>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (intense music) >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante in theCUBE, and as you know, I've been doing a CEO series, and welcome to the isolation economy. We're here at theCUBE's remote studio, and really pleased to have Charlie Giancarlo, who is the CEO of PureStorage. Charlie, I wish we were face-to-face at Pure Accelerate, but this'll have to do. Thanks for coming on. >> You know, Dave, it's always fun to be face-to-face with you. At Pure Accelerate when we do it in person is great fun, but we do what we have to do, and actually, this has been a great event for us, so appreciate you coming on air with me. >> Yeah, and we're going to chat about that, but I want to start off with this meme that's been going around the internet. I was going to use the wrecking ball. I don't know if you've seen that. It's got the people, the executives in the office building saying, "Eh, digital transformation; "not in my lifetime," complacency, and then this big wrecking ball, the COVID-19. You've probably seen it, but as you can see here, somebody created a survey, Who's leading the digital transformation at your company? The CEO, the CTO, or of course circled is COVID-19, and so we've seen that, right? You had no choice but to be a digital company. >> Well, there's that, and there's also the fact that the CEOs who've been wanting to push a digital transformation against a team that wants to stick with the status quo, it gives the CEO now, and even within our own company in Pure, to drive towards that digital transformation when people didn't really take up the mantle. So no, it's a great opportunity for digital transformation, and of course, the companies that have been doing it all along have been getting ahead during this crisis, and the ones that haven't are having some real trouble. And you and I have had some really interesting conversations. Again, that's, I think, the thing I miss most, not only having you in theCUBE, but the side conversations at the cocktail parties, et cetera. And we've talked about IP, and China, and the history of the US, and all kinds of interesting things there, but one of the things I want to put forth, and I know you guys, Kix especially, has done a lot of work on Tech For Good, but the narrative pre-COVID, PC I guess we'd call it, was really a lot of vitriol toward big tech especially, but you know what? That tech lash... Without tech, where would we be right now? >> Well, just think about it, right? Where would we be without videoconferencing, without the internet, right? We'd be sheltered in place with literally nothing to do, and all business would stop, and of course many businesses that require in-person have, but thank God you can still get goods at your home. You can still get food, you can still get all these things that today is enabled by technology. We've seen this ourselves, in terms of having to make emergency shipments during our first quarter to critical infrastructure to keep things going. It's been quite a quarter. I was saying to my team recently that we had just gotten everyone together in February for our sales kickoff for the year, and it felt like a full year since I had seen them all. >> Well, I had interviewed, I think, is it Mike Fitzgerald, your head of supply chain. >> Yes. >> In March, and he was saying, "No. "We have no disruptions. "We're delivering for clients," and we certainly saw that in your results in the quarter. >> Yeah, no, we're very fortunate, but we had been planning for doing our normal business continuity disaster planning, and actually, once we saw COVID in Asia in January we started exercising all those muscles, including pre-shipping product around to depos around the world in case transportation got clogged, which it in fact did. So we were well-prepared, but we're also, I think, very fortunate in terms of the fact that we had a very distributed supply chain. >> Yeah, I mean you guys obviously did a good job. You saw in Dell's earnings they held pretty firm. HPE, on the other hand, really saw some disruption, so congratulations to you and the team on that. So as we think about exiting this isolation economy, we've done work that shows about 44% of CIOs see a U-shaped recovery, but it's very fragmented. It varies by industry. It varies by how digital the organizations are. Are they able to provide physical distancing? How essential are these organizations? And so I'm sure you're seeing that in your customer base as well. How are you thinking about exiting this isolation economy? >> Well, I've certainly resisted trying to predict a U- or a V-shape, because I think there are many more unknowns than there are knowns, and in particular, we don't know if there's a second wave. If there is a second wave, is it going to be more or less lethal than the first wave? And as you know, maybe some of your audience knows, I contracted COVID in March. So I've done a lot of reading on not just COVID, but also on the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. It's going to take a while before this settles down, and we don't know what it's going to look like the rest of the year or next year. So a lot of the recovery is going to depend on that. What we can do, however, is make sure that we're prepared to work from home, work in the office, that we make sure that our team out in the field is well-placed to be able to support our customers in the environment, and the way that we're incenting our overall team now has less to do with the macro than it does with our specific segment, and what I mean by that is we're incenting our team to continue to build market share, and to continue to outperform our competition as we go forward, and also on our customer satisfaction figure, which you know is our Net Promoter Score, which is the highest in the industry. So that's how we're incenting our team. >> Yeah, and we're going to talk about that, and by the way, yes, I did know, and it's great to see you healthy, and I'd be remiss if I didn't also express my condolences, Matt, the loss of Matt Danziger, your head of IR, terrible tragedy. Of course Matt had some roots in Boston, went to school in Maine. >> Yeah. >> Loved Cape Cod, and so really sad loss, I'm sure, for all of the Puritans. >> It's affected us all very personally, because Matt was just an incredible team member, a great friend, and so young and vital. When someone that young dies for almost unexplainable reasons. It turned out to be a congenital heart condition that nobody knew about, but it just breaks... It just breaks everyone's heart, so thank you for your condolences. I appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Okay, so let's get into the earnings a little bit. I want to just pull up one of the charts that shows roughly, I have approximately Q1 because some companies like NetApp, Dell, HPE, are sort of staggered, but the latest results you saw IBM growing at 19%. Now we know that was mainframe-driven in a very easy compare. Pure plus 12, and then everybody else in the negative. Dell, minus five, so actually doing pretty well relative to NetApp and HPE, who, as I said, had some challenges with deliveries. But let's talk about your quarter. You continue to be the one sort of shining star in the storage business. Let's get into it. What are your big takeaways that you want us to know about? >> Well, of course I'd rather see everybody in the black, right, everybody in the positive, but we continue to take market share and continue to grow 20 to 30% faster than the rest of the industry combined, and it's quarter after quarter. It's not just a peak in one quarter and then behind in another quarter. Every quarter we're ahead of the rest of the industry, and I think the reasoning is really quite straightforward. We're the one company that invests in storage as if it's high technology. You do hear quite often, and even among some customers, that storage is commoditized, and all of our competitors invest in it, or don't invest in it, as if it's a commoditized market. Our view is quite straightforward. The science and the engineering of computing and data centers continues to evolve, continues to advance, has to advance if we continue down this path of becoming more of a digital economy. As we all know, processors advance in speed and capability. Networking advances in terms of speed and capability. Well, data storage is a third of data center spend, and if it doesn't continue to advance at the same pace or faster than everything else, it becomes a major bottleneck. We've been the innovator. If you look at a number of different studies, year after year, now over six or seven years, we are the leader in innovation in the data storage market, and we're being rewarded for that by penetrating more and more of the customer base. >> All right, let's talk about that. And you mentioned in your keynote at Accelerate that you guys spend more on R&D as a percentage of revenue than anybody, and so I want to throw out some stats. I'm sorry, folks, I don't have a slide on this. HPE spends about 1.8 billion a year on R&D, about 6% of revenues. IBM, I've reported on IBM and how it's spending the last 10 years, spent a huge amount on dividends and stock buybacks, and they spent six billion perpetually on R&D, which is now 8% of revenue. Dell at five billion. Of course Dell used to spend well under a billion before the EMC acquisition. That's about 6% of revenue. And NetApp, 800 million, much higher. They're a pure play, about 13%. Pure spends 430 million last year on R&D, which is over 30% of revenue on R&D, to your point. >> Yeah, yeah, well, as I said, we treat it like it's high technology, which it is, right? If you're not spending at an appropriate level you're going to fall behind, and so we continue to advance. I will say that you mentioned big numbers by the other players, but I was part of a big organization as well with a huge R&D budget, but what matters is what percent of the revenue of a specific area are you spending, right? You mentioned Dell and VMware. A very large fraction of their spend is on VMware. Great product and great company, but very little is being spent in the area of storage. >> Well, and the same thing's true for IBM, and I've made this point. In fact, I made this point about Snowflake last week in my breaking analysis. How is Snowflake able to compete with all these big whales? And the same thing for you guys. Every dime you spend on R&D goes to making your storage products better for your customers. Your go-to-market, same thing. Your partner ecosystem, same thing, and so you're the much more focused play. >> Right, well I think it boils down to one very simple thing, right? Most of our competitors are, you might call them one-stop shops, so the shopping mall of IT gear, right? The Best Buy, if you will, of information technology. We're really the sole best of breed player in data storage, right, and if you're a company that wants two vendors, you might choose one that's a one-stop shop. If you have the one-stop shop, the next one you want is a best of breed player, right? And we fill that role for our customers. >> Look it, this business is a technology business, and technology and innovation is driven by research and development, period, the end. But I want to ask you, so the storage business generally, look, you're kind of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind here. I mean the storage business has been somewhat on the back burner. In part it's your fault because you put so much flash into the data center, gave so much headroom that organizations didn't have to buy spindles anymore to get to performance, the cloud has also been a factor. But look, last decade was a better decade for storage than the previous decade when you look at the exits that you guys had and escape velocity, Nutanix, if you can kind of put them in there, too. Much larger than say the Compellents or 3PARs. They didn't make it to a billion. So my question is storage businesses, is it going to come back as a growth business? Like you said, you wish everybody were in the black here. >> Right, well a lot of what's being measured, of course, is enterprise on-prem storage, right? If we add on-prem and cloud, it actually continues to be a big growth business, because data is not shrinking. In fact, data is still growing faster than the price reduction of the media underneath, right, so it's still growing. And as you know, more recently we've introduced what we call Pure as-a-Service and Cloud Block Store. So now we have our same software, which we call Purity, that runs on our on-prem arrays, also running on AWS, and currently in beta on Azure. So from our point of view this is a... First of all, it's a big market, about $30 to $40 billion total. If you add in cloud, it's another $10 to $15 billion, which is a new opportunity for us. Last year we were about 1.65 billion. We're still less than, as you know, less than 10% of the overall market. So the opportunity for us to grow is just tremendous out there, and whether or not total storage grows, for us it's less important right now than the market share that we pick up. >> Right, okay, so I want to stay on that for a minute and talk about... I love talking about the competition. So what I'm showing here with this kind of wheel slide is data from our data partner ETR, and they go out every quarter. They have a very simple methodology. It's like Net Promoter Score, and it's very consistent. They say relative to last year, are you adopting the platform, that's the lime green, and so this is Pure's data. Are you increasing spend by 6% or more? That's the 32%, the forest green. Is spending going to be flat? Is it going to decrease by more than 6%? That's the 9%. And then are you replacing the platform, 2%. Now this was taken at the height of the US lockdown. This last survey. >> Wow. >> So you can see the vast majority of customers are either keeping spending the same, or they're spending more. >> Yeah. >> So that's very, very strong. And I want to just bring up another data point, which is we like to plot that Net Score here on the vertical axis, and then what we call market share. It's not like IDC market share, but it's pervasiveness in the survey. And you can see here, to your point, Pure is really the only, and I've cited the other vendors on the right hand, that box there, you're the only company in the green with a 40% Net Score, and you can see everybody else is well below the line in the red, but to your point, you got a long way to go in terms of gaining market share. >> Exactly, right, and the reason... I think the reason why you're seeing that is really our fundamental and basic value is that our product and our company is easy to do business with and easy to operate, and it's such a pleasure to use versus the competition that customers really appreciate the product and the company. We do have a Net Promoter Score of over 80, which I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another company in any industry with Net Promoter Scores that high. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on the R&D thing for a minute, because you guys bet the company from day one on simplicity, and that's really where you put a lot of effort. So the cloud is vital here, and I want to get your perspective on it. You mentioned your Cloud Block Store, which I like that, it's native to AWS. I think you're adding other platforms. I think you're adding Azure as well, and I'm sure you'll do Google. >> Azure, Azure's in beta, yes. >> Yeah, Google's just a matter of time. Alibaba, you'll get them all, but the key here is that you're taking advantage of the native services, and let's take AWS as an example. You're using EC2, and high priority instances of EC2, as an example, to essentially improve block storage on Amazon. Amazon loves it because it sells Compute. Maybe the storage guys in Amazon don't love it so much, but it's all about the customer, and so the native cloud services are critical. I'm sure you're going to do the same thing for Azure and other clouds, and that takes a lot of investment, but I heard George Kurian today addressing some analysts, talking about they're the only company doing kind of that cloud native approach. Where are you placing your bets? How much of it is cloud versus kind of on-prem, if you will? >> Yeah, well... So first of all, an increasing fraction is cloud, as you might imagine, right? We started off with a few dozen developers, and now we're at many more than that. Of course the majority of our revenue still comes from on-prem, but the value is the following in our case, which is that we literally have the same software operating, from a customer and from a application standpoint. It is the same software operating on-prem as in the cloud, which means that the customer doesn't have to refactor their application to move it into the cloud, and we're the one vendor that's focused on block. What NetApp is doing is great, but it's a file-based system. It's really designed for smaller workloads and low performance workloads. Our system's designed for high performance enterprise workloads, Tier 1 workloads in the cloud. To say that they're both cloud sort of washes over the fact that they're almost going after two completely separate markets. >> Well, I think it's interesting that you're both really emphasizing cloud native, which I think is very important. I think that some of the others have some catching up to do in that regard, and again, that takes a big investment in not just wrapping your stack, and shoving it in the cloud, and hosting it in the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the local services. >> Well, I mean one thing I'll mention was Amazon gave us an award, which they give to very few vendors. It's called the Well-Architected AWS Award, because we've designed it not to operate, let's say, in a virtualized environment on AWS. We really make use of the native AWS EC2 services. It is designed like a web service on EC2. >> And the reason why this is so important is just, again, to share with our audience is because when you start talking about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, you want the same exact experience on-prem