(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm talking next with Sanzio Bassini, the head of High Performance Computing at Cineca a Dell Technologies customer. Sanzio, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure. >> Lisa Martin: Likewise. Nice to see you. So tell us a little bit about Cineca, this is a large computing center, but a very large Italian non-profit consortium. Tell us about it. >> Yes, Cineca has been founded 50 years ago, from the university systems in Italy to support the scientific discovery and the industry innovations using the high-performance computing, and the correlated mythologies like intelligence together with the big data processing, and the simulations. We are a corsortium, which means that is a private not-for-profit organization. Currently our member of the consortium, almost all the universities in Italy and also all the national agencies. >> Lisa Martin: And I also read that you are the top 10 out of the top 500 of the world's fastest super computers. That's a pretty big accomplishment. >> Yes. That is a part of our statutory visions in the last 10 to 15 years , we have been to say, frequent buyers in the top 10. The idea is that we're enabling the scientific discovery by mean of the providing the most advanced systems, and the co-designing the the most advanced HPC systems to promote to support the accents in science. And being part of the European high-performance computing ecosystems. >> Now, talk to me about some of the challenges that Cineca is trying to solve in particular, the human brain project. Talk to us a little bit about that and how you're leveraging high-performance computing to accelerate scientific discovery. >> The human brain project is one of the flagship projects that has been co-funded by the European Commission and the participating member states that are two different, right now , flagships together with another that is just in progress, which is the the quantum of flagship we are participating indirectly together with the National Disaster Council. And we are core partners of the HPC constructors , that is the human brain project. One billion euro of investment, co-founded by the participating states and the European Commissions. it's a project that would combine both the technology issues and the designing of a high-performance computing systems that would meet the requirements of the community. And the big scientific challenges, correlated to the physiological functions of the human brains, including different related to the behavior of the, of the human brain, either from the pathological point of view either from the physiological point of view. In order to better understand the aging user, that it would impact the, the health the public health systems, some other that are correlating with what would be the support for the physiological knowledge of the human brains. And finally computational performance, the human brain is more than Exascale systems, but with a average consumption, which is very low. We are talking about some hundred of wards of energy would provide a, an extreme and computational performance. So if we put the organizing the technology high-performance computing in terms of interconnections now we're morphing the computing systems that would represent a tremendous step in order to facing the big challenges of our base and energies, personalized medicine, climate change, food for all those kinds of big social economic challenge that we are facing. >> Which reading them, besides the human brain project, there are other projects going on, such as that you mentioned. I'd like to understand how Cineca is working with Dell Technologies. You have to translate, as you mentioned a minute ago, the scientific requirements for discovery into high-performance computing requirements. Talk to me about how you've been doing that with partners like Dell Technologies. >> In our computing architectures. We had the need to address the capability to facing the big data processing involved with respect of the Human Brain Project and generally speaking that evolved with the respect of the science-driven that would provide cloud access to the systems by means of containers technologies. And the capability also to address what will be the creation of a Federation for high performance computing facility in Europe. So at the end we manage a competitive dialogue procurement the processor, that in a certain sense would share together with the different potential technology providers, what would be the visions and also the constraints with respect to the divisions including budget constraints and at the end Dell had shown the characteristics of the solution, that it will be more, let's say compliant. And at the same time, flexible with respect of the combinations of very different constraints and requirements. >> Dell Technologies has been sounds like a pretty flexible partner because you've got so many different needs and scientific needs to meet for different researchers. Talk to me about how you mentioned that this is a multi-national effort. How does Cineca serve and work with teams not only in Italy, but in other countries and from other institutes? >> The Italian commitment together with the European member states is that by mean of scientific methods and peer review process roughly speaking of the production capacity, would be shared at the European level, that it's a commitment that has been shared together with the France, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland. Where also of course, the Italian scientists, can apply and participate, but in a sort of emulations and the advanced competition for addressing what will be the excellence in science. The remaining 50% of our production capacity is for, for the national community and in somehow to support the Italian community to be competitive on the worldwide scenario that setting up would lead also to the agreement after the international level, with respect of some of the actions that are promoted in progress in the US and in Japan also that means the sharing options with the US researchers or Japanese researchers in an open space. >> It sounds like the human brain project, which the HPC is powering, which has been around since 2013 is really facilitating global collaboration. Talk to me about some of the results that the high-performance computing environment has helped the human brain project to achieve so far. >> The main outcomes that it will be consolidated in the next phase that will be lead by Euro SPC, which is called the phoenix that stands for Federation of a high-performance computing system in Europe. That provide open service based on two concepts One is the sharing of the ID at the European level. So it means that open the access to the Cineca system to the system in France , to UNIX system in Germany, to fifth system in Switzerland, and to the diocese the marine ocean system in Spain that is federated, ID management, others, et cetera, related to what will be the Federation of data access. The scientific community may share their data in a seamless mode, the actions is being supported by genetic, has to do with the two specific target. One is the elaborations of the data that are provided by the lens, laser, laboratory facility in Florence, that is one of the core parts of garnering the data that would come from the mouse brains, the time user for caviar. And the second part is for the meso scale studies of the cortex of the brain. In some situations they combinations of performance capability of the Federation systems for addressing what would be the simulations of the overall being of the human brain would take a lot of performance that are challenging simulation periodically that they would happen combining that they HPC facility as at European level. >> Right. So I was reading there's a case study by the way, on Cineca that Dell Technologies has published. And some of the results you talked about those at the HPC is facilitating research and results on epilepsy, spinal cord injury, brain prosthesis for the blind, as well as new insights into autism. So incredibly important work that you're doing here for the human brain project. One last question for you. What advice would you give to your peers who might be in similar situations that need to, to build and deploy and maintain high-performance computing environments? Where should they start? >> There is a continuous sharing, of knowledge, experience, best practices, where the situation is different in the sense that there are, what would we be the integration of the high-performance computing technology into their production workflow. That is the sharing of the experience in order to provide a spreads and amplifications of the opportunity for supporting the innovation. That is part of our social mission in Italy, but it's also the objective. that is supported by the European Commission. >> Excellent, that sharing and that knowledge transfer and collaboration. It seems to be absolutely fundamental and the environment that you've built, facilitates that. Sanzio, thank you so much for sharing with us, what Cineca is doing and the great research that's going on there. And across a lot of disciplines. We appreciate you joining the program today. Thank you. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. >> Likewise, for Sanzio Bassini. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube Conversation. (upbeat music)

>> From the theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Well, it looks like hybrid cloud is finally here. We've seen a decade of posturing, marchitecture, slideware and narrow examples of hybrid cloud, but there's little question that the definition of cloud is expanding to include on-premises workloads in hybrid models. Now depending on which numbers you choose to represent IT spending, public cloud only accounts for actually less than 5% of the total pie. So the big question is, how will this now evolve? Customers want control, they want governance, they want security, flexibility and a feature-rich set of services to build their digital businesses. It's unlikely that they can buy all that, so they're going to have to build it with partners, specifically vendors, SI's, consultancies and their own developers. The tug of war to win the new cloud day has finally started in earnest between the hyperscalers and the largest enterprise tech companies in the world. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE insights, powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll walk you through how we see the battle for hybrid cloud, how we got here, where we are and where it's headed. First, I want to go back to 2009, in a blog post by a man named Chuck Hollis. Chuck Hollis, at the time, was a CTO and marketing guru inside of EMC who, remember, owned VMware. Chuck was kind of this hybrid, multi-tool player, pun intended. EMC at the time had a big stake, a lot at stake, as the ascendancy of AWS was threatening the historical models, which had defined enterprise IT. Now around that time, NIST published its first draft of a cloud computing definition which, as I recall, included language, something to the effect of accessing remote services over the public network, i.e., public IP networks. Now, NIST has essentially or since evolved that definition, but the original draft was very favorable to the public cloud. And the vendor community, the traditional vendor community, said hang on, we're in this game too. So that was 2009 when Chuck Hollis published this slide. He termed it Private Cloud, a term which he saw buried inside of a Gartner research post or research note that was not really fleshed out and defined. The idea was pretty compelling. The definition of cloud centered on control, where you, as the customer, had on-prem workloads that could span public and on-prem clouds, if you will, with federated security and a data plan that spanned the states. Essentially, you had an internal and an external cloud with a single point of control. This is basically what the hybrid cloud vision has become. An abstraction layer that spans on-prem and public clouds and we can extend that across clouds and out to the edge, where a customer has a single point of control and federated governance and security. Now we know this is still aspirational, but we're now seeing vendor offerings that put forth this promise and a roadmap to get there from different points of view, that we're going to talk about today. The NIST definition now reads cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, e.g., network server storage, applications and services, that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. So there you have it, that is inclusive of on-prem, but it took the industry a decade plus to actually get where we are today. And they did so by essentially going to school with the public cloud offerings. Now in 2018, AWS announced Outposts and that was another wake up call to the on-prem community. Externally, they pointed to the validation that hybrid cloud was real. Hey, AWS is doing it so clearly they've capitulated, but most on-prem vendors at the time didn't have a coherent offering for hybrid, but the point is the on-prem vendors responded as they saw AWS moving past the demilitarized zone into enemy lines. And here's what the competitive landscape of hybrid offerings looks like today. All three US-based hyperscalers have an offering or multiple offerings in various forms, Outposts from Amazon and other services that they offer, Google Anthos and Azure Arc, they're all so prominent, but the real action today is coming from the on-prem vendors. Every major company has an offering. Now most of these stemmed from services-led and finance-led initiatives, but they're evolving to true Azure Service models. HPE GreenLake is prominent and the company's CEO, Antonio Neri, is putting the whole company behind Azure Service. HPE claims to be the first, it uses that in its marketing, with such an Azure Service offering, but actually Oracle was their first with Cloud@Customer. You know, possibly Microsoft could make a claim to being early as well, but it really doesn't matter. Let's see, Dell has responded with Apex and is going hard after this opportunity. Cisco has Cisco Plus and Lenovo has TruScale. IBM also has a long services and finance-led history and has announced pockets of Azure Service in areas like storage. And Pure Storage is an example that we chose of a segment player, of course within storage, that has a strong Azure Service offering, and there are others like that. So the landscape is getting very busy. And so, let's break this down a bit. AWS is bringing its programmable infrastructure model and its own hardware to what it calls the edge. And it looks at on-prem data centers as just another edge node. So that's how they're de-positioning the on-prem crowd, but the fact is, when you really look at what Outposts can do today, it's limited, but AWS will move quickly so expect a continued rapid evolution of their model and the services that are supported on Outposts. Azure gets its hardware from partners and has relationships with virtually everyone that matters. Anthos is, as well, a software layer and Google created Kubernetes as the great equalizer in cloud. And it was a nice open source gift to the industry and has obviously taken off. So the cloud guys have the advantage of owning a cloud. The pure on-prem players, they don't, but the on-prem crowd has rich stacks, much richer and more mature in a lot of areas, as it relates to supporting on-premises workloads and much more so than the cloud players, but they don't have mature cloud stacks. They're kind of just getting started with things like subscription billing and API-based microservices offerings. They got to figure out Salesforce compensation and just the overall Azure service mentality versus the historical product box mentality, and that takes time. And they're each coming at this from their respective different points of view and points of strength. HPE is doing a very good job of marketing and go-to market. It probably has the cleanest model, enabled by the company's split from HP, but it has some gaps that it's needed to fill and it's doing so through acquisitions. Ezmeral, for example, is it's new data play. It just bought Zerto to facilitate backup as a service. And it's expanded partnerships to fill gaps in the portfolio. Some partnerships, which they couldn't do before because it created conflicts inside of HPE or HP. Dell is all about the portfolio, the breadth of the portfolio, the go-to-market prowess and its supply chain advantage. It's very serious about Azure Service with Apex and it's driving hard to win that day. Cisco comes at this from a huge portfolio and of course, a point of strength and networking, which maybe is a bit tougher to offer as a service, but Cisco has a large and fast growing subscription business in collaborations, security and other areas, so it's cloud-like in that regard. And Oracle, of course, has the huge advantage of an extremely rich functional stack and it owns a cloud, which has dramatically improved in the past few years, but Oracle is narrow to the red stack, at least today. Oracle, if it wanted to, we think, could dominate the database cloud, it could be the database cloud, especially if it decided to open its cloud to competitive database offerings and run them in the Oracle cloud. Hmm. Wonder if Oracle will ever move in that direction. Now a big part of this shift is the appeal of OPEX versus CAPEX. Let's take a look at some ETR data that digs a bit deeper into this topic. This data is from an August ETR drill down, asking CIOs and IT buyers how their budgets are split between OPEX and CAPEX. The mid point of the yellow line shows where we are today, 57% OPEX, expecting to grow to 63% one year from now. That's not a huge difference, there's not a huge difference when you drill into global 2000, which kind of surprised me. I thought global 2000 would be heavier CAPEX, but they seem to be accelerating the shift to OPEX slightly faster than the overall base, but not really in a meaningful way. So I didn't really discern big differences there. Now, when you dig further into industries and look at subscription versus consumption models for OPEX, you see about 60/40 favoring subscription models, with most industry slowly moving toward consumption or usage based models over time. There are a couple of outliers, but generally speaking, that's the trend. What's perhaps more interesting is when you drill into subscription versus usage based models by product area, and that's what this chart shows. It shows by tech segment, the percent subscription, that's the blue, versus consumption or usage based, that's the gray bars, yellow being indifferent or maybe it's I don't know. What stands out are two areas that are more usage heavy, consumption heavy. That's database, data warehousing, and IS. So database is surely weighted by companies like Snowflake and offerings like Redshift and other cloud databases from Azure and Google and other managed services, but the IS piece, while not surprising, is, we think, relevant because most of the legacy vendor Azure Service offerings are borrowing from a SaaS-oriented subscription model with a hardware twist. In other words, as a customer, you're committing to a term and a minimum spend over the life of that term. You're locked in for a year or three years, whatever it is, to account for the hardware and headroom the vendor has to install because they want to allow you to increase your usage. So that's the usage based model. See, you're then paying by the drink for that consumption above that minimum threshold. So it's a hybrid subscription consumption model, which is actually quite interesting. And we've been saying, what would really be cool is if one of the on-prem penguins on the iceberg would actually jump in and offer a true consumption model right out of the box, as a disruptive move to the industry and to the cloud players, and take that risk. And I think that might happen once they feel comfortable with the financial model and they have nailed the product market fit, but right now, the model is what it is. And even AWS without post requires a threshold and a minimum commitment. So we'd love to see someone take that chance and offer true cloud consumption pricing to facilitate more experimentation and lower risk for the customer entry points. Now let's take a look at some of these players and see what kind of spending momentum they have. This is our popular XY chart-view that plots net score or spending velocity on the x-axis and market share or pervasiveness in the data set on the... Oh, sorry, net score or spending momentum on the y-axis and pervasiveness or market share on the x-axis. Now this is cut by cloud computing vendors, as defined by the customers responding. There were nearly 1500 respondents in the ETR survey, so a couple of points here. Note the red line is the elevated line. In other words, anything above that is considered really robust momentum. And no surprise, Azure, AWS and Google are above that line. Azure and AWS always battle it out for top share of voice in the x-axis in this survey. Now this, remember, is the July survey, but ETR, they gave me a sneak peek at the October results that they're going to be releasing in the coming week and Dell cloud and VMware cloud, which is VCF and maybe some other components, not VMware cloud and AWS, that's a separate beast, but those two are moving up in the y-axis. So they're demonstrating spending momentum. IBM is moving down and Oracle is at a respectable 20% on the y-axis. Now, interestingly, HPE and Lenovo don't show up in the cloud taxonomy, in that cloud cut, and neither does Cisco. I believe I'm correct in that this is an open-ended question, i.e., who are your cloud suppliers? So the customers are not resonating with that messaging yet, but I'm going to double check on that. Now to widen the aperture a bit, we said let's do a cut of the on-prem and cloud players within cloud accounts, so we can include HPE and Cisco and see how they're doing inside of cloud accounts. So that's what this chart does. It's a filter on 975 customers who identify themselves as cloud accounts. So here we were able to add in Cisco and HPE. Now, Lenovo still doesn't show up on the data. It shows up in laptops and desktops, but not as prominent in the enterprise, not prominent at all, but HPE Ezmeral did show up and it's moving forward in the October survey, again, part of the sneak peek. Ezmeral is HPE's data platform that they've introduced, combining the assets of MapR, BlueData and some other organic development. Now, as you can see, HPE and Cisco, they show up on the chart, as I said, and you can see the rope in the tug of war is starting to get a little bit more taut. The cloud guys have momentum and big account presence, but the on-prem folks also have big footprints, rich stacks and many have strong services arms, and a lot of customer affinity. So let's wrap with some comments about how this will shake out and what's some of the markers we can watch. Now, the first thing I'll say is we're starting to hear the right language come out of the vendor community. The idea that they're investing in a layer to abstract the underlying complexity of the clouds and on-prem infrastructure and turning the world into, essentially, a programmable interface to resources. The question is, what about giving access through that layer to underlying primitives in the public cloud? VMware has been very clear on this. They will facilitate that access. I believe Red Hat as well. So watch to the degree in which the large on-prem players are enabling that access for developers. We believe this is the right direction overall, but it's also very hard and it's going to require lots of resources and R & D. I would say at this point that each company has its respective strengths and weaknesses. I see HPE mostly focused today on making its on-prem offerings work like a cloud, whereas some of the others, VMware, Dell and Cisco, are stressing to a greater degree, in my view, enabling multi-cloud and edge connections, cross connections. Not that HPE isn't open to that when you ask them about it, but its marketing is more on-prem leaning, in my opinion. Now all of the traditional vendors, in my view, are still defensive about the cloud, although I would say much less so each day. Increasingly, they look at the public cloud as an opportunity to build value on top of that abstraction layer, if you will. As I said earlier, these on-prem guys, they all have ways to go. They're in the early stages of figuring out what a cloud operating model looks like, how it works, what services to offer, how to pay sellers and partners, but the public cloud vendors, they're miles ahead in that regard, but at the same time, they're navigating into on-prem territory. And they're very immature, in most cases. So how do they service all this stuff? How do they establish partnerships and so forth? And how do they build stacks on prem that are as rich as they are in the cloud? And what's their motivation to do that? Are they getting pulled, digging their heels in? Or are they really serious about it? Now, in some respects, Oracle is in the best position here in terms of hybrid maturity, but again, it's narrowly focused on the Red Stack. I would say the same for Pure Storage, more mature as a service, but narrowly focused, of course, on storage. Let's talk marketplace and ecosystems. One of the hallmarks of public clouds is optionality of tooling. Just all you do is go to the AWS Marketplace and you'll see what I mean. It's got this endless bevy of choices. It's got one of everything in there and you can buy directly from your AWS Console. So watch how the hybrid cloud plays out in terms of partner inclusion and ease of doing business, that's another sign of maturity. Let's talk developers and edge. This is by far the most important and biggest hole in the hybrid portfolios, outside the public cloud players. If you're going to build infrastructure as code, who do you expect to code it? How are the on-prem players cultivating developer communities? IBM paid 34 billion to buy its way in. Actually, in today's valuation terms, you might say that's looking like a good play, but still, that cash outlay is equal to one third of IBM's revenue. So big, big bet on OpenShift, but IBM's infrastructure strategy is fragmented and its cloud business, as IBM reports in its financial statements, is a services-heavy, kitchen sink set of offerings. It's very confusing. So they got to still do some clean up there, but they're serious about the architectural battle for hybrid cloud, as Arvind Krishna calls it. Now VMware, by cobbling together the misfit developer toys of the remnants from the EMC Federation, including Pivotal, is trying to get there. You know, but when you talk to customers, they're still not all in on VMware's developer affinity. Now Cisco has DevNet, but that's basically CCIE's and other trained networking engineers learning to code in languages like Python. It's not necessarily true devs, although they're upskilling. It's a start and they're investing, Cisco, that is, investing in the community, leveraging their champions, and I would say Dell could do the same with, for example, the numerous EMC storage admins that are out there. Now Oracle bought Sun to get Java, and that's a large community of developers, but even so, when you compare AWS and Microsoft ecosystems to the others, it's not even close in terms of developer affinity. So lots of work to be done there. One other point is Pure's acquisition of Portworx, again, while narrowly focused, is a good move and instructive of the changes going on in infrastructure. Now how does this all relate to the edge? Well, I'm not going to talk much about that today, but suffice to say, developers, in our view, will win the edge. And right now, they're coding in the cloud. Now they're often coding in the cloud and moving work on prem, wrapping them in containers, but watch how sticky that model is for the respective players. The other thing to watch is cadence of offerings. Another hallmark of cloud is a rapid expansion of features. The public cloud players don't appear to be slowing down and the on-prem folks seem to be accelerating. I've been watching HPE and GreenLake and their cadence of offerings, and watch how quickly the newbies of Azure Service can add functionality, I have no doubt Dell is going to be right there as well, as is Cisco and others. Also pay attention to financial metrics, watch how Azure Service impacts the income statements and how the companies deal with that because as you shift to deferred revenue models, it's going to hurt profitability. And I'm not worried about that at all because it won't hurt cashflow, or at least it shouldn't. As long as the companies communicate to Wall Street and they're transparent, i.e., they don't shift reporting definitions every year and a half or two years, but watch for metrics around retention and churn, RPO or Remaining Performance Obligations, billing versus bookings, increased average contract values, cohort selling, the impact on both gross margin and operating margin. These are the things you watch with SaaS companies and essentially, these big hardware players are becoming Azure Service slash SaaS companies. These are going to be the key indicators of success and the proof in the pudding of the transition to Azure Service. It should be positive for these companies, assuming they get the product market fit right, and can create a flywheel effect with their respective ecosystems and partner channels. Now I'm sure you can think of other important factors to watch, but I'm going to leave it here for now. