>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE coverage of the AWS Public Sector Partner Awards. We going to be talking about the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. So happy to welcome to the program. First of all, welcoming back Joel Lipkin. He is the chief operating officer of Four Points Technologies, which is the winner of the aforementioned award and joining him one of his customers, Ryan Hillard, who is a assistant developer with the United States, Small Business Administration, and of course the SBA, an organization that a lot of people in the United States have gotten more familiar with this year. Joel and Ryan, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu? >> Hey Stu; Thank you. >> All right, so Ryan, I'm sorry, Joel, as I mentioned, you've been on the program, but maybe just give us a sketch if you would, Four Points, your role, your partnership with AWS. >> Sure, I'm Joel Lipkin. I'm the chief operating officer at Four Points Technology, Four Points is a value added technology reseller focused on the federal government and we've been working with federal customer since 2002. We're a service disabled veteran owned small business, and we've been in a Amazon partner since 2012. >> Wonderful; Ryan, if you could, obviously, as I mentioned, the SBA, a lot of people know for the PPP in 2020, if you could tell us a little bit about your role in your organization and tee up for us, if you would, the project that Four Points was involved with that you worked on. >> Sure; so I worked for the chief information officer and I don't have this official title, but I am the de facto manager of our Amazon Web Services presence. This year, we've had a very exciting time with what's been happening in the world, the Paycheck Protection Program, and the SBA have been kind of leveraged to help the US economy recover in the face of the pandemic. And a key part of that has been using Amazon Web Services and our partnership with Four Points Technology to launch new applications to address those requirements. >> Wonderful; Joel, maybe a connect for us. How long has Four Points been working with the SBA and start to give us a little bit more about the projects that you're working together, which I understand was predated the COVID incidents. >> Sure; we've been with SBA for several years now. And SBA was one of the earlier federal agencies that really saw the value in separating their procurement for cloud capacity, from the development implementation and managed services that they either did internally or use third party contractors for. So, Four Points came in as a true value added reseller of cloud to SBA providing cloud capacity and also Amazon professionals services. >> All right; so Ryan bring us in a little bit, the project that we're talking about here, what was the challenge? What were the goals you were looking to accomplish? Help flush out a little bit, what you're doing there? >> Yeah, so most recently Four Points partnered with us to deliver Lender Gateway. Lender Gateway is an application for small community oriented lenders to submit Paycheck Protection loans. So some of these lenders don't have giant established IT departments like big banks do, and they needed an easier way to help their customers. We built that application in six days and I called the Four Points cloud manager on a Saturday, and I said, help, help, I need two accounts by three o'clock and Four Points was there for us. We got new accounts set up. We were able to build the application and deploy it literally in a week and meet the requirements set for us. And that system has now moved billions of dollars of loans. I don't know the exact amount, but has done an incredible amount of work and it wouldn't have been possible without our partnership with Four Points. So we're really excited about that. >> Yeah, If I could drill in there for a second. Absolutely it's been an unprecedented, how fast that amount of money move through the legislature to out to the end user. Help us understand a little bit, how much were you using AWS technologies and solutions that Four Points had helped you with, and how much of this was kind of a net new, you said you built a new application, you had to activate some things fast, help us understand a little bit more. >> Yeah, that's so that's a great question. So we have five major systems in AWS today. And so we're very comfortable with AWS service offerings. What's interesting about Lender Gateway is that it's the first application we've built from scratch in a totally serverless capacity. So one of the hard technical requirements of the Paycheck Protection Program is that, it has huge amounts of demand. So when we're launching a system, we need to know that that system will not go down no matter how much traffic it receives or how many requests it has to handle. So we leaned on services like AWS Lambda, S3, dynamoDB, all of their serverless offerings to make sure that under no circumstances could this application fail. And it never did. We never even actually saw a performance degradation. So a massive success from my perspective as the program manager. >> well, that's wonderful. Joel, of course, you talk about scalability, you talk about uptime. Those are really the promise the public cloud has brought. Ryan did a good job of teeing out some of the services from AWS, but help us understand architecturally how you help put that together, and, the various pieces underneath. >> Yes Stu, it's interesting. Four Points is really focused on delivering capacity. Our delivery model is very much built around giving our customers like Ryan full control over their cloud environments so that they can use it as transparently as though they were working with Amazon directly. They have access to all of the 200+ services that AWS has. They also have a direct access to billing and usage information that lets them really optimize things. So this is sort of a perfect example of how well that works because SBA and Ryan knew their requirements better than anyone. And they were able to leverage exactly the right AWS tools without having to apply to use them. It was as though they were working directly with AWS and the AWS environment on the technology side. And I will say SBA has been really a leader in using of variety of AWS services beyond standard compute and storage, not just in a tested environment, but in a live very, very robust, really large environment. >> Yeah, right, and I was excited to hear about your Lambda usage, how you're building with the serverless architecture there. Could you just bring us through a little bit, how you ramped up on that, any tools or community solutions that you were leveraging to make sure you understood that and any lessons you learned along the way as you were building that application and rolling it out? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So I think one of the mistakes that I see program managers make all the time is thinking that they can migrate a workload to the cloud and keep it architecturally the same way it was. And what they quickly find out is that their old architecture that ran in their on premise data center might actually be more expensive in the cloud than it was in their data center. And so when you're thinking about migrating a workload, you really need to come in with the assumption that you will actually be redesigning that workload and building the system in cloud native technology. You know, the concept of Lambda is so powerful, but it didn't exist for, you know, it didn't exist 20 years ago when some of these systems and applications were being written and now being able to leverage Lambda to only use exactly the compute you need, means you can literally pay pennies on the dollar. One of the interesting things about the PPP program and everything happening in the world is that our main website, sba.gov is now serving a a hundred or a thousand times more traffic daily than it was used to doing. But because we lean on serverless technology like Lambda, we have scaled non-linearly in terms of costs. So we're only paying like two or three times more than we used to pay per month, but we're doing a hundred or a thousand times more work. That's a win, that's a huge victory for cloud technology, in my opinion. >> Yeah, and on that point, I think the other thing that SBA did really amazingly well was take advantage of first reserved instances. But I think it was the day that Amazon announced savings plans as a cost control mechanism. Ryan and SBA were on them. They were our first customer to use savings plans. And I think there were probably the first customer in the federal space to use them. So it's not just using the technology smart, it's using the cost control tools really well also. >> Yeah, so Stu, I wanted to jump in here just because I'm so glad Joel brought that up. I was describing how workloads need to morph and transform as they move from legacy setups into more cloud native ones. Well, we were the first federal agency to buy savings plans. And for folks who don't know savings plans essentially make your reserved instances fungible across services. So if you had a workload that was running on EC2 before, now instead of buying a reserved instance at a certain instant size, a certain family, you can instead buy a savings plan. And when your workload is ready to be moved from EC2 to something a little bit more containerized or cloud native, like Fargate or Lambda, then you don't actually forego your reserved instance. I see program managers get into this weird spot where they bought reserved instances, so they feel like they need to use them for a whole year. So they don't upgrade their system until their reserved instances expire. And that's really the tail wagging the dog. We were very excited about savings plans. I think we bought them four days after they came out and they have enabled us to do things like, be very ambitious with how we rethink our systems and how we rebuild them. And I'm so glad you brought that up to all because it's been such a key thing over this last year. >> Yeah, it's been a really interesting discussion point I've been having the last few years, is that the role between developers and that, that finance piece. So, Ryan, who is it that advises you on this? Is there somebody on the finance team from the SBA? is it Four Points? You know, being aware of savings plan, it was something that was announced at Reinvent, but it takes a while for that to trickle and oftentimes developers don't need to think about or think that they don't need to think about the financial implications of how they're architecting things. So how, how does that communication and decision making happen? >> That's such a great question. I think it goes back to how Four Points is customer obsessed. One of our favorite things about using a small business reseller like Four Points instead of dealing directly with our cloud service provider is that Four Points provides us a service where every quarter they do an independent assessment of our systems, how much we're spending and what that looks like from a service breakdown. And then we get that perspective and that opinion, and we enrich it with our conversation with our AWS account manager, with our finance people. But having that third party independent person come in and say, "Hey, this is what we think" has been so powerful because Joel and Dana and team have always had observations that nobody else has had. And those kinds of insights are nice to have, when you have people who are suspicious of a vendor telling you to buy more things with them, because they're the vendor >> From the lessons you've learned there, any final advice that you'd give to your peers out there, and how will you take what you've learned working on this project to other things, either in the SBA or in talking with your peers in other organizations. >> So I have two big things. So one is go use a small business reseller. I would be remiss if I didn't use this opportunity to tell you as a member of the US Small Business Administration, that there are some really, really great service providers out there. They are part of our programs like Four Points, and they can help you achieve that balance between trusting your cloud service provider and having that a third party entity that can come in and, call bowl and also call Yahtzee. So recognize good things and recognize bad things. So that would be number one. And then number two is moving to the cloud is so often sold as a technology project. And it's like 20% technology and 80% culture and workforce change. And so be honest with yourselves and your executive teams that this isn't a technology project. This is, we going to change how we do business project, and we going to change the culture of this organization kind of project. >> All right; and Joel, I'll let you have the final word on lessons learned here and also about Four Points and congratulations again, the Customer Obsession Mission award winner. >> Great, thanks Stu, we're so appreciative to Amazon for their recognition and to Ryan and SBA for giving us the opportunity to support such an important program. We are a small business, we are very much focused on delivering what our customers need in the cloud. And it's just such a tremendous feeling to be able to work on a program like this that has such, such payoff for the whole country. >> All right, Well, Joel and Ryan, thank you so much for sharing your updates, such an important project this year. Thanks so much. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks >> Stay with us for more covered from the AWS Public Sector Partner awards. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this CUBE conversation where we're going to go deep into system performance. We're here with an expert. Kim Leyenaar is the Principal Performance Architect at Broadcom. Kim. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks so much too. >> So you have a deep background in performance, performance assessment, benchmarking, modeling. Tell us a little bit about your background, your role. >> Thanks. So I've been a storage performance engineer and architect for about 22 years. And I'm specifically been for abroad with Broadcom for I think next month is going to be my 14 year mark. So what I do there is initially I built and I manage their international performance team, but about six years ago I moved back into architecture, and what my roles right now are is I generate performance projections for all of our next generation products. And then I also work on marketing material and I interface with a lot of the customers and debugging customer issues, and looking at how our customers are actually using our storage. >> Great. Now we have a graphic that we want to share. It talks to how storage has evolved over the past decade. So my question is what changes have you seen in storage and how has that impacted the way you approach benchmarking. In this graphic we got sort of big four items that impact performance, memory processor, IO pathways, and the storage media itself, but walk us through this data if you would. >> Sure. So what I put together is a little bit of what we've seen over the past 15 to 20 years. So I've been doing this for about 22 years and kind of going back and focusing a little bit on the storage, we looked back at hard disk, they ruled for. And nearly they had almost 50 years of ruling. And our first hard drive that came out back in the 1950s was only capable of five megabytes in capacity. and one and a half iOS per second. It had almost a full second in terms of seat time. So we've come a long way since then. But when I first came on, we were looking at Ultra 320 SCSI. And one of the biggest memories that I have of that was my office is located close to our tech support. And I could hear the first question was always, what's your termination like? And so we had some challenges with SCSI, and then we moved on into SAS and data protocols. And we continued to move on. But right now, back in the early 2000s when I came on board, the best drives really could do maybe 400 iOS per second. Maybe two 250 megabytes per second, with millisecond response times. And so when I was benchmarking way back when it was always like, well, IOPS are IOPS. We were always faster than what the drives to do. And that was just how it was. The drives were always the bottleneck in the system. And so things started changing though by the early 2000s, mid 2000s. We started seeing different technologies come out. We started seeing that virtualization and multi-tenant infrastructures becoming really popular. And then we had cloud computing that was well on the horizon. And so at this point, we're like, well, wait a minute, we really can't make processors that much faster. And so everybody got excited to include (indistinct) and the home came out but, they had two cores per processor and four cores per processor. And so we saw a little time period where actually the processing capability kind of pulled ahead of everybody else. And memory was falling behind. We had good old DVR, 2, 6, 67. It was new with the time, but we only had maybe one or two memory channels per processor. And then in 2007 we saw disk capacity hit one terabyte. And we started seeing a little bit of an imbalance because we were seeing these drives are getting massive, but their performance per drive was not really kind of keeping up. So now we see a revolution around 2010. And my co-worker and I at the time, we have these little USB discs, if you recall, we would put them in. They were so fast. We were joking at the time. "Hey, you know what, wonder if we could make a raid array out of these little USB disks?" They were just so fast. The idea was actually kind of crazy until we started seeing it actually happen. So in 2010 SSD started revolutionizing storage. And the first SSDs that we really worked with these plaint LS-300 and they were amazing because they were so over-provisioned that they had almost the same reader, right performance. But to go from a drive that could do maybe 400 IOS per second to a drive like 40,000 plus iOS per second, really changed our thought process about how our storage controller could actually try and keep up with the rest of the system. So we started falling behind. That was a big challenge for us. And then in 2014, NVMe came around as well. So now we've got these drives, they're 30 terabytes. They can do one and a half million iOS per second, and over 6,000 megabytes per second. But they were expensive. So people start relegating SSDs more towards tiered storage or cash. And as the prices of these drives kind of came down, they became a lot more mainstream. And then the memory channels started picking up. And they started doubling every few years. And we're looking now at DVR 5 4800. And now we're looking at cores that used to go from two to four cores per processor up to 48 with some of the latest different processes that are out there. So our ability to consume the computing and the storage resources, it's astounding, you know, it's like that whole saying, 'build it and they will come.' Because I'm always amazed, I'm like, how are we going to possibly utilize all this memory bandwidth? How are we going to utilize all these cores? But we do. And the trick to this is having just a balanced infrastructure. It's really critical. Because if you have a performance mismatch between your server and your storage, you really lose a lot of productivity and it does impact your revenue. >> So that's such a key point. Pardon, begin that slide up again with the four points. And that last point that you made Kim about balance. And so here you have these, electronic speeds with memory and IO, and then you've got the spinning disc, this mechanical disc. You mentioned that SSD kind of changed the game, but it used to be, when I looked at benchmarks, it was always the D stage bandwidth of the cash out to the spinning disc was always the bottleneck. And, you go back to the days of you it's symmetrics, right? The huge backend disk bandwidth was how they dealt with that. But, and then you had things the oxymoron of the day was high spin speed disks of a high performance disk. Compared to memories. And, so the next chart that we have is show some really amazing performance increases over the years. And so you see these bars on the left-hand side, it looks at historical performance for 4k random IOPS. And on the right-hand side, it's the storage controller performance for sequential bandwidth from 2008 to 2022. That's 22 is that yellow line. It's astounding the increases. I wonder if you could tell us what we're looking at here, when did SSD come in and how did that affect your thinking? (laughs) >> So I remember back in 2007, we were kind of on the precipice of SSDs. We saw it, the writing was on the wall. We had our first three gig SAS and SATA capable HPAs that had come out. And it was a shock because we were like, wow, we're going to really quickly become the bottleneck once this becomes more mainstream. And you're so right though about people work in, building these massive hard drive based back ends in order to handle kind of that tiered architecture that we were seeing that back in the early 2010s kind of when the pricing was just so sky high. And I remember looking at our SAS controllers, our very first one, and that was when I first came in at 2007. We had just launched our first SAS controller. We're so proud of ourselves. And I started going how many IOPS can this thing, even handled? We couldn't even attach enough drives to figure it out. So what we would do is we'd do these little tricks where we would do a five 12 byte read, and we would do it on a 4k boundary, so that it was actually reading sequentially from the disc, but we were handling these discrete IOPS. So we were like, oh, we can do around 35,000. Well, that's just not going to hit it anymore. Bandwidth wise we were doing great. Really our limitation and our bottleneck on bandwidth was always either the host or the backend. So, our controllers are there basically, there were three bottlenecks for our storage controllers. The first one is the bottleneck from the host to the controller. So that is typically a PCIe connection. And then there's another bottleneck on the controller to the disc. And that's really the number of ports that we have. And then the third one is the discs themselves. So in typical storage, that's what we look at. And we say, well, how do we improve this? So some of these are just kind of evolutionary, such as PCIE generations. And we're going to talk a little bit about that, but some of them are really revolutionary, and those are some of the things that we've been doing over the last five or six years to try and make sure that we are no longer the bottleneck. And we can enable these really, really fast drives. >> So can I ask a question? I'm sorry to interrupted but on these blue bars here. So these all spinning disks, I presume, out years they're not. Like when did flash come in to these blue bars? is that..you said 27 you started looking at it, but on these benchmarks, is it all spinning disc? Is it all flash? How should we interpret that? >> No, no. Initially they were actually all hard drives. And the way that we would identify, the max iOS would be by doing very small sequential reads to these hard drives. We just didn't have SSDs at that point. And then somewhere around 2010 is where we.. it was very early in that chart, we were able to start incorporating SSD technology into our benchmarking. And so what you're looking at here is really the max that our controller is capable of. So we would throw as many drives as we could and do what we needed to do in order to just make sure our controller was the bottleneck and what can we expose. >> So the drive then when SSD came in was no longer the bottleneck. So you guys had to sort of invent and rethink sort of how, what your innovation and your technology, because, I mean, these are astounding increases in performance. I mean, I think in the left-hand side, we've built this out pad, you got 170 X increase for the 4k random IOPS, and you've got a 20 X increase for the sequential bandwidth. How were you able to achieve that level of performance over time? >> Well, in terms of the sequential bandwidth, really those come naturally by increases in the PCIe or the SAS generation. So we just make sure we stay out of the way, and we enable that bandwidth. But the IOPS that's where it got really, really tricky. So we had to start thinking about different things. So, first of all, we started optimizing all of our pathways, all of our IO management, we increased the processing capabilities on our IO controllers. We added more on-chip memory. We started putting in IO accelerators, these hardware accelerators. We put in SAS poor kind of enhancements. We even went and improved our driver to make sure that our driver was as thin as possible. So we can make sure that we can enable all the IOPS on systems. But a big thing happening a few couple of generations ago was we started introducing something called tri capable controllers, which means that you could attach NVMe. You could attach SAS or you could attach SATA. So you could have this really amazing deployment of storage infrastructure based around your customized needs and your cost requirements by using one controller. >> Yeah. So anybody who's ever been to a trade show where they were displaying a glass case with a Winchester disc drive, for example, you see it's spinning and its actuators is moving, wow, that's so fast. Well, no. That's like a tourist slower. It's like a snail compared to the system's speed. So it's, in a way life was easy back in those days, because when you did a right to a disk, you had plenty of time to do stuff, right. And now it's changed. And so I want to talk about Gen3 versus Gen4, and how all this relates to what's new in Gen4 and the impacts of PCIe here, you have a chart here that you've shared with us that talks to that. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that, Kim. >> Sure. But first, you said something that kind of hit my funny bone there. And I remember I made a visit once about 15 or 20 years ago to IBM. And this gentleman actually had one of those old ones in his office and he referred to them as disk files. And he never until the day he retired, he'd never stopped calling them disc files. And it's kind of funny to be a part of that history. >> Yeah. DASD. They used to call it. (both laughing) >> SD, DASD. I used to get all kinds of, you know, you don't know what it was like back then, but yeah. But now nowadays we've got it quite easily enabled because back then, we had, SD DASD and all that. And then, ATA and then SCSI, well now we've got PCIe. And what's fabulous about PCIe is that it just has the generations are already planned out. It's incredible. You know, we're looking at right now, Gen3 moving to Gen4, and that's a lot about what we're going to be talking about. And that's what we're trying to test out. What is Gen4 PCIe when to bias? And it really is. It's fantastic. And PCIe came around about 18 years ago and Broadcom is, and we do participate and contribute to the PCIe SIG, which is, who develops the standards for PCIe, but the host in both our host interface in our NVMe desk and utilize the standards. So this is really, really a big deal, really critical for us. But if you take a look here, you can see that in terms of the capabilities of it, it's really is buying us a lot. So most of our drives right now NVMe drives tend to be by four. And a lot of people will connect them. And what that means is four lanes of NVMe and a lot of people that will connect them either at by one or by two kind of depending on what their storage infrastructure will allow. But the majority of them you could buy, or there are so, as you can see right now, we've gone from eight gig transfers per second to 16 gig of transfers per second. What that means is for a by four, we're going from one drive being able to do 4,000 to do an almost 8,000 megabytes per second. And in terms of those 4k IOPS that really evade us, they were really really tough sometimes to squeeze out of these drives, but now we're got 1 million, all we have to 2 million, it's just, it's insane. You know, just the increase in performance. And there's a lot of other standards that are going to be sitting on top of PCIe. So it's not going away anytime soon. We've got to open standards like CXL and things like that, but we also have graphics cards. You've got all of your hosts connections, they're also sitting on PCIe. So it's fantastic. It's backwards, it's orbits compatible, and it really is going to be our future. >> So this is all well and good. And I think I really believe that a lot of times in our industry, the challenges in the plumbing are underappreciated. But let's make it real for the audience because we have all these new workloads coming out, AI, heavily data oriented. So I want to get your thoughts on what types of workloads are going to benefit from Gen4 performance increases. In other words, what does it mean for application performance? You shared a chart that lists some of the key workloads, and I wonder if we could go through those. >> Yeah, yeah. I could have a large list of different workloads that are able to consume large amounts of data, whether or not it's in small or large kind of bytes of data. But as you know right now, and I said earlier, our ability to consume these compute and storage resources is amazing. So you build it and we'll use it. And the world's data we're expected to grow 61% to 175 zettabytes by the year 2025, according to IDC. So that's just a lot of data to manage. It's a lot of data to have, and it's something that's sitting around, but to be useful, you have to actually be able to access it. And that's kind of where we come in. So who is accessing it? What kind of applications? I spend a lot of time trying to understand that. And recently I attended a virtual conference SDC and what I like to do when I attend these conferences is to try to figure out what the buzz words are. What's everybody talking about? Because every year it's a little bit different, but this year was edge, edge everything. And so I kind of put edge on there first in, even you can ask anybody what's edge computing and it's going to mean a lot of different things, but basically it's all the computing outside of the cloud. That's happening typically at the edge of the network. So it tends to encompass a lot of real time processing on those instant data. So in the data is usually coming from either users or different sensors. It's that last mile. It's where we kind of put a lot of our content caching. And, I uncovered some interesting stuff when I was attending this virtual conference and they say only about 25% of all the usable data actually even reach the data center. The rest is ephemeral and it's localized, locally and in real time. So what it does is in the goal of edge computing is to try and reduce the bandwidth costs for these kinds of IOT devices that go over a long distance. But the reality is the growth of real-time applications that require these kinds of local processing are going to drive this technology forward over the coming years. So Dave, your toaster and your dishwasher they're, IOT edge devices probably in the next year, if they're not already. So edge is a really big one and consumes a lot of the data. >> The buzzword does your now is met the metaverse, it's almost like the movie, the matrix is going to come in real time. But the fact is it's all this data, a lot of videos, some of the ones that I would call out here, you mentioned facial recognition, real-time analytics. A lot of the edge is going to be real-time inferencing, applying AI. And these are just a massive, massive data sets that you again, you and of course your customers are enabling. >> When we first came out with our very first Gen3 product, our marketing team actually asked me, "Hey, how can we show users how they can consume this?" So I actually set up a head to environment. I decided I'm going to learn how to do this. I set up this massive environment with Hadoop, and at the time they called big data, the 3V's, I don't know if you remember these big 3Vs, the volume, velocity and variety. Well Dave, did you know, there are now 10 Vs? So besides those three, we got velocity, we got valued, we got variability, validity, vulnerability, volatility, visualization. So I'm thinking we need just to add another beat of that. >> Yeah. (both laughing) Well, that's interesting. You mentioned that, and that sort of came out of the big data world, a dupe world, which was very centralized. You're seeing the cloud is expanding, the world's getting, you know, data is by its very nature decentralized. And so you've got to have the ability to do an analysis in place. A lot of the edge analytics are going to be done in real time. Yes, sure. Some of it's going to go back in the cloud for detailed modeling, but we are the next decade Kim, ain't going to be like the last I often say. (laughing) I'll give you the last word. I mean, how do you see this sort of evolving, who's going to be adopting this stuff. Give us a sort of a timeframe for this kind of rollout in your world. >> In terms of the timeframe. I mean really nobody knows, but we feel like Gen5, that it's coming out next year. It may not be a full rollout, but we're going to start seeing Gen5 devices and Gen5 infrastructure is being built out over the next year. And then follow very, very, very quickly by Gen6. And so what we're seeing though is, we're starting to see these graphics processors, These GPU's, and I'm coming out as well, that are going to be connecting, using PCIe interfaces as well. So being able to access lots and lots and lots of data locally is going to be a really, really big deal and order because worldwide, all of our companies they're using business analytics. Data is money. And the person that actually can improve their operational efficiency, bolster those sales and increase your customer satisfaction. Those are the companies that are going on to win. And those are the companies that are going to be able to effectively store, retrieve and analyze all the data that they're collecting over the years. And that requires an abundance of data. >> Data is money and it's interesting. It kind of all goes back to when Steve jobs decided to put flash inside of an iPhone and the industry exploded, consumer economics kicked in 5G now edge AI, a lot of the things you talked about, GPU's the neural processing unit. It's all going to be coming together in this decade. Very exciting. Kim, thanks so much for sharing this data and your perspectives. I'd love to have you back when you got some new perspectives, new benchmark data. Let's do that. Okay. >> I look forward to it. Thanks so much. >> You're very welcome. And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards Program. I'm here with the leader of the partner program, Sandy Carter, Vice President, AWS, Amazon Web Services @Sandy_Carter on Twitter, prolific on social and great leader. Sandy, great to see you again. And congratulations on this great program we're having here. In fact, thanks for coming out for this keynote. Well, thank you, John, for having me. You guys always talk about the coolest thing. So we had to be part of it. >> Well, one of the things that I've been really loving about this success of public sector we talked to us before is that as we start coming out of the pandemic, is becoming very clear that the cloud has helped a lot of people and your team has done amazing work, just want to give you props for that and say, congratulations, and what a great time to talk about the winners. Because everyone's been working really hard in public sector, because of the pandemic. The internet didn't break. And everyone stepped up with cloud scale and solve some problems. So take us through the award winners and talk about them. Give us an overview of what it is. The criteria and all the specifics. >> Yeah, you got it. So we've been doing this annually, and it's for our public sector partners overall, to really recognize the very best of the best. Now, we love all of our partners, John, as you know, but every year we'd like to really hone in on a couple who really leverage their skills and their ability to deliver a great customer solution. They demonstrate those Amazon leadership principles like working backwards from the customer, having a bias for action, they've engaged with AWS and very unique ways. And as well, they've contributed to our customer success, which is so very important to us and to our customers as well. >> That's awesome. Hey, can we put up a slide, I know we have slide on the winners, I want to look at them, with the tiles here. So here's a list of some of the winners. I see a nice little stars on there. Look at the gold star. I knows IronNet, CrowdStrike. That's General Keith Alexander's company, I mean, super relevant. Presidio, we've interviewed them before many times, got Palantir in there. And is there another one, I want to take a look at some of the other names here. >> In overall we had 21 categories. You know, we have over 1900 public sector partners today. So you'll notice that the awards we did, a big focus on mission. So things like government, education, health care, we spotlighted some of the brand new technologies like Containers, Artificial Intelligence, Amazon Connect. And we also this year added in awards for innovative use of our programs, like think big for small business and PTP as well. >> Yeah, well, great roundup, they're looking forward to hearing more about those companies. I have to ask you, because this always comes up, we're seeing more and more ecosystem discussions when we talk about the future of cloud. And obviously, we're going to, you know, be at Mobile World Congress, theCUBE, back in physical form, again, (indistinct) will continue to go on. The notion of ecosystem is becoming a key competitive advantage for companies and missions. So I have to ask you, why are partners so important to your public sector team? Talk about the importance of partners in context to your mission? >> Yeah, you know, our partners are critical. We drive most of our business and public sector through partners. They have great relationships, they've got great skills, and they have, you know, that really unique ability to meet the customer needs. If I just highlighted a couple of things, even using some of our partners who won awards, the first is, you know, migrations are so critical. Andy talked at Reinvent about still 96% of applications still sitting on premises. So anybody who can help us with the velocity of migrations is really critical. And I don't know if you knew John, but 80% of our migrations are led by partners. So for example, we gave awards to Collibra and Databricks as best lead migration for data as well as Datacom for best data lead migration as well. And that's because they increase the velocity of migrations, which increases customer satisfaction. They also bring great subject matter expertise, in particular around that mission that you're talking about. So for instance, GDIT won best Mission Solution For Federal, and they had just an amazing solution that was a secure virtual desktop that reduced a federal agencies deployment process, from months to days. And then finally, you know, our partners drive new opportunities and innovate on behalf of our customers. So we did award this year for P to P, Partnering to Partner which is a really big element of ecosystems, but it was won by four points and in quizon, and they were able to work together to implement a data, implement a data lake and an AI, ML solution, and then you just did the startup showcase, we have a best startup delivering innovation too, and that was EduTech (indistinct) Central America. And they won for implementing an amazing student registration and early warning system to alert and risks that may impact a student's educational achievement. So those are just some of the reasons why partners are important. I could go on and on. As you know, I'm so passionate about my partners, >> I know you're going to talk for an hour, we have to cut you off a little there. (indistinct) love your partners so much. You have to focus on this mission thing. It was a strong mission focus in the awards this year. Why are customers requiring much more of a mission focused? Is it because, is it a part of the criteria? I mean, we're seeing a mission being