as you do in the cloud, whether it's hybrid or across clouds, and the key is if you're using cloud native services, you have the most efficient, the highest performance, lowest latency, and lowest cost solution. That is going to be... That's going to be a determinate of the winner. >> Yes, I believe so. Customers don't want to be doing... Be working with software that is going to change, fundamentally change and cause them to have to refactor their applications. If it's not designed natively to the cloud, then when Amazon upgrades it may cause a real problem with the software or with the environment, and so customers don't want that. They want to know they're cloud native. >> Well, your task over the next 10 years is something. Look it, it's very challenging to grow a company the size of Pure, period, but let's face it, you guys caught EMC off-guard. You were driving a truck through the Symmetrics base and the VNX base. Not that that was easy. (chuckling) And they certainly didn't make it easy for ya. But now we've got this sort of next chapter, and I want to talk a little bit about this. You guys call it the Modern Data Experience. You laid it out last Accelerate, kind of your vision. You talked about it more at this year's Accelerate. I wonder if you could tell us the key takeaways from your conference this year. >> Right, the key takeaway... So let me talk about both. I'll start with Modern Data Experience and then key takeaways from this Accelerate. So Modern Data Experience, for those that are not yet familiar with it, is the idea that an on-prem experience would look very similar, if not identical, to a cloud experience. That is to say that applications and orchestrators just use APIs to be able to call upon and have delivered the storage environment that they want to see instantaneously over a high speed network. The amazing thing about storage, even today, is that it's highly mechanical, it's highly hardware-oriented to where if you have a new application and you want storage, you actually have to buy an array and connect it. It's physical. Where we want to be is just like in the cloud. If you have a new application and you want storage or you want data services, you just write a few APIs in your application and it's delivered immediately and automatically, and that's what we're delivering on-prem with the Modern Data Experience. What we're also doing, though, is extending that to the cloud, and with Cloud Block Store as part of this, with that set of interfaces and management system exactly the same as on-prem, you now have that cloud experience across all the clouds without having to refactor applications in one or the other. So that's our Modern Data Experience. That's the vision that drives us. We've delivered more and more against it starting at the last Accelerate, but even more now. Part of this is being able to deliver storage that is flexible and able to be delivered by API. On this Accelerate we delivered our Purity 6.0 for Flash Array, which adds not only greater resiliency characteristics, but now file for the first time in a Flash Array environment, and so now the same Flash Array can deliver both file and block. Which is a unified experience, but all delivered by API and simple to operate. We've also delivered, more recently, Flash Array 3.0... I'm sorry, Purity 3.0 on FlashBlade that delivers the ability for FlashBlade now to have very high resiliency characteristics, and to be able to even better deliver the ability to restore applications when there's been a failure of their data systems very, very rapidly, something that we call Rapid Restore. So these are huge benefits. And the last one I'll mention, Pure as-a-Service allows a customer today to be able to contract for storage as a service on-prem and in the cloud with one unified subscription. So they only pay for what they use. They only pay for what they use when they use it, and they only pay for it, regardless of where it's used, on-prem or in the cloud, and it's a true subscription model. It's owned and operated by Pure, but the customer gets the benefit of only paying for what they use, regardless of where they use it. >> Awesome, thanks for that run through. And a couple other notes that I had, I mean you obviously talked about the support for the work from home and remote capabilities. Automation came up a lot. >> Yep. >> You and I, I said, we have these great conversations, and one of the ones I would have with you if we were having a drink somewhere would be if you look at productivity stats in US and Europe, they're declining-- >> Yes. >> Pretty dramatically. And if you think about the grand challenges we have, the global challenges, whether it's pandemics, or healthcare, or feeding people, et cetera, we're not going to be able to meet those challenges without automation. I mean people, for years, have been afraid of automation. "Oh, we're going to lose jobs." We don't have enough people to solve all these problems, and so I think that's behind us, right-- >> Yeah, I agree. >> The fear of automation. So that came up. Yeah, go ahead, please. >> I once met with Alan Greenspan. You may remember him. >> Of course. >> This is after he was the chairman, and he said, "Look, I've studied the economies now "for the last 100 years, "and the fact of the matter is "that wealth follows productivity." The more productive you are as a society, that means the greater the wealth that exists for every individual, right? The standard of living follows productivity, and without productivity there's no wealth creation for society. So to your point, yeah, if we don't become more productive, more efficient, people don't live better, right? >> Yeah, I knew you'd have some good thoughts on that, and of course, speaking of Greenspan, we're seeing a little bit of rational exuberance maybe in the market. (chuckling) Pretty amazing. But you also talked about containers, and persisting containers, and Kubernetes, the importance of Kubernetes. That seems to be a big trend that you guys are hopping on as well. >> You bet. It is the wave of the future. Now, like all waves of the future, it's going to take time. Containers work entirely differently from VMs and from machines in terms of how they utilize resources inside a data center environment, and they are extraordinarily dynamic. They require the ability to build up, tear down connections to storage, and create storage, and spin it down at very, very rapid rates, and again, it's all API-driven. It's all responsive, not to human operators, but it's got to be responsive to the application itself and to the orchestration environment. And again, I'll go back to what we talked about with our Modern Data Experience. It's exactly the kind of experience that our customers want to be able to be that responsive to this new environment. >> My last question is from John Furrier. He asked me, "Hey, Charlie knows a lot about networking." We were talking about multi-cloud. Obviously cross-cloud networks are going to become increasingly important. People are trying to get rid of their MPLS networks, really moving to an SD-WAN environment. Your thoughts on the evolution of networking over the next decade. >> Well, I'll tell you. I'm a big believer that even SD-WANs, over time, are going to become obsolete. Another way to phrase it is the new private network is the internet. I mean look at it now. What does SD-WAN mean when nobody's in the local office, right? No one's in the remote office; they're all at home. And so now we need to think about the fact... Sometimes it's called Zero Trust. I don't like that term. Nobody wants to talk about zero anything. What it really is about is that there is no internal network anymore. The fact of the matter is even for... Let's say I'm inside my own company's network. Well, do they trust my machine? Maybe not. They may trust me but not my machine, and so what we need to have is going to a cloud model where all communication to all servers goes through a giant, call it a firewall or a proxy service, where everything is cleaned before it's delivered. People, individuals only get, and applications, only get access to the applications that they're authorized to use, not to a network, because once they're in the network they can get anywhere. So they should only get access to the applications they're able to use. So my personal opinion is the internet is the future private network, and that requires a very different methodology for authentication for security and so forth, and if we think that we protect ourselves now by firewalls, we have to rethink that. >> Great perspectives. And by the way, you're seeing more than glimpses of that. You look at Zscaler's results recently, and that's kind of the security cloud, and I'm glad you mentioned that you don't like that sort of Zero Trust. You guys, even today, talked about near zero RPO. That's an honest statement-- >> Right. >> Because there's no such thing as zero RPO. (chuckling) >> Right, yeah. >> Charlie, great to have you on. Thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Dave, always a pleasure. Thank you so much, and hopefully next time in person. >> I hope so. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019, brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman theCUBE coming to you from Dell Technology Worlds 2019 day one, there's only about 15 thousand people here and about four thousand of Dell Technologies closest partners. We're very pleased to welcome back one of our Alumni to theCUBE, Chris McNabb the CEO of Dell Boomi. Chris thanks for joining us! >>u Lisa it's great to be here, Stu great to see you again. You know it's really exciting. >> This morning we've had such an electric day, I'd say we're half way through day one. This mornings key note kicked off with a lot of energy. First of all I have to say Michael Dell coming out to Queen music, that was for me you had me at hello. >> Yeah me too. After seeing Bohemian Rhapsody, it was the only way to go. >> He must be a fan of the movie! >> Exactly. >> Yeah Chris do you have your walk on music picked yet? >> I don't yet I'm still kind of shuffling through a couple different options. >> Okay well we can help with that, we're music fans too. >> Gotcha. >> But so much excitement, so much energy, so much collaboration across all of Dells brands, Michael saying with big energy, Boomi is leading with cloud data integration. Talk to us about what's going on at Boomi we were with you guys about five months or so ago at Boomi World, what's happening now, what's exciting you? >> So every day is exciting at Boomi we continue to grow extraordinarily rapidly across the world and we are focused on accelerating business outcomes for our customers, it is simple as that. It's why our customers stay with us we have over 97% retention rate so we're successful at doing that and when you can come in and produce wins for people, you know they have data silos all over the place, they need to be able to reconnect their systems, apps, databases, but also their processes, people and devices. And once you look at that whole landscape when you can come in and reunify that for them in a way in which they can engage customers, partners or employees in new ways, it's just a huge win and it's a pleasure to get up out of bed every morning without problem. >> Chris It's a powerful story I have to admit it took me a little while to kind of squint through and understand what Boomi did because a lot of times it's like oh it's the cool cloud native, new factor everything like that and we understand getting from the applications that I have today to you know whatever that digitalization, monetization, modernization I have is challenging and there's multiple ways to get there so if I can the thing that was exciting is we hear a lot you know let's meet you where you are and a lot of that is my applications and my processes, my work flow so to modernize and go through that digital transformation, some of it is to create brand new but a lot of that is how do I get what I have to that new multi cloud environment and that was the shout out I heard from Michael this morning about Pivotal, VMware, and Boomi as part of that spectrum to help get us there. Do I have that right? >> Yeah Stu you do, it's just listen, Hybrid IT is going to be here a really long time. People are going to try and survive a scenario where you've got 15 different apps built by 15 different vendors, you've got shadow databases, you've got all this stuff and you're like, but I've got customer data everywhere. So when you're looking for something as simple as a list of customers, what list? None of those data sources are the same, so how do you aggregate that, how do you filter that, how do you do it. So Boomi doesn't want people to just survive Hybrid IT, Boomi wants you to thrive in that environment, want you to really get going and be able to easily unite that, aggregate that, filter that as necessary. So now I have a unified data set in which I can go and engage my sales force and my customers with, and that's really where we play is trying to get it all to be reconnected or unified. >> It's essential everything is about the customer experience, Stu and I were just at a show that was all focused on CX but to have a good customer experience you have to have the right technologies enabling your own workforce to deliver what the customer needs because customer satisfaction yield business outcomes, it's a whole cycle there. >> Yeah. >> For our viewers who want a better vision of where does Boomi fit into you know, I'm a Dell EMC customer, I'm VMware customer, where does Boomi fit in and help these customers to transform that integration layer that allows them to take advantage of this exciting multi cloud world? >> Yeah so Lisa I'll just tell you a really quick story, I'll tell you a personal story. When Boomi has been growing very very rapidly, 62% growth through last year alone, so we're adding people really really fast. As a result of that scale we were horrible at onboarding our new employees, we had a really bad problem, so we looked to our own platform to transform our business and our net new employees experience with that business. Long story short I didn't have people, everybody was busy, I got one of our partners to use our platform to create an entire new employee onboarding process for Boomi. Our net new employee just kind of jumped to the end of the deal, we now have a 21st century engagement mechanism for our employees, that partner of ours put that whole solution together and put it into production in four months, most importantly let's talk about business outcomes. My net new employee NPS went from minus 76, worse number I've ever heard in anything, been in IT 30 years, to plus 92, six months after it's in production we're ready to go. So now to give you a sense, people used to have to fill out a case and go to our case management, fill out a case, schedule a meeting to get a picture taken to get their security badge, now selfie, do you like it, submit, you're done. And all of that, the mobile app that tracks it and performs it, all the engagement, all the interaction with all the systems, we provision our employees across 27 different systems all instantaneous, that used to take us 60 days to get them on to all those different systems. So all of those outcomes is all done with the Boomi platform, the integration requirements, the low code, and the mobile app is all Boomi. So that's why we focus on outcomes. >> So Chris in the key note this morning, want to understand how Boomi fits into some of these environments. We saw Microsoft obviously a big push, long Dell partner, and the other one Kubernetes is the area for all the cloud native discussion and various pieces. How do those fit in to your world? >> So Stu first of all to really understand sort of the bigger picture with Dell and their transformation story right, essential hardware provider, infrastructure provider, you've got VMware and Virtustrea almost making an infrastructure as a service sort of like the bottom of a triangle. You have Pivotal cloud boundary, building applications for competitive advantage right, and then no application works without data. And when you talk about it from a platform perspective that's how I like to think about it and explain it to people that's how Dell Technologies can bring all of this to the table and focus it now on your transformation. When ti comes to the specifics around what VMware and Pivotal are doing with Kubernetes and Google and some other folks and so on, the way we distribute integrations is basically via container technologies, we've had Docker Support now Kubernetes support, so it's very native to us that's how we can manage it from one spot and yet deploy really anywhere as it runs, so there's a lot of data capabilities that really align very well with Pivotal, we also have the Pivotal Data Services Tile so if you're an application developer, you're building that really cool app and oh that's ready to go but you need data from somewhere, you click the Boomi tile it's that data services tile, you can embed it right into your code, in and out comes the data sort seamlessly for you, it's a much better experience for the developer. So all of these companies are coming together to make sure these platforms align in such a way that our transform and outcome focus for our Dell technologies customers. >> We've heard a lot of that, companies coming together. Collaboration was one of the themes I took away from this mornings key note with the guys and gals that were on stage. We've heard that from Dell Technologies, Dell EMC folks, this morning, today, yourself. That collaborative effort is really clear when you're talking to customers. Speaking of collaborating with customers on the evolution and iterations and things, what were some of the, I'm curious, the theme of Boomi world was you guys were going to reinvent iPads, about five months since, you're smiling. >> Yeah. Talk to us about how you've collaborated with some of your key customers to do that, where you are today five months after saying hey, this is what we're going to do we're going to shake this up. >> The future of iPads is extraordinarily exciting, and come to Boomi