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and please subscribe, check out ETR's website at etr.plus. We also publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can get in touch with me, email david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante. You can comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, everybody, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm talking next with Sanzio Bassini, the Head of High Performance Computing at Cineca, at DELL technologies customer. Sanzio, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure, it's a pleasure. >> Likewise, nice to see you. So tell us a little bit about Cineca. This is a large computing center, but a very large Italian nonprofit consortium. Tell us about it. >> Yes, Cineca been founded 50 years ago, from the university systems in Italy. For a statutory mission, which is to support, the scientific discovery, and the industry innovations, using the High Performance Computing and the correlated methodologies like a, Artificial Intelligence, which is one of the, you see the more, in a, in a adopted in those days, but together with the big data processing and and simulation. Yes, we are a consortium, which means that this is a private not-for-profit organizations. Currently, our member of the consortium, almost all the universities in Italy and also all the national agencies for those selected structures. Uh. The main quarter of Cineca is in Bologna, which is in the heart Nation, with the bunch of presence in Milan, in Rome and in Naples, so we are a consultation organization. >> And I also read that you were, are the top 10 out of the top 500 of the world's fastest super computers. That's a pretty big accomplishment. >> Yes. That is a part of our institutional missions, the last 10 to 15 years we have been to say, frequent flyers in the top 10. There been at least two, three systems that have been ranked at the top 10. Apart, the.., whatever would be the meaning of such an advance market, there's a lot of its criticalities. We are well aware. The idea is that we're enabling the scientific discovery, by means of providing the most advanced systems and the co-designing, the most advanced HPC systems to promote and support the, what is the, excellence in science. And that being part of European high-performance computing IT system. That is the case. >> Excellent. Now, talk to me about some of the challenges that Cineca is trying to solve in particular, the Human Brain Project. Talk to us a little bit about that and how you're leveraging high-performance computing to accelerate scientific discovery. >> Um, The Human Brain Project is one of the flagship project that has been co-founded by the European commission and that the participating member states. Is not as another situations that are undertaking, it's definitely a joint collaboration between members states and the European commission. There are two different right now, flagships together with another, that is in progress, which is that the quantum of flagship, the first two flagship abroad that that has been lost. The commission for operation with the participating states has been one on the digraph vein on which also we are participating in directly together with the CNR, is the national business counselor. And the second for which we are core partners of the HPC that is, the Human Brain Project. That, that is a big flagship, one million offer, of newer investment, co-founded by the participating states and that the European commission. The project it's going to set up, in what to do be the, third strategic grant agreement that they will go over the next three years, the good, the complete that the, the whole process. Then we see what is going to happen at Africa. We thought that their would be some others progress offer these big projects. It's project that would combine both the technology issues, like the designing the off high-performance computing systems that meet the requirements of the community and the big challenge, scientific challenges correlated to the physiological functions of the human brain center, including the different farm show survey to do with the behavior of the human brain. A from the pathological point of view, from the physiological point of view, that better understand the could be the way for, for a facing that. Let's say the pathology, some of those are very much correlated with respect to aging, and that it would impact the, the health, the public health systems. Some other that are correlating with what would be the support for the physiological knowledge of the, of the human brains. And finally that they, let me say, technological transfer stuff that represented the knowing off at the physiological, behavior of the human brain. Just to use a sort of metaphor to have happen from the point of view of there computational performance, the human brain is a, a, a, more than Exoscale systems, but with a energy consumption, which is very low, we are talking about some hundreds of Watts. So some hundreds of watts of energy, would provide a an extreme and computational performance. So if would could organized the technology of the high-performance computing in terms of interconnections now we're morphing the computing systems and exploitations of that kind of technologies, in I build a system that it might provide the computational power that would represent a tremendous and tremendous step ahead, in order to facing the big challenges of our base, like energies, personalized medicine, try not to change food for all those kinds of big socioeconomic challenges that we are facing. >> Yes I was reading that besides, sorry Sanzio I was reading that besides the Human Brain Project, there are other projects going on, such as that you mentioned, I'd like to understand how Cineca is working with Dell technologies. You have to translate, as you've mentioned a minute ago, the scientific requirements for discovery into high-performance computing requirements. Talk to me about how you've been doing that with partners like Dell technologies. >> Yes, in particularly in our computing architectures, we had the need to address the capability to facing the data processing involved with backed off the Human Brain Project and general speaking that is backed off the science vendor, that would combine the capability also to provide the cloud access to the system. So by main soft containers technologies and the capability also, to address what would be the creation of a Federation. So Piper problems with people proceeded in a new world. So at the end that the requirements and the terms of reference of the would matter will decline and the terms of a system that would be capable to manage, let's say, in a holistic approach, the data processing, the cloud computing services and the opportunity before for being integrated that in a Federation of HSBC system in Europe's, and with this backed off, that kind of thing, we manage a competitive dialogue procurement processor, I think I the sentence would share together with the different potential technology providers, what would be the visuals and those are the constraints (inaudible) and those other kinds of constraints like, I don't want to say, I mean, environmental kind of constraints and uh, sharing with this back of the technology provider what would it be the vision for this solution, in a very, let's say hard, the competitive dialogue, and at the end, results in a sort of, I don't want to say Darwinian processes, okay. So I mean, the survivors in terms of the different technology providers being Dell that shown the characteristics of the solution that it will be more, let's say compliant. And at the same time are flexible with respect of the combinations of very different constraints and requirements that has been the, the process that has been the outcomes of such a process. >> I like that you mentioned that Darwinian survival of the fittest and that Dell technologies has been, it sounds like a pretty flexible partner because you've got so many different needs and scientific needs to meet for different researchers. Talk to me about how you mentioned that this is a multi-national effort. How does Cineca serve and work with teams not only in Italy, but in other countries and from other institutes? >> Definitely the volume commitment that together with the, European member states is that by means of scientific merits and the peer review process, roughly speaking the arc of the production capacity, would be shared at the European level. That it's a commitment that, that there's been, that there's been a shared of that together with France, Germany, Spain, and, and with the London. So, I mean, our, half of our production capacity, it's a share of that at the European level, where also of course the Italian scientist can apply in the participates, but in a sort of offer emulations and the advanced competition for addressing what it would be the excellence in science. The remaining 50% of our production capacity is for, for the national community and, somehow to prepare and support the Italian community to be competitive on the worldwide scenario on the European and international scenario, uh that setting up would lead also to the agreement at the international level, with respect of some of the options that, that are promoted the progress in a US and in Japan also. So from this point of view, that mean that in some cases also the, access that it would come from researchers the best collaborations and the sharing options with the US researchers their or Japanese researchers in an open space. >> Open space for, it sounds like the Human Brain Project, which the HPC is powering, which has been around since 2013 is really facilitating global collaboration. Talk to me about some of the results that the high-performance computing environment has helped the Human Brain Project to achieve so far. >> The main outcomes that it will be consolidated in the next phase that will be need the by rural SPC that is the Jared undertaking um entities, that has been created for consolidating and for progressing the high-performance computing ecosystem in Europe. It represented by the Federations of high-performance computing systems at European level, there is a, a, an option that, that has been encapsulated and the elaborated inside the human brain flagship project which is called the FEHIPCSE that stand for Federation of a High-Performance Computing System in Europe. That uh provide the open service based on the two concepts on one, one is the sharing of the Heidi at a European level, so it means that the, the high demand of the users or researchers more properly. It's unique and Universal at the European level. That didn't mean better the same, we see identity management, education management with the open, and the access to the Cineca system, to the SARS system in France, to the unique system in, uh Germany to the, Diocese system in a Switzerland, to the Morocco System in a Spain. That is the part related to what will be the federated, the ID management, the others, et cetera, related to what will be the Federation off the data access. So from the point of view, again, the scientific community, mostly the community of Human Brain Project, but that will be open at other domains and other community, make sure that data in a seamless mode after European language, from the technological point of view, or let's say from the infrastructure point of view, very strong up, from the scientific point of view, uh what they think they may not, will be the most of the options is being supported by Cineca has to do with the two specific target. One is the elaboration of the data that are provided by the lands. The laws are a laboratory facility in that Florence. That is one of the four parts, and from the bottom view of the provisions of the data that is for the scattering, the, the data that would come from the mouse brains, that are use for, for (inaudible) And then the second part is for the Mayor scale studies of the cortex of the of the human brain, and that got add-on by a couple of groups that are believing that action from a European level their group of the National Researcher Counsel the CNR, that are the two main outcome on which we are in some out reference high-performance computing facilities for supporting that kind of research. Then their is in some situations they combinations of the performance a, capability of the Federation systems for addressing what will be the simulations of the overall human brain would take a lot of performance challenge simulation with bacteria that they would happen combining that they SPC facility as at European level. >> Right! So I was reading there's a case study by the way, on Cynic that Dell technologies has published. And some of the results you talked about, those that the HPC is facilitating research and results on epilepsy, spinal cord injury, brain prostheses for the blind, as well as new insights into autism. So incredibly important work that you're doing here for the Human Brain Project. One last question Sanzio, for you, what advice would you give to your peers who might be in similar situations that need to, to build and deploy and maintain high-performance computing environments? Where should they start? >> (coughs laughs) I think that at, at a certain point, that specific know how would became sort of a know how that is been, I mean, accumulated and then by some facilities and institutions around the world. There are the, the federal labs in US, the main nation model centers in Europe, the big facilities in Japan. And of course the, the big university facilities in China that are becoming, how do you say, evident and our progressively occupied increasing the space, that to say that that is somehow it, that, that, that the, those institutions would continues collaborate and sharing that there are periods I would expect off what to do, be the top level systems. Then there is a continuous sharing of uh knowledge, the experience best practices with respect off, let's say the technologies transfers towards productions and services and boosterism. Where the situation is big parenta, in the sense that, their are focused what it would be, uh the integration of the high-performance computing technology into their production workflow. And from the point of view, there is the sharing of the experience in order to provide the, a sort of, let's say, spreads and amplifications of the opportunity for supporting innovation. That is part of are solution means, in a Italy but it also, eh, er sort of um, see objective, that is addressed by the European options er supported by the European commission. I think that that sort of (inaudible) supply that in US, the, that will be coming there, sort of you see the max practice for the technology transfer to support the innovation. >> Excellent, that sharing and that knowledge transfer and collaboration. It seems to be absolutely fundamental and the environment that you've built, facilitates that. Sanzio thank you so much for sharing with us, what Cineca is doing and the great research that's going on there, and across a lot of disciplines, we appreciate you joining the program today. Thank you. >> Thank you, it's been a pleasure, thank you very much for the opportunity. >> Likewise, for Sanzio Bassini. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (calming music)

>>Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be in conversation with you today. And I thought I would just kick things off with some opening reflections on this really important session theme, and then we can jump into discussion. So I'd like us to, as a starting point, um, wrestle with these buzz words, empowerment and inclusion so that we can, um, have them be more than kind of big platitudes and really have them reflected in our workplace cultures and the things that we design and the technologies that we put out into the world. And so to do that, I think we have to move beyond techno determinism and I'll explain what that means in just a minute. And techno determinism comes in two forms. The first on your left is the idea that technology automate. Um, all of these emerging trends are going to harm us are going to necessarily, um, harm humanity. >>They're going to take all the jobs they're going to remove human agency. This is what we might call the techno dystopian version of the story. And this is what Hollywood loves to sell us in the form of movies like the matrix or Terminator. The other version on your right is the techno utopian story that technologies automation, the robots, as a shorthand are going to save humanity. They're going to make everything more efficient, more equitable. And in this case, on the surface, they seem like opposing narratives, right? They're telling us different stories. At least they have different endpoints, but when you pull back the screen and look a little bit more closely, you see that they share an underlying logic, that technology is in the driver's seat and that human beings, that social society can just respond to what's happening. But we don't, I really have a say in what technologies are designed. >>And so to move beyond techno determinism, the notion that technology is in the driver's seat, we have to put the human agents and agencies back into the story protagonists and think carefully about what the human desires, worldviews values assumptions are that animate the production of technology. We have to put the humans behind the screen back into view. And so that's a very first step in when we do that. We see as was already mentioned that it's a very homogenous group right now in terms of who gets the power and the resources to produce the digital and physical infrastructure that everyone else has to live with. And so, as a first step, we need to think about how to, to create more participation of those who are working behind the scenes to design technology. Now, to dig a little more deeper into this, I want to offer a kind of low tech example before we get to the more high tech ones. >>So what you see in front of you here is a simple park bench public it's located in Berkeley, California, which is where I went to graduate school. And on this one particular visit, I was living in Boston. And so I was back in California, it was February, it was freezing where I was coming from. And so I wanted to take a few minutes in between meetings to just lay out in the sun and soak in some vitamin D. And I quickly realized actually I couldn't lay down on the bench because of the way it had been designed with these arm rests at intermittent intervals. And so here I thought, okay, th th the armrests have a functional reason why they're there. I mean, you could literally rest your elbows there, or, um, you know, it can create a little bit of privacy of someone sitting there that you don't know. >>Um, when I was nine months pregnant, it could help me get up and down or for the elderly the same thing. So it has a lot of functional reasons, but I also thought about the fact that it prevents people who are, are homeless from sleeping on the bench. And this is the Bay area that we're talking about, where in fact, the tech boom has gone hand in hand with a housing crisis. Those things have grown in tandem. So innovation has grown with inequity because we have, I haven't thought carefully about how to address the social context in which technology grows and blossoms. And so I thought, okay, this crisis is growing in this area. And so perhaps this is a deliberate attempt to make sure that people don't sleep on the benches by the way that they're designed and where the, where they're implemented. And so this is what we might call structural inequity, by the way something is designed. >>It has certain yeah. Affects that exclude or harm different people. And so it may not necessarily be the intent, but that's the effect. And I did a little digging and I found, in fact, it's a global phenomenon, this thing that architect next call, hostile architecture around single occupancy, benches and Helsinki. So only one booty at a time, no Nolan down there. I've found caged benches in France. Yeah. And in this particular town, what's interesting here is that the mayor put these benches out in this little shopping Plaza and within 24 hours, the people in the town rally together and have them removed. So we see here that just because we, we have a discriminatory design in our public space, doesn't mean we have to live with it. We can actually work together to ensure that our public space reflects our better values. But I think my favorite example of all is the metered bench. >>And then this case, this bench is designed with spikes in them and to get the spikes to retreat into the bench, you have to feed the meter. You have to put some coins in, and I think it buys you about 15, 20 minutes, then the spikes come back up. And so you will be happy to know that in this case, uh, this was designed by a German artist to get people to think critically about issues of design, not the design of physical space, but the design of all kinds of things, public policies. And so we can think about how our public life in general is metered, that it serves those that can pay the price and others are excluded or harmed. Whether we're talking about education or healthcare. And the meter bench also presents something interesting for those of us who care about technology, it creates a technical fix for a social problem. >>In fact, it started out as art, but some municipalities in different parts of the world have actually adopted this in their public spaces, in their parks in order to deter so-called loiters from using that space. And so by a technical fix, we mean something that creates a short-term effect, right? It gets people who may want to sleep on it out of sight. They're unable to use it, but it doesn't address the underlying problems that create that need to sleep outside of the first place. And so, in addition to techno determinism, we have to think critically about technical fixes, that don't address the underlying issues that the tech tech technology is meant to solve. And so this is part of a broader issue of discriminatory design, and we can apply the bench metaphor to all kinds of things that we work with, or that we create. >>And the question we really have to continuously ask ourselves is what values are we building in to the physical and digital infrastructures around us? What are the spikes that we may unwittingly put into place? Or perhaps we didn't create the spikes. Perhaps we started a new job or a new position, and someone hands us something, this is the way things have always been done. So we inherit the spiked bench. What is our responsibility? When we notice that it's creating these kinds of harms or exclusions or technical fixes that are bypassing the underlying problem, what is our responsibility? All of this came to a head in the context of financial technologies. I don't know how many of you remember these high profile cases of tech insiders and CEOs who applied for apples, >>The Apple card. And in one case, a husband and wife applied, and the husband, the husband received a much higher limit, almost 20 times the limit as his, >>His wife, even though they shared bank accounts, they lived in common law state. Yeah. >>And so the question there was not only the fact that >>The husband was receiving a much better rate and a high and a better >>The interest rate and the limit, but also that there was no mechanism for the individuals involved to dispute what was happening. They didn't even know how, what the factors were that they were being judged that was creating this form of discrimination. So >>In terms of financial technologies, it's not simply the outcome, that's the issue, or that can be discriminatory, >>But the process that black box is all of the decision-making that makes it so that consumers and the general public have no way to question it, no way to understand how they're being judged adversely. And so it's the process, not only the product that we have to care a lot about. And so the case of the Apple card is part of a much broader phenomenon >>Of, um, races >>And sexist robots. This is how the headlines framed it a few years ago. And I was so interested in this framing because there was a first wave of stories that seemed to be shocked at the prospect, that technology is not neutral. Then there was a second wave of stories that seemed less surprised. Well, of course, technology inherits its creators biases. And now I think we've entered a phase of attempts to override and address the default settings of so-called racist and sexist robots for better or worse than here. Robots is just a kind of shorthand that the way that people are talking about automation and emerging technologies more broadly. And so, as I was encountering these headlines, I was thinking about how these are not problems simply brought on by machine learning or AI. They're not all brand new. And so I wanted to contribute to the conversation, a kind of larger context and a longer history for us to think carefully about the social dimensions of technology. And so I developed a concept called the new Jim code, >>Which plays on the phrase, >>Jim Crow, which is the way that the regime of white supremacy and inequality in this country was defined in a previous era. And I wanted us to think about how that legacy continues to haunt the present, how we might be coding bias into emerging technologies and the danger being that we imagine those technologies to be objective. And so this gives us a language to be able to name this phenomenon so that we can address it and change it under this larger umbrella of the new Jim code are four distinct ways that this phenomenon takes shape from the more obvious engineered inequity. Those are the kinds of inequalities tech mediated in the qualities that we can generally see coming. They're kind of obvious, but then we go down the line and we see it becomes harder to detect it's happening in our own backyards, it's happening around us. And we don't really have a view into the black box. And so it becomes more insidious. And so in the remaining couple of minutes, I'm just, just going to give you a taste of the last three of these, and then a move towards conclusion. Then we can start chatting. So when it comes to default discrimination, this is the way that social inequalities >>Become embedded in emerging technologies because designers of these technologies, aren't thinking carefully about history and sociology. A great example of this, uh, came to, um, uh, the headlines last fall when it was found that widely used healthcare algorithm, effecting millions of patients, um, was discriminating against black patients. And so what's especially important to note here is that this algorithm, healthcare algorithm does not explicitly take note of race. That is to say it is race neutral by using cost to predict healthcare needs this digital triaging system unwittingly reproduces health disparities, because on average, black people have incurred fewer costs for a variety of reasons, including structural inequality. So in my review of this study, by Obermeyer and colleagues, I want to draw attention to how indifference to social reality can be even more harmful than malicious intent. It doesn't have to be the intent of the designers to create this effect. >>And so we have to look carefully at how indifference is operating and how race neutrality can be a deadly force. When we move on to the next iteration of the new Jim code, coded exposure, there's a tension because on the one hand, you see this image where the darker skin individual is not being detected by the facial recognition system, right on the camera, on the computer. And so coded exposure names, this tension between wanting to be seen and included and recognized whether it's in facial recognition or in recommendation systems or in tailored advertising. But the opposite of that, the tension is with when you're over, it >>Included when you're surveilled, when you're >>Too centered. And so we should note that it's not simply in being left out, that's the problem, but it's in being included in harmful ways. And so I want us to think carefully about the rhetoric of inclusion and understand that inclusion is not simply an end point, it's a process, and it is possible to include people in harmful processes. And so we want to ensure that the process is not harmful for it to really be effective. The last iteration of the new Jim code. That means the, the most insidious let's say is technologies that are touted as helping us address bias. So they're not simply including people, but they're actively working to address bias. And so in this case, there are a lot of different companies that are using AI to hire, uh, create hiring, um, software and hiring algorithms, including this one higher view. >>And the idea is that there there's a lot that, um, AI can keep track of that human beings might miss. And so, so the software can make data-driven talent decisions after all the problem of employment discrimination is widespread and well-documented, so the logic goes, wouldn't this be even more reason to outsource decisions to AI? Well, let's think about this carefully. And this is the idea of techno benevolence, trying to do good without fully reckoning with what, how technology can reproduce inequalities. So some colleagues of mine at Princeton, um, tested a natural learning processing algorithm and was looking to see whether it exhibited the same, um, tendencies that psychologists have documented among humans. And what they found was that in fact, the algorithm associated black names with negative words and white names with pleasant sounding words. And so this particular audit builds on a classic study done around 2003 before all of the emerging technologies were on the scene where two university of Chicago economists sent out thousands of resumes to employers in Boston and Chicago. >>And all they did was change the names on those resumes. All of the other work history education were the same. And then they waited to see who would get called back and the applicants, the fictional applicants with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks than the, the black applicants. So if you're presented with that study, you might be tempted to say, well, let's let technology handle it since humans are so biased. But my colleagues here in computer science found that this natural language processing algorithm actually reproduced those same associations with black and white names. So two with gender coded words and names as Amazon learned a couple years ago, when its own hiring algorithm was found discriminating against women, nevertheless, it should be clear by now why technical fixes that claim to bypass human biases are so desirable. If only there was a way to slay centuries of racist and sexist demons with a social justice bot beyond desirable, more like magical, magical for employers, perhaps looking to streamline the grueling work of recruitment, but a curse from any job seekers as this headline puts it. >>Your next interview could be with a racist bot, bringing us back to that problem space. We started with just a few minutes ago. So it's worth noting that job seekers are already developing ways to subvert the system by trading answers to employers tests and creating fake applications as informal audits of their own. In terms of a more collective response. There's a Federation of European trade unions call you and I global that's developed a charter of digital rights for workers that touches on automated and AI based decisions to be included in bargaining agreements. And so this is one of many efforts to change the ecosystem, to change the context in which technology is being deployed to ensure more protections and more rights for everyday people in the U S there's the algorithmic accountability bill that's been presented. And it's one effort to create some more protections around this ubiquity of automated decisions. >>And I think we should all be calling for more public accountability when it comes to the widespread use of automated decisions. Another development that keeps me somewhat hopeful is that tech workers themselves are increasingly speaking out against the most egregious forms of corporate collusion with state sanctioned racism. And to get a taste of that, I encourage you to check out the hashtag tech, won't build it among other statements that they've made and walking out and petitioning their companies. One group said as the, at Google at Microsoft wrote as the people who build the technologies that Microsoft profits from, we refuse to be complicit in terms of education, which is my own ground zero. Um, it's a place where we can, we can grow a more historically and socially literate approach to tech design. And this is just one resource that you all can download, um, by developed by some wonderful colleagues at the data and society research Institute in New York. >>And the, the goal of this intervention is threefold to develop an intellectual understanding of how structural racism operates and algorithms, social media platforms and technologies not yet developed and emotional intelligence concerning how to resolve racially stressful situations within organizations and a commitment to take action, to reduce harms to communities of color. And so as a final way to think about why these things are so important, I want to offer, uh, a couple last provocations. The first is pressed to think a new about what actually is deep learning when it comes to computation. I want to suggest that computational depth when it comes to AI systems without historical or social depth is actually superficial learning. And so we need to have a much more interdisciplinary, integrated approach to knowledge production and to observing and understanding patterns that don't simply rely on one discipline in order to map reality. >>The last provocation is this. If as I suggested at the start in the inequity is woven into the very fabric of our society. It's built into the design of our, our policies, our physical infrastructures, and now even our digital infrastructures. That means that each twist coil and code is a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, and politics. The vastness of the problems that we're up against will be their undoing. Once we, that we are pattern makers. So what does that look like? It looks like refusing colorblindness as an anecdote to tech media discrimination, rather than refusing to see difference. Let's take stock of how the training data and the models that we're creating. Have these built in decisions from the past that have often been discriminatory. It means actually thinking about the underside of inclusion, which can be targeting and how do we create a more participatory rather than predatory form of inclusion. And ultimately it also means owning our own power in these systems so that we can change the patterns of the past. If we're, if we inherit a spiked bench, that doesn't mean that we need to continue using it. We can work together to design more, just an equitable technologies. So with that, I look forward to our conversation.

