>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Welcome back to the Venetian convention center. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HPE discover 2022. The first discover live discover in three years, 2019 was the last one. The cube we were just talking about. This has been at H HP discover. Now HPE since 2011, my co-host John furrier. We're pleased to welcome Phil Maru. Who's the executive vice president and general manager of HPE Aruba. And he's joined by David Hughes, the chief product and technology officer at HPE Aruba gentleman. Welcome to the cube. Good to see you. Thank you. Thank >>You. >>Okay, so you guys talk a lot, Phil, about the intelligent edge. Yep. Okay. What do you, what do you mean by that? >>Yeah, so we, well, we're kind of focused on, is providing technology to customers that sits out at the edge and typically the edge would be, uh, any location out of the data center or out of the cloud. So for the most part, our customers would deploy our technology either in their office premises or maybe retail premises shops, uh, maybe deploying out of the home where their employees are on a factory floor. And we're really talking about technology to connect both people and devices back to, um, systems and technology throughout an organization. So, but >>I, I, you know, sometimes I call it the near edge and the far edge yeah. Near, near edge. Maybe as we saw home Depot up on the stage yesterday far, Edge's like space. Right. You're including all of that. Right. That's >>Edge. >>Yeah. And actually we, we, we, you know, we've got a broad range of technology that actually works within the data center as well. So, you know, what we are focused on is providing, uh, network technology, software and services. And, you know, for the most part, our heritage is at the edge, but it's more pervasive than that. So >>If you have the edge, you got connectivity and power, that's an edge. How much, um, is the physical world being connected now you're seeing robotics automation. Yeah. Ex and with machine learning specifically in compute, really driving a new acceleration at the edge. What you, how do you guys view that? What's your reaction? Yeah. >>I think, look, it, I think as connectivity is improving and that's both in terms of wifi connectivity, so, you know, wifi technology continues to, uh, advance and also you've got this new kind of private 5g area, just generally connectivity is becoming more pervasive and that's helping some industries that haven't previously embraced it. And I think industrial is, is one of the big ones. So, you know, historically it was difficult for kind of car manufacturers to really enable a factory floor. But now the connectivity is connectivity is better. That gives them the opportunity to be able to really change how they do things. So >>David, if you do take an outside in view, mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and, and, and when you talk to customers, what are they telling you and how is that informing your product strategy? >>Yeah, well, you >>Know, I think there's, there's several themes we hear. One is, you know, it's really important, better work from anywhere they wanna enable their employees, um, to get the same experience, whether they're at home or on the road or in their branch office or at headquarters. Um, you know, people are also concerned that as they deploy, deploy all of this IOT and pursuit of digital transformation, they don't want those devices to be a weak point where someone breaks into one device and moves naturally, um, across the network. So they want to have this great experience for their customers and their users, but they wanna make sure that they're not compromising security, um, in any way. And so it's about getting that balance between ease of use and, and security. That's one of the primary things we hear, >>You know, Dave, one of the things we talked about many, many years ago was when hybrid and was starting to come out multi-cloud was on the, on the table early on. Uh, we were, we were saying, Hey, the data center is just a big edge, right? I mean, if you have cloud operations and you see what's going on with GreenLake here now, the momentum hybrid cloud is cloud operations, right? An edge off data centers to a big edge on premises. And you got the edge as you have cloud operations, like say GreenLake, plugging in partners and diverse environments. You're connecting, not just branch offices that are per perimeter based. You have no perimeter and you have now other companies connecting mm-hmm <affirmative> so you got data and you got network. How do you guys see that transition as GreenLake has a very big ecosystem part of it, partners and whatnot. >>Yeah. So, you know, I think for us, um, the ecosystem of partners that we have is critical in terms of delivering what our customers need. And, you know, I think one of the really important areas is around verticals. So, um, you know, when you think about different verticals, they have similar problems, but you need to tailor the solutions. Um, to each of those, you know, we are talking a bit about devices and people. When you look at say a healthcare environment, there can be 30 devices there for each patient. And, um, so there's connecting all those devices securely, but we have partners that will help pull all of that together that may be focused on, um, you know, medical environment that may focused on stadiums. They may be focused on industrial. Um, so having partners that understand those verticals and working closely with them to deliver solutions is important in our go to market. >>So another kind of product question and related to what you just said, David, I got connectivity, speed, reliability, cost security, or maybe a missing something. But you, you said earlier, you gonna gotta balance those. How do you do that? And do you do that for the specific use cases? Like for instance, you just mentioned stadiums and 81 and how do you balance those and, and do you tailor those for the use cases? >>Yeah, well, I think it depends on the customer and different people have different views about where they need to be. So some people are, are so afraid about security. They wanna be air gapped and completely separate than the internet. That would be one extreme mm-hmm <affirmative> other people, you know, look at it and see what's happening with COVID with everyone working from home with people being able to work from Starbucks or the airport. And they're beginning to think, well, why is the branch that much different? And so what I think we are seeing is, you know, a reevaluation of how people connect to, um, the apps they're using and, uh, you know, you, you, you've probably for sure heard people talking about zero trust, talking about micro segmentation. You know, I think what we we see is that people wanna be able to build a network in a way where rather than any device being able to talk to any device or any person, which is where the internet started, we wanna build to build networks where people or devices can only talk to the destinations that are necessary for them to do their job. >>And so a lot of the technology that we are building into the network is really about making security intrinsic by limiting what can talk to what that's >>Actually micro, micro segmentations, zero trust, um, these all point to a modern, the modern network, as you say, Antonio Neri was just on the cube, talking about programmability, substrate, the words like that come to mind, what is the modern network look like? I mean, you have to be agile. You have to be programmable. You have to have security. Can you describe in your words, what does the modern network these days need to look like? How should customers think about architecting them? What are some of the table stakes and what are some of the differentiators that customers need to do to have a modern network? >>Yeah, well, you covered off a coup a few quarter, one there with clarity and so on. So let me pick one that you didn't mention. And, and I, you know, I think we are seeing, you know, a lot of interest around network as a service. And, you know, when we think about network as a service, we think about it broadly, um, you know, for consumers, we're getting more and more used to buying things as a service versus buying a thing. When you, when you get Alexa, you care about how well she answers your questions, you don't care about what CPU is or how much Ram Alexa has. And likewise with networking, people are caring about the outcomes of keeping their employees connected, keeping their, their devices and systems running. And so what for us, what NASA is all about is that shift of thinking about a network as being a collection of devices that get managed to being a framework for connectivity and running it from the point of view of those outcomes. >>And so whether, you know, it's about CapEx versus OPEX or about do it yourself, managing the network yourself versus outsourcing that, um, or it's about the, you know, Greenfield versus brownfield, each of our customers has got a different starting point, but they're all getting heading towards this destination of being able to treat their network as a service. And so that is, you know, a key area of innovation for us and whether it's big customers like home Depot that you heard about yesterday, um, where we kind of manage everything for them on a, as on a store basis, um, for connectivity, um, or, you know, the recent, um, skew based nest that we launched, which is a really scalable foundation for our partners to build nest offerings around. Um, we see this as a key part of network modernization. Yeah. >>And one of the things, again, that's great stuff. Uh, infrastructure is code, which was really kind of pioneer the DevOps movement in cloud kind of as platform level. And you got data ops now and AI at the top of the stack, we were always wondering when network as code was gonna come, uh, and where you actually have it, where it's programmable. I mean, we all know what policies do do. They're good. That's all great network as code. >>Yeah. >>And that's the concept that's like DevOps, it's like, make it work just seamlessly, just be always on. And >>Yeah. And smart, you know, people are always looking for the, for the easy button. Um, and so they want, they want things to operate easily. They want it to be easy to manage. And, you know, I actually think there's a little bit of a, um, a conflict between networkers code and the easy button, right? So it depends on the class of customers. Some customers like financials, for instance, have a huge software development organizations that are extremely capable that could, that can go with program ability that want things as code. But the majority of the, of, of the verticals that we deal with, um, don't have those big captive software organizations. And so they're really looking for automation and simplicity and they wanna outsource that problem. So in Aruba central, we have invested a lot to make it really easy for our customers to, um, get what they need, you know, is that movement of zero code. It's more like zero code. They want, they want something packaged now >>The headless networks. Yeah. Low code, no code >>Kind of thing. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, obviously for people that have the sophistication that want to, um, do the most advanced things, we have APIs. And so we support that kind of programmable way of doing things. But I'd say that that's that's, those are more specialized customers. So >>Phil, yeah. Uh, is that the strategy? I mean, David listed off a number of, of factors here is that Aruba's strategy to modernize networks to actually create the easy button through network as a service is as simple as dial tone. Is that how we >>Should think? I mean, the way I think about the strategy is I think about it as a triangle, really, along the bottom, we've got the products and services that we offer and we continue to add more products and services. We either buy companies such as silver peak a couple of years ago, or we build, uh, additional products and by, and by the way, that's in response to customers who are frustrated with some other suppliers and wanna move on mass over to, uh, companies like ourselves. So at the bottom layer of the product and services, and then the other side of the triangle one would be NAS, which we talked about, which is kind of move to buying network and as a service. And then the other side of the triangle is the platform, which for us is river central, which is part of HP GreenLake. And that's really all about, you know, kind of making it easy for customers to manage networks and Aruba central right now has got about 120,000 live customers on it. It connects to about 2 million devices and it's collecting a lot of data as well. So we anonymously collect data from all of our customers. We've got one and a half billion data points in the platform. And what we do is we let that data kind of look for anomalies and spot problems on the network before they happen for customers. >>So Aruba central predated, uh, uh, GreenLake GreenLake. Yeah. And, and so did you write to GreenLake through GreenLake APIs? How, what was the engineering work to accomplish that? >>Yeah, so really, um, Aruba central is kind of the Genesis of the GreenLake platform. So we took Aruba central and made it more generic okay. To build the GreenLake cloud platform. And you know, what we've done very recently is bring, bring Aruba into that unified infrastructure, along with storage and compute. So the same sign-on applies across all of HP's, um, products, the same way of managing licenses, managing devices. And so it provides us, uh, great foundation going forwards to, um, solve more comprehensively. Our customers automation requires. >>So, so just a quick follow. So Aruba actually was the main spring of GreenLake from the standpoint of okay. Sing, like you said, single sign on a platform that could evolve and become more, more generic. Yes. So, okay. So that was a nice little, um, bonus of the acquisition, you know, it's now the whole company >><laugh> Aruba taking over. >>Yeah. There's been a lot of work to, to, uh, you know, make it generic and, and widely applicable. Right. Yeah. Um, so, but >>You were purpose >>Built for yeah. Well it's foundational. Yes. So foundational for GreenLake, they built on top of it. Yeah. So you mentioned the data points, billions of data points. So I gotta ask you, cuz we're seeing this, um, copy more and more with machine learning, driving a lot of acceleration, cuz you can do simulations with machine learning and compute. We had Neil McDonal done earlier. He's a compute guy, you got networking. So with all this, um, these services and devices being put on and off the network humans, can't actually figure this out. You can discover what's on the network. How are you guys viewing the discovery and monitoring because there's no perimeter okay. On the network anymore. So I want to know what's out there. Um, how do you get through it? How does machine learning and AI play into this? >>Yeah. I mean, what we are trying to do is obviously flag trends for customers and say, Hey look, you know, we can either see something happening with your network. So there's a particular issue over here and we need to, I dunno, free up more capacity to solve that. Or we're looking at how their network is running and then comparing that with anonymized data from all of our other customers as well. So we're just helping find those problems. But yeah, you're right. I mean, I think it is becoming more of an issue for organizations, you know, how do you manage the network, >>But you see machine learning and AI playing a big part. >>Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think, uh, AI massively and, and other technology advances as well that we make. So recently we, uh, also announced the availability of location awareness within our access points. And that might sound like a simple thing. But when network, when companies build out their networks, they often lose or they potentially could lose the records as to, well, where were the access points that we laid out and actually where are they not within, you know, 20 feet, but where actually are they? So we introduced kind of location, finding technology as well into our, uh, access points to make it easy for >>Customers. So Aruba one of the best, if not the best acquisition. I think that HP E has made, um, it's made by three par was, you know, good. It saved the storage business. Okay. That was more of a defensive play. Uh, but to see Aruba, it's a growth business. You guys report on it every quarter. Yeah. It's obviously a key ingredient to enable uh, uh, GreenLake and, and a that's another example, nimble was similar. We're much smaller sort of more narrow, but taking the AI ops piece and bringing it over. So it's, it was great to see HPE executing on some of its M and a as opposed to just leaving them alone and not really leveraging 'em. So guys, yeah. Congratulations really appreciate you guys coming on and explaining that. Congratulations on all the, all the great work and thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. >>Thank you guys. Yeah. Thanks for having us. >>All right, John, and I'll be back right after this short break. You're watching the cube, the leader in enterprise tech coverage from HPE Las Vegas, 2022. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> The ascendancy of cloud and SAS has shown new light on how organizations think about, pay for, and value hardware. Once sought after skills for practitioners with expertise in hardware troubleshooting, configuring ports, tuning storage arrays, and maximizing server utilization has been superseded by demand for cloud architects, DevOps pros, developers with expertise in microservices, container, application development, and like. Even a company like Dell, the largest hardware company in enterprise tech touts that it has more software engineers than those working in hardware. Begs the question, is hardware going the way of Coball? Well, not likely. Software has to run on something, but the labor needed to deploy, and troubleshoot, and manage hardware infrastructure is shifting. At the same time, we've seen the value flow also shifting in hardware. Once a world dominated by X86 processors value is flowing to alternatives like Nvidia and arm based designs. Moreover, other componentry like NICs, accelerators, and storage controllers are becoming more advanced, integrated, and increasingly important. The question is, does it matter? And if so, why does it matter and to whom? What does it mean to customers, workloads, OEMs, and the broader society? Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we've organized a special power panel of industry analysts and experts to address the question, does hardware still matter? Allow me to introduce the panel. Bob O'Donnell is president and chief analyst at TECHnalysis Research. Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research. David Nicholson is a CTO and tech expert. Keith Townson is CEO and founder of CTO Advisor. And Marc Staimer is the chief dragon slayer at Dragon Slayer Consulting and oftentimes a Wikibon contributor. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for spending some time here. >> Good to be here. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay before we get into it, I just want to bring up some data from ETR. This is a survey that ETR does every quarter. It's a survey of about 1200 to 1500 CIOs and IT buyers and I'm showing a subset of the taxonomy here. This XY axis and the vertical axis is something called net score. That's a measure of spending momentum. It's essentially the percentage of customers that are spending more on a particular area than those spending less. You subtract the lesses from the mores and you get a net score. Anything the horizontal axis is pervasion in the data set. Sometimes they call it market share. It's not like IDC market share. It's just the percentage of activity in the data set as a percentage of the total. That red 40% line, anything over that is considered highly elevated. And for the past, I don't know, eight to 12 quarters, the big four have been AI and machine learning, containers, RPA and cloud and cloud of course is very impressive because not only is it elevated in the vertical access, but you know it's very highly pervasive on the horizontal. So what I've done is highlighted in red that historical hardware sector. The server, the storage, the networking, and even PCs despite the work from home are depressed in relative terms. And of course, data center collocation services. Okay so you're seeing obviously hardware is not... People don't have the spending momentum today that they used to. They've got other priorities, et cetera, but I want to start and go kind of around the horn with each of you, what is the number one trend that each of you sees in hardware and why does it matter? Bob O'Donnell, can you please start us off? >> Sure Dave, so look, I mean, hardware is incredibly important and one comment first I'll make on that slide is let's not forget that hardware, even though it may not be growing, the amount of money spent on hardware continues to be very, very high. It's just a little bit more stable. It's not as subject to big jumps as we see certainly in other software areas. But look, the important thing that's happening in hardware is the diversification of the types of chip architectures we're seeing and how and where they're being deployed, right? You refer to this in your opening. We've moved from a world of x86 CPUs from Intel and AMD to things like obviously GPUs, DPUs. We've got VPU for, you know, computer vision processing. We've got AI-dedicated accelerators, we've got all kinds of other network acceleration tools and AI-powered tools. There's an incredible diversification of these chip architectures and that's been happening for a while but now we're seeing them more widely deployed and it's being done that way because workloads are evolving. The kinds of workloads that we're seeing in some of these software areas require different types of compute engines than traditionally we've had. The other thing is (coughs), excuse me, the power requirements based on where geographically that compute happens is also evolving. This whole notion of the edge, which I'm sure we'll get into a little bit more detail later is driven by the fact that where the compute actually sits closer to in theory the edge and where edge devices are, depending on your definition, changes the power requirements. It changes the kind of connectivity that connects the applications to those edge devices and those applications. So all of those things are being impacted by this growing diversity in chip architectures. And that's a very long-term trend that I think we're going to continue to see play out through this decade and well into the 2030s as well. >> Excellent, great, great points. Thank you, Bob. Zeus up next, please. >> Yeah, and I think the other thing when you look at this chart to remember too is, you know, through the pandemic and the work from home period a lot of companies did put their office modernization projects on hold and you heard that echoed, you know, from really all the network manufacturers anyways. They always had projects underway to upgrade networks. They put 'em on hold. Now that people are starting to come back to the office, they're looking at that now. So we might see some change there, but Bob's right. The size of those market are quite a bit different. I think the other big trend here is the hardware companies, at least in the areas that I look at networking are understanding now that it's a combination of hardware and software and silicon that works together that creates that optimum type of performance and experience, right? So some things are best done in silicon. Some like data forwarding and things like that. Historically when you look at the way network devices were built, you did everything in hardware. You configured in hardware, they did all the data for you, and did all the management. And that's been decoupled now. So more and more of the control element has been placed in software. A lot of the high-performance things, encryption, and as I mentioned, data forwarding, packet analysis, stuff like that is still done in hardware, but not everything is done in hardware. And so it's a combination of the two. I think, for the people that work with the equipment as well, there's been more shift to understanding how to work with software. And this is a mistake I think the industry made for a while is we had everybody convinced they had to become a programmer. It's really more a software power user. Can you pull things out of software? Can you through API calls and things like that. But I think the big frame here is, David, it's a combination of hardware, software working together that really make a difference. And you know how much you invest in hardware versus software kind of depends on the performance requirements you have. And I'll talk about that later but that's really the big shift that's happened here. It's the vendors that figured out how to optimize performance by leveraging the best of all of those. >> Excellent. You guys both brought up some really good themes that we can tap into Dave Nicholson, please. >> Yeah, so just kind of picking up where Bob started off. Not only are we seeing the rise of a variety of CPU designs, but I think increasingly the connectivity that's involved from a hardware perspective, from a kind of a server or service design perspective has become increasingly important. I think we'll get a chance to look at this in more depth a little bit later but when you look at what happens on the motherboard, you know we're not in so much a CPU-centric world anymore. Various application environments have various demands and you can meet them by using a variety of components. And it's extremely significant when you start looking down at the component level. It's really important that you optimize around those components. So I guess my summary would be, I think we are moving out of the CPU-centric hardware model into more of a connectivity-centric model. We can talk more about that later. >> Yeah, great. And thank you, David, and Keith Townsend I really interested in your perspectives on this. I mean, for years you worked in a data center surrounded by hardware. Now that we have the software defined data center, please chime in here. >> Well, you know, I'm going to dig deeper into that software-defined data center nature of what's happening with hardware. Hardware is meeting software infrastructure as code is a thing. What does that code look like? We're still trying to figure out but servicing up these capabilities that the previous analysts have brought up, how do I ensure that I can get the level of services needed for the applications that I need? Whether they're legacy, traditional data center, workloads, AI ML, workloads, workloads at the edge. How do I codify that and consume that as a service? And hardware vendors are figuring this out. HPE, the big push into GreenLake as a service. Dale now with Apex taking what we need, these bare bone components, moving it forward with DDR five, six CXL, et cetera, and surfacing that as cold or as services. This is a very tough problem. As we transition from consuming a hardware-based configuration to this infrastructure as cold paradigm shift. >> Yeah, programmable infrastructure, really attacking that sort of labor discussion that we were having earlier, okay. Last but not least Marc Staimer, please. >> Thanks, Dave. My peers raised really good points. I agree with most of them, but I'm going to disagree with the title of this session, which is, does hardware matter? It absolutely matters. You can't run software on the air. You can't run it in an ephemeral cloud, although there's the technical cloud and that's a different issue. The cloud is kind of changed everything. And from a market perspective in the 40 plus years I've been in this business, I've seen this perception that hardware has to go down in price every year. And part of that was driven by Moore's law. And we're coming to, let's say a lag or an end, depending on who you talk to Moore's law. So we're not doubling our transistors every 18 to 24 months in a chip and as a result of that, there's been a higher emphasis on software. From a market perception, there's no penalty. They don't put the same pressure on software from the market to reduce the cost every year that they do on hardware, which kind of bass ackwards when you think about it. Hardware costs are fixed. Software costs tend to be very low. It's kind of a weird thing that we do in the market. And what's changing is we're now starting to treat hardware like software from an OPEX versus CapEx perspective. So yes, hardware matters. And we'll talk about that more in length. >> You know, I want to follow up on that. And I wonder if you guys have a thought on this, Bob O'Donnell, you and I have talked about this a little bit. Marc, you just pointed out that Moore's laws could have waning. Pat Gelsinger recently at their investor meeting said that he promised that Moore's law is alive and well. And the point I made in breaking analysis was okay, great. You know, Pat said, doubling transistors every 18 to 24 months, let's say that Intel can do that. Even though we know it's waning somewhat. Look at the M1 Ultra from Apple (chuckles). In about 15 months increased transistor density on their package by 6X. So to your earlier point, Bob, we have this sort of these alternative processors that are really changing things. And to Dave Nicholson's point, there's a whole lot of supporting components as well. Do you have a comment on that, Bob? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a great point, Dave. And one thing to bear in mind as well, not only are we seeing a diversity of these different chip architectures and different types of components as a number of us have raised the other big point and I think it was Keith that mentioned it. CXL and interconnect on the chip itself is dramatically changing it. And a lot of the more interesting advances that are going to continue to drive Moore's law forward in terms of the way we think about performance, if perhaps not number of transistors per se, is the interconnects that become available. You're seeing the development of chiplets or tiles, people use different names, but the idea is you can have different components being put together eventually in sort of a Lego block style. And what that's also going to allow, not only is that going to give interesting performance possibilities 'cause of the faster interconnect. So you can share, have shared memory between things which for big workloads like AI, huge data sets can make a huge difference in terms of how you talk to memory over a network connection, for example, but not only that you're going to see more diversity in the types of solutions that can be built. So we're going to see even more choices in hardware from a silicon perspective because you'll be able to piece together different elements. And oh, by the way, the other benefit of that is we've reached a point in chip architectures where not everything benefits from being smaller. We've been so focused and so obsessed when it comes to Moore's law, to the size of each individual transistor and yes, for certain architecture types, CPUs and GPUs in particular, that's absolutely true, but we've already hit the point where things like RF for 5g and wifi and other wireless technologies and a whole bunch of other things actually don't get any better with a smaller transistor size. They actually get worse. So the beauty of these chiplet architectures is you could actually combine different chip manufacturing sizes. You know you hear about four nanometer and five nanometer along with 14 nanometer on a single chip, each one optimized for its specific application yet together, they can give you the best of all worlds. And so we're just at the very beginning of that era, which I think is going to drive a ton of innovation. Again, gets back to my comment about different types of devices located geographically different places at the edge, in the data center, you know, in a private cloud versus a public cloud. All of those things are going to be impacted and there'll be a lot more options because of this silicon diversity and this interconnect diversity that we're just starting to see. >> Yeah, David. David Nicholson's got a graphic on that. They're going to show later. Before we do that, I want to introduce some data. I actually want to ask Keith to comment on this before we, you know, go on. This next slide is some data from ETR that shows the percent of customers that cited difficulty procuring hardware. And you can see the red is they had significant issues and it's most pronounced in laptops and networking hardware on the far right-hand side, but virtually all categories, firewalls, peripheral servers, storage are having moderately difficult procurement issues. That's the sort of pinkish or significant challenges. So Keith, I mean, what are you seeing with your customers in the hardware supply chains and bottlenecks? And you know we're seeing it with automobiles and appliances but so it goes beyond IT. The semiconductor, you know, challenges. What's been the impact on the buyer community and society and do you have any sense as to when it will subside? >> You know, I was just asked this question yesterday and I'm feeling the pain. People question, kind of a side project within the CTO advisor, we built a hybrid infrastructure, traditional IT data center that we're walking with the traditional customer and modernizing that data center. So it was, you know, kind of a snapshot of time in 2016, 2017, 10 gigabit, ARISTA switches, some older Dell's 730 XD switches, you know, speeds and feeds. And we said we would modern that with the latest Intel stack and connected to the public cloud and then the pandemic hit and we are experiencing a lot of the same challenges. I thought we'd easily migrate from 10 gig networking to 25 gig networking path that customers are going on. The 10 gig network switches that I bought used are now double the price because you can't get legacy 10 gig network switches because all of the manufacturers are focusing on the more profitable 25 gig for capacity, even the 25 gig switches. And we're focused on networking right now. It's hard to procure. We're talking about nine to 12 months or more lead time. So we're seeing customers adjust by adopting cloud. But if you remember early on in the pandemic, Microsoft Azure kind of gated customers that didn't have a capacity agreement. So customers are keeping an eye on that. There's a desire to abstract away from the underlying vendor to be able to control or provision your IT services in a way that we do with VMware VP or some other virtualization technology where it doesn't matter who can get me the hardware, they can just get me the hardware because it's critically impacting projects and timelines. >> So that's a great setup Zeus for you with Keith mentioned the earlier the software-defined data center with software-defined networking and cloud. Do you see a day where networking hardware is monetized and it's all about the software, or are we there already? >> No, we're not there already. And I don't see that really happening any time in the near future. I do think it's changed though. And just to be clear, I mean, when you look at that data, this is saying customers have had problems procuring the equipment, right? And there's not a network vendor out there. I've talked to Norman Rice at Extreme, and I've talked to the folks at Cisco and ARISTA about this. They all said they could have had blowout quarters had they had the inventory to ship. So it's not like customers aren't buying this anymore. Right? I do think though, when it comes to networking network has certainly changed some because there's a lot more controls as I mentioned before that you can do in software. And I think the customers need to start thinking about the types of hardware they buy and you know, where they're going to use it and, you know, what its purpose is. Because I've talked to customers that have tried to run software and commodity hardware and where the performance requirements are very high and it's bogged down, right? It just doesn't have the horsepower to run it. And, you know, even when you do that, you have to start thinking of the components you use. The NICs you buy. And I've talked to customers that have simply just gone through the process replacing a NIC card and a commodity box and had some performance problems and, you know, things like that. So if agility is more important than performance, then by all means try running software on commodity hardware. I think that works in some cases. If performance though is more important, that's when you need that kind of turnkey hardware system. And I've actually seen more and more customers reverting back to that model. In fact, when you talk to even some startups I think today about when they come to market, they're delivering things more on appliances because that's what customers want. And so there's this kind of app pivot this pendulum of agility and performance. And if performance absolutely matters, that's when you do need to buy these kind of turnkey, prebuilt hardware systems. If agility matters more, that's when you can go more to software, but the underlying hardware still does matter. So I think, you know, will we ever have a day where you can just run it on whatever hardware? Maybe but I'll long be retired by that point. So I don't care. >> Well, you bring up a good point Zeus. And I remember the early days of cloud, the narrative was, oh, the cloud vendors. They don't use EMC storage, they just run on commodity storage. And then of course, low and behold, you know, they've trot out James Hamilton to talk about all the custom hardware that they were building. And you saw Google and Microsoft follow suit. >> Well, (indistinct) been falling for this forever. Right? And I mean, all the way back to the turn of the century, we were calling for the commodity of hardware. And it's never really happened because you can still drive. As long as you can drive innovation into it, customers will always lean towards the innovation cycles 'cause they get more features faster and things. And so the vendors have done a good job of keeping that cycle up but it'll be a long time before. >> Yeah, and that's why you see companies like Pure Storage. A storage company has 69% gross margins. All right. I want to go jump ahead. We're going to bring up the slide four. I want to go back to something that Bob O'Donnell was talking about, the sort of supporting act. The diversity of silicon and we've marched to the cadence of Moore's law for decades. You know, we asked, you know, is Moore's law dead? We say it's moderating. Dave Nicholson. You want to talk about those supporting components. And you shared with us a slide that shift. You call it a shift from a processor-centric world to a connect-centric world. What do you mean by that? And let's bring up slide four and you can talk to that. >> Yeah, yeah. So first, I want to echo this sentiment that the question does hardware matter is sort of the answer is of course it matters. Maybe the real question should be, should you care about it? And the answer to that is it depends who you are. If you're an end user using an application on your mobile device, maybe you don't care how the architecture is put together. You just care that the service is delivered but as you back away from that and you get closer and closer to the source, someone needs to care about the hardware and it should matter. Why? Because essentially what hardware is doing is it's consuming electricity and dollars and the more efficiently you can configure hardware, the more bang you're going to get for your buck. So it's not only a quantitative question in terms of how much can you deliver? But it also ends up being a qualitative change as capabilities allow for things we couldn't do before, because we just didn't have the aggregate horsepower to do it. So this chart actually comes out of some performance tests that were done. So it happens to be Dell servers with Broadcom components. And the point here was to peel back, you know, peel off the top of the server and look at what's in that server, starting with, you know, the PCI interconnect. So PCIE gen three, gen four, moving forward. What are the effects on from an interconnect versus on performance application performance, translating into new orders per minute, processed per dollar, et cetera, et cetera? If you look at the advances in CPU architecture mapped against the advances in interconnect and storage subsystem performance, you can see that CPU architecture is sort of lagging behind in a way. And Bob mentioned this idea of tiling and all of the different ways to get around that. When we do performance testing, we can actually peg CPUs, just running the performance tests without any actual database environments working. So right now we're at this sort of imbalance point where you have to make sure you design things properly to get the most bang per kilowatt hour of power per dollar input. So the key thing here what this is highlighting is just as a very specific example, you take a card that's designed as a gen three PCIE device, and you plug it into a gen four slot. Now the card is the bottleneck. You plug a gen four card into a gen four slot. Now the gen four slot is the bottleneck. So we're constantly chasing these bottlenecks. Someone has to be focused on that from an architectural perspective, it's critically important. So there's no question that it matters. But of course, various people in this food chain won't care where it comes from. I guess a good analogy might be, where does our food come from? If I get a steak, it's a pink thing wrapped in plastic, right? Well, there are a lot of inputs that a lot of people have to care about to get that to me. Do I care about all of those things? No. Are they important? They're critically important. >> So, okay. So all I want to get to the, okay. So what does this all mean to customers? And so what I'm hearing from you is to balance