world next year and we're going to tell you a really good story. But when you talk about redefining the ion iPads, going from integration platforms of service to intelligent platforms of service, and how AIML can change this game. We brought together key partners who have had extensive experience both in AIML, a lot of big public companies that you would know, as well as our customers and now you start looking at things in combination to dramatically speed up how integrations done and who's capable of doing it. I always felt like if I could get integration down into the hands of business analyst, and down into the hands of smart people but not software engineers, leave them for the really hard technical problems, the things that push your business forward, and not hey I need a data set from HR for salary reasons or whatever. And voice and combination with AI allowing you to generate and respond to natural language, hey sales force I'd like the pipeline report for Western North America please, back comes the data set and all you have to do as a user of that is form a question and humans are awesome at that they've been doing it since they were two, and when you can start to leverage that kind of capability, AIML for natural language, you figure out how to interact with it, you get patterns on how to do that that's in our database from the thousands of people that have interacted. So when we look at the future, leveraging our partners for skills that we're not expert at yet, AIML gave us a leep, customers what is it that you need us to do first? And we're starting to bring all that together In a very very interesting way. >> Alright so Chris Boomi has it's own show, but I'm sure there's a lot of overlap between the customers here. What are some of the key objectives and what's your teams goals for this week here at Dell Technologies World? >> Well this week here you know we have a lot of customers here as well, obviously in the Boomi World show we're very specific to the user community that we've got so you get a lot of tracks about specific tips and tricks that you can have and specific ways to do things, best practices, did you know we could do this, did you know that, all that kind of things. Here it's a little bit broader picture, you're dealing with a broader audience, there's more of an awareness problem in some cases some people aren't quite sure what Boomi does and why Dell Technologies has a company like Boomi, so we're here to change that from an awareness side. Got some really cool demos in how we do that, and kind of engage, and then we have our specific customers who we can pull off to the side and talk about their specific challenges. What's next for them, what're the next transformations they want to achieve and what's the next outcome they've got in line and how can we partner with them to help them achieve that. So it's really kind of a two fold kind of a thing, our booth is awareness and is there an opportunity to work together and partners, what's the next step for us. >> One of the things I heard when you shared that Boomi's personal story, the Boomi on Boomi story was the massive impacts that you've made to just the employee onboarding process and I shouldn't say just because we all know, again we talked about customer experience a few minutes ago and that's essential for any business, but to have a good customer experience you have to have successful, enabled, productive employees on all that lines, front lines, middle lines, back lines, et cetera. When you are talking with prospects who maybe are very familiar with Dell Technologies and most of the brands, how well does that story resonate that this is really fundamental integration, especially in this big hybrid multi cloud world in which we live, to have this integration as a core enabler of digital transformation, but also of employee experience, customer experience, business outcomes. >> You know Lisa a lot of times when you talk to people, like if I were to tell you the Boomi story and we had never met it's a little hard to believe that I could do that much and have that big of an impact in four months. It's kind of like oh okay, is he selling me? So a lot of times when we meet people for the first time, if we can get them to just give us a chance, we do a lot of proof of concepts with people, we're cloud software so I can give it to you right now, I could just set you up with an account in three minutes and you're off and running. So you can play with it, you can get experienced with it, you can kind of understand how we do that. Like if we have a claim that we're six times faster than Legacy providers it's like well how do you do that? Well you get a sense of how we do that, and how leverage, meditate it, we use AI to do that, we generate things for you, et cetera. So there's a bit of a awareness and then they take that Missouri side, but can you show me, I'm not sure I believe you, show me. We do that in POC's and then we can kind of really get the ball rolling. So that tends to be the general pattern that we go through with net new customers and prospects, to try and get them exposure. >> You guys have I think it's over eight thousand, over 82 hundred customers globally, you've got some big brands, you've got Lyft, you've got Sky, Chevron, GE, one of my favorite stories from Boomi World was one of your customer award winners, Digital Angel, and how they're reinventing this smart bed technology for hospitals in the Netherlands. Something I wasn't aware of before even technology in a mattress. Talk to us about how Boomi is an enabler there. >> Well it's such a great outcome story. So the smart mattress is intended for the Geriatric Nursing Home settings, and one of the biggest most fundamental problems with health care in a geriatric setting is infection with body sores, decubs, and very simply moisture is a massive cause, lack of movement is a massive cause, and it depends a little bit on age and so on but so they install the smart mattress in all the rooms, and it records and its monitoring your breaths, your perspiration, any moisture events, your heart rate, and so on, and all this data it's just spitting out data and Boomi's there to catch it. Now what Boomi does is it sits on the mattress, and just processes data and as long as everything's fine it just sort of processes it, the minute any thresholds are met, so if you haven't moved in two hours, two hours is kind of a magic number for people if you have not moved in two hours, Boomi immediately sends up an alert in the form of a case, and this case in Tampa Bay in their service now system it shows up on their board priority one case, go get Lisa and give her a nudge, get her to move around a little bit. Same with a moisture event, that's a priority one, go dry them and so on, and they've been able to dramatically reduce the infection rate for the elderly as they reside in these nursing home settings just to be attentive, they know immediately when something needs to be done and only when it's done, you don't get the false positive. So that setting to me and what Digital Angel's doing with that mattress is changing outcomes, and then Boomi just sits on all the mattresses and communicates the individual to the common nursing setting, it's great. >> Pretty powerful stuff. >> It's awesome like I said it's fun when you can make such a big outcome change for people that who you get that kind of reduction in infections in a short period of time, it's very exhilarating. >> So Chris last thing I wanted to ask is, it's addressing people always often look at the pieces of the Dell family as independent and on their own, they've got their brand their on the banner and everything, but you know we talked to Rory about and we saw on the stage this morning a lot of how the pieces are really working together from the top strategy all the way down to the field, how they're working together, give us your perspective as one of the CEO's in the Dell family as to how that's moving. >> Stu I refer to it for folks as our unfair competitive advantage, it's as simple as that. The horse power, the just sheer sort of economy's of scale, and the technical ability, the innovation and the customer first perspective that all these business bring together, as we come together and work together, we have an ability to change customers lives forever in combination and I haven't met a leader of a business that has said well wait a minute, where's my piece of the puzzle, where is this, how do I win, there are no I's when we come together. Rory running the Virtustream business and we're talking about Boomi now runs on Virtustream and as you move mission critical applications how can you get Boomi there so people can share the SAP data that's there now in Virtustream, into other parts of the organization. Talked about the Pivotal Tile, I've got some work going on with Sanjay at VMware, and it's never I, it's always how do we do more for our customers and when we do that and then you put the Dell go to market field behind it, I don't know how many there are 20, 30 thousand sales makers in Dell technologies alone doesn't include VMware and the rest of us, it's an extraordinarily powerful ecosystem that is focused on one thing, customer results. And I'll tell you it couldn't be better, as a leader of a business within there, it literally couldn't be better. >> Wow Chris that is outstanding thank you so much for sharing your perspectives -- >> My pleasure. >> And what's going on with Boomi, we look forward to seeing you at Boomi World 2019. >> Lisa I can't wait, Stu I hope you can make it this time. But thank you very much I really appreciate you having me one. >> Oh our pleasure. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching us live in Vegas, day one of Dell Technology World's 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technology's World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are live at Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas with about 15,000 or so other people. There's about 4,000 of the Dell Technologies community of partners here as well. Day one as I mentioned, we're very pleased to welcome back one of our cube alumni, Karen Quintos, EVP and Chief Customer Officer from Dell Technologies, Karen, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you. Always great to be with you all. >> So one of the things you walk down on stage this morning with Michael Dell and and the whole gang and you started to share a story that I'd love for you to share with our audience about this darling little girl, Phoebe from Manchester, England that has to do with this Dell Technologies partnership with Deloitte Detroit and 3D prosthetics. Can you share this story and what it meant about this partnership. >> Well we wanted to tell this story about Phoebe because we really wanted the audience to understand the innovation and all of what's done it with social good is really about the individual, You know, technology plays a key role but the face behind the technology and the innovation are people and you know, as you mention Phoebe is from Manchester, U.K. Her father wrote this blog about Phoebe's experience. Phoebe's aunt, Claire works for Deloitte. She had access to a lot of what they could do in terms of 3D printing and basically came to Dell and we were able to take it and scale it and accelerate it and speed it up with a engineer by the name of Seamus who saw what the precision workstation could do. So it was this small idea to help an amazing little girl like this that has now turned into this movement around how do we more rapidly, quickly scale 3D prosthetics so these children and adults can have a chance at a normal life so. >> What kind of prosthetics did you guys build for her? >> It's an arm, so the very first arm that we built for her when she was about five years old had the frozen Disney theme painted on it. I asked her father Keith what is the one that she's wearing now because she's now this like really super cool seven-year-old that goes to school and all of her classmates and friends around her see her as this rock star and the one that she has today is printed with unicorns and rainbows. So if you know anything about seven-year-old girls, it's all about unicorns and rainbows and she's done an amazing thing and she's inspired so many other people around the world, individuals, customers, partners like Deloitte and others that we're working with to really take this to a whole new level. >> Karen, I think back to Dell you know, if you think back a couple of decades ago you know, drove a lot of the some of the waves of technology change you know, think back to the PC, but in the early days it was you know supply chain and simple ordering in all these environments and when I've watched Dell move into the enterprise, a lot of that is, I need to be listening to my customer, I need to be much closer to them because it's not just ordering your SKU and having it faster and at a reasonable price but there's a lot more customization. Can you talk about how you're kind of putting that center, that customer in the center of the discussion and that feedback loops that you have with them, how that's changed in Dell. >> Yeah sure, so all of the basic fundamentals around you got to order, deliver, make the supply chain work to deliver for our customers still matters but it's gone beyond that to your point and probably the best way to talk about it is these six customer award winners that we recognized last night. I've gotten to know all six of those over the last year and while they are doing amazing things from a digital transformation using technology in the travel business, the automotive business, banking, financial services, insurance, kind of across the board, the thing that they say consistently is look, we didn't always have the answer in terms of what we needed but you came in, you listened, you rolled up your sleeves to try to figure out how you could design a solution that would meet the needs that we have and they said, that's why you're one of the most strategic partners that we have. Now you can do all those other things, right? You can supply chain ride and build and produce and all that but it's the design of a solution that helps us do the things that will allow us to be differentiated and you look at that list of six customers and brands that they represent, right, Carnival Cruise Lines, USAA, Bradesco, McLaren I mean, the list kind of goes on, they are the differentiators out there and we're really honored to be able to be working with them. >> So we're only a day one and it's only just after lunchtime but one of the things I think somatically that I heard this morning in the keynote with Michael and Pat and Jeff and Satya and yourself is, it's all about people. A couple interviews I did earlier today, same sort of thing, it's like we had the city of Las Vegas on. This is all driven by the people in for the people so that sense of community is really strong. I also noticed this year's theme of real transformation, parlays off last year's theme of make it real, it being digital transformation, IT, security, workforce transformation, what are some of the things that were like at Dell Technologies. Cloud this morning for example, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC that you guys specifically heard say from last year's attendees that are manifesting in some of the announcements today and some of the great things the 15 or so thousand people here are going to get to see and feel and touch at this year's event? >> Well, Lisa you nailed it. What you heard on stage today is what customers have been telling us over the last year. We unveiled about a month ago with a very small group of CIOs in Amia, our cloud strategy, our portfolio, the things that we're going to be able to do and one customer in particular immediately chimed in and said, we need you in the cloud and we need you in there now because you offer choice, you offer open, you offer simplicity, you offer integration and they're like, there's just too many choices and a lot of them are expensive. So what you heard on stage is absolutely a manifestation of what they told us. The other pieces, look, I think I think the industry and CIOs are very quickly realizing their workforce matters, making them happy and productive matters having them enabled that they can work flexibly wherever they want to really, really matters and you know, our Unified Workspace ONE solution is all about how we help them simplify, automate, streamline that experience with their workforce so their employees stick around. I mean, there's a war on talent and everybody's dealing with it and that experience is really, really important in particular to the gensies and the millennials. >> Karen, I love that point. Actually, I was really impressed this morning. In the press and analyst session this morning, there was a discussion of diversity and inclusion and the thing that I heard is, it's a business imperative, it's not, okay it's nice to do it or we should do it but no, this is actually critical to the business. Can you talk about what that means and what you hear from your customers and partners. >> Yes, yes, well, we're seeing it in spades and all of these technology jobs that are open, right. So look, all the research has shown that if you build a diverse team, you'll get to a more innovative solution and people generally get that but what they really get today is here in the U.S. alone, there's 1.1 million open technology jobs by the year 2024, half of them, half of them are going to be filled by the existing workforce. So there is this war in talent that is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and I think that's what really has given a wake-up call to corporations around why this matters. I think the other piece that we're starting to see, not just around diversity but in our other social impact priorities around the environment as well as how we use our technology for good, look, customers want to do business with a corporation that has a soul and they stand for something and they're doing something, not just a bunch of talking heads but where it's really turning into action and they're being transparent about the journeys