>>Hi, I'm Frank's Luqman CEO of Snowflake. And welcome to the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit. I'd like to take the next few minutes to introduce you to >>the data cloud on why it matters to the modern enterprise. As an industry, we have struggled to mobilize our data, meaning that has been hard to put data into service of our enterprises. We're not living in a data economy and for most data central how we run our lives, our businesses and our institutions, every single interaction we have now, whether it's in social media, e commerce or any other service, engagement generates critical data. You multiply this out with the number of actors and transactions. The volume is overwhelming, growing in leaps and bounds every day. There was a time when data operations focused mostly on running reports and populating dashboards to inform people in the enterprise of what had happened on what was going on. And we still do a ton of that. But the emphasis is shifting to data driving operations from just data informing people. There is such a thing as the time value off data meaning that the faster data becomes available, the more impactful and valuable it ISS. As data ages, it loses much of its actionable value. Digital transformation is an overused term in our industry, but the snowflake it means the end to end automation of business processes, from selling to transacting to supporting to servicing customers. Digital processes are entirely disinter mediated in terms of people. Involvement in are driven into end by data. Of course, many businesses have both physical and digital processes, and they are >>intertwined. Think of retail, logistics, delivery services and so on. So a data centric operating discipline is no longer optional data operations Air now the beating heart >>of the modern enterprise that requires a massively scalable data platform talented data engineering and data science teams to fully exploit the technology that now is becoming available. Enter snowflake. Chances are that, you know, snowflake as a >>world class execution platform for a diverse set of workloads. Among them data warehousing, data engineering, data, lakes, data, science, data applications and data sharing. Snowflake was architected from scratch for cloud scale computing. No legacy technology was carried forward in the process. Snowflake reimagined many aspects of data management data operations. The result was a cloud data platform with massive scale, blistering performance, superior economics and world class data governance. Snowflake innovated on a number of vectors that wants to deliver this breakthrough. First scale and performance. Snowflake is completely designed for cloud scale computing, both in terms of data volume, computational performance and concurrent workload. Execution snowflake features numerous distinct innovations in this category, but none stands up more than the multi cluster shared stories. Architectural Removing the control plane from the individual cluster led to a dramatically different approach that has yielded tremendous benefits. But our customers love about Snowflake is to spin up new workloads without limitation and provisioned these workloads with his little or as much compute as they see fit. No longer do they fear hidden capacity limits or encroaching on other workloads. Customers can have also scale storage and compute independent of each other, something that was not possible before second utility and elasticity. Not only can snowflake customer spin up much capacity for as long as they deem necessary. Three. Utility model in church, they only get charged for what they consumed by the machine. Second, highly granular measurement of utilization. Ah, lot of the economic impact of snowflake comes from the fact that customers no longer manage capacity. What they do now is focused on consumption. In snowflake is managing the capacity. Performance and economics now go hand in hand because faster is now also cheaper. Snowflake contracts with the public cloud vendors for capacity at considerable scale, which then translates to a good economic value at the retail level is, well, third ease of use and simplicity. Snowflake is a platform that scales from the smallest workloads to the largest data estates in the world. It is unusual in this offer industry to have a platform that controversy the entire spectrum of scale, a database technology snowflake is dramatically simple fire. To compare to previous generations, our founders were bent on making snowflake, a self managing platform that didn't require expert knowledge to run. The role of the Deba has evolved into snowflake world, more focused on data model insights and business value, not tuning and keeping the infrastructure up and running. This has expanded the marketplace to nearly any scale. No job too small or too large. Fourth, multi cloud and Cross Cloud or snowflake was first available on AWS. It now also runs very successfully on mark yourself. Azure and Google Cloud Snowflake is a cloud agnostic platform, meaning that it doesn't know what it's running on. Snowflake completely abstracts the underlying cloud platform. The user doesn't need to see or touch it directly and also does not receive a separate bill from the cloud vendor for capacity consumed by snowflake. Being multi cloud capable customers have a choice and also the flexibility to change over time snowflakes. Relationships with Amazon and Microsoft also allow customers to transact through their marketplaces and burned down their cloud commit with their snowflakes. Spend Snowflake is also capable of replicating across cloud regions and cloud platforms. It's not unusual to see >>the same snowflake data on more than one public cloud at the time. Also, for disaster recovery purposes, it is desirable to have access to snowflake on a completely different public cloud >>platform. Fifth, data Security and privacy, security and privacy are commonly grouped under the moniker of data governance. As a highly managed cloud data platform, snowflake designed and deploys a comprehensive and coherent security model. While privacy requirements are newer and still emerging in many areas, snowflake as a platform is evolving to help customers steer clear from costly violations. Our data sharing model has already enabled many customers to exchange data without surrendering custody of data. Key privacy concerns There's no doubt that the strong governance and compliance framework is critical to extracting you analytical value of data directly following the session. Police Stay tuned to hear from Anita Lynch at Disney Streaming services about how >>to date a cloud enables data governance at Disney. The world beat a >>path to our door snowflake unleashed to move from UN promised data centers to the public cloud platforms, notably AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Snowflake now has thousands of enterprise customers averaging over 500 million queries >>today across all customer accounts, and it's one of the fastest growing enterprise software companies in a generation. Our recent listing on the New York Stock Exchange was built is the largest software AIPO in history. But the data cloth conversation is bigger. There is another frontier workload. Execution is a huge part of it, but it's not the entire story. There is another elephant in the room, and that is that The world's data is incredibly fragmented in siloed, across clouds of old sorts and data centers all over the place. Basically, data lives in a million places, and it's incredibly hard to analyze data across the silos. Most intelligence analytics and learning models deploy on single data sets because it has been next to impossible to analyze data across sources. Until now, Snowflake Data Cloud is a data platform shared by all snowflake users. If you are on snowflake, you are already plugged into it. It's like being part of a Global Data Federation data orbit, if you will, where all other data can now be part of your scope. Historically, technology limitations led us to build systems and services that siloed the data behind systems, software and network perimeters. To analyze data across silos, we resorted to building special purpose data warehouses force fed by multiple data sources empowered by expensive proprietary hardware. The scale limitations lead to even more silos. The onslaught of the public cloud opened the gateway to unleashing the world's data for access for sharing a monetization. But it didn't happen. Pretty soon they were new silos, different public clouds, regions within the and a huge collection of SAS applications hoarding their data all in their own formats on the East NC ations whole industries exist just to move data from A to B customer behavior precipitated the silo ing of data with what we call a war clothes at a time mentality. Customers focused on the applications in isolation of one another and then deploy data platforms for their workload characteristics and not much else, thereby throwing up new rules between data. Pretty soon, we don't just have our old Silas, but new wants to content with as well. Meanwhile, the promise of data science remains elusive. With all this silo ing and bunkering of data workload performance is necessary but not sufficient to enable the promise of data science. We must think about unfettered data access with ease, zero agency and zero friction. There's no doubt that the needs of data science and data engineering should be leading, not an afterthought. And those needs air centered on accessing and analyzing data across sources. It is now more the norm than the exception that data patterns transcend data sources. Data silos have no meaning to data science. They are just remnants of legacy computing. Architectures doesn't make sense to evaluate strictly on the basis of existing workloads. The world changes, and it changes quickly. So how does the data cloud enabled unfettered data access? It's not just a function of being in the public cloud. Public Cloud is an enabler, no doubt about it. But it introduces new silos recommendation by cloud, platform by cloud region by Data Lake and by data format, it once again triggered technical grandstands and a lot of programming to bring a single analytical perspective to a diversity of data. Data was not analytics ready, not optimized for performance or efficiency and clearly lacking on data governance. Snowflake, address these limitations, thereby combining great execution with great data >>access. But, snowflake, we can have the best of both. So how does it all work when you join Snowflake and have your snowflake account? You don't just >>avail yourself of unlimited stories. And compute resource is along with a world class execution platform. You also plug into the snowflake data cloud, meaning that old snowflake accounts across clouds, regions and geography are part of a single snowflake data universe. That is the data clouds. It is based on our global data sharing architectures. Any snowflake data can be exposed and access by any other snowflake user. It's seamless and frictionless data is generally not copied. Her moves but access in place, subject to the same snowflake governance model. Accessing the data cloth can be a tactical one on one sharing relationship. For example, imagine how retailer would share data with a consumer back. It's good company, but then it easily proliferate from 1 to 1. Too many too many. The data cloud has become a beehive of data supply and demand. It has attracted hundreds of professional data listings to the Snowflake Data Marketplace, which fuels the data cloud with a rich supply of options. For example, our partner Star Schema, listed a very detailed covert 19 incident and fatality data set on the Snowflake Data Marketplace. It became an instant hit with snowflake customers. Scar schema is not raw data. It is also platform optimize, meaning that it was analytics ready for all snowflake accounts. Snowflake users were accessing, joining and overlaying this new data within a short time of it becoming available. That is the power of platform in financial services. It's common to see snowflake users access data from snowflake marketplace listings like fax set and Standard and Poor's on, then messed it up against for example. Salesforce data There are now over 100 suppliers of data listings on the snowflake marketplace That is, in addition to thousands of enterprise and institutional snowflake users with their own data sets. Best part of the snowflake data cloud is this. You don't need to do or buy anything different. If your own snowflake you're already plugged into the data clouds. A whole world data access options awaits you on data silos. Become a thing of the past, enjoy today's presentations. By the end of it, you should have a better sense in a bigger context for your choices of data platforms. Thank you for joining us.

[Music] from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston it's the cube covering the IBM think brought to you by IBM hi everybody welcome back to the cubes coverage wall-to-wall coverage of the IBM think 20/20 digital event experience my name is Dave Volante we'll be going really all week and and focusing on the impact of the pandemic how IBM is responding how customers are likely to respond I'm really excited Luke Niazi is here's the global managing director of consumer industries at IBM Luke good to see you nice do you see even that nice to be on the cool I mean if I think about consumer all the assumptions that we made about consumer behavior they're really up in the air right now I wonder if you could share with us what your current thinking is I mean the consumer has powered this global economy years what are you thinking about the consumer right now in the consumer behavior well was he some a massive shift in terms of the immediacy let me this back a little bit Dave and give you a bit of context we did some research at the beginning of the year that we launched the National Retail Federation and we surveyed over 19,000 people globally and that survey showed that they were do be on a shifts that are appearing first of all there was a shift in of the purpose given consumer of the 19,000 people that we surveyed 40% of them said that they were making decisions that were purpose different compared to 41% that make visions that were convenience and that's people who care about sustainability and where products are coming and the other big thing that we saw was popping in micro moments increase digital shopping and of anytime anywhere now of course with the and Emmy we are seeing an acceleration and fastening of those first of all beyond the immediate move panic buying that occurred we've seen a big big shift in online buying and we think like Ron and driver also a reinforcement of this move to more sustainable product and services yeah I mean so right now you have I guess buying for what's available you need something it might not be available as a consumer you're making a lot of trade-offs okay well I'll go for you know alcohol-based hand sanitizer you know as opposed to just conventional hand sanitizer as an example oh well I'll make some trade-offs in tissue paper etcetera etcetera and maybe there's some boredom buying I don't have you've seen that your people are shut-in but though all kinds of of daily changes weekly changes so how do you see this exiting how do you see compute consumer behavior you know changing as we exit this pandemic in waves and we're only sure how we're going to exit well let me kind of break it down in terms of what's been going on right now so of course we saw this massive waves of you know a shift to sanitary products a shift or groceries then we've seen a shift about how can I keep my kids entertained while they're at home and kind of more discretionary choices being much lower so when you kind of look at that in terms of actual impact on business we've seen grocery say in the u.s. up by about twenty seven and we've seen a move on digital in the u.s. about three percent of the of the US population shifts about buys online that's do 43 percent during this period and of course we think that these are things that are going to sustain what it's done is it's accelerate the type of purchases that people are doing in a digital context and we think that that is you know continued by some thoughts the data on the pandemic looks like it's been to continue for many months and and in ways those that we've seen the shifted digital and initially people are kind of looking for things anywhere but it's going to be combined with a kind of a new type of delivery model there's much more buy online pick up in center distribution center pick up our part whether that's you know your groceries or whether that's health related so it's going to change the delivery models it also means of course that stores are going to change a great great deal at the moment grocery stores all have social distancing with the protection of the store associates been you know a key element of that you're gonna see not the same amount of people in those stores going forward and you know a different configuration and application of technology also in store to keep monitoring both the safety of the employees and the safety of the customers but also make sure that occupancy levels are appropriate etc so big shifts the digital the big shifts to different types of delivery models you know big shifts of safety related technology of course what we're also seeing and this is the difficult piece which is if you have discretionary spend fashion apparel luxury the open those volumes are very very significant I mean look I've actually been quite impressed with some providers that have pivoted very quickly to things like curbside pickup and have really responded you know quite fast to that at the same time I've seen others where I mean it's clear that they really didn't have the infrastructure or the processes of their asking hey how how did we do do you mind taking a quick survey because they need to iterate how can I be M help those that really weren't that prepared and it sort of band-aided together some solutions get to the point post pandemic before this thing ends where they really need to be what are you guys doing with client yeah so well first and foremost as the pandemic we focused very much on resilience making sure that our clients but operators as robustly as possible in fact you know 95 percent to our services are being delivered it just began and remotely right what then happened was how do I deal with these massive volumes of airing in my two centers where by the way I have less staff because the people are I having to even themselves safe and social distance and so we deployed immediately beyond our resiliency solutions all centers that are helping our clients booth by aura ties and scream one of our major retail clients in the u.s. said you know I thought that the Watson Chapman knowledge ease were going to be helpful they weren't just helpful they saved us and so that kind of things occurring in the immediate that's the next piece of course you then start see is that finds have realized that both their digital panels and their fulfillment models have not been able to keep up nobody is being able to keep up with the demand that's not even Amazon's been able to keep up and what was you know a 24 or 48 hour delivery slot those those kind of slots have gone out the window so we are going to see a wave of reinvest in enhancing digital channels and we will leverage no both our our services business as well as our cloud knowledge ease to support that and then underpinning that you you're also seeing a need to rebalance the supply chain because of course where products come from have changed where is vsauce is now having to move much more from a global supply chain to a global local supply chain and we're having to balance supply with more local providers and so is a there's a demand supply balancing to be done that means that eyes are and i think about the practicalities of that but they were investing in next-generation technologies to support that for IBM that things like our IBM sterling portfolio but it's also the activation of our supply chain AI this massive demand set by and of imbalancing and we've been helping certain clients look at that and move stock most appropriate locations we've been doing that to help clients kind of rethink that there's this budgeting so we're gonna see a lot of that we have all of the intelligence of by chain and we're going to see no investment in the intelligence of buy chain just like we see this investment at baring in the change in the commerce engines last thing to say is wrap in trace is going to be hugely important reckon trace of all products and where they come from where they were handled and people and so technologies like lock pane and what we do with food trusts are also going to be a really important element yeah another really piece of digital I mean the cube we go to physical events and we've been saying that hang that this is not going to go back to 2019 the people are going to learn through this experience that there's really some additional value that they they can create through digital you think you think about consumer that's a much much more complex environment tens of thousands and fully hundreds of thousands or even millions of fights the product dimension chat thoughts you know the entire experience that we talked about a curbside pickup lead times people you know managing demand with lead times you can only or limiting the volume you mentioned supply chain track and trace block pain so a whole new set of digital assumptions are going to emerge or are emerging I don't want to make it sound like there's a there's some kind of binary beginning an end to this thing this is this is going to be a slow but yet fast iteration of constant iteration and continuous improvement yeah it is what am i - the newer faculty were talking earlier this week and they said look as difficult the environment is right now and of course we've been focused on our current operations and fulfilling our customers as best we can it's actually bringing us through a whole new window about who we think the priority is of our investment and how we look at that going forward and you know he's almost saying well I'm gonna have to zero based budgeting approach and against that we're gonna see a much better investment in almost regardless of what your model is whether you are digital first or physical first you're gonna see much better focus on kind of dealing with the pasady and the variability that we've experienced because organizations weren't geared up for that and you're going to see them the investment in the intelligence and the supply chain who support that backed up with trust and traceability and now back to the points that I start at the beginning of this session it means that the trends that we saw and we assess actually are going to be almost perpetuated because we think this move to sustainable and more local sourcing more balanced sourcing will continue to be a big factor and we think that this kind of idea of shopping in the micro moment but shopping in a much more digital way is here to stay the consequence of that is it's gonna have a what a big impact on the physical environments and unfortunately there aren't gonna do there are going to be as easy in this with certain sectors that are not going to be able to sustain the the big shift in the model so obviously physical down for the immediate and probably mid and maybe even long term digital up you one of your areas of expertise is agribusiness we thought you note you know tumour in general I wonder if you could share with us what you're what you're seeing there I'm inferring more more local sourcing which obviously has some impacts on what's available at different times a year potentially on on pricing thoughts on agribusiness and how they're responding yeah well it's it's fascinating you know if you take it into first of all of course you know agriculture has been impacted right now by not so much for the professional farming which has a large-scale mechanization before a lot of farming in large parts of Asia or Latin parts of Latin America or parts of Africa and even parts of Europe there's a lot of transitionary labor that occurs in order to be able to harvest crops and so that's a that's a really difficult immediate problem we've seen you people volunteering in certain countries like here in the UK where I live either people volunteering you can't work in their current job see how can I help that's kind of it an immediate thing that's needed right now but the broader topic in the work that my teams do is that actually the application of digital technologies and science who is behind what it is in other industries and there's such a great opportunity by leveraging digital only be more effective in actually hitting the most out of farming land without over farming the land and so we're working quite a lot on digital economics of buying base ability you truly from farmed or and no but have been together data sources that were not in the same base to be able to help build effectively an AgrAbility for the benefit the farmers and cross those things were going to see farmers empowered with more information in it more insight so simple things like The Weather Channel application that we have from our weather comm we're deploying that to millions of farmers in Africa and Asia and on top of that we're being able to and for the deployment of other related information though how to farm but also we could start to look at how to provide safety related information etcetera to those farmers so so we are going to see through effective use of technology increase appropriate digitization of no farming processes and there'll be in a very practical level what I'd put onto my phone so so definitely this is a big thing and and of course as you know the traceability that we do with our food resan isn't just about safety and talk about how food was produced how far it's traveled what conditions was it handled in what's a co2 footprint and so that traceability engine can actually accelerate also this is and as I referred to earlier Luca mean as we're discussing you know the moment-by-moment the assumptions are changing you know the narrative this weekend of course at least in the US was pay we've got it now get out there and and many are saying this not all but but just effect mass unity that it's really going to be the only way vaccines aren't coming anytime soon young people will go out retail environment of course you're gonna have social distancing people that are compromised or older aren't going to go out the clearly volumes are going to be down but it's a very fluid situation so business resiliency and flexibility is critical here and it sounds like you're helping organizations really build that into their operating model that is critical yeah absolutely and you know for some of the grantees that I haven't boomer you what you're seeing in things like a chorale fashion luxury is a a move to try to drive that engagement to you the customer in a much more digital sense so how do I interact with the brand how do I experience the band how can I all the way through to my purchase digitally when I don't have the ability to get stores so this digital transformation agenda will affect pretty much all major segments obviously the foods by chain the health by chain is the focus right now but we will see on the increasing digitization and a need to rebalance the in-store experience even for the segments so there will be a lot of transformation to be done a while of course having to deal with the cost balancing that need in these industries as they effectively shift more towards digital yeah you're right I mean the cost structure may dramatically change yet at the same time it may be critical for or maintaining or even gaining market share so a lot of potential disruption Luke I'll give you the final word your thoughts bring us home well you know first of all you know people's well-being in safety is our paramount purpose and that's what we've been looking at the outset but I think people would be positive that there is a lot of opportunity in which we can deliver the things that they need in a safe way in a secure way in a digital way that is able to cope with the environments that we see today and may prevail and it's about winning that intelligence and innovation into both the promise and the digital channels and into the supply chains all the way through to the track and trace which is what we focus on well look thanks so much for coming on the cube was great to have you with your your insights on the IBM very clearly has its hands and a lot of these different industries and it's great to have your industry expertise sharing with our audience I really appreciate your time take care thank you all right thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for our continuous coverage of IBM think digital event experience 2020 you're watching the cube right back right after this short break you [Music] you

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everybody, this is Dave Vallante with Stu Miniman and we're going to take a look back at ten years of theCUBE at VMworld and look forward to see what's coming next. So, as I say, this is theCUBE's 10th year at VMworld, that's VMworld, of course 2019. And Stu, if you think about the VMware of 2010, when we first started, it's a dramatically different VMware today. Let's look back at 2010. Paul Maritz was running VMware, he set forth the vision of the software mainframe last decade, well, what does that mean, software mainframe? Highly integrated hardware and software that can run any workload, any application. That is the gauntlet that Tucci and Maritz laid down. A lot of people were skeptical. Fast forward 10 years, they've actually achieved that, I mean, essentially, it is the standard operating system, if you will, in the data center, but there's a lot more to the story. But you remember, at the time, Stu, it was a very complex environment. When something went wrong, you needed guys with lab coats to come in a figure out, you know, what was going on, the I/O blender problem, storage was a real bottleneck. So let's talk about that. >> Yeah, Dave, so much. First of all, hard to believe, 10 years, you know, think back to 2010, it was my first time being at VMworld, even though I started working with VMware back in 2002 when it was like, you know, 100, 150 person company. Remember when vMotion first launched. But that first show that we went to, Dave, was in San Francisco, and most people didn't know theCUBE, heck, we were still figuring out exactly what theCUBE will be, and we brought in a bunch of our friends that were doing the CloudCamps in Silicon Valley, and we were talking about cloud. And there was this gap that we saw between, as you said, the challenges we were solving with VMware, which was fixing infrastructure, storage and networking had been broken, and how were we going to make sure that that worked in a virtual environment even better? But there were the early thought leaders that were talking about that future of cloud computing, which, today in 2019, looks like we had a good prediction. And, of course, where VMware is today, we're talking all about cloud. So, so many different eras and pieces and research that we did, you know, hundreds and hundreds of interviews that we've done at that show, it's definitely been one of our flagship shows and one of our favorite for guests and ecosystems and so much that we got to dig into at that event. >> So Tod Nielsen, who was the President and probably COO at the time, talked about the ecosystem. For every dollar spent on a VMware license, $15 was spent on the ecosystem. VMware was a very, even though they were owned by EMC, they were very, sort of, neutral to the ecosystem. You had what we called the storage cartel. It was certainly EMC, you know, but NetApp was right there, IBM, HP, you know, Dell had purchased EqualLogic, HDS was kind of there as well. These companies were the first to get the APIs, you remember, the VASA VAAI. So, we pushed VMware at the time, saying, "Look, you guys got a storage problem." And they said, "Well, we don't have a lot of resources, "we're going to let the ecosystem solve the problem, "here's an API, you guys figure it out." Which they largely did, but it took a long time. The other big thing you had in that 2010 timeframe was storage consolidation. You had the bidding war between Dell and HP, which, ultimately, HP, under Donatelli's leadership, won that bidding war and acquired 3PAR >> Bought 3PAR >> for 2.4, 2.5 billion, it forced Dell to buy Compellent. Subsequently, Isilon was acquired, Data Domain was acquired by EMC. So you had this consolidation of the early 2000s storage startups and then, still, storage was a major problem back then. But the big sea change was, two things happened in 2012. Pat Gelsinger took over as CEO, and VMware acquired Nicira, beat Cisco to the punch. Why did that change everything? >> Yeah, Dave, we talked a lot about storage, and how, you know, the ecosystem was changing this. Nicira, we knew it was a big deal. When I, you know, I talked to my friends that were deep in networking and I talked with Nicira and was majorly impressed with what they were doing. But this heterogeneous, and what now is the multi-cloud environment, networking needs to play a critical role. You see, you know, Cisco has clearly targeted that environment and Nicira had some really smart people and some really fundamental technology underneath that would allow networking to go just beyond the virtual machine where it was before, the vSwitch. So, you know, that expansion, and actually, it took a little while for, you know, the Nicira acquisition to run into NSX and that product to gain maturity, and to gain adoption, but as Pat Gelsinger has said more recently, it is one of the key drivers for VMware, getting them beyond just the hypervisor itself. So, so much is happening, I mean, Dave, I look at the swings as, you know, you said, VMware didn't have enough resources, they were going to let the ecosystem do it. In the early days, it was, I chose a server provider, and, oh yeah, VMware kind of plays in it. So VMware really grew how much control and how much power they had in buying decisions, and we're going through more of that change now, as to, as they're partnering we're going to talk about AWS and Microsoft and Google as those pieces. And Pat driving that ship. The analogy we gave is, could Pat do for VMware what Intel had done for a long time, which is, you have a big ecosystem, and you slowly start eating away at some of that other functionality without alienating that ecosystem. And to Pat's credit, it's actually something that he's done quite well. There's been some ebbs and flows, there's pushback in the community. Those that remember things like the "vTax," when they rolled that out. You know, there's certain features that the rolled into the hypervisor that have had parts of the ecosystem gripe a little bit, but for the most part, VMware is still playing well with the ecosystem, even though, after the Dell acquisition of EMC, you know, we'll talk about this some more, that relationship between Dell and VMware is tighter than it ever was in the EMC days. >> So that led to the Software-Defined Data Center, which was the big, sort of, vision. VMware wanted to do to storage and networking what it had done to compute. And this started to set up the tension between with VMware and Cisco, which, you know, lives on today. The other big mega trend, of course, was flash storage, which