big. Why is that the case? >> Well, you know, IDC, said that IT spend for a mission or something with a purpose or line of business was five times greater than IT. We also recently did our CTO study where we surveyed thousands of CTOs. And the biggest and most changing elements today is really not around the technology. But it's around the industry, healthcare, space that we talked about earlier, or government. So those are really important. So for instance, New Reburial, they won Best Emission for Healthcare. And they did that because of their new smart diagnostic system. And then we had a partner when PA consulting for Best Amazon Connect solution around a mission for providing support for those most at risk, the elderly population, those who already had pre existing conditions, and really making sure they were doing what they called risk shielding during COVID. Really exciting and big, strong focus on mission. >> Yeah, and it's also, you know, we've been covering a lot on this, people want to work for a company that has purpose, and that has missions. I think that's going to be part of the table stakes going forward. I got to ask you on the secrets of success when this came up, I love asking this question, because, you know, we're starting to see the playbooks of what I call post COVID and cloud scale 2.0, whatever you want to call it, as you're starting to see this new modern era of success formulas, obviously, large scale value creation mission. These are points we're hearing and keep conversations across the board. What do you see as the secret of success for these parties? I mean, obviously, it's indirect for Amazon, I get that, but they're also have their customers, they're your customers, customers. That's been around for a while. But there's a new model emerging. What are the secrets from your standpoint of success? you know, it's so interesting, John, that you asked me this, because this is the number one question that I get from partners too. I would say the first secret is being able to work backwards from your customer, not just technology. So take one of our award winners Cognizant. They won for their digital tolling solution. And they work backwards from the customer and how to modernize that, or Pariveda, who is one of our best energy solution winners. And again, they looked at some of these major capital projects that oil companies were doing, working backwards from what the customer needed. I think that's number one, working backwards from the customer. Two, is having that mission expertise. So given that you have to have technology, but you also got to have that expertise in the area. We see that as a big secret of our public sector partners. So education cloud, (indistinct) one for education, effectual one for government and not for profit, Accenture won, really leveraging and showcasing their global expansion around public safety and disaster response. Very important as well. And then I would say the last secret of success is building repeatable solutions using those strong skills. So Deloitte, they have a great solution for migration, including mainframes. And then you mentioned early on, CloudStrike and IronNet, just think about the skill sets that they have there for repeatable solutions around security. So I think it's really around working backwards from the customer, having that mission expertise, and then building a repeatable solution, leveraging your skill sets. >> That's a great formula for success. I got you mentioned IronNet, and cybersecurity. One of things that's coming up is, in addition to having those best practices, there's also like real problems to solve, like, ransomware is now becoming a government and commercial problem, right. So (indistinct) seeing that happen a lot in DC, that's a front burner. That's a societal impact issue. That's like a cybersecurity kind of national security defense issue, but also, it's a technical one. And also public sector, through my interviews, I can tell you the past year and a half, there's been a lot of creativity of new solutions, new problems or new opportunities that are not yet identified as problems and I'd love to get your thoughts on my concern is with Jeff Bar yesterday from AWS, who's been blogging all the the news and he is a leader in the community. He was saying that he sees like 5G in the edge as new opportunities where it's creative. It's like he compared to the going to the home improvement store where he just goes to buy one thing. He does other things. And so there's a builder culture. And I think this is something that's coming out of your group more, because the pandemic forced these problems, and they forced new opportunities to be creative, and to build. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so I see that too. So if you think about builders, you know, we had a partner, Executive Council yesterday, we had 900, executives sign up from all of our partners. And we asked some survey questions like, what are you building with today? And the number one thing was artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I think that's such a new builders tool today, John, and, you know, one of our partners who won an award for the most innovative AI&ML was Kablamo And what they did was they use AI&ML to do a risk assessment on bushfires or wildfires in Australia. But I think it goes beyond that. I think it's building for that need. And this goes back to, we always talk about #techforgood. Presidio, I love this award that they won for best nonprofit, the Cherokee Nation, which is one of our, you know, Native American heritage, they were worried about their language going out, like completely out like no one being able to speak yet. And so they came to Presidio, and they asked how could we have a virtual classroom platform for the Cherokee Nation? And they created this game that's available on your phone, so innovative, so much of a builder's culture to capture that young generation, so they don't you lose their language. So I do agree. I mean, we're seeing builders everywhere, we're seeing them use artificial intelligence, Container, security. And we're even starting with quantum, so it is pretty powerful of what you can do as a public sector partner. >> I think the partner equation is just so wide open, because it's always been based on value, adding value, right? So adding value is just what they do. And by the way, you make money doing it if you do a good job of adding value. And, again, I just love riffing on this, because Dave and I talked about this on theCUBE all the time, and it comes up all the time in cloud conversations. The lock in isn't proprietary technology anymore, its value, and scale. So you starting to see builders thrive in that environment. So really good points. Great best practice. And I think I'm very bullish on the partner ecosystems in general, and people do it right, flat upside. I got to ask you, though, going forward, because this is the big post COVID kind of conversation. And last time we talked on theCUBE about this, you know, people want to have a growth strategy coming out of COVID. They want to be, they want to have a tail win, they want to be on the right side of history. No one wants to be in the losing end of all this. So last year in 2021 your goals were very clear, mission, migrations, modernization. What's the focus for the partners beyond 2021? What are you guys thinking to enable them, 21 is going to be a nice on ramp to this post COVID growth strategy? What's the focus beyond 2021 for you and your partners? >> Yeah, it's really interesting, we're going to actually continue to focus on those three M's mission, migration and modernization. But we'll bring in different elements of it. So for example, on mission, we see a couple of new areas that are really rising to the top, Smart Cities now that everybody's going back to work and (indistinct) down, operations and maintenance and global defense and using gaming and simulation. I mean, think about that digital twin strategy and how you're doing that. For migration, one of the big ones we see emerging today is data-lead migration. You know, we have been focused on applications and mainframes, but data has gravity. And so we are seeing so many partners and our customers demanding to get their data from on premises to the cloud so that now they can make real time business decisions. And then on modernization. You know, we talked a lot about artificial intelligence and machine learning. Containers are wicked hot right now, provides you portability and performance. I was with a startup last night that just moved everything they're doing to ECS our Container strategy. And then we're also seeing, you know, crippin, quantum blockchain, no code, low code. So the same big focus, mission migration, modernization, but the underpinnings are going to shift a little bit beyond 2021. >> That's great stuff. And you know, you have first of all people don't might not know that your group partners and Amazon Web Services public sector, has a big surface area. You talking about government, health care, space. So I have to ask you, you guys announced in March the space accelerator and you recently announced that you selected 10 companies to participate in the accelerated program. So, I mean, this is this is a space centric, you know, targeting, you know, low earth orbiting satellites to exploring the surface of the Moon and Mars, which people love. And because the space is cool, let's say the tech and space, they kind of go together, right? So take us through, what's this all about? How's that going? What's the selection, give us a quick update, while you're here on this space accelerated selection, because (indistinct) will have had a big blog post that went out (indistinct). >> Yeah, I would be thrilled to do that. So I don't know if you know this. But when I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. We just helped through (indistinct), one of our partners reach Mars. So Clint, who is a retired general and myself got together, and we decided we needed to do something to help startups accelerate in their space mission. And so we decided to announce a competition for 10 startups to get extra help both from us, as well as a partner Sarafem on space. And so we announced it, everybody expected the companies to come from the US, John, they came from 44 different countries. We had hundreds of startups enter, and we took them through this six week, classroom education. So we had our General Clint, you know, helping and teaching them in space, which he's done his whole life, we provided them with AWS credits, they had mentoring by our partner, Sarafem. And we just down selected to 10 startups, that was what Vernors blog post was. If you haven't read it, you should look at some of the amazing things that they're going to do, from, you know, farming asteroids to, you know, helping with some of the, you know, using small vehicles to connect to larger vehicles, when we all get to space. It's very exciting. Very exciting, indeed, >> You have so much good content areas and partners, exploring, it's a very wide vertical or sector that you're managing. Is there any pattern? Well, I want to get your thoughts on post COVID success again, is there any patterns that you're seeing in terms of the partner ecosystem? You know, whether its business model, or team makeup, or more mindset, or just how they're organizing that that's been successful? Is there like a, do you see a trend? Is there a certain thing, then I've got the working backwards thing, I get that. But like, is there any other observations? Because I think people really want to know, am I doing it right? Am I being a good manager, when you know, people are going to be working remotely more? We're seeing more of that. And there's going to be now virtual events, hybrid events, physical events, the world's coming back to normal, but it's never going to be the same. Do you see any patterns? >> Yeah, you know, we're seeing a lot of small partners that are making an entrance and solving some really difficult problems. And because they're so focused on a niche, it's really having an impact. So I really believe that that's going to be one of the things that we see, I focus on individual creators and companies who are really tightly aligned and not trying to do everything, if you will. I think that's one of the big trends. I think the second we talked about it a little bit, John, I think you're going to see a lot of focus on mission. Because of that purpose. You know, we've talked about #techforgood, with everything going on in the world. As people have been working from home, they've been reevaluating who they are, and what do they stand for, and people want to work for a company that cares about people. I just posted my human footer on LinkedIn. And I got my first over a million hits on LinkedIn, just by posting this human footer, saying, you know what, reply to me at a time that's convenient for you, not necessarily for me. So I think we're going to see a lot of this purpose driven mission, that's going to come out as well. >> Yeah, and I also noticed that, and I was on LinkedIn, I got a similar reaction when I started trying to create more of a community model, not so much have people attend our events, and we need butts in the seats. It was much more personal, like we wanted you to join us, not attend and be like a number. You know, people want to be part of something. This seem to be the new mission. >> Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think that, you know, people do want to be part of something and they want, they want to be part of the meaning of something too, right. Not just be part of something overall, but to have an impact themselves, personally and individually, not just as a company. And I think, you know, one of the other trends that we saw coming up too, was the focus on technology. And I think low code, no code is giving a lot of people entry into doing things I never thought they could do. So I do think that technology, artificial intelligence Containers, low code, no code blockchain, those are going to enable us to even do greater mission-based solutions. >> Low code, no code reduces the friction to create more value, again, back to the value proposition. Adding value is the key to success, your partners are doing it. And of course, being part of something great, like the Global Public Sector Partner Awards list is a good one. And that's what we're talking about here. Sandy, great to see you. Thank you for coming on and sharing your insights and an update and talking more about the 2021, Global Public Sector partner Awards. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Okay, the Global Leaders here presented on theCUBE, again, award winners doing great work in mission, modernization, again, adding value. That's what it's all about. That's the new competitive advantage. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>We continue our coverage here in the cube of AWS reinvent 2020, and we're now joined by guru Vasudeva, who was the chief technology officer at nationwide insurance and a good route. Good afternoon to you. Thanks for joining us here on the cube. Good news. Um, big announcement for you folks in terms of AWS and, uh, making that connection that you have even deeper and even broader going with AWS now is your preferred cloud provider. Um, let's just talk about, about making that kind of a commitment first off on your end. What were some of those key factors, those drivers that led you to say, okay, this is where we really want to sink our resources. >>Yeah. You know, uh, our journey with this that started almost, uh, two years ago, uh, and, uh, what we, uh, were looking for, uh, was a partner, uh, who is leading edge in the cloud capabilities, as well as the ones that are creating new services. Uh, and obviously AWS is definitely, uh, a great partner to do that. And then, uh, we also found that, uh, they have this, uh, AWS next program enterprise next program. So we, uh, found that to be pretty attractive as well, because it's not just about migrating the applications, but also modernizing them, uh, in a waiting. So they are, we're going to really give us not only the technical capability, but also access to talent and best practices. So we really entered into this partnership, uh, with AWS, uh, to do achieve all of the above. >>You know, there's, there's this, um, as you know, it's very popular or, or, um, uh, in Vogue, obviously it's talk about digital transformations, right? There are, women's going undergoing that is complete metamorphosis, uh, of your, uh, your VIT structure. But, but this is where you are. Uh, and you were already kind of in the, in the throws of this or in the midst of this, in terms of accelerating that process and refining that process, uh, what is AWS now bringing to your table and what did you want, what did you need from them to, to get you going a little bit quicker, maybe in the direction you were already going? >>Yeah. You know, one of the, um, like I will give you two answers. One on the technology side, they have got a huge array of services available in AI machine learning, data and analytics. So they're constantly, you know, weighting those things. So it makes it easier for us to really stitch together solutions that, uh, gives a better experience for our customers or for agents or our financial advisors, right. On the process side. Uh, what they really brought to about brought to bear is their own internal methodology for innovation. Uh, so they, uh, we've been able to really partner with our business partners and AWS to apply that methodology, uh, to really see, can we really do those kinds of things in an insurance company, right. And we have found that methodology to be of equal value. Hmm. >>You know, um, I mean, the fact is your portfolio is so broad or, or, or, you know, your arsenal, if you will, 2000 plus applications right here, are you guys up and running and you're moving a little less than half of them to AWS. I mean, this is a huge undertaking and the idea, obviously that to, to maintain business operations as usual. So tell us about that tight rope act. I mean, how, how do you manage that and keep business going, keep operations still humming. And in fact, you're already looking for new kind of efficiencies and new processes that make even a little sharper, a little leaner. Yeah. >>You know, uh, the approach that we took is it's a methodology that I've used with many of our, uh, transformations that I've had the opportunity to lead here at nationwide, uh, where we use a very methodical, repeatable process and we call it, we started with diagnostics. And then once you look at the diagnostics, you build a plan and then you execute the plan and then you go back and see, did it really give you the results and tweak the loop? Right. So our diagnostics methodology starts with looking at an existing application for us, for example, our claims system, uh, or our policy admin system, right. These are very critical systems for a company like us, and you can adjust, you know, migrate them and hope that it'll work out. Right. So instead we did a very methodical approach of diagnosing and saying, technologically architecture wise, what needs to change? >>What are the opportunities for optimizing them instead of just migrate them likewise, as it can really optimize it and migrated at the same time, how about security? What are the different things that we need to do on security wise? Right. And then last but not least is money, right. What does it cost for us on prime and can it cost cheaper? Uh, and if we really apply all of these different lovers, can we make it cheaper in the cloud? So we did all of those four different elements, and we found that methodology to be instrumental in our success story. This year, we migrated our claim system. We migrated our commercial lines policy, uh, admin system, or a personalized policy admin system, our nationwide.com and all of our financial services front ends. So it's a huge, like it's like the heart and soul of the company, uh, and they have, uh, gone extremely well. And we really attribute that to the methodical. I'm looking at all these dimensions. I don't know how you slept. >>I mean, th that, that is a, that's a full slate. Um, and to go back to the four points you were talking about earlier about, you know, the, the, the, the gains you got the last one that caught my eye or one that caught my attention, there was about the, the, uh, bottom line, the fact that you reduced costs that, that you did save money. So it is possible, uh, that this cloud migration, again, this is, uh, on a, uh, Archie overarching level. You can make this migration and go through this enormous transformation and, and still, >>So, yeah, add to the bottom line. Yeah. So the, uh, um, you know, many people these days, you read in the articles, Oh, well, cloud migration not necessarily saves you money, or that's not the real reason to do it. I didn't really want to accept that as an answer. Instead, what we really said is we want it to be better, faster, cheaper, all of the above, right. So we have challenged ourselves to say, um, what would it cost if we were to really keep it on prem and can, what changes we need to make in order to get the efficiency? For example, our claim system, if we were to migrate it like for lying, it would have cost us 25% more to run in the cloud. We said, no, we're going to tweak how we have architected, uh, how many, uh, how much storage we need, what kind of things we provision? Uh, so we changed the architecture and the underpinning and the engineering, and we were able to find that our 20% savings, right. So if you think about it, that's like a 45% swing. Uh, if we had not done the diagnostics after the migration, I would've been like, Oh my God, it actually costs us more money. And that we couldn't really do what what's been the >>Th the big gain in terms of, you talked about claims. So obviously it heart and soul of your company, insurance policies, both on the commercial and the residential side, or the, you know, the personal user. Um, >>I mean, what, what's been the biggest, >>Uh, impact, if you will, in terms of your core business, and then introducing these new technologies and these new efficiencies into the process, >>You know, uh, this year, uh, for us, uh, if you take a look at property and casualty companies like, uh, you know, insurance companies has been a very eventful year, not only with COVID, but also with all the other events that happened with the fires and the various tornadoes and so on. So when, uh, we have more claim volume, we can actually take our, uh, environment up and down seamlessly, right? We can add more capacity, very seamlessly. So that's a beast, uh, premise, if you will, off of the cloud is that you can actually consume more and you don't have to really wait for adding additional capacity. That part has actually worked out really well. And the reverse is true as well. We've been able to actually reduce capacity when we don't need it right on the base level. And on the more innovation level, we've been able to tap into AI machine learning kind of capabilities and stitch together, new experiences in our commercial line space, uh, to deliver, uh, new types of insights, new types of, uh, um, uh, solutions for our business partners. So we have been very pleased with how we've been able to stitch together solutions by kind of tapping into the various services that AWS bonds. >>Yeah, you were, you've been talking about, uh, all these, uh, tremendous innovations in terms of how you go about your business and how you do your business. And certainly you're realizing great benefit and gain from that. What about the other side, the, the, your customers, you know, millions of customers that you have, and as you said, experiencing a number of challenges this year to say the least, but at the end of the day, what has been the bottom line or what is going to be the bottom line for them, >>For them? Um, uh, our, uh, kind of, uh, kind of vision is completely transforming the customer experience that we provide them, uh, by digital capabilities, right? So they should be able to get to any answer that they want, whether it's beyond their cell phone or their computer, and to do that, uh, to provide that kind of service. Uh, I think these kinds of technologies actually enables us to really deliver that kind of a digital transformation. >>What about the security side of all this? Uh, I know that's part of your, of your concern too. I mean, it's certainly an area that that is receiving, uh, and understandably a lot of attention these days in terms of, uh, providing more secure solutions and, and, uh, making sure that there's customer data, which is so precious is protected. Um, in terms of all this activity that you're doing, you've got to put in that layer of security on top of that, right. Which is paramount to your success these days as a company, what kind of focus have you maybe reconfigured in that respect now with regard to security and your customers and, and your operational security too? >>Yeah. So, you know, in the diagnostics methodology that I talked about, security is one of those dimensions that we looked at, how do we secure the information on prem versus in the cloud? Uh, they're not like for, like, we need to apply different techniques, sometimes different technology. Uh, so we built that in from the beginning. And then, uh, the great thing is, you know, we have also learned a lot by working with Amazon, uh, about, uh, how do they do it? In-house right. I mean, they obviously run the biggest if you will, online, um, shopping capability out there and how did they do it? So that's the other kind of access to talent. That's been really helpful. Uh, and we look at this constantly, it says something, it's something that's evolving as new threat actors come on, board or new techniques of attack comes on board with constantly evaluating and making sure that we are fine tuning that security, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. >>What of your headlights hit it now, when you look down the road, uh, I know you're, you're not done with this by any means. Uh, uh, I certainly understand that, but in terms of the next 12 to 18 months, uh, what kind of progress do you want to make and where do you think that you're gonna, you're going to have to where you want to make it the most? >>So on the, uh, on the efficiency side, uh, we've got a pretty big goal, uh, to reduce our expenses, uh, by hundreds of millions of dollars, we spent well over a billion dollars on technology every year, uh, and our cloud migration and optimization is definitely a key lever that we are, you know, uh, pulling. And so for me, uh, B have a target of, um, uh, applications that we wanted to, uh, one of migrate to the cloud and we will be done with 32% of them by the end of this year. And now they're 30 to 32% next year. So we've got ways to go, but in the next couple of years, we would be well on our way to really migrating what we want to migrate to the cloud. So that's definitely a big focus area while delivering savings on the innovation. Go ahead, please go ahead. Yeah. On the innovation side, uh, I think there is so much more to be done, whether it be internet of things or providing new, uh, offerings for our customer, for our agents, for financial advisors. Uh, so there are so many new things that we can do. And now that we've got a repeatable pattern for migration, our energy is going to really shift towards those more innovation, more new and additional experiences. That's where our energy is going to really shift. >>Well, you took a big step today, certainly with the announcement. I know the AWS partnership is one that you put a lot of value on. It certainly has been successful for you, and we wish you all the continued success as well as you, uh, head on into 2021. Thank you for joining us here today. Thanks John.