and where they're at with it. So it matters now to the current generation, the next generation, it matters to business leaders, matters to the financial services community, which you start to see you know, some of the momentum around you know, the black stones and state street. So it's really exciting that we're part of it and we're leading the way in a lot of number of areas. >> And it's something to that we talked about a lot on theCUBE, diversity and inclusion from many different levels, one of them being the business imperative that you talked about, the workforce needing to compete for this talent, but also how much different products and technologies and apps and APS and things can be with just thought diversity in and of itself and I think it's refreshing to what Stu was saying, hey, we're hearing this is a business imperative but you're also seeing proof in the pudding. This isn't just, we've got an imperative and we're going to do things nominally, you're seeing the efforts manifest. One of the, Draper Labs who was one of the customer award winners. That video that was shown this morning struck probably everyone's heart with the campfire in Paradise California. >> Tragic. >> I grew up close to there and that was something that only maybe, I get goosebumps, six months ago, so massively devastating and we think you know, that was 2018 but seeing how Dell Technologies is enabling this laboratory to investigate the potential toxins coming from all of this chart debris and how they're working to understand the social impact to all of us as they rebuild, I just thought it was a really nice manifestation of a social impact but also the technology breadth and differentiation that Dell has enabling. >> That was also why this story today was so great about Phoebe, right because it's where you can connect the human spirit with technology and scale and have an even bigger impact and there's so much that technology can help with today. You know, that that story about Phoebe. From the time that her aunt from Deloitte identified, you know, what we could do, all the way to the time that Phoebe got her first arm was less than seven months, seven months and you think about you know, some of the other prototypes that were out there, times would take years to be able to do it. So I love that you know, connection of human need with the human spirit and connecting and inspiring and motivating so many children and adults around the world. >> And what what are some of the next, speaking of Phoebe and the Deloitte digital 3D prosthetics partnership, what are some of the other areas we're going to see this technology that this little five-year-old from Manchester spurned. >> Well, I'll give you another example. So we, there was an individual in India, actually an employee of ours that designed an application to help figure out how to deploy healthcare monitoring in some of the remote villages in India where they don't have access to basic things that we take for granted. Monitoring your blood pressure, right, checking your cholesterol level and he created this application that a year later now, we have given kind of the full range of the Dell portfolio technology suite. So it is you know our application plus Pivotal plus VMware plus Dell EMC combined with the partnering that we've done with Tata Trust and the State of India, we've now deployed this healthcare solution called Life Care Solution to nearly 37 million rural residents, citizens in India. >> Wow 37 million. >> 37 million, so a small idea, you take from a really passionate individual, a person, a human being and figure out how you can really leverage that across the full gamut of what Dell can do, I think the results are incredible. >> Awesome, you guys also have a Women in Technology Executive Summit that you're hosting later this week. Let's talk about that in conjunction of what we talked a minute ago about, it's a business imperative as Stu pointed out, there are tangible, measurable results, tell us about this. >> Well, I'm kind of done honestly with a lot of the negativity around, oh, we're not making any progress, oh, we need to be moving fast and if you look at the amount of effort, energy and focus that is going into this space by so many companies and the public sector, it's remarkable and I've met a number of these CIOs over the last year or two, so we basically said let's invite 20 of them, let's share our passion, have made progress, care about solving this across their organization. A lot of us are working on the same things so if we simply got in a room and figured out, are their power in numbers and if we worked collectively together, could we accelerate progress. So that's what it's all about. So we have about 15 or 20 CEOs, both men and women and we'll be spending you know, six or seven hours together and we want to walk away with one or two recommendations on some things that we could collaborate on and have a faster, bigger impact. >> And I heard that, you mentioned collaboration, that's one of the vibes I also got from the keynote this morning when you saw Michael up there with Pat and Jeff and Satya, the collaboration within Dell Technologies, I think even talking with Stu and some of the things that have come out and that I've read, it seems to be more symbiosis with VMware but even some the, like I said, we're only in, I wouldn't even say halfway through day one and that is the spirit around here. We talk about people influence, but this spirit of collaboration is very authentic here. You are the first chief customer officer for Dell, if you look back at your tenure in this role, could you have envisioned where you are now? >> No, because it was like the first ever chief customer officer at Dell and you know, it really gave me a unique opportunity to build something from scratch and you know, there's been a number of other competitors as well as other companies that have announced in the last year or so the need to have a chief customer officer, the need to figure out how, which is a big remit of mine across Dell Technologies, how do we how do we eliminate the silos and connect the seams because that's where the value is going to be unlocked for our customers. That's what you saw on stage today. You saw the value of that with Jeff, with Pat, with Satya, some you know, one of our most important partners out there. Our customers don't want point solutions, they want them to be integrated, they want it to be streamlined, they don't be automated, they want us to speed time to value, they want us to streamline a lot of the back-office kind of mundane things that they're like, I don't want my people spending their time anymore and doing that and that's where we see Dell Technologies being so much more differentiated from other choices in the market. >> Yep, I agree with you. Well Karen, thank you so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon, sharing some of the stories, look forward to hearing next year what comes out of this year's as Women in Tech Exec Summit. Thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you very much, thank you. >> with Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, live day one of Dell Technology World from Las Vegas, thanks for watching. (light electronic music)

>> Live from New York. It's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE New York City, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media, and it's ecosystem partners. >> I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, our next two guests are Jim Franklin with Dell EMC Director of Product Management Anant Chintamaneni, who is the Vice President of Products at BlueData. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I've been following BlueData since the founding. Great company, and the founders are great. Great teams, so thanks for coming on and sharing what's going on, I appreciate it. >> It's a pleasure, thanks for the opportunity. >> So Jim, talk about the Dell relationship with BlueData. What are you guys doing? You have the Dell-ready solutions. How is that related now, because you've seen this industry with us over the years morph. It's really now about, the set-up days are over, it's about proof points. >> That's right. >> AI and machine learning are driving the signal, which is saying, 'We need results'. There's action on the developer's side, there's action on the deployment, people want ROI, that's the main focus. >> That's right. That's right, and we've seen this journey happen from the new batch processing days, and we're seeing that customer base mature and come along, so the reason why we partnered with BlueData is, you have to have those softwares, you have to have the contenders. They have to have the algorithms, and things like that, in order to make this real. So it's been a great partnership with BlueData, it's dated back actually a little farther back than some may realize, all the way to 2015, believe it or not, when we used to incorporate BlueData with Isilon. So it's been actually a pretty positive partnership. >> Now we've talked with you guys in the past, you guys were on the cutting edge, this was back when Docker containers were fashionable, but now containers have become so proliferated out there, it's not just Docker, containerization has been the wave. Now, Kubernetes on top of it is really bringing in the orchestration. This is really making the storage and the network so much more valuable with workloads, whether respective workloads, and AI is a part of that. How do you guys navigate those waters now? What's the BlueData update, how are you guys taking advantage of that big wave? >> I think, great observation, re-embrace Docker containers, even before actually Docker was even formed as a company by that time, and Kubernetes was just getting launched, so we saw the value of Docker containers very early on, in terms of being able to obviously provide the agility, elasticity, but also, from a packaging of applications perspective, as we all know it's a very dynamic environment, and today, I think we are very happy to know that, with Kubernetes being a household name now, especially a tech company, so the way we're navigating this is, we have a turnkey product, which has containerization, and then now we are taking our value proposition of big data and AI and lifecycle management and bringing it to Kubernetes with an open source project that we launched called Cube Director under our umbrella. So, we're all about bringing stateful applications like Hadoop, AI, ML to the community and to our customer base, which is some of the largest financial services in health care customers. >> So the container revolution has certainly groped developers, and developers have always had a history of chasing after the next cool technology, and for good reason, it's not like just chasing after... Developers tend not to just chase after the shiny thing, they chased after the most productive thing, and they start using it, and they start learning about it, and they make themselves valuable, and they build more valuable applications as a result. But there's this interesting meshing of creators, makers, in the software world, between the development community and the data science community. How are data scientists, who you must be spending a fair amount of time with, starting to adopt containers, what are they looking at? Are they even aware of this, as you try to help these communities come together? >> We absolutely talk to the data scientists and they're the drivers of determining what applications they want to consume for the different news cases. But, at the end of the day, the person who has to deliver these applications, you know data scientists care about time to value, getting the environment quickly all prepared so they can access the right data sets. So, in many ways, most of our customers, many of them are unaware that there's actually containers under the hood. >> So this is the data scientists. >> The data scientists, but the actual administrators and the system administrators were making these tools available, are using containers as a way to accelerate the way they package the software, which has a whole bunch of dependent libraries, and there's a lot of complexity our there. So they're simplifying all that and providing the environment as quickly as possible. >> And in so doing, making sure that whatever workloads are put together, can scaled, can be combined differently and recombined differently, based on requirements of the data scientists. So the data scientist sees the tool... >> Yeah. >> The tool is manifest as, in concert with some of these new container related technologies, and then the whole CICD process supports the data scientist >> The other thing to think about though, is that this also allows freedom of choice, and we were discussing off camera before, these developers want to pick out what they want to pick out what they want to work with, they don't want to have to be locked in. So with containers, you can also speed that deployment but give them freedom to choose the tools that make them best productive. That'll make them much happier, and probably much more efficient. >> So there's a separation under the data science tools, and the developer tools, but they end up all supporting the same basic objective. So how does the infrastructure play in this, because the challenge of big data for the last five years as John and I both know, is that a lot of people conflated. The outcome of data science, the outcome of big data, with the process of standing up clusters, and lining up Hadoop, and if they failed on the infrastructure, they said it was a failure overall. So how you making the infrastructure really simple, and line up with this time of value? >> Well, the reality is, we all need food and water. IT still needs server and storage in order to work. But at the end of the day, the abstraction has to be there just like VMware in the early days, clouds, containers with BlueData is just another way to create a layer of abstraction. But this one is in the context of what the data scientist is trying to get done, and that's the key to why we partnered with BlueData and why we delivered big data as a service. >> So at that point, what's the update from Dell EMC and Dell, in particular, Analytics? Obviously you guys work with a lot of customers, have challenges, how are you solving those problems? What are those problems? Because we know there's some AI rumors, big Dell event coming up, there's rumors of a lot of AI involved, I'm speculating there's going to be probably a new kind of hardware device and software. What's the state of the analytics today? >> I think a lot of the customers we talked about, they were born in that batch processing, that Hadoop space we just talked about. I think they largely got that right, they've largely got that figured out, but now we're seeing proliferation of AI tools, proliferation of sandbox environments, and you're psyched to see a little bit of silo behavior happening, so what we're trying to do is that IT shop is trying to dispatch those environments, dispatch with some speed, with some agility. They want to have it at the right economic model as well, so we're trying to strike a better balance, say 'Hey, I've invested in all this infrastructure already, I need to modernize it, and that I also need to offer it up in a way that data scientists can consume it'. Oh, by the way, we're starting to see them start to hire more and more of these data scientists. Well, you don't want your data scientists, this very expensive, intelligent resource, sitting there doing data mining, data cleansing, detail offloads, we want them actually doing modeling and analytics. So we find that a lot of times right now as you're doing an operational change, the operational mindset as you're starting to hire these very expensive people to do this very good work, at the corest of the data, but they need to get productive in the way that you hired them to be productive. >> So what is this ready solution, can you just explain what that is? Is it a program, is it a hardware, is it a solution? What is the ready solution? >> Generally speaking, what we do as a division is we look for value workloads, just generally speaking, not necessarily in batch processing, or AI, or applications, and we try and create an environment that solves that customer challenge, typically they're very complex, SAP, Oracle Database, it's AI, my goodness. Very difficult. >> Variety of tools, using hives, no sequel, all this stuff's going on. >> Cassandra, you've got Tensorflow, so we try fit together a set of knowledge experts, that's the key, the intellectual property of our engineers, and their deep knowledge expertise in a certain area. So for AI, we have a sight of them back at the shop, they're in the lab, and this is what they do, and they're serving up these models, they're putting data through its paces, they're doing the work of a data scientist. They are data scientists. >> And so this is where BlueData comes in. You guys are part of this abstraction layer in the ready solutions. Offering? Is that how it works? >> Yeah, we are the software that enables the self-service experience, the multitenancy, that the consumers of the ready solution would want in terms of being able to onboard multiple different groups of users, lines of business, so you could have a user that wants to run basic spark, cluster, spark jobs, or you could have another user group that's using Tensorflow, or accelerated by a special type of CPU or GPU, and so you can have them all on the same infrastructure. >> One of the things Peter and I were talking about, Dave Vellante, who was here, he's at another event right now getting some content but, one of the things we observed was, we saw this awhile ago so it's not new to us but certainly we're seeing the impact at this event. Hadoop World, there's now called Strata Data NYC, is that we hear words like Kubernetes, and Multi Cloud, and Istio for the first time. At this event. This is the impact of the Cloud. The Cloud has essentially leveled the Hadoop World, certainly there's some Hadoop activity going on there, people have clusters, there's standing up infrastructure for analytical