was coming into play. In many ways, that whole API gymnastics was a Band-Aid. But the other big piece if it is Pat Gelsinger was much more willing to integrate, you know, some of the EMC technologies, and now Dell technologies, into the VMware sort of stack. >> Right, so Dave, you talked about all of those APIs, Vvols was a huge multi-year initiative that VMware worked on and all of the big storage players were talking about how that would allow them to deeply integrate and make it virtualization-aware storage your so tense we come out on their own and try to do that. But if you look at it, VVols was also what enabled VMware to do vSAN, and that is a little bit of how they can try to erode in some of the storage piece, because vSAN today has the most customers in the hyperconverged infrastructure space, and is keeping to grow, but they still have those storage partnerships. It didn't eliminate it, but it definitely adds some tension. >> Well it is important, because under EMC's ownership it was sort of a let 1,000 flowers bloom sort of strategy, and today you see Jeff Clarke coming in and consolidating the portfolios, saying, "Look, let's let VMware go hard with vSAN." So you're seeing a different type of governance structure, we'll talk about that. 2013 was a big year. That's the year they brought in Sanjay Poonen, they did the AirWatch acquisition, they took on what the industry called VDI, what VMware called EUC, End-User Computing. Citrix was the dominant player in that space, VMware was fumbling, frankly. Sanjay Poonen came in, the AirWatch acquisition, now, VMware is a leader in that space, so that was big. The other big thing in 2013 was, you know, the famous comment by Carl Eschenbach about, you know, if we lose to the book seller, we'll all lose. VMware came out with it's cloud strategy, vCloud Air. I was there with the Wall Street analyst that day listening to Pat explain that and we were talking afterwards to a number of the Wall Street analysts saying, "This really doesn't make a lot of sense." And then they sort of retreated on that, saying that it was going to be an accelerant, and it just was basically a failed cloud strategy. >> And Dave, that 2013 is also when they spun out Cloud Foundry and founded Pivital. So, you know, this is where they took some of the pieces from EMC, the Greenplum, and they took some of the pieces from VMware, Spring and the Cloud Foundation, and put those together. As we speak right now, there was just an SEC Filing that VMware might suck them back in. Where I look at that, back in 2013, there was a huge gap between what VMware was doing on the infrastructure side and what Cloud Foundry was doing on the application modernization standpoint, they had bought the Pivotal Labs piece to help people understand new programming models and everything along those lines. Today, in 2019, if you look at where VMware is going, the changes happening in containerization, the changes happening from the application down, they need to come together. The Achilles heel that I have seen from VMware for a long time is that VMware doesn't have enough a tie to or help build the applications. Microsoft owns the applications, Oracle owns the applications. You know, there are all the ISVs that own the applications, and Pivotal, if they bring that back into VMware it can help, but it made sense at the time to kind of spin that out because it wasn't synergies between them. >> It was what I called at the time a bunch of misfit toys. And so it was largely David Goulden's engineering of what they called The Federation. And now you're seeing some more engineering, financial engineering, of having VMware essentially buy another, you know, Dell Silver Lake asset, which, you know, drove the stock price up 77% in a day that the Dow dropped 800 points. So I guess that works, kind of funny money. The other big trend sort of in that mid-part of this decade, hyperconverged, you know, really hit. Nutanix, who was at one point a strong partner of both VMware and Dell, was sort of hitting its groove swing. Fast forward to 2019, different situation, Nutanix really doesn't have a presence there. You know, people are looking at going beyond hyperconverged. So there's sort of the VMware ecosystem, sort of friendly posture has changed, they point fingers at each other. VMware says, "Well, it's Nutanix's fault." Nutanix will say it's VMware's fault. >> Right, so Dave, I pointed out, the Achilles heel for VMware might be that they don't have the closest tie to the application, but their greatest strength is, really, they are really the data center operating system, if you will. When we wrote out our research on Server SAN was before vSAN had gotten launched. It was where Nutanix, Scale Computing, SimpliVity, you know, Pivot3, and a few others were early in that space, but we stated in our research, if Microsoft and VMware get serious about that space, they can dominate. And we've seen, VMware came in strong, they do work with their partnerships. Of course, Dell, with the VxRail is their largest solution, but all of the other server providers, you know, have offerings and can put those together. And Microsoft, just last year, they kind of rebranded some of the Azure Stack as HCI and they're going strong in that space. So, absolutely, you know, strong presence in the data center platform, and that's what they're extending into their hybrid and multi-cloud offering, the VMware Cloud Solutions. >> So I want to get to some of the trends today, but just real quick, let's go through some of this. So 2015 was the big announcement in the fall where Dell was acquiring EMC, so we entered, really, the Dell era of VMware ownership in 2016. And the other piece that happened, really 2016 in the fall, but it went GA 2017, was the announcement AWS and VMware as the preferred partnership. Yes, AWS had a partnership with IBM, they've subsequently >> VMware had a partnership >> Yeah, sorry, VMware has a partnership with IBM for their cloud, subsequently VMware has done deals with Google and Microsoft, so there's, we now have entered the multi-cloud hybrid world. VMware capitulated on cloud, smart move, cleaned up its cloud strategy, cleaned that AirWatch mess. AWS also capitulated on hybrid. It's a term that they would never use, they don't use it necessarily a lot today, but they recognize that On Prem is a viable portion of the marketplace. And so now we've entered this new era of cloud, hybrid cloud, containers is the other big trend. People said, "Containers are going to really hurt VMware." You know, the jury's still out on that, VMware sort of pushes back on that. >> And Dave, just to put a point on that, you know, everybody, including us, spent a lot of time looking at this VMware Cloud on AWS partnership, and what does it mean, especially, to the parent, you know, Dell? How do they make that environment? And you've pointed out, Dave, that while VMware gets in those environments and gives themselves a very strong cloud strategy, AWS is the key partner, but of course, as you said, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and all the server providers, we have a number of them including CenturyLink and Rackspace that they're partnering with, but we have to wait a little while before Amazon, when they announced their outpost solutions, VMware is a critical software piece, and you've got two flavors of the hardware. You can run the full AWS Stack, just like what they're running in their data center, but the alternative, of course, is VMware software running on Dell hardware. And we think that if VMware hadn't come in with a strong position with Amazon and their 600,000 customers, we're not sure that Amazon would have said, "Oh yeah, hey, you can run that same software stack "that you're running, but run some different hardware." So that's a good place for Dell to get in the environment, it helps kind of close out that story of VMware, Dell, and AWS and how the pieces fit together. >> Yeah, well so, by the way, earlier this week I privately mentioned to a Dell executive that one of the things I thought they should do was fold Pivotal into VMware. By the way, I think they should go further. I think they should look at RSA and Dell Boomi and SecureWorks, make VMware the mothership of software, and then really tie in Dell's hardware to VMware. That seems to me, Stu, the direction that they're going to try to gain an advantage on the balance of the ecosystem. I think VMware now is in a position of strength with, what, 5 or 600,000 customers. It feels like it's less ecosystem friendly than it used to be. >> Yeah, Dave, there's no doubt about it. HPE and IBM, who were two of the main companies that helped with VMware's ascendancy, do a lot of other things beyond VMware. Of course, IBM bought Red Hat, it is a key counterbalance to what VMware is doing in the multi-cloud. And Dave, to your point, absolutely, if you look at Dell's cloud strategy, they're number one offering is VMware, VMware cloud on Dell. Dell as the project dimension piece. All of these pieces do line up. I'll say, some of those pieces, absolutely, I would say, make sense to kind of pull in and shell together. I know one of the reasons they keep the security pieces at arm's length is just, you know, when something goes wrong in the security space, and it's not of the question of if, it's a question of when, they do have that arm's length to be able to keep that out and be able to remediate a little bit when something happens. >> So let's look at some of the things that we're following today. I think one of the big ones is, how will containers effect customer spending on VMware? We know people are concerned about the vTax. We also know that they're concerned about lock-in. And so, containers are this major force. Can VMware make containers a tailwind, or is it a headwind for them? >> So you look at all the acquisitions that they've made lately, Dave, CloudHealth is, from a management standpoint, in the public cloud. Heptio and Bitnami, targeting that cloud native space. Pair that with Cloud Foundry and you see, VMware and Pivotal together trying to go all-in on Kubernetes. So those 600,000 customers, VMware wants to be the group that educates you on containerization, Kubernetes, you know, how to build these new environments. For, you know, a lot of customers, it's attractive for them to just stay. "I have a relationship, "I have an enterprise licensing agreement, "I'm going to stay along with that." The question I would have is, if I want to do something in a modern way, is VMware really the best partner to choose from? Do they have the cost structure? A lot of these environments set up, you know, it's open source base, or I can work with my public cloud providers there, so why would I partner with VMware? Sure, they have a lot of smart people and they have expertise and we have a relationship, but what differentiates VMware, and is it worth paying for that licensing that they have, or will I look at alternatives? But as VMware grows their hybrid and multi-cloud deployments they absolutely are on the short list of, you know, strategic partners for most customers. >> The other big thing that we're watching is multi-cloud. I have said over and over that multi-cloud has largely been a symptom of multi-vendor. It's not necessarily, to date anyway, been a strategy of customers. Having said that, issues around security, governance, compliance have forced organizations and boards to say, "You know what, we need IT more involved, "let's make multi-cloud part of our strategy, "not only for governance and compliance "and making sure it adheres to the corporate edicts, "but also to put the right workload on the right cloud." So having some kind of strategy there is important. Who are the players there? Obviously VMware, I would say, right now, is the favorite because it's coming from a position of strength in the data center. Microsoft with it's software state, Cisco coming at it from a standpoint of network strength. Google, with Anthos, that announcement earlier this year, and, of course, Red Hat with IBM. Who's the company that I didn't mention in that list? >> Well, of course, you can't talk about cloud, Dave, without talking about AWS. So, as you stated before, they don't really want to talk about hybrid, hey, come on, multi-cloud, why would you do this? But any customer that has a multi-cloud environment, they've got AWS. And the VMware-AWS partnership is really interesting to watch. It will be, you know, where will Amazon grow in this environment as they find their customers are using multiple solutions? Amazon has lots of offerings to allow you leverage Kubernetes, but, for the most part, the messaging is still, "We are the best place for you, "if you do everything on us, "you're going to get better pricing "and all of these environments." But as you've said, Dave, we never get down to that homogeneous, you know, one vendor solution. It tends to be, you know, IT has always been this heterogeneous mess and you have different groups that purchase different things for different reasons, and we have not seen, yet, public cloud solving that for a lot of customers. If anything we often have many more silos in the clouds than we had in the data center before. >> Okay. Another big story that we're following, big trend, is the battle for networking. NSX, the software networking component, and then Cisco, who's got a combination of, obviously, hardware and software with ACI. You know, Stu, I got to say, Cisco a very impressive company. You know, 60+% market share, being able to hold that share for a long time. I've seen a lot of companies try to go up against Cisco. You know, the industry's littered with failures. It feels, however, like NSX is a disruptive force that's very hard for Cisco to deal with in a number of dimensions. We talked about multi-cloud, but networking in general. Cisco's still a major player, still, you know, owns the hardware infrastructure, obviously layering in its own software-defined strategy. But that seems to be a source of tension between the two companies. What's the customer perspective? >> Yeah, so first of all, Dave, Cisco, from a hardware perspective, is still going strong. There are some big competitors. Arista has been doing quite well into getting in, especially, a high performance, high speed environments, you know, Jayshree Ullal and that team, you know, very impressive public company that's doing quite well. >> Service providers that do really well there. >> Absolutely, but, absolutely, software is eating the world and it is impacting networking. Even when you look at Cisco's overall strategy, it is in the future. Cisco is not a networking company, they are a software company. The whole DevNet, you know, group that they have there is helping customers modernize, what we were talking about with Pivotal. Cisco is going there and helping customers create those new environments. But from a customer standpoint, they want simplicity. If my VMware is a big piece of my environment, I've probably started using NSX, NSX-T, some of these environments. As I go to my service providers, as I go to multi-cloud, that NSX piece inside my VMware cloud foundation starts to grow. I remember, Dave, a few years back, you know, Pat Gelsinger got up on a stage and was like, "This is the biggest collection of network administrators that we've ever seen!" And everybody's looking around and they're like, "Where? "We're virtualization people. "Oh, wait, just because we've got vNICs and vSwitches "and things like that." It still is a gap between kind of a hardcore networking people and the software state. But just like we see on storage, Dave, it's not like vSAN, despite it's thousands and thousands of customers, it is not the dominant player in storage. It's a big player, it's a great revenue stream, and it is expanding VMware beyond their core vSphere solutions. >> Back to Cisco real quickly. One of the things I'm very impressed with Cisco is the way in which they've developed infrastructures. Code with the DevNet group, how CCIEs are learning Python, and that's a very powerful sort of trend to watch. The other thing we're watching is VMware-AWS. How will it affect spending, you know, near-term, mid-term, long-term? Clearly it's been a momentum, you know, tailwind, for VMware today, but the questions remains, long-term, where will customers place their bets? Where will the spending be? We know that cloud is growing dramatically faster than On Prem, but it appears, at least in the near- to mid-term, for one, two, maybe three more cycles, maybe indefinitely, that the VMware-AWS relationship has been a real positive for VMware. >> Yeah, Dave, I think you stated it really well. When I talked to customers, they were a bit frozen a couple of years ago. "Ah, I know I need to do more in cloud, "but I have this environment, what do I do? "Do I stay with VMware, do I have to make a big change." And what VMware did, is they really opened things up and said, "Look, no, you can embrace cloud, and we're there for you. "We will be there to help be that bridge to the future, "if you will, so take your VMware environment, "do VMware cloud in lots of places, "and we will enable that." What we know today, the stat that we hear all the time, the old 80/20 we used to talk about was 80% keeping the lights on, now the 80% we hear about is, there's only 20% of workloads that are in public cloud today. It doesn't mean that that other 80% is going to flip overnight, but if you look over the next five to ten years, it could be a flip from 80/20 to 20/80. And as that shift happens, how much of that estate will stay under VMware licenses? Because the day after AWS made the announcement of VMware cloud on AWS, they offered some migration services. So if you just want to go on natively on the public cloud, you can do that. And Microsoft, Google, everybody has migration services, so use VMware for what I need to, but I might go more native cloud for some of those other environments. So we know it is going to continue to be a mix. Multi-cloud is what customers are doing today, and multi- and hybrid-cloud is what customers will be doing five years from now. >> The other big question we're watching is Outposts. Will VMware and Outposts get a larger share of wallet as a result of that partnership at the expense of other vendors? And so, remains to be seen, Outposts grabbed a lot of attention, that whole notion of same control plane, same hardware, same software, same data plane On Prem as in the Data Center, kind of like Oracle's same-same approach, but it's seemingly a logical one. Others are responding. Your thoughts on whether or not these two companies will dominate or the industry will respond or an equilibrium. >> Right, so first of all, right, that full same-same full stack has been something we've been talking about now, feels like for 10 years, Dave, with Oracle, IBM had a strategy on that, and you see that, but one of the things with VMware has strong strength. What they have over two decades of experiences on is making sure that I can have a software stack that can actually live in heterogeneous environments. So in the future, if we talk about if Kubernetes allows me to live in a multi-cloud environment, VMware might be able to give me some flexibility so that I can move from one hardware stack to another as I move from data centers to service providers to public clouds. So, absolutely, you know, one to watch. And VMware is smart. Amazon might be their number one partner, but they're lining up everywhere. When you see Sanjay Poonen up on stage with Thomas Kurian at Google Cloud talking about how Anthos in your data center very much requires VMware. You see Sachi Nodella up on stage talking about these kind of VMware partnerships. VMware is going to make sure that they live in all of these environments, just like they lived on all of the servers in the data center in the past. >> The other last two pieces that I want to touch on, and they're related is, as a result of Dell's ownership of VMware, are customers going to spend more with Dell? And it's clear that Dell is architecting a very tight relationship. You can see, first of all, Michael Dell putting Jeff Clarke in charge of everything Dell was brilliant, because, in a way, you know, Pat was kind of elevated as this superstar. And Michael Dell is the founder, and he's the leader of the company. So basically what he's created is this team of rivals. Now, you know, Jeff and Pat, they've worked together for decades, but very interesting. We saw them up on stage together, you know, last year, well I guess at Dell Technologies World, it was kind of awkward, but so, I love it. I love that tension of, It's very clear to me that Dell wants to integrate more tightly with VMware. It's the clear strategy, and they don't really care at this point if it's at the expense of the ecosystem. Let the ecosystem figure it out themselves. So that's one thing we're watching. Related to that is long-term, are customers going to spend more of their VMware dollars in the public cloud? Come back to Dell for a second. To me, AWS is by far the number one competitor of Dell, you know, that shift to the cloud. Clearly they've got other competitors, you know, NetApp, Huawei, you know, on and on and on, but AWS is the big one. How will cloud spending effect both Dell and AWS long-term? The numbers right now suggest that cloud's going to keep growing, $35, $40 billion run-rate company growing at 40% a year, whereas On Prem stuff's growing, you know, at best, single digits. So that trend really does favor the cloud guys. I talked to a Gartner analyst who tracks all this stuff. I said, "Can AWS continue to grow? It's so big." He said, "There's no reason, they can't stop. "The market's enormous." I tend to agree, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, first of all, on the AWS, absolutely, I agree, Dave. They are still, if you look at the overall IT spend, AWS is still a small piece. They have, that lever that they have and the influence they have on the marketplace greatly outweighs the, you know, $30, $31 billion that they're at today, and absolutely they can keep growing. The one point, I think, what we've seen, the best success that Dell is having, it is the Dell and VMware really coming together, product development, go to market, the field is tightly, tightly, tightly alligned. The VxRail was the first real big push, and if they can do the same thing with the vCloud foundation, you know, VMware cloud on Dell hardware, that could be a real tailwind for Dell to try to grow faster as an infrastructure company, to grow more like the software companies or even the cloud companies will. Because we know, when we've run the numbers, Dave, private cloud is going to get a lot of dollars, even as public cloud continues its growth. >> I think the answer comes down to a couple things. Because right now we know that 80% of the spend and stall base is On Prem, 20% in the cloud. We're entering now the cloud 2.0, which introduces hybrid-cloud, On Prem, you know, connecting to clouds, multi-cloud, Kubernetes. So what it comes down to, to me Stu, is to what degree can Dell, VMware, and the ecosystem create that cloud experience in a hybrid world, number one? And number two, how will they be able to compete from a cost-structure standpoint? Dell's cost-structure is better than anybody else's in the On Prem world. I would argue that AWS's cost-structure is better, you know, relative to Dell, but remains to be seen. But really those two things, the cloud experience and the cost-structure, can they hold on, and how long can they hold on to that 80%? >> All right, so Dave here's the question I have for you. What are we talking about when we're talking about Dell plus VMware and even add in Pivotal? It's primarily hardware plus software. Who's the biggest in that multi-cloud space? It's IBM plus Red Hat, which you've stated emphatically, "This is a services play, and IBM has, you know, "just got, you know, services in their DNA, "and that could help supercharge where Red Hat's going "and the modernization." So is that a danger for Dell? If they bring in Pivotal, do they need to really ramp up that services? How do they do that? >> Yeah, I don't think it's a zero sum game, but I also don't think there's, it's five winners. I think that the leader, VMware right now would be my favorite, I think it's going to do very well. I think Red Hat has got, you know, a lot of good market momentum, I think they've got a captive install base, you know, with IBM and its large outsourcing business, and I think they can do pretty well, and I think number three could do okay. I think the other guys struggle. But it's so early, right now, in the hybrid-cloud world and the multi-cloud world, that if I were any one of those five I'd be going hard after it. We know Google's got the dollars, we know Microsoft has the software state, so I can see Microsoft actually doing quite well in that business, and could emerge as the, maybe they're not a long-shot right now, but they could be a, you know, three to one, four to one leader that comes out as the favorite. So, all right, we got to go. Stu, thanks very much for your insights. And thank you for watching and listening. We will be at VMworld 2019. Three days of coverage on theCUBE. Thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Dell technologies world 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world I'm Lisa Martin we're in Vegas I'm with Keith Townsend and we have a couple of guests here joining us as we wrap up day - we've got Chad Dunn a cube alumni VP of Product Management at Dell EMC and Matt Harris senior director of product marketing at VMware welcome so guys lots of news coming out today saw in the press release Dell EMC now is the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure announcements 2vx rail VX rack sddc what's new obviously there's a lot new I mean really happy with with the market share and the and the traction that we're getting with both of the products in the VMware hyper-converged portfolio VX rail VX rack at CDC on VX rail we added new capabilities like 25 gig Ethernet nvme drives new security capabilities new graphical processing unit high density memory on the VX rack side we're now on Dell 14 G servers in fact that hardware is basically VX rail inside VX rack SD DC so you can sort of start to see how these things come together as we move forward in the roadmap and we also announced a VMware validated design on VX rail and again we're starting to sort of merge the divisions of these two products so they become consumption models of the same technology so met helped paint a picture for what this means for VMware and typical vmware vsphere we abstracted away the hardware so the hardware doing no longer matters right yeah well that's a great analogy actually so I'm a longtime vmware employee and one of the things that's Jean about vSphere is it really brought together more than one component for the underlying virtualization infrastructure so what cloud formations really doing it's like the next iteration of East here it's bringing together the storage compute network and management layers that make up our entire sddc solution and delivering that as a automated and and a two operated system the customers get the maximum value out of that and when we partner up with somebody like Dell I was able to bring unique value on their hardware platforms that's cognizant of all of those capabilities and Clapp foundation we're able to really get a lot of traction in the marketplace and hardware always matters we're literally nothing without it first Dell technologies world in the name change an indicator alone of the incorporation of the EMC Federation companies what we'll say power does that are you hearing from the customers and the partners that are here in terms of the strengthening of what that means for Dell EMC and VMware well I think the the obvious thing that everybody sees is the power of the portfolio that we now have ya know me as a product owner of a hyperconvergence platform I was doing that job at EMC and I didn't have a server there are a lot - OH - MS do to get servers to build our product but now you know I've got the best x86 portfolio in the market yeah right here under the same roof and now I have product managers who work for me are now in Round Rock or integrated with those teams so having the power both internally and npower for our customers to tap into all the things across the portfolio VMware pivotal RSA secure works virtuous dream I mean it's a really amazing IT portfolio and the great thing about coming to a show like this is I've seen a lot of the same faces of people I've known for years I've been here 11 years and I'm seeing a lot of new faces and getting them reenergized about the technology so Matt let's execute a similar question pre-merger one of the things that on the customer side you know I had an EMC rep rep I had a vmworld rep generally speaking never suck we've never met together can you talk about the cultural change if any with the relationship with dale emc versus the previous emc where the pro folio was limited to mainly storage products yeah well so the reality is vmware has always had a great relationship with obviously emc where i owned us but also with dell I mean if I think about my years in the field with customers Dell was the easiest partner for us to go to market with together they had a great sales organization and great products that customers loved it was always the easiest to walk into a customer account with the Dell Rob that's only gotten easier and because my product that I'm responsible for Clapp foundation is one that lands very specifically on unique capabilities from Dells solutions that just makes that conversation more meaningful it's a great story between us and VMware because we're actually able to to leverage some of the IP that we created for VX rail and now bring that into our cloud foundation instantiation which is VX RAC sddc so you don't think our group and we're pretty proud of the fact that we probably collaborate more closely with vmware in more places than anybody else in WMC we've had a long-standing collaboration on VX rail and now with cloud foundation it gets even better and what's the business value that you're seeing from VCS in the customer service in light of this strong new collaboration that's that's a great question so you know you know virtualization is great but what really customers are looking for is something that's adapting to the new realities of the way datacenters actually exist today it's not just private and public cloud the dimensions of the datacenter expanding all over the place edge systems are important as public and private cloud and what the value proposition we're seeing is having a ubiquitous consistent and transparent underlying infrastructure that can exist across all of those streamlets operations it adds agility to organizations to actually be able to deploy workload consistently across all of those different platforms and and you know if you combine it with something that we're doing together with Dell then all of those customers are benefiting across multiple parts of what they consider their data center I'm a great example this is the kind of work they were doing around IOT with Dell and that's another possible profile of workload that could live on top of class foundation now you've got multiple business value points traversing both of our solutions so I can take the extra lvx rack instead of setting up a POC of open source software to find data centers I'm sure customers have tried that and attempted it talk about that conversation when they come back either through the Dell channel or back to VMware and say you know what we tried this this is where it was good and this is why we're having this second set of conversations where are the pain points that VCF but on top of vehicle rack it's all well start from the bottom up and think about the things that we worry about so that you as the customer don't have to there are between nine and twelve different programmable firmware devices inside of PowerEdge server do you really want to track all those and make sure they match up with all your VMware drivers no of course not right you want something that's automated that lives in the system that knows how to upgrade those drivers out upgrade that firmware connect it to the right bits in in the VMware stack and make sure that you're always in a known good state and you're gonna get peak performance so we want to take those things that nobody really wants to do and let us do them for you when people tried to do it themselves they quickly find out that we were doing a lot of stuff that we didn't always talk about that made their lives easier so that's not on the hardware side on the software side yeah so I will tell you that there's no way to really deploy applications across multiple points of presence hybrid cloud for example is not doable unless you can really remove make the infrastructure invisible in a way and that's what this collaboration is really done and that's a critical pain point that you know customers have always derived benefit from NSX the Santa Ana VCR but to have these things all integrated into one product with the cloud foundation that was a game-changer for bringing these solutions together for lifecycle management day to operations as I mentioned that's unique capability there that is differentiated than just doing a ad hoc deployment of any of these technologies so the theme of the event make it real if you look at a financial services institution for example together what are you making a reality for them as it relates to IT transformation or digital transformation what is that reality that you're helping them achieve yeah well so one thing I'll say is that the reality of any workload across multiple clouds delivered to any user to any mobile device or desktop device that's a real capability that we're delivering for example Clapp foundation can instantiate through this concept called workload domain both traditional infrastructures of service applications and VDI the virtual desktops so this is real work that we're doing with real customers today together yeah just not with 1:00 this morning and they're now migrating about 500 virtual machines per week on to their VX rack sddc infrastructure and I believe they just crossed the 5500 VM mark and there'll be 8,000 VMs when they complete the project so that's real and and from the business outcomes perspective what does it allow that customer to achieve that then allows them to you know transition from where they are today which is about 60 percent virtualized to 95 percent virtualized when they when they reach the end of this journey and because we offload a lot of the tasks around managing the hardware managing the software on all of those lifecycle things and the automation that comes from the cloud management platform you can start to redeploy some of those resources to things that differentiate the business right instead of worrying about all the you know the bits and pieces that are in your infrastructure so what's next what was one on the horizon for the relationship what our customers asking for 200 meetings this week I'm sure there's been requests from customers tons of requests they want to see more automated lifecycle management they want to see vx rail releases in VMware releases get closer together in time they want us to be simultaneously shipping which is something that we're working on they want latest and greatest everybody wants to talk about nvme you know now we have nvme faster connectivity for the devices so you know the platform roadmap will continue but I think what Matt and I what we talk about quite frequently you can start to see us foreshadowing this strategy as we have the x-ray oh and we have the X rack sddc and we have cloud foundation doesn't need to be - right how do these come together is this consumption model it's just a different consumption model for the same technology so we're looking to see what synergies can we bring across those two products - to build a better portfolio for the VMware I've converged use case and I would say for our part we look to continue this partnership and I love what Chad was saying about the idea of you know VX rail and in VX rack having you know the same underlying components and how can we bring those things together I'll also say that looking out into the future I mentioned multiple workload profiles data analytics IOT NFV in addition to traditional high as it would be very interesting for us to work together to see how can we move up the stack for from an automated perspective can we automate the applique underlying application infrastructure in a way that will make customers more agile and that's something we could definitely look to try to do together in the future well guys thanks so much for stopping by talking about what's new how you're enabling cuz to really facilitate the IT transformation enabling that digital transformation and delivering a differentiated way of doing that to be here thank you we want to thank you for watching the queue we are live at day two or finishing day two I should say of Delft technologies world in Las Vegas I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend thanks for watching we'll see you tomorrow

