>>Okay. Okay. Now we're gonna go into the Green Lake Power Panel. Talk about the cloud landscape hybrid cloud and how the partner ecosystem and customers are thinking about cloud hybrid cloud as a service and, of course, Green Lake. And with me or CR Houdyshell, president of Advise X. Ron Nemecek, Who's the business Alliance manager at C B. T s. Harry Zaric is president of competition, and Benjamin Clay is VP of sales and alliances at Arrow Electronics. Great to see you guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Thanks for having us >>would be here. >>Okay, here's the deal. So I'm gonna ask you guys each to introduce yourselves and your company's add a little color to my brief intro and then answer the following question. How do you and your customers think about hybrid cloud and think about it in the context of where we are today and where we're going? Not just the snapshot, but where we are today and where we're going. CR, why don't you start, please? >>Sure. Thanks a lot. They appreciate it. And, uh, again cr Howdy Shell President of advising. I've been with the company for 18 years the last four years as president. So had the great great opportunity here to lead a 45 year old company with a very strong brand and great culture. Uh, as it relates to advise X and where we're headed to with hybrid Cloud is it's a journey, so we're excited to be leading that journey for the company as well as HP. We're very excited about where HP is going with Green Lake. We believe it's it's a very strong solution when it comes to hybrid. Cloud have been an HP partner since since 1980. So for 40 years it's our longest standing OM relationship, and we're really excited about where HP is going with Green Lake from a hybrid cloud perspective. Uh, we feel like we've been doing the hybrid cloud solutions in the past few years with everything that we've focused on from a VM Ware perspective. But now, with where HP is going, we think really changing the game and it really comes down to giving customers at cloud experience with the on Prem solution with Green Lake, and we've had great response from our customers and we think we're gonna continue to see how that kind of increased activity and reception. >>Great. Thank you. Cr and yeah, I totally agree. It is. It is a journey. And we've seen it really come a long way in the last decade. Ron, I wonder if you could kick off your little first intro there, please? >>Sure. Dave, thanks for having me today. And it's a pleasure being here with all of you. My name is Ron Nemecek, business Alliance manager at C B. T. S. In my role, I am responsible for RHP Green Lake relationship globally. I've enjoyed a 33 year career in the I T industry. I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve in multiple functional and senior leadership roles that have helped me gather a great deal of education and experience that could be used to aid our customers with their evolving needs for business outcomes. The best position them for sustainable and long term success. I'm honored to be part of the C B. T s and Annex Canada Organization, C B T s stands for consult Bill transform and support. We have a 35 year relationship with HP or a platinum and inner circle partner. We're headquartered in Cincinnati Ohio. We service 3000 customers, generating over a billion dollars in revenue, and we have over 2000 associates across the globe. Our focus is partnering with our customers to deliver innovative solutions and business results through thought leadership. We drive this innovation VR team of the best and brightest technology professionals in the industry that have secured over 2800 technical certifications 260 specifically with HP and in our hybrid cloud business. We have clearly found the technology new market demands for instant responses and experiences evolving economic considerations with detailed financial evaluation and, of course, the global pandemic have challenged each of our customers across all industries to develop an optimal cloud strategy we have. We now play an enhanced strategic role for our customers as there Technology Advisor and their guide to the right mix of cloud experiences that will maximize their organizational success with predictable outcomes. Our conversations have really moved from product roadmaps and speeds and feeds to return on investment, return on capital and financial statements, ratios and metrics. We collaborate regularly with our customers at all levels and all departments to find an effective, comprehensive cloud strategy for their workloads and applications, ensuring proper alignment and costs with financial return. >>Great. Thank you, Ron. Yeah, Today it's all about the business value. Harry, please, >>I Dave. Thanks for the opportunity and greetings from the Great White North, where Canadian based company headquartered in Toronto, with offices across the country. We've been in the tech industry for a very long time. What we would call a solution provider hard for my mother to understand what that means. But our goal is to help our customers realize the business value of their technology investments just to give you an example of what it is we try and do. We just finished a build out of a new networking and point in data center technology for a brand new hospital is now being mobilized for covid high risk patients. So talk about are all being an essential industry, providing essential services across the whole spectrum of technology. Now, in terms of what's happening in the marketplace, our customers are confused. No question about it. They hear about cloud and cloud first, and everyone goes to the cloud. But the reality is there's lots of technology, lots of applications that actually still have to run on premises for a whole bunch of reasons. And what customers want is solid senior serious advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure but modernized and updated So it looks and feels a lot like a cloud. But they have the security. They have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on from. And so the Green Lake philosophy is perfect. That allows customers to actually have 1 ft in the cloud, 1 ft in their traditional data center, but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity. And it's that kind of flexibility that gives us an opportunity collectively, ourselves, our partners, HP to really demonstrate that we understand how to optimize the use of technology across all of the business applications they need to rest >>your hair. It's interesting about what you said is is cloud is it is kind of chaotic. My word not yours, but but there is a lot of confusion out there. I mean, it's what's cloud right? Is it Public Cloud is a private cloud the hybrid cloud. Now, now it's the edge. And of course, the answer is all of the above. Ben, what's your perspective on all this? >>Um, from a cloud perspective. You know, I think as an industry, you know, I think we we've all accepted that public cloud is not necessarily gonna win the day and were, in fact, in a hybrid world, there's certainly been some some commentary impress. Um, you know, that would sort of validate that. Not that necessarily needs any validation. But I think it's the linkages between on Prem, Um, and cloud based services have increased. Its paved the way for customers to more effectively deploy hybrid solutions in the model that they want that they desired. You know, Harry was commenting on that a moment ago. Um, you know, as the trend continues, it becomes much easier for solution providers and service providers to drive there services, initiatives, uh, you know, in particular managed services. So, you know, from from an arrow perspective, as we think about how we can help scale in particular from Greenland perspective, we've got the ability to stand up some some cloud capabilities through our aero secure platform. um that can really help customers adopt Green Lake. Uh, and, uh, benefit to benefit from, um, some alliances, opportunities as well. And I'll talk more about that as we go through >>that. I didn't mean to squeeze you on a narrow. I mean, you got arrows. Been around longer than computers. I mean, if you google the history of arrow, it'll blow your mind. But give us a little, uh, quick commercial. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, um, I've been with arrow for about 20 years. I've got responsibility for alliances, organization, North America for Global value, added distribution, business consulting and channel enablement Company. Uh, you know, we bring scope, scale and and, uh, expertise as it relates to the I t industry. Um, you know, I love the fast paced, the fast paced that comes with the market, that we're all all in, and I love helping customers and suppliers both, you know, be positioned for long term success. And, you know, the subject matter here today is just a great example of that. So I'm happy to be here and or to the discussion. >>All right, We got some good brain power in the room. Let's let's cut right to the chase. Ron, Where's the pain? What are the main problems that C B. T s. I love the what it stands for. Consult Bill Transform and support the What's the main pain point that that customers are asking you to solve when it comes to their cloud strategies. >>Third day of our customers' concerns and associated risk come from the market demands to deliver their products, services and experiences instantaneously. And then the challenges is how do they meet those demands because they have aging infrastructure processes and fiscal constraints. Our customers really need us now more than ever to be excellent listeners so we can collaborate on an effective map for the strategic placement of workloads and applications in that spectrum of cloud experiences, while managing their costs and, of course, mitigating risk to their business. This collaboration with our customer customers often identify significant costs that have to be evaluated, justified or eliminated. We find significant development, migration and egress charges in their current public cloud experience, coupled with significant over provisioning, maintenance, operational and stranded asset costs in their on premise infrastructure environment. When we look at all these costs holistically through our customized workshops and assessments. We can identify the optimal cloud experience for the respective workloads and applications through our partnership with HP and the availability of the HP Green Lake Solutions. Our customers now have a choice to deliver SLA's economics and business outcomes for their workloads and applications that best reside on premise in a private cloud and have that experience. This is a rock solid solution that eliminates, you know, the development costs at the experience and the egress charges that are associated with the public cloud while utilizing HP Green Lake to eliminate over provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrastructure hardware. Lastly, our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no upfront capital expense. And now that achieves true utilization to cost economics. You know, with HP Green Lake solution from C B. T s. >>I love to focus on the business case because it's measurable. That sort of follow the money. That's where it's where the opportunity is. Okay, See, I got a question for you thinking about advise X customers. How are they? Are they leaning into Green Lake? You know, what are they telling you? Is the business impact when they when they experience Green Lake, >>I think it goes back to what Ron was talking about. We have to solve the business challenges first, and so far the reception's been positive. When I say that is, customers are open, everybody wants to. The C suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits, but what we're hearing, what we're seeing from our customers is we're seeing more adoption from customers that it may be their first put in, if you will. But as importantly, we're able to share other customers with our potentially new clients that that say, What's the first thing that happens with regard to Green like Well, number one, it works. It works as advertised and as a as a service. That's a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today, but when you can say we have a proven solution, it's working in in in our environment today. That's key. I think the second thing is is flexibility. You know, when customers are looking for this, this hybrid solution, you've got to be flexible for again. I think Ron said it well, you don't have a big capital outlay but also what customers want to be able to. We're gonna build for growth, but we don't want to pay for it, so we'll pay as we grow. Not as not as we have to use because we used to do It was upfront of the capital expenditure, and I will just pay as we grow and that really facilitates. In another great examples, you'll hear from a customer, uh, this afternoon, but you'll hear where one of the biggest benefits they just acquired a $570 million company, and their integration is going to be very seamless because of their investment in Green Lake. They're looking at the flexibility to add the Green Lake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions and finally is really we see it really brings the cloud experience and as a service to our customers bring. And with HP Green Lake, it brings best to breathe. So it's not just what HP has to offer. When you look at hyper converged, they have Nutanix kohi city, so I really believe it brings best to breathe. So, uh to net it out and close it out with our customers thus far, the customer experience has been exceptional with Green Lake Central has interface. Customers have had a lot of success. We just had our first customer from about a year and a half ago, just re up, and it was a highly competitive situation. But they just said, Look, it's proven it works and it gives us that cloud experience So I had a lot of great success thus far, looking forward to more. >>Thank you. So, Harry, I want to pick up on something, CR said, And get your perspectives. So when you when I talk to the C suite, they do all want to hear about, you know, Cloud, they have a cloud agenda and and what they tell me is it's not just about their I t transformation. They want, they want that. But they also want to transform their business. So I wonder if you could talk Harry about competence, perspective on the potential business impact of Green Lake, and and also, you know, I'm interested in how you guys are thinking about workloads, how to manage work, you know how to cost optimize in i t. But also the business value that comes out of that capability. >>Yes. So, Dave, you know, if you were to talk to CFO and I have the good fortune to talk to lots of CFOs, they want to pay the cost. When they generate the revenue, they don't want to have all the cost up front and then wait for the revenue to come through. A good example of where that's happening right now is related to the pandemic. Employees that used to work at the office have now moved to working from home, and now they have to. They have to connect remotely to run the same application. So use this thing called VD virtual interfacing to allow them to connect to the applications that they need to run in the off. Don't want to get into too much detail. But to be able to support that from an at home environment, they needed to buy a lot more computing capacity to handle this. Now there's an expectation that hopefully six months from now, maybe sooner than that people will start returning to the office. They may not need that capacity so they can turn down on the cost. And so the idea of having the capacity available when you need it, But then turning it off when you don't need it is really a benefit of a variable cost model. Another example that I would use is one in new development if a customer is going to implement and you, let's say, line of business application essay P is very, very popular, you know, it actually, unfortunately takes six months to two years to actually get that application setup installed, validated, test it and then moves through production. You know what used to happen before they would buy all that capacity at front and basically sit there for two years? And then when they finally went to full production, then they were really getting value out of that investment. But they actually lost a couple of years of technology, literally sitting almost idle. And so, from a CFO perspective, his ability to support the development of those applications as he scales it perfect Green Lake is the ideal solution that allows them to do that. >>You know, technology has saved businesses in this pandemic. There's no question about it and what Harry was just talking about with regard to VD. You think about that. There's the dialing up and dialing down piece, which is awesome from an i t perspective and then the business impact. There is the productivity of Of of the end users, and most C suite executives I've talked to said Productivity actually went up during covid with work from home, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. Ben, you know Ben, I We said Arrow has been around for a long, long time, certainly before all of us were born and it's gone through many, many industry transitions during our lifetimes. How does arrow and how do How do your partners think about building cloud experience experiences? And where does Green Lake fit in from your perspective? >>A great question. So from a narrow perspective, when you think about cloud experience and, of course, us taking a view as a distribution partner, we want to be able to provide scale and efficiency to our network of partners. So we do that through our aero screw platform. Um, just just a bit of a you know, a bit of a commercial. I mean, you get single quote single bill auto provision compared multi supplier, if you will Subscription management utilization reporting from the platform itself. So if we pivot that directly to HP, you're going to get a bit of a scoop here, Dave. So we're excited today to have Green Lake live in our platform available for our part of community to consume in particular the swift solutions that HP has announced. So we're very excited to to share that today, Um, maybe a little bit more on Green Lake. I think at this point in time, there it's differentiated, Um, in a sense that if you think about some of the other offerings in the market today and further with, um uh, having the solutions himself available in a row sphere So, you know, I would say, Do we identify the uniqueness, um, and quickly partner with HP to to work with our atmosphere platform? One other sort of unique thing is, you know, when you think about platform itself, you've got to give a consistent experience the different geographies around the world. So, you know, we're available in north of 20 countries. There's thousands of resellers and transacting on the platform on a regular basis, and frankly, hundreds of thousands and customers are leveraging today, so that creates an opportunity for both Arrow HP and our partner community. So we're excited. >>Uh, you know, I just want to open it up and we don't have much time left, but thoughts on on on differentiation. You know, when people ask me Okay, what's really different about H P E and Green Lake? As others you know are doing things that with with as a service to me, it's a I I always say cultural. It starts from the top with Antonio, and it's like the company's all in. But But I wonder from your perspective because you guys are hands on. Are there other differential factors that you would point to let me just open that up to the group? >>Yeah, if I could make a comment. You know, Green Lake is really just the latest invocation of the as a service model. And what does that mean? What that actually means is you have a continuous ongoing relationship with the customer. It's not a cell. And forget not that we ever forget about customers, but there are highlights. Customer buys, it gets installed, and then for two or three years, you may have an occasional engagement with them. But it's not continuous. When you move to a Green Lake model, you're actually helping them manage that you are in the core in the heart of their business. No better place to be if you want to be sticky and you want to be relevant, and you want to be always there for them. >>You know, I wonder if somebody else could add to and and and in your in your remarks from your perspective as a partner because, you know, Hey, a lot of people made a lot of money selling boxes, but those days are pretty much gone. I mean, you have to transform into a services mindset. But other thoughts, >>I think I think Dad did that day. I think Harry's right on right. What he the way he positioned Exactly. You get on the customer. Even another step back for us is we're able to have the business conversation without leading with what you just said. You don't have to leave with a storage solution to leave with a compute. You can really have step back, have a business conversation, and we've done that where you don't even bring up hp Green Lake until you get to the point of the customer says, So you can give me an on prem cloud solution that gives me scalability, flexibility, all the things you're talking about. How does that work then? Then you bring up. It's all through this HP Green link tool. It really gives you the ability to have a business conversation. And you're solving the business problems versus trying to have a technology conversation. And to me, that's clear differentiation for HP. Green length. >>All right, guys. CR Ron. Harry. Ben. Great discussion. Thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. >>Thanks for having us, Dave. >>All >>right. Keep it right there for more great content at Green Lake Day. Right back? Yeah.