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>We continue our coverage here in the cube of AWS reinvent 2020, and we're now joined by guru Vasudeva, who was the chief technology officer at nationwide insurance and a good route. Good afternoon to you. Thanks for joining us here on the cube. Good news. Um, big announcement for you folks in terms of AWS and, uh, making that connection that you have even deeper and even broader going with AWS now is your preferred cloud provider. Um, let's just talk about, about making that kind of a commitment first off on your end. What were some of those key factors, those drivers that led you to say, okay, this is where we really want to sink our resources. >>Yeah. You know, uh, our journey with this that started almost, uh, two years ago, uh, and, uh, what we, uh, were looking for, uh, was a partner, uh, who is leading edge in the cloud capabilities, as well as the ones that are creating new services. Uh, and obviously AWS is definitely, uh, a great partner to do that. And then, uh, we also found that, uh, they have this, uh, AWS next program enterprise next program. So we, uh, found that to be pretty attractive as well, because it's not just about migrating the applications, but also modernizing them, uh, in a waiting. So they are, we're going to really give us not only the technical capability, but also access to talent and best practices. So we really entered into this partnership, uh, with AWS, uh, to do achieve all of the above. >>You know, there's, there's this, um, as you know, it's very popular or, or, um, uh, in Vogue, obviously it's talk about digital transformations, right? There are, women's going undergoing that is complete metamorphosis, uh, of your, uh, your VIT structure. But, but this is where you are. Uh, and you were already kind of in the, in the throws of this or in the midst of this, in terms of accelerating that process and refining that process, uh, what is AWS now bringing to your table and what did you want, what did you need from them to, to get you going a little bit quicker, maybe in the direction you were already going? >>Yeah. You know, one of the, um, like I will give you two answers. One on the technology side, they have got a huge array of services available in AI machine learning, data and analytics. So they're constantly, you know, weighting those things. So it makes it easier for us to really stitch together solutions that, uh, gives a better experience for our customers or for agents or our financial advisors, right. On the process side. Uh, what they really brought to about brought to bear is their own internal methodology for innovation. Uh, so they, uh, we've been able to really partner with our business partners and AWS to apply that methodology, uh, to really see, can we really do those kinds of things in an insurance company, right. And we have found that methodology to be of equal value. Hmm. >>You know, um, I mean, the fact is your portfolio is so broad or, or, or, you know, your arsenal, if you will, 2000 plus applications right here, are you guys up and running and you're moving a little less than half of them to AWS. I mean, this is a huge undertaking and the idea, obviously that to, to maintain business operations as usual. So tell us about that tight rope act. I mean, how, how do you manage that and keep business going, keep operations still humming. And in fact, you're already looking for new kind of efficiencies and new processes that make even a little sharper, a little leaner. Yeah. >>You know, uh, the approach that we took is it's a methodology that I've used with many of our, uh, transformations that I've had the opportunity to lead here at nationwide, uh, where we use a very methodical, repeatable process and we call it, we started with diagnostics. And then once you look at the diagnostics, you build a plan and then you execute the plan and then you go back and see, did it really give you the results and tweak the loop? Right. So our diagnostics methodology starts with looking at an existing application for us, for example, our claims system, uh, or our policy admin system, right. These are very critical systems for a company like us, and you can adjust, you know, migrate them and hope that it'll work out. Right. So instead we did a very methodical approach of diagnosing and saying, technologically architecture wise, what needs to change? >>What are the opportunities for optimizing them instead of just migrate them likewise, as it can really optimize it and migrated at the same time, how about security? What are the different things that we need to do on security wise? Right. And then last but not least is money, right. What does it cost for us on prime and can it cost cheaper? Uh, and if we really apply all of these different lovers, can we make it cheaper in the cloud? So we did all of those four different elements, and we found that methodology to be instrumental in our success story. This year, we migrated our claim system. We migrated our commercial lines policy, uh, admin system, or a personalized policy admin system, our nationwide.com and all of our financial services front ends. So it's a huge, like it's like the heart and soul of the company, uh, and they have, uh, gone extremely well. And we really attribute that to the methodical. I'm looking at all these dimensions. I don't know how you slept. >>I mean, th that, that is a, that's a full slate. Um, and to go back to the four points you were talking about earlier about, you know, the, the, the, the gains you got the last one that caught my eye or one that caught my attention, there was about the, the, uh, bottom line, the fact that you reduced costs that, that you did save money. So it is possible, uh, that this cloud migration, again, this is, uh, on a, uh, Archie overarching level. You can make this migration and go through this enormous transformation and, and still, >>So, yeah, add to the bottom line. Yeah. So the, uh, um, you know, many people these days, you read in the articles, Oh, well, cloud migration not necessarily saves you money, or that's not the real reason to do it. I didn't really want to accept that as an answer. Instead, what we really said is we want it to be better, faster, cheaper, all of the above, right. So we have challenged ourselves to say, um, what would it cost if we were to really keep it on prem and can, what changes we need to make in order to get the efficiency? For example, our claim system, if we were to migrate it like for lying, it would have cost us 25% more to run in the cloud. We said, no, we're going to tweak how we have architected, uh, how many, uh, how much storage we need, what kind of things we provision? Uh, so we changed the architecture and the underpinning and the engineering, and we were able to find that our 20% savings, right. So if you think about it, that's like a 45% swing. Uh, if we had not done the diagnostics after the migration, I would've been like, Oh my God, it actually costs us more money. And that we couldn't really do what what's been the >>Th the big gain in terms of, you talked about claims. So obviously it heart and soul of your company, insurance policies, both on the commercial and the residential side, or the, you know, the personal user. Um, >>I mean, what, what's been the biggest, >>Uh, impact, if you will, in terms of your core business, and then introducing these new technologies and these new efficiencies into the process, >>You know, uh, this year, uh, for us, uh, if you take a look at property and casualty companies like, uh, you know, insurance companies has been a very eventful year, not only with COVID, but also with all the other events that happened with the fires and the various tornadoes and so on. So when, uh, we have more claim volume, we can actually take our, uh, environment up and down seamlessly, right? We can add more capacity, very seamlessly. So that's a beast, uh, premise, if you will, off of the cloud is that you can actually consume more and you don't have to really wait for adding additional capacity. That part has actually worked out really well. And the reverse is true as well. We've been able to actually reduce capacity when we don't need it right on the base level. And on the more innovation level, we've been able to tap into AI machine learning kind of capabilities and stitch together, new experiences in our commercial line space, uh, to deliver, uh, new types of insights, new types of, uh, um, uh, solutions for our business partners. So we have been very pleased with how we've been able to stitch together solutions by kind of tapping into the various services that AWS bonds. >>Yeah, you were, you've been talking about, uh, all these, uh, tremendous innovations in terms of how you go about your business and how you do your business. And certainly you're realizing great benefit and gain from that. What about the other side, the, the, your customers, you know, millions of customers that you have, and as you said, experiencing a number of challenges this year to say the least, but at the end of the day, what has been the bottom line or what is going to be the bottom line for them, >>For them? Um, uh, our, uh, kind of, uh, kind of vision is completely transforming the customer experience that we provide them, uh, by digital capabilities, right? So they should be able to get to any answer that they want, whether it's beyond their cell phone or their computer, and to do that, uh, to provide that kind of service. Uh, I think these kinds of technologies actually enables us to really deliver that kind of a digital transformation. >>What about the security side of all this? Uh, I know that's part of your, of your concern too. I mean, it's certainly an area that that is receiving, uh, and understandably a lot of attention these days in terms of, uh, providing more secure solutions and, and, uh, making sure that there's customer data, which is so precious is protected. Um, in terms of all this activity that you're doing, you've got to put in that layer of security on top of that, right. Which is paramount to your success these days as a company, what kind of focus have you maybe reconfigured in that respect now with regard to security and your customers and, and your operational security too? >>Yeah. So, you know, in the diagnostics methodology that I talked about, security is one of those dimensions that we looked at, how do we secure the information on prem versus in the cloud? Uh, they're not like for, like, we need to apply different techniques, sometimes different technology. Uh, so we built that in from the beginning. And then, uh, the great thing is, you know, we have also learned a lot by working with Amazon, uh, about, uh, how do they do it? In-house right. I mean, they obviously run the biggest if you will, online, um, shopping capability out there and how did they do it? So that's the other kind of access to talent. That's been really helpful. Uh, and we look at this constantly, it says something, it's something that's evolving as new threat actors come on, board or new techniques of attack comes on board with constantly evaluating and making sure that we are fine tuning that security, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. >>What of your headlights hit it now, when you look down the road, uh, I know you're, you're not done with this by any means. Uh, uh, I certainly understand that, but in terms of the next 12 to 18 months, uh, what kind of progress do you want to make and where do you think that you're gonna, you're going to have to where you want to make it the most? >>So on the, uh, on the efficiency side, uh, we've got a pretty big goal, uh, to reduce our expenses, uh, by hundreds of millions of dollars, we spent well over a billion dollars on technology every year, uh, and our cloud migration and optimization is definitely a key lever that we are, you know, uh, pulling. And so for me, uh, B have a target of, um, uh, applications that we wanted to, uh, one of migrate to the cloud and we will be done with 32% of them by the end of this year. And now they're 30 to 32% next year. So we've got ways to go, but in the next couple of years, we would be well on our way to really migrating what we want to migrate to the cloud. So that's definitely a big focus area while delivering savings on the innovation. Go ahead, please go ahead. Yeah. On the innovation side, uh, I think there is so much more to be done, whether it be internet of things or providing new, uh, offerings for our customer, for our agents, for financial advisors. Uh, so there are so many new things that we can do. And now that we've got a repeatable pattern for migration, our energy is going to really shift towards those more innovation, more new and additional experiences. That's where our energy is going to really shift. >>Well, you took a big step today, certainly with the announcement. I know the AWS partnership is one that you put a lot of value on. It certainly has been successful for you, and we wish you all the continued success as well as you, uh, head on into 2021. Thank you for joining us here today. Thanks John.