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend and we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time, Varun Chhabra, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Dell EMC Storage and Data Protection. Hi Varun. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> Oh, our pleasure. So, the theme of first Dell Technologies World, huge 14,000 people. >> Absolutely. >> 5,000 plus partners here (audio dropping) make it real. What does that mean? What are you helping customers make real as it relates to all these different, transformational initiatives. Digital, IT, workforce, security. >> I'm a product marketer by trade, so we throw around a lot of buzz words, right. We've been guilty of that. But one of the things that I've observed over the last year or so is, every customer that we speak to, they're really thinking about digital transformation. And, you know, it could have different words but really what it means is, the economy is getting increasingly digitized. When you have something getting increasingly digitized it leaves a digital marker. Every activity leaves a digital marker. In other words, that's basically data. What is data but a digital marker? It's just fascinating, the customers that we talk to, they're very aware that there's because of all this activity that they're able to track and draw insights out of, if they don't do that, their competitors might do it. You could have up starts coming up and disrupting a particular business model. In the media, we often hear a lot about, you know, Netflix, Tesla and of course those are great examples, but we see this in every industry. Whether it's genomics, health care, in media and entertainment, it's happening everywhere, whether it's companies reinventing themselves, trying to disrupt their own business models to stay relevant or new startups coming in and trying to say how can we do this differently. >> So let's talk about the impact of digital transformation on storage and data protection. What data is, the new oil, all the buzz words we want to throw onto that. You, as a marketer, you have to translate into what that means from a technology perspective. For the boots on the ground what does digital transformation mean to people concerned with storage and data? >> Absolutely, it basically means, it means data. What is underpinning, a lot of times we talk to customers, they'll say, oh, I have big data initiatives, because they're trying to to make digital transformation real, you need to pull our insights from the data. So, it's big data, IoT, you know pick your buzz word. ML, AI, but if you take a step back all of these initiatives, they are basically dependent on data. You can't run an ML or AI algorithm without data. People talk about neural networks, neural networks are networks of data. What we find with customers is that they know that they have a lot of data, but they run into a lot of challenges with them. So there's really three big challenges. One is, how do we, you know, you could have data sitting in one system, you could have data sitting in another system, it's in silos. If you have data locked in silos you can't correlate them, we can't correlate them you really can't run analytics. The magic of insights comes out when you're correlating disparate data. That's one problem. Now, if you have everything in one single unified data Lake let's say you don't have silos, then there's this the the volume of data that's growing. It's incredible, it's not uncommon for our customers to tell us that they're seeing 30, 40, 50% year-over-year growth in their data. I mean, if you think about it, you're talking exponential growth iin a few years. So, how do you harness all that growth? How do you keep it on your systems of record without going bankrupt? Because it, often, it is a question of just managing all that data growth. Now, let's say that's challenge number two, let's say you've done that as well and you need to be able to draw insights out of it. Just because you have data sitting somewhere doesn't mean that you're going to be able to pull out analytics, doesn't mean that your processes and systems are really organized with it. All of this is really what we help try to do with customers. We have products like Isilon and ECS that are at the forefront of unstructured data. Which is really, 80% of the data today is unstructured, we help create unified data lakes for our customers so they don't have data sitting in silos. Then, these platforms are scalable platforms, so they scale very cost-effectively. Then they all support analytics natively. So you can run a big data analysis on the storage platform itself. >> You mentioned insights, and that's actionable insights another marketing buzz word there. But it's imperative for an organization to be able to have a foundation to be able to act on those insights. You talk about, you know, people say data, more buzz words, the new oil, really kind of think of it, a former biologist, as a. (audio dropping) Companies that do it well, that transform well, are able to apply data to different, multiple use cases at the same time yes, combine it, recombine it. But then, they also need to have this agile infrastructure to be able to take advantage of that, be able to adapt their software. Use things like sensors and smart devices, that are telling them how the customers are interacting the products and services and deliver something that's differentiated. So, as Dell EMC is doing that yourselves, is there any (audio dropping) that pops to mind because this is a great hallmark of digital transformation. >> Yeah, and to just talk about, extend what you said, we actually are starting to call data a capital asset. It's not very different from the other things that you have on your balance sheet. There just isn't a scientific method or an agreed-upon method we really value it yet. But I am sure that ten years from now or maybe earlier, just like we have stock exchanges, you could probably have data exchanges, where you have data be traded, it's monetized, it's valued. A classic example of what you said is we had a customer come in that owns a sports franchise, a very popular sports franchise in the United States. They also own their own arenas. They have Bluetooth sensors, 80 Bluetooth sensors, sitting all over their stadium. They have loyalty apps for their customers. When they come in, they open the app up, you know, with permissions, it connects to the Bluetooth sensors and now, to your point about the data, unlocking or catalyzing different the sheer number of things that can be done with that data to help improve experience, both for the viewer but also for the businesses that support, the restaurants that are in there, the vendors that are in the arena as well it's just mind boggling. For example, you can now, these people can now track when someone's walking. Whether they're walking towards, let's say, a barbecue joint a vendor in the arena. As they're standing there, first, they could actually know if they're standing or they're just walking by. If they're standing they have digital signage close to these places, but they can serve up ads and say hey, here's a discount. Because you're probably looking at the barbecue joint and thinking well, do you want to eat this or maybe I should do, am I in the mood for ribs today, and then presto, you get an ad next to you saying, hey we have a two-for-one or something. That's great from a commerce perspective. But then also for like the restroom lines. If you know that a lot of people are congregated in one restroom, you can actually say, hey, direct people towards other areas. Then beer kegs, like if we could have sensors under their beer kegs that are tracking when a beer keg is almost empty. All right, you're going to send a signal to the kitchen, they're going to roll out a beer keg before it gets over. Think about how that reduces wait times while you're replacing beer kegs. It's all one set of data, enabling so many different things for just improving experience. >> Wherever this place is, let's go. (panel laughing) >> Yeah, it sounds like a cool place. So let's kind of blow out or a section of your title that's deceptive, I think, in a sense. (audio dropping) To protect that access. But data protection has now become, I think, a catch-all for much more than just data protection. These products backing data protection are all not just about protecting data but adding mobility to data. Can you talk about the need to be able to take data and move it from where it's ingested to where it can be further crunched from a machine learning perspective? >> Yes, that's a great point. We talk about data originating in different sources, the edge, the core, or the cloud and really that mobility is super critical. If you just expand out a little bit more and just think about the Dell Technologies portfolio, we have data that's being generated on the edge, with sensors and devices. With the advent of the edge computing, you're beginning to see a lot more new computing models. So now, you have this notion of the fog, so you have many data centers that are collecting data. You could be running some real-time analytics on there. High level, real-time analytics to make decisions about let's say you're in a factory, you could have a fog data center in a factory or you could call it the edge as well, basically detecting defects in a particular spare part. And then you have real-time analytics going on there. But then all of that data also gets pushed into a central data center where you're running machine learning algorithms and you're training your real-time analytics systems to be that much more effective, to be that much more accurate. In these situations, like every point, single point decimal makes a huge difference in a company's bottom or top line. Yes, I think data mobility from the edge to the core, to the cloud or the fog, whatever you want to call it, is very, very critical. Different use cases in different areas are driving the that mobility. >> I'd love to understand what some of the differentiators are. What, we're at Dell Technologies, we're at the first one, indicative of the absorption of the EMC Federation companies within Dell. What differentiates what you're delivering and hoping customers achieve from your competition? >> Yeah, I mean, my specific areas of expertise are basically Isilon, ECS, our file storage platform an object storage platform. There are three things that differentiate us. We are really focused on creating eliminating silos. So, unifying everything in one data lake. Whether it's in the edge, the core, or the cloud, we want to provide a common, some data lake experience for our apps and for our users. The second thing is, we're we're hyper focused on providing cost-effective scaling mechanisms. So, if you scale, you're going to be able to handle that data in a much more cost-effective manner than if you have a product that does not scale out for example. The third thing that we do is that's really different is that we support inline analytics on the storage platform itself. If you think about a large model, a large part of the model for analytics array is directed at storage and I think that's going to continue have a large place to play. But shared storage is becoming increasingly viable option for running analytics, without having to move it somewhere, running the analytics on it and moving it back. Just more efficient, you just basically run analytics on it. It's really those three things that we think differentiate us from our competition. >> We can't have a conversation about storage and data without talking about cloud. You talk about the cloud strategy that integrates with your product portfolio. >> Absolutely, you know, as Michael said in the keynote yesterday, a cloud is not a destination, it's a model. Really, what we find is, every customer has their own cloud roadmap. So as a vendor it doesn't behoove us to say, we have this one-size-fits-all solution for you. It's really incumbent upon us to really meet the customer where they are. So whether it's with Isilon or with ECS, we have a host of different consumption models. You could run it as an appliance from us, or (audio dropping). You could run, for example, ECS is a software-defined platform, so if you're running, if you want to be really agile and you want to have servers that are running, you know, industry standard servers versus proprietary hardware, we can do that as well. Then, as we start thinking about the public cloud, we just announced, actually Michael announced yesterday that we're now offering Isilon with Google cloud. So, you could actually run Isilon systems, co-located with your Google compute clusters. All the wealth of the analytics capabilities that Google has, and then the compute capabilities that they have, you now don't have to compromise in terms of your file storage platform. You can actually run enterprise ready, scalable file system co-located with the Google cluster as well. That's a new model that we're looking at with customers. Because customers are telling us they love our products, on-premises there is a place for that, but they also want to be able to, if they're making bets on some of the big cloud providers, they want to be able to consume our products and take advantage of the features that they have on-premises, in the cloud as well. We're we're definitely trying to meet customers where they are in the cloud. >> And last question as we wrap up here, 5,000 channel partners, technology partners that are here, what are you hearing from the channel as often times the channel partners are at the forefront of talking with customers about a digital transformation strategy. What's some of the feedback from the channel been? >> The first thing that I noticed as a product marketer our partners always keep us honest, and the minute they hear a buzz word, you see their face frown. But I will tell you that in my meetings this year, anytime I talk about digital transformation they are looking at us with rapt attention. Because they are validating to us that their customers, just like ours, our customers together, this is top of mind for them. The other thing that I'm hearing from partners a lot is this notion that data actually has value, that it's an asset that customers are starting to value. It's honestly a great time to be in the tech space. Great time to be in the storage space because we're able to show customers how we can help transform their business. Five or six years ago to be able to say that about a storage platform, was probably marketing speak. But it's real right now. >> Varun, thanks so much for stopping by, sharing what's new and as we've talked about, digital transformation isn't a buzz word, it's not a nice to have, it's a mandatory. So, thanks for your time and your clarifying things, it was very, very informative. Thanks for dealing with this loud music show that's going on here. We want to thank you for continuing to watch theCUBE. I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend live from Dell Technologies World 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Los Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018 (relaxed music) brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (relaxed music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live on day two at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost the one and only @Stu, Stu Miniman. We are here in Vegas with about 14,000 attendees, the biggest event ever. Not just 14,000 people here but about 35,000 also engaging with the video experiences, live streaming, and the on-demand. Also going on here is a big event with partners. We're excited to welcome back to theCUBE Cheryl Cook, Senior Vice President of Global Channel Marketing from Dell EMC. Hi, Cheryl! >> Hi, thanks for havin' me! Welcome back! >> Yeah. So 6,500 partners. >> Absolutely. >> Wow, that's up from last year! >> We have record attendants. We just are really, really excited about the engagement and how we're resonating with our partners, so we just had a fantastic kick-off to our Global Partner Summit yesterday. >> So some big news regarding the Channel. One of the things I'd like to start with is the name of the event this year. The first time it's Dell Technologies World. Last year was Dell EMC World. >> Absolutely. Kind of indicative of the EMC Federation companies being absorbed into Dell, companies with their own channel programs. Talk to us about what you announce regarding the Dell Technologies Advantage framework. What is the framework, and how does it make it easier for channel partners to sell Dell products of- >> Well, thank you. You know, as you said, we've really elevated this event to the Dell Technologies World, and many of our partners today already participate in VMware's program or in Dell EMC's program, and really what we're doing with the Advantage is we're taking a lot of the messaging, the story, a lot of the marketing collateral that we candidly educated our internal employees on so that we can best differentiate and articulate to our customers the value and the power of all these strategically aligned businesses. So for the Partner community, we're bringing IT transformational campaigns to them, we're bringing a lot of the messaging and the story on how to enable and share with their team members and their customers, and we're also working on enablement and really driving more cross-functional, inclusive competencies and trainings to really enable them and their team members to be more effective. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Cheryl, maybe you could explain to us some of those, the training and the cross-competencies and things like that. You know, I'm sure there's people on the Dell Channel side that need to be educated on other products and vice versa, and there's new products all the time, new changing. You know, Jeff Clark walk-through, you know interesting things with like AI and IoT that are coming in the future. So maybe bring us inside some of that training. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we're very mindful of trying to develop either reference architectures or some of our curriculum around training that would include, you know, vSphere from VMware for example along with the Dell EMC infrastructure or even on our client initiatives a Windows 10 refresh effort that includes AirWatch from VMware. So really looking at the outcome-based opportunity that we know we have to engage in those conversations with our customers so that we can stitch together the training and the availability, and we want to on a future state develop these training so our partners wouldn't have to take them multiple times. It would be credited and eligible in both, VMware's program as well as Dell EMC. So we're really striving to give commonality and be efficient with speed, time to market, and really leveraging all the capabilities across the strategic landline businesses. >> What about some of the feedback that you've gotten from, you know, legacy EMC partners, Dell partners, in terms of how to make this complimentary. Was that, being that the partners are on the front lines talking with customers about all their transformation needs, how have the partners really helped to create this new framework? >> Well, you know, we're always listening, and we host a number of advisory boards, and we listen to our partners, and we've heard very, very common: "We love the product marketing, "but we want you to give us solution marketing. "Can you help enable us "in the outcome-based conversation and dialogue?" One of the things we announced this week is an IT transformation marketing campaign which we're going to put in market with Dell EMC. It's available simultaneously for the partners that essentially really does map together all the technologies and componentry across the strategic landline businesses to the business outcomes that they're talkin' to their customers about. We also launched an IoT Competency for the first time this week which again is really driving at some of those emerging technologies you heard Jeff talk about like AI and getting to machine learning and analytics to really help them engage and be more competent and effective in those technologies. >> Yeah. Cheryl, how's the Channel doing? You know, there's been (Cheryl laughs) so much change going on. I remember back when, you know, converged infrastructure first launched. It was like, "Oh, we need to create data center practices "because they were server or storage people." When Cloud rolled out, it was like, "Well, we're workin' with Microsoft. "How do we figure this out?" How is the Channel transforming? How do they look at their business? How do they look at where they add value? >> Absolutely, and I'll tell ya, Stu, I've been in this business a long time, and I don't know a more exciting time when it's moving faster, and that's also true in the partner ecosystem, in the partner community. So we're still going to transact a lot of business the traditional way that we do now, but increasingly I'm hearin' from the partners they're looking at forming new alliances, they're looking at acquisitions, they're buying new skills and capabilities. We really want to help chart that map for them on kind of where the vision is heading and how we can help align with them. So if it's possible, we want to try and help align new alliances and introductions for them with other partners, or as I said continue to bring solutions, reference architectures, to market that can help them enable around it. >> Can you tell us a little bit about what was announced regarding the Dell EMC Ready Stack for Channel Partners and reference architectures? >> So that's a great example of where we're going to always continue to work to bring engineered systems together like a VxRail or a VxBlock. But the Dell EMC Ready Stack is really a certified and tested reference architecture for those partners in those instances where they want to go build it. So we'll tell them, "Here's all the buildin' materials and all the capabilities. "It'll be a completely inclusive Dell Technology stack," but it's a way to give them confidence, mitigate risk, and they can build it and integrate it rather than buying a system that's been pre engineered. >> Cheryl, how has the Dell Technologies World experience different for the Channel partners? You know, one of the feedbacks I always get is, I was like aw, well, I mean everybody from Dell is really busy, and there's certain things you can tell the customers, but the Channel people it's like, "Well, tell us more about the future. "Give us some of that NDA stuff." How do you manage that and, you know, maybe give us a little bit of flavor of what the week is like for them that are attending. >> Well, you've certainly seen the scale of this event, so we call our Global Partner Summit an event inside an event, but we have everything from technical training, where the partners are able to take their exams and certifications. We certainly have Heroes exposition and Heroes going for the Pre-Sales technical community, and we also have an Executive Briefing Center where we're hosting. Right behind me, we have our partner lounge. We're hosting over 800 one-on-one meetings in that partner lounge where the partners get to meet either with customers. They've certainly brought a lot of customers here. They get to meet with Dell EMC executives or the partner executives, and it's really around collaborating, networking. In many ways it accelerates sales opportunities here, so it's a combination of technical training, networking, executive meetings, obviously product launches and announcements that we're bringing to market, the opportunity to really cultivate and work globally in our Global Partner Summit. So it's a pretty active week, but we have everybody rather busy. >> Talk to us about some of the ways that you are incentivizing and rewarding partners for their loyalty. >> Yeah, well thanks for asking. One of the things we announced this week actually is a My Rewards program, and think of this as a way to accelerate incentives to our partners, sales reps and their Pre-Sale SE community. So it's a platform that's going to allow them to redeem points, so you earn these points. You can either get cash cards, gifts, trips, and it really does go directly to their sales reps and their SEs. So we've launched a really comprehensive loyalty program around our storage offerings. This is an excellent sales tool that our partners can leverage with their customers, but it comes with it a host of incentives and rewards for competitive take-out and displacement, growth of new business and new logos. I mean, our partner community in the last year brought 54,000 new customers to Dell EMC, many of those if they're targeting these competitive takeouts, they're eligible for those incentives, and it's a win-win. >> Cheryl, how is the competitive landscape out there? You know, it's always a balance between, "Well, I want to incent you for loyalty, "but it's a diverse market, "and there's a partner you might grow with "that might end up being more competitive "somewhere down the road." How do ya balance that? How do you work through some of those issues in the field? >> Well, you know, we're very focused on tryin' to earn their business and earn the opportunity in the marketplace. We're incredibly fortunate right now that we've been experiencing double-digit growth. Many of our partners would tell us that they're growing faster with us than others, and to be completely honest, when you look at the categories we compete in, we enjoy market leadership positions whether it's in our servers or in storage or all-flash or hyper-converged. So when you really bring that together, it's an opportunity, candidly, for our partners. We're going to have to earn it every day. We recognize and know that they're business people and they work with other companies, but we're just trying to make sure that we bring simple, predictable, and profitable opportunities in both technology and platforms but also in our program and engagement. >> So the transformation theme has been really predominately woven throughout yesterday and today as well, digital transformation, IT transformation, security and workforce transformation. And in fact, Jeff talked about that during his keynote this morning. What are some of the expectations as the partners being on the front lines with customers, and customers are now looking at leaders like Dell Technologies to say, "How do we start utilizing emerging new technologies?" You mentioned IoT, campaign. How are you, what are your expectations for the Channel to be able to help customers build infrastructures that allow them to take advantage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, to really be able to then transform their businesses to be competitive? >> You know, I am impressed every day when I meet with our partner community. In many ways they're leading the charge. So the natural engagement of some of these leading edge and emerging new technologies, our partners are doing amazingly innovative work on embedding their intellectual property around these. But for our part, what we want to do is certainly make sure that they're aware of use cases. Here's business outcomes, many of which were kind of shown in the keynote, in the big stage earlier this morning, and we'll just drive competencies, we'll give them demo gear, we'll put them in labs in our Executive Briefing Centers. We actively encourage our partners to take advantage of our Solution Centers and our Executive Briefing Centers. It's a fantastic way for them to come into a sandbox and really immerse themselves in the technology and do proof-of-concepts with their customers. So we're going to continue to be focused on doing market research for them. Must of the marketing material that we're bringing out on these transformational campaigns, the partners can benefit and leverage the research that we've done with companies like ESG and IDC and Forbes to really substantiate and build assessments and use cases for business outcomes with their customers. >> Yeah. Cheryl, we've watched since the acquisition, Dell has been very, you know, focused on, "How do we merge these companies? "How do we put this Channel program together?" Would you say are we at kind of a 1.5 version of that now? How when you would talk to the channel, how much more change did they expect kind of throughout the year? And there's always feedback and learning, of course, but (mumbles). >> Well, we're moving fast, but we're also genuinely committed to predictability and consistency with our partners. So one piece of pretty honest feedback we receive is don't change it all the time, right? Don't change it frequently. And we couldn't be more delighted with the success we've had in our inaugural year. I mean, when you just look at the fact that we unified and brought the program together, the success we're both enjoying, it's not completely broken. So we want to make sure that we can make refinements, we can adapt and be responsive to some of these new technologies and new transformations without really being disruptive and have wholesale change. So you'll see us really listen and continue to take feedback from our partners, but frankly, we feel like we're winning right now, and we want to continue to just try and earn it and keep goin' fast. >> The word that comes to mind in summary is symbiosis. >> Yes, yes. >> Thank you, Cheryl, so much for comin' by, >> Absolutely. and congratulations on growing the partner community this year and having over 800 meetings. Wow, that's a lot! >> I know. >> We're busy. Thank you! >> You are busy, thanks so much. We want to thank you for watchin' theCUBE. We are live in Los Vegas, day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman! We'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Our first day of coverage at Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are joined by a customer of Dell EMC, Fernando Almeida, the head of Infrastucture at Grupo Boticário. Welcome to theCUBE, Fernando. >> Thank you, thank you for invite me. I appreciate it. >> So you've been, as we were talking before we went live, an EMC customer, you're using VMware. This is your first Dell Technologies World, and you picked a big one. 14,000 attendees, loud music. There's a rock band going on there. Just an orientation, for our viewers, of Grupo Boticário. The largest perfume and cosmetics franchise in the world. So it automatically just smelled better when you got onto our side. (Fernando laughs) You guys have a presence in 1750 countries, cities, excuse me, and producing 300 million products every year. With that size of an organization, to be competitive, to offer different shaded products and a superior customer experience, and you think, we've got to transform our business. Where do you start? >> First of all, thank you for inviting me here. I'll talk a little bit about Grupo Boticário. Is a Brazilian company. It's maybe, I think 20,000 employees around the Brazil. Present in 11 countries. I dunno exactly counted but we present in 11 countries. The Grupo Boticário has 4,700 stores around the world. Yes, big, really big. The company is the-- I think is-- We don't have another company. We take companies like us, you know, it's the big one, McDonalds or Avon, no. Boticário is the biggest. The retail company start in 1977. Grupo Boticário is holding, responsible for five brands now: quem disse, berenice?, The Beauty Box, Eudora, and now Vult is the new one. The Grupo Boticário started in 2010, one roading responsible for five brands. It's a great company, a big one. >> Keith: It is big. >> Yeah. >> So, talk to us about some of the challenges being that big, that dispersed. As IT infrascture lead, people look at you to make sure that operation team's going. So talk about some of the pressures as you guys are competing. You really don't, as you say, you don't have a peer. But you have to stay ahead. Talk about some of those pressures of competing on your team. >> The most important, to support this company, we need to stay aware with the technology and they all help us to stay aware with the IT Transformation. My 2018 challenge is change the products, put on IT technology, the most products that they'll have, or other providers. Now when I see-- Do you guys know, see or know something like Butchcar stores, for example. When I go to these stores, we have a lot of lanes to pay. And now, after IT Transformation, we don't have more cashiers, for example. It's like Apple, for example. >> So I can come there and buy a product using my mobile phone. >> Exactly, exactly. This project lead was VMware products, Dell products, EMC legacy products, now Dell technology. I think this is a big project in 2018. >> So let's talk about, you said over 4,000, I think maybe 4700 stores. >> Fernando: Yes, yes. >> So you have a lot of people expecting this seamless, easy experience. Not just the consumers, but also the sales associates in the retail stores. Talk to us about the deployment model. As you needed to evolve IT to support that and allow your company to be competitive, from a technology standpoint, did you look at going from traditional infrastructure to converged, hyper converged? Talk to us about the transformation of your IT infrastructure as an enabler, of your digital transformation. >> Yes, good questions. Before a digital transformation we had, we lost our sales. Because a lot of lanes. >> You had a lot of customers like me, yeah. If there's a long, I can spend two hours shopping, long line-- >> Long line. >> I'm out of there. >> Go to another, you know it's crazy. After meeting with Dell, with VMware, I saw the-- I can't remember the products that I use. Airwatch. >> Keith: Yes. >> Yes, and they show us and it's pretty good to use here. Take care of the big store, to put these products, and I see the difference between a store with a cashier and the store without cashier. The sales grow up like 15%. >> Wow! >> Yeah, yeah. >> That's a dramatic improvement from the business bottom line perspective. >> Because the performance, agility. 