on in the networking space, was heavily influenced by what we saw going on in the server space 20 years ago when client server hit the scene. That stack became massively disaggregated. The folks who tried to keep these things stitched together into monolithic silos ultimately weren't successful. Either had to change their strategy, or drifted off into the sunset. We certainly was influenced by that history and looking forward at what we saw happening in this space. I'd say as well looking at a lot of the innovation coming out from open source projects and start ups in this space as well, doing some new and exciting things in networking. There was a big keynote yesterday and the panel discussion where a venture capitalist starting talking about, hey networking's cool again. I couldn't agree more where we're seeing startups come in and do really interesting things really, really well. What we're trying to do is create a model where those startups don't have to develop their own operating system and develop their own hardware and then all the management tools that go on top of it. Let them focus at what they're good at, which is a certain piece of IP. Let us work through things like the open networking foundation to drive disaggregation of the stack, making them successful. >> It's an interesting way too to build your community almost indirectly if you will. It's not like you have to sign a bunch of partner agreements and you can't keep track of all these startups and all your alliance people running around. But by putting it into the open source, especially with the Linux foundation just automatically, you're exposed to all these different types of new companies and innovations and that exposure goes both ways. >> Drew: Absolutely. >> It's a really cool trend, where we're seeing these big companies donate parts of these things into this formal situation that is the Linux foundation so it has a home and a place to live and grow. >> Absolutely. >> I want to shift gears a little bit. Today's keynote is about 5G. A lot of talk about 5G, mobile world congress is all about 5G but some people saying wait, it's not here yet, it's far out. But clearly, I think the message this morning from Sandra and also on the Cube yesterday is it's coming, but you don't just turn it on one day. You got to put all the pieces in place. What's Dell EMC's perspective on 5G? Where are you guys on this journey? >> For us in terms of where we play at an infrastructure level in the data center, for us, the key step right now is to get to this model where we can decouple function from location. Which is what the telecoms and the mobile networks have been trying to do through things like NFV. What we've been trying to do is help them on that journey long before we even get to the point where 5G is knocking at the door. Working with them today to put in the right infrastructure capable of supporting highly virtualized workloads and also capable of supporting a variety of different software defined networking solutions. If you get those components right, you're setting yourself up with a really good foundation for 5G. If 5G gets here and you haven't decoupled function and location yet in terms of your infrastructure or strategy that's going to be a tough one. What we're trying to do is shepherd that along and move that as fast as we can right now. >> We got Dell EMC World coming up pretty soon right? >> That's right, I hope to see you guys there. >> Previews of this? What can we expect to see? >> It will be interesting. This is the first time that as a combined company we're doing this event in Vegas. We had a preview in October as a newly closed transaction. This will have the full force effect of the combined Dell EMC firm coming together to put on a great show. Looking forward to it. Huge venue, I know you guys play a prominent role there. I'm hoping to see you guys there as well. Yes, there will be lots of announcements. I'm not going to go get myself in trouble by saying what any of those are four weeks in advance of when that's going to happen. >> No hints or anything. >> No hints, but certainly on the networking side, you'll hear a couple of announcements from us in terms of new products that we'll be talking about and stay tuned. >> I'll ask you the softer way to get to the same answer, but I know you're not going to give me the answer, but looking forward, 2017 what are some of your priorities top of mind that you guys are working on where if we see you a year from now, you'll report back that here's what we did in 2017? >> Clearly, this OS 10 strategy that we have, building upon this base is going to be key for that. Continuing to support the donations that we've made through the Linux foundation and Open Switch. Bringing in additional partners to develop on top of that to get their IP ready to be able to take advantage of that will be a key focus for us. But as well, there's some key networking speed transitions coming up that you got to keep pace with from a road map perspective, so you'll probably hear some things about that. Then as well just thinking from a Dell EMC perspective, as we look at how our portfolio as a company is evolving, a big shift toward software defined storage models, converged infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure. On the networking side, we're clearly trying to do everything we can to position ourselves to be a value add in any of those solutions today. That'll be the hint of the areas you can expect to hear about in May. >> That's good, that's a good little hint. It's a month to the Dell EMC World again the first combined Dell EMC World >> Drew: In Vegas. >> Well, last year we had EMC World in Vegas and Dell EMC World, it got very confusing. Now there's just one. We're like is it the Vegas one or the Austin one? So now there's just one, it's easier to keep track. >> Drew: One forum to rule them all. >> We look forward to Michael coming on, we had him on at both as well as VM World and it's always great to get his take as well. So Drew, thanks for stopping by and we look forward to seeing you in about a month in Vegas. >> Likewise, thanks guys, great time. >> Drew Schulke, Scott Reynovitch, Jeff Rick. You're watching the Cube from Open Networking Summit 2017. Thanks for watching. We'll be back after this short break. (bright music)