infrastructures that do analytics, obviously AI drives that, but now you have the Cloud being a power base. Changing that analytics infrastructure. How has it impacted you guys? BlueData, how are you guys impacted by the Cloud? Tailwind for you guys? Helpful? Good? >> You described it well, it is a tailwind. This space is about the data, not where the data lives necessarily, but the robustness of the data. So whether that's in the Cloud, whether that's on Premise, whether that's on Premise in your own private Cloud, I think anywhere where there's data that can be gathered, modeled, and new insights being pulled out of, this is wonderful, so as we ditched data, whether it's born in the Cloud or born on Premise, this is actually an accelerant to the solutions that we built together. >> As BlueData, we're all in on the Cloud, we support all the three major Cloud providers that was the big announcement that we made this week, we're generally available for AWS, GCP, and Azure, and, in particular, we start with customers who weren't born in the Cloud, so we're talking about some of the large financial services >> We had Barclays UK here who we nominated, they won the Cloud Era Data Impact Award, and what they're actually going through right now, is they started on Prem, they have these really packaged certified technology stacks, whether they are Cloud Era Hadoop, whether they are Anaconda for data science, and what they're trying to do right now is, they're obviously getting value from that on Premise with BlueData, and now they want to leverage the Cloud. They want to be able to extend into the Cloud. So, we as a company have made our product a hybrid Cloud-ready platform, so it can span on Prem as well as multiple Clouds, and you have the ability to move the workloads from one to the other, depending on data gravity, SLA considerations. >> Compliancy. >> I think it's one more thing, I want to test this with you guys, John, and that is, analytics is, I don't want to call it inert, or passive, but analytics has always been about getting the right data to human beings so they can make decisions, and now we're seeing, because of AI, the distinction that we draw between analytics and AI is, AI is about taking action on the data, it's about having a consequential action, as a result of the data, so in many respects, NCL, Kubernetes, a lot of these are not only do some interesting things for the infrastructure associated with big data, but they also facilitate the incorporation of new causes of applications, that act on behalf of the brand. >> Here's the other thing I'll add to it, there's a time element here. It used to be we were passive, and it was in the past, and you're trying to project forward, that's no longer the case. You can do it right now. Exactly. >> In many respects, the history of the computing industry can be drawn in this way, you focused on the past, and then with spreadsheets in the 80s and personal computing, you focused on getting everybody to agree on the future, and now, it's about getting action to happen right now. >> At the moment it happens. >> And that's why there's so much action. We're passed the set-up phase, and I think this is why we're hearing, seeing machine learning being so popular because it's like, people want to take action there's a demand, that's a signal that it's time to show where the ROI is and get action done. Clearly we see that. >> We're capitalists, right? We're all trying to figure out how to make money in these spaces. >> Certainly there's a lot of movement, and Cloud has proven that spinning up an instance concept has been a great thing, and certainly analytics. It's okay to have these workloads, but how do you tie it together? So, I want to ask you, because you guys have been involved in containers, Cloud has certainly been a tailwind, we agree with you 100 percent on that. What is the relevance of Kubernetes and Istio? You're starting to see these new trends. Kubernetes, Istio, Cupflow. Higher level microservices with all kinds of stateful and stateless dynamics. I call it API 2.0, it's a whole other generation of abstractions that are going on, that are creating some goodness for people. What is the impact, in your opinion, of Kubernetes and this new revolution? >> I think the impact of Kubernetes is, I just gave a talk here yesterday, called Hadoop-la About Kubernetes. We were thinking very deeply about this. We're thinking deeply about this. So I think Kubernetes, if you look at the genesis, it's all about stateless applications, and I think as new applications are being written folks are thinking about writing them in a manner that are decomposed, stateless, microservices, things like Cupflow. When you write it like that, Kubernetes fits in very well, and you get all the benefits of auto-scaling, and so control a pattern, and ultimately Kubernetes is this finite state machine-type model where you describe what the state should be, and it will work and crank towards making it towards that state. I think it's a little bit harder for stateful applications, and I think that's where we believe that the Kubernetes community has to do a lot more work, and folks like BlueData are going to contribute to that work which is, how do you bring stateful applications like Hadoop where there's a lot of interdependent services, they're not necessarily microservices, they're actually almost close to monolithic applications. So I think new applications, new AI ML tooling that's going to come out, they're going to be very conscious of how they're running in a Cloud world today that folks weren't aware of seven or eight years ago, so it's really going to make a huge difference. And I think things like Istio are going to make a huge difference because you can start in the cloud and maybe now expand on to Prem. So there's going to be some interesting dynamics. >> Without hopping management frameworks, absolutely. >> And this is really critical, you just nailed it. Stateful is where ML will shine, if you can then cross the chasma to the on Premise where the workloads can have state sharing. >> Right. >> Scales beautifully. It's a whole other level. >> Right. You're going to the data into the action, or the activity, you're going to have to move the processing to the data, and you want to have nonetheless, a common, seamless management development framework so that you have the choices about where you do those things. >> Absolutely. >> Great stuff. We can do a whole Cube segment just on that. We love talking about these new dynamics going on. We'll see you in CF CupCon coming up in Seattle. Great to have you guys on. Thanks, and congratulations on the relationship between BlueData and Dell EMC and Ready Solutions. This is Cube, with the Ready Solutions here. New York City, talking about big data and the impact, the future of AI, all things stateful, stateless, Cloud and all. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action. Stay with us for more after this short break.

(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Well, good afternoon. Welcome back. We are live here on theCUBE, Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. I'm John Walls with Stu Miniman, and I hope you're hungry, because we have just something to satisfy that tech appetite of yours. We have a couple of guests to talk about plants, about eating, about vegetables. I'm looking forward to this. Marc Oshima, the CMO of AeroFarms. Marc, thank you for being with us. >> Yeah, thank you. We're always excited to share what we're doing and how we're transforming agriculture, how we are feeding communities, nourishing communities by enabling local production, bringing the farm to the cities where people are >> Excellent. Good, and also with us is Kash Saikh, who is the vice president of Cloud & Solutions at Dell EMC. Kash, good to see you too. >> Thank you for having me again. >> You bet. So, Marc, let's talk about AeroFarms. First off, to share your story with the folks at home, in case they're not familiar, when I said I hope you're hungry, there's a reason why, AeroFarms. >> Yeah, so this is one of the exciting things we're doing at AeroFarms. I'm one of the co-founders. We are growing indoors. This is indoor vertical farming. We're growing in converted warehouses without sun or soil. We're really rethinking about agriculture and what we can do when we think about the rising challenges we have, climate change, we think about access to fresh water, loss of arable land, but more importantly, again, how can we take back that control as a way of growing. So, AeroFarms, the Aero in AeroFarms refers to aeroponics. We're misting the roots with nutrients and water, using 95% less water than the field farm, so, we have growing that uses no pesticides, we use a fraction of the fertilizer. So, we're really changing the inputs, something about how we have better outputs, and this is an exciting time for us. >> Well, I do want to say, first off, congratulations to the Dell EMC Workforce Transformation Award Winner, so congratulations on that front. That's a great distinction, I assume quite proud and quite worthy, right? >> Yeah, a number of farms, we have a number of great stories and it's, really, starts with the company, so idea, the culture, the people, is really what makes it special, so for us it's very meaningful. So, we think about these farms being for the community, by the community. Our global headquarters are Newark, New Jersey. It's an exciting time in that city, helping really be part of a revitalization there. But 40% of our team's coming from Newark, 85% live within 15 miles of Newark, so the idea that we can create these year-long jobs, better wages, better benefits, and then really address the fact that it's a food desert as well, increase access to healthier foods, so it's exciting to think about what we can do with business. >> Yeah, okay, Kash, actually, I was trying to remember, was it an Innovation Award, that AeroFarms-- >> It was Innovation Award. >> Maybe for our audience, talk about some of what that means to be an Innovation Award. Obviously, AeroFarms is doing some pretty cool stuff, but bring if from the Dell's standpoint. >> Absolutely. Obviously, we are working very closely, my team and myself have been working very closely with AeroFarms, and they way I describe AeroFarms is they are what I call the digital born companies. They are completely disrupting the vertical data in the line of business they are in from all aspects. The innovation is multi-dimensional, if I can say that. So, if you look at the environment they are in, this is actually a warehouse, so there is no sunlight, there is no soil, and they are reducing the water by 95%. They are using our IOT technologies, alternative think technologies. They have the gateways where they are collecting the logistics of location, they have the multi-spectral camera where they are taking the images of the plants as they are coming in on these trays, in terms of what is the color, what is the texture, how they can make it more tasty, and that's where the machine learning comes in, where we are now looking at automating some of this processes around when they have the images, rather than sorting through these images, how we can automate them and make it even more digital. But, you know, it's impressive in terms of how many aspects of digital born and digital firsts these guys are using, because I don't think there is any customer that I've talked to in this area who's using all aspects of the disruption and disruptive technologies as Marc and AeroFarms is using. So, to me, they really deserve the Innovation Award, from so many perspectives and how they are leveraging the technology and how they are changing things in a very traditional industry. If you look at farming, it's a traditional industry but it's from the ground up, more digital. >> Marc, actually, I want to start there first, before we get into the IOT and the ML and all that wonderful stuff that we definitely want to cover. What do you consider your company? Are you a farming company, are you a technology company? You're one of the co-founders. Bring us back. You know, I'm from the area of New Jersey that you're based, no land, no soil, no area, a lot of time no sunlight, yep, sounds about right for that part of New Jersey. >> Yeah. >> So, the founding, was it a point in time with the technology, the skill set, bring us back, and how do you think of yourselves? >> Yeah, so, at the heart, we're farmers, but we're also a technology company, and there's this symbiotic relationship, and we realize if we want to be good at the farming, we need to be good at the technology. If we want to be good at the technology, we need to be good at the farming as well, so understanding this interaction. So, we think about the biology and the engineering and the environment, and what's exciting now, is we bring in the big data, so we're constantly sensing and looking at what's happening with the plant, so the plants are being monitored 24/7, so we think we are the world experts in understanding how to grow plants. We can grow a wide range of different types of crops, so what's exciting is that we can really change the equation in terms of having a better product. We can think about things like the taste, texture, and nutrition and, ultimately, yield, so we can have the right kind of sustainable business plan. >> I love that you say you're farmers. It's not just, oh, we're a software company, we're a digital company. You're right, farming's at the core. People that have seen the videos or tried your products understand, this is great produce you create there, and that pairing with, a big thing we've seen at the show, is the technology and the people, and bringing those together. So, bring us inside a little bit, your IT world, how you manage that, how you look at data as being a core piece of your business. >> What we love about the theme of the show is, well, make it real. It's so real that it's very tangible, it's food and thinking about how we can have that impact in communities, so everybody in our organization's very much aligned in terms of, again, how can we think about a new way of farming, from seed to package, a new way of growing that has food safety at the highest level. So, how do we do that? The technology, the IT, is helping enable a lot of this. We have an amazing workforce. We also have over 300 standard operating procedures on how to run a farm, but what the technology's allowing us to do is how to replicate that, how to scale the businesses, and how to make sure we can do it consistently all year round. So, the idea that we have eyes and ears and, literally, we think of ourselves as the plant listeners or the plant whisperers of what do the plants need, and the technologies allowing us those windows into, again, how to optimize 'em. >> So, what are you measuring? I assume, soil, moisture, humidity, what all inputs are you getting, and how are you processing them, and then how's that, I guess, Kash, I want to hear from you, how you are enabling them to make sense of all this, the analytic side? >> We actually are growing without soil, so just to make that perfectly clear. >> That's right, I'm sorry. That's right, my mistake. >> We have patents on our growing medium. It's actually cloth, and so it's a reusable medium, but allows us a lot of flexibility in terms of the types of crops we can grow. But, we're looking at the environmental factors, so things like temperature, humidity, we're also thinking about things like the nutrients, we're thinking about lighting. So, we talk about having this expertise, understand how to have more effective photosynthesis. We can look at each plant, each stage of maturation, understand not only what type of spectrum of light, but what intensity, what frequency, so we can actually have more effective photosynthesis indoors and then have that consistently. So, we actually develop these growing algorithms, so this idea, so we have an R&D farm, R&D team is taking this, and really calibrating it, then it gets handed over to our operations team. An idea, though, is every harvest now becomes another learning opportunity, and the fact is we can have up to 30 different harvests a year, so those are 30 learning opportunities. We think about that, exponentially, how much more insight we have, how much more data, and that's what I think makes AeroFarms unique is this holistic view. So, we've been doing this since 2004. We'll be the first to tell you, it's really challenging, how to bring this together, and it's by working with partners like Dell can help us really amplify that work and be able to use the technology to make insights around the data. So, we think of ourselves, not only harvesting the plant, but harvesting those insights as well. >> Kash, bring us inside this. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't sound like something that's off the shelf. What's involved in putting together a solution like this? How does Dell work with customers like AeroFarms? >> There are several aspects. The way we started was we started with an IOT workshop with AeroFarms. We also started with the gateways, which as we discussed, provide the logistics and location and all that good stuff. Then, we started working with Marc and the team on looking at how we can automate some of the things, especially around imaging. As I mentioned, there is a multi-spectral camera that is mounted on the harvesting table, and as you're taking the images, and rather than manually sorting through the images, the ideas can be applied, machine-learning technologies to automate some of that, because this is where we come in, especially from the machine learning and deep learning perspective, when we get involved, the first thing we evaluate is, with the customers, do they have the right set of the data? Do you have the right amount of data? If they have the data that is classified and categorized, and then the next step is, obviously, we can apply automation and machine learning and deep learning to get them faster in size, rather than doing it manually. And, in this case, like I said, they were pretty much already there because they are digital born company, they were using analytics, they have a lot of data, and so for us, it was a matter of making sure we focus on what is that they are trying to achieve. There are several aspects, as Marc said, there is yield, obviously, you want to increase the yield per square foot, and one of the matrix I saw was 390 times better productivity per square foot. So, the end of the day, they are trying to increase the yield and, for us, it's a matter of as we are gathering these images, how we can make the process more automated using machine learning and deep learning, if I can simplify that with the right amount of data. And, to answer your other part of the questions, too, in some cases, it's very customized, because they are different kind of customers. As I said, for me, AeroFarms is an example of digital first, they are already there, they have most of the technologies. In some cases, we work with a customers, they are in mature industries and they are mature customers, but they are now trying to be more digitally transformed. They are using some aspects of the digital transformation and we have them leverage machine learning or deep learning to get the faster in size and intelligence that can help them with a competitive differenciation. What we are trying to do is, as a part of these engagements, as in working with really advanced customers like AeroFarms or some other customers, is figuring out what are the typical challenges these customers run into. If I can summarize it, because there are a variety of customers, there are, obviously, early adapters, they come to us, they have figured out most of the things, but they have a particular problem around, let's say, a framework, TensorFlow, Caffe2, and what have you. Large majority of customers, they have heard about AI, they come to me and they are like, Kash, help us get started on this journey. It's just basic stuff, like how do get, even if I have IOT, how do I get started? So, I've heard about GPU and AI which is a cool thing. At the end of the day, I'm trying to solve my business problem and use it as a competitive differenciation. To me, is my job, especially as a solution lead for Dell EMC, is to bridge that gap, not just give them a building block, give them a solution. So, what we do, we have a lab we put together solutions. So, AI, complicated. You have various kinds of accelerators, you have operating systems, and then you have these frameworks, and then there are vertical softwares, what I call the AI. What we are doing in our labs is, based on learning from some of the customers, we are developing an AI validated start, which can be customized, depending on what the customers are trying to do, but they got a lot of guesswork. They got all their self-learning. Along with that, we provide consulting services, so, for example, these data scientists, they are a premium resource, hard-to-find skill sets. We don't want our customers to have the data scientists setting up these data lakes or figuring out all the stacks on their own. Give them the stack, provide them the services, so the idea is from accelerator, GPU, to solution faster. >> Right. So, Marc, your peers really appreciate that you're chewing some glass and working on some of these early solutions. Most customers I talk to, IOT is still relatively early, same thing with machine learning, so I wonder if you could just take a second and talk to some of the things you've learned, anything now that you look back and say I wish I'd understand this, either from a technology or organizational standpoint, kind of key lessons learned, that we can all learn from what you've done. >> Yeah, sure. I think at the heart of what we've heard is that this is a customized approach, so the idea that there are some key lessons, but we're writing a new playbook. That's what's exciting about this, and I think what was so key, though, what we saw with Dell, is there was a process. There was a collaboration in terms of hearing. These are important lessons because this is foundational work. So, I mentioned about the IOT workshop, really be able to get the stakeholders together, really understanding what are the business, and what are our business needs. But, it's not just that one point in time. It's ongoing, it's a really great collaboration, understanding how we integrated the data, what are the data insights, and then how we, it's a interative process, in terms of, again, how do we continue to evolve and make sense of this? Those are important lessons for any partner and any person starting out in this journey is making sure, understanding what the business's business need, but then being able to articulate that in a way that it'd be turned into action and insights. >> Anything that surprised you or caught you off guard in the process? >> Yeah, these are things that, again, because it's new, so it's making sure that we have an organizational commitment, again, in terms of, again, how we prioritize as scaling business, as an emerging business, with competing objectives at times, but at the heart of this is we really need to see what's the pulse of the business, and this is what's allowing us, so this is really important about making sure, strategically, it's front and center. >> It's a cool concept, no doubt about it, hydroponics, technology, an idea that you could say it's taken root, but that would be a terrible joke, and I wouldn't do that. Marc, thanks for being with us. Kash, a pleasure as well, and continued success. >> Well, I appreciate it. >> AeroFarms, based in Newark, New Jersey. Back with more, you're watching Dell Technologies World 2018, and we are live on theCUBE in Las Vegas, Nevada. (techy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's CUBE Conversations with John Furrier. >> Well, welcome to a special CUBE conversation here at Amazon Web Services headquarters in public sector, in Washington DC, actually, in Arlington, Virginia. It's a CUBE coverage on the ground in Washington DC. Our next guest is Shannon Kellogg, who's the Director of AWS Public Policy in Americas, here, joining us. Thanks for spending the time with us. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> So obviously, public policy is a big part of public sector, hence the success you guys have had. Amazon's had great success. I mean, you go back four years ago, the shock heard all around the cloud was the CIA deal. >> Shannon: Indeed. >> And since then, there's been this gestation period of innovation. You guys have been penetrating, doing a lot of hard work. I know how hard it is. And kind of knowing the DC culture, how hard was it, and hard is it for you guys now? Is it getting easier? I mean, policies, got a lot of education involved, a lot of moving parts. >> Yeah, well, I joined over five years ago. And when I joined, there was very little understanding that Amazon was even in the cloud computing business. And so we really had to start from scratch. And so it was just basic education and awareness work. And I wouldn't call that easy, but it certainly was in a different time where people were curious about Amazon, AWS, and cloud. What is cloud computing? The cloud computing directive of the Federal Government, Cloud First Policy, had just come out a year prior, and so there was a lot of curiosity. So people were willing to talk. People were curious, but they didn't really understand what cloud computing was. And again, they didn't even realize AWS was in that business. >> And back at that time, and I know you have a tech history over at EMC before and RSA. You know the tech game. You've seen many waves of >> Shannon: I have. >> innovation, and it's almost a time where you saw some interesting shadow IT developing. Shadow IT term referred to kind of a in-the-shadows experiment. You put your credit card down and get some Amazon, get some cloud, and test, kick the tires, if you will, kind of, without anyone seeing you, called shadow IT. That became a big part of the growth. How much shadow IT has been involved to kind of force Amazon to the table? Did that help? Was that a help-driver for you guys? Was it going on? >> Yeah. Well, it's interesting, because when you look back four or five years ago, there were a lot of first movers in departments and agencies, folks in little units that I had actually even never heard of in some of the big agencies, customers that I would speak to that were experimenting with AWS and commercial cloud. In those days, they were able to take out their credit card and experiment a little bit with it and discover what was possible. And we saw a lot of uptake in interest as a result of some of that experimentation. But really, things started to change in a big way when AWS won the contract to build the community cloud for the intelligence community. And following that win, and as that project was implemented, and in the six months to a year after that award, we saw a lot more interest by agencies to not just experiment, but to go bigger. >> I couldn't get Amazon to confirm. I've tried many times on the CUBE, Jassy and Teresa, to get them to confirm that that was certainly a shadow IT effort, that someone within the CIA came out of the woodwork and said, "Hold on IBM, we have an alternative." >> Yeah, well I can't-- >> (laughing) Conferment denied. I can't comment on that either, but I can tell you that it was a very open, competitive process that we won. And it was a very big deal for the community and a very big deal for us. And that's when we really started to see a number of other agencies and organizations, really, not just experiment with cloud, but how can we leverage this to get the same benefits that the intel community needs? >> And IBM didn't help either. They got cocky. They figured they're going to sue you guys and ended up amplifying it, where the judge actually said on the ruling, "Amazon is a better service." >> Shannon: Yeah. >> I mean, you couldn't get a better testimony. But let's talk about that move. >> There was a resounding public, or resounding legal opinion, and I would encourage your viewers who haven't read it to read it. >> It's well doc, but at SiliconANGLE. Search SiliconANGLE, AWS, IBM, CIA deal, you'll find it. But I think what's notable about that is it's kind of cocky, because the old way of doing things was schmooze, win the ivory tower, have that relationship, lean on that relationship. And the IT just, they were just like going through security at the airport, just whatever, right? >> Shannon: Right. They just checked the boxes. You got to win the C level. That now has changed, where not only at the buying and evaluation process bottoms up, there's a lot of consensus involved. There's now new stakeholders. >> You bet. >> Talk about that new dynamic, because this is a modern trend. It's not just send it to the department for a check box, it's truly agile. Talk about this new, modern procurement process that people are going through. >> You bet, and it's still evolving. But over the last few years, we've seen a lot of interest by federal organizations to shift from what is traditionally a capital expense model to an operational expense model. And you'll probably laugh at me that I actually even remember this. But in the 2015 budget, with the previous administration, President Obama's budget request in 2015, there was, actually, on page 41 of that budget, a line, or actually a paragraph, that talked about how the Federal Government would need to continue to move to commercial cloud services. And in the language, in the budget, it actually talked about the consumption model, the operational expense model versus the traditional capex model. >> Shannon, what is commercial cloud, because, I mean, again, back to the old days, kind of back in my days when I was growing with the industry, you had a federal division that managed all the government stuff, sometimes separate products, right, I mean, absolutely different, unique features >> Yeah, you bet. >> in the government. Now with the cloud, I'm I hearing that this is the same cloud that Amazon runs? Is it a different product. I know there's different private clouds. >> Certainly, our cloud >> But what is the commercial cloud? >> is one option. >> Explain what the commercial cloud is. >> Yeah, our cloud is one option in this area of commercial cloud services. And we think it's a great option. But if you look at the different types of solutions, NIST actually talked about this when they put out the definition on what cloud computing should be described as several years ago. I think the final definition came out in 2011. And at the time, they called public cloud, which we in federal agencies, now, really refer to as commercial cloud, as one of the deployment models. But it also is really emphasizing commercial solutions and commerciality, versus having an agency go out and try to build its own cloud, or to issue a special contract that is controlled by that agency, that does a traditional private-cloud type of build, like for example, California did with CalCloud several years ago. We're seeing more and more agencies move away from that model and into procuring-- >> Why is that? Why are they moving, costly? >> Well, because, yeah, it's-- >> Just like HP and everyone else backed out of the cloud, same reason? >> It's costly, and one thing, looking at CalCloud, and if you haven't sort of looked at what they did with their policy, in 2014 they issued a policy, California did, which basically created a preference for CalCloud. And by August of 2017, they moved away from that preference reversing the policy and then doing sort of a about-face and saying not only is there not a preference for CalCloud, this privately built cloud, anymore in California, but there's going to be a preference for commercial cloud services and leveraging commercial solutions and technologies. >> Is that, again, the same reasons why a lot of commercial vendors like HP, even VMware, and others who kind of backed out of the cloud. It's expensive, it's complicated, right? I mean, is that main driver, or is it of talent? I mean, why did CalCloud move from that to the (mumbles). >> Yeah, I mean, I obviously can't speak for what other >> Well generally speaking. >> companies have done, but I think, based on our observations at the federal level, at the state level, and even internationally, we're seeing more and more governments in their cloud policies focus on how to leverage commercial cloud services, versus build their own, or go out and spend a billion dollars in trying to build their own through a contractor or traditional contractor. >> I talked to Teresa Carlson. >> And by the way, just for the record, in California, it was IBM who actually ended up building CalCloud. >> Nice dig on IBM there, good one. >> So I just talked to Teresa Carlson, and she and I, we talked about the notion of commercializing ecosystem, to bring in tech in with government kind of the mash up or integration culturally among other things, technology. I had an interview with an executive of New Relic, one of Amazon's top customers. I think they were saying they were getting FedRAMP certified. But there's a variety of certifications that you guys offer, essentially, people in the ecosystem, non-governmental, but they can come in and provide solutions. Can you talk about that dynamic, because we're seeing that become a trend now, where folks in the Amazon, or in general tech ecosystems, that says, "Hey, you know what? "I can go in through Amazon and do some business "with the public sector." >> Sure. >> What do you guys offer? Is there a playbook? Is there a roadmap? Is there check boxes? What's the playbook? >> Well, first of all, if you don't, if your viewers don't know what FedRAMP is, it's a Federal Government security evaluation process for cloud computing providers and service providers who want to sell to the US Federal Government. And the framework itself was created on international security standards as well as existing, and evolving in some cases, NIST security standards. And so it's a common security framework that any company of any size can align to. And AWS, because we believe so strongly in security, and because we had a lot of first-mover customers in the Federal Government marketplace, we really invested in that process early. And as a result of that, we meet the FedRAMP requirements at the different security levels that exist. And we were one of the first providers to actually do that. And then partners started working with us and leveraging that. And not just-- >> So what does that mean to the partner? >> resellers or systems integrators. >> They piggyback on your certification, or they have to do some modifications? It's like the stamp of approval. You can't get into the party without it, right? >> Yeah, you have to have FedRAMP certification in order to provide certain types of services to the US government. A lot of agencies now require some type of FedRAMP certification to do business with them. It's very common now. >> Any other certifications that they need? >> Well, that's the most common one at the federal level. But there are some department-specific requirements too. So for example, when you look at the Defense Department, they've added additional requirements on top of FedRAMP. And providers like us have to go through those additional processes, and then again, if you're partnering with an AWS, and we've gone through that process, and we made the investments, and you have some software that's based on AWS, that's going to be favorable for you in order to sell to that market segment. >> Take a step back and zoom out, and talk about the big landscape in DC. Obviously, DC's the center of the action for policy and this, obviously, public sector all around the world, as well in the United States. What's the trend that you're seeing? I mean, obviously Amazon is kind of like its own black swan. If you think about it, lowering prices, increasing functionality on a daily basis is the business model of Amazon. They win on scale. Customers are happy with that, and government seems to be happy. Yet, the competitive landscape couldn't have been at an all-time high, certainly Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, the others are competing for the same dollars, potentially. So you have the old guard, as Andy