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover virtual experience brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. This is the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, and I'm joined by a couple of guys who were gonna talk through one of HPC ease. Longest partnerships. We've got shells. No Ryan and the Senior director Ecosystem Sales or North America at HP And Dr Rajesh, It's really a Boston. The global head of sales and solutions for the TCS. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >>Yeah, Thank you. >>So, first question for you is I mentioned HP and TCS have been partners for over 30 years. Talk to our audience about the partnership and how it has evolved to where it is today. >>Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. Firstly, you know, I'm pretty excited to be part of this Cube interview with garages. You know, I know him personally for over five years through various interactions globally and this new role for North America. This is our strategy and global system integrator partner. And this is a longstanding partnership between HP and this years has grown multi falls over the last 30 years. Ah, we you know, pretty much enjoyed every single I would say transactions or the business engagements, what we've had so far. And we liberate each other for our internal I T requirements and also to drive joint, go to market initiatives across the world. That's making this a truly 3 60 degree partnership. There is a lot of heritage, a mutual trust and respect between both organizations at all levels and the complimentary offerings. You know what you will hear a lot more in the next couple of questions. Uh, we bring to the table together are very unique and very differentiating to the clients which are >>excellent. Dr. Rajesh, walk us through some of those joint offerings that TCS cloud in h e or delivering. >>Yeah, so far. So far. Thanks. I just want to thank the HP team for giving me the opportunity to up to a larger audience. Andi, This new normal. This is the first time I'm doing an interview like this. Thanks for that experience. Actually, as Jules mentioned, this relationship goes a long way. I am talking about the larger PCs were a long relationship, Andi, specifically on the easiest load we started this journey in a very, very practical way. Five years back it was it was started in a very, very small trial and error basis. We started this relationship RPC explode. But at this point in time after So yes, we have taken this into ah, new norm, actually. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the examples We have a very major retailer in Germany, which we work so that it was a $1,000,000 deals. Our busiest on GHB. Yes, you wanna unique offering to the customer s AP and a space on that is really growing a lot. And that's the one offering I would like to tell the audience that really has picked up and spent on the relationship in the German region. Right now we are trying to take that up, offering across on other other regions also, so that is one of the key offerings that we are doing it. The other offerings are multiple offerings we are doing. But again, I want to highlight the storage as a service offering. Great. It's everybody in the industry today, Andi, we are experimenting that in the initial stages in Australia we started in Australia a small offering. And now we are expanding it in the US geography in a big way. And this year we are going to make that as a unique offering. And we're going to offer they're all over cloud customers as a storage as a service offering. Also multiple other offering, Lisa. But I just thought that I like this tool which are making our business. We're making a lot of business together with these two offerings >>is the, uh, s AP opportunity that you mentioned is that the Hana as a service that TCS is delivered? >>That's correct. So it's ah, it's a service. But the uniqueness of that particular offering is we jointly created the architecture so that the customer can use that, like a database as a service model. Right? So it was It was not available that time in the industry so easily like what we offered at that point in time to do enough years back. We offer that particular said we spoke a summer and interestingly, that particular offering the customer was using s AP themselves as a service initially, and they migrated their to us actually from Maybe that's a reason they bought HP and TCS. There is like a summer on this API and a platform. So that's the That's the interesting story under, >>if we didn't do that just a little bit further, I wanted the audience to understand the impact that this partnership has H p E and TCS delivering Hana as a service or your customers. What are the benefits there than what the customer, as you said was doing previously? >>Yeah, yeah, I think I just want to highlight the three or four points that make that this offering very unique, and that helps the customer number one is associated with model. So the customer has got the complete flexibility off going up and down like a true cloud model, right? And so it is a really a unique proposition at that point in time, where the customer not a story about using less for some time and then using more sometimes so it's kind of a complete, flexible model that we offered at the time. Number two is, it's a complete customization is possible. It is not like a fixed architecture. The architecture is so flexible so that the customer business needs can be met through the architectural changes. So it's not like normally people think that lotus highly standardized architecture, right? So that has gone out, and we were given a flexible architecture for the customer. That is the number two number three, obviously the cost end of the day. There's a business case which we need to make it work right for the customer. So obviously, with the PCs and HP coming together, we were able to do the costarred, want age with a customer that is the third advantage of that. The last, but not the least, is the quality of service it is it is all about. I always used to tell my partners that selling is easy. Delivering it is what it's important it is, which will make the customer to stick with you, right? The were given and delivery quality experience who our customer s so that I think that makes a very unique proposition from a technology perspective from a pricing. But but from an architecture and also from the delivery perspective. So those are the few few things I just thought that I violated. >>Excellent. So a couple of words that you mentioned popped into my mind as really even more well, have a different meeting as we're in summer 2020 flexibility and unique offering chills back to you from a go to market perspective. How is that relationship with HP? And he says, changing in the Koven era. >>Yeah, it's pretty interesting, and I would like to call it an example off. You know, what we see is is that you themselves during the corporate times, you know, it also came in the in the pets close to 90% of the workforce. We're 100% productive. Uh, and, uh, they have a plan to go 75% of the employees, you know, go being remote by 2025. Right? So that's the journey they're taking on. And another thing that you notice there's a lot of the, you know, During the corporate times, many of the customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure. So they wanted their employees to be productive, bi directional and in the other area of focus was like a TCP, you know, how do I kind of make sure on the applications are available to you? The customers and also do their internal organizations. So we've seen a lot off. I would say engagement with that is I could picture team and also the solution team toe address This requirements off the market joint >>when we look at certain things that now might even be more important with this new normal, if you will, that the fact that most companies are still in phase one of this work, everyone works from home trying to get to a phase to that might see some some maybe by function groups coming back to the office and then getting to this third. Maybe it's the new nirvana of some hybrid workforce, where there's gonna be some that come back permanently, and some that Don't and Tony Unirea chose, I saw was quoted last month as saying he thinks that 50% of the workforce will only 50% will come back. So in this new not only hybrid I T environment in which your customers love it now, this new pending hybrid workforce environment how are you addressing some of the concerns together with respect to the network connectivity security, >>I will just take the cost anything. It's a very, very interesting at least when we all ended up in this pandemic in March. We really very, very nervous, actually, because everyone has to operate remotely on we are. We are dealing with the customer data. It's ah, it's very, very important that we have a secure environment to access the information and at the same time maintain the integrity of the data and also the quality off the plate. Those other two primary objective for us. We don't want to compromise on quality. We don't want to compromise on security from a cloud perspective. So the solution we have put in really, I just give you one example there was on the airline Ah, UK based the airline industry airline company which they need that workforce overnight. They want everybody to go remote because you know you cape on. They just put up condition that nobody can work from the office overnight and then terror ports as toe work from home purchases, implement the solution for them on our clothes overnight and make that 1000 employees store from home the next day morning. All of them started working with full quality of services and also with a full security aspect of it, has been taken care ornate on the solution. We are deployed. Very interesting case study on The important thing we have done is use the technology to the port. Use all kinds of technology to make sure that the employees that work from home we took care of the network connectivity. We took our eye off the security aspects off the data from security aspects. We've implemented all the security functions from really APIs. But people, Children stop perspective. Andi, make the workforce enable that. But now you are talking about millions off millions of workers going to work from home. Right? Because it is one example for one company we have done that now the easiest themselves has got more than 400 1000 employees. And we are talking about millions off our pores, going to work from home on going forward. So that is I'm seeing this as a big opportunity. It's not that everybody has are just this at this point in time, I'm seeing this as an opportunity where on the cloud easiest cloud kind off. The solution is going to help them to achieve this. And this is a great opportunity for not only for PCs, but also for HP because the solution we're putting together with the HP is more on the digital or course how we can enable the people to work from home, not compromising on as I mentioned from a security you're in from millions perspective. So I'm seeing this as an opportunity for both the organization, and it's a long way to go is we need to work on this. It's not. We don't have a magic want to make the millions off workers to work from home, but it is going to have all soon and probably in the next step. Yeah, so we may achieve this, impair people off. The workforce is going to go remotely on this list. So that's that. And my take on this >>is so the impact that HP and TCS Herb being able to make for customers who have had to massively transform their entire workforce overnight, as he said, to work from home to talk about some of the new maybe new solutions or new business opportunities that HPC is partnering with TCS shells, we'll start with you in this new era, >>Yeah, so if you look at it, I just taking it again on extension off of the projects. What he just mentioned about the percentage of employees going remote Lisa across industries today. I would say less than 20% of the employees are actually working remote or they have the ability. But the organizations have the ability to support the employees going, and if you have to take it to 50% so you can look at the kind of opportunity we have both as HP and as PCs. So we bring in a lot of best in breed infrastructure from for enabling the employee workforce to know where it is. I would say capacity off workloads and it's all workload specific. And what business does this or when people Pretty easy as we kind of bundle that creating a reference architecture or a giant architect picture addressing the customers by industry word. So because one what suits for one vertical may not be really suiting well for a different world, right? For example, if you take a banking sector are playing, a workstation solution would look very different from somebody's doing remote work in retail, so we kind of continuously engage with the PCs, and that's where both of us have joint lab as well, where our technologies and