a system it's becoming, you know, more complicated. And I kind of been waiting for this day for a long time, because as we all know the bottleneck was always the spinning disc, the last mechanical. So people who wrote software knew that when they were doing it right, the disc had to go and do stuff. And so they were doing other things in the software. And now with all these new interconnects and flash and things like you could do atomic rights. And so that opens up new software possibilities and combine that with alternative processes. But what's the so what on this to the customer and the application impact? Can anybody address that? >> Yeah, let me address that for a moment. I want to leverage some of the things that Bob said, Keith said, Zeus said, and David said, yeah. So I'm a bit of a contrarian in some of this. For example, on the chip side. As the chips get smaller, 14 nanometer, 10 nanometer, five nanometer, soon three nanometer, we talk about more cores, but the biggest problem on the chip is the interconnect from the chip 'cause the wires get smaller. People don't realize in 2004 the latency on those wires in the chips was 80 picoseconds. Today it's 1300 picoseconds. That's on the chip. This is why they're not getting faster. So we maybe getting a little bit slowing down in Moore's law. But even as we kind of conquer that you still have the interconnect problem and the interconnect problem goes beyond the chip. It goes within the system, composable architectures. It goes to the point where Keith made, ultimately you need a hybrid because what we're seeing, what I'm seeing and I'm talking to customers, the biggest issue they have is moving data. Whether it be in a chip, in a system, in a data center, between data centers, moving data is now the biggest gating item in performance. So if you want to move it from, let's say your transactional database to your machine learning, it's the bottleneck, it's moving the data. And so when you look at it from a distributed environment, now you've got to move the compute to the data. The only way to get around these bottlenecks today is to spend less time in trying to move the data and more time in taking the compute, the software, running on hardware closer to the data. Go ahead. >> So is this what you mean when Nicholson was talking about a shift from a processor centric world to a connectivity centric world? You're talking about moving the bits across all the different components, not having the processor you're saying is essentially becoming the bottleneck or the memory, I guess. >> Well, that's one of them and there's a lot of different bottlenecks, but it's the data movement itself. It's moving away from, wait, why do we need to move the data? Can we move the compute, the processing closer to the data? Because if we keep them separate and this has been a trend now where people are moving processing away from it. It's like the edge. I think it was Zeus or David. You were talking about the edge earlier. As you look at the edge, who defines the edge, right? Is the edge a closet or is it a sensor? If it's a sensor, how do you do AI at the edge? When you don't have enough power, you don't have enough computable. People were inventing chips to do that. To do all that at the edge, to do AI within the sensor, instead of moving the data to a data center or a cloud to do the processing. Because the lag in latency is always limited by speed of light. How fast can you move the electrons? And all this interconnecting, all the processing, and all the improvement we're seeing in the PCIE bus from three, to four, to five, to CXL, to a higher bandwidth on the network. And that's all great but none of that deals with the speed of light latency. And that's an-- Go ahead. >> You know Marc, no, I just want to just because what you're referring to could be looked at at a macro level, which I think is what you're describing. You can also look at it at a more micro level from a systems design perspective, right? I'm going to be the resident knuckle dragging hardware guy on the panel today. But it's exactly right. You moving compute closer to data includes concepts like peripheral cards that have built in intelligence, right? So again, in some of this testing that I'm referring to, we saw dramatic improvements when you basically took the horsepower instead of using the CPU horsepower for the like IO. Now you have essentially offload engines in the form of storage controllers, rate controllers, of course, for ethernet NICs, smart NICs. And so when you can have these sort of offload engines and we've gone through these waves over time. People think, well, wait a minute, raid controller and NVMe? You know, flash storage devices. Does that make sense? It turns out it does. Why? Because you're actually at a micro level doing exactly what you're referring to. You're bringing compute closer to the data. Now, closer to the data meaning closer to the data storage subsystem. It doesn't solve the macro issue that you're referring to but it is important. Again, going back to this idea of system design optimization, always chasing the bottleneck, plugging the holes. Someone needs to do that in this value chain in order to get the best value for every kilowatt hour of power and every dollar. >> Yeah. >> Well this whole drive performance has created some really interesting architectural designs, right? Like Nickelson, the rise of the DPU right? Brings more processing power into systems that already had a lot of processing power. There's also been some really interesting, you know, kind of innovation in the area of systems architecture too. If you look at the way Nvidia goes to market, their drive kit is a prebuilt piece of hardware, you know, optimized for self-driving cars, right? They partnered with Pure Storage and ARISTA to build that AI-ready infrastructure. I remember when I talked to Charlie Giancarlo, the CEO of Pure about when the three companies rolled that out. He said, "Look, if you're going to do AI, "you need good store. "You need fast storage, fast processor and fast network." And so for customers to be able to put that together themselves was very, very difficult. There's a lot of software that needs tuning as well. So the three companies partner together to create a fully integrated turnkey hardware system with a bunch of optimized software that runs on it. And so in that case, in some ways the hardware was leading the software innovation. And so, the variety of different architectures we have today around hardware has really exploded. And I think it, part of the what Bob brought up at the beginning about the different chip design. >> Yeah, Bob talked about that earlier. Bob, I mean, most AI today is modeling, you know, and a lot of that's done in the cloud and it looks from my standpoint anyway that the future is going to be a lot of AI inferencing at the edge. And that's a radically different architecture, Bob, isn't it? >> It is, it's a completely different architecture. And just to follow up on a couple points, excellent conversation guys. Dave talked about system architecture and really this that's what this boils down to, right? But it's looking at architecture at every level. I was talking about the individual different components the new interconnect methods. There's this new thing called UCIE universal connection. I forget what it stands answer for, but it's a mechanism for doing chiplet architectures, but then again, you have to take it up to the system level, 'cause it's all fine and good. If you have this SOC that's tuned and optimized, but it has to talk to the rest of the system. And that's where you see other issues. And you've seen things like CXL and other interconnect standards, you know, and nobody likes to talk about interconnect 'cause it's really wonky and really technical and not that sexy, but at the end of the day it's incredibly important exactly. To the other points that were being raised like mark raised, for example, about getting that compute closer to where the data is and that's where again, a diversity of chip architectures help and exactly to your last comment there Dave, putting that ability in an edge device is really at the cutting edge of what we're seeing on a semiconductor design and the ability to, for example, maybe it's an FPGA, maybe it's a dedicated AI chip. It's another kind of chip architecture that's being created to do that inferencing on the edge. Because again, it's that the cost and the challenges of moving lots of data, whether it be from say a smartphone to a cloud-based application or whether it be from a private network to a cloud or any other kinds of permutations we can think of really matters. And the other thing is we're tackling bigger problems. So architecturally, not even just architecturally within a system, but when we think about DPUs and the sort of the east west data center movement conversation that we hear Nvidia and others talk about, it's about combining multiple sets of these systems to function together more efficiently again with even bigger sets of data. So really is about tackling where the processing is needed, having the interconnect and the ability to get where the data you need to the right place at the right time. And because those needs are diversifying, we're just going to continue to see an explosion of different choices and options, which is going to make hardware even more essential I would argue than it is today. And so I think what we're going to see not only does hardware matter, it's going to matter even more in the future than it does now. >> Great, yeah. Great discussion, guys. I want to bring Keith back into the conversation here. Keith, if your main expertise in tech is provisioning LUNs, you probably you want to look for another job. So maybe clearly hardware matters, but with software defined everything, do people with hardware expertise matter outside of for instance, component manufacturers or cloud companies? I mean, VMware certainly changed the dynamic in servers. Dell just spun off its most profitable asset and VMware. So it obviously thinks hardware can stand alone. How does an enterprise architect view the shift to software defined hyperscale cloud and how do you see the shifting demand for skills in enterprise IT? >> So I love the question and I'll take a different view of it. If you're a data analyst and your primary value add is that you do ETL transformation, talk to a CDO, a chief data officer over midsize bank a little bit ago. He said 80% of his data scientists' time is done on ETL. Super not value ad. He wants his data scientists to do data science work. Chances are if your only value is that you do LUN provisioning, then you probably don't have a job now. The technologies have gotten much more intelligent. As infrastructure pros, we want to give infrastructure pros the opportunities to shine and I think the software defined nature and the automation that we're seeing vendors undertake, whether it's Dell, HP, Lenovo take your pick that Pure Storage, NetApp that are doing the automation and the ML needed so that these practitioners don't spend 80% of their time doing LUN provisioning and focusing on their true expertise, which is ensuring that data is stored. Data is retrievable, data's protected, et cetera. I think the shift is to focus on that part of the job that you're ensuring no matter where the data's at, because as my data is spread across the enterprise hybrid different types, you know, Dave, you talk about the super cloud a lot. If my data is in the super cloud, protecting that data and securing that data becomes much more complicated when than when it was me just procuring or provisioning LUNs. So when you say, where should the shift be, or look be, you know, focusing on the real value, which is making sure that customers can access data, can recover data, can get data at performance levels that they need within the price point. They need to get at those datasets and where they need it. We talked a lot about where they need out. One last point about this interconnecting. I have this vision and I think we all do of composable infrastructure. This idea that scaled out does not solve every problem. The cloud can give me infinite scale out. Sometimes I just need a single OS with 64 terabytes of RAM and 204 GPUs or GPU instances that single OS does not exist today. And the opportunity is to create composable infrastructure so that we solve a lot of these problems that just simply don't scale out. >> You know, wow. So many interesting points there. I had just interviewed Zhamak Dehghani, who's the founder of Data Mesh last week. And she made a really interesting point. She said, "Think about, we have separate stacks. "We have an application stack and we have "a data pipeline stack and the transaction systems, "the transaction database, we extract data from that," to your point, "We ETL it in, you know, it takes forever. "And then we have this separate sort of data stack." If we're going to inject more intelligence and data and AI into applications, those two stacks, her contention is they have to come together. And when you think about, you know, super cloud bringing compute to data, that was what Haduck was supposed to be. It ended up all sort of going into a central location, but it's almost a rhetorical question. I mean, it seems that that necessitates new thinking around hardware architectures as it kind of everything's the edge. And the other point is to your point, Keith, it's really hard to secure that. So when you can think about offloads, right, you've heard the stats, you know, Nvidia talks about it. Broadcom talks about it that, you know, that 30%, 25 to 30% of the CPU cycles are wasted on doing things like storage offloads, or networking or security. It seems like maybe Zeus you have a comment on this. It seems like new architectures need to come other to support, you know, all of that stuff that Keith and I just dispute. >> Yeah, and by the way, I do want to Keith, the question you just asked. Keith, it's the point I made at the beginning too about engineers do need to be more software-centric, right? They do need to have better software skills. In fact, I remember talking to Cisco about this last year when they surveyed their engineer base, only about a third of 'em had ever made an API call, which you know that that kind of shows this big skillset change, you know, that has to come. But on the point of architectures, I think the big change here is edge because it brings in distributed compute models. Historically, when you think about compute, even with multi-cloud, we never really had multi-cloud. We'd use multiple centralized clouds, but compute was always centralized, right? It was in a branch office, in a data center, in a cloud. With edge what we creates is the rise of distributed computing where we'll have an application that actually accesses different resources and at different edge locations. And I think Marc, you were talking about this, like the edge could be in your IoT device. It could be your campus edge. It could be cellular edge, it could be your car, right? And so we need to start thinkin' about how our applications interact with all those different parts of that edge ecosystem, you know, to create a single experience. The consumer apps, a lot of consumer apps largely works that way. If you think of like app like Uber, right? It pulls in information from all kinds of different edge application, edge services. And, you know, it creates pretty cool experience. We're just starting to get to that point in the business world now. There's a lot of security implications and things like that, but I do think it drives more architectural decisions to be made about how I deploy what data where and where I do my processing, where I do my AI and things like that. It actually makes the world more complicated. In some ways we can do so much more with it, but I think it does drive us more towards turnkey systems, at least initially in order to, you know, ensure performance and security. >> Right. Marc, I wanted to go to you. You had indicated to me that you wanted to chat about this a little bit. You've written quite a bit about the integration of hardware and software. You know, we've watched Oracle's move from, you know, buying Sun and then basically using that in a highly differentiated approach. Engineered systems. What's your take on all that? I know you also have some thoughts on the shift from CapEx to OPEX chime in on that. >> Sure. When you look at it, there are advantages to having one vendor who has the software and hardware. They can synergistically make them work together that you can't do in a commodity basis. If you own the software and somebody else has the hardware, I'll give you an example would be Oracle. As you talked about with their exit data platform, they literally are leveraging microcode in the Intel chips. And now in AMD chips and all the way down to Optane, they make basically AMD database servers work with Optane memory PMM in their storage systems, not MVME, SSD PMM. I'm talking about the cards itself. So there are advantages you can take advantage of if you own the stack, as you were putting out earlier, Dave, of both the software and the hardware. Okay, that's great. But on the other side of that, that tends to give you better performance, but it tends to cost a little more. On the commodity side it costs less but you get less performance. What Zeus had said earlier, it depends where you're running your application. How much performance do you need? What kind of performance do you need? One of the things about moving to the edge and I'll get to the OPEX CapEx in a second. One of the issues about moving to the edge is what kind of processing do you need? If you're running in a CCTV camera on top of a traffic light, how much power do you have? How much cooling do you have that you can run this? And more importantly, do you have to take the data you're getting and move it somewhere else and get processed and the information is sent back? I mean, there are companies out there like Brain Chip that have developed AI chips that can run on the sensor without a CPU. Without any additional memory. So, I mean, there's innovation going on to deal with this question of data movement. There's companies out there like Tachyon that are combining GPUs, CPUs, and DPUs in a single chip. Think of it as super composable architecture. They're looking at being able to do more in less. On the OPEX and CapEx issue. >> Hold that thought, hold that thought on the OPEX CapEx, 'cause we're running out of time and maybe you can wrap on that. I just wanted to pick up on something you said about the integrated hardware software. I mean, other than the fact that, you know, Michael Dell unlocked whatever $40 billion for himself and Silverlake, I was always a fan of a spin in with VMware basically become the Oracle of hardware. Now I know it would've been a nightmare for the ecosystem and culturally, they probably would've had a VMware brain drain, but what does anybody have any thoughts on that as a sort of a thought exercise? I was always a fan of that on paper. >> I got to eat a little crow. I did not like the Dale VMware acquisition for the industry in general. And I think it hurt the industry in general, HPE, Cisco walked away a little bit from that VMware relationship. But when I talked to customers, they loved it. You know, I got to be honest. They absolutely loved the integration. The VxRail, VxRack solution exploded. Nutanix became kind of a afterthought when it came to competing. So that spin in, when we talk about the ability to innovate and the ability to create solutions that you just simply can't create because you don't have the full stack. Dell was well positioned to do that with a potential span in of VMware. >> Yeah, we're going to be-- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, in fact, I think you're right, Keith, it was terrible for the industry. Great for Dell. And I remember talking to Chad Sakac when he was running, you know, VCE, which became Rack and Rail, their ability to stay in lockstep with what VMware was doing. What was the number one workload running on hyperconverged forever? It was VMware. So their ability to remain in lockstep with VMware gave them a huge competitive advantage. And Dell came out of nowhere in, you know, the hyper-converged market and just started taking share because of that relationship. So, you know, this sort I guess it's, you know, from a Dell perspective I thought it gave them a pretty big advantage that they didn't really exploit across their other properties, right? Networking and service and things like they could have given the dominance that VMware had. From an industry perspective though, I do think it's better to have them be coupled. So. >> I agree. I mean, they could. I think they could have dominated in super cloud and maybe they would become the next Oracle where everybody hates 'em, but they kick ass. But guys. We got to wrap up here. And so what I'm going to ask you is I'm going to go and reverse the order this time, you know, big takeaways from this conversation today, which guys by the way, I can't thank you enough phenomenal insights, but big takeaways, any final thoughts, any research that you're working on that you want highlight or you know, what you look for in the future? Try to keep it brief. We'll go in reverse order. Maybe Marc, you could start us off please. >> Sure, on the research front, I'm working on a total cost of ownership of an integrated database analytics machine learning versus separate services. On the other aspect that I would wanted to chat about real quickly, OPEX versus CapEx, the cloud changed the market perception of hardware in the sense that you can use hardware or buy hardware like you do software. As you use it, pay for what you use in arrears. The good thing about that is you're only paying for what you use, period. You're not for what you don't use. I mean, it's compute time, everything else. The bad side about that is you have no predictability in your bill. It's elastic, but every user I've talked to says every month it's different. And from a budgeting perspective, it's very hard to set up your budget year to year and it's causing a lot of nightmares. So it's just something to be aware of. From a CapEx perspective, you have no more CapEx if you're using that kind of base system but you lose a certain amount of control as well. So ultimately that's some of the issues. But my biggest point, my biggest takeaway from this is the biggest issue right now that everybody I talk to in some shape or form it comes down to data movement whether it be ETLs that you talked about Keith or other aspects moving it between hybrid locations, moving it within a system, moving it within a chip. All those are key issues. >> Great, thank you. Okay, CTO advisor, give us your final thoughts. >> All right. Really, really great commentary. Again, I'm going to point back to us taking the walk that our customers are taking, which is trying to do this conversion of all primary data center to a hybrid of which I have this hard earned philosophy that enterprise IT is additive. When we add a service, we rarely subtract a service. So the landscape and service area what we support has to grow. So our research focuses on taking that walk. We are taking a monolithic application, decomposing that to containers, and putting that in a public cloud, and connecting that back private data center and telling that story and walking that walk with our customers. This has been a super enlightening panel. >> Yeah, thank you. Real, real different world coming. David Nicholson, please. >> You know, it really hearkens back to the beginning of the conversation. You talked about momentum in the direction of cloud. I'm sort of spending my time under the hood, getting grease under my fingernails, focusing on where still the lions share of spend will be in coming years, which is OnPrem. And then of course, obviously data center infrastructure for cloud but really diving under the covers and helping folks understand the ramifications of movement between generations of CPU architecture. I know we all know Sapphire Rapids pushed into the future. When's the next Intel release coming? Who knows? We think, you know, in 2023. There have been a lot of people standing by from a practitioner's standpoint asking, well, what do I do between now and then? Does it make sense to upgrade bits and pieces of hardware or go from a last generation to a current generation when we know the next generation is coming? And so I've been very, very focused on looking at how these connectivity components like rate controllers and NICs. I know it's not as sexy as talking about cloud but just how these opponents completely change the game and actually can justify movement from say a 14th-generation architecture to a 15th-generation architecture today, even though gen 16 is coming, let's say 12 months from now. So that's where I am. Keep my phone number in the Rolodex. I literally reference Rolodex intentionally because like I said, I'm in there under the hood and it's not as sexy. But yeah, so that's what I'm focused on Dave. >> Well, you know, to paraphrase it, maybe derivative paraphrase of, you know, Larry Ellison's rant on what is cloud? It's operating systems and databases, et cetera. Rate controllers and NICs live inside of clouds. All right. You know, one of the reasons I love working with you guys is 'cause have such a wide observation space and Zeus Kerravala you, of all people, you know you have your fingers in a lot of pies. So give us your final thoughts. >> Yeah, I'm not a propeller heady as my chip counterparts here. (all laugh) So, you know, I look at the world a little differently and a lot of my research I'm doing now is the impact that distributed computing has on customer employee experiences, right? You talk to every business and how the experiences they deliver to their customers is really differentiating how they go to market. And so they're looking at these different ways of feeding up data and analytics and things like that in different places. And I think this is going to have a really profound impact on enterprise IT architecture. We're putting more data, more compute in more places all the way down to like little micro edges and retailers and things like that. And so we need the variety. Historically, if you think back to when I was in IT you know, pre-Y2K, we didn't have a lot of choice in things, right? We had a server that was rack mount or standup, right? And there wasn't a whole lot of, you know, differences in choice. But today we can deploy, you know, these really high-performance compute systems on little blades inside servers or inside, you know, autonomous vehicles and things. I think the world from here gets... You know, just the choice of what we have and the way hardware and software works together is really going to, I think, change the world the way we do things. We're already seeing that, like I said, in the consumer world, right? There's so many things you can do from, you know, smart home perspective, you know, natural language processing, stuff like that. And it's starting to hit businesses now. So just wait and watch the next five years. >> Yeah, totally. The computing power at the edge is just going to be mind blowing. >> It's unbelievable what you can do at the edge. >> Yeah, yeah. Hey Z, I just want to say that we know you're not a propeller head and I for one would like to thank you for having your master's thesis hanging on the wall behind you 'cause we know that you studied basket weaving. >> I was actually a physics math major, so. >> Good man. Another math major. All right, Bob O'Donnell, you're going to bring us home. I mean, we've seen the importance of semiconductors and silicon in our everyday lives, but your last thoughts please. >> Sure and just to clarify, by the way I was a great books major and this was actually for my final paper. And so I was like philosophy and all that kind of stuff and literature but I still somehow got into tech. Look, it's been a great conversation and I want to pick up a little bit on a comment Zeus made, which is this it's the combination of the hardware and the software and coming together and the manner with which that needs to happen, I think is critically important. And the other thing is because of the diversity of the chip architectures and all those different pieces and elements, it's going to be how software tools evolve to adapt to that new world. So I look at things like what Intel's trying to do with oneAPI. You know, what Nvidia has done with CUDA. What other platform companies are trying to create tools that allow them to leverage the hardware, but also embrace the variety of hardware that is there. And so as those software development environments and software development tools evolve to take advantage of these new capabilities, that's going to open up a lot of interesting opportunities that can leverage all these new chip architectures. That can leverage all these new interconnects. That can leverage all these new system architectures and figure out ways to make that all happen, I think is going to be critically important. And then finally, I'll mention the research I'm actually currently working on is on private 5g and how companies are thinking about deploying private 5g and the potential for edge applications for that. So I'm doing a survey of several hundred us companies as we speak and really looking forward to getting that done in the next couple of weeks. >> Yeah, look forward to that. Guys, again, thank you so much. Outstanding conversation. Anybody going to be at Dell tech world in a couple of weeks? Bob's going to be there. Dave Nicholson. Well drinks on me and guys I really can't thank you enough for the insights and your participation today. Really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching this special power panel episode of theCube Insights powered by ETR. Remember we publish each week on Siliconangle.com and wikibon.com. All these episodes they're available as podcasts. DM me or any of these guys. I'm at DVellante. You can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com. Check out etr.ai for all the data. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And welcome to this CUBE conversation where we welcome an ESG senior analyst, Bob Laliberte Bob, good to see you. >> Great to see you too. Thanks for having me >> Love it, I love to have the analyst sessions. Set it up. What's your scope, what's your area of expertise? >> So my coverage area right now is networking in its entirety. So that spans everything from enterprise networking, wired, wireless, campus, data center, et cetera. All the way up through telco and, in cloud networking. >> So how do you look at the landscape? One of the big things I think about a lot is how does the shift to cloud migration? How does that affect the existing, network layers? I mean, you got Cisco as the big whale and it's just, it's amazing to me. They still have whatever percent market share they have 60, 65% of the market. Are things, what's happening in the competitive landscape. How is cloud affecting that? >> That's a great question. I think the interesting piece is so many times organizations think about the network as plumbing. But the reality is the it's really important plumbing because as you talk about cloud and things get more distributed, well, guess what connects those distributed locations? It's the network. And so organizations as they've moved to the cloud you've seen a big shift with things like SD-WAN and so forth. How do I get more efficient connectivity up to that cloud? How do I not only enable able better connectivity between my data centers in the cloud, but now all my remote workers in the cloud. And so there's been a lot of big shifts going on that have driven the importance of having not only network, but secure networks. So like I said, cloud is one thing, and you're moving your applications there. But with the pandemic you saw the remote work. Think about the network administrators who we're managing, hey, I've got to control network connections between my data centers, a couple clouds and maybe dozens maybe a hundred remote branches. And now I'm connecting to 10,000 micro branches that I need to ensure that they can connect up to these applications and so forth. Hell of a lot more complex environment today than it used to be for these network teams. When we look at the, what we're seeing, how the networking providers are responding it's by driving comprehensive end-to-end solutions. So unifying, wired, wireless, and WAN. Driving efficiencies there. You're seeing even ThousandEyes for Cisco and things like that. Because they know the Internet's becoming more integral part of the corporate network. So being able to drive those types of things being able to, I think look at how to drive those operational efficiencies through AI and ML. So one of the big shifts we've seen in networking is the transition to cloud-based network management. And obviously that couple of things that helps with, first of all, the operations teams who are working remotely can more easily access it. But once all that data is up in the cloud, it creates a platform to be able to invest in AI/ML, and be able to drive intelligent alerting and even automation. And that's really what's needed because as the environments get more distributed and complex, you need to have that those operational efficiencies that automation, that intelligence to help them. >> How has remote work and hybrid work affected sort of network, spending priorities. Obviously when the pandemic hit you had to accommodate end points. And I always have this theory okay, when people come back to the office and I know it's going to be a different world but, the HQ probably needs some love as well. So has that been a tailwind for the industry? >> Absolutely, that's what we're seeing now. I think when the pandemic first hit, everyone said I've got to ramp up my VPNs. I've got to scale out my concentrators. I've got to add more firewalls in my data center. And then after a while, when they realized this was here to stay, they said, okay we just created that hub-and-spoke network that we just got rid of with SD-WAN. So what are the better solutions we can implement? So now you're seeing them not only implement better networking solutions for the remote workers. But reimagining what the campus looks like. Because it's not going to be ever 100% full or maybe it will, but how, for how many times a year will it be 100% full? So you've got to go from 80% cubes and 20% conference and collaboration areas, to 80% collaboration areas and 20% cubes. So we're seeing a lot of transition taking place in the campus environment as organizations are deploying newer technologies like Wi-Fi 6E. That have greater bandwidth to allow for those collaboration apps to run in those collaboration areas. Instead of just having the single wired conference room for video. Everyone's got to be able to run their video, voice and video collaboration apps. >> So how do you look at the landscape now? Again, you can't talk about networking without talking about Cisco. I think they, up there, I saw you and Zeus as talking about out, Cisco's quarter and other networking topics. Their long term guidance is for 60% growth for a company that size that's really outstanding. I mean, Cisco's, really has always been an execution machine of course. And it's a new era now under Chuck. There are more than ankle biters. If you look at Arista's doing pretty well there's guys like Extreme, there's others that are out there but nobody seemed to be able to unseat Cisco. What's happening in the landscape? >> I mean, that's a great question. Cisco's just been around for so long and been so big for so long. And you have to also keep in mind that with Cisco it's not just about the technology, but the fact from a if you think about it from a cultural standpoint these are workers who have been trained on Cisco since, some of them since high school. The educational component that Cisco has done has groomed generations of network technologists. So when they come into the market, they're fully familiar and used to Cisco. Plus they make a really good product and they've got products that cover everything. They cover the whole gambit. So they're still able to maintain their share. They're able to grow. They're able to move. They've made a shift last year. They announced in last spring that they were going to focus more on end-to-end. So instead of just having, hey, here's a point product, here's a point product. Here's a point product. Let's think about it in its entirety. Let's deliver a complete end-to-end solution solve bigger problems for customers, which obviously makes it much harder to remove when you're just trying to remove a piece of that single problem. But the other competitors are also having good years. And I think also the rising tide floats all boats. And so because of this distributed nature, the importance of the network, everyone is doing that. Plus obviously this has to be said, the supply chain issues where people are ordering ahead as well. But organizations, you look at Arista, they've gone from just being a data center company to expanding all the way down to the campus edge, wireless, right there creating an end-to-end environment Extreme did the same thing. They went out and made a lot of acquisitions. They pulled them all together, integrated. They're all moving to this cloud based end-to-end network management. Arista has been on a tear, bringing in a lot of, not only innovative technology, but innovative technologists. So if you look at some of the organizations they bought. I keep calling it Route 128, it's 128 Technologies. So sorry folks I live in Massachusetts. It's always been Route 128. >> You Remember when don't we. 128 Technology's Mist was their big. Mist was their, Mist was kind of like their VMware. VMware to EMC was Mist was to Juniper. And so we call it the Mistification of Juniper where every organization, every company they bring in they're rolling under that and this the AI engine. So they're bringing in 128 Technologies into that. They've got their own, their own stuff under that, their wired switches. So they've got this unified wired and wireless and WAN assurance now that they have. They've been gaining a lot of traction with that. And again, for the things we were talking about because it's far more distributed and complex. You need to have, It's not like people are getting replaced. It's not like, hey, we're leveraging this automation so that we can get rid of network teams. It's because it's getting so much more complex just to have the same number of people manage that more complex environment. We need those intelligence solutions. >> So I want to ask you about network and multi-cloud. And so it's kind of tongue in cheek because we coined this term super cloud. And so what we meant by that, so here's the premise. And I wonder you could give us your perspective. Multi-cloud, I've said many times is I think largely a symptom of multi-vendor I run in this, I run in AWS or, Azure, I've done the work to understand their primitives and or Google, whatever it is. But it's not like an abstraction layer that's floating above all those but now you're starting to see that. In fact, it re:Invent in November. The ecosystem it seemed like was everybody was focused on developing what we call these super clouds. And again, it's tongue in cheek, this abstraction layer it hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs adds incremental value on top of that. So there's a company Prosimo, which Steve Herrod, is invested in and others Praveen Akkiraju, whom I'm sure you know from Viptela. Aviatrix is another company that's sort of, Steve Malaney has come on theCUBE and talked about what they're doing. Like yeah, that's super cloud. It seems like it's something new and different than just multi-cloud which is kind of connecting in to different clouds. It's that value on top. What do you think about that? And what does that mean for networking? >> That's a really good point because we are starting to see the inception of organizations going beyond having multiple cloud providers and looking at starting to deploy applications across multiple clouds. It's still really early. The vast majority of organizations are still, I use this application for this cloud and this application for that cloud. But that's the next frontier. That's what they're trying to solve is how do I create this basically cloud fabric and make it as simple as possible. And again, all the things we've been talking about how do I, instead of you having to learn Amazon, Google, Azure networking technology, learn mine, I'll take care of it, but I'll abstract all that complexity from you and make it so much simpler to be able to connect to these interconnect, and connect to them in a seamless fashion. And so that's what they're really trying to do is they're. And the hard part is it takes really sophisticated solutions to remove that high level of complexity and make it simple for an organization to do that. So yeah, absolutely. >> If I had more time I'd make it shorter as somebody who writes a lot. And I think you're right. I think it is future. It's not definitely not here today, but the other thing is it ties into digital transformation. We used this again, throw that buzzword around but, companies not just tech company, I mean everybody's becoming like a tech company, but organizations, financial services companies, healthcare they're building their own clouds on top of the hyperscalers who spend $100 billion a year on CapEx. And that seems to be a trend that I think is going to take legs over this next decade. Just like in the previous decade everybody was thinking, okay, we're going to SaaSify our business softwares (indistinct) the world. And now it's software and cloud services are the way in which I'm going to create customer experiences. >> Correct, yeah. It's why should I go out and make an investment in technology when the technology's already there? And I can rent it for when I need it scale it as I need it and, and do all of that. I agree with that. I think that's something that we're seeing. The interesting part though is that when we look at our data points, probably let