(bright upbeat music) >> Announcer: We are entering an age of insight where data moves freely between environments to work together powerfully, from wherever it lives. A new era driven by next generation cloud services. It's freedom that accelerates innovation and digital transformation, but it's only for those who dare to propel their business toward a new future that pushes beyond the usual barriers. To a place that unites all information under a fluid yet consistent operating model, across all your applications and data. To a place called HPE GreenLake. HPE GreenLake pushes beyond the obstacles and limitations found in today's infrastructure because application entanglements, data gravity, security, compliance, and cost issues simply aren't solved by current cloud options. Instead, HPE GreenLake is the cloud that comes to you, bringing with it, increased agility, broad visibility, and open governance across your entire enterprise. This is digital transformation unlocked, incompatibility solved, data decentralized, and insights amplified. For those thinkers, makers and doers who want to create on the fly scale up or down with a single click, stand up new ideas without risk, and view it all as a single agile system of systems. HPE GreenLake is here and all are invited. >> The definition of cloud is evolving and now clearly comprises hybrid and on-prem cloud. These trends are top of mind for every CIO and the space is heating up as every major vendor has been talking about as-a-Service models and making moves to better accommodate customer needs. HPE was the first to market with its GreenLake brand, and continues to make new announcements designed to bring the cloud experience to far more customers. Come here from HPE and its partners about the momentum that they're seeing with this trend and what actions you can take to stay ahead of the competition in this fast moving market. (bright soft music) Okay, we're with Keith White, Senior Vice President and General Manager for GreenLake at HPE, and George Hope, who's the Worldwide Head of Partner Sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome gentlemen, good to see you. >> Awesome to be here. >> Yeah. Thanks so much. >> You're welcome, Keith, last we spoke, we talked about how you guys were enabling high performance computing workloads to get green-late right for enterprise markets. And you got some news today, which we're going to get to but you guys, you put out a pretty bold position with GreenLake, basically staking a claim if you will, the edge, cloud as-a-Service all in. How are you thinking about its impacts for your customers so far? >> You know, the impact's been amazing and, you know, in essence, I think the pandemic has really brought forward this real need to accelerate our customer's digital transformation, their modernization efforts, and you know, frankly help them solve what was amounting to a bunch of new business problems. And so, you know, this manifests itself in a set of workloads, set of solutions, and across all industries, across all customer types. And as you mentioned, you know GreenLake is really bringing that value to them. It brings the cloud to the customer in their data center, in their colo, or at the edge. And so frankly, being able to do that with that full cloud experience. All is a pay per use, you know, fully consumption-based scenario, all managed for them so they get that as I mentioned, true cloud experience. It's really sort of landing really well with customers and we continue to see accelerated growth. We're adding new customers, we're adding new technology. And we're adding a whole new set of partner ecosystem folks as well that we'll talk about. >> Well, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that just cause as a quick aside it's, the definition of cloud is evolving and it's because customers, it's the way customers look at it. It's not just vendor marketing. It's what customers want, that experience across cloud, edge, you know, multiclouds, on-prem. So George, what's your take? Anything you'd add to Keith's response? >> I would, you've heard Antonio Neri say it several times and you probably saying it for yourself. The cloud is an experience, it's not a destination. The digital transformation is pushing new business models and that demands more flexible IT. And the first round of digital transformation focused on a cloud first strategy. For our customers we're looking to get more agility. As Keith mentioned, the next phase of transformation will be characterized by bringing the cloud speed and agility to all apps and data, regardless of where they live, According to IDC, by the end of 2021, 80% of the businesses will have some mechanism in place to shift the cloud centric, infrastructure and apps and twice as fast as before the pandemic. So the pandemic has actually accelerated the impact of the digital divide, specifically, in the small and medium companies which are adapting to technology change even faster and emerging stronger as a result. You know, the analysts agree cloud computing and digitalization will be key differentiators for small and medium business in years to come. And speed and automation will be pivotal as well. And by 2022, at least 30% of the lagging SMBs will accelerate digitalization. But the fair focus will be on internal processes and operations. The digital leaders, however, will differentiate by delivering their customers, a dynamic experience. And with our partner ecosystem, we're helping our customers embrace our as-a-Service vision and stand out wherever they are. on their transformation journey. >> Well, thanks for those stats, I always liked the data. I mean, look, if you're not a digital business today I feel like you're out of business only 'cause.... I'm sure there's some exceptions, but you got to get on the digital bandwagon. I think pre-pandemic, a lot of times people really didn't know what it meant. We know now what it means. Okay, Keith, let's get into the news when we do these things. I love that you guys always have something new to share. What do you have? >> No, you got it. And you know, as we said, the world is hybrid and the world is multicloud. And so, customers are expecting these solutions. And so, we're continuing to really drive up the innovation and we're adding additional cloud services to GreenLake. We just recently went to General AVailability of our MLOps, Machine Learning Operations, and our containers for cloud services along with our virtual desktop which has become very big in a pandemic world where a lot more people are working from home. And then we have shipped our SAP HEC, customer edition, which allows SAP customers to run on their premise whether it's the data center or the colo. And then today we're introducing our new Bare Metal capabilities as well as containers on Bare Metal as a Service, for those folks that are running cloud native applications that don't require any sort of hypervisor. So we're really excited about that. And then second, I'd say similar to that HPC as a Service experience we talked about before, where we were bringing HPC down to a broader set of customers. We're expanding the entry point for our private cloud, which is virtual machines, containers, storage, compute type capabilities in workload optimized systems. So again, this is one of the key benefits that HPE brings is it combines all of the best of our hardware, software, third-party software, and our services, and financial services into a package. And we've workload optimized this for small, medium, large and extra-large. So we have a real sort of broader base for our customers to take advantage of and to really get that cloud experience through HPE GreenLake. And, you know, from a partner standpoint we also want to make sure that we continue to make this super easy. So we're adding self-service capabilities we're integrating into our distributors marketplaces through a core set of APIs to make sure that it plugs in for a very smooth customer experience. And this expands our reach to over 100,000 additional value-added resellers. And, you know, we saw just fantastic growth in the channel in Q1, over 118% year over year growth for GreenLake Cloud Services through the channel. And we're continuing to expand, extend and expand our partner ecosystem with additional key partnerships like our colos. The colocation centers are really key. So Equinix, CyrusOne and others that we're working with and I'll let George talk more about. >> Yeah, I wonder if you could pick up on that George. I mean, look, if I'm a partner and and I mean, I see an opportunity here.. Maybe, you know, I made a lot of money in the old days moving iron. But I got to move, I got to pivot my business. You know, COVID's actually, you know, accelerating a lot of those changes, but there's a lot of complexity out there and partners can be critical in helping customers make that journey. What do you see this meaning to partners, George? >> So I completely agree with Keith and through and with our partners we give our customers choice. Right, they don't have to worry about security or cost as they would with public cloud or the hyperscalers. We're driving special initiatives via Cloud28 which we run, which is the world's largest cloud aggregator. And also, in collaboration with our distributors in their marketplaces as Keith mentioned. In addition, customers can leverage our expertise and support of our service provider ecosystem, our SI's, our ISV's, to find the right mix of hybrid IT and decide where each application or workload should be hosted. 'Cause customers are now demanding robust ecosystems, cloud adjacency, and efficient low latency networks. And the modern workload demands, secure, compliant, highly available, and cost optimized environments. And Keith touched on colocation. We're partnering with colocation facilities to provide our customers with the ability to expand bandwidth, reduce latency, and get access to a robust ecosystem of adjacent providers. We touched on Equinix a bit as one of them, but we're partnering with them to enable customers to connect to multiple clouds with private on-demand interconnections from hundreds of data center locations around the globe. We continue to invest in the partner and customer experience, you know, making ourselves easier to do business with. We've now fully integrated partners in GreenLake Central, and could provide their customers end to end support and managing the entire hybrid IT estate. And lastly, we're providing partners with dedicated and exclusive enablement opportunities so customers can rely on both HPE and partner experts. And we have a competent team of specialists that can help them transform and differentiate themselves. >> Yeah, so, I'm hearing a theme of simplicity. You know, I talked earlier about this being customer-driven. To me what the customer wants is they want to come in, they want simple, like you mentioned, self-serve. I don't care if it's on-prem, in the cloud, across clouds, at the edge, abstract, all that complexity away from me. Make it simple to do, not only the technology to work, you figure out where the workload should run and let the metadata decide and that's a bold vision. And then, make it easy to do business. Let me buy as-a-Service if that's the way I want to consume. And partners are all about, you know, reducing friction and driving that. So, anyway guys, final thoughts, maybe Keith, you can close it out here and maybe George can call it timeout. >> Yeah, you summed it up really nice. You know, we're excited to continue to provide what we view as the largest and most flexible hybrid cloud for our customers' apps, data, workloads, and solutions. And really being that leading on-prem solution to meet our customer's needs. At the same time, we're going to continue to innovate and our ears are wide open, and we're listening to our customers on what their needs are, what their requirements are. So we're going to expand the use cases, expand the solution sets that we provide in these workload optimized offerings to a very very broad set of customers as they drive forward with that digital transformation and modernization efforts. >> Right, George, any final thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, with our partners we work as one team and continue to hone our skills and embrace our competence. We're looking to help them evolve their businesses and thrive, and we're here to help now more than ever. So, you know, please reach out to our team and our partners and we can show you where we've already been successful together. >> That's great, we're seeing the expanding GreenLake portfolio, partners key part of it. We're seeing new tools for them and then this ecosystem evolution and build out and expansion. Guys, thanks so much. >> Yeah, you bet, thank you. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> You're welcome. (bright soft music) >> Okay, we're here with Jo Peterson the VP of Cloud & Security at Clarify360. Hello, Jo, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hello. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, all right, let's get right into it. How do you think about cloud where we are today in 2021? The definitions evolve, but where do you see it today and where do you see it going? >> Well, that's such an interesting question and is so relevant because the labels are disappearing. So over the last 10 years, we've sort of found ourselves defining whether an environment was public or whether it was private or whether it was hybrid. Here's the deal, cloud is infrastructure and infrastructure is cloud. So at the end of the day cloud in whatever form it's taking is a platform, and ultimately, this enablement tool for the business. Customers are consuming cloud in the best way that works for their businesses. So let's also point out that cloud is not a destination, it's this journey. And clients are finding themselves at different places on that road. And sometimes they need help getting to the next milestone. >> Right, and they're really looking for that consistent experience. Well, what are the big waves and trends that you're seeing around cloud out there in the marketplace? >> So I think that this hybrid reality is happening in most organizations. Their actual IT portfolios include a mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure, and we're seeing this blurred line happening between the public cloud and the traditional data center. Customers want a bridge that easily connects one environment to the other environment, and they want end-to-end visibility. Customers are becoming more intentional and strategic about their cloud roadmaps. So some of them are intentionally and strategically selecting hybrid environments because they feel that it affords them more control, cost, balance, comfort level around their security. In a way, cloud itself is becoming borderless. The major tech providers are extending their platforms in an infrastructure agnostic manner and that's to work across hybrid environments, whether they be hosted in the data center, whether it includes multiple cloud providers. As cloud matures, workload environments fit is becoming more of a priority. So forward thinking where the organizations are matching workloads to the best environment. And it's sort of application rationalization on this case by case basis and it really makes sense. >> Yeah, it does makes sense. Okay, well, let's talk about HPE GreenLake. They just announced some new solutions. What do you think it means for customers? >> I think that HPE has stepped up. They've listened to not only their customers but their partners. Customers want consumable infrastructure, they've made that really clear. And HPE has expanded the cloud service portfolio for clients. They're offering more choices to not only enterprise customers but they're expanding that offering to attract this mid-market client base. And they provided additional tools for partners to make selling GreenLake easier. This is all helping to drive channel sales. >> Yeah, so better granularity, just so it increases the candidates, better optionality for customers. And this thing is evolving pretty quickly. We're seeing a number of customers that we talked to interested in this model, trying to understand it better and ultimately, I think they're going to really lean in hard. Jo, I wonder if you could maybe think about or share with us which companies are, I got to say, getting it right? And I'm really interested in the partner piece, because if you think about the partner business, it's really, it's changing a lot, right? It's gone from this notion of moving boxes and there was a lot of money to be made over the decades in doing that, but they have to now become value-add suppliers and really around cloud services. And in the early days of cloud, I think the channel was a little bit freaked out, saying, uh-oh, they're going to cut out the middleman. But what's actually happened is those smart agile partners are adding substantial value, they've got deep relationships with customers and they're serving as really trusted advisors and executors of cloud strategies. What do you see happening in the partner community? >> Well, I think it's been a learning curve and everything that you said was spot on. It's a two way street, right? In order for VARs to sell residual services, monthly recurring services, there has to have been some incentive to do that and HPE really got it right. Because they, again listened to that partner community, and they said, you know what? We've got to incentivize these guys to start selling this way. This is a partnership and we expect it to be a partnership. And the tech companies that are getting right are doing that same sort of thing, they're figuring out ways to make it palatable to that VAR, to help them along that journey. They're giving them tools, they're giving them self-serve tools, they're incentivizing them financially to make that shift. That's what's going to matter. >> Well, that's a key point you're making, I mean, the financial incentives, that's new and different. Paying, you know, incentivizing for as-a-Service models versus again, moving hardware and paying for, you know, installing iron. That's a shift in mindset, isn't it? >> It definitely is. And HPE, I think is getting it right because I didn't notice but I learned this, 70% of their annual sales are actually transacted through their channel. And they've seen this 116% increase in HPE GreenLake orders in Q1, from partners. So what they're doing is working. >> Yeah, I think you're right. And you know, the partner channel it becomes super critical. It's funny, Jo, I mean, again, in the early days of cloud, the channel was feeling like they were going to get disrupted. I don't know about you, but I mean, we've both been analysts for awhile and the more things get simple, the more they get complicated, right? I mean the consumerization of IT, the cloud, swipe your credit card, but actually applying that to your business is not easy. And so, I see that as great opportunities for the channel. Give you the last word. >> Absolutely, and what's going to matter is the tech companies that step up and realize we've got this chance, this opportunity to build that bridge and provide visibility, end-to-end visibility for clients. That's what going to matter. >> Yeah, I like how you're talking about that bridge, because that's what everybody wants. They want that bridge from on-prem to the public cloud, across clouds, going to to be moving out to the edge. And that is to your point, a journey that's going to evolve over the better part of this coming decade. Jo, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE today. >> Thanks for having me. (bright soft music) >> Okay, now we're going to into the GreenLake power panel to talk about the cloud landscape, hybrid cloud, and how the partner ecosystem and customers are thinking about cloud, hybrid cloud as a Service and of course, GreenLake. And with me are C.R. Howdyshell, President of Advizex. Ron Nemecek, who's the Business Alliance Manager at CBTS. Harry Zarek is President of Compugen. And Benjamin Klay is VP of Sales and Alliances at Arrow Electronics. Great to see you guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Good to be here. >> Okay, here's the deal. So I'm going to ask you guys each to introduce yourselves and your companies, add a little color to my brief intro, and then answer the following question. How do you and your customers think about hybrid cloud? And think about it in the context of where we are today and where we're going, not just the snapshot but where we are today and where we're going. C.R., why don't you start please? >> Sure, thanks a lot, Dave, appreciate it. And again, C.R. Howdyshell, President of Advizex. I've been with the company for 18 years, the last four years as president. So had the great opportunity here to lead a 45 year old company with a very strong brand and great culture. As it relates to Advizex and where we're headed to with hybrid cloud is it's a journey. So we're excited to be leading that journey for the company as well as HPE. We're very excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. We believe it's a very strong solution when it comes to hybrid cloud. Have been an HPE partner since, well since 1980. So for 40 years, it's our longest standing OEM relationship. And we're really excited about where HPE is going with GreenLake. From a hybrid cloud perspective, we feel like we've been doing the hybrid cloud solutions, the past few years with everything that we've focused on from a VMware perspective. But now with where HPE is going, we think, probably changing the game. And it really comes down to giving customers that cloud experience with the on-prem solution with GreenLake. And we've had great response for customers and we think we're going to continue to see that kind of increased activity and reception. >> Great, thank you C.R., and yeah, I totally agree. It is a journey and we've seen it really come a long way in the last decade. Ron, I wonder if you could kickoff your little first intro there please. >> Sure Dave, thanks for having me today and it's a pleasure being here with all of you. My name is Ron Nemecek, I'm a Business Alliance manager at CBTS. In my role, I'm responsible for our HPE GreenLake relationship globally. I've enjoyed a 33 year career in the IT industry. I'm thankful for the opportunity to serve in multiple functional and senior leadership roles that have helped me gather a great deal of education and experience that could be used to aid our customers with their evolving needs, for business outcomes to best position them for sustainable and long-term success. I'm honored to be part of the CBTS and OnX Canada organization. CBTS stands for Consult Build Transform and Support. We have a 35 year relationship with HPE. We're a platinum and inner circle partner. We're headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. We service 3000 customers generating over a billion dollars in revenue and we have over 2000 associates across the globe. Our focus is partnering with our customers to deliver innovative solutions and business results through thought leadership. We drive this innovation via our team of the best and brightest technology professionals in the industry that have secured over 2,800 technical certifications, 260 specifically with HPE. And in our hybrid cloud business, we have clearly found that technology, new market demands for instant responses