15%, just one store. It's amazing. >> That's an amazing story. So Airwatch. VMware, I have to give them more credit. When they bought Airwatch, I can express my head, one billion dollar business. >> Fernando: Airwatch. >> Yeah, one billion dollar business. So it's amazing watching the growth for Airwatch and hearing your story. Can you talk about, you know, Michael Dell talks about Dell Technologies on top of Dell Technologies are best. Let's talk about the back end. Are you guys using some of the products that we saw on stage this morning, VxRail et cetera? >> Yes, yes, yes. We started out using VxRail this year, 2018. In the past, 2017, we changed storage. For example, we had mechanical discs. I can't remember the exact model, but we change for All Flash storage. The performance is pretty good. It's amazing. We put the offline stores, VxRail, Airwatch, all Dell Technology products, you know. Because of this, now we have 20, 25% more performance. It's really good for us. I think this is a big change for us and a big project when I talk about IT Transformation. >> One of the things that we hear often, and especially since the acquisition of the EMC Federation a couple of years ago, is IT leaders want to have seamlessness, simplicity, agility. Those are all keywords everybody needs to have them. But they want to have one stop, a one-stop-shop like Dell Technologies considers themselves. To be able to make digital transformation real. So you were using EMC acquisition, VMware as well. With Dell Technologies, is that allowing you to have this one-stop-shop location and be able to facilitate the transformation to ultimately meet customer demands, that are improving revenue and sales? >> Before the old technology, we have EMC products of course. But now, we have-- When I look at my point of view, the customer point of view, it's better after the change, after the merge, because we have just one company and a lot of products. I just talk to one person to buy a lot of products. It's more easy, it's more closed up (in Portuguese), it's more commitment. I think the portfolio right now is much better than before the merge, EMC with Dell. Now I think is better, much better. >> So let's talk about some of those sales and architecture meetings that you're having with Dell Technologies directly. What's different about that? 'Cause EMC will always come in and say "Oh, we have VMware, we have RSA, we have Pivotal." Unfortunately, they didn't have a server group. They didn't have a desktop group. Much, much bigger organization. One of the fears, is that they would become like their competitors and you'd go talk to a Dell Technologies rep, and there's just too much technology and they wouldn't be able to solution. It doesn't sound like that's been your experience. >> Well, before the merge, we used just EMC storage, only. Because I think, this is my opinion, I think the better products that EMC have in the past, before the merge, is the storage. And now, when I see Dell Technologies have kept the storage, but we have hyper convergence, we have VMware, together with this company. It is one company. For customers, I think it's much better. Just talk to one person like say, a few minutes ago. But, I'd think, when I see my environment in Boticário, I have a lot of challenges in this year because I need to say more. I need to put technology on my stores, to say more. I need to offer, for my final customer, a great product in agility, performance. If we have this, we have more sales, we have more stores. >> One of the things too that I was reading about getting ready for this show, is we're going to hear a lot about digital transformation, IT transformation, data. The volume continues to grow and grow and grow. And we have new technologies, emerging technologies: artificial intelligence, machine learning, IOT. How are you going to be able to leverage all of this data that you have across all of these stores. Data about customers, buying habits and things like that. How are you envisioning, in the future, leveraging emerging technologies to be able to, like you said, increase the number of stores, increase sales, and ultimately delight your customers? >> It's a surprise. (Keith laughs) I can't talk about it. >> Lisa: (laughs) Oh! >> It's really a surprise but you know, we have a great challenge when I think artificial intelligence and the other products, hyper convergence, block chain for example, but, it's a secret. I can't talk. >> It is a tough challenge. We hear the buzz words. I think I agree that it is a competitive advantage that I can take the stuff, stitch it together, and come up with a solution that's acting competitive and helps you to outsell your competition. So, I can appreciate that. Just one quick question about speeds and fees. A global company, a lot of data as you sell a lot more data. Michael said as you grow, the data grows, that you enable better use of the data. It feeds upon itself. What are the building blocks of your data platform? What technologies specifically are you using within Dell's storage portfolio? >> We use Airwatch, like I said. We use all-flash platforms. We use a lot of products, man. >> You're also using some BI-- >> VxRail, Isilon 2. Now we use Isilon 4 to support the stores. Of course, the most important to support the stores is all-flash storages and Airwatch. >> To sum up, you've already made big improvements to sales, to the customer in-store experience, to performance internally, as you mentioned switching to All-Flash Array. So you're well on your way in this digital transformation. We won't ask you any more questions about the secret sauce of using emerging technologies, but we look forward to hearing, maybe next year, what you're doing there to delight your customers. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, Fernando. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> And you've been watching theCUBE. We want to thank you, as well. We are live, day one of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, with my co-host Keith Townsend. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier. We are here in the Cube at IBM Think 2018. Great conversations here in the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas for IMB Think, which is six shows wrapped into one, all combined into a big tent event. Good call by IBM, great branding. Our next guest is Rob Thomas. Cube alumni, general manager of IBM Analytics. Great to see you. >> John, great to see you. Thanks for being here. >> We love having you on, Cube alumni many times. I mean, you've seen the journey. I can remember when I talked to you, it was almost five, four or five years ago. Data, Hadoop, big data analytics, data lakes evolved significantly now where Jenny's major keynote speech has data at the center of the value proposition. I mean, we've said that before. >> Yes, we have. >> The data is the center of the value proposition. >> Every company is finally waking up. >> And then I had coined the term "the innovation sandwich." Blockchain on one side of the data, and you got AI on the other side, it's actually software. This is super important with multi-cloud. You've got multiple perspectives. You've got regions all around the world, GDPR, which everyone's been talking about, you guys have been doing lately, but the bigger question is: the technical stacks are changing. 30 years of stacks evolving, technology under the hood is changing, but the business models are also changing. This puts data as the number one conversation. That's your division. Your keynote here, what are you guys talking about? Are you hitting that note as well? >> So, number one is, think of this ladder to AI. We've talked about that before. Every client's on a journey towards AI, and there's a set of building blocks everybody needs to get there. We used the phrase once before, "There's no AI without IA," meaning if you want to get to that end point, you have to have the right information architecture. We're going to focus a lot on that. We've got a new product we've released called IBM Cloud Private for Data, which takes all of the assembly out of the data process. A really elegant solution to see all your enterprise data. That's going to be the focus for me this week. >> I want to get into that, but I also heard Scott, your VP of marketing now, talk about bad data can cripple you. So, I want to explain what that actually means. Because it's always been dirty data, it's been kind of a data science word, data warehouse word, clean data, you know, data cleanliness, but if you're going to use AI as a real strategic thing, you need high quality data. >> You do. >> John: Your thoughts? >> Think backwards from the shiny object, 'cause everybody loves the shiny object, which is some type of AI outcome, customer centricity, making you feel like a celebrity. There's two things that have to happen before that, or really three. One is you need some type of inferencing, a model layer where you're actually automating a lot of the predictive process. Before that, you need to actually understand what the data is. That's the data governance, the data integration. And before that, you need to actually have access to the data, meaning know where it's stored. Without those things, you just have a shiny object and not necessarily an outcome. That's why these building blocks are fundamental. And the clients, they get to this point, and they're the ones who try to jump to the shiny object and they don't have the data to support that. >> And then you've got companies going on digital transformation, which is basically saying all their data legacy, trying to modernize it. The modern companies like Uber, and we saw the first fatality of an Uber car this week, again, points out the reality that realtime is realtime, and the importance of having data, whether it's sensing data. We're not, it's coming there, you can start to see it happening. Realtime data is key. That means data mobility is critical, and you mentioned private, public. Storing the data and moving the data around, having data intelligence, is the most important thing. Realtime data in motion, intelligence, you know, where are we? Is that a setback with the Uber incident? Is it a step forward, is it learning? What's your view of the data quality of movement in realtime? >> I think data ingestion is one of the least talked about topics that is one of the most important. With IBM Cloud Private for data, we can ingest 250 billion events a day. Let me give you some context for that. 2016, the entire credit card industry, everywhere in the world, did 250 billion transactions. So what credit cards do in a year, we can do in a day. Biggest stock trading day ever on the New York Stock Exchange, what got done in that entire day, we can do in the first 40 minutes of trading. But that value there is, how fast can you bring data in to be analyzed, and can you do a decent bit of that pre-processing, or analytics, on the way in? That's how you start to solve some of the problems that you're describing, because it's instant >> John: Yeah. >> And it's unsurpassed amounts of data. >> So ingestion's a key part of the value chain, if you will, on data management. The new kind of data management. Ingesting it, understanding context, then is that where AI kicks in? Where does the AI kick in? Because the ingestion speaks to the information architecture, IA. >> Rob: Yes. >> Now I got to put AI on top of that data, so is the data different? Talk about the dynamic between, okay I'm ingesting data for the sake of ingesting, where does the AI connect? >> So you got the data, yep. So you go the data, AI starts where you're saying, all right, now we want to automate this. We're going to build models, we're going to use the data that we've got in here to train those models. As we get more data, the models are going to get better. Now we're going to connect it to how humans want to interact. Maybe it's natural language processing, maybe it's visualizing data. That's the whole lineage of how somebody gets toward this AI idea. >> What are some of the conversations you're having with customers, and how have they changed? And give some color, I mean, only a few years ago we're talking about data lakes. >> Right. >> Okay, what is the conversation now, and give some context of how far that conversation has gone down the road toward advancement. >> I think we're going from data lakes to an idea of a fluid data layer, which is all your data assets managed as a single system, even if they sit in different architectures. Because there's no one, we all know this. We've been around this industry forever. There's no one way to support or manage data that's going to support every use case. So this idea of a fluid data layer becomes critical for every organization. That's one big change. Other big change is containers. What we're doing with Cloud Private for Data is based on Kubernetes, that's how people want to consume applications, but nobody's really solved that for data. I think we're solving that for data. >> Let's dig into that. It was one of my topics I wanted to drill down on. Containers have been great for moving workloads around, certainly Kubernetes has been a great orchestration tool. How does that fit for data? I'm just putting a container on data sets? Who's addressing the envelope of that container? How is that addressable? I mean, how does it work? >> Let me give you an analogy. So you go back to the year 1955. There is no standards in any shipping port around the world. Everybody is literally building their own containers, building their own ships, building their own trucks. It's incredibly expensive and takes forever to get cargo to move from one place to the next. 1956, a guy named Malcom McClean, he invents the first intermodal shipping container, patents it. It becomes the standard. So now, every port, every container looks identical. What's the benefit? Sure, it made more flexibility. Saved lot of money, 90% of the cost came out of shipping a container. But the biggest thing is it changed commerce. So, you look at GDP at that time, it took off. All because of the standardization around a form factor that made it accessible to everybody. Now, let's put that in the IT world. We got containers for the application world. Made it much easier to deploy, a standard, again. >> Yeah, and program around. >> More cost-effective, more-- Yep, exactly. What's the cargo in IT? It's data. Data is the cargo, that's what's sitting inside the container. Now you have to say, how do we actually take the same concepts that we did for applications, make that available for data so that my data can fit anywhere? That's what we're doing. >> How does that work and what's the impact to the customer? Is it IBM software that you're doing? Is it Kubernetes open source software? Just tie that together for me. >> So IBM Cloud Private is our Kubernetes distribution, with some different pieces we put on it. When you add the Cloud Private for Data, it's got a Spark Engine, like everything we do it's based on open source to start with. And then we have an experience for a data scientist, an experience for a data analyst. It's your view to your enterprise data. You'll love the UI when you see it. First, above the fold, all my machine learning models in the organization, what's working, what's not working. Below the fold, what's my data? Structured or unstructured? Sensitive, non-sensitive? I click it on, I can see all of my data. Hadoop, Cloud-A, Cloud-B, Cloud-C, on-premise system. It's get a view to all of your data. >> So is the purpose to move the data around? >> No, the purpose is actually the exact opposite. Leave the data in place, but be able to treat it as a single data environment. We're doing a lot of work with Federation, our SQL technology which historically, as we all know, Federation hasn't really performed. We have it performing. >> Okay, so I'm just, in the use case in my head, so I store the data on my private, secure, comfortable, feeling good about it, but I have a public cloud app. How does that work? Is it a replica of the data? Is it just the container that makes it addressable? How does that move across? >> So, click a button, move the data. If you want it to be a replica, click a button and say "replicate." If you want to just move it, just click a button and move it. It's literally that easy. >> And so the customers can choose where to put the data. >> Yes. >> Can they do a public version of this, or only private? >> Both, it connects to public as well. >> Okay, so that was Jenny's mention, okay cool. What's the most exciting thing for you this week going on in your world? Obviously, center of the value proposition, and Jenny used your lines so I'm sure you fed her some good sound bytes there, because she was basically taking your pitch as the headline for the keynote. Is that the highlight, or is it customer activity? >> I think the exciting thing, and Jenny did talk about it, is connecting data to AI. I'd say many clients have kind of thought of those as two different topics. We do that in three ways. We say common machine learning fabric. You can build a model in Watson, you can deploy it where your enterprise data is or vice versa. We do that with the metadata. You create business or technical metadata on-premise, you can push that to Watson or vice versa. And like we just talked about, we make the data movement incredibly easy. So we're uniting these two worlds of data and AI that have tended to be different parts of an organization in many clients. We're uniting that, I think that's pretty interesting. >> All right, so final question, I've got to ask the tough one, which is, okay, Rob I love it, but I'm really not paying attention to the data because I've got my hands full in my IT transformation and we're making critical decisions on cloud globally, I've got multiple regions to deal with, I got different issues outside in each digital nation, but I'm going to get the data after. What's in it for me, your whole pitch? I'm dealing with cloud right now, so why should I be cross-connecting with the cloud decision and the cloud conversations that relate to the benefit of what you're doing? >> If you're not paying attention to the data, you're not going to be around. So your cloud decisions are kind of worthless, because you're not going to be around if you're not paying attention to the data. >> So I can make a bad cloud decision if I don't factor in what? >> I believe you have to think about your data strategy. Look, every organization is going to be multi-cloud, but you have to have a single data strategy regardless of what your cloud strategy is. You've got to think about all those building blocks I talked about. Manage data, collect data, govern data, analyze data. That has to be one strategy regardless of cloud. If you're not thinking about that, you're in trouble. >> Or making sure that I have Kubernetes? Is that a good decision? >> That is a great decision. >> (laughs) >> Makes it really easy, seamless to deploy applications, to deploy data, to move it around clouds. Makes it really easy. >> And what's the business model for containers? Kind of shifts to being a commodity? >> I think over time, yes, but there's so much to do around containers because containers, again, go back to the analogy. It's just the crate. >> John: Makes things easy. >> It's not the cargo, it's not the ship. It's just the crate, it's one piece. >> Yeah, and there's no, a lot of choice there, too. Clients can do whatever they want. >> Yeah. >> All right, we love Kubernetes. We'll be at KubeCon in Copenhagen next month, so keep a lookout there for us. This is Rob Thomas, here inside the Cube, here at IBM Think, breaking down all the action in the data science world, data world. It's the center of the value proposition. Main story here at IBM Think is data at the center of the value proposition for the modern enterprise. I'm John Furrier inside the Cube. We'll be back with more after this short break. (light electronic music)

>> Announcer: Please welcome Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Amazon Web Services, Ariel Kelman. (applause) (techno music) >> Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming. I hope you guys are having a great day here. It is my pleasure to introduce to come up on stage here, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, Andy Jassy. (applause) (techno music) >> Okay. Let's get started. I have a bunch of questions here for you, Andy. >> Just like one of our meetings, Ariel. >> Just like one of our meetings. So, I thought I'd start with a little bit of a state of the state on AWS. Can you give us your quick take? >> Yeah, well, first of all, thank you, everyone, for being here. We really appreciate it. We know how busy you guys are. So, hope you're having a good day. You know, the business is growing really quickly. In the last financials, we released, in Q four of '16, AWS is a 14 billion dollar revenue run rate business, growing 47% year over year. We have millions of active customers, and we consider an active customer as a non-Amazon entity that's used the platform in the last 30 days. And it's really a very broad, diverse customer set, in every imaginable size of customer and every imaginable vertical business segment. And I won't repeat all the customers that I know Werner went through earlier in the keynote, but here are just some of the more recent ones that you've seen, you know NELL is moving their their digital and their connected devices, meters, real estate to AWS. McDonalds is re-inventing their digital platform on top of AWS. FINRA is moving all in to AWS, yeah. You see at Reinvent, Workday announced AWS was its preferred cloud provider, and to start building on top of AWS further. Today, in press releases, you saw both Dunkin Donuts and Here, the geo-spatial map company announced they'd chosen AWS as their provider. You know and then I think if you look at our business, we have a really large non-US or global customer base and business that continues to expand very dramatically. And we're also aggressively increasing the number of geographic regions in which we have infrastructure. So last year in 2016, on top of the broad footprint we had, we added Korea, India, and Canada, and the UK. We've announced that we have regions coming, another one in China, in Ningxia, as well as in France, as well as in Sweden. So we're not close to being done expanding geographically. And then of course, we continue to iterate and innovate really quickly on behalf of all of you, of our customers. I mean, just last year alone, we launched what we considered over 1,000 significant services and features. So on average, our customers wake up every day and have three new capabilities they can choose to use or not use, but at their disposal. You've seen it already this year, if you look at Chime, which is our new unified communication service. It makes meetings much easier to conduct, be productive with. You saw Connect, which is our new global call center routing service. If you look even today, you look at Redshift Spectrum, which makes it easy to query all your data, not just locally on disk in your data warehouse but across all of S3, or DAX, which puts a cash in front of DynamoDB, we use the same interface, or all the new features in our machine learning services. We're not close to being done delivering and iterating on your behalf. And I think if you look at that collection of things, it's part of why, as Gartner looks out at the infrastructure space, they estimate the AWS is several times the size business of the next 14 providers combined. It's a pretty significant market segment leadership position. >> You talked a lot about adopts in there, a lot of customers moving to AWS, migrating large numbers of workloads, some going all in on AWS. And with that as kind of backdrop, do you still see a role for hybrid as being something that's important for customers? >> Yeah, it's funny. The quick answer is yes. I think the, you know, if you think about a few years ago, a lot of the rage was this debate about private cloud versus what people call public cloud. And we don't really see that debate very often anymore. I think relatively few companies have had success with private clouds, and most are pretty substantially moving in the direction of building on top of clouds like AWS. But, while you increasingly see more and more companies every month announcing that they're going all in to the cloud, we will see most enterprises operate in some form of hybrid mode for the next number of years. And I think in the early days of AWS and the cloud, I think people got confused about this, where they thought that they had to make this binary decision to either be all in on the public cloud and AWS or not at all. And of course that's not the case. It's not a binary decision. And what we know many of our enterprise customers want is they want to be able to run the data centers that they're not ready to retire yet as seamlessly as they can alongside of AWS. And it's why we've built a lot of the capabilities we've built the last several years. These are things like PPC, which is our virtual private cloud, which allows you to cordon off a portion of our network, deploy resources into it and connect to it through VPN or Direct Connect, which is a private connection between your data centers and our regions or our storage gateway, which is a virtual storage appliance, or Identity Federation, or a whole bunch of capabilities like that. But what we've seen, even though the vast majority of the big hybrid implementations today are built on top of AWS, as more and more of the mainstream enterprises are now at the point where they're really building substantial cloud adoption plans, they've come back to us and they've said, well, you know, actually you guys have made us make kind of a binary decision. And that's because the vast majority of the world is virtualized on top of VMWare. And because VMWare and AWS, prior to a few months ago, had really done nothing to try and make it easy to use the VMWare tools that people have been using for many years seamlessly with AWS, customers were having to make a binary choice. Either they stick with the VMWare tools they've used for a while but have a really tough time integrating with AWS, or they move to AWS and they have to leave behind the VMWare tools they've been using. And it really was the impetus for VMWare and AWS to have a number of deep conversations about it, which led to the announcement we made late last fall of VMWare and AWS, which is going to allow customers who have been using the VMWare tools to manage their infrastructure for a long time to seamlessly be able to run those on top of AWS. And they get to do so as they move workloads back and forth and they evolve their hybrid implementation without having to buy any new hardware, which is a big deal for companies. Very few companies are looking to find ways to buy more hardware these days. And customers have been very excited about this prospect. We've announced that it's going to be ready in the middle of this year. You see companies like Amadeus and Merck and Western Digital and the state of Louisiana, a number of others, we've a very large, private beta and preview happening right now. And people are pretty excited about that prospect. So we will allow customers to run in the mode that they want to run, and I think you'll see a huge transition over the next five to 10 years. >> So in addition to hybrid, another question we get a lot from enterprises around the concept of lock-in and how they should think about their relationship with the vendor and how they should think about whether to spread the workloads across multiple infrastructure providers. How do you think about that? >> Well, it's a question we get a lot. And Oracle has sure made people care about that issue. You know, I think people are very sensitive about being locked in, given the experience that they've had over the last 10 to 15 years. And I think the reality is when you look at the cloud, it really is nothing like being locked into something like Oracle. The APIs look pretty similar between the various providers. We build an open standard, it's like Linux and MySQL and Postgres. All the migration tools that we build allow you to migrate in or out of AWS. It's up to customers based on how they want to run their workload. So it is much easier to move away from something like the cloud than it is from some of the old software services that has created some of this phobia. But I think when you look at most CIOs, enterprise CIOs particularly, as they think about moving to the cloud, many of them started off thinking that they, you know, very well might split their workloads across multiple cloud providers. And I think when push comes to shove, very few decide to do so. Most predominately pick an infrastructure provider to run their workloads. And the reason that they don't split it across, you know, pretty evenly across clouds is a few reasons. Number one, if you do so, you have to standardize in the lowest common denominator. And these platforms are in radically different stages at this point. And if you look at something like AWS, it has a lot more functionality than anybody else by a large margin. And we're also iterating more quickly than you'll find from the other providers. And most folks don't want to tie the hands of their developers behind their backs in the name of having the ability of splitting it across multiple clouds, cause they actually are, in most of their spaces, competitive, and they have a lot of ideas that they want to actually build and invent on behalf of their customers. So, you know, they don't want to actually limit their functionality. It turns out the second reason is that they don't want to force their development teams to have to learn multiple platforms. And most development teams, if any of you have managed multiple stacks across different technologies, and many of us have had that experience, it's a pain in the butt. And trying to make a shift from what you've been doing for the last 30 years on premises to the cloud is hard enough. But then forcing teams to have to get good at running across two or three platforms is something most teams don't relish, and it's wasteful of people's time, it's wasteful of natural resources. That's the second thing. And then the third reason is that you effectively diminish your buying power because all of these cloud providers have volume discounts, and then you're splitting what you buy across multiple providers, which gives you a lower amount you buy from everybody at a worse price. So when most CIOs and enterprises look at this carefully, they don't actually end up splitting it relatively evenly. They predominately pick a cloud provider. Some will just pick one. Others will pick one and then do a little bit with a second, just so they know they can run with a second provider, in case that relationship with the one they choose to predominately run with goes sideways in some fashion. But when you really look at it, CIOs are not making that decision to split it up relatively evenly because it makes their development teams much less capable and much less agile. >> Okay, let's shift gears a little bit, talk about a subject that's on the minds of not just enterprises but startups and government organizations and pretty much every organization we talk to. And that's AI and machine learning. Reinvent, we introduced our Amazon AI services and just this morning Werner announced the general availability of Amazon Lex. So where are we overall on machine learning? >> Well it's a hugely exciting opportunity for customers, and I think, we believe it's exciting for us as well. And it's still in the relatively early stages, if you look at how people are using it, but it's something that we passionately believe is going to make a huge difference in the world and a huge difference with customers, and that we're investing a pretty gigantic amount of resource and capability for our customers. And I think the way that we think about, at a high level, the machine learning and deep learning spaces are, you know, there's kind of three macro layers of the stack. I think at that bottom layer, it's generally for the expert machine learning practitioners, of which there are relatively few in the world. It's a scarce resource relative to what I think will be the case in five, 10 years from now. And these are folks who are comfortable working with deep learning engines, know how to build models, know how to tune those models, know how to do inference, know how to get that data from the models into production apps. And for that group of people, if you look at the vast majority of machine learning and deep learning that's being done in the cloud today, it's being done on top of AWS, are P2 instances, which are optimized for deep learning and our deep learning AMIs, that package, effectively the deep learning engines and libraries inside those AMIs. And you see companies like Netflix, Nvidia, and Pinterest and Stanford and a whole bunch of others that are doing significant amounts of machine learning on top of those optimized instances for machine learning and the deep learning AMIs. And I think that you can expect, over time, that we'll continue to build additional capabilities and tools for those expert practitioners. I think we will support and do support every single one of the deep learning engines on top of AWS, and we have a significant amount of those workloads with all those engines running on top of AWS today. We also are making, I would say, a disproportionate investment of our own resources and the MXNet community just because if you look at running deep learning models once you get beyond a few GPUs, it's pretty difficult to have those scale as you get into the hundreds of GPUs. And most of the deep learning engines don't scale very well horizontally. And so what we've found through a lot of extensive testing, cause remember, Amazon has thousands of deep learning experts inside the company that have built very sophisticated deep learning capabilities, like the ones you see in Alexa, we have found that MXNet scales the best and almost linearly, as we continue to add nodes, as we continue to horizontally scale. So we have a lot of investment at that bottom layer of the stack. Now, if you think about most companies with developers, it's still largely inaccessible to them to do the type of machine learning and deep learning that they'd really like to do. And that's because the tools, I think, are still too primitive. And there's a number of services out there, we built one ourselves in Amazon Machine Learning that we have a lot of customers use, and yet I would argue that all of those services, including our own, are still more difficult than they should be for everyday developers to be able to build machine learning and access machine learning and deep learning. And if you look at the history of what AWS has done, in every part of our business, and a lot of what's driven us, is trying to democratize technologies that were really only available and accessible before to a select, small number of companies. And so we're doing a lot of work at what I would call that middle layer of the stack to get rid of a lot of the muck associated with having to do, you know, building the models, tuning the models, doing the inference, figuring how to get the data into production apps, a lot of those capabilities at that middle layer that we think are really essential to allow deep learning and machine learning to reach