Jassy would say, and you guys, self-described, new guard. What's the landscape look like? How are you guys competing? What observations can you share and the role of policy makers in the middle of it? Are they stuck between all this? >> Well, it's been quite a ride over the last seven or eight years. Again, going back to when the First Cloud Policy was issued by the Federal Government CIO at the time, Vivek Kundra. Very early days, they talked about each agency trying to move three applications to the cloud. And so we're in a much different time now. And there a lot of agencies who are going all in on cloud services. That's actually been really fast forward and emphasized even more over the last couple years, starting with the previous administration and the emphasis that they had. I talked about the 2015 budget, but we also saw a number of other policy initiatives in the previous administration during President Obama's eight years. And then you had the new administration come in and really emphasize this early too. And one of the cornerstone things that's happened by the new administration over the last year has been the development and then the release of the President's report on IT modernization. And they set up a new Office of American Innovation and a new tech council to advise on the development of that report. And they went out, the administration did, and got a lot of input from the industry. And then they came out with a final report of recommendations in December. And they're already moving to actually implement a number of those recommendations and pilot a number of recommendations in agencies. And they're really emphasizing shared services and commercial cloud services as a key part of that effort. And then in tandem with that, and this is probably going to shock you, but in tandem with that, Congress actually worked with the administration to also make a number of changes to law, including in December of 2017, a really important piece of legislation called, The Modernizing Government Technology Act. And that was added to the Defense Authorization Bill for 2018. You know in this town, that's often how legislation moves at the end of the year is through the Defense Authorization Bill. So that legislation was passed, and it really is focused on helping agencies in their IT modernization efforts move again from legacy IT systems to the cloud. And they're not doing that just because it lowers cost, and it's a good thing to do. They're actually doing that as part of a way to improve the Federal Government cyber security posture. And that's the last thing I'll talk about that's happened in the last year is I mentioned what the administration did about its IT Modernization Report. I mentioned also what Congress did with the Modernizing Government Technology Act. Well, there was also a new cyber security executive order that was issued during the year by the President that married those two things. And basically, it made very clear that there's very little possibility to actually improve the security of federal systems without moving forward with the IT modernization efforts and moving to cloud. >> And the cyber warfare we're living in it truly is a cyber war. This is not just hand-waving, IT modernization. It's beyond that, because it's critical infrastructure now being compromised. This is our security, right? It's the state of the security of our people. >> You bet, and quite frankly, we're seeing this trend internationally too. You see more and more governments making this link between IT modernization and improving the country's cyber security posture. We've seen that in the UK. We've seen that in Australia. >> It takes cyber war to fix IT. I mean, is that what we're coming to? Okay, final point is obviously IT modernization is key. I love that that's driving it. We need to go faster. Question for you, Cloud First, certainly a big, initial orientation from the government to go Cloud First. Question for you is do you see the expectations yet in the agencies and throughout public sector for cloud speed, meaning not only like speed in feeds, like moving to an agile outcome, faster delivery, under budget, on time, lower prices. Is that expectation now set, or is it still getting there? >> No, we believe it is being set. And if you look at developments over the last six months I mean, you now have the Department of Defense that has come out with changes to policy to move faster to the cloud. And if you look at the Secretary, I'm sorry, the Deputy Secretary of Defense's memorandum in September of last year, he talked a lot about leveraging cloud computing as part of a way to make improvements in the implementation of technology, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. And in that memo they talked about that's a national security imperative to do that. And so they're seeing technology, not as the end result, but as a way to enable a lot of these developments and changes. And we've already seen many of those steps forward in the intelligence community. So it's very encouraging to us that we're also seeing now the Department of Defense move in this direction. >> So they're running towards the cloud. They're running towards AI. >> Shannon: They're trying to. >> They're going as fast as they can, because they need to. >> They're trying to. >> Final word on security. What do you hope to have happen in our government in America to really crack the code on cyber security and surveillance all these holes? Especially with IoT, their surface area couldn't be bigger. >> So before I answer that question, one thing I did want to say, because we were talking about the Department of Defense. And you had added a question in earlier about what some of the legacy proprietors may or may not be doing. Well, these two things are married. What we're seeing at the Department of Defense is that they really do want to move faster to the cloud. But you probably noticed in the press that there are many different legacy providers out there. And as our boss would say, Andy Jassy, a lot of the old-guard community, who want to try to slow that transition down. And so that is really something that's going on right now. There's a lot of effort out there to pursue the status quo, to continue to keep the lights on. And if you look at what amount of the federal budget that is being spent on keeping the lights on in IT, it's over 80% is what the number is commonly referred to. And so a lot of companies are making traditional companies, old-guard companies, as Andy Jassy would say, are making a lot of money following that same path. And you know what? The taxpayer can't afford that anymore. The mission owners can't afford that anymore. And so it's really time to move forward into the 21st century and leverage commercial cloud technology and some of these advanced capabilities, like artificial intelligence and machine learning. And then to answer your final question-- >> Hold on, on the DoD thing, because I did see that in the news. It's obviously clearly FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, as they said, in the industry from the old guards to slow down the process. That's classic move, right? Hey, slow down. >> It is. >> We're going to lose this thing. If we don't put the brakes on-- >> It's a classic move that some companies have been practicing for a few decades. >> Decades, decades, we all know that, I mean, it's called Selling 101 when you want to secure the ivory tower. Okay, so papa, this is the tactic, and I want to get your opinion. This is a policy question. It's not in the best interest of the users, and the society, and the citizens to have a policy injection for political warfare on deal selling. So that's, essentially, what I see happening. >> Yeah, we agree. >> I want to get your comments on this, because it comes up to a very political topic, technically, multi-cloud. >> Shannon: Right. So the move is, whoa, you can't go to one cloud. We're putting all our eggs in one basket, so we have to spec it to be multi-cloud. That's the policy injection. What's the impact of that in your opinion? Does it matter? Does the government say, "Hey, we should do multi-cloud"? You actually want to have one cloud. That's what Andy Jassy >> Well, actually... >> wants, right? >> you know, that's not true. What I'll say, and take a step back here, is that what we want is what the customer wants. And a lot of companies are forgetting the customer in this debate about multi-cloud versus single cloud. >> So you're jump ball. Your philosophy is to say jump ball. >> We welcome open competition. >> So multi-cloud, >> We want to serve the customer. >> and single cloud. >> What happened with the intelligence community is they had an open competition for a single-cloud approach. One thing that's happening right now as part of this broader discussion is some of the old-guard companies are spreading a lot of misinformation about-- >> John: Like what? >> the different types of contracts, and so there's been a lot of misinformation about DoD trying to pursue a sole-source contract for this JEDI program that they're trying to do to implement cloud. And what DoD has said in the stories that I've read on the record is that they want to have an open competition. And whether or not they choose a single award, which is different than a sole source that's not competed, if they choose a single award that's competed like the intelligence community did, or they choose a multi-award, it's going to be their preference. And let me tell you something, the policy space, what we've heard consistently from members of Congress and other policy makers is they don't want to be in the business of telling the Department of Defense or any other federal agency, specifically, what they should do or shouldn't do in a technology procurement. What they want is an open competition. And I'll tell you on the record, we embrace an open competition, and that will serve the customers well. But don't tell the customer if you're an old-guard company what they should or shouldn't do. And don't ignore the customer. >> Well, I would, from just a personal standpoint, industry participant, I would say that that's going backwards. If you have the companies doing old-guard tactics injecting policy and FUD to slow a deal down just to save it, that's really bad, bad form. >> Yeah, it's- >> That's going backwards. >> It's bad policy, but it's also bad for the taxpayer, and it's bad for the mission owner. So let there be open competition. Let the customers, like DoD, make the decisions that they're going to make, which is going to be best for their mission. >> Well, Shannon, as Teresa, a basketball fan, would say, "Jump ball," make it fair. >> Let's do it. >> Let the chips fall where they may. >> Let's do it. >> All right. Open competition, that is Amazon's position here in DC. Policy, no problem, we can play that game, but it's all about the customers. Shannon, thanks for your insight and observations. >> You bet. >> Shannon Kellogg, who's in charge of policy at Americas for AWS. This is CUBE Conversations. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (rhythmic electronic music)

(technology music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to VMworld, we are live on theCUBE, day two of our continuing coverage here. We've had a great day and half so far. I'm Lisa Martin, with my cohost Keith Townsend. We're excited to be joined by two guests from HPE, who are new to theCUBE. We have Leslie Maher, the VP of North American Enterprise Servers and Converged Systems. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> And Satya Vardharajan, Senior Director of Strategic Alliances, from HPE. Welcome to you as well. >> Oh thank you, Lisa. Thanks for inviting us here. >> Absolutely. So guys, let's talk to each of you, Leslie we'll start with you. Tell us about your role, especially in the converged side for HPE, and what you're doing with VMware. >> Great. So, my role at HPE is I'm responsible for enterprise servers and converged systems. What that means is, really our value products. A couple of my key responsibility, one is our HPE Synergy Composable Infrastructure, I'm you've probably heard, people talk about here at the event. We also have converged products around offerings like SAP Hana, and some of the more mission critical servers. So here a lot of the focus has been on Synergy, and our relationship once with VMware, but also solutions around vSan and vCloud Foundation, where Synergy provides some really unique capabilities. >> Yes. And Satya tell us about your role in alliances, and your GTM strategy with VMware. >> Sure, so I manage the VMware Alliance globally, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and this is a very strategic relationship for each HPE. We have a long history with VMware, over 15 years. We've had a great run with VMware. And we continue to innovate everyday. My role at HPE is to make sure that we keep the customer trends in our radar as we copartner and innovate together, with VMware. At VMworld 2017, we've got lots of great and exciting announcements. And we're more than happy to share with them as we get to the discussion today. >> Fantastic >> A big question around converged systems, you guys will have the hyper-converged guys on shortly, but converged systems have kind of gotten a bad rap over the past couple of years. Like, "Oh, that's the legacy." But as you mentioned, SAP Hana systems, what's the relationship between converged systems and Vmware? >> To your point, about seven years ago the industry tried to simplify IT operations by doing converged systems. And that was putting together servers, storage, and networking fabric; and putting it all together for our customers. Where the industry has moved to now, is more software defined capabilities, where not just putting those hardware pieces together but enabling them through software. So hyper-converged as one flavor of that, and we're hearing a lot about that here in the conference, and then at HPE, what we did is we innovated around the best of converged and hyper-converged. Put them together into a new category of infrastructure, called composable. Fully software defined, it does compute, storage, and fabric. And the essential idea here is that you can have any combinations of these elements, through a software defined capability. So it really extends the ability of hyper-converge to multiple workloads. We use this term Composable Infrastructure, in addition to supporting through other products we have hyper-converged. That's where we're seeing the market trend. >> So Leslie, that's a unique concept. This composable concept. It sounds a lot like virtualization. How does the two relate? Can I run virtualization on top of these Synergy systems? >> Great questions. Absolutely. In fact one of the key things with hyper-converged or composable, is the ability to really have virtualized workloads. In addition to that, with our composable infrastructure, we let you also run bare metal, as well as containerized workload. So you have a real range of workloads you can run in one set of infrastructure. And so we can support lots of workloads, different kinds of storage in the environment in fabric. So you have a real range of opportunity. >> Let's talk a little bit about composable and your target market. What is the key message? A lot of, sounds like, flexibility and agility within the technology. What's the key message to your VMware customers that are using the VMware software? >> Sue, with customers who are using VMware software, it's the flexibility. For example, with vSan, we've talked a lot about here at the conference, our relationship with VMware. And vSan is the ability to have software defined storage. And what our HP offerings allow you to do, is to have the ability to scale, compute, and storage independently. So giving you this very flexible environment, to grow your capacity. And then you manage it with this virtualized vSan, software defined storage from VMware. Very simple for our customers to really have a simple operations, and really flexible scale; is what these new applications are requiring. >> As you guys have been talking from a VMware and HPE perspective to customers. How are they receiving this message? >> From a customer standpoint it's very clear. They need to move to the hybrid IT model. And that's kind of the mandate that's coming. They see it on the horizon. But they also want to do it in a very cost effective manner. They want to do it in a very scalable, efficient, and automated manner. And that's when customers look to HPE and VMware to solve the problem for them. And that's where our flagship composable platform Synergy comes in to play. Marrying the benefits of Synergy with VMware's Cloud Foundation Software, which is a very seamless and automated way of consuming a software-defined stack. You bring those two together, what you get is industry's first composable platform, that lets you set up your private cloud, in less than minutes. There also gives you the ability to allocate and reallocate. Again, compute, storage, and networking resources independent of each other, at will. Creating this very flexible platform for traditional workloads, cloud native workloads, private cloud workloads. That's what we're hearing from the customers, they want us to step in, solve this problem. But also give them the visibility on top. We were at a partner panel earlier today, and one of the partners got up and said, "Look. This is all fantastic. You're making the right moves, "You're building the right solutions for us, "But help us understand how you're going to build "That uber layer of visibility, "and more detailed predicative analytics. "To help us get the whole picture. "Because I don't want to use third party tools." And those are the frontiers that HPE and VMworld will continue to work on together, and create new solutions for our customers. >> One of the things this morning that Michael Dell mentioned when he was onstage with Pat Gelsinger, was that Dell EMC and VMware where like peanut butter and chocolate. (Satya laughs) Such a good combination. (Leslie laughs) So one year post combination, has that strengthened the HP VMware partnership with this now umbrella under Dell Technologies? In the last minute or so, talk to us about how that's helped you maybe differentiate. >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, right from the beginning, as soon as the acquisition was announced, there was a lot of skepticism. And that was industry wide. Everybody said, "Hey. How is this going to impact "The rest of the ecosystem?" VMware made it a point, and Michael as well, made it a point to come outright and say, "Look. We don't want to mess with the ecosystem. "The neutrality is very important to us." To make VMware not only thrive, survive, all of the above. So we've seen that in the market. We don't see any material change in the relationship with VMware. Just a few proof points I want to throw out there, we are still the largest OEM for VMware from a product perspective. We have over 500,000 customers together, who make demands on running workloads. Our channel overlap is over 80%. All of this continues to be recognized. We won a lot of awards in the past, the last two years, we won the OEM Innovation Award of the Year. Partner of the Year Award. >> I saw it. I think I may have a photo with you. >> Yeah >> To talk about synergy, pun intended. (group laughs) >> No it is. >> It sounds like it's only a strengthening. >> It is strengthening. 