and experiences, evolving economic considerations with detailed financial evaluation, and of course the global pandemic, have challenged each of our customers across all industries to develop an optimal cloud strategy. We now play an enhanced strategic role for our customers as their technology advisor and their guide to the right mix of cloud experiences that will maximize their organizational success with predictable outcomes. Our conversations have really moved from product roadmaps and speeds and feeds to return on investment, return on capital, and financial statements, ratios, and metrics. We collaborate regularly with our customers at all levels and all departments to find an effective comprehensive cloud strategy for their workloads and applications ensuring proper alignment and cost with financial return. >> Great, thank you, Ron. Yeah, today it's all about the business value. Harry, please. >> Hi Dave, thanks for the opportunity and greetings from the Great White North. We're a Canadian-based company headquartered in Toronto with offices across the country. We've been in the tech industry for a very long time. We're what we would call a solution provider. How hard for my mother to understand what that means but what our goal is to help our customers realize the business value of their technology investments. Just to give you an example of what it is we try and do. We just finished a build out of a new networking endpoint and data center technology for a brand new hospital. It's now being mobilized for COVID high-risk patients. So talk about our all being in an essential industry, providing essential services across the whole spectrum of technology. Now, in terms of what's happening in the marketplace, our customers are confused. No question about it. They hear about cloud, I mean, cloud first, and everyone goes to the cloud, but the reality is there's lots of technology, lots of applications that actually still have to run on premises for a whole bunch of reasons. And what customers want is solid senior serious advice as to how they leverage what they already have in terms of their existing infrastructure, but modernize it, update it, so it looks and feels a lot like the cloud. But they have the security, they have the protection that they need to have for reasons that are dependent on their industry and business to allow them to run on-prem. And so, the GreenLake philosophy is perfect. That allows customers to actually have one foot in the cloud, one foot in their traditional data center but modernize it so it actually looks like one enterprise entity. And it's that kind of flexibility that gives us an opportunity collectively, ourselves, our partners, HPE, to really demonstrate that we understand how to optimize the use of technology across all of the business applications they need to run. >> You know Harry, it's interesting about what you said is, the cloud it is kind of chaotic my word, not yours. But there is a lot of confusion out there, I mean, what's cloud, right? Is it public cloud, is it private cloud, the hybrid cloud? Now, it's the edge and of course the answer is all of the above. Ben, what's your perspective on all this? >> From a cloud perspective, you know, I think as an industry, I think we we've all accepted that public cloud is not necessarily going to win the day and we're in fact, in a hybrid world. There's certainly been some commentary and press that was sort of validate that. Not that it necessarily needs any validation but I think is the linkages between on-prem and cloud-based services have increased. It's paved the way for customers more effectively, deploy hybrid solutions in in the model that they want or that they desire. You know, Harry was commenting on that a moment ago. As the trend continues, it becomes much easier for solution providers and service providers to drive their services initiatives, you know, in particular managed services. >> From an Arrow perspective is we think about how we can help scale in particular from a GreenLake perspective. We've got the ability to stand up some cloud capabilities through our ArrowSphere platform that can really help customers adopt GreenLake and to benefit from some alliances opportunities, as well. And I'll talk more about that as we go through. >> And Ben, I didn't mean to squeeze you on Arrow. I mean, Arrow has been around longer than computers. I mean, if you Google the history of Arrow it'll blow your mind, but give us a little quick commercial. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I've been with Arrow for about 20 years. I've got responsibility for Alliance organization in North America, We're a global value added distribution, business consulting and channel enablement company. And we bring scope, scale and and expertise as it relates to the IT industry. I love the fast pace that comes with the market that we're all in. And I love helping customers and suppliers both, be positioned for long-term success. And you know, the subject matter here today is just a great example of that. So I'm happy to be here and look forward to the discussion. >> All right, we got some good brain power in the room. Let's cut right to the chase. Ron, where's the pain? What are the main problems that CBTS I love what it stands for, Consult Build Transform and Support. What's the main pain point that customers are asking you to solve when it comes to their cloud strategies? >> Sure, Dave. Our customers' concerns and associated risks come from the market demands to deliver their products, services, and experiences instantaneously. And then the challenge is how do they meet those demands because they have aging infrastructure, processes, and fiscal constraints. Our customers really need us now more than ever to be excellent listeners so we can collaborate on an effective map with the strategic placement of workloads and applications in that spectrum of cloud experiences while managing their costs, and of course, mitigating risks to their business. This collaboration with our customers, often identify significant costs that have to be evaluated, justified or eliminated. We find significant development, migration, and egress charges in their current public cloud experience, coupled with significant over provisioning, maintenance, operational, and stranded asset costs in their on-premise infrastructure environment. When we look at all these costs holistically, through our customized workshops and assessments, we can identify the optimal cloud experience for the respective workloads and applications. Through our partnership with HPE and the availability of the HPE GreenLake solutions, our customers now have a choice to deliver SLA's, economics, and business outcomes for their workloads and applications that best reside on-premise in a private cloud and have that experience. This is a rock solid solution that eliminates, the development costs that they experience and the egress charges that are associated with the public cloud while utilizing HPE GreenLake to eliminate over provisioning costs and the maintenance costs on aging infrastructure hardware. Lastly, our customers only have to pay for actual infrastructure usage with no upfront capital expense. And now, that achieves true utilization to cost economics, you know, with HPE GreenLake solutions from CBTS. >> I love focus on the business case, 'cause it's measurable and it's sort of follow the money. That's where the opportunity is. Okay, C.R., so question for you. Thinking about Advizex customers, how are they, are they leaning into GreenLake? What are they telling you is the business impact when they experience GreenLake? >> Well, I think it goes back to what Ron was talking about. We had to solve the business challenges first and so far, the reception's been positive. When I say that is customers are open. Everybody wants to, the C-suite wants to hear about cloud and hybrid cloud fits. But what we hear and what we're seeing from our customers is we're seeing more adoption from customers that it may be their first foot in, if you will, but as important, we're able to share other customers with our potentially new clients that say, what's the first thing that happens with regard to GreenLake? Well, number one, it works. It works as advertised and as-a-Service, that's a big step. There are a lot of people out there dabbling today but when you can say we have a proven solution it's working in our environment today, that's key. I think the second thing is,, is flexibility. You know, when customers are looking for this hybrid solution, you got to be flexible for, again, I think Ron said (indistinct). You don't have a big capital outlay but also what customers want to be able to do is we want to build for growth but we don't want to pay for it. So we'll pay as we grow not as we have to use, as we used to do, it was upfront, the capital expenditure. Now we'll just pay as we grow, and that really facilitates in another great example as you'll hear from a customer, this afternoon. But you'll hear where one of the biggest benefits they just acquired a $570 million company and their integration is going to be very seamless because of their investment in GreenLake. They're looking at the flexibility to add to GreenLake as a big opportunity to integrate for acquisitions. And finally is really, we see, it really brings the cloud experience and as-a-Service to our customers. And with HPE GreenLake, it brings the best of breed. So it's not just what HPE has to offer. When you look at Hyperconverged, they have Nutanix, they have Cohesity. So, I really believe it brings best of breeds. So, to net it out and close it out with our customers, thus far, the customer experience has been exceptional. I mean, with GreenLake Central, as interface, customers have had a lot of success. We just had our first customer from about a year and a half ago just reopened, it was a highly competitive situation, but they just said, look, it's proven, it works, and it gives us that cloud experience so. Had a lot of great success thus far and looking forward to more. >> Thank you, so Harry, I want to pick up on something C.R. said and get your perspectives. So when I talk to the C-suite, they do all want to hear about, you know, cloud, they have a cloud agenda. And what they tell me is it's not just about their IT transformation. They want that but they also want to transform their business. So I wonder if you could talk, Harry, about Compugen's perspective on the potential business impact of GreenLake. And also, I'm interested in how you guys are thinking about workloads, how to manage work, you know, how to cost optimize in IT, but also, the business value that comes out of that capability. >> Yeah, so Dave, you know if you were to talk to CFO and I have the good fortune to talk to lots of CFOs, they want to pay the costs when they generate the revenue. They don't want to have all the costs upfront and then wait for the revenue to come through. A good example of where that's happening right now is you know, related to the pandemic, employees that used to work at the office have now moved to working from home. And now, they have to connect remotely to run the same application. So use this thing called VDI, virtual interfacing to allow them to connect to the applications that they need to run in the office. I don't want to get into too much detail but to be able to support that from an an at-home environment, they needed to buy a lot more computing capacity to handle this. Now, there's an expectation that hopefully six months from now, maybe sooner than that, people will start returning to the office. They may not need that capacity so they can turn down on the costs. And so, the idea of having the capacity available when you need it, but then turning it off when you don't need it, is really a benefit of the variable cost model. Another example that I would use is one in new development. If a customer is going to implement a new, let's say, line of business application. SAP is very very popular. You know, it actually, unfortunately, takes six months to two years to actually get that application set up, installed, validated, tested, then moves through production. You know, what used to happen before? They would buy all that capacity upfront, and it would basically sit there for two years, and then when they finally went to full production, then they were really value out of that investment. But they actually lost a couple of years of technology, literally sitting almost sidle. And so, from a CFO perspective, his ability to support the development of those applications as he scales it, perfect. GreenLake is the ideal solution that allows him to do that. >> You know, technology has saved businesses in this pandemic. There's no question about it. When Harry was just talking about with regard to VDI, you think about that, there's the dialing up and dialing down piece which is awesome from an IT perspective. And then the business impact there is the productivity of the end users. And most C-suite executives I've talked to said productivity actually went up during COVID with work from home, which is kind of astounding if you think about it. Ben, we said Arrow's been around for a long, long time. Certainly, before all of us were born and it's gone through many many industry transitions during our lifetimes. How does Arrow and how do your partners think about building cloud experiences and where does GreenLake fit in from your perspective? >> Great question. So from an Arrow perspective, when you think about cloud experience in of course us taking a view as a distribution partner, we want to be able to provide scale and efficiency to our network of partners. So we do that through our ArrowSphere platform. Just a bit of, you know, a bit of a commercial. I mean, you get single quote, single bill, auto provision, multi supplier, if you will, subscription management, utilization reporting from the platform itself. So if we pivot that directly to HPE, you're going to get a bit of a scoop here, Dave. And we're excited today to have GreenLake live in our platform available for our partner community to consume. In particular, the Swift solutions that HPE has announced so we're very excited to share that today. Maybe a little bit more on GreenLake. I think at this point in time, that it's differentiated in a sense that, if you think about some of the other offerings in the market today and further with having the the solutions themselves available in ArrowSphere. So, I would say, that we identify the uniqueness and quickly partner with HPE to work with our ArrowSphere platform. One other sort of unique thing is, when you think about platform itself, you've got to give a consistent experience. The different geographies around the world so, you know, we're available in North of 20 countries, there's thousands of resellers and transacting on the platform on a regular basis. And frankly, hundreds of thousands end customers. that are leveraging today. So that creates an opportunity for both Arrow, HPE and our partner community. So we're excited. >> You know, I just want to open it up. We don't have much time left, but thoughts on differentiation. Some people ask me, okay, what's really different about HPE and GreenLake? These others, you know, are doing things with as-a-Service. To me, I always say cultural, it starts from the top with Antonio, and it's like the company's all in. But I wonder from your perspectives, 'cause you guys are hands on. Are there other differentiable factors that you would point to? Let me just open that up to the group. >> Yeah, if I could make a comment. GreenLake is really just the latest invocation of the as-a-Service model. And what does that mean? What that actually means is you have a continuous ongoing relationship with the customer. It's not a sell and forget. Not that we ever forget about customers but there are highlights. Customer buys, it gets installed, and then for two or three years you may have an occasional engagement with them but it's not continuous. When you move to our GreenLake model, you're actually helping them manage that. You are in the core, in the heart of their business. No better place to be if you want to be sticky and you want to be relevant and you want to be always there for them. >> You know, I wonder if somebody else could add to it in your remarks. From your perspective as a partner, 'cause you know, hey, a lot of people made a lot of money selling boxes, but those days are pretty much gone. I mean, you have to transform into a services mindset, but other thoughts? >> I think to add to that Dave. I think Harry's right on. The way he positioned it it's exactly where he did own the customer. I think even another step back for us is, we're able to have the business conversation without leading with what you just said. You don't have to leave with a storage solution, you don't have to lead with compute. You know, you can really have step back, have a business conversation. And we've done that where you don't even bring up HPE GreenLake until you get to the point where the customer says, so you can give me an on-prem cloud solution that gives me scalability, flexibility, all the things you're talking about. How does that work? Then you bring up, it's all through this HPE GreenLake tool. And it really gives you the ability to have a business conversation. And you're solving the business problems versus trying to have a technology conversation. And to me, that's clear differentiation for HPE GreenLake. >> All right guys, C.R., Ron, Harry, Ben. Great discussion, thank you so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us, Dave. >> Appreciate it Dave. >> All right, keep it right there for more great content at GreenLake Day, be right back. (bright soft music) (upbeat music) (upbeat electronic music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Del Tech World 2020. With me is Jeff Boudreau, the president general manager of Infrastructure Solutions group Deltek. Jeff, always good to see you, my friend. How you doing? >>Good. Good to see you. >>I wish we were hanging out a Sox game or a pat's game, but, uh, I guess this will dio But, you know, it was about a year ago when you took over leadership of I s G. I actually had way had that sort of brief conversation. You were in the room with Jeff Clark. I thought it was a great, great choice. How you doing? How you feeling Any sort of key moments the past 12 months that you you feel like sharing? >>Sure. So I first I want to say, I do remember that about a year ago. So thank you for reminding me. Yeah, it's, uh it's been a very interesting year, right? It's been it's been one year. It was in September was one year since I took over I s G. But I'm feeling great. So thank you for asking. I hope you're doing the same. And I'm really optimistic about where we are and where we're heading. Aziz, you know, it's been an extremely challenging year in a very unpredictable year, as we've all experienced. And I'd say for the, you know, the first part of the year, especially starting in March on I've been really focused on the health and safety of our, you know, the families, our customers and our team members of the team on a lot of it's been shifting, you know, in regards to helping our customers around, you know, work from home or education and learn from home. And, you know, during all this time, though, I'll tell you, as a team, we've accomplished a lot. There's a handful of things that I'm very proud of, you know, first and foremost, that states around the customer experience we have delivered on our best quality in our product. NPS scores in our entire history. So something I'm extremely proud of during this time around our innovation and innovation engine, we part of the entire portfolio which you're well aware of. We had nine launches in nine weeks back in that May in June. Timeframe. So something I'm really proud of the team on, uh, on. Then last, I'd say it's around the team and right, we shifted about 90% of our workforce from the office tow home, you know, from an engineering team. That could be, you know, 85% of my team is engineers and writing code. And so, you know, people were concerned about that. But we didn't skip a beat, so, you know, pretty impressed by the team and what they've done there. So, you know, the strategy remains unchanged. Uh, you know, we're focused on our customers integrating across the entire portfolio and the businesses like VM ware and really focused on getting share. So despite all the uncertainty in the market, I'm pretty pleased with the team and everything that's been going on. So uh, yeah, it's it's been it's been an interesting year, but it's really great. I'm really optimistic about what we have in front of us. >>Yeah, I mean, there's not much you could do a control about the macro condition on it, you know it. Z dealt to us and we have to deal with it. I mean, in your space. It's the sort of countervailing things here one is. Look, you're not selling laptops and endpoint security. That's not your business right in the data center. Eso. But the flip side of that is you mentioned your portfolio refresh. You know, things like Power Store. You got product cycles now kicking in. So that could be, you know, a buffer. What are you seeing with Power Store and what's the uptake look like? They're >>sure. Well, specifically, let me take a step back and the regards the portfolio. So first, you know, the portfolio itself is a direct reflection in the feedback from all our partners and our customers over the last couple of years on Day two, ramp up that innovation. I spent a lot of time in the last few years simplifying under the power brands, which you're well aware of, right? So we had a lot of for a legacy EMC and Legacy dollars. Really? How do we simplify under a set of brands really over delivering innovation on a fewer set of products that really accelerating in exceeding customer needs? And we did that across the board. So from power edge servers, you know, power Max, the high end storage, the Powerball, all that we didn't hear one. And just most recently. And, you know, it's part of the big launches. We had power scale. We have power flex for software to find. And, of course, the new flagship offer for the mid range, which is power store. Um, Specifically, the policy of the momentum has been building since our launch back in May. And the feedback from our partners and our customers has been fantastic. And we've had a lot of big wins against, you know, a lot of a lot of our core competitors. A couple examples one is Arrow Electronics SAA, Fortune 500 Global Elektronik supplier. They leverage power Store to provide, you know, basically both, you know, enterprise computing and storage needs for their for their broader bases around the world on there, really taking advantage of the 41 data reduction, really helping them simplify their capacity planning and really improve operational efficiencies specifically without impacting performance. So it's it's one. We're given the data reductions, but there's no impact on performance, which is a huge value proffer for arrow another big customers tickets and write a global law firm on their reporting to us that over 90 they've had a 90% reduction in their rack space, and they've had over five times two performance over a core competitors storage systems azi. They've deployed power store around the world, really, and it's really been helping them. Thio easily migrate workloads across, so the feedback from the customers and