than 40% of the applications and workloads are in the cloud today. So there's still a role that the corporate data center plays. We are seeing over time. They expect that to progress and transition but I think there's still always going to be maybe a quarter of the workloads and applications may never leave. Depending on how they're built, et cetera. So there's always going to be that distributed environment where you've got workloads in the private data centers, workloads in multiple public clouds. And also, the big thing too is don't forget about the edge. We're seeing a lot more edge activity take place as organizations recognize, as they deploy more IOT devices, and want to get realtime business insights they've got to deploy the compute there. >> Well, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about, but going back to what you just said, which is, I agree with you. So that suggests to me, Bob that we're just kind of, with cloud just entering the steep part of the S curve. Amazon's headed toward $100 billion, run rate business. Maybe they probably won't get there this year but they will next year. We're entering that steep growth phase, really could be. It's incredible. But I wanted to ask you about the edge. Because you're right is we got to move compute to the edge, ARM is going to dominate. I would think, the edge. They already are with our smartphones. How do you see the cloud guys participating in the edge? Whether it was Andy Jassy, or now Adam Selipsky or anybody at Amazon. They have the dogma of in the fullness of time all workloads are going to be in the cloud. So they either have to change their definition of cloud. Or they're wrong. So what's your thought on that? >> I think it really starts coming down to what's your definition of edge. And so, much like when the cloud technologies first came about and you had all the shadow IT. Everyone running off, and everyone thought oh this is all great, until you realized you had to operationalize it and you had to pull the brakes. Stop doing that. We're going to make sure IT operations. >> Call the CIO up. Exactly, finding out where stuff was by going through accounting and seeing credit card charges. For the edge what we've seen I think is maybe organizations really saying I've got to deploy my servers in my own site. Right at that edge in order to get the lowest possible latency. And so what I think we're starting to see is organizations looking at that and saying, okay well I'm in a metro and I've got 25 locations in a metro. And I've deployed technology to every single one of those sites. Do I need it there? Or can I put it in an Equinix facility that's less than five milliseconds from all 25 sites? So I think there's starting to be this pragmatic approach of looking at let's look at the edge, let's take a look at what type of latencies. What is our definition of real time. When do we actually need the data and so forth? What kind of connectivity do we have? And then from there figure out how we go about connecting it. And so for companies like AWS and Google and Azure a lot of them there's local zones and things like that. They're deploying them in those colos because they don't have data centers in every metro but they can leverage an Equinix. They can leverage someone else's hardware that's there to deploy their software stack within that location. So I think that's something that we're starting to see more and more of as the edge. And obviously the association with the telcos as well. They've got a great footprint. If you want to get close to the edge with their colos Their home offices and things like that and whatnot. Their ability to move the compute closer to the edge, the base stations of the antennas and things like that, are certainly significant. And that's why you're seeing the wavelengths and things like that, programs like that. >> So I was going to close, but there some really interesting topics you just brought up. Call it whatever you going to call it near edge, far edge or deep edge. And you mentioned real time. Yeah. So for those Equinix data centers, I don't need, true real time. But for Tesla, I need real time. I need real time inference at the edge probably using a bunch of ARM cores and I can't go back to any cloud. How do you look at that? Both, I would think big markets. Do you have a sense as to, is one bigger than the other? Are they both just enormous or we don't even know yet. >> I'm not sure that we know yet. I think certainly, it's riding the tail of the IOTs. So the more sensors, the more things that are deployed the more that, that data businesses realize they can leverage that data to make real time business insights to drive either better experiences. And if you're in retail. So location based services and real time offer management it doesn't do any good to offer a coupon for something that you've, that's 40 yards behind you. That that's past, like you said with the cars there's, I've seen some studies recently. They say, well, based on the latency, if the command is to stop and you're at one millisecond, it stops within four inches. If you are at 50 milliseconds, it stops 10 feet later. That's a big difference. And I don't know if those numbers are right but you get the idea about the impact, what the real time impact is of. >> Margin is not huge. >> Exactly, so that's where organizations, I think first and foremost need to take a pragmatic approach to determine what is real time for us. What's our definition of it. And then that can lead them to where do I need to place this compute technology? And then that goes to how do I then connect to it? So for the Teslas and so forth, obviously you're going to want 5G connections if possible. Ultra low latency and not just any 5G. The good stuff, the millimeter bandwidth stuff that that's the ultra low latency. >> So let's wrap. So, what's going on in your research world obviously the big, big acquisition tech target they seem to be investing in ESG. You guys are really growing and hiring. That's awesome. Any research that you're working on? >> Yeah, there's a couple of couple of projects we have going on right now. We're wrapping up a four part distributed cloud research series. So we did it on distributed cloud infrastructure. Applications, observability. And now this last one is on the edge. Coincidentally. So we're working on that. We've got some new network modernization research that we've published. And we're going to be looking, from a networking perspective looking at end-to-end network modernization which will be coming out soon. >> Awesome, Bob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really would love to have you back and chat about some of those things. Observability hot space. God, I wish we had more time. >> Absolutely, appreciate it, thanks. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Well, hello everybody, John Walls here on theCUBE and continuing our coverage. So splunk.com for 21, you know, we talk about big data these days, you realize the importance of speed, right? We all get that, but certainly Formula One Racing understands speed and big data, a really neat marriage there. And with us to talk about that is James Hodge, who was the global vice president and chief strategy officer international at Splunk. James, good to see it today. Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, John. Thank you for having me and yeah, the speed of McLaren. Like I'm, I'm all for it today. >> Absolutely. And I find it interesting too, that, that you were telling me before we started the interview that you've been in Splunk going on nine years now. And you remember being at splunk.com, you know, back in the past other years and watching theCUBE and here you are! you made it. >> I know, I think it's incredible. I love watching you guys every single year and kind of the talk that guests. And then more importantly, like it reminds me of conf for every time we see theCUBE, no matter where you are, it reminds me of like this magical week there's dot com for us. >> Well, excellent. I'm glad that we could be a part of it at once again and glad you're a part of it here on theCUBE. Let's talk about McLaren now and the partnership, obviously on the racing side and the e-sports side, which is certainly growing in popularity and in demand. So just first off characterize for our audience, that relationship between Splunk and McLaren. >> Well, so we started the relationship almost two years ago. And for us it was McLaren as a brand. If you think about where they were, they recently, I think it's September a Monza. They got a victory P1 and P2. It was over 3200 days since their last victory. So that's a long time to wait. I think of that. There's 3000 days of continual business transformation, trying to get them back up to the grid. And what we found was that ethos, the drive to digital the, the way they're completely changing things, bringing in kind of fluid dynamics, getting people behind the common purpose that really seem to fit the Splunk culture, what we're trying to do and putting data at the heart of things. So kind of Formula One and McLaren, it felt a really natural place to be. And we haven't really looked back since we started at that partnership. It's been a really exciting last kind of 18 months, two years. >> Well, talk a little bit about, about the application here a little bit in terms of data cars, the, the Formula One cars, the F1 cars, they've got hundreds of sensors on them. They're getting, you know, hundreds of thousands or a hundred thousand data points almost instantly, right? I mean, there's this constant processing. So what are those inputs basically? And then how has McLaren putting them to use, and then ultimately, how is Splunk delivering on that from McLaren? >> So I learned quite a lot, you know, I'm, I'm, I been a childhood Formula One fan, and I've learned so much more about F1 over the last kind of couple of years. So it actually starts with the car going out on the track, but anyone that works in the IT function, the car can not go out on track and less monitoring from the car actually is being received by the garage. It's seen as mission critical safety critical. So IT, when you see a car out and you see the race engineer, but that thumbs up the mechanical, the thumbs up IT, get their vote and get to put the thumbs up before the car goes out on track there around about 300 sensors on the car in practice. And there were two sites that run about 120 on race day that gets streamed on a two by two megabits per second, back to the FIA, the regulating body, and then gets streams to the, the garage where they have a 32 unit rack near two of them that have all of their it equipment take that data. They then stream it over the internet over the cloud, back to the technology center in working where 32 race engineers sit in calm conditions to be able to go and start to make decisions on when the car should pit what their strategy should be like to then relate that back to the track side. So you think about that data journey alone, that is way more complicated and what you see on TV, you know, the, the race energy on the pit wall and the driver going around at 300 kilometers an hour. When we look at what Splunk is doing is making sure that is resilient. You know, is the data coming off the car? Is it actually starting to hit the garage when it hits that rack into the garage, other than streaming that back with the right latency back to the working technology center, they're making sure that all of the support decision-making tools there are available, and that's just what we do for them on race weekend. And I'll give you one kind of the more facts about the car. So you start the beginning of the season, they launched the car. The 80% of that car will be different by the end of the season. And so they're in a continual state of development, like constantly developing to do that. So they're moving much more to things like computational fluid dynamics applications before the move to wind tunnel that relies on digital infrastructure to be able to go and accelerate that journey and be able to go make those assumptions. That's a Splunk is becoming the kind of underpinning of to making sure those mission critical applications and systems are online. And that's kind of just scratching the surface of kind of the journey with McLaren. >> Yeah. So, so what would be an example then maybe on race day, what's a stake race day of an input that comes in and then mission control, which I find fascinating, right? You've got 32 different individuals processing this input and then feeding their, their insights back. Right. And so adjustments are being made on the fly very much all data-driven what would be an example of, of an actual application of some information that came in that was quickly, you know, recorded, noted, and then acted upon that then resulted in an improved performance? >> Well, the most important one is pit stop strategy. It can be very difficult to overtake on track. So starting to look at when other teams go into the pit lane and when they come out of the, the pit lane is incredibly important because it gives you a choice. Do you stay also in your current set of tires and hope to kind of get through that team and kind of overtake them, or do you start to go into the pits and get your fresh sets of tires to try and take a different strategy? There are three people in mission control that have full authority to go and make a Pit lane call. And I think like the thing that really resonated for me from learning about McLaren, the technology is amazing, but it's the organizational constructs on how they turn data into an action is really important. People with the right knowledge and access to the data, have the authority to make a call. It's not the team principle, it's not the person on the pit wall is the person with the most amount of knowledge is authorized and kind of, it's an open kind of forum to go and make those decisions. If you see something wrong, you are just as likely to be able to put your hand up and say, something's wrong here. This is my, my decision than anyone else. And so when we think about all these organizations that are trying to transform the business, we can learn a lot from Formula One on how we delegate authority and just think of like technology and data as the beginning of that journey. It's the people in process that F1 is so well. >> We're talking a lot about racing, but of course, McLaren is also getting involved in e-sports. And so people like you like me, we can have that simulated experience to gaming. And I know that Splunk has, is migrating with McLaren in that regard. Right. You know, you're partnering up. So maybe if you could share a little bit more about that, about how you're teaming up with McLaren on the e-sports side, which I'm sure anybody watching this realizes there's a, quite a big market opportunity there right now. >> It's a huge market opportunity is we got McLaren racing has, you know, Formula One, IndyCar and now extreme E and then they have the other branch, which is e-sports so gaming. And one of the things that, you know, you look at gaming, you know, we were talking earlier about Ted Lasso and, you know, the go to the amazing game of football or soccer, depending on kind of what side of the Atlantic you're on. I can go and play something like FIFA, you know, the football game. I can be amazing at that. I have in reality, you know, in real life I have two left feet. I am never going to be good at football however, what we find with e-sports is it makes gaming and racing accessible. I can go and drive the same circuits as Lando Norris and Daniel Ricardo, and I can improve. And I can learn like use data to start to discover different ways. And it's an incredibly expanding exploding industry. And what McLaren have done is they've said, actually, we're going to make a professional racing team, an e-sports team called the McLaren Shadow team. They have this huge competition called the Logitech KeyShot challenge. And when we looked at that, we sort of lost the similarities in what we're trying to achieve. We are quite often starting to merge the physical world and the digital world with our customers. And this was an amazing opportunity to start to do that with the McLaren team. >> So you're creating this really dynamic racing experience, right? That, that, that gives people like me, or like our viewers, the opportunity to get even a better feel for, for the decision-making and the responsiveness of the cars and all that. So again, data, where does that come into play there? Now, What, what kind of inputs are you getting from me as a driver then as an amateur driver? And, and how has that then I guess, how does it express in the game or expressed in, in terms of what's ahead of me to come in a game? >> So actually there are more data points that come out of the F1 2021 Codemasters game than there are in Formula One car, you get a constant stream. So the, the game will actually stream out real telemetry. So I can actually tell your tire pressures from all of your tires. I can see the lateral G-Force longitudinal. G-Force more importantly for probably amateur drivers like you and I, we can see is the tire on asphalt, or is it maybe on graphs? We can actually look at your exact position on track, how much accelerator, you know, steering lock. So we can see everything about that. And that gets pumped out in real time, up to 60 Hertz. So a phenomenal amount of information, what we, when we started the relationship with McLaren, Formula One super excited or about to go racing. And then at Melbourne, there's that iconic moment where one of the McLaren team tested positive and they withdrew from the race. And what we found was, you know, COVID was starting and the Formula One season was put on hold. The FIA created this season and called i can't remember the exact name of it, but basically a replica e-sports gaming F1 series. We're using the game. Some of the real drivers like Lando, heavy gamer was playing in the game and they'd run that the same as race weekends. They brought celebrity drivers in there. And I think my most surreal zoom call I ever was on was with Lando Norris and Pierre Patrick Aubameyang, who was who's the arsenal football captain, who was the guest driver in the series to drive around Monaco and Randy, the head of race strategy as McLaren, trying to coach him on how to go drive the car, what we ended up with data telemetry coming from Splunk. And so Randy could look out here when he pressing the accelerator and the brake pedal. And what was really interesting was Lando was watching how he was entering corners on the video feed and intuitively kind of coming to the same conclusions as Randy. So kind of, you could see that race to intuition versus the real stats, and it was just incredible experience. And it really shows you, you know, racing, you've got that blurring of the physical and the virtual that it's going to be bigger and bigger and bigger. >> So to hear it here, as I understand what you were just saying now, the e-sports racing team actually has more data to adjust its performance and to modify its behaviors, then the real racing team does. Yep. >> Yeah, it completely does. So what we want to be able to do is turn that into action. So how do you do the right car setup? How do you go and do the right practice laps actually have really good practice driver selection. And I think we're just starting to scratch the surface of what really could be done. And the amazing part about this is now think of it more like a digital twin, what we learn on e-sports we can actually say we've learned something really interesting here, and then maybe a low, you know, if we get something wrong, it may be doesn't matter quite as much as maybe getting an analytics wrong on race weekend. >> Right. >> So we can actually start to look and improve through digital and then start to move that support. That's over to kind of race weekend analytics and supporting the team. >> If I could, you know, maybe pun intended here, shift gears a little bit before we run out of time. I mean, you're, you're involved on the business side, you know, you've got, you know, you're in the middle east Africa, right? You've got, you know, quite an international portfolio on your plate. Now let's talk about just some of the data trends there for our viewers here in the U S who maybe aren't as familiar with what's going on overseas, just in terms of, especially post COVID, you know, what, what concerns there are, or, or what direction you're trying to get your clients to, to be taking in terms of getting back to work in terms of, you know, looking at their workforce opportunities and strengths and all those kinds of things. >> I think we've seen a massive shift. I think we've seen that people it's not good enough just to be storing data its how do you go and utilize that data to go and drive your business forwards I think a couple of key terms we're going to see more and more over the next few years is operational resilience and business agility. And I'd make the assertion that operational resilience is the foundation for the business agility. And we can dive into that in a second, but what we're seeing take the Netherlands. For example, we run a survey last year and we found that 87% of the respondents had created new functions to do with data machine learning and AI, as all they're trying to do is go and get more timely data to front line staff to go. And next that the transformation, because what we've really seen through COVID is everything is possible to be digitized and we can experiment and get to market faster. And I think we've just seen in European markets, definitely in Asia Pacific is that the kind of brand loyalty is potentially waning, but what's the kind of loyalty is just to an experience, you know, take a ride hailing app. You know, I get to an airport, I try one ride hailing app. It tells me it's going to be 20 minutes before a taxi arrives. I'm going to go straight to the next app to go and stare. They can do it faster. I want the experience. I don't necessarily want the brand. And we're find that the digital experience by putting data, the forefront of that is really accelerating and actually really encouraging, you know, France, Germany are actually ahead of UK. Let's look, listen, their attitudes and adoption to data. And for our American audience and America, America is more likely, I think it's 72% more likely to have a chief innovation officer than the rest of the world. I think I'm about 64% in EMEA. So America, you are still slightly ahead of us in terms of kind of bringing some of that innovation that. >> I imagine that gap is going to be shrinking though I would think. >> It is massively shrinking. >> So before we, we, we, we are just a little tight on time, but I want to hear about operational resilience and, and just your, your thought that definition, you know, define that for me a little bit, you know, put a little more meat on that bone, if you would, and talk about why, you know, what that is in, in your thinking today and then why that is so important. >> So I think inputting in, in racing, you know, operational resilience is being able to send some response to what is happening around you with people processing technology, to be able to baseline what your processes are and the services you're providing, and be able to understand when something is not performing as it should be, what we're seeing. Things like European Union, in financial services, or at the digital operational resilience act is starting to mandate that businesses have to be operational in resilient service, monitoring fraud, cyber security, and customer experience. And what we see is really operational resilience is the amount of change that can be absorbed before opportunities become risk. So having a stable foundation of operational resilience allows me to become a more agile business because I know my foundation and people can then move and adjust quickly because I have the awareness of my environment and I have the ability to appropriately react to my environment because I've thought about becoming a resilient business with my digital infrastructure is a theme. I think we're going to see in supply chain coming very soon and across all other industries, as we realize digital is our business. Nowadays. >> What's an exciting world. Isn't it, James? That you're, that you're working in right now. >> Oh, I, I love it. You know, you said, you know, eight and an eight and a half years, nine years at Splunk, I'm still smiling. You know, it is like being at the forefront of this diesel wave and being able to help people make action from that. It's an incredible place to be. I, is liberating and yeah, I can't even begin to imagine what's, you know, the opportunities are over the next few years as the world continually evolves. >> Well, every day is a school day, right? >> It is my favorite phrase >> I knew that. >> And it is, James Hodge. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Glad to have you on finally, after being on the other side of the camera, it's great to have you on this side. So thanks for making that transition for us. >> Thank you, John. You bet James Hodge joining us here on the cube coverage of splunk.com 21, talking about McLaren racing team speed and Splunk.

>> Welcome everybody to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're joined today by Richard Goodwin, who's the group director of IT at Ultraleap and Avishek Kumar, who manages Dell's Power Store, product line, he directs that product line along with several other lines for the company. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >> (Avishek) Hi Dave. >> (Richard) Hi >> (Dave) So Richard, Ultraleap, very cool company tracks hand movements, and so forth. Tell us about the company and the technology I'm really interested in how it's used. >> Yeah, we've had many product lines, obviously. We're very innovative, and the organization was spun up from a PhD, a number of PhD students who were the co-founders for Ultraleap, and initially with mid-air haptics, as you, as many people may have seen, but also hand tracking, mid-air touch, sense and feel. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's quite impressive what we have produced and the number of sectors and markets that we were in. And obviously to, to push us to where we are, we have relied upon lots of the Dao technology, both software and hardware. >> (Dave) And what's your role at the company? >> I'm the group IT director, I'm responsible for the IT and business platforms, all infrastructure, network, hardware, software, and also the transition of those platforms to ensure that we're scalable. And we are able to develop our software and hardware as rapidly as possible. >> (Dave) Awesome. Yeah, a lot of data behind that too I bet. Okay Avishek, you direct a number of products at Dell across the portfolio, Unity, Extreme IO, the SC series, and of course power vault. It's quite the portfolio that you look after. So let's get into the case study, if we can, a bit, Richard, maybe you could paint a picture of, of your environment, some of the key applications that you're supporting and maybe what your infrastructure looks like. Give us a high level view. >> Sure. So, pre Power Store, we had quite a disparate architecture, so a fairly significant split and siding on the side of the cloud, not as hybrid as we would like, and not, not as much as on-prem, as we would have liked, and hey, but that's changed quite significantly. So we now have a number of servers and storage and storage arrays that we have on, on-premise, and then we host ourselves. So we are moving quite rapidly, you know as a startup and then moving to a scale-up, we needed that, that scalability and that versatility, and also the whole OPEX versus CAPEX, and also not being driven by lots of SaaS products and architecture and infrastructure, where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our products, product development. >> (Dave) So wait, Okay, So, so, too much cloud. I'm hearing you wanted a little bit a dose of on-prem, explain that a little bit more, the cloud wasn't doing it for you in terms of your development cycle, your control. Can you double click on that? >> Yeah. Some of the, some of the control and you know, there's always a balance because there's certain elements of our development cycles and our engineering, software engineering, where we need a very high parallelism for some of the work that we're doing, which then, you know, the CAPEX investment makes things very, very challenging, not commercially the right thing to do. However, there are some of our information, some of IP, some of the secure things that we do, we also do not want upgrades as an example, or any advantages or certain types of server and spec that we need to be quite and unique and that needs to be within our control. >> (Dave) Got it, Okay. Thank you for that. Avishek, we're going to talk about Power Store today. So set it up, please, tell us about Power Store, what it is, you know, why it's important to this conversation. >> Sure. So Power Store is a product that we launched may of 2020, roughly a little bit more than a year now. And it's a brand new architecture that Dell technologies released. And at the end of the day, I'll talk about a few unique aspects of the product, but at the end of the day, where we start with, it's a storage platform, right? So where we see similar to what Richard is saying here, in terms of being able to consolidate the customer's environment, whether it is blog, file, WeVaults, physical, virtual environments, and, and it's, as I said, it's a brand new architecture where we leveraged pieces of existing products, where it made sense, we are using all the latest and greatest technologies delivering the best performance based data reduction. And where we see a lot of traction is the options that it brings to the table for our customers in terms of flexibility, whether they want to add capacity, compute, whether in fact, we have apps on the deployment model where customers can consolidate their compute as well on the static storage platform with needed. So a lot of innovation from a platform perspective itself, and it's not just about the platform itself, but what comes along with it, right? So we refer to it as an ecosystem, part of it, where we work with Ansible playbooks, CSI plugin, you name it, right. And it's the storage platform by itself, doesn't stand by itself in a customer's environment, there are other aspects of the infrastructure that it needs to integrate with as well. Right? So if they are using Ansible playbooks, we want to make sure the integration is there. >> (Dave) Got it. >> And last, but perhaps not the least is the intelligence built into the platform, right? So as we are building these capabilities into the product, there is intelligence built into the product, as well as outside the product where things like Cloud IQ, things like technologies built into power suit itself makes it that much easier for the customers to manage the infrastructure and go from there. >> (Dave) Thank you for that, So, Richard, what was the workload? So it actually, you started with the sort of a Greenfield on-prem. If I understand it correctly, what was the workload that you were sort of building around or workloads? >> So, we had a, a number of different applications. Some of which we cannot really talk about too much, but we had, we had a VxRail, we had a a smaller doubt array and we have lots of what we class as runners, Kubernetes cluster that we run and quite a few different VMs that run on our, on-prem server infrastructure and storage arrays and the issues that we began to hit because of the high IO, from some of our workloads, that we were hitting very high latency, which rapidly stopped, began to cause us issues, especially with some of our software engineering teams. And that is when we embarked upon a competitive RFP for Dell Power Store, Dell were already engaged from an end-user compute where they'd been selected as the end-user compute provider from a previous competitive RFP. And then we engaged them regarding the storage issue that we had and we engaged the, our account lead and count exec, and a number of solution architects were working with us to ensure that we have the optimal solution. Dell were selected over the competitors because of many reasons, you know, the new technology, the de-duplication, the compression, the data, overall data reduction, and the guarantee that also came, came with that, the four-to-one data reduction guarantee, which was significant to us because of their amounts of data that we hold. And we have, you know, as I've mentioned, we're pulling further, further data of ours back into our hosted environments, which will end up on the Power Store, especially with the de-duplication that we're now getting. We've actually hit nine-to-one, which is significant. We were expecting four-to-one, maybe five-to-one with some of the data types. And what was excellent that we were that confident that they did not even review our data types prior, and they were willing to stand by that guarantee of four-to-one. And we've excelled that, we've got significant different data types on, on that array, and we've hit nine-to-one and that's gradually grown over the last nine months, you know, we were kind of at the six then we moved to seven and now we're hitting nine-to-one ratio. >> (Dave) That's great. So you get a little free storage. That's interesting what you're saying, Richard, cause I just assumed that a company that guaranteed four-to-one is going to say okay, let us, let us inspect your workload first and then we'll do the deal. So Avishek, what's the tech behind that data reduction that you're able to, with such confidence, not have to pre inspect the workload in this case anyway. >> Yeah. So, it goes back to the technologies that goes behind the product, right? So, so we, we stand behind the technology and we want to make it simpler for our customers as well where, again we don't want to spend weeks looking at all the data, scanning all the data before giving the guarantee. So we stand behind the technology where we understand that as the data is coming in, we are always going to be de-duplicate it. We are always going to compress it. There is technology within the product where we are offloading some of that to the outside the CPU, so it is not impacting the performance that the applications are going to see. So a data reduction by itself is not good enough, performance by itself is not good enough. Both of them have to be together, right? So, and that's what Power Store brings to the table. >> (Dave) Thank you. So Richard, I'm interested. I mean, I remember the Power Store announcement of, sort of, saw it leading up to it. And one of the big thrusts from Dell was the way I phrase it is essentially trying to create a cloud like experience on-prem. So really focused on simplicity. So my question to you is, let's start with just the deployment. You know, how complicated was it to install? What was that process like? How many clicks, I mean, not that you have to tell me how many clicks, but you know, what I'm asking is, is how difficult was it to get from zero to, you know, up and running? >> Well, we actually stepped our very difficult challenge. We were in quite a difficult situation where we'd pretty much gone off the cliff in terms of our IOPS performance. So the RFP was quite rapid, and then we needed to get whoever which vendor was successful, we needed to get that deployed rather rapidly and on the floor in our data center and server rooms, which we did. And it was very very simplistic, within three weeks of placing the order, we had that array in our server rack and we'd begun the migration, it was very simple to set up. And the management of that array has been, we've seen say 40% reduction in terms of effort to be able to manage our storage because it is very self-contained, you know, even from a reporting perspective, the deployment, the migration was all very, very, very simplistic, and you know, we we've done some work recently where we had to also do some work on the array and some other migrations that we were doing and the resilience came, came to, came to the forefront of where the Juul architecture and no single point of failure enabled us to do some things that we needed to do quite rapidly because of the, the Juul norms and the resilience within, within the unit and within the Power Store itself was considerable where we, we kept performance up, it also prioritize any discreet rebuilds, keeps the incoming ingest rates high, and prioritizes the, you know, the workloads, which is really impressive, especially when we are moving so quickly with our technology. We don't really have much time to, you know, micromanage the estate. >> (Dave) Can you, can you just repeat what you said on the percent reduction? I think I heard you cut out there a little bit, a percent reduction on, on, on management, on, on, on the labor side. >> So our lead storage engineer is estimated around 40% less management. >> (Dave) Wow. Okay. So that's, that's good. So actually, I love this conversation because, you know, in the early days of automation, people like, ah, that's my job, provisioning LUNs. I'm really good at it, but I think people are realizing that it's actually not something that you want to be really good at. It's something that you want to eliminate. So, it now maybe it's that storage engineer got his or her nights and weekends back, but, but what do they do now when they get that extra time, what do you, what do you put them on? You know, no more strategic initiatives or, you know, other, other tech things on the to-do list. What's that like?. >> The last thing that, you know, any of my team, whether it's the storage leads or some of the infrastructure team that were also involved in engaged, cause you know, the organization, we have to be quite versatile as a team in our skillsets. We don't want to be doing those BAU mundane tasks. Even the storage engineer does not want to be allocating LUNs and allocating storage to physical servers, Vms, etc. We want all of that to be automated. And, you know, those engineers, they're working on some of the cutting edge things that we're trying to do with machine learning as an example, which is much more interesting. It's what they want to be doing. You know, that aides, the obvious things like retention, interest and personal development, we don't want to be, you know, that base IT infrastructure management, is not where any of the engineers wants to be. >> (Dave) In terms of the decision to go with Dell Power Store. I'm definitely hearing there was a relationship. There was an existing relationship with Dell. I'm sure that played into it. >> There were many things. So the relationship wasn't really part of this, even though I've mentioned the end-user compute in any sets or anything that we're procuring, we want best of breed, you know, best of sets. And that was done on, the cost is definitely a driver. The technology, you know, is a big trust to us, We're a tech company, new technology to us is also fascinating, not only our own, but also the storage guarantee, the simplicity, the resilience within, within the unit. Also the ability, which was key to us because of what we're trying to do with our hybrid model and bring, bring back repatriate some of the data as it were from the client. We needed that ability to, with ease, to be able to scale up and scale high, and the Power Store gave us that. >> (Dave) When you say cost, I want to dig into that price or you know, the price tag or the, the cost, I mean, when you do the business case. And I wonder if we could add a little color to that. >> (Richard) There's two elements to this, so they're not only the cost of the price tag, but then also cost of ownership and the comparisons that we were running against the other vendors, but also the comparisons that we were running from a CAPEX investment against OPEX and what we have in the cloud, and also the performance, performance that we get from the cloud and our cloud storage and the resilience within that. And then also the initial price tag, and then comparing the CapEx investments to the OPEX where all elements that were key to us making our decision. And I know that there has to be some credit taken by the Dell account team and that their relationship towards the final phrase of that RFP, you know, were key initially, not all, we were just looking for the best possible storage solution for Ultraleap. >> (Dave) And to determine that on your end, was that like a feature, because it's sometimes fuzzy what the business impact is going to be like that 40% you mentioned, or the data reduction at nine to one, when there's a promise of four to one, did you, what did you do? Did you kind of do a feature function analysis and sort of line that up and, and say, okay, I'm going to map that to our business processes our IT processes and try to predict what the impact would be. Is that how you did it? or did you take a different approach? >> (Richard) We did. So we did that, obviously between vendors usually expected an RFP, but then also mapping to how that would impact the business. And that is not an easy process to go through. And we've seen more gains even comparing one vendor to another, some of that because of the technology, the terminology is very very different and sometimes you have to bring that upper level and also gain a much more detailed understanding, which at times can be challenging, but we did a very like-for-like comparison and, and also lots of research, but you're quite right. The business analysis to what we needed. We had quite a good forecast and from summarized stock information data, and also our engineering and business and strategic roadmap, we were able to map those two together, not the easiest of experiences, not one that I want to repeat, but we, we got it. (Dave laughing) >> (Dave)Yeah, a little bit of art and science involved. Avishek, maybe you could talk about Power Store, what, you know, give us the commercial. What makes it different from other products in the market of things like cloud IQ? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Sure. So, so again, from a, it's music to my ears, when Richard talks about the ease of deployment and the management, because there is a lot of focus on that. But even as I said earlier, from a man technology perspective, a lot of goodness built-in, in terms of being able to consolidate a customer's environment, onto the platform. So that's more from a storage point of view that give the best performance, give the best data reduction, storage efficiencies. The second part, of course, the flexibility, the options that Power Store gives to the customers in terms of sort of desegregating the storage and the compute aspects of it. So if, as a customer, I want to start with different points in terms of what our customer requirements are today, but going forward as the requirements change from a compute capacity perspective, you can use a scale up and scale out capabilities, and then the intelligence built in, right? So, as you scale out your cluster, being able to move storage around right, as needed being able to do that non-disruptively. So instead of saying that Mr. Customer, your, your storage is going to you're at 90% capacity, being able to say that based on your historical trending, we expect you run out of capacity in six months, some small things like that, right? And of course, if the, the dial home, the support assist capabilities that enabled, cloud IQ brings a lot of intelligence to the table as well. In addition to that, as they mentioned earlier, there is apps on capability that gives another level of flexibility to the customers to integrate your storage infrastructure into a virtual environment, if the customer chooses to do that. And last but not the least, it's not just about the product, right? So it's about the programs that we have put around it, anytime upgrade is a big differentiator for us, where it's an investment protection program for customers, where if they want to have the peace of mind, in terms of three months, nine months, three years down the line, if we come out with new technologies, being able to be upgrade to that non-disruptively is a big part of it as well. It's a peace of mind for the customers that, yes I'm getting into the Power Store architecture today, but going forward, I'm protected from that point of view. So anytime upgrade, it's a new business program that we put around leveraging the architectural benefits of Power Store, whether your compute requirement, your storage requirements change, you're covered from that point of view. So again, a very quick overview of, of what Power Store is, why it is different. And again, that's where that comes from. >> (Dave) Thank you for that. Richard, are you actively using cloud IQ? Do you get the, what kind of value do you get from it? >> Not currently. However, we have, we have had plans to do that. The uptake and BCR, our internal Workload is not allowed us, to do that. But one of the other key reasons for selecting Power Store was the non-disruptive element, you know, with other SaaS products, other providers, and other issues that we have experienced. That was one, that was a key decision for us from a Power Store perspective. One of the other, you know, to go back to the conversation slightly, in terms of performance, we are getting, getting there. You know, there's a 400% speed of improvement of publishing. We've got an 80% faster code coverage. Our firmware builds a 1300% quicker than they were previously. and the time savings of the storage engineer and, you know, as a director of IT, I often asked for certain reports from, from the storage array, we're working at, for storage forecast, performance forecast, you know, when we're coming close to product releases, code drops that we're trying to manage, the reporting or the Power Store is impressive. Whereas previously my storage engineer would not be the, the most happiest of people when I would be trying to pull, you know, monthly and quarterly reports, et cetera. Whereas now it's, it's ease and we have live dashboards running and we can easily extract that information. >> (Dave) I love that because, you know, so often we talk about the 40% reduction in IT labor, which okay, that's cool. But then your CFO's going to say, yeah, but it's not like we're getting rid of people. We, you know, we're still spending that money and you're like, okay. You're now into soft dollars, but when you talk about 400%, 80%, 1300% of what you're talking about business impact and that's telephone numbers to a CFO. So I love those metrics. Thank you for sharing. >> Yeah. But what would, they obviously, it's sort of like dashboards when they visualize that they are very hard hitting, you know, the impact. You're quite right the CFO does chase down you know, the availability and the resource profile, however, we're on a huge upward trajectory. So having the right resilience and infrastructure in places is exactly what we need. And as I mentioned before, those engineers are all reallocated to much more interesting work and, you know, the areas that will actually drive our business forward. >> (Dave) Speaking of resilience, are you doing any replication? >> Not currently. However, we've actually got a meeting regarding this today with some of the enterprise and some of their storage specialists, in a couple of hours time, actually, because that is a very high on the agenda for us to be able to replicate and have a high availability cluster and another potentially Power Store need. >> (Dave) Okay. So I was going to ask you where you want to take this thing. I'm hearing, you're looking at cloud IQ, really try to exploit that. So you got some headroom here in terms of the value that you can get out of this platform to do replication, faster recovery, et cetera, maybe protect against, you know, events. Guys, Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights. >> (Richard) No problem. >> (Avishek) Thank you. >> And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE in ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Cisco is a company at the crossroads. It's transitioning from a high margin hardware business to a software subscription-based model, which also should be high margin through both organic moves and targeted acquisitions. It's doing so in the context of massive macro shifts to digital in the cloud. We believe Cisco's dominant position in networking combined with a large market opportunity and a strong track record of earning customer trust, put the company in a good position to capitalize on cloud momentum. However, there are clear challenges ahead for Cisco, not the least of which is the growing complexity of its portfolio, a large legacy business, and the mandate to maintain its higher profitability profile as it transitions into a new business model. Hello and welcome to this week's Wiki-bond cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we welcome in Zeus Kerravala, who's the founder and principal analyst at ZK Research, long time Cisco watcher who together with me crafted the premise of today's session. Zeus, great to see you welcome to the program. >> Thanks Dave. It's always a pleasure to be with you guys. >> Okay, here's what we're going to talk about today, set the agenda. The catalyst for this session, Zeus and I attended Cisco's financial analyst day. We received a day and a half of firehose presentations, drill downs, interactions, Q and A with Cisco execs and one key customer. So we're going to share our takeaways from these sessions and add our additional thoughts. Now, in particular, we're going to talk about Cisco's TAM, its transformation to a subscription-based model, and how we see that evolving. As always, we're going to bring in some ETR spending data for context and get Zeus' take on what that tells us. And we'll end with a summary of Cisco's cloud strategy and outlook for how it could win in the cloud. So let's talk about Cisco's sort of structure and TAM opportunities. First, Zeus, Cisco has four main lines of business where it's organized it's executives around sort of four product areas. And it's got a large service component as well. Network equipment, SP routing, data center, collaboration that security, and as I say services, that's not necessarily how it's going to market, but that's kind of the way it organizes its ELT, its executive leadership team. >> Yeah, the in fact, the ELT has been organized around those products, as you said. It used to report to the street three product segments, infrastructure platforms, which was by far the biggest, it was all their networking equipment, then applications, and then security. Now it's moved to five new segments, secure agile networks, hybrid work, end to end security, internet for the future and optimized app experiences. And I think what Cisco's trying to do is align their, the way they report along the lines of the way customers buy. 'Cause I think before, you know, they had a very simplistic model before. It was just infrastructure, apps, and security. The ELT is organized around product roadmap and the product innovation, but that's not necessarily the way customers purchase things and so, purchase things so I think they've tried to change things a little bit there. When you look at those segments though, you know, by, it's interesting. They're all big, right? So, by far the biggest distilled networking, which is almost a hundred billion dollar TAM as they reported and they have it growing a about a 9% CAGR as reported by other analyst firms. And when you think about how mature networking is Dave, the fact that that's still growing at high single digit CAGR is still pretty remarkable. So I think that's one of those things that, you know, watchers of Cisco historically have been calling for the network to be commoditized for decades. For as long as I've been watching Cisco, we've been, people have been waiting for the network to be commoditized. My thesis has always been, if you can drive enough innovation into things, you can stave off commoditization and that's what they've done. But that's really the anchor for them to sell all their other products, some of which are higher margin, some which are a little bit sore, but they're all good high margin businesses to your point. >> Awesome. We're going to dig into that. So, so they flattened the organization when Geckler left. You've got Todd Nightingale, Jonathan Davidson, Liz Centoni, and Jeetu Patel who we heard from and we'll make some comments on what we heard from them. One of the big takeaways at the financial analysts meeting was on the TAM, as you just mentioned. Liz Centoni who also is heavily involved in strategy and the CFO Scott Herren, showed this slide, which speaks to the company's TAM and the organizational structure that you were just talking about. So the big message was that Cisco has got a large and growing market, you know, no shortage of available market. Somewhere between eight and 900 billion, depending on which of the slides you pull out of the deck. And ironically Zeus, when you look at the current markets number here on the right hand side of this slide, 260 billion, it just about matches the company's market cap. Maybe an interesting coincidence, but at any rate, what was your takeaway from this data? >> Well, I think, you know, the big takeaway from the data is there's still a lot of room ahead for Cisco to grow, right? Again, this is a, it's a company that I think most people would put in the camp of legacy IT vendor, just because of how long they've been around. But they have done a very good job of staving off innovation. And part of that is just these markets that they play in continue to grow and they continue to have challenges that they can solve. I think one of the things Cisco has done though, since the arrival of Chuck Robbins, is they don't fight these trends anymore, Dave. I know prior to Chuck's arrival, they really fought the tide of software defined networking and you know, trends like that, and even cloud to some extent. And I remember one of the first meetings I had with Chuck, I asked him about that and he said that Cisco will never do that again. That under his watch, if customers are going through a market transition, Cisco wants to lead them through it, not try and hold them back. And I think for that reason, they're able to look at, all of those trends and try and take a leadership position in them, even though you might look at some of those and feel that some of them might be detrimental to Cisco's business in the short term. So something like software defined WANs, which you would throw into secure agile networks, certainly doesn't, may not carry the same kind of RPOs and margins with it that their traditional routers did, but ultimately customers are going to buy it and Cisco would like to be the ones to sell it to them. >> You know, you bring up a great point. This industry is littered, there's a graveyard of executives who fought the trend. Many people, some people remember Ken Olson of Digital Equipment Corporation. "Unix is snake oil," is what he said. IBM mainframe guys said, "PCs are a toy." And of course the history, they were the wrong side of history. The other big takeaway was the shift to software in subscription. They really made a big point of this. Here's a chart Cisco showed a couple of times to make the point that it's one of the largest software companies in the world. You know, in the top 10. They also made the point that Chuck Robbins, when he joined in 2015, and since that time, it's nearly 4x'ed it's subscription software revenue, and roughly doubled its software sales. And it now has an RPO, remaining performance obligations, that exceeds 30 billion. And it's committing to grow its subscription business in the forward-looking statements by 15 to 17% CAGR through 25, which would imply about a doubling of these, the blue lines. Zeus, it's unclear if that forward-looking forecast is just software. I presume it includes some services, but as Herren pointed out, over time, these services will be bundled into the product revenue, same way SAS companies do it. But the point is Cisco is committed, like many of their peers, to moving to an ARR model. But please, share your thoughts on Cisco's move to software subscriptions and how you see the future of consumption-based pricing. >> Yeah, this has been a big shift for Cisco, obviously. It's one that's highly disruptive. It's one that I know gave their partners a lot of angst for a long time because when you sell things upfront, you get a big check for selling that, right? And when you sell things in a subscription model, you get a much smaller check for a number of months over the period of the contract. It also changes the way you deal with the customer. When you sell a one-time product, you basically wipe your hands. You come back in three or four years and say, "it's time to upgrade." When you sell a subscription, now, the one thing that I've tried to talk to Cisco and its partners about is customers don't renew things they don't use. And so it becomes incumbent on the partner, it becomes incumbent upon Cisco to make sure that things that the customer is subscribing to, that they do use. And so Cisco's had to create a customer success organization. They've had to help their partners create those customer success organizations. So it's really changed the model. And Cisco not only made the shift, they've done it faster than they actually had originally forecast. So during the financial analyst day, they actually touted their execution on software, noting that it hit it's 30% revenue as percent of total target well before it was supposed to, it's actually exceeded its targets. And now it's looking to increase that to, it actually raised its guidance in this area a little bit by a few percentage points, looking out over the next few years. And so it's moved to the subscription model, Dave, the thing that you brought up, which I do see as somewhat of a challenge is the shift to consumption-based pricing. So subscription is one thing in that I write you a check every month for the same amount. When I go to the consumption-based pricing, that's easy to do for cloud services, things like WebEx or Duo or, you know, CloudLock, some of the security products. That that shift should be relatively simple. If customers want to buy it that way. It's unclear as to how you do that when you're selling on-prem equipment with the software add-on to it because in that case, you have to put metering technology in to understand how much they're using. You have to have a minimum baseline to start with. They've done it in some respects. The old HCS product that they sold, the Telcos, actually was sold with a minimum commit and then they tacked on a utilization on top of that. So maybe they move into that kind of model. But I know it's something that they've, they get asked about a lot. I know they're still thinking about it, but it's something that I believe is coming and it's going to come pretty fast. >> I want to pick up on that because I think, you know, they made the point that we're one of the top 10 software companies in the world. It's very difficult for hardware companies to make the transition to software. You know, HP couldn't do it. >> Well, no one's done it. >> Well, IBM has kind of done it, but they really struggle. It's kind of this mishmash of tooling and software products that aren't really well-integrated. But, I would say this, everybody now, Cisco, Dell, HPE with GreenLake, Lenovo, pretty much all the traditional hardware players are trying to move to an as a service model or at least for a portion of their business. HPE's all in, Dell transitioning. And for the most part, I would make the following observation. And I'd love to get your thoughts on this. They're pretty much following a SAS like model, which in my view is outdated and kind of flawed from a customer standpoint. All these guys say, "Hey, we're doing this because "this is what the customers want." I think the cloud is really a true consumption based model. And if you look at modern SAS companies, a lot of the startups, they're moving to a consumption based model. You see that with Snowflake, you see that with Stripe. Now they will offer incentives. But most of the traditional enterprise players, they're saying, "Okay, pay us upfront, "commit to some base level. "If you go over it, you know, "we'll charge you for it. "If you go under it, you're still going to pay "for that base level." So it's not true consumption base. It's not really necessarily the customer's best interest. So that's, I think there's some learnings there that are going to have to play out. >> Yeah, the reason customers are shying away from that SAS type model, I think during the pandemic, the one thing we learned, Dave, is that the business will ebb and flow greatly from month to month sometimes. And I was talking with somebody that worked for one of the big hotel chains, and she was telling me that what their CRM providers, she wouldn't tell me who it was, except said it rhymed with Shmalesforce, that their utilization of it went from, you know, from a nice steady level to spiking really high when customers started calling in to cancel hotel rooms. And then it dropped down to almost nothing as we went through that period of stay at home. And now it's risen back up. And so for her, she wanted to move to a consumption-based model because what happens otherwise is you wind up buying for peak utilization, your software subscriptions go largely underutilized the majority of the year, and you wind up paying, you know, a lot more than you need to. If you go to more of a true consumption model, it's harder to model out from a financial perspective 'cause there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the business, but over a longer period of time, it's more cost-effective, right? And so the, again, what the pandemic taught us was we don't really know what we're going to need from a consumption standpoint, you know, nevermind a year from now, maybe even six months from now. And consumption just creates a lot more flexibility and agility. You can scale up, you can scale down. You can bring in users, you can take out users, you can add consultants, things like that. And it just, it's much more aligned with the way businesses are run today. >> Yeah, churn is a silent killer of a software company. And so there's retention is the key here. So again, I think there's lots of learning. Let's put Cisco into context with some of its peers. So this chart we developed compares five companies to Cisco. Core Dell, meaning Dell, without VMware. VMware, HPE, IBM, we've put an AWS, and then Cisco as, IBM, AWS and Cisco is the integrated plays. So the chart shows the latest quarterly revenue multiplied by four to get a run rate, a three-year growth outlook, gross margin percentage, market cap, and revenue multiple. And the key points here are that one, Cisco has got a pretty awesome business model. It's got 60% gross margin, strong operating margins, not shown here, but in the mid twenties, 25%. It's got a higher growth rate than most of its peers. And as such, a much better, multiple than say, for instance, Core Dell gets 33 cents on the revenue dollar. HPE is double that. IBM's below two X. Cisco's revenue multiple rivals VMware, which is a pure software company. Now in a large part that's because VMware stock took a hit recently, but still the point is obvious. Cisco's got a great business. Now for context, we've added AWS, which blows away any company on this chart. We've inferred a market cap of nearly 600 billion, which frankly is conservative at a 10 X revenue multiple given it's inferred margins and growth rate. Now Zeus, if AWS were a separate company, it could have a market cap that approached 800 billion in my view. But what does this data tell you? >> Well, it just tells me that Cisco continues to be a very well-run company that has staved off commoditization, despite the calling for it for years. And I think the big lesson, and I've talked to financial analysts about this over the years, is that if, I don't really believe anything in this world is a commodity, Dave. I think even when Cisco went to the server market, if you remember back then, they created a new way of handling memory management. They were getting well above average margins for service, albeit less than Cisco's network margins, but still above average for server margins. And so I think if you can continue to innovate, you will see the margin stay where they are. You will see customers continue to buy and refresh. And I think one of the challenges Cisco's had in the past, and this is where the subscription business will help, is getting customers to stay with the latest and greatest. Prior to this refresh of network equipment, some of the stuff that I've seen in the fields, 10, 15 years old, once you move to that sell me a box and then tack on the subscription revenue that you pay month by month, you do drive more consistent refresh. Think about the way you just handle your own mobile phone. If you had to go pay, you know, a thousand dollars every three years, you might not do it at that three-year cycle. If you pay 40 bucks a month, every time there's a new phone, you're going to take it, right? So I think Cisco is able to drive greater, better refresh, keep their customers current, keep the features in there. And we've seen that with a lot of the new products. The new Cat 9,000, some of the new service provider products, the new wifi products, they've all done very well. In fact, they've all outpaced their previous generation products as far as growth rate goes. And so I think that is a testament to the way they've run the business. But I do think when people bucket Cisco in with HP and Dell, and I understand why they do, their businesses were similar at one time, it's really not a true comparison anymore. I think Cisco has completely changed their business and they're not trying to commoditize markets, they're trying to drive innovation and keep the margins up, where I think HP and Dell tend to really compete on price versus innovation. >> Well, and we are going to get to this point about the tailwinds and headwinds and cloud, and how Cisco to do it. But, to your point about, you know, the cell phone analogy. To the extent that Cisco can make that seamless for customers could hide that underlying complexity, that's going to be critical for the cloud. Now, but before we get there, I want to talk about one of the reasons why Cisco such a high multiple, and has been able to preserve its margins, to your point, not being commoditized. And it's been able to grow both organically, but also has a strong history of M and A. It's this chart shows a dominant position in core networking. So this shows, so ETR data within the Fortune 500. It plots companies in the ETR taxonomy in two dimensions, net score on the vertical axis, which is a measure of spending velocity, and market share on the horizontal axis, which is a measure of presence in the survey. It's not like IDC market share, it's mentioned market share if you will. The point is Cisco is far and away the most pervasive player in the market, it's generally held its dominant position. Although, it's been under pressure in the last few years in core networking, but it retains or maintains a very respectable net score and consistently performs well for such a large company. Zeus, anything you'd add with respect to Cisco's core networking business? >> Yeah, it's maintained a dominant network position historically. I think part of because it drives good products, but also because the competitive landscape, historically has been pretty weak, right? We saw companies like 3Com and Nortel who aren't around anymore. It'll be interesting to see moving forward now that companies like VMware are involved in networking. AWS is interested in networking. Arista is a much stronger company. You know, Juniper bought Mist and is in better position. Even Extreme Networks who most people thought was dead a few years ago has made a number of acquisitions and is now a billion dollar company. So while Cisco has done a great job of execution, they've done a great job on the innovation side, their competitive landscape, looking out over the next five years, I think is going to be more difficult than it has been over the previous five years. And largely, Dave, I think that's good for Cisco. I think whenever Cisco's pressed a little bit from competition, they tend to step on the innovation gas a little bit more. And I look back and even just the transition when VMware bought Nicira, that got Cisco's SDN business into gear, like nothing else could have, right? So competition for that company, they always seem to respond well to it. >> So, let's break down Cisco's net score a little bit. Explain why the company has been able to hold its spending momentum despite its large size. This will give you a little insight to the survey. So this chart shows the granular components of net score. The lime green is new adoptions to Cisco. The forest green is spending more than 6%. The gray is flat plus or minus 5%. The pink is spending drops by more than 5%. And the red is we're chucking the platform, we're getting off. And Cisco's overall net score here is 25%, which for a company of its size speaks to the relationships that it has with customers. It's of course got a fat middle in the gray area, like all sort of large established companies. But very low defections as well, it's got low new adoptions. But very respectable. So that is background, Zeus. Let's look at spending momentum over time across Cisco's portfolio. So this chart shows Cisco's net score by that methodology within the ETR taxonomy for Cisco over three survey periods. And what jumps out is Meraki on the left, very strong. Virtualization business, its core networking, analytics and security, all showing upward momentum. AppD is a little bit concerning, but that could be related to Cisco's sort of pivot to full stack observability. So maybe AppD is being bundled there. Although some practitioners have cited to us some concerns in that space. And then WebEx at the end of the chart, it's showing some relative strength, but not that high. Zeus, maybe you could comment on Meraki and any other takeaways across the portfolio. >> Yeah, Meraki has proven to be an excellent acquisition for Cisco. In fact, you might, I think it's arguable to say it's its best acquisition in history going all the way back to camp Kalpana and Grand Junction, the ones that brought up catalyst switches. So, in fact, I think Meraki's revenue might be larger than security now. So, that shows you the momentum it has. I think one of the lessons it brought to Cisco was that simpler is better, sometimes. I think when they first bought Meraki, the way Meraki's deployed, it's very easy to set up. There's a lot of engineering work though that goes into making a product simple to use. And I think a lot of Cisco engineers historically looked at Meraki as, that's a little bit of a toy. It's meant for small businesses, things like that, but it's not for enterprise. But, Rocky's done a nice job of expanding the portfolio, of leveraging the cloud for analytics and showing you a lot of things that you wouldn't necessarily get from traditional networking equipment. And one of the things that I was really delighted to see was when they put Todd Nightingale in charge of all the networking business, because that showed to me that Chuck Robbins understood that the things Meraki were doing were right and they infuse a little bit of Meraki into the rest of the company. You know, that's certainly a good thing. The other areas that you showed on the chart, not really a surprise, Dave. When you think of the shift hybrid work and you think of the, some of the other transitions going on, I think you would expect to see the server business in decline, the storage business, you know, maybe in a little bit of decline, just because people aren't building out data centers. Where the other ones are related more to hybrid working, hybrid cloud, things like that. So it is what you would expect. The WebEx one was interesting too, because it did show somewhat of a dip and then a rise. And I think that's indicative of what we've seen in the collaboration space since the pandemic came about. Companies like Zoom and RingCentral really got a lot of the headlines. Again, when you, the comment I made on competition, Cisco got caught a little bit flat-footed, they've caught up in features and now they really stepped on the gas there. Chuck joked that he gave the WebEx team a bit of a blank check to go do what it had to do. And I don't think that was a joke. I think he actually did that because they've added more features into WebEx in the last year then I think they did the previous five years before that. >> Well, let's just drill into video conferencing real quick here, if we could. Here's that two dimensional view, again, showing net score against market share or pervasiveness of mentions, and you can see Microsoft Teams in the upper right. I mean, it's off the chart, literally. Zoom's well ahead of Cisco in terms of, you know, mentions presence. And that could be a spate of freemium, you know, but it's basically a three horse race in this game. And Cisco, I don't think is trying to take Zoom head on, rather it seems to be making WebEx a core part of its broader collaboration agenda. But Zeus, maybe you could comment. >> Well, it's all coming together, right? So, it's hard to decouple calling from video from meetings. All of the vendors, including Teams, are going after the hybrid work experience. And if you believe the future is hybrid and not just work from home, then Cisco does have a pretty interesting advantage because it's the only one that makes its own end points, where Teams and Zoom doesn't. And so that end to end experience it can deliver. The Microsoft Teams one's interesting because that product, frankly, when you talk to users, it doesn't have a great user score, like as far as user satisfaction goes, but the one thing Microsoft has done a very good job of is bundling it in to the Office365 licenses, making it very easy for IT to deploy. Zoom is a little bit in the middle where they've appealed to the users. They've done a better job of appealing to IT, but there is a, there is a battleground now going on where video's not just video. It includes calling, includes meetings, includes room systems now, and I think this hybrid work friend is going to change the way we think about these meeting tools. >> Now we'd be remiss if we didn't spend a moment talking about security as a key part of Cisco's business. And we have a graphic on this same kind of X, Y. And it's been, we've seen several quarters of growth. Although, the last quarter security growth was in the low single digits, but Cisco is a major player in security. And this X, Y graph shows, they've got both a large presence and a solid spending momentum. Not nearly as much momentum as Okta or Zscaler or a CrowdStrike and some of the smaller companies, but they're, these guys are on a rocket ship, but others that we featured in these episodes, but much more than respectable for Cisco. And security is critical to the strategy. It's a big part of the subscriber base. And the last thing, Zeus, I'll say about Cisco made the point in analyst day, that this market is crowded. You can see that in this chart. And their goal is to simplify this picture and make it easier for customers to secure their data and apps. But that's not easy, Zeus. What are your thoughts on Cisco's security opportunities? >> Yeah, I've been waiting for Cisco go to break up in security a little more than it has. I do think, I was talking with a CSO the other day, Dave, that said to me he's starting to understand that you don't have to have best of breed everywhere to have best in class threat protection. In fact, there's a lot of buyers now will tell you that if you try and have best of breed everywhere, it actually creates a negative when it comes to threat protection because keeping all the policies and things up to date is very, very difficult. And so the industry is moving more to a platform model, right? Now, the challenge for Cisco is how do you get that, the customer to think of the network as part of the platform? Because while the platform model, I think, is starting to gain traction, FloridaNet, Palo Alto, even McAfee, companies like that also have their own version of a security platform. And if you look at the financial performance of companies like FloridaNet and Palo Alto over the past, you know, over the past couple of years, they've been through the roof, right? And so I think an interesting and unique challenge for Cisco is can they convince the security buyer that the network is as important a part of that platform as any other component? If they can do that, I think they can break away from the pack. If not, then they'll stay mixed in with those, you know, Palo, FloridaNet, Checkpoint, and, you know, and Cisco, in that mix. But I do think that may present their single biggest needle moving opportunity just because of how big the security TAM is, and the fact that there is no de facto leader in security today. If they could gain the same kind of position in security as they have a networking, who, I mean, that would move the needle like no other market would. >> Yeah, it's really interesting that they're coming at security, obviously from a position of networking strength. You've got, to your point, you've got best of breed, Okta in identity, you got CrowdStrike in endpoint, Zscaler in cloud security. They're all growing like crazy. And you got Cisco and you know, Palo Alto, CSOs tell us they want to work with Palo Alto because they're the thought leader and they're obviously a major player here. You mentioned FloridaNet, there's a zillion others. We could talk all day about security. But let's bring it back to cloud. We've talked about a number of the piece in Cisco's portfolio, and we haven't really spent any time on full stack observability, which is a big push for Cisco with AppD, Intersight and the ThousandEyes acquisition. And that plays into this equation. But my take, Zeus, is Cisco has a number of cloud knobs that it can turn, it sells core networking equipment to hyperscalers. It can be the abstraction layer to connect on-prem to the cloud and hybrid and across clouds. And it's in a good position with Telcos too, to go after the 5G. But let's use this chart to talk about Cisco's cloud prospects. It's an ETR cut of the cloud customer spending. So we cut it by cloud customers. And they're are, I don't know, 800 or so in the survey. And then looking at various companies performance within that cut. So these are companies that compete, or in the case of HashiCorp, partner with Cisco at some level. Let me just set this up and get your take. So the insert on the chart by the way shows the raw data that positions each dot, the net score and the shared n, i.e. the number of accounts in the survey that responded. The key points, first of all, Azure and AWS, dominant players in cloud. GCP is a distant third. We've reported on that a lot. Not only are these two companies big, they have spending momentum on their platforms. They're growing, they are on that flywheel. Second point, VMware and Cisco are very prominent. They have huge customer bases. And while they're often on a collision course, there's lots of room in cloud for multiple players. When we plotted some other Cisco properties like AppD and Meraki, which as we said, is strong. And then for context, we've placed Dell, HPE, Aruba, IBM and Oracle. And also VMware cloud and AWS, which is notable on its elevation. And as I say, we've added HashiCorp because they're critical partner of Cisco and it's a multi-cloud play. Okay, Zeus, there's the setup. What does Cisco have to do to make the cloud a tailwind? Let's talk about strategy, tailwinds, headwinds, competition, and bottom line it for us. >> Yeah, well, I do think, well, I talked about security being the biggest needle mover for Cisco, I think its biggest challenge is convincing Wall Street in particular, that the cloud is a tailwind. I think if you look at the companies with the really high multiples to their stock, Dave, they're all ones where they're viewed as, they go along with the cloud ride, Right? So the, if you can associate yourself with the cloud and then people believe that the cloud is going to, more cloud equals more business, that obviously creates a better multiple because the cloud has almost infinite potential ahead of it. Now with respect to Cisco, I do think cloud has presented somewhat of a double-edged sword for Cisco. I don't believe the current consumption model for cloud is really a tailwind for Cisco, not really a headwind, but it doesn't really change Cisco's business. But I do think the very definition of cloud is changing before our eyes, Dave. And it's shifting away from centralized clouds. If you think of the way customers bought cloud before, it might have used AWS, it might've used Azure, but it really, that's not really multi-cloud, it's just multiple clouds in which I put things in these centralized resources. It's shifting more to this concept of distributed cloud in which a single application can be built using resources from your private cloud, for AWS, from Azure, from Edge locations, all the cloud providers have built their portfolios to support this concept of distributed cloud and what becomes important there, is a highly agile dynamic network. And in that case with distributed cloud, that is a tailwind for Cisco because now the network is that resource that ties all those distributed cloud components together. Now the network itself has to change. It needs to become a lot more agile and microservices and container friendly itself so I can spin up resources and, you know, in an Edge location, as fast as I can on-prem and things like that. But I do think it creates another wave of innovation and networking, and in that case, I think it does act as a tailwind for Cisco, aside from just the work it's done with the web scalers, you know, those types of companies. So, but I do think that Cisco needs to rethink its delivery model on network services somewhat to take advantage of that. >> At the analyst meeting, Cisco made the point that it does sell to the hyperscalers. It talked about the top six hyperscalers. You know, you had mentioned to me, maybe IBM and Oracle were in there. I always talk about four hyperscalers and only four, but that's fine. Here's my question. Practitioners have told me, buyers have told me, the more money and more workloads I put in the cloud, the less I spend with Cisco. Now, even though that might be Cisco gear powering those clouds, do you see that as a potential threat in that they don't own that relationship anymore and value will confer to the cloud players? >> Yeah, that's, I've heard that too. And I don't, I believe that's true when it comes to general purpose compute. You're probably not buying as many UCS servers and things like that because you are putting them in the cloud. But I do think you do need a refresh the network. I think the network becomes a very important role, plays a very important role there. The variant, the really interesting trend will be, what is your WAM look like? Do you have thousands of workers scattered all over the place, or do you just have a few centralized locations? So I think also, you know, Cisco will wind up providing connectivity within the cloud. If you think of the transition we've seen in other industries, Dave, as far as cloud goes, you think of, you know, F5, a company like that. People thought that AWS would commoditize F5's business because AWS provides their own load balancers, right? But what AWS provides is a very basic, very basic functionality and then use F5's virtual edition or a cloud edition for a lot of the advanced capabilities. And I think you'll see the same thing with the cloud that customers will start buying versions of Cisco that go in the cloud to drive a lot of those advanced capabilities that only Cisco delivers. And so I think you wind up buying more Cisco over time, although the per unit price of what you buy might be a little bit lower. If that makes sense here. >> It does, I think it makes a lot of sense and that fits into the cloud model. You know, you bring up a good point, the conversation with the customer was Rakuten. And that individual was essentially sharing with us, somebody was asking, one of the analysts was asking, "Well, what about the cloud guys? "Aren't they going to really threaten the whole Telco "industry and disrupt it?" And his point was, "Look at, this stuff is not trivial." So to your point, you know, maybe they'll provide some basic functionality. Kind of like they do in a lot of different areas. Data protection is another good example. Security is another good example. Where there's plenty of room for partners, competitors, of on-prem players to add value. And I've always said, "Look, the opportunity "is the cloud players spend 100 billion dollars a year "on CapEx." It's a gift to companies like Cisco who can build an abstraction layer that connects on-prem, cloud for hybrid, across clouds, out to the edge, and really be that layer that is that layer that takes advantage of cloud native, but also delivers that experience, I don't want to use the word seamlessly, but that experience across those clouds as the cloud expands. And that's fundamentally Cisco's cloud strategy, isn't it? >> Oh yeah. And I think people have underestimated over the years, how hard it is to build good networking products. Anybody can go get some silicon and build a product to connect two things together. The question is, can you do it at scale? Can you do it securely? And lots of companies have tried to commoditize networking, you know, White Boxes was looked at as the existential threat to Cisco. Huawei was looked at as the big threat to Cisco. And all of those have kind of come and gone because building high quality network equipment that scales is tough. And it's tougher than most people realize. And your other point on the cloud providers as well, they will provide a basic level of functionality. You know, AWS network equipment doesn't work in Azure. And Azure stuff doesn't work in Google, and Google doesn't work in AWS. And so you do need a third party to come in and act as almost the cloud middleware that can connect all those things together with a consistent set of policies. And that's what Cisco does really well. They did that, you know back when they were founded with routing protocols and you can think this is just an extension of what they're doing just up at the cloud layer. >> Excellent. Okay, Zeus, we're going to leave it there. Thanks to my guest today, Zeus Kerravala. Great analysis as always. Would love to have you back. Check out ZKresearch.com to reach him. Thank you again. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Now, remember I publish each week on Wikibond.com and siliconangle.com. All these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Braking Analysis" podcast, and you can connect on Twitter at DVallante or email me David.Vallante@siliconangle.com. Thanks for the comments on LinkedIn. Check out etr.plus for all the survey action. This is Dave Vallante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Be well and we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to this cube conversation, on cube on cloud startups. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're wrapping up the closing keynote fireside chat of the AWS showcase, the hottest startups in data and cloud. We've got some great guests here to eluminate what's happened and why it's important. And Michael Skok who's the founding partner, Michael Skok founding partner of Underscore VC, Mike Feinstein, principal business development manager, and the best Ben Haynes CIO advisor Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this closing keynote for the AWS showcase. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, first of all-- >> Happy to be here >> Guys, do you guys have a unique background from startup funding, growing companies, managing these partners at AWS and being a practitioner with Ben here. The first question I have is, what is the real market opportunity? We've heard from McKinsey that there's a trillion dollars of unlocked value in cloud and that really is going to come from all enterprises big and small. So the question is that that's what every wants to know. What's the secret answer key to the to the test if you are a business. 'Cause you don't want to be on the wrong side of cloud history here. There is a playbook, there's some formation of patterns and there's some playbook things happening out there. How do you guys see this? >> Well, I can try to take a crack at that. First of all I think, there's not only one playbook, you know, only one recipe. If it's a trillion dollar opportunity, that's in the aggregate. There's many different types of opportunities. I think you could have existing companies that are maybe older line companies that need to change the way they're doing things. You can have the younger companies that are trying to take advantage of all the data they've already collected and try to get more value out of it. There could be some radically different types of opportunities with newer technology. I think, you know, for each company just like each of the companies here at the showcase today, they are targeting some, you know, segment of this. Each of those segments is already large. And I think you're going to see a wide range of solutions taking hold here. >> Yeah, cloud drives a lot of value. Michael, I want to get your thoughts. You know, you've seen the software revolution you know, over the years. This time it seems to be accelerated, the time to value, if you're a startup. I mean, you couldn't ask for the perfect storm for our innovation if you're coming out of MIT, Stanford, any college. If you're not even going to school you can get in cloud, do anything. Starting software now is not as hard as it was or its different. What's your perspective because you know, these companies are adding treated value and they're going into an enterprise market that wants scale, they want the reliability. How do you see this evolving? >> You know, the very first time I saw Bezos get on stage and pitch AWS he said one thing which is, "We take away all the hard stuff about starting a software business and let you focus on the innovation." And I think that's still applies. So you're dead right John. And honestly, most founders don't want to spend any time on anything other than unique piece of innovation that they're going to deliver for their customers. So, I think that is fabulous news. I'm going to joke for a second, so I think we're all under shooting on this number. I mean, the reality is that every part of compute infrastructure that we talk about today was built from an infrastructure that's you know, decades old. By which I mean 30 to 50 decades in some 30 to 50 years in some cases. And we look forward in 30 to 50 years, we won't be talking about cloud or everything else. We'll be just talking about computing or whatever it is that we want to talk about at the edge. Or the application of data that you know, in a car and an ARVR heads up display that's helping surgeons work across the world. The fact is the only way this is really going to work is on the cloud. So I think it's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, we're just taking a snapshot of it right now. And we're in an interesting point because of course digital transformation has been rapidly accelerated. I mean, there's all these jokes about you know, we've had five years of transformation in five months. I don't really care what the number is but what is obvious is that we couldn't have gone off to work and to play and to teach and all these other things without the cloud. And we just took it for granted but a year ago, that's what we all did and look, they're thriving. This whole thing is that, you know, a live broadcast that we're doing on the cloud. So yeah, I think it's a very big opportunity and whatever sector I think to Mike's point, that you look at and all the companies that you've seen this morning prove that, if you want to innovate today, you start on the cloud. Your cloud native as I would say. And as you grow, you will be a cloud assumed. It will be the basis on which everybody wants to access your products and services. So I'm excited about the future if you can't tell. >> I totally subscribe to that. Ben, I want to get your take as the CIO, now advisor to companies. If you're going to look at what Michael's laying out, which is born in the cloud native, they have an advantage, an inherent advantage right out of the gate. They have speed agility and scale. If you're an existing business you say, "Wait a minute I'm going to be competed against these hot startups." There's some serious fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed, right? I mean, you might go out of business. So this is the real threat. This is not just talked about, there's real examples now playing out. So as a practitioner, thinking about re-architecting or rejuvenating or pivoting or just being competitive. It's really the pressure's there. How do you see this? >> Yeah I know it really is. And every enterprise company and through every decade is it's a buyer versus build conversation. And with the cloud opportunities, you can actually build a lot quicker or you can leverage companies that can even go quicker than you that have a focus on innovation. 'Cause sometimes enterprise companies, it's hard to focus on the really cool stuff and that's going to bring value but maybe it won't. So if you can partner with someone and some of these companies that you just showcase, start doing some amazing things. That can actually help accelerate your own internal innovation a lot quicker than trying to spool up your own team. >> We heard some companies talking about day two operations lift and shift, not a layup either. I mean, lift and shift if not done properly as it's well discussed. And McKinsey actually puts that in their report as there's other point outs. It's not a no brainer. I mean, it's a no brainer to go to the cloud but if you lift and shift without really thinking it through or remediating anything, it could be, it could cost more. And you got the CAPEX and OPEX dynamics. So, certainly cloud is happening and this kind of gives a great segue into our next topic that I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on. And that is the business model, the business structure, business organization. Michael you brought up some interesting topics around, some of the new ideas that could be, you know, decentralized or just different consumption capabilities on both sides of the equation. So, the market's there, trillions and trillions of dollars are shifting and the spoils will go to the ones who are smart and agile and fast. But the business model, you could have it, you could be in the right market, but the wrong business model. Who wants to take the first cut at that? >> Mike do you want to go? >> Sure, I'd be happy to. I think that, you know, I mean again, there's not there only going to be one answer but I think one of the things that really make sense is that the business models can be much more consumption-based. You're certainly not going to see annual software licenses that you saw in the old world. Things are going to be much more consumption-based obviously software is a service type of models. And you're going to see, I think lots of different innovations. I've also seen a lot of companies that are starting up kind of based on open source as like a first foray. So there's an open source project that really catches hold. And then a company comes up behind it to both enhance it and to also provide support and to make it a real enterprise offering. But they get there early quick adoption of the frontline engineers by starting off with an open source project. And that's a model that I've seen work quite well. And I think it's a very interesting one. So, you know, the most important thing is that the business model has to be one that's as flexible as what the solutions are that you're trying to get the customers to adopt. The old way of everything being kind of locked in and rigid isn't going to work in this world 'cause you have to just really be agile. >> I want to come back to you Mike in a second on this 'cause I know Amazon's got some innovative go to market stuff. Michael you've written about this, I've read many blog posts on your side about SaaS piece. What's your take on business structure. I mean, obviously with remote, it's clear people are recognizing virtual companies are available. You mentioned you know, edge and compute, and these new app, these emerging technologies. Does the business structure and models shift? Do you have to be on certain side of this business model innovation? How do you view? 'Cause you're seeing the startups who are usually crazy at first, but then they become correct at the end of the day. What's your take? >> Well first of all, I love this debate because it's over. We used to have things that were not successful that would become shelfware. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. There is no shelfware. You're either live and being used or you're dead. So the great news about this is, it's very visible. You know, you can measure every person's connection to you for how long and what they're doing. And so the people that are smart, don't start with this question, the business model. They start with what am I actually doing for my user that's in value them? So I'll give you some examples like build on Mike's team. So, you know, I backed a company called Acquia. But it was based on an open source project called Drupal. Which was initially used for content management. Great, but people started building on it and over time, it became used for everything from the Olympics and hosting, you know, theirs to the Grammy's, to you know, pick your favorite consumer brand that was using it to host all of their different brands and being very particular about giving people the experiences. So, it's now a digital experience platform. But the reason that it grew successfully as a company is because on top of the open source project, we could see what people were doing. And so we built what in effect was the basis for them to get comfortable. By the way, Amazon is very fundamental partner in this was, became an investor extremely helpful. And again, took away all the heavy lifting so we could focus on the innovation. And so that's an example of what's going on. And the model there is very simple. People are paying for what they use to put that digital experience of that, to create a great customer journey. And for people to have the experience that obviously you know, makes the brand look good or makes the audience feel great if it's the Grammy's or whatever it is. So I think that's one example, but I'll give you two others because they are totally different. And one of the most recent investments we made is in a company called Coder. Which is a doc spelled backwards. and it's a new kind of doc that enables people to collaborate and to bring data and graphics and workflow and everything else, all into the simplicity of what's like opening up a doc. And they don't actually charge anybody who uses their docs. They just charge for people who make their docs. So its a make a best pricing, which is very interesting. They've got phenomenal metrics. I mean they're like over 140% net dollar retention, which is astoundingly good. And they grew over three and a half times last year. So that's another model, but it's consumer and it's, you know, as I said, make a price. And then, you know, another company we've been involved with if I look at it way back was Demand Web. It was the first e-commerce on demand company. We didn't charge for the software at all. We didn't charge for anything in fact. what we did was to take a percentage of the sales that went through the platform. And of course everybody loved that because, you know, if we were selling more or getting better uplift then everybody started to do very well. So, you know, the world's biggest brands moved online and started using our platform because they didn't want to create all that infrastructure. Another totally different model. And I could go on but the point is, if you start from the customer viewpoint like what are you doing for the customer? Are you helping them sell more? Or are you helping them build more effective business processes or better experiences? I think you've got a fantastic opportunity to build a great model in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a great point. I think that's a great highlight also call out for expectations become the experience, as the old saying goes. If a customer sees value in something, you don't have to be tied to old ways of selling or pricing. And this brings up, Ben, I want to tie in you in here and maybe bring Mike back in. As an enterprise, it used to be the old adage of, well startups are unreliable, blah, blah, blah, you know, they got to get certified and enterprise usually do things more complicated than say consumer businesses. But now Amazon has all kinds of go to market. They have the marketplace, they have all kinds of the partner networks. This certification integration is a huge part of this. So back to, you know, Michael's point of, if you're dead you're dead or knows it, but if you're alive you usually have some momentum it's usually well understood, but then you have to integrate. So it has to be consumable for the enterprise. So Ben, how do you see that? Because at the end of the day, there's this desire for the better product and the better use case. That can, how do I procure it? Integration? These used to be really hard problems. Seems to be getting easier or are they? What's your take? >> Not 100%. I mean, even five years ago you would have to ask a lot of startups for a single sign on and as table stakes now. So the smart ones are understanding the enterprise principles that we need and a lot of it is around security. And then, they're building that from the start, from the start of their products. And so if you get out of that security hurdle, the stability so far is a lot more improved because they are, you know, a lot more focused and moving in a really, really quick way which can help companies, you know, move quickly. So definitely seen an improvement and there's still, the major entry point is credit card, small user base, small pricing, so you're not dealing with procurement. And building your way up into the big purchase model, right? And that model hasn't changed except the start is a lot lot quicker and a lot easier to get going. >> You know, I remember the story of the Amazon web stores, how they won the CIA contract is someone put a test on a credit card and IBM had the deal in their back pocket. They had the Ivory Tower sales call, Michael, you know the playbook on enterprise sales, you know, you got the oracles and you guys call it the top golf tournament smoothing and then you got the middle and then you got the bottoms up you got the, you know, the data dogs of the world who can just come in with freemium. So there's different approaches. How do you guys see that? Michael and Mike, I'd love for you to weigh in on this because this is really where there's no one answer, but depending upon the use case, there's certain motions that work better. Can you elaborate on which companies should pay attention to what and how customers should understand how they're buying? >> Yeah, I can go first on that. I think that first of all, with every customer it's going to be a little different situation, depends on the scale of the solution. But I find that, these very large kind of, you know, make a huge decision and buy some really big thing all at once. That's not happening very much anymore. As you said John, people are kind of building up it's either a grassroots adoption that then becomes an enterprise sale, or there is some trials or smaller deployments that then build up at enterprise sales. Companies can't make those huge mistake. So if they're going to make a big commitment it's based on confidence, that's come from earlier success. And one of the things that we do at AWS in addition to kind of helping enterprises choose the right technology partners, such as many of the companies here today. We also have solutions partners that can help them analyze the market and make the choice and help them implement it. So depending on the level of help that they need, there's lots of different resources that are going to be available to help them make the right choice the first time. >> Michael, your thoughts on this, because ecosystems are a part of the entire thing and partnering with Amazon or any cloud player, you need to be secure. You need to have all the certifications. But the end of the day, if it works, it works. And you can consume it whatever way you can. I mean, you can buy download through the marketplace. You can go direct, it's free. What do you see as the best mix of go to market from a cloud standpoint? Given that there's a variety of different use cases. >> Well, I'm going to play off Ben and Mike on this one and say, you know, there's a perfect example of what Ben brought up, which is single sign on. For some companies, if you don't have that you just can't get in the door. And at the other extreme to what Mike is saying, you know, there are reasons why people want to try stuff before they buy it. And so, you've got to find some way in between these two things to either partner with the right people that have the whole product solution to work with you. So, you know, if you don't have single sign on, you know, go work with Okta. And if you don't have all the certification that's needed well, work with AWS and you know, take it on that side of cash and have better security than anybody. So there's all sorts of ways to do this. But the bottom line is I think you got to be able to share value before you charge. And I'll give you two examples that are extreme in our portfolio, because I think it will show the sort of the edge with these two things. You know, the first one is a company called Popcart. It's been featured a lot in the press because when COVID hit, nobody could find whatever it was, that TP or you know, the latest supplies that they wanted. And so Popcart basically made it possible for people to say, "Okay, go track all the favorite suppliers." Whether it's your Walmarts or your Targets or your Amazons, et cetera. And they would come back and show you the best price and (indistinct) it cost you nothing. Once you started buying of course they were getting (indistinct) fees and they're transferring obviously values so everybody's doing well. It's a win-win, doesn't cost the consumer anything. So we love those strategies because, you know, whenever you can make value for people without costing them anything, that is great. The second one is the complete opposite. And again, it's an interesting example, you know, to Ben's point about how you have to work with existing solutions in some cases, or in some cases across more things to the cloud. So it's a company called Cloud Serum. It's also one we've partnered with AWS on. They basically help you save money as you use AWS. And it turns out that's important on the way in because you need to know how much it's going to cost to run what you're already doing off premises, sorry off the cloud, into the cloud. And secondly, when you move it there to optimize that spend so you don't suddenly find yourself in a situation where you can't afford to run the product or service. So simply put, you know, this is the future. We have to find ways to specifically make it easy again from the customer standpoint. The get value as quickly as possible and not to push them into anything that feels like, Oh my God, that's a big elephant of a risk that I don't obviously want to take on. >> Well, I'd like to ask the next question to Michael and Ben. This is about risk management from an enterprise perspective. And the reason Michael we just want to get you in here 'cause you do risk for living. You take risks, you venture out and put bets on horses if you will. You bet on the startups and the growing companies. So if I'm a customer and this is a thing that I'm seeing both in the public and private sector where partnerships are super critical. Especially in public right now. Public private partnerships, cybersecurity and data, huge initiatives. I saw General Keith Alexander talking about this, about his company and a variety of reliance on the private problem. No one winning formula anymore. Now as an enterprise, how do they up level their skill? How do you speak to enterprises who are watching and learning as they're taking the steps to be cloud native. They're training their people, they're trying to get their IT staff to be superpowers. They got to do all these. They got to rejuvenate, they got to innovate. So one of the things that they got to take in is new partnerships. How can an enterprise look at these 10 companies and others as partners? And how should the startups that are growing, become partners for the enterprise? Because if they can crack that code, some say that's the magical formula. Can you guys weigh in on that? (overlapping chatter) >> Look, the unfortunate starting point is that they need to have a serious commitment to wanting to change. And you're seeing a lot of that 'cause it is popping up now and they're all nodding their heads. But this needs people, it needs investment, and it needs to be super important, not just to prior, right? And some urgency. And with that behind you, you can find the right companies and start partnering to move things forward. A lot of companies don't understand their risk profile and we're still stuck in this you know, the old days of global network yet infiltrated, right? And that's sort of that its like, "Oh my God, we're done." And it's a lot more complicated now. And there needs to be a lot of education about the value of privacy and trust to our consumers. And once the executive team understands that then the investments follow. The challenge there is everyone's waiting, hoping that nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong, oh, we better address that, right? And so how do we get ahead of that? And you need a very proactive CSO and CIO and CTO and all three if you have them really pushing this agenda and explaining what these risks are. >> Michael, your thoughts. Startups can be a great enabler for companies to change. They have their, you know, they're faster. They bring in new tech to the scenario scene. What's your analysis? >> Again, I'll use an example to speak to some of the things that Ben's talking about. Which is, let's say you decide you want to have all of your data analysis in the cloud. It turns out Amazon's got a phenomenal set of services that you can use. Do everything from ingest and then wrangle your data and get it cleaned up, and then build one of the apps to gain insight on it and use AI and ML to make that whole thing work. But even Amazon will be the first to tell you that if you have all their services, you need a team understand the development, the operations and the security, DevSecOps, it's typically what it's referred to. And most people don't have that. If you're sure and then say you're fortune 1000, you'll build that team. You'll have, you know, a hundred people doing that. But once you get below that, even in the mid tier, even in a few billion dollar companies, it's actually very hard to have those skills and keep them up to date. So companies are actually getting built that do all of that for you, that effectively, you know, make your services into a product that can be run end to end. And we've invested in one and again we partnered with Amazon on gold Kazina. They effectively make the data lake as a service. And they're effectively building on top of all the Amazon services in orchestrating and managing all that DevSecOps for you. So you don't need that team. And they do it in, you know, days or weeks, not months or years. And so I think that the point that Ben made is a really good one. Which is, you know, you've got to make it a priority and invest in it. And it doesn't just happen. It's a new set of skills, they're different. They require obviously everything from the very earliest stage of development in the cloud, all the way through to the sort of managing and running a bit. And of course maintaining it all securely and unscalable, et cetera. (overlapping chatter) >> It's interesting you bring up that Amazon's got great security. You mentioned that earlier. Mike, I wanted to bring you in because you guys it's graduating a lot of startups, graduating, it's not like they're in school or anything, but they're really, you're building on top of AWS which is already, you know, all the SOC report, all the infrastructure's there. You guys have a high bar on security. So coming out of the AWS ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. I mean, you got to kind of go through and I've heard from many startups that you know, that's a grueling process. And this is, should be good news for the enterprise. How are you guys seeing that partnership? What's the pattern recognition that we can share with enterprises adopting startups coming on the cloud? What can they expect? What are some best practices? What are the things to look for in adopting startup technologies? >> Yeah, so as you know we have a shared security model where we do the security for the physical infrastructure that we're operating, and then we try to share best practices to our partners who really own the security for their applications. Well, one of the benefits we have particularly with the AWS partner network is that, we will help vet these companies, we will review their security architecture, we'll make recommendations. We have a lot of great building blocks of services they can use to build their applications, so that they have a much better chance of really delivering a more secure total application to the enterprise customer. Now of course the enterprise customers still should be checking this and making sure that all of these products meet their needs because that is their ultimate responsibility. But by leveraging the ecosystem we have, the infrastructure we have and the strength of our partners, they can start off with a much more secure application or use case than they would if they were trying to build it from scratch. >> All right. Also, I want to get these guys out of the way in on this last question, before we jump into the wrap up. products and technologies, what is the most important thing enterprises should be focused on? It could be a list of three or four or five that they should be focused on from emerging technologies or a technology secret sauce perspective. Meaning, I'm going to leverage some new things we're going to build and do or buy from cloud scale. What are the most important product technology issues they need to be paying attention to? >> I think I'll run with that first. There's a major, major opportunity with data. We've gone through this whole cycle of creating data lakes that tended to data's forms and big data was going to solve everything. Enterprises are sitting on an amazing amount of information. And anything that can be done to, I actually get insights out of that, and I don't mean dashboards, PI tools, they're like a dime a dozen. How can we leverage AI and ML to really start getting some insights a lot quicker and a lot more value to the company from the data they owns. Anything around that, to me is a major opportunity. >> Now I'm going to go just a little bit deeper on that 'cause I would agree with all those points that Ben made. I think one of the real key points is to make sure that they're really leveraging the data that they have in kind of in place. Pulling in data from all their disparate apps, not trying to generate some new set of data, but really trying to leverage what they have so they can get live information from the disparate apps. Whether it's Salesforce or other systems they might have. I also think it's important to give users the tools to do a lot of their own analytics. So I think definitely, you know, kind of dashboards are a dime a dozen as Ben said, but the more you can do to make it really easy for users to do their own thing, so they're not relying on some central department to create some kind of report for them, but they can innovate on their own and do their own analytics of the data. I think its really critical to help companies move faster. >> Michael? >> I'll just build on that with an example because I think Ben and Mike gave two very good things, you know, data and making it self service to the users et cetera So, an example is one of our companies called Salsify, which is B2B commerce. So they're enabling brands to get their products out into the various different channels the day that people buy them on. Which by the way, an incredible number of channels have been created, whether it's, you know, Instagram at one extreme or of course you know, traditional commerce sites is another. And it's actually impossible to get all of the different capabilities of your product fully explained in the right format in each of those channels humanly. You actually have to use a computer. So that highlights the first thing I was thinking is very important is, what could you not do before that you can now do in the cloud? And you know, do in a distributed fashion. So that's a good example. The second thing is, and Mike said it very well, you know, if you can give people the data that Ben was referring to in a way that they line a business user, in this case, a brand manager, or for example the merchandiser can actually use, they'll quickly tell you, "Oh, these three channels are really not worth us spending a lot of money on. We need waste promotion on them. But look at this one, this one's really taking up. This TikTok thing is actually worth paying attention to. Why don't we enable people to buy, you know, products there?" And then focus in on it. And Salsify, by the way, is you know, I can give you stats with every different customer they've got, but they've got huge brands. The sort of Nestlés, the L'Oreals et cetera. Where they're measuring in terms of hundreds of percent of sales increase, because of using the data of Ben's point and making itself service to Mike's point. >> Awesome. Thought exercise for this little toss up question, for anyone who wants to grab it. If you had unlimited budget for R&D, and you wanted to play the long game and you wanted to take some territory down in the future. What technology and what area would you start carving out and protecting and owning or thinking about or digging into. There's a variety of great stuff out there and you know, being prepared for potentially any wildcards, what would it be? >> Well, I don't mind jumping in. That's a tough question. Whatever I did, I would start with machine learning. I think we're still just starting to see the benefits of what this can do across all of different applications. You know, if you look at what AWS has been doing, we, you know, we recently, many of our new service offerings are integrating machine learning in order to optimize automatically, to find the right solution automatically, to find errors in code automatically. And I think you're going to see more and more machine learning built into all types of line of business applications. Sales, marketing, finance, customer service. You know, you already see some of it but I think it's going to happen more and more. So if I was going to bet on one core thing, it would be that. >> I'll jump on that just because I-- >> You're VC, do you think about this as an easy one for you. >> Well, yes or no (indistinct) that I've been a VC now for too long. I was you know (indistinct) for 21 years. I could have answered that question pretty well but in the last 19 of becoming a VC, I've become ruined by just capital being put behind things. But in all seriousness, I think Mike is right. I think every single application is going to get not just reinvented completely reimagined by ML. Because there's so much of what we do that there is indeed managing the data to try to understand how to improve the business process. And when you can do that in an automated fashion and with a continuous close loop that improves it, it takes away all the drudgery and things like humans or the other extreme, you know, manufacturing. And in-between anything that goes from border to cash faster is going to be good for business. And that's going to require ML. So it's an exciting time ahead. That's where we're putting our money. >> Ben, are you going to go off the board here or you're going to stay with machine learning and dating, go wild card here. Blockchain? AR? VR? (overlapping chatter) >> Well I'd have to say ML and AI applying to privacy and trust. Privacy and trust is going to be a currency that a lot of companies need to deal with for a long time coming. And anything you can do to speed that up and honestly remove the human element, and like Michael said, there's a lot of, before there's a lot of services on AWS that are very creative. There's a lot of security built-in But it's that one S3 bucket that someone left open on the internet, that causes the breach. So how are we automating that? Like how do we take the humans out of this process? So we don't make human errors to really get some security happening. >> I think trust is an interesting one. Trust is kind of data as well. I mean, communities are, misinformation, we saw that with elections, huge. Again, that's back to data. We're back to data again. >> You know, John if I may, I'd like to add to that though. It's a good example of something that none of us can predict. Which is, what will be a fundamentally new way of doing this that we haven't really thought of? And, you know, the blockchain is effectively created a means for people to do distributed computing and also, you know, sharing of data, et cetera. Without the human being in the middle and getting rid of many of the intermediaries that we thought were necessary. So, I don't know whether it's the next blockchain or there's blockchain itself, but I have a feeling that this whole issue of trust will become very different when we have new infrastructure. >> I think I agree with everyone here. The data's key. I come back down to data whether you're telling the sovereignty misinformation, the data is there. Okay. Final, final question before we wrap up. This has been amazing on a more serious note for the enterprise folks out there and people in general and around the world. If you guys could give a color commentary answer to, what the post COVID world will look like. With respect to technology adoption, societal impact and technology for potentially good and aura for business. Now that we're coming closer to vaccines and real life again, what is the post COVID world going to look like? What do we learn from it? And how does that translate into everyday in real life benefits? >> Well, I think one of the things that we've seen is that people have realized you can do a lot of work without being in the office. You could be anywhere as long as you can access the data and make the insights from it that you need to. And so I think there's going to be an expectation on the part of users, that there'll be able to do that all the time. They'll be able to do analytics on their phone. They'll be able to do it from wherever they are. They'll be able to do it quickly and they'll be able to get access to the information that they need. And that's going to force companies to continue to be responsive to the expectations and the needs of their users, so that they can keep people productive and have happy employees. Otherwise they're going to go work somewhere else. >> Michael, any thoughts? Post COVID, what do we learn? What happens next? >> You said one key thing Mike, expectations. And I think we're going to live in a very difficult world because expectations are completely unclear. And you might think it's based on age, or you might think it's based on industry or geography, etc. The reality is people have such wildly different expectations and you know, we've tried to do surveys and to try and understand, you know, whether there are some patterns here. I think it's going to be one word, hybrid. And how we deal with hybrid is going to be a major leadership challenge. Because it's impossible to predict what people will do and how they will behave and how they want to for example, go to school or to you know, go to work or play, et cetera. And so I think the third word that I would use is flexibility. You know, we just have to be agile and flexible until we figure out, you know, how this is going to settle out, to get the best of both worlds, because there's so much that we've learned that has been to your point, really beneficial. The more productivity taking out the community. But there's also a lot of things that people really want to get back to such as social interaction, you know, connecting with their friends and living their lives. >> Ben, final word. >> So I'll just drill in on that a little bit deeper. The war on talent, if we talk about tech, if we talk a lot about data, AI, ML. That it's going to be a big differentiator for the companies that are willing to maintain a work from home and your top level resources are going to be dictating where they're working from. And they've seen our work now. And you know, if you're not flexible with how you're running your organization, you will start to lose talent. And companies are going to have to get their head around that as we move forward. >> Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. That's a great wrap up to this cube on cloud, the AWS startup showcase. Thank you very much on behalf of Dave Vellante, myself, the entire cube team and Amazon web services. Thank you very much for closing out the keynote. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you John and thanks Amazon for a great day. >> Yeah, thank you John. >> Okay, that's a wrap for today. Amazing event. Great keynote, great commentary, 10 amazing companies out there growing, great traction. Cloud startup, cloud scale, cloud value for the enterprise. I'm John Furrier on behalf of theCUBE and Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem >>partners. Hello and welcome to the Cube. Special coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for host of the Cube were stupid men Day volonte all doing interviews covering the virtual version of VM World. First time it's ever happened. We've been covering VM World for over 10 years, our 11th season with Cube at VM World. And of course, it's difference virtual. But we're doing our part. We're getting in the programs. We need to get the stories out and we got a great guest here. Submit to on who's the chief customer officer of the M where, uh, back to VM, where he ran the end user computing of which we covered air. Watch a lot of great announcements Submit. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on to the Q. Virtual >>John. Great to see you again. And great to be back on the Cube. >>So great to see you. And again I know you. You came in your back into the wheelhouse of VM ware. But as the theme of this show is putting the digital foundation for an unpredictable world. Also, with Covidien going virtual makes a lot of sense. However, VM Ware has been doing extremely well on the business performance side and making all the right tech moves we've been covering them to Cuba is well documented, the business models evolving. The performance is there. You are in a new role for VM, where its newly created chief customer officer tell us why you're back. Why this role? Why is it important? >>Yeah, great question, John. You know, I I joined the anywhere because we end where I look at sort of what bm where is trying to do all aligned with what customers want If you think about customers, they have been up until now, dabbling with cloud building sort of strategies on how to embrace Cloud, which applications will go to which parts off the cloud. And it has been something that has been more off slow RL strategy and with the multi cloud transition plan. Now, VM Ware provides to some extent this, you know, started out with operating system for the hardware, and it has evolved to provide operating system for the cloud it truly runs applications across multiple clouds. And with our partnerships with AWS Azure, Microsoft Google, we're able to sort of give our customers this multi cloud platform for them to run any application, whether that's traditional or modern, in a sort of unified operational fashion. Now this is a different subscription world for customers, right and customers in the world of cloud, especially when they're going into this kind of a transformational journey. Um, you know, it requires we anywhere to think slightly differently. It's not just the traditional cell implement support kind of customer model. You have really help them achieve their out, come over a period of time and then make them successful as they continue to sort of face the uncertainties off the multi cloud world. So So So Pat and Sanjay decided to create this new customer experience office and all different functions from success support digital engagement as well a czar insulting professional services. Tam's were put together so that we can offer integrated experiences to the customer. And that sounded exciting and, you know, we're making tons off interesting innovations there. Some announced that GM World and, uh, very much aligned with an objective to help our customers. >>E. I want to dig into the news and the announcement because I think there's a specific thing I'd like to drill into. But I want to get your thoughts submit because I think VM Ware and I thought to Sanjay about this as well as Pat. Clearly. Cooper Days is the dial tone of the Internet investment cloud Native Project. Monterey speaks to Multi cloud, totally get it. But Cove it has accelerated not only VM where every company, whether they're on the delivery side of it selling side or even consuming of the technology cloud, for instance, has forced the digital transformation. And it's catching some people off guard, right? So what are your thoughts? Because, you know, you have a value projects, you sell it to customers, you implement it, you support it. I mean, that >>was a >>nice grew swing for enterprise vendors like VM Ware. But now, with cove, it and all the digital transformation acceleration, it's causing a lot of people to be ready faster. How >>do you get >>that readiness? What do you bring to the table? What's your view on this? What's your reaction? Because people >>try to >>figure this out. It's confusing. >>I mean, I You know what it's it's very interesting. For example, I will give you an example. There's like, two extremes, and both of them are dealing with a very similar situation, all caused because of prove it. Okay, On one end of the spectrum, there are customers who are saying, Listen, our business is doing extremely well because of digital, and all of a sudden, uh, business needs this rapid agility, which can only be achieved through modern applications, and they're able to sort of move these applications because of elasticity of the cloud and leveraging multiple clouds. To do so is extremely important. If you're on one side of the spectrum on your business, where the business is doing extremely well, you have a percentage of the business that was coming from e commerce. All of a sudden that e commerce has accelerated. You know you can think off certain retailers, you know. Large scale retailers in that segment, and their their multi cloud journeys are accelerated, mostly because off just this surge in demand and change in capabilities that are needed to perform digital engagement with customers at a much much rapid pace, which are very difficult to do without leveraging multiple clouds. That's one extreme. The other extreme is, you know, I'll give you an example from large scale airlines and we all know in the travel hospitality airline business, this is extremely slow business for them, right at this point of time, and they're using the opportunity off this sort of time when things are slower to say, Okay, why don't we take this opportunity to fundamentally change our distilling it and truly embraced multi cloud while doing so? Because there is an opportunity to do so. The workload on the application than the infrastructure does not high little more technology reasons. A little bit more sort of a for downtime reason sort of go through the transformation faster. In other words, both ends of the spectrum. I'm seeing customers move the words sort of this destination fast it. And guess what? There is really no one at this stage outside of VM ware who can help them achieve that because otherwise you set a single voice. You know, there are their players who died. You tow their singular cloud solution and running. You know what I what I tell customers is multi cloud doesn't mean you are running two different architectures on two different clouds, right? That's not multi cloud. Multi cloud means running a singular architectures on multiple clouds, because that's when you get through governance and true operational scale and true experience and elasticity and control. And that's what we, um, where is all about? So we are now engaged with those conversations and helping customers at both the front end right when they're engaged with us at this stage. But we have also down tailored our service delivery and our success off offerings and are how we engage with customers digitally and sort of technically and through people. Uh, in once they start their journey with us, Um, and they sort of embark on leveraging the technology into multi cloud I want. So So that's the sort of shift that has occurred. >>Yeah, I want to unpack the offering in a second, but I want to stay in the customer experience for a minute. We've heard that cliche a customer experience. So digital transmission. Okay, it's actually happening now, and I totally agree with you, by the way there's there's the modernization trend. You just basically spoke to the spectrums. But it's about modernization. Okay, if you think modernization, you think business model business model is Hey, it's pretty light right now. I'm not a lot of people traveling. Let's retool, Let's modernize, Let's use our resource is and modernize our business, which is a lot of applications. It's everything up and down the stack. And then the companies that have a tailwind with Covic, who have had the epiphany and saying, If we don't building modern app or have modern APS in market, we're out of business. So there's a critical urgency to, uh, coming out of it with a growth strategy that's a business model transformation. Totally get that. That's where the customers are. So the question for you is okay. How do you talk to the customer that is saying, Hey, I'm building a modern app. We have to pivot, were forced to pivot whatever word you want to use force to survive. They're now they have to build a modern app. How do you guys support that customer? How does that customer? What does that customer need to be successful? >>Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with an architectural approach right. We bring to the customers and architectural approach across multiple clouds that helped them when they go for their existing applications or new modern applications conforming toe, one operating model and one architectures. Because in this in this time, you know, customers have many critical line of business applications. This airline customer I was talking about, they have 600 applications that are quite critical. They sort of segment them out on which one they will truly modernize because of the business model modernization like you mentioned and which ones they will live with, the way they are for multiple reasons and how it starts with connecting them with a unified architect chair and a unified operating model is how we start with customers. Okay. And that is where the power off the younger comes in. Because, like I said, it becomes this architectural operating system for for the customers to run and adopt multiple clouds. >>You gotta be the chief customer officer. You're the quarterback. You're the one in charge of making sure customers were happy. Okay? And they get what they need. And again, there's different aspects of it. What do you guys announcing it? VM World 2020 virtual, um, that people should pay attention thio around servicing customers in this new subscription and SAS world. >>Yeah, I think besides the technology announcements in terms off modern, sort off, multi cloud platform, the architectural with Project Monterey from the customer experience side, we did announcement to announcements. One was for customers embarking on a journey. We want to make sure that customers get everything they need to be successful on the journey on an ongoing basis. Some off these journeys for large customers, John can take not just sort of three months, but three years because they're dealing with various applications. So for that we announced two pretty simple and easy to embrace offerings. One is AP navigator. AP Navigator enables customers to quickly assess which applications I have to be, you know, on one end, you know, rewritten, completely rewritten and on the other end simply sort of re hosted. Okay, and there are multiple options in between, and we call them as a five, our model with customers, and we guide customers through our own assessment and working with customers on how to sort of segment their applications and use a common architectures across all of them that we can then help and it and secondly, toe help them with. We announced something called Success 3 60 Success 3 60 is Our Mechanism Toe guide and help customers on an ongoing basis for a success plan with continuous, sort off adoption guidance designed workshops as well as providing they're dedicated support that customers need for embracing multiple cloud across all the cloud. With this architectural this way, customers get assured that they're able to get the right up front sort of assessment on applications and ongoing success. Okay, And that's sort of what we announced within customer experience side. And we have been able all of this available two people you know there are critical for large scale engagements, but also digital, you know, just like our customers are innovating with digital. We innovated with our own digital environment, and we brought it all together with something called customer Connect, all available with one single digital experience that's mobile friendly, alert driven, search driven. You know, all the AI that's needed at this point of time in terms of engaging with customers with proactive notifications and guidance in terms of how they're doing with success built into a singular experience so that they can engage with us, and we can engage with them to make them successful. >>And so it's people in technology you guys are bringing to the table. What can customers expect? Because, you know, as they've worked with the M where you've always had great technical support outside its have been a technology driven company. Um, but as you start getting into SAS, you're starting to get into the business model transformation. How do you guys impacting the customers and how you go to market and how you, uh, service your customer base? >>Yeah, I think there are two elements What customers can expect one. They don't have to stand up and engagement and experience mortal completely separate for a small set of applications on a completely different you know, cloud architectures. They could just fit and build a single experience off dealing with the M, where, as a mechanism to enable all of their applications to be hosted, regardless of which cloud there in Uh huh Sandvik they do it at their own pace, right? As then when they're ready for applications. Secondly, and more importantly, for the business model transformation side. We have a model where we continue to show them the value realization. Okay, because these are true business model transformations. At this stage, there is lot off investment that's coming into I P while at the same time, the rest off the business is doing belt type. So there is a continuous pressure on Earth. Customers are I t. That is the champion for the customers, and they're working with developers in line of business teams, and they have to continue to show how what they're investing into as a singular platform or in architecture is going to deliver some kind of a value on an ongoing basis. So we have delivered on an ongoing basis rip boards and feed back and continuous sort of information back to the customers so that they can take back to their businesses on all the investments they're making now are ongoing basis what value the business is getting, because at the end of the day in this, this is probably the first time in the where I I t is probably getting the least belt tightening in the case off sort of an economic downturn, and in fact, it is being looked at as a way to invest out off the downturn. Right? So they're going to be, in a way where there sometimes even going into the boardroom and showing not just governance, but also sort of the investments they made, what kind of value they they got. So those are the two things were providing seamless and at at pace move toe multi cloud with a common experience and second, ongoing value realization that they can communicate whoever they need. Toe >>submit. You know, we've been following VM where for many me personally of persons that was founded. But with the Cube since 2010 star 11th year, You know, we've been critical of times and pointing out the obvious and in some cases, not so obvious successes and challenges. Um and so we've seen the completeness of vision evolved and pat, certainly. You know, he he held the line and he did the right things. And then he executed. So, you know, as you look at the emerald, we're now been complimentary on some of the moves. Certainly on the technology side that you guys have made and then we again we've talked about this many times on the Cube. So complete in this, uh, vision check. Okay, this is wholesome. Michael Dell issues, but gave talks about that. So good vision complete executed business performance is there. But as you talk about sass and subscription, your ability to execute is going to be a key variable and things like the Gartner Magic quadrant for the areas you're competing in. Multi cloud talk about how you guys just set up financially to support that personnel. What is your organization gonna do? Can you share your vision? How you going to be able to execute customers success programs as this uncertainty around multi cloud continues to become reality and things are changing. >>Yeah, I think a couple of things firstly, you know, to be absolutely candid, you know, the pace at which the customers are going to the new multi cloud models is faster now than it was nine months ago. We just discussed that. Okay, so I wouldn't I would be misrepresenting if I said we always were ready for this kind of the case. We're also adjusting and innovating at this stage as fast as possible. The good news is that we were headed in the right direction. Okay, if we were headed in the wrong direction, it would have been much, much harder. Okay. Secondly, I think there is a very strong leadership, the leadership team. I mean, at the end of the day, it's vision, leadership, team investment, the components and, of course, diligence to execute that comes in for the execution. To me vision and the direction was always very, very strong. It motivated me to join the anywhere for this important mission. Second and many other exact. If second the leadership team is as strong as they get, the four team is extremely strong. We have strong leadership team leadership from Pat Michael, of course, as well as Sanjay Rgu Rajiv. Everyone provides strong leadership and then third, you asked about sort of the financial element. You know, they're The company continues to perform quite well, right? We have core businesses that some critical for customers to use as technologies to enable them, you know, to come out off this sort off economic issue we're facing and they're facing. So as a result, you know, financially, we're in a good position to be able to invest back into the business and Secondly, we have made now we've always, always been extremely strong on the technology front. Okay, now with Sanjay and packed sort of saying that we're going to be extremely strong in terms of customer experience front because the world of subscription, the world of cloud, the world off the SAS requires not just great technology but also a great customer experience. So we're seeing tremendous in a continued sort of support financially in terms of investing into the customer experience, from both getting the right set of people offerings as well as technology. So I believe we have all three things. Having said that, you know, some of these things that we're investing in. They need a lot of work, and I'm. While I'm proud of what we have accomplished, I truly believe you know the best is yet to come, and the right investments that we're making are going to continue to sort of enhance our offerings both through people as well as technology. But there's work to be done. You >>know, it's all about, you know, having the consume ability of the technology thio, the value proposition of VM ware and also also is a company being um, open and easy to work with and consumable that way. So I think this is a great time. Certainly. Product wise. Business wise, You guys do extremely well. Congratulations on your new role on the senior leadership is the chief customer officer of VM Ware will be following the stories of your customers. So I really appreciate you taking the time. >>Thank you. Thank you so much, John. Excited to be back. Great >>to have you back on the queue here. VM world coverage of 2020 virtual. I'm John for this. The host of Cube Virtual. Check us out cube dot Net. And also our new cube 3 65 where it's our new modern application for virtual events. Of course, we want to continue to tell the most important stories and cover all the key people making it happen. Submit. Thank you for coming on. This is the Cube. Thanks for watching

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe. These are cloud native insights. Hi, I'm stew Minimum and the host of Cloud Native Insights. And the threat that we've been pulling on with Cloud Native is that we needed to be able to take advantage of the innovation and agility that cloud in the ecosystem around it can bring, not just the location. It's It's not just the journey, but how do I take advantage of something today and keep being able to move for Happy to welcome back to the program one of our regulars and someone that I've had lots of discussion about? Cloud Cloud. Native Serverless So Cory Quinn, the Keith Cloud economists at the Duck Bill Group. Corey, always good to see you. Thanks for joining us. >>It is great to see me. And I always love having the opportunity to share my terrible opinions with people who then find themselves tarred by the mere association. And there's certainly no exception to use, too. Thanks for having me back. Although I question your judgment. >>Yeah, you know, what was that? Pandora's box. I open when I was like Hey, Corey, let's try you on video so much. And if people go out, they can look at your feet and you've spent lots of money on equipment. You have a nice looking set up. I guess you missed that one window of opportunity to get your hair cut in San Francisco during the pandemic. But be doesn't may Corey, why don't you give our audience just the update You went from a solo or mentor of the cloud? First you have a partner and a few other people, and you're now you've got economists. >>Yes, it comes down to separating out. What I'm doing with my nonsense from other people's other people's careers might very well be impacted by it considered tweet of mine. When you start having other clouds, economists and realize, okay, this is no longer just me we're talking about here. It forces a few changes. I was told one day that I would not be the chief economist. I smile drug put on a backlog item to order a new business cards because it's not like we're going to a lot of events these days, and from my perspective, things continue mostly a base. The back. To pretend people now means that there's things that my company does that I'm no longer directly involved with, which is a relief, that absolutely, ever. But it's been an interesting right. It's always strange. Is the number one thing that people who start businesses say is that if they knew what they were getting into, they'd never do it again. I'm starting to understand that. >>Yeah, well, Corey, as I mentioned you, and I have had lots of discussions about Cloud about multi Cloud server. Listen, like when you wrote an article talking about multi cloud is a worse practice. One of the things underneath is when I'm using cloud. I should really be able to leverage that cloud. One of the concerns that when you and I did a cube con and cloud native con is does multi cloud become a least common denominator? And a comment that I heard you say was if I'm just using cloud and the very basic services of it, you know, why don't I go to an AWS or an azure which have hundreds of services? Maybe I could just find something that is, you know, less expensive because I'm basically thinking of it as my server somewhere else. Which, of course, cloud is much more than so you do with a lot of very large companies that help them with their bills. What difference there differentiates the companies that get advantage from the cloud versus those that just kind of fit in another location, >>largely the stories that they tell themselves internally and how they wind up adapting to cloud. If the reason I got into my whole feel about why multi cloud is a worst practice is that of you best practices a sensible defaults, I view multi cloud as a ridiculous default. Sure, there are cases where it's important, and so I don't say I'm not suggesting for a second that those people who are deciding to go down that are necessarily making wrong decisions. But when you're building something from scratch with this idea toward taking a single workload and deploying it anywhere in almost every case, it's the wrong decision. Yes, there are going to be some workloads that are better suited. Other places. If we're talking about SAS, including that in the giant wrapper of cloud definition in terms of what was then, sure you would be nuts to wind of running on AWS and then decide you're also going to go with codecommit instead of git Hub. That's not something sensible people to use get up or got sick. But when I am suggesting, is that the idea of building absolutely every piece of infrastructure in a way that avoids any of the differentiated offerings that your primary cloud provider uses is just generally not a great occasionally you need to. But that's not the common case, and people are believing that it is >>well, and I'd like to dig a little deeper. Some of those differentiated services out there there are concerned, but some that said, You know, I think back to the past model. I want to build something. I can have it live ever anywhere. But those differentiated services are something that I should be able to get value out of it. So do you have any examples, or are there certain services that you have his favorites that you've seen customers use? And they say, Wow, it's it's something that is effective. It's something that is affordable, and I can get great value out of this because I didn't have to build it. And all of these hyper scaler have lots of engineers built, building lots of cool things. And I want to take advantage of that innovation. >>Sure, that's most of them. If we're being perfectly honest, there are remarkably few services that have no valid use cases for no customer anywhere. A lot of these solve an awful lot of pain that customers have. Dynamodb is a good example of this Is that one a lot of folks can relate to. It's super fast, charges you for what you use, and that is generally yet or a provision Great. But you don't have to worry about instances. You have to worry about scaling up or scaling down in the traditional sense. And that's great. The problem is, is great. How do I migrate off of this on to something else? Well, that's a good question. And if that is something that you need to at least have a theoretical exodus for, maybe Dynamo DV is the wrong service for you to pick your data store personally. If I have to build for a migration in mind on no sequel basis, I'll pick mongo DB every time, not because it's any easier to move it, but because it's so good at losing data, that'll have remarkably little bit left. Migrate. >>Yeah, Corey, of course. One of the things that you help customers with quite a bit is on the financial side of it. And one of the challenges if I moved from my environment and I move to the public cloud, is how do I take advantage not only of the capability to the cloud but the finances of the cloud. I've talked to many customers that when you modernize your pull things apart, maybe you start leveraging serverless capabilities. And if I tune things properly, I can have a much more affordable solution versus that. I just took my stuff and just shoved it all in the cloud kind of a traditional lift and shift. I might not have good economics. When I get to the cloud. What do you see along those lines? >>I'd say you're absolutely right with that assessment. If you are looking at hitting break even on your cloud migration in anything less than five years, it's probably wrong. The reason to go to Cloud is not to save money. There are edge cases where it makes sense, Sure, but by and large you're going to wind up spending longer in the in between state that you would believe eventually you're going to give up and call it hybrid game over. And at some point, if you stall long enough, you'll find that the cloud talent starts reaching out of your company. At which point that Okay, great. Now we're stuck in this scenario because no one wants to come in and finish the job is harder than we thought we landed. But it becomes this story of not being able to forecast what the economics are going to look like in advanced, largely because people don't understand where their workloads start and stop what the failure modes look like and how that's going to manifest itself in a cloud provider environment. That's why lift and shift is popular. People hate, lift and ship. It's a terrible direction to go in. Yeah, so are all the directions you can go in as far as migrating, short of burning it to the ground for insurance money and starting over, you've gotta have a way to get from where you are, where you're going. Otherwise, migration to be super simple. People with five weeks of experience and a certification consult that problem. It's but how do you take what's existing migrated end without causing massive outages or cost of fronts? It's harder than it looks. >>Well, okay, I remember Corey a few years ago when I talk to customers that were using AWS. Ah, common complaint was we had to dedicate an engineer just to look at the finances of what's happening. One of the early episodes I did of Cloud Native Insights talked to a company that was embracing this term called Been Ops. We have the finance team and the engineering team, not just looking back at the last quarter, but planning understanding what the engineering impacts were going forward so that the developers, while they don't need tohave all the spreadsheets and everything else, they understand what they architect and what the impact will be on the finance side. What are you hearing from your customers out there? What guidance do you give from an organizational standpoint as to how they make sure that their bill doesn't get ridiculous? >>Well, the term fin ops is a bit of a red herring in there because people immediately equate it back to cloud ability before their app. Geo acquisitions where the fin ops foundation vendors are not allowed to join except us, and it became effectively a marketing exercise that was incredibly poorly executed in sort of poisoned the well. Now the finance foundations been handed off to the Cloud Native Beauty Foundation slash Lennox Foundation. Maybe that's going to be rehabilitated, but we'll have to find out. One argument I made for a while was that developers do not need to know what the economic model in the cloud is going to be. As a general rule, I would stand by that. Now someone at your company needs to be able to have those conversations of understanding the ins and outs of various costs models. At some point you hit a point of complexity we're bringing in. Experts solve specific problems because it makes sense. But every developer you have does not need to sit with 3 to 5 days course understanding the economics of the cloud. Most of what they need to know if it's on a business card, it's on an index card or something small that is carplay and consult business and other index ramos. But the point is, is great. Big things cost more than small things. You're not charged for what you use your charger for. What you forget to turn off and being able to predict your usage model in advance is important and save money. Data transfers Weird. There are a bunch of edge cases, little slice it and ribbons, but inbound data transfer is generally free. Outbound, generally Austin arm and a leg and architect accordingly. But by and large for most development product teams, it's built something and see if it works first. We can always come back later and optimize costs as you wind up maturing the product offering. >>Yeah, Cory, it's some of those sharp edges I've love learning about in your newsletter or some of your online activities there, such as you talked about those egress fees. I know you've got a nice diagram that helps explain if you do this, it costs a lot of money. If you do this, it's gonna cost you. It cost you a lot less money. Um, you know, even something like serverless is something that in general looks like. It should be relatively expensive, but if you do something wrong, it could all of a sudden cost you a lot of money. You feel that companies are having a better understanding so that they don't just one month say, Oh my God, the CFO called us up because it was a big mistake or, you know, where are we along that maturation of cloud being a little bit more predictable? >>Unfortunately, no. Where near I'd like us to be it. The story that I think gets missed is that when you're month over, month span is 20% higher. Finance has a bunch of questions, but if they were somehow 20% lower, they have those same questions. They're trying to build out predictive models that align. They're not saying you're spending too much money, although by the time the issues of the game, yeah, it's instead help us understand and predict what's happening now. Server less is a great story around that, because you can tie charges back to individual transactions and that's great. Except find me a company that's doing that where the resulting bill isn't hilariously inconsequential. A cloud guru Before they bought Lennox, I can't get on stage and talk about this. It serverless kind of every year, but how? They're spending $600 a month in Lambda, and they have now well, over 100 employees. Yeah, no one cares about that money. You can trace the flow of capital all you want, but it grounds up to No one cares at some point that changes. But there's usually going to be far bigger fish to front with their case, I would imagine, given, you know, stream video, they're probably gonna have some data transfer questions that come into play long before we talk about their compute. >>Yeah, um, what else? Cory, when you look at the innovation in the cloud, are there things that common patterns that you see that customers are missing? Some of the opportunities there? How does the customers that you talk to, you know, other than reading your newsletter, talking Teoh their systems integrator or partner? How are they doing it? Keeping up with just the massive amount of change that happens out >>there. Get customers. AWS employees follow the newsletter specifically to figure out what's going on. We've long since passed a Rubicon where I can talk incredibly convincingly about services that don't really exist. And Amazon employees won't call me out on the joke that I've worked in there because what the world could ever say that and then single. It's well beyond any one person's ability to keep it all in their head. So what? We're increasingly seeing even one provider, let alone the rest. Their events are outpacing them and no one is keeping up. And now there's the persistent, never growing worry that there's something that just came out that could absolutely change your business for the better. And you'll never know about it because you're too busy trying to keep up with all the other number. Every release the cloud provider does is important to someone but none of its important everyone. >>Yeah, Corey, that's such a good point. When you've been using tools where you understand a certain way of doing things, how do you know that there's not a much better way of doing it? So, yeah, I guess the question is, you know, there's so much out there. How do people make sure that they're not getting left behind or, you know, keep their their their understanding of what might be able to be used >>the right answer. There, frankly, is to pick a direction and go in it. You can wind up in analysis paralysis issues very easily. And if you talk about what you've done on the Internet, the number one responsible to get immediately is someone suggesting an alternate approach you could have taken on day one. There is no one path forward for any six, and you can second guess yourself that the problem is that you have to pick a direction and go in it. Make sure it makes sense. Make sure the lines talk to people who know what's going on in the space and validate it out. But you're going to come up with a plan right head in that direction, I assure you, you are probably not the only person doing it unless you're using. Route 53 is a database. >>You know, it's an interesting thing. Corey used to be said that the best time to start a project was a year ago. But you can't turn back time, so you should start it now. I've been saying for the last few years the best time to start something would be a year from now, so you can take advantage of the latest things, but you can't wait a year, so you need to start now. So how how do you make sure you maintain flexibility but can keep moving projects moving forward? E think you touched on that with some of the analysis paralysis, Anything else as to just how do you make sure you're actually making the right bets and not going down? Some, you know, odd tangent that ends up being a debt. >>In my experience, the biggest problem people have with getting there is that they don't stop first to figure out alright a year from now. If this project has succeeded or failed, how will we know they wind up building these things and keeping them in place forever, despite the fact that cost more money to run than they bring in? In many cases, it's figure out what success looks like. Figure out what failure looks like. And if it isn't working, cut it. Otherwise, you're gonna wind up, went into this thing that you've got to support in perpetuity. One example of that one extreme is AWS. They famously never turn anything off. Google on the other spectrum turns things off as a core competence. Most folks wind up somewhere in the middle, but understand that right now between what? The day I start building this today and the time that this one's of working down the road. Well, great. There's a lot that needs to happen to make sure this is a viable business, and none of that is going to come down to, you know, build it on top of kubernetes. It's going to come down. Is its solving a problem for your customers? Are people they're people in to pay for the enhancement. Anytime you say yes to that project, you're saying no to a bunch of others. Opportunity Cost is a huge thing. >>Yeah, so it's such an important point, Cory. It's so fundamental when you look at what what cloud should enable is, I should be able to try more things. I should be able to fail fast on, and I shouldn't have to think about, you know, some cost nearly as much as I would in the past. We want to give you the final word as you look out in the cloud. Any you know, practices, guidelines, you can give practitioners out there as to make sure that they are taking advantage of the innovation that's available out there on being able to move their company just a little bit faster. >>Sure, by and large, for the practitioners out there, if you're rolling something out that you do not understand, that's usually a red flag. That's been my problem, to be blunt with kubernetes or an awful lot of the use cases that people effectively shove it into. What are you doing? What if the business problem you're trying to solve and you understand all of its different ways that it can fail in the ways that will help you succeed? In many cases, it is stupendous overkill for the scale of problem most people are throwing. It is not a multi cloud answer. It is not the way that everyone is going to be doing it or they'll make fun of you under resume. Remember, you just assume your own ego. In this sense, you need to deliver an outcome. You don't need to improve your own resume at the expense of your employer's business. One would hope, >>Well, Cory, always a pleasure catching up with you. Thanks so much for joining me on the cloud. Native insights. Thank you. Alright. Be sure to check out silicon angle dot com if you click on the cloud. There's a whole second for cloud Native insights on your host to minimum. And I look forward to hearing more from you and your cloud Native insights Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, Host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California, for a special conversation with an industry analyst who's been, who travels a lot, does a lot of events, covers the industry, up and down, economically and also some of the big trends, to talk about how the at scale problem that the COVID-19 is causing. Whether it's a lot of people are working at home for the first time, to at scale network problems, the pressure points that this is exposing for what I would call the mainstream world is a great topic. Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, friend of theCUBE. Zeus, welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you remotely. We're, as you know, working in place here. I came to the studio for, with our quarantine crew here, to get these stories out, 'cause they're super important. Thanks for spending the time. >> Hi, yeah, thanks, it's certainly been an interesting last couple months and we're probably, maybe half way through this, I'm guessing. >> Yeah, and no matter what happens the new reality of this current situation or mess or whatever you want to call it is the fact that it has awakened what us industry insiders have been seeing for a long time, big data, new networks, cloud native, micro-services, kind of at scale, scale out infrastructure, kind of the stuff that we've been kind of covering is now exposed for the whole world to see on a Petri dish that is called COVID-19, going, "Wow, this world has changed." This is highlighting the problems. Can you share your view of what are some of those things that people are experiencing for the first time and what's the reaction, what's your reaction to it all? >> Yeah, it's been kind of an interesting last couple of months when I talk to CIO's about how they're adapting to this. You know, when, before I was an analyst, John, I was actually in corporate IT. I was part of a business continuity plans group for companies and the whole definition of business continuity's changed. When I was in corporate IT, we thought of business continuity as being able to run the company with a minimal set of services for a week or a month or something like that. So, for instance, I was in charge of corporate technology and financial services firm and we thought, "Well, if we have 50 traders, can we get by with 10", right? Business continuity today is I need to run the entire organization with my full staff for an indefinite period of time, right? And that is substantially different mandate than thinking of how I run a minimal set of services to just maintain the bare minimum business operations and I think that's exposed a lot of things for a lot of companies. You know, for instance, I've talked to so many companies today where the majority of their employees have never worked remote. For you or I, we're mobile professionals. We do this all the time. We travel around. We go to conferences. We do this stuff all, it's second nature. But for a lot of employees, you think of contact center agents, in store people, things like that, they've never worked from home before. And so, all of a sudden, the new reality is they've got to set up a computer in the kitchen or their bedroom or something like that and start working from home. Also for companies, they've never had to think about a world where everybody worked remotely, right? So the VP in Infrastructure would have, the cloud apps they have, the remote access technology they have was set up for a subset of users, maybe 10%, maybe 15%, but certainly not everybody. And so now we're seeing corporate networks get crushed. All the cloud providers are getting crushed. I know some of the conferencing companies, the video companies are having to double, triple capacity. And so I think to your point when you started this, we would have seen this eventually with all the data coming in and all the new devices being connected. I think what COVID did was just accelerate it just to the point where it's exposed to everything at once. >> Yeah, and you know, I have a lot of, being an entrepreneur and done a lot of corporate legal contracts. The word force majeure is always a phrase that's a legal jargon, which means act of God or so to speak, something you can't control. I think what's interesting to your point is that the playbook in IT, even some of the most cutting edge IT, is forecasting some disruption, but never like this. And also disaster recovery and business continuity, as you mentioned, have been practices, but state of the art has been percentages of overall. But disaster recovery was a hurricane, or a power outage, so generators, fail over sites or regions of your cloud, not a change in a new vector. So the disruption is not disruption. It's an amplification of a new work stream. That's the disruption. That's what you're saying. >> Yeah, you know, that's correct. Business continuity used to be very data center-focused. It was, how do I get my power? How do I create some, replicate my office and have 50 desks in here, instead of 500? But now it's everybody working remotely, so I got to have ways for them to collaborate. I have to have ways for them to talk to customers. I have to have ways for them to deliver services. I have to enable people to do what they did in the office, but not in the office, right? And so that's been the big challenge and I think it's been an interesting test for CIO's that have been going through digital transformation plans. I think it's shifted a lot of budgets around and made companies look at the way they do things. There's also the social aspect of a job. People like to go to the office. They like to interact with co-workers. And I've talked to some companies where they're bringing in medical doctors, they're bringing in psychologists to talk to their employees, because if you're never worked from home before, it's quite a big difference. The other aspect of this that's underappreciated, I think, is the fact that now our kids are home, right? >> John: Yeah. (laughter) >> So we've got to contend with that. And I know that the first day that the shelter in place order got put in place for the San Francisco area, a new call, I believe a new version of Call of Duty had just come out. You know, we had some new shows pop up in Netflix, some series continuances. So now these kids who are at home are bored. They're downloading content. They're playing games. At the same time, we're trying to work and we're trying to do video calls and we're trying to bring in multiple video streams or even if they're in classrooms, they're doing Zoom-based calls, that type of thing, or using WebEx or an application like that, and it's played havoc on corporate networks, not just company networks, and so... >> Also Comcast and the providers, AT&T. You've got the fiber seems to be doing well, but Comcast is throttling. I mean, this is the crisis. It's a new vector of disruption. But how do you develop... >> Yeah, YouTube said that they're going to throttle down. Well, I think what this is is it makes you look at how you handle your traffic. And I think there's plenty of bandwidth out there. And even the most basic home routers are capable of prioritizing traffic and I think there's a number of IT leaders I've talked who have actually gone through the steps of helping their employees understand how you use your home networking technology to be able to prioritize video and corporate voice traffic over top. There are corporate ways to do that. You know, for instance, Aruba and Extreme Networks both offer these remote access points where you just plug 'em in and you're connected through a corporate network and you pick up all the policies. But even without that, there's ways to do with home. So I think it's made us rethink networking. Instead of the network being a home network, a WiFi network, a data center network, right, the Internet, we need to think about this grand network as one network and then how we control the quality of a cloud app when the person's home to the cloud, all the way back to the company, because that's what drives user experience. >> I think you're highlighting something really important. And I just want to illustrate and have you double down on more commentary on this, because I think, you know, the one network where we're all part of one network concept shows that the perimeter's dead. That's what we've been saying about the cloud, but also if you think about just the crimes of opportunity that are happening. You've got the hacker and hacking situation. You have all kinds of things that are impacted. There's crimes of opportunity, and there's disruption that's happening because of the opportunity. Can you just share more and unpack that concept of this one network? What are some of the things that business are thinking about now? You've got the VPN. You've got collaboration tools that sometimes are half-baked. I mean, I love Zoom and all, but Zoom is crashing too. I mean, WebEx is more corporate-oriented, but not really as strong as what Zoom is for the consumer. But still they have an opportunity, but they have a challenge as well. So all these work tools are kind of half-baked too. (laughing) >> Well, the thing is they were never designed... I remember seeing in an interview that Chuck Robbins had on CNBC where he said, "We didn't design WebEx to support everybody working from home". It just, that wasn't even a thought. Nowhere did he ever go to his team and say, build this for the whole world to connect, right? And so, every one of the video providers and the cloud collaboration providers have problems, and I don't really blame them, because this is a dynamic we were never expecting to see. I think you brought up a good point on the security side. We, a lot has been written about how more and more companies are moving to these online tools, like Zoom and WebEx and applications like that to let us communicate, but what does that mean from a security perspective? Now`all of sudden I have people working from home. They're using these Web-based applications. I remember a conversation I had about six months ago with one of the world's most famous hackers who does nothing but penetration tests now. He said that the cloud-based applications are his number one entry point into companies and to penetrate them, because people's passwords and things like that are fairly weak. So, now we're moving everything to the cloud. We're moving everything to these SaaS apps, right? And so now it's creating more exposure points. We've got fishers out there that are using the term COVID or Corona as a way to get people to click on links they shouldn't. And so now our whole security paradigm has blown up, right? So we used to have this hard shell we could drop around our company. We can't do that anymore. And we have to start worrying about things on an app-by-app basis. And it's caused companies to rethink security, to look at multi-factor authentication tools. I think those are a lot better. We have to look at Casb tools, the cloud access tools, kind of monitor what apps people are using, what they're not using. Trying to cut down on the use of consumer tools, right? So it's a lot for the security practice to take ahold of too. And you have to understand, even from a company standpoint, your security operations center was built on the concept they pull all their data into one location. SOC engineers aren't used to working remotely as well, so that's a big change as well. How do I get my data analyzed and to my SOC engineers when they're working from home? >> You know, we have coined the term Black Friday for the day after, you know, Thanksgiving. >> Thanksgiving, yeah. >> You know, the big surge, but that's a term to describe that first experience of, holy shit, everyone's going to the websites and they all crashed. So we're kind of having that same moment now, to your point earlier. So I want to read a statement that was on Nima Baidey's LinkedIn. He's at Google now, former Pivotal guy. You probably know him. He had a little graphic that says, "Who led the digital transformation of your company?" It's got a poll with a question mark. "A) Your CEO, B) your CTO, or C) COVID-19"? And it circles COVID-19 and that's the image and that's the meme that's going around. But the reality is it is highlighting it and I want to get your thoughts on this next track of thinking around how people may shift their focus and their spend, because, hey, hybrid cloud's great and multicloud's the next big wave, but screw multicloud. If I can't actually fix my current situation, maybe I'll push off some of the multicloud stuff or maybe I won't. So, how do you see the give and get of project prioritization, because I think this is going to wake everyone up. You mentioned security, clearly. >> Yeah, well, I think it has woken everybody up and I think companies now are really rethinking how they operate. I don't believe we're going to stop traveling. I think once this is over, people are going to hop back on planes. I also don't believe that we'll never go back into the office. I think the big shift here though, John, is we will see more acceptance to hire people out of region. I think that it's proved that you don't have to be in the office, right, which will drive these collaboration tools. And I also think we'll see less use of desktop phones and more use of video means. So now that people are getting used to using these types of tools, I think they're starting to like the experience. And so voice calls get replaced by video calls and that is going to crush our networks in buildings. So we've got WiFi 6 coming. We've got 5G coming, right. We've got lots of security tools out there. And I think you'll see a lot of prioritization to the network and that's kind of an interesting thing, because historically, the network didn't get a lot of C level time, right? It was those people in the basement. We didn't really know what they did. I'm a former network engineer. I was treated that way. (laughing) But most digital organizations now have to come to the realization that they're network-centric, and then so the network is the business and that's not something that anybody's ever put a lot of focus on. But if you look at the building blocks of digital IoT, mobility, cloud, the writing's been on the wall for a while, and I've written this several times. But you need to pay more attention to the network. And I think we're finally going to see that transition, some prioritization of dollars there. >> Yeah, I will attest you have been very vocal and right on point on that, so props to that. I do want to also double amplify your point. The network drives everything, that's clear. I think the other thing that's interesting and used to be kind of a cliche in a pejorative way is the user is the product. I think that's a term that's been coined to Facebook. You know, you're data. You're the product. If you're the product, that's a problem, you know. To describe Facebook as the app that monetizes you, the user. I think this situation has really pointed out that yes, it's good to be the product. The user value and the network are two now end points of the spectrum. The network's got to be kick ass from the ground up, but the user is the product now, and it should be, in a good way, not exploiting. So I think if you're thinking about user-centric value, how my kid can play Call of Duty, how my family can watch the new episode on Netflix, how I can do a kick ass Zoom call, that's my experience. The network does its job. The application service takes advantage of making me happy. So I think this is interesting, right. So we're getting a new thing here. How real do you think that is? Where are we on the spectrum of that nirvana? >> I think we're rapidly approaching that. I think it's been well documented that 2020 was the year that customer experience become the number one brand differentiate, right. In fact, I think it was actually 2018 that that happened, but Walker and Gartner and a few other companies would be 2020. And what that means is that if you're a business, you need to provide exemplary customer service in order to gain share. I think one of the things that was lost in there is that employee experience has to be best in class as well. And so I think a lot of businesses over-rotated the spin away from employee experience to customer experience, and rightfully so, but now they got to rotate back to make sure their workers have the right tools, have the right services, have the right data, to do their jobs better, because when they do, they can turn around and provide customers better experience. So this isn't just about training your people to service customers well. It's about making sure people have the right data, the right information to do their jobs, to collaborate better, right. And there's really a tight coupling now between the consumer and the employee, or the customer and the employee. And, you know, Corona kind of exposed to that, 'cause it shows that we're all connected, in a way. And the connection of people, whether they're the customers or employees or something, that businesses have to focus on. So I think we'll see some dollars sign back to internal, not just customer facing. >> Yeah, well, great insight. And, first of all, we all connect to your great CUBE alumni. But you're also right up the street in California. We're in Palo Alto. You're in San Mateo. You literally could have driven here, but we're sheltering in place. >> We're sheltered in place. >> Great insight and, you know, thanks for sharing that and I think it's good content for people, you know, be aware of this. Obviously they're living in it right now, but I think the world is going to be back to business soon, but it's never going to be the same. I think it's digital... >> No, it'll never be the same. I think this is a real watershed point for the way we work and the way we treat our employees and our customers. I think you'll see a lot of companies make a lot of change. And that's good for the whole industry, 'cause it'll drive innovation. And I think we'll have some innovation come out of this that we never saw before. >> Quick final word for the folks that are on this big wave that's happening. It's reality. It's the current situation now. What's your advice for them as they get on their surfboard, so to speak, and ride this wave? What's your advice to them? >> Yeah, I think use this opportunity to find those weak points in your networks and find out where the bottlenecks are, because I think having everybody work remotely exposes a lot of problems in processes and where a lot of the hiccups happen. But I do think my final word is invest in the network. I think a lot of the networks out there have been badly under-invested in, which I think is why people get frustrated when they're in stadiums or hotels or casinos. I think the world is shifting. Applications and people are becoming network-centric. And if those don't work, nothing works. And I think that's really been proven over the last couple months. If our networks can't handle the traffic and our networks can't handle what we're doing, nothing works. >> You know, you and I could do a podcast show called "No Latency"... >> (mumbles) so it'll be good. >> Zeus, thanks for coming on. I appreciate taking the time. >> No problem, John. >> Stay safe. And I want to follow up with you and get a check in further down the road, in a couple days or maybe next week, if you can. >> Yeah, looking forward to it. >> Thanks a lot. Okay, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto Studios doing the remote interviews, getting the quick stories that matter, help you out, and (mumbles) great guest there. Check out ZK Research, a great friend of theCUBE, cutting edge, knows the networking. This is an important area. The network, the users' experience is critical. Thanks for coming and watching today. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (lighthearted music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my cohost Justin Warren, this is day one of our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2019, Naveen Rao here, he's the corporate vice president and general manager of artificial intelligence, AI products group at Intel, good to see you again, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: You're very welcome, so what's going on with Intel and AI, give us the big picture. >> Yeah, I mean actually the very big picture is I think the world of computing is really shifting. The purpose of what a computer is made for is actually shifting, and I think from its very conception, from Alan Turing, the machine was really meant to be something that recapitulated intelligence, and we took sort of a divergent path where we built applications for productivity, but now we're actually coming back to that original intent, and I think that hits everything that Intel does, because we're a computing company, we supply computing to the world, so everything we do is actually impacted by AI, and will be in service of building better AI platforms, for intelligence at the edge, intelligence in the cloud, and everything in between. >> It's really come full circle, I mean, when I first started this industry, AI was the big hot topic, and really, Intel's ascendancy was around personal productivity, but now we're seeing machines replacing cognitive functions for humans, that has implications for society. But there's a whole new set of workloads that are emerging, and that's driving, presumably, different requirements, so what do you see as the sort of infrastructure requirements for those new workloads, what's Intel's point of view on that? >> Well, so maybe let's focus that on the cloud first. Any kind of machine learning algorithm typically has two phases to it, one is called training or learning, where we're really iterating over large data sets to fit model parameters. And once that's been done to a satisfaction of whatever performance metrics that are relevant to your application, it's rolled out and deployed, that phase is called inference. So these two are actually quite different in their requirements in that inference is all about the best performance per watt, how much processing can I shove into a particular time and power budget? On the training side, it's much more about what kind of flexibility do I have for exploring different types of models, and training them very very fast, because when this field kind of started taking off in 2014, 2013, typically training a model back then would take a month or so, those models now take minutes to train, and the models have grown substantially in size, so we've still kind of gone back to a couple of weeks of training time, so anything we can do to reduce that is very important. >> And why the compression, is that because of just so much data? >> It's data, the sheer amount of data, the complexity of data, and the complexity of the models. So, very broad or a rough categorization of the complexity can be the number of parameters in a model. So, back in 2013, there were, call it 10 million, 20 million parameters, which was very large for a machine learning model. Now they're in the billions, one or two billion is sort of the state of the art. To give you bearings on that, the human brain is about a three to 500 trillion model, so we're still pretty far away from that. So we got a long way to go. >> Yeah, so one of the things about these models is that once you've trained them, that then they do things, but understanding how they work, these are incredibly complex mathematical models, so are we at a point where we just don't understand how these machines actually work, or do we have a pretty good idea of, "No no no, when this model's trained to do this thing, "this is how it behaves"? >> Well, it really depends on what you mean by how much understanding we have, so I'll say at one extreme, we trust humans to do certain things, and we don't really understand what's happening in their brain. We trust that there's a process in place that has tested them enough. A neurosurgeon's cutting into your head, you say you know what, there's a system where that neurosurgeon probably had to go through a ton of training, be tested over and over again, and now we trust that he or she is doing the right thing. I think the same thing is happening in AI, some aspects we can bound and say, I have analytical methods on how I can measure performance. In other ways, other places, it's actually not so easy to measure the performance analytically, we have to actually do it empirically, which means we have data sets that we say, "Does it stand up to all the different tests?" One area we're seeing that in is autonomous driving. Autonomous driving, it's a bit of a black box, and the amount of situations one can incur on the road are almost limitless, so what we say is, for a 16 year old, we say "Go out and drive," and eventually you sort of learn it. Same thing is happening now for autonomous systems, we have these training data sets where we say, "Do you do the right thing in these scenarios?" And we say "Okay, we trust that you'll probably "do the right thing in the real world." >> But we know that Intel has partnered with AWS, I ran autonomous driving with their DeepRacer project, and I believe it's on Thursday is the grand final, it's been running for, I think it was announced on theCUBE last year, and there's been a whole bunch of competitions running all year, basically training models that run on this Intel chip inside a little model car that drives around a race track, so speaking of empirical testing of whether or not it works, lap times gives you a pretty good idea, so what have you learned from that experience, of having all of these people go out and learn how to use these ALM models on a real live race car and race around a track? >> I think there's several things, I mean one thing is, when you turn loose a number of developers on a competitive thing, you get really interesting results, where people find creative ways to use the tools to try to win, so I always love that process, I think competition is how you push technology forward. On the tool side, it's actually more interesting to me, is that we had to come up with something that was adequately simple, so that a large number of people could get going on it quickly. You can't have somebody who spends a year just getting the basic infrastructure to work, so we had to put that in place. And really, I think that's still an iterative process, we're still learning what we can expose as knobs, what kind of areas of innovation we allow the user to explore, and where we sort of walk it down to make it easy to use. So I think that's the biggest learning we get from this, is how I can deploy AI in the real world, and what's really needed from a tool chain standpoint. >> Can you talk more specifically about what you guys each bring to the table with your collaboration with AWS? >> Yeah, AWS has been a great partner. Obviously AWS has a huge ecosystem of developers, all kinds of different developers, I mean web developers are one sort of developer, database developers are another, AI developers are yet another, and we're kind of partnering together to empower that AI base. What we bring from a technological standpoint are of course the hardware, our CPUs, our AI ready now with a lot of software that we've been putting out in the open source. And then other tools like OpenVINO, which make it very easy to start using AI models on our hardware, and so we tie that in to the infrastructure that AWS is building for something like DeepRacer, and then help build a community around it, an ecosystem around it of developers. >> I want to go back to the point you were making about the black box, AI, people are concerned about that, they're concerned about explainability. Do you feel like that's a function of just the newness that we'll eventually get over, and I mean I can think of so many examples in my life where I can't really explain how I know something, but I know it, and I trust it. Do you feel like it's sort of a tempest in a teapot? >> Yeah, I think it depends on what you're talking about, if you're talking about the traceability of a financial transaction, we kind of need that maybe for legal reasons, so even for humans we do that. You got to write down everything you did, why did you do this, why'd you do that, so we actually want traceability for humans, even. In other places, I think it is really about the newness. Do I really trust this thing, I don't know what it's doing. Trust comes with use, after a while it becomes pretty straightforward, I mean I think that's probably true for a cell phone, I remember the first smartphones coming out in the early 2000s, I didn't trust how they worked, I would never do a credit card transaction on 'em, these kind of things, now it's taken for granted. I've done it a million times, and I never had any problems, right? >> It's the opposite in social media, most people. >> Maybe that's the opposite, let's not go down that path. >> I quite like Dr. Kate Darling's analogy from MIT lab, which is we already we have AI, and we're quite used to them, they're called dogs. We don't fully understand how a dog makes a decision, and yet we use 'em every day. In a collaboration with humans, so a dog, sort of replace a particular job, but then again they don't, I don't particularly want to go and sniff things all day long. So having AI systems that can actually replace some of those jobs, actually, that's kind of great. >> Exactly, and think about it like this, if we can build systems that are tireless, and we can basically give 'em more power and they keep going, that's a big win for us. And actually, the dog analogy is great, because I think, at least my eventual goal as an AI researcher is to make the interface for intelligent agents to be like a dog, to train it like a dog, reinforce it for the behaviors you want and keep pushing it in new directions that way, as opposed to having to write code that's kind of esoteric. >> Can you talk about GANs, what is GANs, what's it stand for, what does it mean? >> Generative Adversarial Networks. What this means is that, you can kind of think of it as, two competing sides of solving a problem. So if I'm trying to make a fake picture of you, that makes it look like you have no hair, like me, you can see a Photoshop job, and you can kind of tell, that's not so great. So, one side is trying to make the picture, and the other side is trying to guess whether it's fake or not. We have two neural networks that are kind of working against each other, one's generating stuff, and the other one's saying, is it fake or not, and then eventually you keep improving each other, this one tells that one "No, I can tell," this one goes and tries something else, this one says "No, I can still tell." The one that's trying with a discerning network, once it can't tell anymore, you've kind of built something that's really good, that's sort of the general principle here. So we basically have two things kind of fighting each other to get better and better at a particular task. >> Like deepfakes. >> I use that because it is relevant in this case, and that's kind of where it came from, is from GANs. >> All right, okay, and so wow, obviously relevant with 2020 coming up. I'm going to ask you, how far do you think we can take AI, two part question, how far can we take AI in the near to mid term, let's talk in our lifetimes, and how far should we take it? Maybe you can address some of those thoughts. >> So how far can we take it, well, I think we often have the sci-fi narrative out there of building killer machines and this and that, I don't know that that's actually going to happen anytime soon, for several reasons, one is, we build machines for a purpose, they don't come from an embattled evolutionary past like we do, so their motivations are a little bit different, say. So that's one piece, they're really purpose-driven. Also, building something that's as general as a human or a dog is very hard, and we're not anywhere close to that. When I talked about the trillions of parameters that a human brain has, we might be able to get close to that from a engineering standpoint, but we're not really close to making those trillions of parameters work together in such a coherent way that a human brain does, and efficient, human brain does that in 20 watts, to do it today would be multiple megawatts, so it's not really something that's easily found, just laying around. Now how far should we take it, I look at AI as a way to push humanity to the next level. Let me explain what that means a little bit. Simple equation I always sort of write down, is people are like "Radiologists aren't going to have a job." No no no, what it means is one radiologist plus AI equals 100 radiologists. I can take that person's capabilities and scale it almost freely to millions of other people. It basically increases the accessibility of expertise, we can scale expertise, that's a good thing. It makes, solves problems like we have in healthcare today. All right, that's where we should be going with this. >> Well a good example would be, when, and probably part of the answer's today, when will machines make better diagnoses than doctors? I mean in some cases it probably exists today, but not broadly, but that's a good example, right? >> It is, it's a tool, though, so I look at it as more, giving a human doctor more data to make a better decision on. So, what AI really does for us is it doesn't limit the amount of data on which we can make decisions, as a human, all I can do is read so much, or hear so much, or touch so much, that's my limit of input. If I have an AI system out there listening to billions of observations, and actually presenting data in a form that I can make better decisions on, that's a win. It allows us to actually move science forward, to move accessibility of technologies forward. >> So keeping the context of that timeframe I said, someday in our lifetimes, however you want to define that, when do you think that, or do you think that driving your own car will become obsolete? >> I don't know that it'll ever be obsolete, and I'm a little bit biased on this, so I actually race cars. >> Me too, and I drive a stick, so. >> I kind of race them semi-professionally, so I don't want that to go away, but it's the same thing, we don't need to ride horses anymore, but we still do for fun, so I don't think it'll completely go away. Now, what I think will happen is that commutes will be changed, we will now use autonomous systems for that, and I think five, seven years from now, we will be using autonomy much more on prescribed routes. It won't be that it completely replaces a human driver, even in that timeframe, because it's a very hard problem to solve, in a completely general sense. So, it's going to be a kind of gentle evolution over the next 20 to 30 years. >> Do you think that AI will change the manufacturing pendulum, and perhaps some of that would swing back to, in this country, anyway, on-shore manufacturing? >> Yeah, perhaps, I was in Taiwan a couple of months ago, and we're actually seeing that already, you're seeing things that maybe were much more labor-intensive before, because of economic constraints are becoming more mechanized using AI. AI as inspection, did this machine install this thing right, so you have an inspector tool and you have an AI machine building it, it's a little bit like a GAN, you can think of, right? So this is happening already, and I think that's one of the good parts of AI, is that it takes away those harsh conditions that humans had to be in before to build devices. >> Do you think AI will eventually make large retail stores go away? >> Well, I think as long as there are humans who want immediate satisfaction, I don't know that it'll completely go away. >> Some humans enjoy shopping. >> Naveen: Some people like browsing, yeah. >> Depends how fast you need to get it. And then, my last AI question, do you think banks, traditional banks will lose control of the payment systems as a result of things like machine intelligence? >> Yeah, I do think there are going to be some significant shifts there, we're already seeing many payment companies out there automate several aspects of this, and reducing the friction of moving money. Moving money between people, moving money between different types of assets, like stocks and Bitcoins and things like that, and I think AI, it's a critical component that people don't see, because it actually allows you to make sure that first you're doing a transaction that makes sense, when I move from this currency to that one, I have some sense of what's a real number. It's much harder to defraud, and that's a critical element to making these technologies work. So you need AI to actually make that happen. >> All right, we'll give you the last word, just maybe you want to talk a little bit about what we can expect, AI futures, or anything else you'd like to share. >> I think it's, we're at a really critical inflection point where we have something that works, basically, and we're going to scale it, scale it, scale it to bring on new capabilities. It's going to be really expensive for the next few years, but we're going to then throw more engineering at it and start bringing it down, so I start seeing this look a lot more like a brain, something where we can start having intelligence everywhere, at various levels, very low power, ubiquitous compute, and then very high power compute in the cloud, but bringing these intelligent capabilities everywhere. >> Naveen, great guest, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> You're really welcome, all right, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest, Dave Vellante for Justin Warren, you're watching theCUBE live from AWS re:Invent 2019. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube covering your storage Accelerate 2019 Brought to you by pure storage. >> How do y'all welcome back Thio, the Cube leader In live coverage we're covering day to a pure accelerate 19 Lisa Martin With Day Volonte Welcoming to the cue for the first time from SG Mark Peters principal analyst and practice >> Oh, my apologies. So young. >> I wish I wish that was true. >> In fact, one of the first analysts I think that's true if not the first analyst ever on the Q. But, >> well, I'll say Welcome back. Thank you. We're glad to have you here. So you've been with Ishii for quite a while, You know, the storage industry inside and out, I'm sure pure. Just about to celebrate their 10th anniversary. Yesterday we heard lots of news, which is always nice for us to have father to talk about. But I'd love to get your take on this disruptive company. What they've been able to achieve in their 1st 10 years going directly through is Dave's been saying the last two days driving a truck there am sees, install, base, back of the day, your thoughts on how they've been able to achieve what they have. >> That'll last me to talk about something I really want to talk about. And I think it addresses your question. How have they been able to do it? It's by being different. Andi, I don't know. I mean, obviously you do a stack of into sheer and maybe other people have talked about that. But that is the end. When I say different, I don't necessarily mean technology. I have a kind of standard riff in this business that we get so embroiled in the technology. Do not for one second think it's not important, but we get so embroiled in that that we missed the human element or the emotional element on dhe. I think that's important. So they were very different. They created, you know, these thes armies of fans who just bought into what they did. Now, of course, that was based on initially bringing flash to the market making flasher Fordham. Well, they've extended that here with the sea announcement and other things as well, so I don't want to just focus on that, but you know, they continue to do things differently with the technology, But I think what really made them an attractive company and why they've survived 10 years on her now big sizable is because they were a different sort of company to deal with. >> Are you at all surprised that the fourth accelerate is in Austin, Texas? Dell's backyard? Yes. Well, they're disruptive. They're different. They're bold. We're okay, >> you see, But But also, did you go to the other three? >> Uh, the last two. I was trying to remind >> myself where they were. I know one was kind of on a pier in a ballpark in San Francisco. One words. You remember the one that was in that you Worf, But that was a a rusting, so cool it was. But it was a metaphor in a rusting spinning desk, right. But it was also such a different sort of place on, So I probably was also a few it D m c. But I agree. And then the last one was in some sort of constantly. Yes, So >> they were all >> different. And so I Yes, I know this is Dell's backyard. Probably literally, because I'm sure Michael owns a lot of the place. It's also kind of very normal place and so there's a little bit of me that I don't want to use the world worry. But as you grow up and of course, we've got the 10 year anniversary, we're in Austin. What's the tagline of Austin? >> I don't know. No. Keep Austin weird. Okay, >> I >> don't want to suggest appears weird, but they were always a little different, I said. That's why I think they were attracted as much as anything. Yes, that's why I had the hordes of admiring fans, all wearing their orange socks and T shirts and cheering on DDE as they get older as they get more mature as they expand their portfolio. Charlie was on stage talking not so much about scale the problem when he was asked, but more about complexity. As you get more complex, you actually get more normal on, So I don't know that weird is the word, but a bit like Austin pure needs to keep your interesting. >> I like that >> Very interesting. So >> you and I, >> we've been around a while. We were kind of students of the industry. I was commenting earlier that it's just to me very impressive that this company has achieved a new definition of escape velocity receiving a billion dollars show. First company since Nana to do it, I gotta listed three. Park couldn't do it. Compelling data domain isolani ecological left hand. Really good cos all very successful companies. Uh, >> what do you think? It's >> all coming out of >> the dot com crash. Maybe that pay part of it. Pure kind of came out of the, you know, the recession. Why >> do you >> think Pure has been able to achieve that? That you know, four x three par, for example in terms of revenues. And it's got a ways to go. They probably do 1.7 this year. I think they have aspirations for five on enough there. Publicly stated that they probably have, right? Of course. Why wouldn't they thoughts on why they were able to achieve that? What were the sort of factors genuinely know? Having no idea what you were gonna ask me. And now actually, listening to question let me You've just made me think of something that I had not really thought. So I took so long to ask the question formulated. And you are so, um, you used the word escape velocity. Let's think about planes. I mean, you know, I think it's a V one, isn't it to take off, Mitch? Maybe not the same as escape, which is in the skies. But you get the point. How long to really take off? Be independently airborne? They gave themselves. I don't know how much was by design default how it really happened? I don't know. They had an immensely long runway. You think the whole conversation about pure for years and years was Oh, yeah, yeah, they're making loads of revenue, but they lose 80 cents every time they get 50. That was the conversation for years and years. I know they've now turned that corner, and I think the difference. Actually, the more I think about it, yes. You can talk about product. Yes, you can talk about the experience. I think those things are both part of it. But the other companies you named had cool things too. They all had cool products you had. What was it? The autopilot thing with compelling. And they had lots of people cheering. Actually, in this building, I think three part was yellow and kind of cool in a different part of the market. and disruptive. But they were both trying to get to the exit fast. Whether the exit was being bought or whether it was going under. I don't know it was gonna be one or the other, and for both of them, they got bought. I don't think pure had that same intention, and it's certainly got funding and backers that allowed it to take longer. So that's a really good point. I think there's a There's a new Silicon Valley playbook. You saw it with service. Now, with Frank's limits like the Silicon Valley Mafia's Sweetman Dietzen, Bush re at Work Day, they all raised a boatload of cash and a sacrifice profits for for growth. I mean, I remember Dave Scott telling me, you know, when he came on, the board was saying, Hey, we're ready to you know, we're prepared to raise 30 million. He said, I need 80 eighties chump change today compared to what these guys were raising. Well, I mean, I think I mean, they pretty quickly raised hundreds of millions, didn't they? They weren't scraping by on 50 or 80 million, which which is what you see. You sort of want one more thought just this escape velocity idea, I think is interesting because the other thing about escape velocity is partly how long you take runway orbit, whatever. But it's the payload on, you know, The more the payload, the longer it takes the take off the ground or the more thrust you need thrust in this case, his money again. But if you think about it, this is another thing where he and I gotta say, we've been doing this a long time. The storage industry over decades has been one of the easiest industries to enter on one of the hardest to actually do well. Why is that? Because the payload is heavy. It's easy to make a box that works fast, big whatever you want in your garage. Two men on one application working for a day. It's really hard to be interoperable with every app, every other system, operational needs and so on and so forth. And so the payload to be successful. I think they understood that, too. So, you know, they didn't let ourselves get distracted by like the initial shiny, glittery we need to get out of this business. >> I love the parallels with payloads and Rockets. Because, of course, we had Leland Melvin inner keynote this morning. I'm a former NASA geek. Talk to us about your thoughts on their cloud strategy, the evolution of the partnership with a W s. We talked about that yesterday. Sort of this customers bringing this forcing function together, but being able to sort of simplify and give customers this pure management playing the software layer wherever their data is your thoughts on how their position themselves for multi cloud hybrid world. >> Okay, two thoughts, one cloud. Then you also used the word simplicity. So I want to talk about both of those things if I can, Um I don't know. I'm sorry. This is not a very good answer. I think it's the truth. I mean, you can't exist in this world if you haven't got a cloud story, and it better be hybrid or pub. Oh, are multi, whichever you prefer. I think those have very distinct meanings, by the way, but we would be here for an hour and 1/2. It'll be a cube special to really get into that. However, So you've got to do this. I mean, there is just, you know, none of the clients they're dealing with. Almost none. That's not research. I'll talk research in a second but glib statement. Everyone's got a cloud strategy. It doesn't matter which analyst company you put up the data, we'll do it. I want to talk about a cup, some research we've done in a second. But everyone will tell you a high number of people who have a cloud first strategy, whether that's overall or just the new applications or whatever. So they've got to do it. What's crucial to whether or not they succeed is not the AWS branding, because everyone's got a W s branding me people that they don't work with or will not work within the next year or two. I mean, I'm sure there's one God you look like you're anxious, you're on a roll. But simplicity is really important. So David knows we do a lot of research early yesterday, one of our cornerstone piece of researchers think all the spending intentions we do every year. One of the questions this year's Bean for a couple of years now is basically saying simple question Excuse. The overuse of the word is how much more complex is I t you know, in your experience, more or less complex. And it was two years ago. I t broadly and you know that I love this question. You know the answer on dhe. 66% of people say it is more complex now than it was two years ago. People don't want complexity. We all know that there's not enough skills around the research to back that up. A swell on dso Simplicity is really important cause who was sitting in this seat before May I think I will say that the company here was founded on simplicity. That was the point. They were to be the apple of storage. I think that's why people love them. They were just very easy to use on dso coming finally back to your question. If they can do this and keep it simple, then they have a better chance of success than others. But how do you define successful them isn't keeping their customers are getting new ones. That's a challenge. >> They do have a very high retention rate. I want to say like 140% but things like we have our dinner for two U percent attention. Yes. How did >> you do? So? So this is is interesting. It's actually 100 and 50% renewal rate. Oh, by the Mike Scarpelli CFO Math of renewal rates on a dollar value on net dollar value renewal rate subscriptions. Mike Scarpelli was the CFO of service. Now invented this model and service now had, like, 100 and whatever 1500 whatever 27. And so it's a revenue based renewal. Makes sense. Sorry for one second you're retaining more people than you >> go. 101 100 >> 50% is insane. 