'Cause we took it upon ourselves at HPE, as a challenge to say, "Hey, look. "I know there's a new owner. "But this shouldn't materially change your business, "Because there's so much business at stake." And we cannot ignore the customers. The demand for our joint products is stronger than ever. >> Absolutely. Great, you guys. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing what's new, what's going on, and the commitment to customers. Outstanding Leslie and Satya. Thank you so much. You're now in the category of CUBE alumni. >> Alright, thank you so much. >> That's great. >> We look forward to having you back. >> Thank you. >> And for my cohost, Keith Townsend, I am Lisa Martin. You've been watching live continuing coverage by theCUBE of VMworld 2017, day two. Stick around, we'll be right back. (technology music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. (Upbeat music fades) >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in San Francisco for Informatica World 2017. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, SiliconeANGLE's flag shift program. We go out to the events and extract the seth-a-pla-noids. My co-host for the next two days is Peter Burris, general manager of Wikibon Research. You can find that research at wikibon.com. Our next guest is Deepak Gattala. Big data architect, enterprise business intelligence strategy and planning with Dell, EMC Dell. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Deepak: Thank you so much. >> Or Dell Technologies. That's a big company now. You got a zillion brands. We just came back from two days at Dell EMC World in Vegas. A lot of action goin' on in your world, but you're here in Informatica World. You are the distinct winner of the Innovation Honorary Award. Tell us about that. That was last night. >> Yeah, exactly. It was a really good. It was great to be there, and part of the Honorary Awards and things like that. Its been really trusting that, well, you should know, big data is coming into maturity at Informatica, and we use a lot of Informatica products to be successful in the big data site. >> So, you're a customer I n this case, with Informatica. You're a customer of theirs. >> Deepak: Yes >> Alright, so how are you guys using Informatica? >> So, Informatica, we use, uh... Well you name it, and we have it so many products that are out there for Informatica right now, so, we started our journey back in 2007 with Informatica Power Center. As we evolved in different silos and different data sets, that got into, over a site regard lot of structure and unstructured data, and the first of big data also started growing tremendously. So, we have a new platform, and we have a data lake today that we harvest a lot of data that's coming from different sources. Some structured, unstructured, semi-structured data. We needed a tool and technology that can help us to actually use our existing skill set, and the army of the people who knows Informatica from the days of 2007 til today, that we have kept in sight. We wanted to level raise our skill set. Then you're creating a bunch of new folks in the big data platform, and starting them from scratch. >> Deepak, Hadoop was supposed to change the world, and like actually kill Informatica. All the press had, "Low End for Matica," and "Big Data Hadoop." Hadoop is just one element, now, of the big data space, or, how we wanted to describe it. Data lakes are also just fine. I don't like the them data lake because they become data swamps if you don't use the data, and as Informatica-- My question is, as data is gettin' laid out, whether it's Hadoop, or in the clouds, making it relevant is a real architectural challenge. Can you share your insight into, how do you guys look at that data architecture? >> Differently, right? So, like anybody else, you know we also face the same problem off record a lot of data or that we put it on, whether it is water data or lake? Whatever you want to call it. Then over the time we realized like, "Oh, okay. "Now what do we do with this data? "What is the value? How we can extract it," right? That's how the tools and technologies around this whole ecosystem comes into the play, which actually provide that value to get that data value extracted from it. Informatica is one of the tools that our choice was offered doing some of the big ops, and going though a process off proof of concept, and we are identified. This is the stage that we have to make a conclusion to say that we want to go with Informatica because of too many reasons I can't speak about, but one the major reason was, what I can say, I can do the same existing skill sets of what we have in house, and improve on top of it. >> So Deepak, the concept of data management used to be associated with managing a file, managing a data base, effectively managing tools that handle data. As we're hearing it increasing applied in the digital universe, I presume at Dell as well, the notion of data management is starting to extend and generalize a little bit differently. How do you see data management? And the next question I may ask you is, from an architectural standpoint, what's the relationship between what you do an architecture standpoint and how you envision data to managed. What is data management to you? >> So the data management is basically like harvesting your data, right? So basically, drives, like I said, data is coming in different forms. You wanted to go and get the data consumption happen from different sources and different silos that we have one time. Now we are at the situation like, what kind of data exists? What is a metadata? What is the governance unearned it, right? So those are becoming more and more and more important as we move and getting mature in this whole data management prospective. >> So, its looking at data across applications and across tools to try to increasingly treat data as an asset that can be managed just like a plant can be managed. Do I got right? >> Exactly. So, we have to realize that now data is an asset. That's where the value is. Your business and your stakeholders, everybody is looking at the data that we extract a value enough. >> So, does a data architect, then... Again a data architect used to be the person who laid out the database manager, and what not. Do you see your job now more as, design plus implementation with an eye towards performance and ensuring peple understand how to use data. Making sure things can be governed. What does the emerging and evolving job of a data architect in this new era of data management as managing data assets? >> So, traditionally with the relational database, it worked pretty well for the architects with the work they are doing, and it worked pretty well. But the thing is with the new changes we are going though, with the fast evolving technologies that we are having and the mobile data that we are getting in different forms. It always gets challenging that it's not just a data architect. It have to be co-- Together with some of the solution architecture together, to see how we have to go and consume all this information, but at the same time, Paul, we are providing value at affect >> So the tools that Informatica is providing are helping you do that? >> Yes the tools at Informatica have definitely helped us, starting at the power center site, which is more inclined towards conditional databases. Today we use big data management tools on our website, which is actually helping us the same kind of value that it provided with the power center. Now we can provide the same value at our new platform. >> So as you look forward over the course of the next few years, do you anticipate that the assets, the data assets that you're creating in Dell, are going to be applied to... How developers going to do things differently? How users are going to do that things differently. How do you see the data architect and data management serving these different consumers of data within Dell? So, what all includes, like, you know the business satisfaction right? The business is trying to get the value of the data yesterday. So, you know what? You need to be so fast enough to deliver the stuff to the business. One of the major capabilities that we are looking at is, to have the self-service capabilities for the business stakeholders so they can go and do themself rather than waiting for the IT or being a bottleneck for them to deliver what they want. >> So I got to ask you about this award. Dell was recently selected as the grand prize winner of the Informatica one million dollar software and services big data ready challenge. Was that cash prize? Michael Dell just spent 69 billion dollars on EMC, you'd probably use-- No, I'm only kiddin' (Peter laughs) Was that cash or was that product services and-- >> No, it's not the cash. You're suggest I'm one of the hundred year award that we got as Dell, being a proactive customer. A few guys who got inbranded. And, so research and the software that actually we are looking at Informatica data and degration hub and Informatica Intelligence Data Lake, which actually will provide self-service capabilities and integration at a single point. >> So you apply-- so, the objective of the self-service capaibility. The outcomes that you seek, you use the data inegration hub and some, for a period of time, some free software and free services to build that pilot, and then roll it outto the organization. >> Exactly. The whole idea is to show the values out of the these tools and technologies that Informatica has been investing` and helping the whole ecosystem to improvise the standards. >> So, Deepak, I got to ask you. We had some of the execs on earlier, and they're talking about, "oh, data's the heartbeat of the organization." You know, kind of cliches, but kind of accurate. We believe that to be true. Certainly, data is the center of the action. But then, it brings up the whole data conversation. Who's the practitioner? Do you have heart surgeons? And then, what about the hygienist? You know you got to have data hygiene. The big data ready challenge is interesting because its always been a challenge to go from pilot to production, but then also its the readiness around an organization's ability to understand what the hell they have, how do they use it, and then how do they take it to the next level? The mastery of doing the data. So, certainly there's different skill sets. How do you look at that analogy, and how would you organize teams around that, because in some cases, there's a heart surgeon needed. You got to redo some surgery on the company, Felt at the data strategy. And, sometimes its just know your hygiene, brush your teeth, if you will, kind of a concept of being ready. Your thoughts and reaction to that? >> So, yeah, initially we also started in the simplest days just to get the data and put it in one place, but it's not; it's just one part of the whole equation. You have so many things like data governance, data quality, data security, because you know, you might have a PIAD now that you want to secure it, and you might have something like, weblocks is doing your security. Everybody has a play in this. Its not just a one thing that you know, here we have the data fusion done, and then, you know, you're good. So it's not that the case. You should just always that the maturity happens in different stages. >> So the hiring and organizing a team, that's a specialty right? You're going to have the more skilled folks, and then some of the, you day to day, maybe an analyst or citizens data wrangler. You know, these things going on. Your thoughts on organizing, and the teams around data. >> Yeah, so one of the teams is that we are starting looking at these. We are harvesting a lot of data scientists interknow to Dell. That's because Dell's the ones, guys stuck Bill Nye on mostly to see, to extract the value of the hidden stuff, that we are not able to see as of today. To do that in an effective manner, we need to know how to unleash those guys and be self sustained by themself, so they can improve the quality and provide the value of innovation. >> The folks that have been following Informatica over the years, they were once a public company. The data warehouse was all the rage. Now, its real time. All kinds of landscape changes in the marketplace. What's Informatica all about today? >> Informatica is no more just data platform. I think its fanning it's wings to do more stuff. Especially on the beginner side. Now you have this Informatica data degration hub, and you are talking about having this intelligent data lake, and things like that. Which is going to be a link to use in learning off machine learning algorithms and things like that, having this whole meditator concept that is matured, or just a metadata manager. And right now, its going very huge because of the different big data platforms are coming together. Its not only the big data platform. The big data platform is very loose term to me. It's just not the Hadoop, you know? It could be... At Dell, we have so many different technologies come together and recall all of them as a data platform for us. We did a platform for us. We know how to just being one of the competent ones. >> So you're saying basically is there's no silver bullet. >> Yes. >> and there is no magical answer. >> But there are skills. >> Yes. >> And so, increasing what you're looking to do, is saying, what are the outcomes? What are the objectives? What are the skills we need to get there? And then, lets look for tools you today are lining up nicely with Informatica. >> Deepak: Exactly. >> So if you think about the next steps that you're going to take, where does the function of a data architect go within Dell, and what kind of recommendations would you make to those users out there who are thinking about how they want to optimize their skills. Their use of their skills in a data analytics world. >> Yeah, sure. So the data architecture is, like I said, knowing the previously in their traditional data warehouse kind of stuff, it was pretty straight forward. But now, they don't-- we are seeing that data architects are getting more and more matured, and I'm getting this data into semi-structured data, and improvising that how the data fit actually get readjusted in the right manner, so that, you know what we can really... Is it like three and one half, or whatever? Is it-- You can't have a data silos anymore? It's like what you need to bring in all data sets together to actually making a meaningful answer-- >> Peter: Well, at least make it possible to bring it together. >> Exactly. >> We had a lot of costs and a lot of pain. >> Yes. >> You may not have to bring them all together. As you said, you don't, its not all about putting it all in the data lake, its about making it possible to acquire. >> Exactly. So you have to know where the data is, you have to be able to quarry, you have to build and reformat on the fly, all these other things to servwe your customers, especially in the self-service world. >> Right. >> So, where does this go? How is this going to drive? What recommendation would you give to companies who are looking to accelerate their use of these new technologies and new approaches? >> I would say this to everybody. Adhere to your customers. Adhere to your business. They are the reason it is for your-- like you know what? There's no person in the organization that knows every domain. So you need to be in a way where right off your sneeze off different data domains that you have, and make sure you pull all these resources together to actually contributing to the whole arbitrational white impact. >> So, start with-- be true to your business. Your customers. Focus on finding data. And then focus on bringing the appropriate level of integration. Not putting it all in one place, but so your customers can be matched to the data they need. >> Deepak: Exactly. >> John: Alright, Deepak, final question. Just your thoughts on the show here. Again 3,000 people and growing every year. The new rebranding, Informatica going into the cloud world. Automation, you're seeing CLAIRE, this new AI meets data. What's your thoughts? >> I think this is phenomenal approach that Informatica is taking right now, and I'm glad. Like you said, there's 3,000 people here really interested to know what's going on and how the things are evolving with Informatica. It's a really great show to be here. Thank you. I'm very glad to be part of it. >> Congratulations on your award for the Big Data Ready Challenge, grand prize winner. A million dollars worth of products. I can knock down some of that purchase price, but I'm sure you guys are big customer. (group laughs) >> Thanks for coming on and sharing your insight as a customer of Informatica. >> It's my pleasure. >> It's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. More live coverage in San Fransisco. theCUBE at Informatica 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Stay with us. (upbeat music)