partners has been extremely positive. Um, there really citing benefits around the architecture, the flexibility architecture around the micro services, the containers they're loving, the D M or integration. They're loving the height of the predictable data reduction capabilities in line with in line performance or no performance penalties with data efficiencies, the workload support, I'd say the other big things around the anytime upgrades is another big thing that customers we're really talking about so very excited and optimistic in regards as we continue to re empower store the second half of the year into next year really is the full full year for power store. >>So can I ask you about that? That in line data reduction with no performance hit is that new ipe? I mean, you're not doing some kind of batch data reduction, right? >>No, it's It's new, I p. It's all patented. We've actually done a lot of work in regards to our technologies. There's some of the things we talk about GPS and deep use and smart Knicks and things like that. We've used some offload engines to help with that. So between the software and the hardware, we've had leverage new I. P. So we can actually provide that predictable data reduction. But right with the performance customers need, So we're not gonna have a trade off in regards. You get more efficiencies and less performance or more performance and less efficiency. >>That's interesting. Yeah, when I talked to the chip guys, they talk about this sort of the storage offloads and other offloads we're seeing. These alternative processors really start to hit the market videos. The obvious one. But you're seeing others. Aziz. Well, you're really it sounds like you're taking advantage of that. >>Yeah, it's a huge benefit. I mean, we should, you know, with our partners, if it's Intel's and in videos and folks like that broad comes, it's really leveraging the great innovation that they do, plus our innovation. So if you know the sum of the parts, can you know equal Mauritz a benefit to our customers in the other day? That's what it's all about. >>So it sounds like Cove. It hasn't changed your strategy. I was talking toe Dennis Hoffman and he was saying, Look, you know, fundamentally, we're executing on the same strategy. You know, tactically, there's things that we do differently. But what's your summarize your strategy coming in tow 2021. You know, we're still early in this decade. What are you seeing is the trends that you're trying to take advantage of? What do you excited about? Maybe some things that keep you up at night? >>Yeah, so I'd say, you know, I'll stay with what Dennis said. You know, it's our strategy is not changing its a company. You probably got that from Michael and from job, obviously, Dennis just recently. But for me, it's a two pronged approach. One's all about winning the consolidation in the core infrastructure markets that we could just paid in today. So I think Service Storage Network, we're already clear leader across all those segments that we serve in our you know, we'll continue to innovate within our existing product categories. And you saw that with the nine launches in the nine weeks in my point on that one is we're gonna always make sure that we have best debris offers. If it's a three tier, two tier or converge or hyper converged offer, we wanna make sure that we serve that and have the best innovation possible. In addition to that, though, the secondary piece of the strategy really is around. How do we differentiate value across or innovating across I S G? You know, Dell Technologies and even the broader ecosystems and some of the examples I'll give you right now that we're doing is if you think about innovating across icy, that's all about providing improved customer experience, a set of solutions and offers that really helped simplify customer operations, right? And really give them better T CEOs or better. S L. A. An example of something like that's cloud like it's a SAS based off of that we have. That really helps provide great insights and telemetry to our customers. That helps them simplify their I T operations, and it's a major step forward towards, you know, autonomous infrastructure which is really what they're asking for. Customers of a very happy with the work we've done around Day one, you know, faster, time to value. But now it's like Day two and beyond. How do you really helped me Kinda accelerate the operations and really take that away from a three other big pieces innovating across all technologies. And you know, we do this with VM Ware now live today, and that's just writing. So things like VX rail is an example where we work together and where the clear leader in H C I. Things like Delta Cloud Uh, when we built in V M V C F A, B, M or cloud foundation in Tan Xue delivering an industry leading hybrid cloud platform just recently a VM world. I'm sure you heard about it, but Project Monterey was just announced, and that's an effort we're doing with VM Ware and some other partners. They're really about the next generation of infrastructure. Um, you know, I guess taking it up a notch out of the infrastructure and I've g phase, you know, some of the areas that we're gonna be looking at the end to end solutions to help our customers around six key areas. I'm sure John Rose talking about the past, but things like cloud Edge five g A i m l data management security. So those will be the big things. You'll see us lean into a Z strategies consistent. Some big themes that you'll see us lean into going into next year. >>Yeah, I mean, it is consistent, right? You guys have always tried to ride the waves, vector your portfolio into those waves and add value. I'm particularly impressed with your focus on customer experience, and I think that's a huge deal. You know, in the past, a lot of companies yours included your predecessor. You see, Hey, throwing so many products at me, I can't I don't understand the portfolio. So I mean, focusing on that I think is huge right now because people want that experience, you know, to be mawr cloudlike. And that's that's what you got to deliver. What about any news from from Dell Tech world? Any any announcements that you you wanna highlight that we could talk about? >>Sure. And actually, just touching back on the point you had no about the simplification that is a major 10 of my in regards the organization. So there's three key components that I drive once around customer focus, and that's keeping customers first and foremost. And everything we do to is around axillary that innovation. Engine three is really bringing everything together as one team. So we provide a better outcome to our customers. You know, in that simplification after that you talk about is court toe what we're driving. So I want to do less things, I guess better in the notion of how we do that. What that means to me is, as I make decisions that want to move away from other technologies and really leverage our best of breed type shared type, that's technology. I p people I p I can, you know, e can exceed customer needs in those markets that were serving. So it's actually allows me to x Sorry, my innovation engine, because I shift more and more resource is onto the newer stock now for Del Tech world. Yes, We got some cool stuff coming. You probably heard about a few of them. Uh, we're gonna be announcing a project project Apex. Hopefully you've been briefed on that already. This isn't new news or I'll be in trouble. But that's really around. Our strategy about delivering, simple, consistent as a service experiences for our customers bringing together are dealt technology as a service offering and our cloud strategy together. Onda also our technology offerings in our go to market all under a single unified effort, which Ellison do would be leading. Um, you know, on behalf of our executive leadership team s, that's one big area. And there is also another big one that I'll talk about a sui expand our as a service offers. And we think there's a big power to that in regards to our Dell Technologies. Cloud console solving will be launching a new cloud console that will provide uniformed experience across all the resources and give users and ability toe instantly managed every aspect of their cloud journey with just a few clicks. So going back to your broader point, it's all about simplicity. >>Yeah, we definitely all over Apex. That's something I wanted to ask you about this notion of as a service, really requiring it could have a new mindset, certainly from a pricing and how you talk about the customer experience that it's a whole new customer experience. Your you're basically giving them access. Thio What I would consider more of a platform on giving them some greater flexibility. Yeah, there's some constraints in there, but of course, you know the physical only put so much capacity and before him. But the idea of being ableto dial up, dial down within certain commitments is, I think, a powerful one. How does it change the way in which you you think about how you go about developing products just in terms of you know, this AP economy Infrastructure is code. How how you converse about those products internally and externally. How would you see that shaking >>out Dave? That's an awesome question. And it's actually for its front center. For everything we do, obviously, customers one choice and flexibility what they do. And to your point as we evolved warm or as a service, no specific product and product brands and logos on probably the way of the future. It's the services. It's the experience that you provide in regards to how we do that. So if you think about me, you know, in in infrastructure making infrastructure as a service, you really want to define what that customer experiences. That s L. A. That they're trying toe realize. And then how do we make sure that we build the right solutions? Products feature functions to enable that a law that goes back to the core engineering stuff that we need to dio right now, a lot of that stuff is about making sure that we have the right things around. If it's around developer community. If it's around AP rich, it's around. SdK is it's all about how do we leverage if it's internal source or external open source, if you will. It's regards to How do we do that? No. A thing that I think we all you know what you're well aware but we ought to keep in mind is that the cloud native applications are really relevant. Toe both the on premises, wealthy off premise. So think about things around portability reusability. You know, those are some great examples of just kind of how we think about this as we go forward. But those modern applications were required modern infrastructure, and regardless of how that infrastructure is abstracted now, just think about things like this. Aggregation or compose ability or Internet based computing. It's just it's a huge trend that we have to make sure we're thinking of. So is we. We just aggregate between the physical layers to the software layers and how we provide that to a service that could be think of a modern container based asset that could be repurposed. Either could be on a purpose built thing. It could be deployed in a converge or hyper converged. Or it could be two points a software feature in a cloud. Now, that's really how we're thinking about that, regards that we go forward. So we're talking about building modern assets or components That could be you right once we used many type model, and we can deploy that wherever you want because of some of the abstraction of desegregation that we're gonna do. >>E could see customers in the in the near term saying, I don't care so much about the product. I want the fast one all right with the cheaper one e. >>It's kind of what you talking about, that I talked about the ways. If you think about that regards, you know, maybe it's on a specific brand or portfolio. You look into and you say, Hey, what's the service level that I'd wanted to your point like Hey, for compute or for storage, it's really gonna end up being the specific S l A. And that's around performance or Leighton see, or cost or resiliency they want. They want that experience in that that you know, And that's why they're gonna be looking for the end of the end state. That's what we have to deliver is an engineering. >>So there's an opportunity here for you guys that I wonder if you could comment on. And that's the storage admin E. M. C essentially created. You know, you get this army of people that you know pretty good of provisioning lungs, although that's not really that's a great career path for folks. But program ability is, and this notion of infrastructure is code as you as you make your systems more programmable. Is there a skill set opportunity to take that army of constituents that you guys helped train and grow and over their careers and bring them along into sort of the next decade? This new era? >>I think the the easy answer is yes, I obviously that's a hard thing to do and you go forward. But I think embracing the change in the evolution of change, I think is a great opportunity. And I think there is e mean if you look step back and you think about data management, right? And you think about all the you know all data is not created equal and you know, and it has a life cycle, if you will. And so if it's on edge to Korda, Cloward, depending think about data vaults and data mobility and all that stuff. There's gonna be a bunch of different personas and people touching data along the way. I think the I T advance and the storage admin. They're just one of those personas that we have to help serve and way talk about How do we make them heroes, if you will, in regards to their broader environment. So if they're providing, if they evolve and really helped provide a modern infrastructure that really enables, you know infrastructure is a code or infrastructure as a service, they become a nightie hero, if you will for the rest of team. So I think there's a huge opportunity for them to evolve as the technology evolves. >>Yeah, you talked about you know, your families, your employees, your team s o. You obviously focused on them. You got your products going hitting all the marks. How are you spending your time these days? >>Thes days right now? Well, we're in. We're in our cycle for fiscal 22 planning. Right? And right now, a lot of that's above the specific markets were serving. It's gonna be about the strategy and making sure that we have people focused on those things. So it really comes back to some of the strategy tents were driving for next year. Now, as I said, our focus big time. Well, I guess for the for this year is one is consolidation of the core markets. Major focus for May 2 is going to be around winning in storage, and I want to be very specific. It's winning midrange storage. And that was one of the big reasons why Power Store came. That's gonna be a big focus on Bennett's really making sure that we're delivering on the as a service stuff that we just talked about in regards to all the technology innovation that's required to really provide the customer experience. And then, lastly, it's making sure that we take advantage of some of these growth factors. So you're going to see a dentist. Probably talked a lot about Telco, but telco on edge and as a service and cloud those things, they're just gonna be key to everything I do. So if you think about from poor infrastructure to some of these emerging opportunities Z, I'm spending all my time. >>Well, it's a It's a big business and a really important one for Fidel. Jeff Boudreau. Thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Really a pleasure seeing you. I hope we can see each other face to face soon. >>You too. Thank you for having me. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Our continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break

>> Live from Anaheim, California It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes Live coverage of Nutanix Next here in Anaheim, California I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We're joined by Pharma's Mahdavi. He is the senior group director Cadence Design Systems. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. So tell our viewers a little bit about Kate, based in San Jose. Can't tell our viewers a little bit about your company Cadence Design Systems. >> So Cajuns has been a A company in the very essence about thirty years ago. So we make software to enable semiconductor companies to design test than billed chips. So most technique, you know, technology that you bought, you see, and the fries Electronics has some cadence solution. >> So you guys had a lot of legacy and you're talking about the nutanix relationship. >> So our journey with Nutanix started about three years ago. I'd actually explored Nutanix at a previous company. I've been with Cadence three and a half years. Eso liked it, but there was really no opportunity Teo do much At that time, the company was very new at the time. But I cadence, we identified some opportunities Teo to explore nutanix. And it's been a great experience so far Way actually are running a lot of our critical of business applications on nutanix. So we're all in. >> What was the door opener for? What was the door opener for you? You guys there? That cadence. What? Goddammit! >> The overall architecture look good in a presentation level s so it was worth exploring. But, you know, it's a new company. New architecture. Er you have to kind of going to it carefully. So it was a matter of identifying opportunities that were maybe not production, not super business critical to start. But as time goes on, you build confidence and you do more and more. So today we're using Nutanix. As I said for business applications were using your for VD I AA lot of ours End that stop. You know, instances are running on nutanix today. We use that as well because here zero so a lot of art shared services. You know, the n s active directory. Those sorts of services are running on his hands. So, you know, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. >> So I always like to know how this actually helps you and your company. Do people do their jobs better, more quickly, more efficiently, more productively? Can you sort of walk us through what life was like before nutanix and what life is like now in terms of the staffing and the overhead and the >> star? So I would say there's a couple of different, you know, big benefits. One is we're in a cloud, uh, era, right? So a lot of companies are looking for work close to move to the public cloud, and we're no different. We're constantly looking for what? What makes sense and the public cloud. What makes sense on Prem? So from this support and skill sets, fan point is very important to be consistent. I basically have the same support model for both on Prima's well as public public cloud. So that's one big benefit that Nutanix offers because the same skill sets to support. Let's say eight lbs environment is the same as, you know, the nutanix support environment. Thie. Other critical thing is just like any ICTSI organization were challenged with limited resource is you know, doing more with less. So the ease of administration, ease of support, just inherent reliability of the technology allows our staff to, you know, sleep more at nights and, you know, work less often during the weekend. So the overalls support overhead has reduced significantly. So that's the those are the biggest things. I would say. >> Those are two very important things. >> Those are the two biggest things that way went into this, um, this engagement with But, you know, we're pleasantly surprised that performance is exceeded our expectations, you know? You know, I did expect reliability. I didn't quite expect this level of performance improvement, so that's been excellent. So again, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. Just given that experience, he >> said, the staff sleeps well at night. How have they reacted? What if some other anecdotes from the staff freed more free time management playing? What's the most of what was some of the feedback from the from your team? >> Well, I mean, I don't want to give the wrong impression. It's not like they're not >> working. Yeah, I write >> the scenario, but, you know, I would say it's gone from, uh, crazy environments is something a little more humane, S O, I think not only with the staff just across the company. You have those who are who kind of buy in and go into it positively and others who are more reluctant. And that's no different the support staff. So I think just their own confidence level. And, you know, there, >> uh, a >> desire to do more with nutanix as increase as they had more experience with >> it. It's interesting. I did a panel yesterday with some customers from NUTANIX and was a mixed in a big bank, midsized company and and a good, big corporate kind of it. And it's very interesting. The legacy with was where there was more legacy. There was a lot of dependencies, and they were looking at time frames for pushing stuff out, like eight weeks to two months in two hours. So they went for eight weeks. Teo pushing any kind of rule propagation or any kind of new stuff. It weeks the two hours and that was a huge number. Are you Are you guys seeing anything around in terms of performance and group on the time side with Nutanix? What are some of the things that you're getting benefits wise operationally. >> Well, the more we do, the more cookie cutter it becomes. So you know, each migration is easier and faster and so on. And that also acid with confidence, right? The very first critical business application that we moved to Nutanix the level of testing we did was insane. Now it's less Oh, so for multiple reasons that migration experience is much more efficient much, much quicker today than it was early on. >> One of the things we hear to Rebecca was, you know, new channels. The new vendor you mentioned new company. They're ten years old, so still new relative to the bigger guys getting it pushed, getting it through, getting it approved by executive confidence from executive management around. Wait, was this new new company what's the benefits? All kinds of gyrations, of approvals and sometimes politics and, you know, legacy kind of factors in How does that work on your N? How did that go? Getting nutanix through was a struggle. That was The challenge was to take us through that. >> So as you mentioned the fact that it's new technology new company that has its own set of challenges from first, some application owners and executives. You know, why take the risk? Why not do the same thing we've done? You know, always, um so? So that that's one big big challenge. The other was There is a tendency, especially early on when NUTANIX was selling it as an appliance, as opposed to license on Lee. Um, there is a tendency to view it as a hardware solution, and it's exactly not that it's the exact opposite of that is purely a software solution. That's where the value is. So it's very easy to get chopped into that hardware discussion where people will kind of compare with servers and storage versus nutanix s. So you have to kind of change that mindset and show the real value that hyper convergence provides thes of administration, that high performance reliability and so on on DH. Then, as you make that argument and convince more people again, you have to, you know, start small and expand. But that that was some of the main challenges. I would say >> when you're talking about the migration experience and you said when