its full potential. And then at the top layer of the stack, we think of those as solutions. And those are things like, pass me an image and I'll tell you what that image is, or show me this face, does it match faces in this group of faces, or pass me a string of text and I'll give you an mpg file, or give me some words and what your intent is and then I'll be able to return answers that allow people to build conversational apps like the Lex technology. And we have a whole bunch of other services coming in that area, atop of Lex and Polly and Recognition, and you can imagine some of those that we've had to use in Amazon over the years that we'll continue to make available for you, our customers. So very significant level of investment at all three layers of that stack. We think it's relatively early days in the space but have a lot of passion and excitement for that. >> Okay, now for ML and AI, we're seeing customers wanting to load in tons of data, both to train the models and to actually process data once they've built their models. And then outside of ML and AI, we're seeing just as much demand to move in data for analytics and traditional workloads. So as people are looking to move more and more data to the cloud, how are we thinking about making it easier to get data in? >> It's a great question. And I think it's actually an often overlooked question because a lot of what gets attention with customers is all the really interesting services that allow you to do everything from compute and storage and database and messaging and analytics and machine learning and AI. But at the end of the day, if you have a significant amount of data already somewhere else, you have to get it into the cloud to be able to take advantage of all these capabilities that you don't have on premises. And so we have spent a disproportionate amount of focus over the last few years trying to build capabilities for our customers to make this easier. And we have a set of capabilities that really is not close to matched anywhere else, in part because we have so many customers who are asking for help in this area that it's, you know, that's really what drives what we build. So of course, you could use the good old-fashioned wire to send data over the internet. Increasingly, we find customers that are trying to move large amounts of data into S3, is using our S3 transfer acceleration service, which basically uses our points of presence, or POPs, all over the world to expedite delivery into S3. You know, a few years ago, we were talking to a number of companies that were looking to make big shifts to the cloud, and they said, well, I need to move lots of data that just isn't viable for me to move it over the wire, given the connection we can assign to it. It's why we built Snowball. And so we launched Snowball a couple years ago, which is really, it's a 50 terabyte appliance that is encrypted, the data's encrypted three different ways, and you ingest the data from your data center into Snowball, it has a Kindle connected to it, it allows you to, you know, that makes sure that you send it to the right place, and you can also track the progress of your high-speed ingestion into our data centers. And when we first launched Snowball, we launched it at Reinvent a couple years ago, I could not believe that we were going to order as many Snowballs to start with as the team wanted to order. And in fact, I reproached the team and I said, this is way too much, why don't we first see if people actually use any of these Snowballs. And so the team thankfully didn't listen very carefully to that, and they really only pared back a little bit. And then it turned out that we, almost from the get-go, had ordered 10X too few. And so this has been something that people have used in a very broad, pervasive way all over the world. And last year, at the beginning of the year, as we were asking people what else they would like us to build in Snowball, customers told us a few things that were pretty interesting to us. First, one that wasn't that surprising was they said, well, it would be great if they were bigger, you know, if instead of 50 terabytes it was more data I could store on each device. Then they said, you know, one of the problems is when I load the data onto a Snowball and send it to you, I have to still keep my local copy on premises until it's ingested, cause I can't risk losing that data. So they said it would be great if you could find a way to provide clustering, so that I don't have to keep that copy on premises. That was pretty interesting. And then they said, you know, there's some of that data that I'd actually like to be loading synchronously to S3, and then, or some things back from S3 to that data that I may want to compare against. That was interesting, having that endpoint. And then they said, well, we'd really love it if there was some compute on those Snowballs so I can do analytics on some relatively short-term signals that I want to take action on right away. Those were really the pieces of feedback that informed Snowball Edge, which is the next version of Snowball that we launched, announced at Reinvent this past November. So it has, it's a hundred-terabyte appliance, still the same level of encryption, and it has clustering so that you don't have to keep that copy of the data local. It allows you to have an endpoint to S3 to synchronously load data back and forth, and then it has a compute inside of it. And so it allows customers to use these on premises. I'll give you a good example. GE is using these for their wind turbines. And they collect all kinds of data from those turbines, but there's certain short-term signals they want to do analytics on in as close to real time as they can, and take action on those. And so they use that compute to do the analytics and then when they fill up that Snowball Edge, they detach it and send it back to AWS to do broad-scale analytics in the cloud and then just start using an additional Snowball Edge to capture that short-term data and be able to do those analytics. So Snowball Edge is, you know, we just launched it a couple months ago, again, amazed at the type of response, how many customers are starting to deploy those all over the place. I think if you have exabytes of data that you need to move, it's not so easy. An exabyte of data, if you wanted to move from on premises to AWS, would require 10,000 Snowball Edges. Those customers don't want to really manage a fleet of 10,000 Snowball Edges if they don't have to. And so, we tried to figure out how to solve that problem, and it's why we launched Snowmobile back at Reinvent in November, which effectively, it's a hundred-petabyte container on a 45-foot trailer that we will take a truck and bring out to your facility. It comes with its own power and its own network fiber that we plug in to your data center. And if you want to move an exabyte of data over a 10 gigabit per second connection, it would take you 26 years. But using 10 Snowmobiles, it would take you six months. So really different level of scale. And you'd be surprised how many companies have exabytes of data at this point that they want to move to the cloud to get all those analytics and machine learning capabilities running on top of them. Then for streaming data, as we have more and more companies that are doing real-time analytics of streaming data, we have Kinesis, where we built something called the Kinesis Firehose that makes it really simple to stream all your real-time data. We have a storage gateway for companies that want to keep certain data hot, locally, and then asynchronously be loading the rest of their data to AWS to be able to use in different formats, should they need it as backup or should they choose to make a transition. So it's a very broad set of storage capabilities. And then of course, if you've moved a lot of data into the cloud or into anything, you realize that one of the hardest parts that people often leave to the end is ETL. And so we have announced an ETL service called Glue, which we announced at Reinvent, which is going to make it much easier to move your data, be able to find your data and map your data to different locations and do ETL, which of course is hugely important as you're moving large amounts. >> So we've talked a lot about moving things to the cloud, moving applications, moving data. But let's shift gears a little bit and talk about something not on the cloud, connected devices. >> Yeah. >> Where do they fit in and how do you think about edge? >> Well, you know, I've been working on AWS since the start of AWS, and we've been in the market for a little over 11 years at this point. And we have encountered, as I'm sure all of you have, many buzzwords. And of all the buzzwords that everybody has talked about, I think I can make a pretty strong argument that the one that has delivered fastest on its promise has been IOT and connected devices. Just amazing to me how much is happening at the edge today and how fast that's changing with device manufacturers. And I think that if you look out 10 years from now, when you talk about hybrid, I think most companies, majority on premise piece of hybrid will not be servers, it will be connected devices. There are going to be billions of devices all over the place, in your home, in your office, in factories, in oil fields, in agricultural fields, on ships, in cars, in planes, everywhere. You're going to have these assets that sit at the edge that companies are going to want to be able to collect data on, do analytics on, and then take action. And if you think about it, most of these devices, by their very nature, have relatively little CPU and have relatively little disk, which makes the cloud disproportionately important for them to supplement them. It's why you see most of the big, successful IOT applications today are using AWS to supplement them. Illumina has hooked up their genome sequencing to AWS to do analytics, or you can look at Major League Baseball Statcast is an IOT application built on top of AWS, or John Deer has over 200,000 telematically enabled tractors that are collecting real-time planting conditions and information that they're doing analytics on and sending it back to farmers so they can figure out where and how to optimally plant. Tata Motors manages their truck fleet this way. Phillips has their smart lighting project. I mean, there're innumerable amounts of these IOT applications built on top of AWS where the cloud is supplementing the device's capability. But when you think about these becoming more mission-critical applications for companies, there are going to be certain functions and certain conditions by which they're not going to want to connect back to the cloud. They're not going to want to take the time for that round trip. They're not going to have connectivity in some cases to be able to make a round trip to the cloud. And what they really want is customers really want the same capabilities they have on AWS, with AWS IOT, but on the devices themselves. And if you've ever tried to develop on these embedded devices, it's not for mere mortals. It's pretty delicate and it's pretty scary and there's a lot of archaic protocols associated with it, pretty tough to do it all and to do it without taking down your application. And so what we did was we built something called Greengrass, and we announced it at Reinvent. And Greengrass is really like a software module that you can effectively have inside your device. And it allows developers to write lambda functions, it's got lambda inside of it, and it allows customers to write lambda functions, some of which they want to run in the cloud, some of which they want to run on the device itself through Greengrass. So they have a common programming model to build those functions, to take the signals they see and take the actions they want to take against that, which is really going to help, I think, across all these IOT devices to be able to be much more flexible and allow the devices and the analytics and the actions you take to be much smarter, more intelligent. It's also why we built Snowball Edge. Snowball Edge, if you think about it, is really a purpose-built Greengrass device. We have Greengrass, it's inside of the Snowball Edge, and you know, the GE wind turbine example is a good example of that. And so it's to us, I think it's the future of what the on-premises piece of hybrid's going to be. I think there're going to be billions of devices all over the place and people are going to want to interact with them with a common programming model like they use in AWS and the cloud, and we're continuing to invest very significantly to make that easier and easier for companies. >> We've talked about several feature directions. We talked about AI, machine learning, the edge. What are some of the other areas of investment that this group should care about? >> Well there's a lot. (laughs) That's not a suit question, Ariel. But there's a lot. I think, I'll name a few. I think first of all, as I alluded to earlier, we are not close to being done expanding geographically. I think virtually every tier-one country will have an AWS region over time. I think many of the emerging countries will as well. I think the database space is an area that is radically changing. It's happening at a faster pace than I think people sometimes realize. And I think it's good news for all of you. I think the database space over the last few decades has been a lonely place for customers. I think that they have felt particularly locked into companies that are expensive and proprietary and have high degrees of lock-in and aren't so customer-friendly. And I think customers are sick of it. And we have a relational database service that we launched many years ago and has many flavors that you can run. You can run MySQL, you can run Postgres, you can run MariaDB, you can run SQLServer, you can run Oracle. And what a lot of our customers kept saying to us was, could you please figure out a way to have a database capability that has the performance characteristics of the commercial-grade databases but the customer-friendly and pricing model of the more open engines like the MySQL and Postgres and MariaDB. What you do on your own, we do a lot of it at Amazon, but it's hard, I mean, it takes a lot of work and a lot of tuning. And our customers really wanted us to solve that problem for them. And it's why we spent several years building Aurora, which is our own database engine that we built, but that's fully compatible with MySQL and with Postgres. It's at least as fault tolerant and durable and performant as the commercial-grade databases, but it's a tenth of the cost of those. And it's also nice because if it turns out that you use Aurora and you decide for whatever reason you don't want to use Aurora anymore, because it's fully compatible with MySQL and Postgres, you just dump it to the community versions of those, and off you are. So there's really hardly any transition there. So that is the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS. I'm amazed at how quickly it's grown. I think you may have heard earlier, we've had 23,000 database migrations just in the last year or so. There's a lot of pent-up demand to have database freedom. And we're here to help you have it. You know, I think on the analytic side, it's just never been easier and less expensive to collect, store, analyze, and share data than it is today. Part of that has to do with the economics of the cloud. But a lot of it has to do with the really broad analytics capability that we provide you. And it's a much broader capability than you'll find elsewhere. And you know, you can manage Hadoop and Spark and Presto and Hive and Pig and Yarn on top of AWS, or we have a managed elastic search service, and you know, of course we have a very high scale, very high performing data warehouse in Redshift, that just got even more performant with Spectrum, which now can query across all of your S3 data, and of course you have Athena, where you can query S3 directly. We have a service that allows you to do real-time analytics of streaming data in Kinesis. We have a business intelligence service in QuickSight. We have a number of machine learning capabilities I talked about earlier. It's a very broad array. And what we find is that it's a new day in analytics for companies. A lot of the data that companies felt like they had to throw away before, either because it was too expensive to hold or they didn't really have the tools accessible to them to get the learning from that data, it's a totally different day today. And so we have a pretty big investment in that space, I mentioned Glue earlier to do ETL on all that data. We have a lot more coming in that space. I think compute, super interesting, you know, I think you will find, I think we will find that companies will use full instances for many, many years and we have, you know, more than double the number of instances than you'll find elsewhere in every imaginable shape and size. But I would also say that the trend we see is that more and more companies are using smaller units of compute, and it's why you see containers becoming so popular. We have a really big business in ECS. And we will continue to build out the capability there. We have companies really running virtually every type of container and orchestration and management service on top of AWS at this point. And then of course, a couple years ago, we pioneered the event-driven serverless capability in compute that we call Lambda, which I'm just again, blown away by how many customers are using that for everything, in every way. So I think the basic unit of compute is continuing to get smaller. I think that's really good for customers. I think the ability to be serverless is a very exciting proposition that we're continuing to to fulfill that vision that we laid out a couple years ago. And then, probably, the last thing I'd point out right now is, I think it's really interesting to see how the basic procurement of software is changing. In significant part driven by what we've been doing with our Marketplace. If you think about it, in the old world, if you were a company that was buying software, you'd have to go find bunch of the companies that you should consider, you'd have to have a lot of conversations, you'd have to talk to a lot of salespeople. Those companies, by the way, have to have a big sales team, an expensive marketing budget to go find those companies and then go sell those companies and then both companies engage in this long tap-dance around doing an agreement and the legal terms and the legal teams and it's just, the process is very arduous. Then after you buy it, you have to figure out how you're going to actually package it, how you're deploy to infrastructure and get it done, and it's just, I think in general, both consumers of software and sellers of software really don't like the process that's existed over the last few decades. And then you look at AWS Marketplace, and we have 35 hundred product listings in there from 12 hundred technology providers. If you look at the number of hours, that software that's been running EC2 just in the last month alone, it's several hundred million hours, EC2 hours, of that software being run on top of our Marketplace. And it's just completely changing how software is bought and procured. I think that if you talk to a lot of the big sellers of software, like Splunk or Trend Micro, there's a whole number of them, they'll tell you it totally changes their ability to be able to sell. You know, one of the things that really helped AWS in the early days and still continues to help us, is that we have a self-service model where we don't actually have to have a lot of people talk to every customer to get started. I think if you're a seller of software, that's very appealing, to allow people to find your software and be able to buy it. And if you're a consumer, to be able to buy it quickly, again, without the hassle of all those conversations and the overhead associated with that, very appealing. And I think it's why the marketplace has just exploded and taken off like it has. It's also really good, by the way, for systems integrators, who are often packaging things on top of that software to their clients. This makes it much easier to build kind of smaller catalogs of software products for their customers. I think when you layer on top of that the capabilities that we've announced to make it easier for SASS providers to meter and to do billing and to do identity is just, it's a very different world. And so I think that also is very exciting, both for companies and customers as well as software providers. >> We certainly touched on a lot here. And we have a lot going on, and you know, while we have customers asking us a lot about how they can use all these new services and new features, we also tend to get a lot of questions from customers on how we innovate so quickly, and they can think about applying some of those lessons learned to their own businesses. >> So you're asking how we're able to innovate quickly? >> Mmm hmm. >> I think there's a few things that have helped us, and it's different for every company. But some of these might be helpful. I'll point to a few. I think the first thing is, I think we disproportionately index on hiring builders. And we think of builders as people who are inventors, people who look at different customer experiences really critically, are honest about what's flawed about them, and then seek to reinvent them. And then people who understand that launch is the starting line and not the finish line. There's very little that any of us ever built that's a home run right out of the gate. And so most things that succeed take a lot of listening to customers and a lot of experimentation and a lot of iterating before you get to an equation that really works. So the first thing is who we hire. I think the second thing is how we organize. And we have, at Amazon, long tried to organize into as small and separable and autonomous teams as we can, that have all the resources in those teams to own their own destiny. And so for instance, the technologists and the product managers are part of the same team. And a lot of that is because we don't want the finger pointing that goes back and forth between the teams, and if they're on the same team, they focus all their energy on owning it together and understanding what customers need from them, spending a disproportionate amount of time with customers, and then they get to own their own roadmaps. One of the reasons we don't publish a 12 to 18 month roadmap is we want those teams to have the freedom, in talking to customers and listening to what you tell us matters, to re-prioritize if there are certain things that we assumed mattered more than it turns out it does. So, you know I think that the way that we organize is the second piece. I think a third piece is all of our teams get to use the same AWS building blocks that all of you get to use, which allow you to move much more quickly. And I think one of the least told stories about Amazon over the last five years, in part because people have gotten interested in AWS, is people have missed how fast our consumer business at Amazon has iterated. Look at the amount of invention in Amazon's consumer business. And they'll tell you that a big piece of that is their ability to use the AWS building blocks like they do. I think a fourth thing is many big companies, as they get larger, what starts to happen is what people call the institutional no, which is that leaders walk into meetings on new ideas looking to find ways to say no, and not because they're ill intended but just because they get more conservative or they have a lot on their plate or things are really managed very centrally, so it's hard to imagine adding more to what you're already doing. At Amazon, it's really the opposite, and in part because of the way we're organized in such a decoupled, decentralized fashion, and in part because it's just part of our DNA. When the leaders walk into a meeting, they are looking for ways to say yes. And we don't say yes to everything, we have a lot of proposals. But we say yes to a lot more than I think virtually any other company on the planet. And when we're having conversations with builders who are proposing new ideas, we're in a mode where we're trying to problem-solve with them to get to yes, which I think is really different. And then I think the last thing is that we have mechanisms inside the company that allow us to make fast decisions. And if you want a little bit more detail, you should read our founder and CEO Jeff Bezos's shareholder letter, which just was released. He talks about the fast decision-making that happens inside the company. It's really true. We make fast decisions and we're willing to fail. And you know, we sometimes talk about how we're working on several of our next biggest failures, and we hope that most of the things we're doing aren't going to fail, but we know, if you're going to push the envelope and if you're going to experiment at the rate that we're trying to experiment, to find more pillars that allow us to do more for customers and allow us to be more relevant, you are going to fail sometimes. And you have to accept that, and you have to have a way of evaluating people that recognizes the inputs, meaning the things that they actually delivered as opposed to the outputs, cause on new ventures, you don't know what the outputs are going to be, you don't know consumers or customers are going to respond to the new thing you're trying to build. So you have to be able to reward employees on the inputs, you have to have a way for them to continue to progress and grow in their career even if they work on something didn't work. And you have to have a way of thinking about, when things don't work, how do I take the technology that I built as part of that, that really actually does work, but I didn't get it right in the form factor, and use it for other things. And I think that when you think about a culture like Amazon, that disproportionately hires builders, organizes into these separable, autonomous teams, and allows them to use building blocks to move fast, and has a leadership team that's looking to say yes to ideas and is willing to fail, you end up finding not only do you do more inventing but you get the people at every level of the organization spending their free cycles thinking about new ideas because it actually pays to think of new ideas cause you get a shot to try it. And so that has really helped us and I think most of our customers who have made significant shifts to AWS and the cloud would argue that that's one of the big transformational things they've seen in their companies as well. >> Okay. I want to go a little bit deeper on the subject of culture. What are some of the things that are most unique about the AWS culture that companies should know about when they're looking to partner with us? >> Well, I think if you're making a decision on a predominant infrastructure provider, it's really important that you decide that the culture of the company you're going to partner with is a fit for yours. And you know, it's a super important decision that you don't want to have to redo multiple times cause it's wasted effort. And I think that, look, I've been at Amazon for almost 20 years at this point, so I have obviously drank the Kool Aid. But there are a few things that I think are truly unique about Amazon's culture. I'll talk about three of them. The first is I think that we are unusually customer-oriented. And I think a lot of companies talk about being customer-oriented, but few actually are. I think most of the big technology companies truthfully are competitor-focused. They kind of look at what competitors are doing and then they try to one-up one another. You have one or two of them that I would say are product-focused, where they say, hey, it's great, you Mr. and Mrs. Customer have ideas on a product, but leave that to the experts, and you know, you'll like the products we're going to build. And those strategies can be good ones and successful ones, they're just not ours. We are driven by what customers tell us matters to them. We don't build technology for technology's sake, we don't become, you know, smitten by any one technology. We're trying to solve real problems for our customers. 90% of what we build is driven by what you tell us matters. And the other 10% is listening to you, and even if you can't articulate exactly what you want, trying to read between the lines and invent on your behalf. So that's the first thing. Second thing is that we are pioneers. We really like to invent, as I was talking about earlier. And I think most big technology companies at this point have either lost their will or their DNA to invent. Most of them acquire it or fast follow. And again, that can be a successful strategy. It's just not ours. I think in this day and age, where we're going through as big a shift as we are in the cloud, which is the biggest technology shift in our lifetime, as dynamic as it is, being able to partner with a company that has the most functionality, it's iterating the fastest, has the most customers, has the largest ecosystem of partners, has SIs and ISPs, that has had a vision for how all these pieces fit together from the start, instead of trying to patch them together in a following act, you have a big advantage. I think that the third thing is that we're unusually long-term oriented. And I think that you won't ever see us show up at your door the last day of a quarter, the last day of a year, trying to harass you into doing some kind of deal with us, not to be heard from again for a couple years when we either audit you or try to re-up you for a deal. That's just not the way that we will ever operate. We are trying to build a business, a set of relationships, that will outlast all of us here. And I think something that always ties it together well is this trusted advisor capability that we have inside our support function, which is, you know, we look at dozens of programmatic ways that our customers are using the platform and reach out to you if you're doing something we think's suboptimal. And one of the things we do is if you're not fully utilizing resources, or hardly, or not using them at all, we'll reach out and say, hey, you should stop paying for this. And over the last couple of years, we've sent out a couple million of these notifications that have led to actual annualized savings for customers of 350 million dollars. So I ask you, how many of your technology partners reach out to you and say stop spending money with us? To the tune of 350 million dollars lost revenue per year. Not too many. And I think when we first started doing it, people though it was gimmicky, but if you understand what I just talked about with regard to our culture, it makes perfect sense. We don't want to make money from customers unless you're getting value. We want to reinvent an experience that we think has been broken for the prior few decades. And then we're trying to build a relationship with you that outlasts all of us, and we think the best way to do that is to provide value and do right by customers over a long period of time. >> Okay, keeping going on the culture subject, what about some of the quirky things about Amazon's culture that people might find interesting or useful? >> Well there are a lot of quirky parts to our culture. And I think any, you know lots of companies who have strong culture will argue they have quirky pieces but I think there's a few I might point to. You know, I think the first would be the first several years I was with the company, I guess the first six years or so I was at the company, like most companies, all the information that was presented was via PowerPoint. And we would find that it was a very inefficient way to consume information. You know, you were often shaded by the charisma of the presenter, sometimes you would overweight what the presenters said based on whether they were a good presenter. And vice versa. You would very rarely have a deep conversation, cause you have no room on PowerPoint slides to have any depth. You would interrupt the presenter constantly with questions that they hadn't really thought through cause they didn't think they were going to have to present that level of depth. You constantly have the, you know, you'd ask the question, oh, I'm going to get to that in five slides, you want to do that now or you want to do that in five slides, you know, it was just maddening. And we would often find that most of the meetings required multiple meetings. And so we made a decision as a company to effectively ban PowerPoints as a communication vehicle inside the company. Really the only time I do PowerPoints is at Reinvent. And maybe that shows. And what we found is that it's a much more substantive and effective and time-efficient way to have conversations because there is no way to fake depth in a six-page narrative. So what we went to from PowerPoint was six-page narrative. You can write, have as much as you want in the appendix, but you have to assume nobody will read the appendices. Everything you have to communicate has to be done in six pages. You can't fake depth in a six-page narrative. And so what we do is we all get to the room, we spend 20 minutes or so reading the document so it's fresh in everybody's head. And then where we start the conversation is a radically different spot than when you're hearing a presentation one kind of shallow slide at a time. We all start the conversation with a fair bit of depth on the topic, and we can really hone in on the three or four issues that typically matter in each of these conversations. So we get to the heart of the matter and we can have one meeting on the topic instead of three or four. So that has been really, I mean it's unusual and it takes some time getting used to but it is a much more effective way to pay attention to the detail and have a substantive conversation. You know, I think a second thing, if you look at our working backwards process, we don't write a lot of code for any of our services until we write and refine and decide we have crisp press release and frequently asked question, or FAQ, for that product. And in the press release, what we're trying to do is make sure that we're building a product that has benefits that will really matter. How many times have we all gotten to the end of products and by the time we get there, we kind of think about what we're launching and think, this is not that interesting. Like, people are not going to find this that compelling. And it's because you just haven't thought through and argued and debated and made sure that you drew the line in the right spot on a set of benefits that will really matter to customers. So that's why we use the press release. The FAQ is to really have the arguments up front about how you're building the product. So what technology are you using? What's the architecture? What's the customer experience? What's the UI look like? What's the pricing dimensions? Are you going to charge for it or not? All of those decisions, what are people going to be most excited about, what are people going to be most disappointed by. All those conversations, if you have them up front, even if it takes you a few times to go through it, you can just let the teams build, and you don't have to check in with them except on the dates. And so we find that if we take the time up front we not only get the products right more often but the teams also deliver much more quickly and with much less churn. And then the third thing I'd say that's kind of quirky is it is an