105 >> percent is great. Yeah, 150% is interrupted. Your question. >> Well, I'm just saying >> it's good. Good nuance, >> Yes, Thanks for clarifying its. You know, companies can say whether it's one. Appears customers are pure themselves or competitors. We are cloud. First, we have a cloud for strategy, and a company like pure can say we deliver simplicity, those air marketing terms until they're actually put in the field and delivered. So in your perspective, how does pure take what I T professionals are saying? Things are so much more complex these days? How does a pure commit and say simple, seamless, sustainable, like Charlie, Giancarlo said yesterday. And actually make that a reality. Well, I >> mean, obviously, that's their challenge, and that's what they have work to do to some degree. And this comes back to what I was saying that to some degree it becomes self fulfilling because your that's why your customers come back with more money because they bought into this on. So as long as they're kept happy, they're probably not going to go and look at 20 other people. I'm not saying they never had any of that simplicity to start off with, but it's very interesting if you go to a pure event, their customers and this might be sacrilege sitting in this environment don't talk about the product. They talk about the company, >> right? >> The experience There's that word again, off being appear customer yes on So they're into it. They brought into whatever this is, and as long as the product, please do not strike me down is good enough. I'm not saying that's all it is. I think it's a lot better that, but as long as it's good enough, but you're really well looked after a few minutes ago, when I'm saying that's why I think this market is about so much more than just how fast can you make the box? How big can you make the box? How smart can you make the box? All of those are interesting, But ultimately, I'm only looking at Dave because he's so old. Ultimately, technology is a leapfrog game. Yeah, branding is not >> Beaver >> s O. So that's a good point. But we've not seen the competitors be able to leap frog pure or be able to neutralize them the way, for example, that DMC was able to somewhat neutralize three par by saying, Oh, yeah, we have virtual ization, too, you know, are thin provisioning. Rather. Yeah. And even though they had a thin provisioning bolt on, it was it was good enough. Yes, they did the check box. You haven't seen the competitors be able to do that here? I'm not saying they won't, but are they? I think, um, I was going to say basically this on my MBA, but I don't have one, so I can't say that, but, you know, I've read that. Read the books. If you look at Harvard Business School cases, I think the mistake made by the competition was to assume that Pierre would go away, that they would each try it or that it would fail on will make fun of the fact they don't make any money for the first few years on dhe. You know, the people going to them, we're gonna be sadly mistaken when they can't handle these features, whether that be cloud or whether that be analytics or fresh blades or whatever else again to add on. They thought they would just go away that there are great parallels in history when you let competition in and you just keep thinking at each point they're going to go away. Spot the accent. British motorcycle industry. When the Japanese came in, they literally said, Well, let them. There are records. We'll let them have the 50 cc market because we don't really care about that. But we'll make the big bikes Well, Okay, well, let them have 152 100 cc because really, that doesn't matter. And 10 years later, there was no industry well, and I think what happened with the emcee in particular because, let's face it, pure hired a bunch of DMC wraps. They took your product and, as I've said before, they drove a truck to the the symmetric V n X install base Emcee responded by buying X extreme io and they said, You know what? We're sick of losing the pure. We're gonna go really aggressive into our own accounts and we're gonna keep them with flash. And then what happened is their accounts. It Hey, we're good. We don't actually really need more stores because the emcee tried to keep it is trying to keep both lines alive. And now they're conflicted, pure. You know, I had a what? We're mission. >> You thought not up a great point. Sorry. Just just because I think >> thing about that is if you look at how e. M. C using my words accurately usedto act, I think you said that, too. So I'm not criticizing Adele is they were exceptional organized marketing organization. We go that way. And if you're not going that way, you got a big problem both as a custom, Miranda's UN employees. But the problem with that is also is that way would sometimes become that way, and then it become that way on the product depending what was doing well. So, for example, they had, you know, tens of thousands of feet, all marching to the extreme. I owe beat for a few quarters, and then they would go off on to the next product pure. Just carried on, marching to its beat down that runway escape velocity question >> appoint you brought up a minute ago before we wrap her. That I think is really interesting is that you write your customers talk about the experience. I think we were talking with a customer yesterday. Dave was asking, Well, what technologies are you think he started talking about workloads? So when we're at other events, you hear other names of boxes brought up here to your point. It is all about the experience so interesting and how they're Can you continuing to just be different, but to wrap things up since they're in my ear, we're almost that time. I just wanna take a minute to ask you kind of upcoming research. What are some of the things that you're working on? Their really intriguing you and SG land. I think right >> now, from my perspective, I mean, as a company would continue to do 27,000 different things because there's so much going on in the market. So whether that's security is massive area of focus right now, even improvements in networking. So it's not just the regular run of the mill, you know, Bigger, faster, cheaper. Which is always there s o A. I, of course, in all these again, you may both know you will now doesn't mean we're always looking at buying intentions rather than counting boxes. So it's really where people are moving over the next few years. That said to May. I think what's really interesting is to other things. Number one is to what extent can. I don't think we can really measure this easily. But to what extent can we get people talking about pure again to acknowledge that emotions, attitudes, experiences are an important part of this business? I'm old enough that I'm not scared of saying it, and I think pure is a company is not scared of saying it, you know, I think a lot of companies don't want to admit that Andi all know that they have different corporate cultures and mantras and views on their customers reflect that two on The other thing just generally is the future of I t. As a whole. I know that. So, I mean, I'm doing this because none of us really know what that is, but, you know, clearly way gotta stop talking about the cloud At some point. It's just part of I t. It's not a thing as such. It's just another resource that you bring to bear. I don't know that we're yet at that point, but that's >> got to happen. >> Interesting. Thanks for looking. I'm imagine this was a crystal ball. But Mark, I wish we had more time because I know we could keep talking. But it's been a pleasure to have you >> got the whole multi cloud hybrid cloud for an hour and 1/2. >> We come back, we'll have that discussion. Like what I'll means and yeah, back anytime. >> Excellent. Thank you for joining David. Me. Thank you for David. Dante. I'm Lisa Martin. You were watching the Cube from pure accelerate 19

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World Here at the Sands Expo at the Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have Sean Kinney joining the program. He is a senior director primary storage marketing at Delhi emcee Thank you so much. Thrilled to redirect from Boston, >> the home of the universe, >> it's indeed well, we would say so so and so lots of news coming out this morning yesterday. Talk about some of the mean. If you want to start with talking about the storage platform, the mid range storage market in general sort of lay the foundation What you're seeing, what you're hearing, and then how the new the new products fit in with what with what customers air needing. We'LL >> break that a couple pieces. I believe that the mid range of the storage market is the most competitive. They're the most players. There are different architectures and implementations, and it's the biggest part of the market. About fifty eight percent or so so that attracts a lot of investments in competition. So what we announced today, it was the deli emcee Unity X t Siri's and that built on all the momentous on the success we had with Unity, which we actually announce basically the same conference three years ago. So we've sold forty thousand systems Good nowhere market leader, and the first part is the external storage market. It's declined, continues to be exaggerated. One of the Ellis firms predicted it wasn't gonna grow it all last year. Well, crew sixteen percent actually grew three billion dollars. It's with unity. Its original design points like the sort of Day one engineering principles were really around a couple of things. One was a true, unified architecture being told to do. Block storage, file storage and VM. Where've evils that was built in, not bolted on like no gateways, no extra window licensing, no limitations on file system size. The second was around operational simplicity and making it easy for a customer to install easier for custom manage. He was a customer of use remotely manage, and then we took that forward by adding all inclusive software, making it easy to own like not him to worry about software contracts. So all of that goodness is rolling forward in the engineering challenge that we took on with E x t wass. You know, a lot of mid range systems switch of those that have an active, passive architectural design. It's hard to do everything at once. Process, application data run, data reduction, run data services like snapshots of replications, all without significantly impacting performance. And a lot of cases, our competitors and other platforms have to make compromises. They say. Okay, if you want performance turned this function off. What was that challenge that our engineers took on? And that's what we came up with. No compromise for midrange storage. That's unity. Extinct. >> Yeah, Shawn, it's it's really interesting you could I could probably do a history lesson on some of the space thing back to, you know, early days when you know we were first to DMC. It was like, Oh, the data general product line. You know, getting merged in very competitive landscape is, as you said, most companies had multiple solutions, you know, unity in the name of it was to talk about Dell and AMC coming together, but what I want you coming on is there was often, you know, okay, somebody came out with, like, a new a new idea, and they sold that as a product. And then it got baked into a feature, and we saw that happened again and again and again. And the storage market, what are some of those key drivers is toe. You know what customers look for? How you differentiate yourself. Are we past that? You know, product feature churn way in the platform phase. Now, you know, we always say it would be great if software was just independent of some of these. But there's a reason why we still have storage raise. Despite the fact that, you know, it's been, you know, it's been nibbled at by some of the other, you know, cloud and hyper converge. You know, talk applications. >> Yeah. Uh, let's say that a couple ways in that, especially in the mid range. Our customers expect the system to do everything you know. It has to do everything Well, it doesn't get to be specialized for a lot of our customers. It is thie infrastructure. It is that data capital, which is the lifeblood of their business. So the first thing is it has to do everything. The second thing I would say is that because it has to do everything and one feature isn't really gonna break through anymore. The architecture's the intelligence, the reliability, the resiliency that takes years of hardening. Okay, the new competitors has to start a ground zero all over again. So I would say that that's part of the second thing I would say is, it's about the experience inside the box from the feature function and outside the box. How do we get a better experience? And for us, that starts with Cloud I. Q. It's a storage, monitoring and analytics platform that you can really you have infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand. You're not tied to a terminal, and if you want to be, of course you can. But you can now remotely monitor your entire storage environment. Unity, Power Max SC Extreme Io. Today we announce connect trick support for sandwiches in VM support. So we're going broader and deeper, you know, as well as making its water. So it's hard to have one feature breakthrough when you need the first ten to even get in the game. >> Well, as you said, for for these customers, this infrastructure has to do it all. And and so how do you manage expectations? And how do you How do you work with your customers? Maybe who have unrealistic expectations about what it can do. >> Our customers are the best. I mean, everybody says it, but because they push us and they push the product and they want to see how far it can go and they want to test it. So I love them. I love because they push us to be better. They push us to think in new ways. Uh, but yeah, there are different architectures. Have differences. Thumbs Power Max is an enterprise. High end, resilient architecture. It's never going to hit a ten thousand dollar price point like the architecture wasn't designed. And so for our customers that wants all these high end features like an end to end envy me implementation. Well, that's actually why we have power, Max. So you don't want to build another Power Macs with unity. So while the new unit e x t, it is envy Emmy ready and that'LL give us a performance boost We're balancing the benefits of envy. Emmy with the economics, the price point that come with it. >> All right, So, Sean, talk about Get front from the user standpoint, you know, we've We've talked about simplicity for a long time. I remember used to be contest. It's like All right, well, you know, bring in the kids and has he how fast they can go through the wizard Or, you know, he had a hyper converts infrastructure. It should just be a button you press and I mean had clouded. Just kind of does it. When we look at the mid range, you know, where are we in that? You know, management. You talked about Cloud like you, you know, how do we measure and how to customers look at you know how invisible their infrastructure is? >> I think every I don't think any marketing person worth his salt would say, My product is hard to use. It's easy to use the word simplicity, but I think it's we're evolving. And again, it's that outside the box experience now, the element manager Unisphere for um, for unity is very easy to use with tons of tests and research. But it's going beyond that is how do we plug into the VM? Where tools. How do we plug? How do we support containers? How do we support playbooks with Ansel? Forget it. It's moving the storage. Management's out of storage. Still remember, twenty years ago, we helped create the concept of a storage admin. You know, things that coming full circle. And except for the biggest companies, you know that it's becoming of'em where admin that wants to manage the whole environment. >> Okay, I wonder if you could walk us up the stack a little bit. You know, when you talk about these environments at the keynote this morning, we're talking about a lot of new application. You're talking about a I and M l. What's the applications, Stace? That's the sweet spot for unity. And, you know, you know, you mentioned kind of container ization in there, you know, Cloud native. How much does that tie into the mid range today? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to that. All of the above. Its some database, some file sharing, some management and movement of work loads to the cloud. Whether be cloud tearing. What? Running disaster recovery As a service where you know you need the replication You just don't want to pay for and manage and owned that second sight in the cloud. We'Ll do that as a service. So I, uh I think it's again. It goes back to that being able to do everything and with the rise of the Internet of things with the rise of new workloads, new workload types, they're just more uses for data and data continues to be the light flooding of business. But it you need the foundation. You need the performance. And with X t now twice as fast as the previous generation, you need the data reduction with compression. Indeed, implication with extra that's now up to five to one. You need the overall system efficiency so the system doesn't have a ton of overhead, and you need multiple paths to the cloud For those customers that already ofwork loads in the cloud. No, they're going to go there in the next twelve months or know that they have to at least think about it and so that we future proof them across all boys. So you need those sort of foundational aspects and we believe we're basically best in class across all of them. But then you get more >> advanced. I want to get your thoughts on where this market is going. As you said that analysts that the news of its demise has been greatly exaggerated, analysts are just not getting it right. I mean, they said it wasn't gonna grow a gross. Sixty grew sixteen percent. Why are they getting it wrong? Are there and also do? What do you see as sort of the growth trajectory of this market? I'm not >> sure they're getting it wrong. And they may be underestimating the new use cases and the new ways customers using data What I think we should probably do a better job of as an industry is realize that there is a lot of space for both best of breed infrastructure and converged infrastructure and things like Piper converge. It's not an or conversation, it's an and conversation, and no one thinks that I love working about Del Technologies is we have the aunt, you know, for us, it's not one or the other, and that's all we could sell. We have the aunt, and that allows us to really better serve our customers because over eighty percent of our customers have both. >> So, Sean, you mentioned working for Del Technologies. There are a couple people that have been at this show for a while there. Like boy, they didn't spend a lot of time in the keynotes talking about storage. Bring us in a little bit. And inside there, you know, still a deli emcee. You got still a storage company. >> Still, you've seen the name isn't there very much. So you know that we wouldn't be spending all this time and R and D and you've heard about the investments we've made in our stores sales organization and our partner organization. You don't do those investments. If you're not committed to storage it, you know, way struggled for a while. We're losing share for awhile, but that ship has turned for the last four quarters. We've grown market share in revenue, but we're pretty good trajectory. I like our chances. >> I want to ask you about something else that was brought up in the keynote. And that is this idea of a very changing workforce. The workforce is now has five generations in it. Uh, it is a much younger workforce in a in a work first that wants to work in different ways. Collaborate in different ways. Uh, how are you personally dealing with that with your team, Maybe a dispersed team. How are you managing new forms of creativity and collaboration and innovation in the workforce? And then how are you helping your customers think about these challenges? >> You know, I, uh, maybe I can't write for the Harvard Business Review. For me personally, this is my approach that is one guy's opinion for me. It's about people like you want to manage the project, not the people I expected. I trust my staff, and they range from twenty two to sixty two to be adults in to get the job done and whether they do it in the office or at home, whether they do it Tuesday at two o'Clock or Tuesday at nine o'Clock. If it's due Wednesday, I'm gonna trust them to get it done. So it's, uh, there's a little of professionals. It does require sometimes more empathy and some understanding of flexibility. But I participate in that change to I don't want to miss my kid's game, and I wanna make sure I bring my daughter to the dentist, So I, uh, I think it's for the best, because we're blurring the lines of on and off. I could see again. I don't write for our business, really a time in the next few years where vacation time is no longer tracked. I don't think that far away >> a lot of companies don't even have it at all. I mean, it's >> just you >> get your work done, do what you need to do. >> So I love it because then we come back to being more of it. It's even more about, um, a meritocracy and performance and delivery and execution. So, uh, I think it's only the better and more productive employees, happier employees. It's actually reinforcing cycle. What I found, >> and that's good for business. That's a bottom line. >> Employees. You good >> for Harvard Business Review. >> So, Sean, last thing I wanted to get is for people that didn't make it to show. Give them a beginning of flavor about what's happening from a mid range to orange around the environment here and tell us, how much time have you been spending at the Fenway and, you know, pro Basketball Hall of Fame sex mons you know, in the Expo Hall there because I know what a big sports got. You >> are not enough is the first question, quite simply, the best mid range storage just got better now the market leader, when all the advantages, we have immunity. We just rolled them forward to a new, more efficient, better performing platform. So it's, ah, our customers are gonna love over bringing forward, and I think it's our sales. Guys will find it much easier to sell. So we're, uh, we're thrilled with today's announcements. Were thrilled with where the marketplaces were thrilled with our market position and best is yet to come. >> Well, we were thrilled to have you on the cute. So thank you so much for coming on. >> It's always a pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stew Minutemen. We will have much more of the cubes Live coverage from Del Technologies World coming up in just a little bit

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with too many man, You're watching The Cube Life from Del Technology. World twenty nineteen were here with about fifteen thousand other people, about four thousand Del Technologies Partners. But how? And now for the first time, we're pleased to welcome the CEO of Virtus Dream. Rory Reid Worry. It's great to have you joining student me on the Cube today. >> It is Lisa. It's a pleasure and riel honor to be on the show today. >> So this morning's Kino we were talking before we went live starts with lots of energy news announcements, partnerships, collaboration, walking, you. You're in industry veteran, which will dig into, I'm sure during the segment. >> Thirty five years. >> Thirty five years. That's >> amazing. Thirty five years is how old tells going tto be tthe when the next week. >> Thirty five years. >> That's a magic number. Congratulations. Thank you Virtus Dream. Talk to us about the integration you lead those efforts. Massive acquisition. What's going on now? What's exciting? You >> Well, I think it's kind of amazing what happened in the integration. This is the largest Tak integration in the world. Sixty seven billion dollars. Shortly after Del goes private, they're going to acquire Delhi, M. C, I, E, M, C and V M, where the huge undertaking thousands of people work on it less than ten months from the time it was announced. October of fifteen. It goes live on September seven sixteen. That's amazing, and our customers reacted and are partners in a just a kn amazing way. It's almost like it didn't happen. You know, I'm biased. I think it went really well. But look at the numbers. Look at the reaction in the marketplace. The growth, the synergy, the revenue, the kinds of impact. And then you see today at Del Adele Technology World. Michael does a keynote. He talked about the impact. Karen comes up and talks about giving back and the work that we're doing around Pathetic and printing three D and artificial intelligence based your limbs. I If you're not fired up about that, you can't get energized. And then you top that off with just a GN amazing discussion about the partnership between VM wear and Del Technologies on the Del Cloud And then the work that we're doing with Microsoft and Satya comes on stage with Michael and >> Pie. I >> mean, this is a power pack woman, and we put this company just three years ago together and look at the kind of impact its house in the industry. Amazing, just amazing. >> So worry. Yeah, I think Jeff Clarke said it well this morning. He said, If you're into technology and can't get excited by what's going on, you know, May maybe you're you know, it's kind of you know, my words. Maybe you're not in the right space. You've got a few of the interesting pieces of the Del Technologies family they talk about. You know, the massive acquisition of DMC with V M. Where Purchase dream Not such a small acquisition itself. Over a billion dollars, one point two billion dollars to billion dollars. And, you know, I remember back Bhumi wasn't out that long ago either, for you know, it was less than a billion dollars, but it was a >> ***. *** is an amazing set of technology. I know you're going tohave Chris McNab on later today. Chris and I have worked on what he called the gloomy acceleration plan the last two years. Way with that team have put in a strategy around taking advantage of just an amazing set of technology. Boo Mi's cloud integration software, I believe, is the absolute best on the planet and the work that we've done. We've doubled that business in the last eighteen months. We've added probably a billion dollars of market valuation they've reached. They add thousands of customers every quarter to that portfolio, the reach and touch and how that's going to drive the way data and applications talk in the cloud era. It's just at the beginning of the impact there. And then you look at a company like Virtus Dream. It's the leader in mission Critical application Work loads on the cloud. This is a company born on the cloud. It's based on the cloud nine years ago. It's the one hand to shake. Customers choose us with their most important applications and data because they need to know that it's gonna work and that we have the experience to Planet Tau migrated, optimize it and bring it to the cloud to cloud of fire and that were the single hand to shake. What's different about us is we have an eye *** way had the infrastructure as a service. We have a software stack with extreme software. Take time. I get fired up about Bloomie's technology Virtus Stream Extreme software. Amazing. And then on top of that, you layer on a white glove said of application and professional services. Very cool. But what was the coolest? Where some of the announcements today and how we're playing with its all of'Em went bare VM were based on, uh, Virtus Dream. And when they announced the partnership with Azure and the idea of V M wear work, clothes on Azure that's actually running will be running and running on. And we've been working with Microsoft and IBM where a virtuous string and it's and then and then you know >> when you say it's running on Virtue Stream, Is it your data centers? Is it part of the soft? Oh no, The >> data, the data centers air all Adger. It's using our software and our technology team have built that said, a technology that we've been in partnership for months with Microsoft and IBM, where to create this offering as one of the Cloud Service partners foundational. It's pretty foundation and you know it. But at the end of a think about del technology is one in the ingredient brand. Sure, that's foundational. This is a company built for the next ten years. Del Technologies. And the impact it's gonna have in the industry is just beginning. Where is it going to go? You saw it this morning in the Kino. Michael has some big, big ideas, >> so worry. A lot of times we look at things in the industry and people is like, Oh, it's binary. It's public cloud or Private Cloud. I've worked with a lot of service providers, and when you look at the world multi cloud, it's really more of an end in putting. That is together. Many of the service providers that air You know where I am seeing her del partners before you know, three or four years ago Oh my gosh, A ws and Microsoft. Well, okay. A partner a little like us off, But Amazons, the enemy. And today it's well, I have our stuff and I'm partnering and I probably have connections between them. Help us. Paint is toe where virtue stream fits into this. You know this spectrum today? >> Your stew. You're on the right point about multi cloud. We just did a press release today at a virtuous stream where we partnered with Forrester. We do, ah, whole industry study on the cloud and the future of the cloud multi cloud ninety seven percent of customers. We spoke to that force or spoke to have a multi cloud strategy for their mission. Critical applications at eighty nine percent of them plan to increase their spend on multi cloud mission critical activities. How we play in that space is that we're the trusted player we've done over eighteen hundred ASAP migration. Where an epic health care leader go talk to Novaya. They asked them how it's gone on Virtus Dreams Cloud amazing set of mission critical capability. But what we're taking is there's this infrastructure is a service in the software stack on the services that software stack is extreme. What we want to do is enable that software stack to manage data and applications in a private environment, a public environment on Prem, and it's all based on the M where so it ties directly into Jeff and Pat's announcement This morning, where they talked about Veum, where being a platform and how they're going to create the Del Cloud on that platform. Virtus Dream is one of the destinations for mission critical workload, but because it's based on VM, where technology it seamlessly begins to integrate across that and allows us to manage data and applications linking our extreme software with the BM, where capabilities that allowed that data and the AP eyes to exchange data and flow freely in a multi cloud world, ninety seven percent of the customers and the forest to research we just released are going to go multi cloud for mission critical, not just based. This's for their most critical applications data >> so future your energy is outstanding in your enthusiasm for this. What are some of the early reactions that customers air having to some of this exciting, groundbreaking news that's coming out today? What do your expectations? >> Well, you know, I spent time with customers, uh, every week and we talk about it, but I've actually talked to customers this day today about it. They found the energy, the passion that the technology that was introduced this morning was sort of game changing because to Stu's point, they are going in a multi cloud era and they know it's going to be multi cloud. And there's going to be on Prem public private. It's gonna link altogether. They need the technology trusted advisors that can work with them, not with a single answer. That only fits one way. Adele Technologies. You want to run on Prem? We have those capabilities you want to run on public count. We have those technologies you want to run in a hybrid kind of solution or a private cloud. We're going to create the ability with these announcements today, tow link it together and create the ability to do it seamlessly, efficiently, productively, cost effectively that allows Our customers too dramatically transformed their business to take them on that digital transformation to disrupt their industries and win. Because when our customers win, we win. That's what we do. Adelle Technologies, we and able our customers to win, and it's all about the customers every single day. You talked about the integration when Michael said every day when we were doing the integration, he said on every decision. When we were building the company, we basically built a new company level by level, he said. The guiding principle that every decision is customer in How does this matter of the customer? How does it make a difference for the customer? And I think we live that everyday. There's fifty fifteen thousand of our closest friends here in Las Vegas there, pretty excited to be here. And why did they take that time? Because we're one of their trusted partners on their digital transformation journey. That's not a bad place to be. If you can't get excited about that, >> Yeah, I'm Rory in the wrong industry. It was amazing to me how fast that immigration work happened. We talked to Howard Elias a bunch along the journey. I'm glad we finally get to you, get you on the record for >> Howard's in the Be's and Guy. What an awesome partner. >> And so you know, one of them's dried. It's ten months is you know, if this thing had taken twenty four months, so much of the industry would have changed by the time from when you went into when you went out. So I guess How do you how do you look at kind of those massive waves versus you know where you need to be with products today in the market and where customers are because you know the danger. You say I want to listen to the customers. Well, you get the old saying if you ask customers they wanted, you know Ah, faster buggy. You know how right you are so right, You make sure you're, you know, hitting that next wave and keeping up with it. I look at you know, all the pieces you have of the puzzle that is the family and in different places along the spectrum. >> Well, I think there's, you know, there's value in the diversity of thought, right, and we talk about on Workforce. But it's a business. The idea that Del technologies is this group of businesses and all these experiences coming together and the interactions with customers from the smallest mom and pop shops farms toe all the way to the most Jake Ganic industry. Transformational companies. You were exposed to a lot of things, and with the kind of forty, one hundred and forty thousand professionals working together and with Michael's vision and the El Tee's vision, there's an ability to see that future, and he is always looking at the future. It's interesting. I worked for a lot of interesting people, but you know, Michael's ability to Teo understand data and of you, he said. It's about having a big year, right? Your ears be twice the size of your mouth. I mean, you gotta listen. And I seriously think he must have a tree of Keebler elves creating data and information. I've never seen so much someone with more data and information. And he he listens. He values the input. He's quick to make a decision, but the team rot rallies around that idea. How can we find that future? And if we make a mistake, let's fix it fast. Let's learn really quick. Make that decision, learn quickly, adjust and capture the opportunity. And it's all about speed and what matters to the customer. I've seen it firsthand. I've been here four years. I spent twenty three years at IBM. I spent five years in Lenovo as their CEO and president. I was CEO and president of Advanced Micro Devices. It's amazing environment where you create a place where technological leaders come every day to solve the most difficult solutions with the founder of the company. That's one of the industry icons, and it's just an amazing privilege and honor to be part of it. And I think you feel that from every person you talk to, that's part of Del Technologies. I am being part of that. Integration was one of the most proudest experiences of my life, and you know what we did way never ran it as an integration office. We kept the decisions with the line with the business, and we had a rapid pays to get through it and decided, and we learned quickly and we adjusted as we went. It wasn't perfect, but it wass pretty close. It's pretty close and I'm bias. I got it. I buy just But it was good. It was good. It was really a great thing. And Howard, amazing guy. But it was because people believed in the vision and they all work together. And when people work together, you can grow, do amazing and great thing. >> You're right. It's all about the people >> it is >> or it's been such a pleasure. Having you on the cute this afternoon was to me. I wish we had more time because I know we can keep talking about it. You're gonna have to come back >> anytime. You like me. It was a pleasure. And thank you so much for taking time to speak to me when you talk to boo me this afternoon, make sure you get into that technology's world. Vast cloud integration platform >> you got. All right, guys. Thank you. Thank you. First to Minuteman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Day one of our double sat coverage of Del technology World twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.