we formed the first business critical application with it was a long time we tested it. We really worked at it. Now we have a bit more faith that it's that it's going to work out. But can you talk about some best practices that emerged in terms of how to migrate and my great well, that maybe other companies could learn from from Cadence Design System? >> Yeah, well, I would say the best practices aren't unique to unit nutanix. Any migration process has, you know, various phases in terms of planning, testing and so on. And I think just having that discipline well documented, consistent process so that you're not starting fresh every time there's a new migration initiative going on. But I think nutanix makes it easier just given the especially the prison management tool. But I would say it's not particularly unique to your tent. NUTANIX Torto organization just need to be well disciplined in immigration process. >> One of the things that you mentioned software, which is great point that cultural shifts, not a hardware box, and it's probably all the best practices around. Evaluating hardware software is becoming more and more central to it. How do you see it evolving because you got cloud right on the horizon. You got public cloud benefits. They are clear if you're greenfield yet legacy Stop. We have containers containing ization happening as a trend lift and shift versus, you know, evolved life cycle management of APS and workloads, or are now under a new kind of view with software that was changing and, you know, as a as a practitioner in the field. Now, do you look at the evolution of how it is going to change? >> So my side of the house is the infrastructure and operations side, and they tend to be historically kind of manual, you know, different network administrator, storage administrator, system administrations, the administrators that is all changing and all becoming more developer skill sets, scripting automation, things without sort. So I think that's the biggest changes going on in today is kind of changing the skill sets and kind of viewing it as a full stack as opposed to just stories. You're just network. So having that holistic view point having ability, too, develop automation that works across the stack. I think that those those are the changes that traditional infrastructure groups need. Thio adapted. >> While I was talking to a customer yesterday And he was a young young guy, was I think, in this late twenties I'm seeing myself. You know, ten years ago he was in high school or college. So you see a new generation coming up where they gravitate towards Dev ops, right? And so they get that so they don't have that dogma. What? We went with this vendor. So they kind of this new thinking, Any observations that you can share on this younger generation coming inside your new talent that's coming in. That's developer or what they like. What? What's the work style? What they gravitate to what some of the tools they like. That's the mindset. >> So I think they can teach us to be honest way have you know, the older folks like myself have a tendency to look at the way things have always been done. Right? So having the fresh viewpoint is great to kind of come into it with a dead body develops mentality, you know, off jump. But I think I which we should kind of welcome that and take advantage of that. Um you know, for cadence in General Wei are pretty mature company in terms of our personnel we don't have that rapid turnover person of, you know, our team members. So we're trying to actually, you know, we welcome that new talent, eh? So that we can kind of get that, uh, Dev officer mentality in house and kind of mature it ourselves. So we're in the beginning of that journey. >> How do you work together? Because, I mean, you're not that old first of all, but But this This is the time where we have multiple generations together working in the workforce, thes digital natives that we were talking about that and the people who get technology so innate Li grew up with it versus the Gen Xers. The boomers are still there. The gen y's that are emerging and graduating. Now, how is it a challenge at at Cadence to to get all these people working collaboratively productively together? >> Well, Katie, this is an extremely technical company. Uh, referred to our customers, you know, they're all double e, you know, Master's and doctorate engineers. So it's a very technical environment. We try not to really focus on the technology, actually, but to look at, you know, the business objectives, you know? What are we trying to achieve what problems that we're trying to solve. That supposed, Tio. Oh, here's a cool technology. How can we use it? You know, the mindset is a little bit different. We're looking at the business side first and then using technology to solve for those problems. So once you have that focus, regardless of your experience, your age, your background, you work together, you know, to to achieve that end goal. >> What you think about the show. We're here at NUTANIX next Anaheim. What's what's your verdict on so far? The content. Positioning your customer. What's next for you guys? Yeah, very loyal customer. Based on what we found. People love the product. What's next, Joe? >> I'm very impressed. I wasn't expecting it to be this large. You know, I went Teo Local smaller version that was in the area last year. That was pretty impressive, too. But this is amazing. I like it because, you know, I t leaders get sales calls all the time, and we kind of get bombarded. So Tennessee so ignore those. This kind of gives us a chance to at our own pace kind of see who the key partners are. Two new tenants look for opportunities and meet some of these other vendors s. So it's been both educational as well as kind of entertaining. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Farmers for coming on the Q b really appreciated >> my pleasure to meet you. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more of nutanix next here in Anaheim, coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from San Francisco. It's theCube covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Moscone Center everybody. The new, improved Moscone Center. We're at Moscone North, stop by and see us. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman and Lisa Martin is here as well, John Furrier will be up tomorrow. You're watching theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day zero essentially, Stu, of IBM Think. Day one, the big keynotes, start tomorrow. Chairman's keynote in the afternoon. Jamie Thomas is here. She's the general manager of IBM's Systems Strategy and Development at IBM. Great to see you again Jamie, thanks for coming on. >> Great to see you guys as usual and thanks for coming back to Think this year. >> You're very welcome. So, I love your new role. You get to put on the binoculars sometimes the telescope. Look at the road map. You have your fingers in a lot of different areas and you get some advanced visibility on some of the things that are coming down the road. So we're really excited about that. But give us the update from a year ago. You guys have been busy. >> We have been busy, and it was a phenomenal year, Dave and Stu. Last year, I guess one of the pinnacles we reached is that we were named with our technology, our technology received the number one and two supercomputer ratings in the world and this was a significant accomplishment. Rolling out the number one supercomputer in Oakridge National Laboratory and the number two supercomputer in Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. And Summit as it's called in Oakridge is really a cool system. Over 9000 CPUs about 27,000 GPUs. It does 200 petaflops at peak capacity. It has about 250 petabytes of storage attached to it at scale and to cool this guy, Summit, I guess it's a guy. I'm not sure of the denomination actually it takes about 4,000 gallons of water per minute to cool the supercomputer. So we're really pleased with the engineering that we worked on for so many years and achieving these World records, if you will, for both Summit and Sierra. >> Well it's not just bragging rights either, right, Jamie? I mean, it underscores the technical competency and the challenge that you guys face I mean, you're number one and number two, that's not easy. Not easy to sustain of course, you got to do it again. >> Right, right, it's not easy. But the good thing is the design point of these systems is that we're able to take what we created here from a technology perspective around POWER9 and of course the patnership we did with Invidia in this case and the software storage. And we're able to downsize that significantly for commercial clients. So this is the world's largest artificial intlligence supercomputer and basically we are able to take that technology that we invented in this case 'cause they ended up being one of our first clients albeit a very large client, and use that across industries to serve the needs of artificial intelligence work loads. So I think that was one of the most significant elements of what we actually did here. >> And IBM has maintained, despite you guys selling off your microelectronics division years ago, you've maintained a lot of IP in the core processing and the design. You've also reached out certainly with open power, for example, to folks. You mentioned Invidia. But having that, sort of embracing that alternative processor mode as opposed to trying to jam everything in the die. Different philosophy that IBM is taking. >> Yeah we think that the workload specific processing is still very much in demand. Workloads are going to have different dimensions and that's what we really have focused on here. I don't think that this has really changed over the last decades of computing and so we're really focused on specialized computing purpose-built computing, if you will. Obviously using that on premise and also using that in our hybrid cloud strategies for clients that want to do that as well. >> What are some of the other cool things that you guys are working on that you can talk about. >> Well I would say last year was quite an interesting year in that from a mainframe perspective we delivered our first 19 inch form factor which allows us to fit nicely on a floor tile. Obviously allows clients to scale more effectively from a data center planning perspective. Allows us to have a cloud footprint, but with all the characteristics of security that you would normally expect in a mainframe system. But really tailored toward new workloads once again. So Linux form factor and going after the new workloads that a lot of these cloud data centers really need. One of our first and foremost focus areas continues to be security around that system and tomorrow there will be some announcements that will happen around Z security. I can't say what they are right now but you'll see that we are extending security in new ways to support more of these hybrid cloud scenarios. >> It's so funny. We were talking in one of our earlier segments talking about how the path of virtualization and trying to get lots of workloads into something and goes back to the device that could manage all workloads which was the Mainframe. So we've watched for many years system Z lots of Linux on there if you want to do some cool container, you know global Z that's an option, so it's interesting to watch while the pendulum swings in IT have happened the Z system has kept up with a lot of these innovations that have been going on in the industry. >> And you're right, one of our big focuses for the platform for Z and power of course is a container-based strategy. So we've created, you know last year we talked about secure container technology and we continue to evolve secure container technology but the idea is we want to eliminate any kind of friction from a developer's perspective. So if you want to design in a container-based environment then you're more easily able to port that technology or your applications, if you will to a Z mainframe environment if that's really what your target environment is. So that's been a huge focus. The other of course major invention that we announced at the Consumer Electronics show is our Quantum System One. And this represented an evolution of our Quantum system over the last year where we now have the world's really first self-contained universal quantum computer in a single form factor where we were able to combine the Quantum processor which is living in the dilution refrigerator. You guys remember the beautiful chandelier from last year. I think it's back this year. But this is all self-contained with it's electronics in a single form factor. And that really represents the evolution of the electronics in particular over the last year where we were able to miniaturize those electronics and get them into this differentiated form factor. >> What should people know about Quantum? When you see the demos, they explain it's not a binary one or zero, it could be either, a virtually infinite set of possibilities, but what should the lay person know about Quantum and try to understand? >> Well I think really the fundamental aspect of it is in today's world with traditional computers they're very powerful but they cannot solve certain problems. So when you look at areas like material science, areas like chemistry even some financial trading scenarios, the problems can either not be solved at all or they cannot be completed in the right amount of time. Particularly in the world of financial services. But in the area of chemistry for instance molecular modeling. Today we can model simple molecules but we cannot model something even as complex as caffeine. We simply don't have the traditional compute capacity to do that. A quantum computer will allow us once it comes to maturity allow us to solve these problems that are not solvable today and you can think about all the things that we could do if were able to have more sophisticated molecular modeling. All the kinds of problems we could solve probably in the world of pharmacology, material science which affects many, many industries right? People that are developing automobiles, people that are exploring for oil. All kinds of opportunities here in this space. The technology is a little bit spooky, I guess, that's what Einstein said when he first solved some of this, right? But it really represents the state of the universe, right? How the universe behaves today. It really is happening around us but that's what quantum mechanics helps us capture and when combined with IT technology the quantum computer can bring this to life over time. >> So one of the things that people point to is potentially a new security paradigm because Quantum can flip the way in which we do security on it's head so you got to be thinking around that as well. I know security is something that is very important to IBM's Systems division. >> Right, absolutely. So the first thing that happens when someone hears about quantum computing is they ask about quantum security. And as you can imagine there's a lot of clients here that are concerned about security. So in IBM research we're also working on quantum-safe encryption. So you got one team working on a quantum computer, you got another team ensuring that the data will be protected from the quantum computer. So we do believe we can construct quantum-safe encryption algorithms based on lattice-based technology that will allow us to encrypt data today and in the future when the quantum computer does reach that kind of capacity the data will be protected. So the idea is that we would start using these new algorithms far earlier than the computer could actually achieve this result but it would mean that data created today would be quantum safe in the future. >> You're kind of in your own arm's race internally. >> But it's very important. Both aspects are very important. To be able to solve these problems that we can't solve today, which is really amazing, right? And to also be able to protect our data should it be used in inappropriate ways, right? >> Now we had Ed Bausch on earlier today. Used to run the storage division. What's going on in that world? I know you've got your hands in that pie as well. What can you tell us about what's going on there? >> Well I believe that Ed and the team have made some phenomenal innovations in the past year around flash MVME technology and fusing that across product lines state-of-the-art. The other area that I think is particularly interesting of course is their data management strategy around things like Spectrum Discover. So, today we all know that many of our clients have just huge amounts of data. I visited a client last year that interesting enough had 1 million tapes, and of course we sell tapes so that's a good thing but then how do you deal and manage all the data that is on 1 million tapes. So one of the inventions that the team has worked on is a metadata tagging capability that they've now shipped in a product called spectrum discover. And that allows a client to have a better way to have a profile of their data, data governance and understand for different use cases like data governance or compliance how do they pull back the right data and what does this data really mean to them. So have a better lexicon of their data, if you will than what they can do in today's world. So I think that's very important technology. >> That's interesting. I would imagine that metadata could sit in Flash somewhere and then inform the serial technology to maybe find stuff faster. I mean, everybody thinks tape is slow because it's sequential. But actually if you do some interesting things with metadata you can-- >> There's all kinds of things you can do I mean it's one thing to have a data ocean if you will, but then how do you really get value out of that data over a long period of time and I think we're just the tip of the spear in understanding the use cases that we can use this technology for. >> Jamie, how does IBM manage that pipeline of innovation. I think we heard very specific examples of how the super computers drive HPC architectures which everybody is going to use for their AI infrastructure. Something like quantum computing is a little bit more out there. So how do you balance kind of the research through the product and what's going to be more useful to users today. >> Yeah, well, that's an interesting question. So IBM is one of the few organizations in the world really that have an applied research organization still. And Dario Gil is here this week he manages our research organization now under Arvind Krishna. An organization like IBM Systems has a great relationship with research. Research are the folks that had people working on Quantum for decades, right? And they're the reason that we are in a position now to be able to apply this in the way that we are. The great news is that along the way we're always working on a pipeline of this next generation set of technologies and innovations. Some of them succeed and some of them don't. But without doing that we would not have things like Quantum. We would not have advanced encryption capability that we pushed all the way down into our chips. We would not have quantum-safe encryption. Things like the metadata tagging that I talked about came out of IBM research. So it's working with them on problems that we see coming down the pipe, if you will that will affect our clients and then working with them to make sure we get those into the product lines at the right amount of time. I would say that Quantum is the ultimate partnership between IBM Systems and IBM research. We have one team in this case that are working jointly on this product. Bringing the skills to bear that each of us have on this case with them having the quantum physics experts and us having the electronics experts and of course the software stacks spanning both organizations is really a great partnership. >> Is there anything you could tell us about what's going on at the edge. The edge computing you hear a lot about that today. IBM's got some activities going on there? You haven't made huge splashes there but anything going on in research that you can share with us, or any directions. >> Well I believe the edge is going to be a practical endeavor for us and what I mean by that is there are certain use cases that I think we can serve very well. So if we look at the edge as perhaps a factory environment, we are seeing opportunities for our storaging compute solutions around the data management out in some of these areas. If you look at the self-driving automobile for instance, just design something like that can easily take over a hundred petabytes of data. So being able to manage the data at the edge, being able to then to provide insight appropriately using AI technologies is something we think we can do and we see that. I own factories based on what I do and I'm starting to use AI technology. I use Power AI technology in my factories for visual inspection. Think about a lot of the challenges around provenance of parts as well as making sure that they're finally put together in the right way. Using these kind of technologies in factories is just really an easy use case that we can see. And so what we anticipate is we will work with the other parts of IBM that are focused on edge as well and understand which areas we think our technology can best serve. >> That's interesting you mention visual inspection. That's an analog use case which now you're transforming into digital. >> Yeah well Power AI vision has been very successful in the last year . So we had this power AI package of open source software that we pulled together but we drastically simplified the use of this software, if you will the ability to use it deploy it and we've added vision capability to it in the last year. And there's many use cases for this vision capability. If you think about even the case where you have a patient that is in an MRI. If you're able to decrease the amount of time they stay in the MRI in some cases by less fidelity of the picture but then you've got to be able to interpret it. So this kind of AI and then extensions of AI to vision is really important. Another example for Power AI vision is we're actually seeing use cases in advertising so the use case of maybe you're at a sporting event or even a busy place like this where you're able to use visual inspection techniques to understand the use of certain products. In the case of a sporting event it's how many times did my logo show up in this sporting event, right? Particularly our favorite one is Formula One which we usually feature the Formula One folks here a little bit at the events. So you can see how that kind of technology can be used to help advertisers understand the benefits in these cases. >> Got it. Well Jamie we always love having you on because you have visibility into so many different areas. Really thank you for coming and sharing a little taste of what's to come. Appreciate it. >> Well thank you. It's always good to see you and I know it will be an exciting week here. >> Yeah, we're very excited. Day zero here, day one and we're kicking off four days of coverage with theCube. Jamie Thomas of IBM. I'm Dave Vellante, he's Stu Miniman. We'll be right back right after this short break from IBM Think in Moscone. (upbeat music)

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪

>> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another CUBE conversation. Today we're going to talk about a really interesting topic. At least it's interesting to me. And that is, if we go back, and the old adage that when you automate bad process or bad business, you just get more bad business at scale. And, when we think about customer service over the last number of years or customer engagement over the last number of years, in many respects we've done a great job of automating really bad practices. And all that has led to is an increased frustration amongst consumers who are trying to utilize an engagement form if they want, more digital engagement, but end up being even more frustrated because it still takes the same amount of time and it still has the same failure rates. And to discuss that today, we've got Mahesh Ram, who's the founding partner of Solvvy, to talk a bit about some of these transformations that are taking place in terms of how digital engagement's going to change the way that businesses interact with consumers. Mahesh, welcome to theCUBE. >> Oh, it's great to be here. I'm a fan of theCube and honored to be here. So, Mahesh, let's start. Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit about Solvvy. Sure, my background is in technology and I've built two successful start-ups in the past. The last one was a company that was acquired by Pearson in 2012, focused on automation for non-native English speakers. But my entire career has been spent really thinking about ways in which we can use technology to make people's lives better and improve existing workflows and processes. And so, it's why Solvvy attracted me, why it's so exciting, and I think that this is the most interesting thing I've ever done in my career, so I'm excited about that. >> Now Solvvy has a pretty decent reputation as being a thought we are in this domain of not just cutting the cost of engagement, but actually improving the quality of engagement. How does it do that? >> I think it's a great question. It starts with the mission of the company, I think. That's the easiest way to say it. Our mission is to enable every interaction between consumers and business to be effortless. Anywhere, any time, and any channel. So if you start with that mission, you really start to focus in on what's most important. What's most important is to deliver that amazing experience for that end user or that consumer, and at the same time, drive down the operational cost for the business, i.e. improve their efficiency. And so our vision for the company, is to take our intelligent AI and machine learning automation technology which is world-class and is better than anything else on the market and apply it to deliver on a vision which is we want these interactions between the consumer and the business to be successfully completed in five minutes or less. >> Five minutes? >> Yes, and today it's measure in hours, eight hours, 12 hours, 24 hours. That's the vision and we're well on the way to accomplishing that. >> Alright, so as a thought leader, give us an example of how business is doing that, and then we'll get into some of the technology questions. But, first off, what is the competitive advantage of being able to complete a client engagement under five minutes versus eight hours? >> Well, first of all, I think, again, if we put the end-user, the consumer, at the focal point, we're talking about a fundamental change in what they expect from business. They expect immediacy, they expect accuracy, they want you to respect their time. In fact, I think some of the latest analyst reports says that valuing consumer's time is the single biggest driver to brand loyalty. So if you've got that situation, you've got an obligation to the consumer to deliver what they want. Well, now put yourself in the shoes of the consumer, which we all are. I'm a consumer, I come to a business, I'm asking you a question about a product, a service, a defect, anything, an order that's missing. I expect to get an answer very quickly because my time is precious and I know that someone like me has asked that question in the past. Why has it not been possible in the past for me as a consumer to get that answer right away, leveraging the expertise that has already happened in an enterprise? And when I do that, when Solvvy is able to enable that for the business, there's multiple benefits. The consumer is happier, their CSAT goes up, their customer satisfaction goes way up. Their time is respected, they get their answer in a minute or less, as opposed to hours. The business is happy because there's no ticket created, there's no need for a human agent to go back and forth with you, ask you a bunch of things, and maybe come back to you six hours later and now you're upset. Maybe you switched brands in the meanwhile because you're so angry of having to wait. So, the benefit is, I sometimes say to our customers, "It's the magic X", the CSAT goes up, and the cost goes down and that's never been possible before Solvvy. >> How does it work? >> How it works is very simple. The first thing we do is we engage with the business. So, the business is our customer, right? They buy the product or they buy our SATS platform. It's a SATS platform built on AI and machine learning technology that was developed by my two co-founders during their PHD work at Carnegie Mellon. So, at it's core, is the ability to understand natural language expressions of issues, by the end user, by the consumer. So typically people give us their life story, but they're asking for a refund. The ability to parcel that in that conversation and say I think you want a refund, let me help you get that is a very powerful piece of IP. So we go to companies and we say, "Just tell us where all of your knowledge assets are." You don't have to touch it, don't create anything new, don't build a new silo because they already have the silo, and we simply go out and index it all, learn from it, and start building a knowledge graph for that business. It's specific to how that business handles resolutions, but it also learns how customers have asked questions in the past, and how agents have answered it. So again, your best expertise is captured and used in that knowledge graph. We then say, "In less than an hour, "in one line of java scripts, here's a model "you can put in front of your consumer." You can put it anywhere you want, and it says when you need help, click on it, pops up, on mobile you can speak the question, and tells the consumer, "Just tell me what your issue is." It understands the intension of that question or the issue, and then goes in the knowledge graph, and says, "Hmmm, can I find an answer "in this knowledge graph that can help you help yourself?" And if so, it matches it. And it's actually giving you a specific resolution. It's not making you wade through pages of material. It's saying, "Here's the three steps you need to do "to reset your account." Now that is instant and immediate for the consumer. They don't have to hunt, they don't have to search. And it says, "Have I helped you?" And we're putting the power in the hands in the consumer. We're saying, "We don't want it to be false fiction." We're saying, you the consumer can say, "Nope, this didin't help me," and now the company can then guide you to the right flow. They can get you on a chat, if you're a V.I.P. user, maybe they get you on a phone call, whatever it might be. But, by putting the consumer at the center, by delivering real value to them, we've accomplished both sides, right? CSATS higher, the cost goes down, because we are actually self-serving anywhere from 15 to 40% of the tickets or issues that used to cost the business money, being self-served now, and so that's a pretty miraculous transformation for the business and for the consumer. >> Well, in today's world, attention is everything. Every, as you said, every experience, every engagement has to be a source of value to the customer. And so, not only do you get a better customer, but you presumably also get a richer set of interactions because the customer now believes that the system actually is helpful, is useful. Does that data then go back into the system, so that it becomes even knowledgeable about the nature of the problems, the nature of the resolutions, anticipatory about how to improve things, and maybe product people can get visibility in this stuff? Is that kind of where all this goes? >> It's a very organic system and it learns constantly. It think that's the really powerful thing about it. So, it learns many things. So it learns when you ask me questions. It learns if I have not given you a good answer. It actually learns from the negative. I still passed you to the agent because then it follows it all the way through and says, "How did the agent answer?" And, it learns from that interaction. And so because we know we can't self-serve every question that a consumer has, but we're getting better, better, and better. In fact, our self-service rates have doubled just in the last 12 months, because of the machine learning and the ability to learn. And we actually learn across all the businesses we do business with. We learn things for example that consumer review show more than a paragraph of text, they don't engage in self-service. We show bullets, they are much more likely to interact. Those are implicit learnings that system uses to more accurately to give you responses. But there's another flip side to this which is when we see 100% of the conversations between the consumer and your business, we're now able to go to business and give them categorical views of what's actually going on once their product or service is shipped to the consumer, which they've never had before. We're now able to say to them, "We think that payment "page that people are using to renew might be broken "because there seems to be a lot "more issues associated with that." Now that's something that the engineer who built that page may not know, or if the person said, "That's broken," they'd say, "How do you know? "Show me the data." And now you can actually go with a data driven model and say, "We can tell you. "This is 14% of the issues this week, "and two weeks ago, it was two percent. "Can you tell me what's changed?" Or you can put a dollar value on it. "This product seems to be defective "and it's costing us money "because we keep having to do returns. "Here's the number of situations where that's happened "in the last week, it's costing us "two million dollars a year, fix it." That's the kind of incite that the vps of customer experience or customer support have had to spend hundreds of hours to try to massage and get, and it doesn't give them a seat at the table with the strategy with product and marketing. >> But every company has been talking about the need to build their community, where basically a community is defined by folks who have something in common and are taking common actions. But one of the challenges has been, is how do I provide value so that I get that type of interaction? Let me ask you a question. Are we ultimately suggesting, we all seem to be getting to a point where the quality of engagement is such, and while it keeps costs low, that it might actually catalyze even greater engagement with the customer base so that you learn not just initially, you not only learn something about a product, or for example, you might actually learn things about how to facilitate adoption, because customers are willing to engage more often and more deeply as a consequence of a good experience in using Solvvy related type technologies? >> It is the opportunity to use that customer engagement when they're contacting your business about an issue or problem, the opportunity is first I have to take care of your issue. You won't listen to me if I don't take care of your issue well, but if I do that, I have an enormous opportunity to educate you. How can you do better with the product or service I sold you" Perhaps you need something that's on top of that. Maybe you're a free user and by subscribing to the premium product, you'd get all the benefits that you're frustrated about. And maybe that's an time to give you an offer. So, I think that notion of personalized recommendation is something that is actually never been possible before with the old systems. The idea was that support was kind of a backwater in many ways, which it should never have been. And in fact, the leading brands like Zappos realized quickly that by winning on that basis, you could actually dominate the market. But, it was often the case that the people in support felt like goal keepers. Just keep the issues away, but in fact, now in an integrated world, it's very difficult with subscription based businesses for example, to know when you're buying and when you're asking for support. It's subscription service, I could cancel at any time. So now I'm engaging with your brand. I'm asking a question, "Hey how do I get "more of x,y,z shipped to my house?" It's an enormous opportunity to not only answer my question, but then suggest things, recommend things, play books, so if you think about that experience, how would I enhance the consumer experience, that interactive conversational flow is the perfectplace to do it. >> I would think it would also allow you to envision other types of engagement, because as long as the consumer finds it valuable, to have that conversation, then they'll be willing to enter into that conversation. Well, so let me step back, where does this all go? Because we've been talking about being able to do this for a number of years, and as I said in the preamble, in many respects, all we did was digitize bad process, but now we're talking about bringing technology to bear and dramatically improving the process. Five minute resolution, pretty good. As a consumer, I'd like that, so where does this go? What's the limit of utilizing these technologies to incorporate or enhance engagement? >> So, let me illustrate with an example that I think is very compelling of the power of how this is going to change our world. So, one of our customers is Eero, the smart wifi system. You're probably familiar with it. One of the most innovative products on the planet. Now, we've been working with Eero for well over a year, and they just published a case study of what we've accomplished with them. So, we have self-served 45% of the issues that would have come into them, that have conversations that come into them regarding issues, and that's a fantastic number. They had never seen anything close to it. And that's a great outcome for the business and the consumer. Under one minute is the average time for resolution for those 45%. Imagine again, how much time I've saved you, me, all of us as consumers of Eero. But the better story that I like is two weeks ago, we got a call from the CEO of one of the leading mid-western electronics distributors in the world, and he had said, "I'm going to have my support team, "customer experience team contact you guys, "because I was at home, I bought an Eero smart wifi system, "I went home and tried to install it, and I had trouble. "And I went on, and Solvvy gave me the exact steps "it took to solve the issue, "and I never had to contact them, "and I was able to get the wifi up and running in minutes, "and I was on my way. "And I'm delighted with my Eero system, "and it was because of this interface." And he said, "I think my company should be using it too." And, that was one of many, many catalytic events for us, that realized, wow, we're touching over 200 million consumers with our service. We're reaching all the way out, and we're extending these brand's promise into the consumers' homes, into their devices. _ Two hundred million? >> Two hundred million. >> So that's literally 10% of the population that's online. >> If you're talking about the world leading brands, so we're working with the leading brands that are reaching these people, so by extension Solvvy is as well. And so, you're talking about companies, leading gaming companies, on-demand companies, consumer electronics. These are all companies that self-service automation. And it's intelligent automation, right? It doesn't require a lot of work from the business. As I said, we implement in less than an hour. With one line of java script, we've developed very powerful, unsupervised machine learning models, that can just take all that transcript date from all the past conversations that consumers have had with your business, automatically learn the best stuff from it, and then be able to show the users the right issues. So the customer journey is where we're so focused, right? Because the customer journey is opportunity for the brand to really create a market-leading position and we're enhancing that conversation. >> Fantastic. >> Mahesh Ram, founding CEO of Solvvy, thank you very much for coming on theCube. It's been a great a great conversation about the evolution of customer service, and where it goes. >> It's my pleasure, an honor to be on theCUBE. >> So once again, this is Peter Burris, this has been a CUBE conversation, until next time.

(triumphant music) >> Hello and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation, exclusive content here in Palo Alto Studios, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and cohost of theCUBE. We have exclusive news with Vectra Networks announcing new funding, new R and D facility. I'm here with the president and CEO, Hitesh Sheth, who's the president and CEO. Welcome to theCUBE Conversation, congratulations. >> Thank you John. glad to be here. >> So you've got some big news. >> Vectra Networks, you guys doing some pretty cool stuff with AI and cyber. >> Correct. >> But it's not just software, it's really kind of changing the game with IT operations, the entire Cloud movement, DevOps automations, all impacting the enterprise. >> Hitesh: Yes. >> And other companies. >> Hitesh: Yes. >> Before we dig into some of the exclusive news you guys have, take a minute to talk about, what is Vectra? What is Vectra Networks? >> Maybe it'd be useful to give you context of the way we see the security industry evolving. And if you think about the last 20 years, and if you were to speak to the security person in an enterprise, their primary concern would be around access banishment, who gets in, who gets out. The firewall industry was born to solve this problem. And you know, in many ways its been a gift that's kept on giving. You know, you've got companies with multi-billion dollar evaluations, Palo Alto, Checkpoint, Fortinet, you know, piece of Cisco, etc, right? There's roughly about 40 billion dollars on the market cap sitting in this industry today. Now, if you go back to the same enterprise today, and you look at the next 5-10 years and you ask them, "What is the number one issue that you care about?" Right? It's no longer who's getting in and out from an access policy standpoint, it's all about threat, management, and mitigation. So, the threat's signal is now the most important commodity inside the enterprise and the pervasive challenge for the customer, the enterprise customer, is, "How do I get my hands on this threat's signal in the most efficient way possible?" And we, at Vectra, are all about automating and helping our customers hunt for advanced cyber attacks using artificial intelligence. >> Where did you get the idea of AI's automation? I've always said in theCUBE, "Oh, AI's a bunch of b.s. Because real true AI is there. But again, AI is really kind of growing out of machine learning. >> Hitesh: Right >> Automating, and so this kind of loose definition but certainly is very sexy right now. People love AI. >> Hitesh: Correct. >> I mean, AI is awesome. But at a practical matter, it seems to be very important for good things, also for the enterprise, where'd you get the idea for using AI for cyber? >> Well, you know, I would go back to in my journey intersection with the notion of using AI for cyber security, Back in about 2010, there are major cyber events reported in the press. At that time, I was in the networking sector and in the networking sector, we all looked at it and said, "You know, we can do something about this," and being good networking company is, we thought we would build chips that would do DPI and do packet inspection. It was, too be blunt, old school thinking, okay? Fast forward to 2012 and I was sitting with Vinod Khosla of Khosla ventures and we were talking about the notion of security. How can you transform security dramatically >> Mhmm. >> Hitesh: And this is when we started talking about using artificial intelligence. It was very nascent and frankly, if you went up and down Sand Hill at that time, you know, most of the venture companies would have- and they did, because we were raising money at the time, they would look at us and said, "You guys are nuts. This is just not going to happen." You know, it's very experimental, it would take forever to come to pass. But that's usually the best time to go and build a new business and take a risk, right? And we said, you know what, AI has matured enough. >> By the way, at that time, they were also poo-pooing the Cloud. >> Absolutely. >> Amazon will be nothing. >> Yeah, exactly. Generally, a good time, a good time to go and do something revolutionary. But, here are the other things to know. Not only had the technology around AI and its applicability had advanced enough, but two other things have happened at the same time. The cost of compute had changed dramatically. The cost of storage had changed dramatically. And ultimately, if AI is going to be efficient, not only is the software got to be good, but the computer's got to be valid as well. Storage got to be valid as well. These three things were really coming together on their timeframe. >> Well, what's interesting, let's dig into that for a second because knowing what the scene was with networking at the time, you said, "old thinking," but the state of the art, you know, In the 90's and 2000's was, hardware got advanced, so you had wire speed capability. So, you can do some cool things like, you know, like still move through the network and do some inspection. >> Hitesh: Correct. >> And you said DPACK is recommended But that's the concept of looking at the data. >> Hitesh: That's correct. >> John: So, okay, now they might have been narrow view so now you take it back >> Hitesh: Yes. >> With AI, am I getting it right? You're thinking of zooming out saying, okay, >> Hitesh: A couple of things. >> You find that notion of inspection of data >> Right. >> With more storage, more compute >> But it comes down to also, you know, what data are you looking at, right? When you had wire spec in booties, you would apply your classic signature based approaches. So you could deal with known attacks, right? What is really happening, like 2011-2012 onwards is, the attack landscape is more stored dramatically. It changes so fast that the approach of just dealing with the known was never going to be enough. >> Yeah. >> So, how do you deal with the unknown? You need software that can learn. You need software that can adapt on the fly. And this is where machine learning comes into play. >> You got to assume everyone's a bad actor at that point. >> You got to assume everybody has been infiltrated in some way or fashion. >> Well, the Cloud, certainly, you guys were on the front end, kind of probably thought we're crazy with other VC's, you mentioned that. But at the time, I do remember when Cloud was kind of looked at as just nonsense. >> Yeah >> But if you then go look at what that impact has been, you're in the right side of history, congratulations,. What really happened? When was the C