unusually truth-seeking culture at Amazon. I think we have a leadership principle that we say have backbone, disagree, and commit. And what it means is that we really expect people to speak up if they believe that we're headed down a path that's wrong for customers, no matter who is advancing it, what level in the company, everybody is empowered and expected to speak up. And then once we have the debate, then we all have to pull the same way, even if it's a different way than you were advocating. And I think, you always hear the old adage of where, two people look at a ceiling and one person says it's 14 feet and the other person says, it's 10 feet, and they say, okay let's compromise, it's 12 feet. And of course, it's not 12 feet, there is an answer. And not all things that we all consider has that black and white answer, but most things have an answer that really is more right if you actually assess it and debate it. And so we have an environment that really empowers people to challenge one another and I think it's part of why we end up getting to better answers, cause we have that level of openness and rigor. >> Okay, well Andy, we have time for one more question. >> Okay. >> So other than some of the things you've talked about, like customer focus, innovation, and long-term orientation, what is the single most important lesson that you've learned that is really relevant to this audience and this time we're living in? >> There's a lot. But I'll pick one. I would say I'll tell a short story that I think captures it. In the early days at Amazon, our sole business was what we called an owned inventory retail business, which meant we bought the inventory from distributors or publishers or manufacturers, stored it in our own fulfillment centers and shipped it to customers. And around the year 1999 or 2000, this third party seller model started becoming very popular. You know, these were companies like Half.com and eBay and folks like that. And we had a really animated debate inside the company about whether we should allow third party sellers to sell on the Amazon site. And the concerns internally were, first of all, we just had this fundamental belief that other sellers weren't going to care as much about the customer experience as we did cause it was such a central part of everything we did DNA-wise. And then also we had this entire business and all this machinery that was built around owned inventory business, with all these relationships with publishers and distributors and manufacturers, who we didn't think would necessarily like third party sellers selling right alongside us having bought their products. And so we really debated this, and we ultimately decided that we were going to allow third party sellers to sell in our marketplace. And we made that decision in part because it was better for customers, it allowed them to have lower prices, so more price variety and better selection. But also in significant part because we realized you can't fight gravity. If something is going to happen, whether you want it to happen or not, it is going to happen. And you are much better off cannibalizing yourself or being ahead of whatever direction the world is headed than you are at howling at the wind or wishing it away or trying to put up blockers and find a way to delay moving to the model that is really most successful and has the most amount of benefits for the customers in question. And that turned out to be a really important lesson for Amazon as a company and for me, personally, as well. You know, in the early days of doing Marketplace, we had all kinds of folks, even after we made the decision, that despite the have backbone, disagree and commit weren't really sure that they believed that it was going to be a successful decision. And it took several months, but thankfully we really were vigilant about it, and today in roughly half of the units we sell in our retail business are third party seller units. Been really good for our customers. And really good for our business as well. And I think the same thing is really applicable to the space we're talking about today, to the cloud, as you think about this gigantic shift that's going on right now, moving to the cloud, which is, you know, I think in the early days of the cloud, the first, I'll call it six, seven, eight years, I think collectively we consumed so much energy with all these arguments about are people going to move to the cloud, what are they going to move to the cloud, will they move mission-critical applications to the cloud, will the enterprise adopt it, will public sector adopt it, what about private cloud, you know, we just consumed a huge amount of energy and it was, you can see both in the results in what's happening in businesses like ours, it was a form of fighting gravity. And today we don't really have if conversations anymore with our customers. They're all when and how and what order conversations. And I would say that this going to be a much better world for all of us, because we will be able to build in a much more cost effective fashion, we will be able to build much more quickly, we'll be able to take our scarce resource of engineers and not spend their resource on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure and instead on what truly differentiates your business. And you'll have a global presence, so that you have lower latency and a better end user customer experience being deployed with your applications and infrastructure all over the world. And you'll be able to meet the data sovereignty requirements of various locales. So I think it's a great world that we're entering right now, I think we're at a time where there's a lot less confusion about where the world is headed, and I think it's an unprecedented opportunity for you to reinvent your businesses, reinvent your applications, and build capabilities for your customers and for your business that weren't easily possible before. And I hope you take advantage of it, and we'll be right here every step of the way to help you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (applause) >> Thank you, Andy. And thank you, everyone. I appreciate your time today. >> Thank you. (applause) (upbeat music)

vmworld 2015 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors and now your host dave vellante welcome back to San Francisco everybody this is the cue the cube is SiliconANGLE wiki bonds continuous coverage of vmworld 2015 this is our sixth year at vmworld we go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise our friend vish mulchen is here with HP storage fish it's always good to see you you know in your hometown and of in the backyard it's great to be in moscone thanks for coming back on the cube thanks Dave great great to be here as always again so we have seen you know I go back to 2010 and at the time you know 3par was a separate company and then we watched the the acquisition occur I'm really badly needed that acquisition was we were at vmworld when the the bidding war was occurring between Dell and yeah that's right and we predicted HP he's going to win that war and of course that changed change the course of the storage at HP you know permanently yes so it's been an amazing run three pars become the crown jewel of the of the portfolio but the most amazing thing is how you've evolved that platform into play into the all flash world very very competitive product so so we've been sort of documenting that that traction but give us the update let's talk about sort of where you've come from and you know where we are today sure sure Dave so I mean if we look back in june 2013 when we first announced the AFA right and since jun 2013 we've had a fire series of announcements in in december we announce something called adaptive sparing which you know was actually very unique flash innovation treating the flash separately giving customers twenty percent more capacity in jun 2014 we brought two dollars per gig deduplication in december 2014 we brought the constable we call the converge flash array right flasher a flash focus design but hey you can add spinning this to it if you want right and several of our customers are actually doing that because they have a need for that and then in june of 2015 we double down right and we announced the 20000 series we brought the affordability even better to a dollar fifty a gig and that was in June so the other amazing thing is the pace of the cadence of announcements I mean I had to say I mean remember for years you know HP the announcements were very slow to come up maybe have one a year maybe you know maybe a name change but now it's like bang bang bang I presume it to the architecture that allows you to do that but a lot of skeptics when you came out yes with the all-flash right yeah it's going to be a bolt on you said no you know NASA died we'll see but now you're proving it why help the people who sort of don't understand the nuances how was it that you were able to do that and what are the proof points that it's not just a bolt on right so you know I think the it all comes down to the architecture right you have to have an architecture that's modular that extensible and you know as we looked at the three Power Architecture all the attributes that we put in place early on we're very applicable to flash now flash did have some differences and we did account for some of the differences in the architecture but the architecture proved to be able to be extensible and a lot of the tenants around scalable controllers for performance the ASIC to offload the fine-grained virtualized operating system with a very small page allocation size all of those fundamentals were perfectly suited for flash right and and you can almost probably say they were there were too much for spinning disk right why was to say was that just was that luck because a bit but of a lot of what the original designers a three-part did were trying to most of it was trying to offset the deficiencies of spinning disk yeah you know did they just have like amazing vision or was it just I give I give the founders a lot of credit for their foresight and in fact if you look at the founders and I spoke to them they were they had a server background and they started right and they said its own server guess I'm sorry guys say they said to me wish when we did a server benchmark it would take us six months four and a half of those six months was getting the storage right and they said they really don't understand why it had to be so hard right and I think they've brought a very different approach to storage to how sort of the industry was handling storage right it was it was very different it actually turned it on his head and they are actually architected some very interesting capabilities which you know I'm very confident as we go to flash 2 point 0 as we talk about other newer non-volatile memory technologies if nan something other than man comes about you know I'm very confident that the architecture will be able to gehen to isolate the media from the customer Martin fake hope said that's member stare but we'll see we'll see what whatever gentleman sorry you know we'll go about the industry members has a big element there but we'll go what the industry wants to look at of course so let's talk about vmworld 2015 what you guys are doing here you know sure emphasize the announcements that you're making talk about that a little bit sure so in vmworld we had several announcements we made what i'll focus in is on the flash announcements and you know if you look at the approach we've taken with flash we've had three vectors right affordability performance and data services and some companies have done one or two but i think it's rare to see all three vectors being attack of the same time and that's been our approach from the start and all the announcements we talked about and in this announcement that we made this week same approach so let's let's maybe go down those three vectors Dave if you allow me to yeah please okay so so let's start with affordability and we announced a new 8000 series which is a refresh to the 7000 line right a very successful 7000 line of which is 7450 flash arrays one of them now the starting point for the 8200 the old flash 8200 now is down to nineteen thousand four hundred ninety seven dollars two controllers six drives six terabyte usable capacity 19,000 999 we're under 20 grand by a lot we make sure you got that 497 right so that's great we also announced then a lower entry price point to the 20000 series that we announced in earlier in June those were as your call aight controller systems we announced a lower price point 2450 a 4 controller capable system as well again on the theme of bringing affordability right driving the price down okay so you have dollar fifty per gig if you want to buy that way if low entry price point with 19 k if you want to buy that way or if you want a scalable system that you can grow to the extreme you can buy affordable price point that way as well right so in my mind the the adoption the success we've had in the marketplace has been a function of a couple of things affordability is a key one right it's economics that's what drives adoption okay now your performance everything's okay let's flash over he's got the same performance is high performance now it's somewhat true because relative to spinning disk it's gonna be you know better performance but there's it's nuanced so talk about your performance yeah so performance is very important we announced a couple of interesting performance first we talked about some some improvements in bandwidth now let's take a look at sort of why that matters right Dave so if you were doing a million iOS and there were small 4k blocks do the math it's four gigabytes per second now if you're doing large block iOS like if you're doing a sequel database query analytical query those are typically large block ayos right we do a million of those and there Sarah megan size then that bandwidth becomes a choke point to the array so we've announced with with the 8000 series you know twenty four gigs the second of bandwidth which is two and a half times more than so but this is ever saw it started erupting but this is why a lot of the existing arrays that bolted on flash failed what yeah so one of the reasons why they fail is their controllers are not able to handle the IO load and once even if they do can they handle the bandwidth requirements and then you know here's the other thing that matters is the latency right so the other thing we announced at the this week was a forty-four percent improvement in latency soumillon I ops 387 microseconds latency Adam denials that's just low latency so you're setting up this little latency storage versus capacity storage right and you got you playing both but we're obviously talking about the latency piece here okay correct so that's the performance piece and then there's there's there's actually two more there's the availability which answer this well free part is known for high availability and it's the new tier one yeah yeah so and it but there's data services associated with that yeah so the resiliency is a big factor there and you know there's single system resiliency pull out a drive pull out a controller fail a cache board how do you react right in fact the reason why we succeed in the marketplace that our customers tell us is that reliability factor and they go and they have these tests where they pull things in and out right and they watch how the other arrays operate right and you know consistently we've come back really operating well in the area of single system resiliency now there's also a multi-system resiliency which is what do I do with replication what I do with snapshots can I move my snapshots to addy duplicating backup device all right how quickly can I move how much do I move so I think there are all of these elements that you look at resiliency that I think important that's another piece and resiliency that's coming up as well emerging Dave and that's around protecting the access to your data security do you encrypt the data so now if you encrypt the data and you have a snapshot and you move that snapshot to a duplicating device what happens to that snapshot and the key do you have to a multiple key so your keys get compromised so that resiliency topic is a big one lots of different areas to go off go after and whether it's replications snapshots backup devices encryption key managers we have all those elevators well how about so again one of the we always talked about this one of the big advantages of an architecture that's been around for a decade is is you've got the stack it's hardened you know that sets the storage services so that's that's a big differentiator from what you see in a lot of the startups yes and and or the bolt ons which everybody thought you're going to be both on baby architected the whole thing so that's cool what about quality of service what about the ability to sort of address quality of service to pin application performance and to actually change that programmatically yeah so quality of service is a very very big big attribute of ours in fact week the product for full HP three parts called priority optimization and in this week's announcement we announce further enhancements first of all we have latency goals on our queue as product which i think is unique nobody else offers latency goals and this week we announced the latency goals going down to half a millisecond I mean if that array is operating at you know three to four hundred microseconds you want to be able to control your priorities with that granularity right and so qos granularity is exactly what we brought and you know Dave Lee if you remember when we did the last cube we talked to the cloud and they they had taken a gold silver bronze tier hardware-based and then put her on a flash array and put priority optimization to implement in software the gold silver bronze right yeah the cloud is a company music louder company yeah so that's right and that was interesting to see that they did that with with flash right you know yeah exactly yeah what do you think is going to happen there right is a worship we're hearing increasingly it shows like this and others that that you're starting to see more tearing and flash you're hearing it now in in the hadoop world and big data world the example that you just gave a lot of people initially and maybe still think you're going to have flashed here in the latency tier and you're going to have the capacity to air the bit bucket what's yours what you're thinking now on how that shakes shakes out and how practitioners should be thinking about their storage architectures going forward and I think you were gonna see the variety of that I think that's one very possible use case which says hey I have a applications that are critical service optimized service level optimized right that got to be on flash and then I may have either a backing store for time or I might have another set of applications that are not service level optimized more cost optimized may be right so and maybe that changes over time maybe it changes by quarter what is cost optimized today needs a spike and come back so this notion of data mobility I think it's very key right and sort of the fourth data service pillar I want to talk about because we announced for wave Federation which is the ability to take for arrays and operate as a single logical hole and you can federated Atta among those arrays now but if you extend the ideas can you federated to a backup device can you fed rate it to the generic cloud right can you federated to an archived here I think these are the kinds of things that our customers are asked that's right they want a first of all federal rate to another array to work load balance for example Oh asset refresh right but all of the other use cases federated a cloud federated to archived here those are all coming up alright so I suspect we're gonna see more of those as I said can I and let's stay tuned state-owned you know I mean as we as we look to to raise the bar once again these are some of the things what we're thinking about all right so so I know you can't give details but give us high level road map what should we be thinking about watching you know HP generally 3par and all flesh specifically yeah so I think we'll continue to drive a affordability right 3d and 3d Nance available as well now there's other flash technologies and you know we want to isolate our customers from whether it's CML CML see 3d 9 i'm gonna say to them look what's your price point what's your capacity point what's your availability point ok and we'll meet that let us worry about that technology problem out there how we get there so that continues to work us on you know the media faster controllers again to drive up the drive of the performance hosting the connects you know there's a lot of talk around the role of 25 gig Ethernet 32 gig fibre channel the RDMA technologies right I sir are I war rocky so there's all these things here nvm e to the backplane nvme to the host so you know flash j-bot so look at yeah it's shit we're shifting the bottleneck are we are you going to look at the bottlenecks across all areas into n and make sure that you're looking at this holistically right as you drive as you drive forward doesn't get less complicated but at least for the for the for the guys who are building this stuff hopefully for I we who are using it it does but fish motion thanks very much baby greater pleasure always pleasure sir I keep right there everybody will be back with our next guest this is the cube we're live from vmworld 2015 in moscone we'll be right back you

it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors now your hosts John furrier and Dave vellante okay welcome back everyone we are live in San Francisco moscone north lobby here for vmworld 2015 this is silicon angles the Q this is our flagship program we go out to the events and extract the Sigma noise i'm john frieda found us look at a humdrum echoes dave vellante co-founder Wikibon calm research our next guest is Robin Matlock the CMO of VMware we are in the cubes set and the two sets here this year we have the director set new innovation here at vmworld again setting the stage the leadership of VMware and the person behind all this is Robin Matlock CMO thanks so much first of all for letting us come and do your lobby here it's been great so far it's one say thank you you guys you know we love having you you're a big part of this program for us six years now we've been watching the transformation it's been interesting this year has been fun to watch because of all the outside noise and certainly the products are doing great at Gelson's keynote this morning was really a home run he really knocked it out of the park so the messaging is tight this year really good it's looking forward it's got a longer perspective it's not a short-term driven messaging it is that by design i mean this is kind of showing the future yeah absolutely we really tried to change things up this year and you know that's important is that we have to reinvent we have to make ourselves relevant and part of it is taking something like the program at vmworld and making sure that every year it delivers fresh new a different perspective for these attendees so we changed things we started with Karl talking about one cloud any application any device very much frame the conversation for V emerald in the keynotes but also more of a 12 18 24 month kind of view and today we closed with Pat Gelsinger on the stage and you're right that was all about forward-looking what lies in the next to 35 years and what is our point of view on it and I agree with you I think that really did an amazing job this morning the ecosystems changing we've been monitoring the ecosystem on our crowd chat platform some great conversations with the thought leaders it's changing the demographics seem to be changing you own IP they got great market share and traditional IT that's being where's legacy wheelhouse so the Ops guys are all here but sad event the DevOps focus is really scratching the services at a whole new developer community do you guys were you guys aware of that is that kind of like the big AHA this year was it is that a big part of the ecosystem can you share some color and how this dev ops team is now resonating through the ecosystem sure and without a doubt it i wouldn't call it an aha i think it's a very strategic intentional move frankly the reality is the world is changing and it's impacting IT you know as part of the core of that transformation so I T needs to change to be relevant for business and DevOps is a part of that how are we going to build applications in this cloud native world how are we going to do it faster more agile and serve our businesses quicker well DevOps plays a key role there and what we can do is help IT serve at development community I mean obviously we had a lot of big announcements that are coming out this week and we wanted to make sure we had a way to deliver that content to this new audience so the ecosystem is evolving and it needs to because part of it is how we all transform so I'm glad you're noticing some of those changes are very strategic I mean the other thing about vmworld that that is been since day one is the core of the practitioner you know community and the peers and people are excited to be here they look forward to it they come early to hang out with their friends but a lot of parties but the content is very much around the customer and so you've been able to preserve that but at the same time you know provide an interesting layer of you know senior management perspectives high level customers when you talk about that chair at the core we really do see vmworld as a technical conference that would be the one thing that's anchored in the ground now as the people that need to engage with technology and as technology itself shifts and changes and VMware's offerings shift and change the ecosystem we have to be able to address a broader set of different types of audience so the practitioners are core but now you get the DevOps audience you get mobility professionals you get networking opps people you get you know storage folks so although the content will always stay very educational and technical in nature i do think we've done a really good job starting to broaden to appeal to these different audience types and so that's the other piece that i wanted to address is i think you know the roles are shifting with in IT and sometimes to me what this conference does it allows people who want a different career path to find one here they don't have to go to 10 different conferences and that's unique I think in the industry there was a wonderful tweet you'll have to pull it up for your audience and I'm sorry I can't reference the gentleman that did it but it it was at the end of yesterday while KITT kolbert and Rio Pharaoh were presenting we ran over a little bit so some people were moving on to their sessions and he tweeted that those that are leaving the hall right now I predict they may not have jobs five years from now because of the shifts and changes and how relevant it is to be in this cloud native world well I think if you know initially the the knee-jerk reaction to that change is somewhat negative and disconcerting but I think when people come to this event and they get back on the plane they start thinking about the opportunities they see this affords a lot of different avenues and it's really grown tremendously over the years i think vmware is doing a lot to help people bridge the two worlds and that's a big part of our philosophy it's a big part of how we're helping customers kind of get from point A to point B and helping the practitioners leverage the skills they've built over the last decade and really apply those to what's going to be required of them on the next decade I'm glad you mentioned that was a big theme of Pat's talk you know the bridge and you hear a lot of talk from the analyst community you know Gartner particular talks about bimodal IT my friends at IDC talk about the third platform but the problem i've always had with that is it's more silos like you know you don't want to be part of the old and i want to be part of it both what you guys are saying your messaging is we're going to bring the existing that asset base that you have along we recognize you want to go from point A to point B without just ripping everything out and so that's fundamental to the strategy and that's coming through in the messaging that's great to hear that is funny Massimino Ray fairing is the guy who said the cube we just pulled it up on our real-time analytics system but he said I feel those leaving you know during kit cobra session may be without a job in five years fact hashtag fact but that is a vibe of the show what are some of the stats on the number share some of the inside the numbers attendees sessions what can you share yes I mean I'm really proud of the stats actually so we exceeded our goal we have 23 5 23 thousand and five hundred plus attendees and they're still coming in the door as you can see out at the registration desk so biggest vmworld ever really solid growth and the demographics is shifting we're starting to see more of these new audience types so really excited about that we have over 400 breakout sessions very well subscribed the demand for the breakouts is quite incredible we have almost 300 289 or so exhibitors and the solutions exchange there is simply no more floor space if I could add another building I'd be able to scale out and get another hundred in the door but I'm just simply have a finite resource of space and we're chatting over Howard feet let's go there so I got it I got to ask about that there's never anyone it's always hard to please everybody at these events and you always feel oh nothing new at vmworld they have people coming oh sorry so fresh and relevant so you have you have a lot of people from the old guard and the new guard kind of coming together as Pat said cowboys and farmers kind of working together it's just quote on the q what is that vibe right now how would you describe that because you thought people scratching their heads and saying what's new this year femur I'm not seeing anything new so for the record sheriff Oakes what's new this year absolutely the new stuff yeah I think there's a lot of new stuff but we are getting into a more iterative development world where you know we're doing kind of lots of little or releases instead of you know five years ago where you just you held out for two years and then it was just one huge release you've got the evo SDDC that was new right and within that STD evo SDC manager brand new quickest way to really implement and get to a software-defined data center a tightly integrated software stack with new management capabilities to under you know manage the underlying hardware in infrastructure you have the whole photon platform right which kit Kolbert and rail Pharaoh launched so the photon platform which is largely open sourced with the exception of the very small in a just enough virtual machine all brand new photon OS photon controller the photon machine part of the photon platform then today we talked about business mobility so you have the workspace sweet Sanjay talked about that what we're doing with air watch we also then of course rolled out security and NSX 6.2 we have all kinds of new cloud services that came out vCloud air the disaster recovery on demand some new sequel database as a service technology so they're really I can just focus on stage Tigers are shaking it up here guys so I got to ask you so as a CMO your job is to kind of watched the trends walk to fashion if you will in the industry and you know the trend oh it says don't fight fashion you got to be fashionable and be relevant I get that but it's a hard thing to market vmware is its unique company you have a core a lot of things going on around the company I'll see the Federation EMC conversations you have customers that are changing hat laid out essentially a whole new future vision what's going to happen to VMware it basically devices world global global company how do you market that and how do you what's your approach and and what's your philosophy how do you how do you do that I think one of the most important things and I hope you got this from the keynotes this week is we are unifying behind a common narrative that is really relevant to our business and the value we deliver to our customers and everything we do somehow connects to that storyline and that's really this concept of one cloud any application any device and ago by one cloud I mean really the simplicity of managing something as one but it's really about a multiple cloud unified hybrid cloud strategy all delivering any application on any device I think the other common theme that we anchored around is what is our relevance to applications because at the end of the day that's what the business cares about so we've worked really hard to make sure that our customers understand how is it what we're doing is enabling them to deliver modern and traditional applications to their business really in any way they want to comply observation there Robin is when so that's great to have the high level messaging but when you test beneath Italy we ask pat ok so how do you live in that heterogeneous world and he basically explained ok took each of the levels of the stacks that is what we're doing there we can't do it at the you know this level we are will do it at this level with a very precise answer as to how that strategy turns along to reality so that to me is the ultimate test not just marketing a little marketing tagline and the reason why that's so important is because that when you test it with the customers and they're actually gonna be doing it you know down the road can't B's give a tie back and that's yeah thank you i would agree customers it has to be has to be relevant to customers I the end of the day they need trust in the vendor ok that I ask a question that everyone wants to know what's the party the big party everyone I mean VMware always has parties as so many parties going on did the event I mean I think there's like 10 different parties happening tonight now if we can't go to all of them but we'll try our best the big party at 18 c 4 share the big party yes it is always one of the highlights of the week i must say for all this technology it boils down to how great is a party well I have good news the San Francisco Giants cooperated and they went ahead and left town for a Wednesday night so we're able to get the park which is fabulous love being at the park so we're back at the park we're featuring two great bands and we very intentionally picked bands that are the up-and-comers you know not the kind of tried and true rock and roll we're going for someone sees every year all the different question the envelope John so you better get comfortable and come out and hang out with us Neon Trees opens up the act and then we're closing with Alabama Shakes and the rumor on the street is if you want to go to a good concert you go see Alabama Shakes perform so come join us it's going to be our walk we'll do our best to sneak into the VIP booth like they did her imagine dragons I hope to see you there okay thanks so much for coming on the guy know you're super busy thanks for sharing the insights and time and update almost love what you guys are doing it's a great audience love to have you thank you it would be back more live at San Francisco moscone north the Emerald 2015 things are shaking up up and coming new things a lot of stuff happening we'll be back after this short break