change? You mentioned 2012, was that because of the overall threat landscape change? Was that because of open source? Was that because of new state sponsored threats? >> Hitesh: Yeah. A couple things. >> What was the key flash point? >> Hitesh: A couple of things. We saw, at the time, that there was an emerging class of threats in the marketplace being sponsored by either state actors but we also saw that there was significant funding going into creating organized entities that were going to go and hack large enterprises. >> John: Not state sponsored directly, state sponsored, kind of, you know, >> On the side. >> Yeah, on the side. >> Let's call them, "For Profit Entities," okay? >> Sounds like Equifax to me. (laughter) >> That's a good point. And we saw that happening. Trend two was, there were enough public on the record, hacks are getting reported, right? Sony would be a really good example at the time. But just as fundamentally, it's not just enough that there's a market. The technology has got to be sufficiently ready to be transformative, and this is the whole point around what we saw in compute and storage and the fact that there was enough advancement in the machine learning itself that it was worth taking a risk and experimenting to see what's going to happen. And in our journey, I can tell you, it took us about 18 months, really, to kind of tune what we were doing because we tried and we failed for 18 months before we kind of came to an answer that was actually going to gel and work for the customers. >> And what's interesting is having a pattern oriented to look for the unknown >> Hitesh: Yeah >> Because it's, you know, in the old days was, "Hey, here's a bunch of threats, look for'em and be prepared to deploy." Here, you got to deal with a couple of the unknown potentially attack. But also I would say that we've observed the surface areas increased. So, you mention Checkpoint in these firewalls. >> Hitesh: Yes. Absolutely. >> Those are perimeter based security models. So you got a perimeter based environment. >> Hitesh: Correct. >> Everyday. >> Hitesh: And you got IOT. >> IOT. So it's a hacker's dream. >> It's absolutely. The way I like to think about it is you got an end by end probatational issue. You got an infinite possible, if you're a hacker, you're absolutely right, it's Nirvana. You've got endless opportunities to break into the enterprise today. It's just going to get better. It's absolutely going to get better for them. >> John: Well, let's get to the hard news. You guys have an announcement. You've got new funding >> Hitesh: Yeah. >> And an R and D facility, in your words, what is the announcement? Share the data. >> We're really excited to announced that we have raised closed a round of 36 million dollars, Series D funding, it's being led by Atlantic Bridge, they are a growth fund, and they've got significant European roots, and in addition to Atlantic Bridge, we're bringing on board two new investors, two additional investors. The Ireland's Strategic Investment Fund, number one, effectively the sovereign fund of Ireland, and then secondly, Nissho Electronics of Japan. This is going to bring our double funding to 123 millions dollars, today. What we're going to be using this funds for is to find things with. One is the classic expansion of sales and marketing. I think we've had very significance success in our business. From 2016 to 2017, our business grew 181% year end year, subscription based, all subscription revenue. So, we're going to use this, this new fuel, to drive business growth, but just as important, we're going to drive our needs growth significantly. And as part of this new funding, we are opening up a brand new R & D center in Dublin, Ireland. This is our fourth R & D center. We've got one here in San Jose, California. We've got one in Austin, Texas, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and so this is number four. >> John: So, you hired some really smart people. How many engineers do you guys have? >> So, we are about a 140% company, roughly half the company is in R and D. >> I see a lot of engineering going on and you need it, too. So let's talk about competitors. Darktrace is out there, heavily funded companies, >> Hitesh: Yes. >> Their competitor, how do you compare against the competition and why do you think you'll be winning? >> I can tell you, statistically, whether it is Darktrace or we run into barcoding with Cisco as well. We win into large enterprise. We win 90% of the time. [Overlapping Conversation] >> It's actually correct. And I'll describe to you why is it that we win. We look at people like Darktrace and there are other smaller players in the marketplace as well And I'll tell you one thing fundamentally true about the competitive landscape and that differentiates us. AI is on everybody's lips nowadays, right? As you pointed out. But what is generally true for most companies doing AI and I think this is true for our competition as well, it tends to be human augmented AI. It's not really AI, right? This is sort of like the Wizard of Oz, you know, somebody behind the curtain actually doing the work and that ultimately does not deliver the promise of AI and automation to the customer. The one thing we have been very - >> John: They're using AI to cover up essentially manual business models for all people added, is that what you're saying? >> Hitesh: That's correct. Effectively, it's still people oriented answer for the customer and if AI is really true, then automation has got to be the forefront and if automation is really going to be true, then the user experience of the software has got to be second to none >> John: So, I know Mike Lynch is on the board of that company, Darktrace, he was indicted or charged with fraud to front for HP for billions of dollars. So, is he involved? Is he a figurehead? How does he relate to that? >> I think you should talk to Mike. You should put him in this chair and have this conversation. I recommend it, that would be great. >> John: I don't think he'd come on. >> But my understanding is that he has a very heavy hand in the reign of Darktrace. Darktrace, if you go to their website, so this is all public data, if you look at their management chain, this is all Autonomy people. What that means, respect to how Autonomy was running and how Vectra is being run, is for them to speak about, what I can tell you is that, when we meet them competitively, we meet other competitors. >> John: I mean, if I'm a customer, I would have a lot of fear and certainty in doubt to work with an Autonomy led because they had such a head fake with the HP deal and how they handled that software and just software stack wasn't that great either. So, I mean, I would be concerned about that. [Overlapping Discussion] >> History may be repeating itself. >> Okay, so you won't answer the question. Okay, well, let's get back to Vectra. Some interesting, notable things I discovered was, you guys had been observing what's been reported in the press with the Olympics. >> Hitesh: Correct. >> You have information and insight on what's going on with the Olympics. Apparently, they were hacked. Obviously, it's in Korea, so it's Asia, there's no DNS that doesn't have certificates that have been hacked or whatever so, I mean, what's going on in South Korea with the Olympics? What's the impact? What's the data? >> Hitesh: Well, I'm going to think, what is really remarkable is that, despite the history of different kinds of attacks, Equifax, what have you, nation state events, political elections getting impacted and so forth, once again, a very public event. We have had a massive breach and they've been able to infiltrate their systems and the remarkable thing is they- >> John: There's proof on this? >> There's proof on this. This is in the press. There's no secret data in our part, which is, this very much out there, in the public arena, they have been sitting in the infrastructure of the Olympics, in Korea, for months and the remarkable thing is, why were they able to get in? Well, I can tell you, I'm pretty sure that the approach to security that these people took is no different than the approach of security most enterprises take. Right? The thing that should really concern us all is that they chose to attack, they chose to infiltrate, but they actually paused before really fundamentally damaging the infrastructure. It goes to show you that they are demonstrating control. I can come in. I can do what I want for as long as I want. I can stop when I want. >> John: They were undetected. >> They were undetected. Absolutely. >> John: And they realized that these attacks reflected that. >> Absolutely. And given the fact there seems to be a recent trend of going after public events, we have many other such public events coming to bear. >> How would you guys have helped? >> The way we would help them, most fundamentally is that, look, here's the fundamental reality, there are, as we've discussed just a second ago, there are infinite options as to break in, into the infrastructure, but once you're in, right? For people like you and I, who are networking people, you're on our turf and the things you can do inside the network are actually very visible. They're very visible, right? It's like somebody breaking through your door, once they get in, their footprints are everywhere, right? And if you had the ability to get your hands on those footprints, right? You can actually contain the attack at- as close to real time as possible, before any real damage is done. >> But then we're going to see where the action is, no doubt about it, you can actually roll that data up and that's where the computer- >> And then you could apply machine learning. You can extract the data, look at the network, extract the right data out of it, apply machine learning or AI and you can get your hands on the attack well before it does any real damage. >> John: And so to your point, if I get this right, if I hear ya properly, computers are much stronger now. >> Hitesh: Correct. >> And with software and AI techniques, you can move on this data quickly. >> Hitesh: Correct. But you have got to, you've got to have a fundamental mindset shift, which is, "I'm not in the business of stopping attacks anymore, I should try, but I recognize I will be breached every single time. So, then, I better have the mechanisms and the means to catch the attack once it's in my environment." And that mindset shift is not pervasive. I am 1,000% sure at the Olympics that people designed the security search have said, "We can stop this stuff, don't worry about it." You had that taught differently that would not be in this position today. >> This is the problem. In all society, whether it's a shooting at a school or Olympic hack event, the role of data is super critical. That's the focus, thanks for coming on and sharing the exclusive news at theCUBE with exclusive coverage of the breaking news of the new round of funding for Vectra Networks. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. >> Hitesh: Thank you, John. (triumphant music)

>> We're here, about to go live, here in a selfie on the pre Silicon Valley Friday Show, about to go live for our show, for some live Friday. We've got a great lineup, it's on my Twitter. Donald Trump and all his viral tweets and now there's an algorithm out there that creates a shorting stock called Trump and Dump, we're going to be talking to the inventor of that new app. Bunch of other great stuff, controversy around Silicon Valley and Intel, controversy on Google, and we'll be watching a great show, well, hopefully you'll be watching. >> Male Announcer: Live, from Cube headquarters in Palo Alto, California it's the Silicon Valley Friday Show, with John Furrier. (serene techno music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Silicon Valley Friday Show, I'm John Furrier, we are here live in Palo Alto, California for the Silicon Valley Friday Show every Friday morning we broadcast what's going on in Silicon Valley, what's going on in the streets, we call up people and find out what's going on, this show we've got a great lineup. We're going to talk about, I'll say, the news, Twitter, but we've got this fun segment where we have an algorithm, a bot, an AI bot that goes out there and takes all of Donald Trump's tweets and creates a shorting of the stock and creates making money, apparently, Donald Trump's tweets do move the market. We're going to talk about Snapchat, Snap Inc's IPO, and a refiling and some controversy going around that. Also, controversy around Intel Corporation that just announced a fab plant in Arizona and the CEO is in the White House making the announcement, giving the impression that Donald Trump was all behind this, turns out the CEO is a Republican and supports Donald Trump, when apparently this has been in the works for multiple years, so, not sure that's going to be a game changer for Trump but certainly Intel's taking advantage of the schmooze factor and the PR stunt that has people in Silicon Valley up in arms. Obviously, Intel is pro-immigration, bringing people in, obviously, Andy Grove was an immigrant, legend of Intel. And we have also tons of stuff going on, we're going to preview Mobile World Congress the big show in Barcelona at the end of the month. We're doing a two day special here, live in Pal Alto, we're going to do a special, new Silicon Valley version of Mobile World Congress. We'll give you a preview, we're going to talk to some analysts. And also, the fake news, fake accuracy, and all the stuff that's going on, what is fake news? What is inaccurate news? Is there a difference? Does it matter? It certainly does, we have an opinion on that so, great show lineup. First, is actually Twitter earnings are out and they kind of missed and hit their up on the monthly active uniques by two million people. A total of I think 300 million people are using the number here, just on my notes here says, that there are up to 319 million active, monthly active users. And of course, Trump has been taking advantage of Twitter and the Trump bump did not happen for Twitter, although some say Trump kept it alive. But Trump is using Twitter. And he's been actively on Twitter and is causing a lot of people, we've talked about it many times on the show, but the funniest thing that we've seen, and probably the coolest thing that's interesting is that there's an entrepreneur out there, an agency guy named Brian, Ben Gaddis, I'm sorry, president of T3. He's a branding guy, created viral videos on NPR, all over the news, went viral, he created an AI chatbot that essentially takes Donald Trump's tweets, analyzes any company mentioned and then instantly shorts the stock of that company. And apparently it's working, so we're going to take a look at that. We're also going to talk to him and find out what's going on. We're going to have Ben Rosenbaum on, we're going to have someone from Intel on, we have a lot of great guests, so let's take a look at this clip of the Trump and Dump and then we're going to talk to Ben right after. >> Announcer: T3 noticed something interesting about Twitter lately, particularly when this guy gets hold of it. Anytime a company mentions moving to Mexico or overseas or just doing something bad, he's on it, he tweets, the stock tanks. Tweet, tank. Tweet, tank. Tweet, tank. Everyone's talking about how to make sense of all this. T3 thought the unpredictability of it created a real opportunity. Meet the Trump and Dump automated trading platform. Trump and Dump is a bot powered by a complex algorithm that helps us short stocks ahead of the market. Here's how. Every time he tweets, the bot analyzes the tweet to see if a publicly traded company is mentioned. Then, the algorithm runs an instant sentiment analysis of the tweet in less than 20 milliseconds. It figures, positive or negative. A negative tweet triggers the bot to short the stock. Like earlier this month, his Toyota tweet immediately tanked the stock. But the Trump and Dump bot was out ahead of the market. It shorted the second after his tweet. As the stock tanked, we closed our short and we made a profit, huge profit. Oh, and we donated our profits here. So now, when President Trump tweets, we save a puppy. It's the Trump and Dump automated trading platform. Twitter monitoring, sentiment analysis, complex algorithms, real time stock trades. All fully automated, all in milliseconds. And all for a good cause. From your friends at T3. >> Okay, we're back here in Silicon Valley Friday Show, I'm John Furrier and you just saw the Trump and Dump, Trump and Dump video and the creator, that is Ben Gaddis on the phone, president of T3, a privately owned think tank focused on branding. Ben, thanks for joining us today. >> Thanks for having me, John. Excited to talk with you. >> So, big news NPR had on their page, which had the embed on there and it went viral. Great video, but first talk about the motivation, what's going on behind this video? This is very cool, explain to the folks out there what this Trump and Dump video is about, why did you create it, and how does it work? >> So, we had just like, I think, almost everyone in the United States, we were having a conversation about what do you do with the fact that President Trump is tweeting and tweeting about these companies, and in many cases negatively. So we saw articles talking about it and actually one day a guy in our New York office came up with this idea that we ought to follow those tweets in real time and if he mentions a publicly traded company negatively, short the stock. And so, we kicked that idea around over slack and in about 30 minutes we had an idea for the platform. And about two days later one of our engineers had actually built it. And so what the platform does is it's really actually simple yet complex. It listens to every tweet that the president puts out and then it does two things: it determines if there's a publicly traded company mentioned and if there is, and it actually does sentiment analysis in real time, so, in about 20 milliseconds, it can tell if the tweet is positive or negative. If it's negative, we've seen the stocks typically go down and we short sell that stock. And so, the profit that we develop from that, then we donate it to the ASPCA and then hopefully we save a puppy or two in the process. >> Yeah, and that's key, I think that's one thing I liked about this was you weren't arbitraging, you weren't like a real time seller like these finance guys on Wall Street, which by the way, have all these complex trading algorithms. Yours is very specific, the variables are basically Donald Trump, public company, and he tends to be kind of a negative Tweeter so, mostly to do with moving to Mexico or some sort of you know, slam or bullying kind of Tweet he does. And which moves the market, and this is interesting though, because you're teasing out something clever and cool on the AI kind of side of life and you know, some sort of semantic bot that essentially looks at some context and looks at the impact. But this is kind of the real world we're living in now, these kinds of statements from a president of the United States, or anyone who's in a position of authority, literally moves the market, so you're not doing it to make money you're doing it to prove a point which is that the responsibility here is all about getting exposed in the sense that you got to be careful of what you say on Twitter when you're the president of the United States. I mean, if it was me saying it, I mean, I'm not going to move the market but certainly, you know, the press who impact large groups of people and certainly the president does that so, did you guys have that in mind when you were thinking about this? >> Well, we did. I mean, I think, you know, our goal was, this is what we do for a living, we help big brands monitor all their digital presences and build digital strategy. So, we're already monitoring sentiment around Twitter and around social platforms so, it's pretty core to what we do. But we're also looking at things that are happening in pop culture and societally, what kind of impact social might have on business. And so, the fact that we're able to take an action and deliver a social action, and deliver a real business outcome is pretty core to what we do. What's different here and what's so unique is the fact that we've never really seen things like, policy, whether it's monetary policy, or just general policy be distributed through one platform like Twitter and have such a big impact. So, we think it's kind of a societal shift that is sort of the new norm. That, I don't know that if everyone has figured out what to do with yet and so our goal is to experiment and decide one, can we consume the information fast enough to take an action? And then how do we build through AI platforms that allow us to be smarter in the world that we're living in today that is very, very unpredictable. >> We have Ben Gaddis, as president of T3 also part of the group that did the Trump and Dump video but he brings out a great point about using data and looking at the collective impact of information in real time. And this interesting, I was looking at some of the impact last night in this and Nordstrom's had a tweet about Ivanka Trump and apparently Nordstrom's stock is up so, is there a flaw in the algorithm here? What's the take on that? Because in a way, that's the reverse of the bullying, he's defensive on that one so, is there a sentiment of him being more offensive or defensive? >> It's pretty standard. So, we're starting to see a pattern. So, what happens is that actually, the Nordstrom stock actually did go down right after the tweet. And so, we saw that that's a pattern that's typical when the president tweets negatively. When he tweets positively, we don't see that much of a bump. When he tweets negatively, typically the stock drops anywhere between one and four percent, sometimes even greater than that. But it rebounds very quickly. So, a big part of what we're trying to do with the bot and the algorithm is understand how long do we hold, and what is that timeframe before people actually come back to more of a rational state and start to buy back a stock that's valuable. Now what's really interesting, you mentioned, you know, the algorithm and whether there's a flaw in it, we learned something very interesting yesterday about Nordstrom's. So, the president tweeted and in that tweet he talked negatively about Nordstrom's, but he also talked very positively about his daughter, Ivanka. And so, the algorithm actually picked up that tweet and registered it as 61.5% positive. So, it didn't trade. So, we actually got kind of lucky on that one. >> You bring up a good point, and this is something that I want to get your thoughts on. You know, we live in an era of fake news, and it's just Snapchat just filed IPO filing to make a change in their filing to show that Amazon is going to be a billion dollar partner as well, which wasn't in the filing. So, there's a line between pure, fake news, which is essentially just made up stuff, and inaccurate news, so what you're kind of pointing out is a new mechanism to take advantage of the collective intelligence of real time information. And so this is kind of a new concept in the media business. And brands, who used to advertise with big media companies, are now involved in this so, as someone who's, you know, an architect for brand and understanding data, how are brands becoming more data driven? >> Well, I think what brands are realizing is that they live in this world that is more real time, that's such a buzzword. But more real time than I think they even thought would ever be possible, the fact that someone like the president can tweet and have literally cut off billions of dollars in market cap value in a moment's time is something that they have to figure out. So, I think the first thing is having the tools in place to actually monitor and understand, and then having a plan in place to react to things that are really quite unpredictable. So, not only, I don't think that you can have a plan for everything but you have to at least have a plan for understanding how you get legal approval on a response. Who would be responsible for that. You know, who do you work with, either through partners or inside of your organization to, you know, to be able to respond to something when you need to get back in promoting, you know, minutes versus hours. The thing that we don't hear people talk near as much about is, our goal was to see how close we can get to the information so we can zoom the data from Twitter's fire hose, so we get it hopefully when everyone else does. And then our goal is to take an action on that quicker than anybody else, and that delta is where we'll make a profit. What's really interesting to me is that the only person closer to that information than the president is Twitter. >> Ben, great to have you on, appreciate it, love to get you back on as a guest. We love to talk about is our model here, it's looking angle, it's extracting the signal from the noise. And certainly the game is changing, you're working with brands and the old model of ad agencies, this is a topic we love to cover here, the old ad agency model's certainly becoming much more platform oriented with data, these real time tools really super valuable, having a listening engine, having some actionable mechanisms to go out there and be part of and influence the conversation with information. Seems to be a good trend that you guys are really riding. Love to have you back on. >> We'd love to be back on, and thanks for the time, we enjoyed it. >> That was Ben Gaddis, who's the president of T3, the firm behind the Trump and Dump, but more importantly highlighting a really big megatrend which is the use of data, understanding its impact, having some analysis, and trying to figure out what that means for people. Be right back with more after this short break. >> [Female Announcer] Why wait for the future? The next evolution in IT infrastructure is happening now. 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Unify your data center with Cisco UCS. >> Male Announcer: You're listening to Cube Fridays, brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Okay, welcome back to the Silicon Valley Friday Show, I'm John Furrier, great show today. Our next guest is Dan Rosenbaum, who is the editor of Wearable Tech Insider, Media Probe, been around the industry for years, been a journalist, reporter, editor, variety through his career, knows the tech business certainly on the infrastructure level with the device. Okay, welcome to the show, great to have you, thanks for being available, he's in New York so, Palo Alto, New York connection here. >> Yeah, we got about maybe an hour or so of snow left. But you know, it's February, it does this in New York. >> Great to have you on, we were just talking on our earlier segment before the break about the guy who created the Trump and Dump video which is a chat bot that goes out, looks at Donald Trump's tweets, and then identifies if there's a public company, shorts the stock, and donates to save puppies. So, they're not doing it for profit but they're, you know, they have their intelligence and listening, and we were just riffing on the concept of that there's been fake news and inaccuracy and a new dynamic that's impacting the media business, which is real time information, data, and certainly the world that you're in with Wearables, this new internet of things, which is hard to understand for most common people but it's really the AI new connected network. It's really impacting things, certainly how people get information, how fast they create data, and it's changing the industry landscape certainly from a media standpoint. You get on TV and the mainstream... >> It really is. When the press secretary stood up and said that that the administration sees the media as the adversary, you know, everyone got sort of upset about it but you know, in a lot of ways it's true. That's a fitting way that the media and any administration, any power structure should be facing each other. There's been such a hop in the media to report the truth as best as it can determine and as accurately as it can. Now, there are differing impacts depending on which sphere you're in, and in politics there's always going to be sort of the tension, well, we think, we look at these facts and we think that and we look at those facts and think the other. >> I think ultimately this new formats that are developing really comes back down to I would add to that as trust. This is a collision course of a complete re-transformation of the media landscape and technology's at the heart of it and, you know, you're in the middle of it. With Wearables, you're seeing that at the edge of the network, these are new phenomenons. What's your take on this new trend of, you know, of computing? And I'm not saying singularity, as Ray Kurzweil would say, but you know, ultimately, it is going down to the point now where it's on your body, potentially in your body, but this is a new form of connection. What's your thoughts on this? >> 12 years ago, I was at the party where they launched MSNBC, and I ran into Andrew Lack, who's the CEO of MSNBC at the time, and asked him, why NBC was cutting this collaboration deal with Microsoft, because remember that's how it was started, when there wasn't any means for the news to go upwards. There was no way for citizen news gathering to be represented on this Microsoft-NBC co-venture. And Andrew actually looked down his nose at me, sneered, and goes, "Who in the world would want "people to be contributing to the news?" Well, now we're 10 or 12 years later and as you say, Snapchat and Skype, and all these mobile technologies have just transformed how people get their information, because they're now witnesses, and there are witnesses everywhere. One of the big transformations in, or about wearable technology is that computing infrastructure has moved from islands of stand-alone, massive computers, to networks of massive computers to stand-alone PCs, to networks to PCs, and now the model for computing and communication is the personal area network, the idea of sensor-based technologies is going to change, or already has changed the world of news, it's in the process of changing the world of medicine, it's in the process of changing the way we build houses, the construction business, with the smartphone, the way that we build and relate to cities. >> So, we're here with Dan Rosenbaum, he's the editor of Wearable Tech Insider, but more importantly he's been a tech insider in media going way back, he's seen the cycles of innovation. Love your point about the flowing conversations coming out of the MSNBC kind of executive in the old broadcast models. I mean, I have four kids, my oldest is 21, they don't use, they don't really care about cable TV anymore so, you know, this is now a new narrative so, those executives that are making those comments are either retired or will be dinosaurs. You now have Amazon, you have Netflix, you have, you know, folks, trying to look at this internet TV model where it's fully synchronous so, now you have collective intelligence of vertical markets that have real time ability to surface information up to bigger outlets. So, this collective media intelligence is happening, and it's all being driven by mobile technology. And with that being said, you know, you're in the business, we've got Mobile World Congress coming up, what is that show turning into? Because it's not about the mobile device anymore, the iPhone's 10 years old, that's a game changer. It's growing up. The impact of mobile is now beyond the device. >> Mobile World Congress is all about wireless infrastructure. It goes from everything from a one millimeter square sensor to the national grade wireless network. But what's really cool about Mobile World is that it's the place where communications or telecom ministers get together with infrastructure carriers, get together with the hardware manufacturers, and they hash out the problems that won't resolve five, 10, 15 years down the road in new products and new services. This is the place where everyone comes together. The back rooms at Mobile World Congress are the hottest place, and the back rooms are the places that you can't get into. >> We're here with Dan Rosenbaum, who's an industry veteran, also in the media frontlines in wireless technology, I mean, wearable technology and among other things, good view of the landscape. Final point, I want to just get a quick comment from ya, I was watching on Facebook, you had a great post around Facebook is feeding you an ad for a $19 million staid-in, let's feel Connecticut. And then you said, "One of us as the wrong idea, so you must be really loaded." This retargeting bullshit on Facebook is just ridiculous, I mean, come on, this bad, big data, isn't it? >> (laughing) Yeah, I mean, the boast of Google is that they want to make, you know, ads so relevant that they look like content. Well, in the process to getting there, there's going to be misses. You know, if this real estate agent decides that they want to hit everyone in my zip code, or everyone in my county, or whatever, and they wanted pay the five dollars so that I'd see that video, god bless 'em, let 'em do it, it's not going to make me, it's not going to overcome any kind of sales resistance. I don't know that I wanted to move up to Litchfield, Connecticut anyway, but if I did, sure, a $19 million house would be really nice. >> You could take a chopper into Manhattan, you know, just drop into Manhattan with a helicopter. >> They would want to take it. >> Alright, we can always take the helicopter in from Litchfield, you know, right at the top of your building. Dan, thanks so much for spending the time, really appreciate it, and we'll have to bring, circle back with you on our two day Mobile World Congress special in Palo Alto we'll be doing, so appreciate the time. Thanks a lot. >> Love to do it, thanks for having me. >> Okay, that was Dan Rosenbaum, really talking about, going down in the weeds a little bit but really more importantly, this Mobile World Congress, what's going on with this new trend, digital transformation really is about the impact to the consumer. And what's going on Silicon Valley right now is there's some hardcore tech that is changing the game from what we used to know as a device. The iPhone's only 10 years old, yet 10 years old, before the iPhone, essentially it was a phone, you made phone calls, maybe surf the Web through some bad browser and do text messages. That's now completely transforming, not just the device, it's the platform, so what we're going to see is new things that are happening and the tell signs are there. Self driving cars, autonomous vehicles, drones delivering packages from Amazon, a completely new, digitized world is coming. This is the real trend and we're going to have an executive from Intel on next to tell us kind of what's going on because Intel is at the ground zero of the innovation with Moore's Law and the integrated circuit. But they're bringing their entire Intel inside as a global platform, and this is really going to be driven through a ton of 5G, a new technology so, we're going to dig in on that, and we're going to have a call-in from her, she's going to be coming in from Oregon and again, we're going to get down to the engineers, the people making the chips under the hood and bringing that to you here on the Silicon Valley Friday Show, I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back after this short break. >> My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm a long-time industry analyst. So, when you're as old as I am you've seen a lot of transitions. Everybody talks about industry cycles and waves, I've seen many, many waves. I've seen a lot of industry executives and I'm a little bit of an industry historian. When you interview many thousands of people, probably five or six thousand people as I have over the last half of the decade, you get to interact with a lot of people's knowledge. And you begin to develop patterns so, that's sort of what I bring is an ability to catalyze a conversation and, you know, share that knowledge with others in the community. Our philosophy is everybody is an expert at something, everybody's passionate about something and has real deep knowledge about that something. Well, we want to focus in on that area and extract that knowledge and share with our communities. This is Dave Vellante, and thanks for watching the Cube. (serene techno music) >> Male Announcer: You're listening to the Silicon Valley Friday Show with John Furrier. >> Okay, welcome back to the Silicon Valley Friday Show, I'm John Furrier, we're here in Palo Alto for this Friday Show, we're going to go under the hood and get into some technology impact around what's going on in the industry, specifically kind of as a teaser for Mobile World Congress at the end of the month, it's a big show in Barcelona, Spain where the whole mobile and infrastructure industry comes together, it's kind of like CES, Consumer Electronics Show, in the mobile world but it's evolved in a big way and it's certainly impacting everyone in the industry and all consumers and businesses. This is Intel's Lynn Comp and this is Intel who, we know about Moore's Law, we know all about the chips that make everything happen, Intel has been the engine of innovation of the PC revolutions, it's been the engine of innovation now in the Cloud and as Intel looks at the next generation, they are the key player in this transformation that we are seeing with AI, wearable computers, internet of things, self driving cars, AI, this is all happening, new stuff's going on. Lynn, welcome to the program. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be here. >> So, you're up in Oregon, thanks for taking the time to allow us to talk via phone, appreciate it. Obviously, Intel, we've been following you guys, and I've been a big fan since 1987, when I almost worked there right out of college. Went to Hewlett Packard instead, but that's a different story but, great, great innovation over the years, Intel has been the bell weather in the tech industry, been a big part of the massive change. But now, as you look at the next generation, I mean, I have four kids and they don't watch cable TV, they don't like, they don't do the things that we used to do, they're on the mobile phone all the time. And the iPhone is now 10 years old as of this year, this early winter part of this, Steve Jobs announced it 10 years ago. And what a change has it been, it's moved from telephone calls to a computer that happens to have software that makes telephone calls. This is a game changer. But now it seems that Mobile World Congress has changed from being a telephone centric, voice centric, phone device centric show to a software show, it seems to be that software is eating the world just like CES is turning into an automotive show. What is Mobile World Congress turning into? What's the preview from Intel's perspective? >> You know, it's a really fascinating question because many years ago, you would only see a bunch of very, very intense base station design, you know, it was very, very oriented around wireless, wireless technology, and radios, and those are really important because they're an engine of fabric that you can build capabilities onto. But last year, just as a reference point for how much it's changed, we have Facebook giving one of the main keynotes. And they're known for their software, they're known for social media, and so you'll see Facebook and Google with an exhibitor there last year as well, so you're not just seeing suppliers into the traditional wireless industry for equipment and the operators who are the purchaser, you're seeing many, many different players show up very much like how you said CES has a lot of automotives there now. >> Yeah, we've seen a lot of revolutions in the computer industry, Intel created a revolution called the Computer Revolution, the PC Revolution, and then it became kind of an evolution, that seems to be the big trends you see, that cycle. But it seems now that we are, kind of been doing the evolution of mobile computing, and my phone gets better, 10 years down to the iPhone, 3G, 4G, LT, okay, I want more bandwidth, of course, but is there a revolution? Where can you point to? Where is the revolution, versus just standard evolutionary kind of trends? Is there something coming out of this that we're going to see? >> That is such a great question because when you look at the first digital wireless technologies that came out and then you had 2G, and 3G, and 4G, those really were evolutionary. And what we're finding with 5G that I believe is going to be a huge theme at Mobile World Congress this year is it is a completely different ballgame, I would say it's more of an inflection point or very revolutionary. And there's a couple reasons for that, both tie up in how ITU is specifying the use cases, it's licensed and unlicensed spectrum which is kind of unusual for how it's been done if you will get 2, 3, and 4G. The other thing that's really interesting about 5G, that it's an inflection point is there's a lot more intelligence assumed in the network and it helps address some of the challenges I think that the industry is seeing a different industry with some of the IoT promise we'll roll out where some of the macro design networks that we'd seen in the past, the ability to have the right latency, the right bandwidth, and the right cost matched to the needs of a specific IoT use case was much more limited in the past and I think we'll see a lot more opportunities moving forward. >> Great, great stuff, we're with Lynn Comp with the Network Platforms Group at Intel. You know, you bring up some, I like the way you're going with this, there's so much like, impact to society going on with these big, big trends. But also I was just having a conversation with some young folks here in Palo Alto, high school kids and some college kids and they're all jazzed up about AI, you can almost see the... I don't want to say addiction but fascination and intoxication with technology. And there's some real hardcore good tech going on here, could you just share your thoughts on, you know, what are some of those things that are going to, 'cause I mean, 5G to wireless, I get that, but I mean, you know, these kids that we talked to and folks that are in the next generation, they love the autonomous vehicles. But sometimes I can't get a phone signal, how are cars going to talk to each other? I mean, how does this, I mean, you've got to pull this together. And these kids are like, and it's into these new careers. What's your thoughts on what are some of the game changing tech challenges that are coming out of this? >> Let's just start with something that was a great example this year 'cause I think I have kids a similar age. And I had been skeptical of things like even just virtual reality, a augmented or virtual reality. And then we had this phenomena last summer that really was just a hint, it wasn't really augmented reality, but it was a hint of the demand that could be met by it and it's Pokemon Go. And so, an example with that, I mean, it really wasn't asking a significantly higher amount of data off the network, but it did change the use profile for many of the coms service providers and many of the networks where they realized I actually have to change the architecture, not just of what's at the edge but in my core network, to be more responsive and flexible, you are going to see something even more so with autonomous driving, even if it's just driver assist. And similar to how the auto pilot evolution happened, you're still going to have these usage patterns where people have too many demands, too much information coming at them, they do want that assistance, or they do want that augmented experience to interact with a brand, and it's going to really stress the network and there's going to have to be a lot of innovation about where some of these capabilities are placed and how much intelligence is close to the user as opposed to just a radio, probably going to need a lot more analytics and a lot more machine learning capabilities there as well. >> We had a segment earlier in the show, it was the entrepreneur who created the Trump and Dump chat bot that would go out and read Donald Trump's tweets and then short all public companies that were mentioned because the trend is, they would do that, but this is an example of some of these chat bots and some of this automation that's going on and it kind of brings the question up to some of the technology challenges that we're looking out at the landscape that we're discussing is the role of data really is a big deal and software and data now have an interaction play where you got to move data around the networks, networks are now ubiquitous, networks are now on people, networks are now in cars, networks are now part of all this, I won't say unstructured networks, but omni-connected fabric. So, data can really change what looks like an optimal architecture to a failed one, if you don't think about it properly. So, how do you guys at Intel think about the role of data? I mean, how do you build the new chips and how do you look at the landscape? And it must be a big consideration, what's your thoughts about the role of data? Because it can happen at any time, a tsunami of data could hit anything. >> Right, the tsunami of data. So for us, it's any challenge, and this is just in Intel's DNA, historically, we'll get challenges as opportunities because we love to solve these really big problems. And so, when you're talking about data moving around a network you're talking about transformation of the network. We've been having a lot of discussions with operators where they see the data tsunami, they're already seeing it, and they realized, I have got to reconfigure the architecture of my network to leverage these technologies and these capabilities in a way that's relevant for the regulatory environment I'm in. But I still have to be flexible, I have to be agile, I have to be leveraging programmability instead of having to rewrite software every generation or every time a new app comes out. >> Lynn, thanks so much for coming on. Like we always say, you know, engine room more power, you can never have enough compute power available in network bandwidth, as far as I'm concerned. You know, we'd love to increase the power, Moore's Law's been just a great thing, keeps on chugging along. Thanks for your time and joining us on the Silicon Valley Friday Show, appreciate it. Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Alright, take care. Okay, this is Silicon Valley Friday Show, I'm John Furrier, thanks so much for listening. I had Ben Gaddis on, Dan Rosenbaum, and Lynn Comp from Intel really breaking it down and bringing you all the best stories of the week here on the Silicon Valley, thanks for watching. (techno music) (bright instrumental music)