pieces technologies come together, working on joint solutions and assisting the market in terms of the opportunity lights. And we offer this as part of A C is our digital workplace offerings. >>Are your conversations Dr Additional go to you or your conversations when you're jointly selling, changing in terms of who your audience is? Is this now a C level conversation? Since these leaders and we've heard leaders of Google and Facebook already last month saying Work from home extended still 2021. Is this now at the C suite level, where you guys are helping them really understand how to completely change and digitize their entire way of doing business? >>Absolutely. I think it's a great question, and it's actually the opportunity goes beyond the work from home solution. As you rightly I want to know that it is. It is all about digitization. It is all about digitizing their whole business process. It is not anymore infrastructure. Our application solution. It is more about really finding that business process be defending. The way the business is going to operate in future is the discussion we are having so a lot of these discussions are happening at a very, very high level and with the business team also directly so earlier, you used to interact with the technology partners off our organization. But now we are interacting directly with the head of business are the C level except of the company. And that is the reason the exact reason is Ah, you. If you want your ports to be productive remotely, you can't just offer them on network on. You can't offer them just a solution to work from home. But you need to really find your whole business process you need. You need to digitize your infrastructure. You need to digitize your application. You need to rethink your whole process off. You're operating on it, so that's what I'm seeing. It's not only an opportunity for our players like a business cloud, but it is the opportunity for a bigger opportunity for PCs. And it should be not only in terms off on infrastructure in our cloud business, it goes beyond that. So that is that is the kind of an opportunity we're seeing, especially in the in the sectors of healthcare you're seeing major reforms are happening in the healthcare industry as we speak, and obviously manufacturing is going to go through a lot of changes. Also from that. And retail obviously has gone through a lot of changes already in terms of online, uh, stuff, but know that also going to go through changes in this new era? Yes, >>I have to ask you shelled, talking about redefining? That's a word that we've seen so many years in a row at tech conferences, right, this technology redefining this business or that industry. And now, of course, we're being redefined by an invisible virus. But how? How is the sales process being redefined? Is it a lot more accelerated because businesses have to put together new plans to continue operations? >>Yeah, again, a great question. Is this how you have? You know, I would say it's divided by industry body. It's not a uniform thing by, as not British was saying, every industry has got its own, its own set of challenges and its own set of opportunities, and some of them are really actually doing well even in times like and some of them have seen, Really. I mean, like, travel our transportation or you know some of those industries are, and even hospitality that's kind of affected big time. So our view of you know, the entire sales engagement of the processes we're spending more time on there. We really need to focus and which can help improve the businesses. Right? So the conversation's ready from How do I take the cost out in terms of how can I make a little more investment to get greater returns from the business? So it's like it's completely, I would say, an interesting pain and engaging compositions and decisions are happening. So we, if you look at us from an automatic perspective, the Internet to the sales team is armed with various virtual tools like we know you zoom views Skype using SMS teens. So all the tools available to make sure that we're able to connect with all our partners and customers on do enable joint business together. >>I just want oh, I add to it, Lisa, 111 point. I want bad, Really interesting change I'm seeing on the sales is normally we respond to it. I asked from a customer that is a sales happens. I want this many days. Do it and then what you can do with a solution that is a normal sales process. What I have seen that has changed completely. Yes, we go and tell the customer, Is this what you need Actually, to make you yourself your business? Better? This is the new offerings I'm having good. And this offering is going to help you to solve the problem what you are having today. So we are engaging a different level off sales conversation today with our customers. We know the problem of the customer because we are working with them for many years and we know exactly what they're going through. And we also know what new offerings we are having in this. So we are engaging the discussion with the customer doing that. This is my new offering. This is going to help you to solve this problem. But that is a different angle of sales we have seen nowadays they spend on it. >>The last question shells to you. We started our interview today talking about the HP TCS relationship. You talked about how it's evolved. Last question. You talked to me about H B's strategy. How does it match TCS Alfa Cloud offering. >>Yeah, so again, a great question, Lisa, if you look at our strategy, is to accelerate the enterprises with it. Centric and cloud enable solutions which are workload up, optimized and delivered everything as a service. And whatever you heard from Dr Rogers through this entire conversation was about how do we give as a service model you gave an example of honor. You gave an example off, you know, going how optimizing workloads for video and getting employees to be able to be productive remotely and all of that kind of extremely resonate well with, you know, what we see is confined to price. Cloud offering is bringing to the table for the customer and the underlying platform. You know, we kind of elaborate extensively and closely with the easiest architecture. Seem to have the HP portfolio off. You know, the compute and storage portfolio integrated as part of their offering, and we go together to market, you know, and addressing and kind of an ask service model. 1,000,000,000. >>Excellent. Well, shells Dr. Rajesh, pleasure talking with you both today about what UCS and H e are doing together and some of the ways that you're really helping businesses move forward in these uncertain times, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you for represents. Thanks. Thank >>you. Dr Rajesh. >>My guest. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover virtual experience brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. This is the virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin with the Cube, and I'm joined by a couple of guys who were gonna talk through one of HPC ease. Longest partnerships. We've got shells. No Ryan and the senior director Ecosystem sales for North America at HP and Dr Rajesh Boston, the global head of sales and solutions for the TCS. Wow. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. >>So, first question for you, as I mentioned, HP and TCS have been partners for over 30 years. Talk to our audience about the partnership and how it has evolved to where it is today. >>Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. Firstly, you know, I'm pretty excited to be part of this Cube interview with garages. I know. I know him personally for over five years through various interactions globally and this new role for North America. This is our strategy and global system integrator partner. And this is a longstanding partnership between HP and this years has grown multi falls over the last 30 years. We you know, pretty much enjoyed every single I would say transactions or the business engagements, what we've had so far. And we liberate each other for our internal I T requirements and also to drive joint, go to market initiatives across the world. That's making this a truly a 3 60 degree partnership. There is a lot of heritage, a mutual trust and respect between both organizations at all levels and the complimentary offerings. You know what you will hear a lot more in the next couple of questions we bring to the table together are very unique and very differentiating to the clients, which are >>excellent. Dr. Rajesh walk us through some of those joint offerings that TCS cloud in h e or delivering. >>Yeah, so far so far. Thanks. I just want to thank the HP team for giving me the opportunity to off to a larger audience. Andi, This new normal. This is the first time I'm doing an interview like this. Thanks for that experience. Actually, as James mentioned, this relationship goes a long way. I am talking about the larger PCs were a long relationship. Andi, specifically on the easiest flowed. We started this journey in a very, very practical way. Five years back it was it was started in a very, very small trial and error basis. We started this relationship RPC explode. But at this point in time after So yes, we have taken this into, ah, new norm, actually. So I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the examples We have a very major retailer in Germany, which we work so that it was a multi $1,000,000 deals, our busiest on GHB. He has been a unique offering to the customer s AP, and a space on that is really growing a lot. And that's the one offering I would like to tell the audience that really has picked up and spent on the relationship in the German region. Right now we are trying to take that up, offering across on other other regions also, so that is one of the key offerings that we are doing it. The other offerings are multiple offerings we are doing, but again, I want to highlight the storage as a service offering. Great. It's everybody in the industry today, Andi, we are experimenting that in the initial stages in Australia, we started in Australia a small offering. And now we are expanding it in the US geography in a big way. And this year we are going to make that as a unique offering. And we're going to offer they're all over cloud customers as a storage as a service offering. Also, multiple other offering. Lisa. But I just thought that I like this tool which are making our business. We're making a lot of business together with these two offerings >>is the, uh, s AP opportunity that you mentioned is that the Hana as a service that TCS is delivered? >>That's correct. So it's ah, it's a service. But the uniqueness of that particular offering is be jointly created the architecture so that the customer can use that, like a database as a service model. Right? So it was It was not available that time in the industry so easily like what we offered at that point in time to do enough years back. We offer that particular said we spoke a summer and interestingly, that particular offering the customer was using s AP themselves as a service initially, and they migrated their to us actually from Maybe that's a reason they bought HP and PCs. That is like a summer on this API and a platform. So that's the That's the interesting story under, >>if we didn't do that just a little bit further, I wanted the audience to understand the impact that this partnership has H p E and TCS delivering Hana as a service for your customers. What are the benefits there than what the customer, as you said was doing previously? >>Yeah, yeah, I think I just want to relay the three or four points that make that this offering very unique, and that helps the customer number one is associated with model. So the customer has got the complete flexibility off going up and down like a true cloud model, right? And so it is a really a unique proposition at that point in time, where the customer not a story about using less for some time and then using more sometimes. So it's kind of a complete, flexible model that we offered at the time. Number two is, it's a complete customization is possible. It is not like a fixed architecture. The architecture is so flexible so that the customer business needs can be met through the architectural changes. So it's not like normally people think that lotus highly standardized architecture, right? So that has gone out, and we were given a flexible architecture for the customer. That is the number two number three, obviously the cost end of the day. There's a business case which we need to make it work right for the customer. So obviously, with the PCs and HP coming together, we were able to do the costarred, want age with a customer that is the third advantage of that. The last, but not the least, is the quality of service it is it is all about. I always used to tell my partners that selling is easy. Delivering it is what it's important it is, which will make the customer to stick with you, right? The were given and delivery quality experience who our customer s so that I think that makes a very unique proposition from a technology perspective from a pricing, but from an architecture and also from the delivery perspective. So those are the few few things I just thought that I violated. >>Excellent. So a couple of words that you mentioned popped into my mind as really even more well have a different meeting as we're in summer 2020 flexibility and unique. Offering chills back to you from a go to market perspective. How is that relationship with HP? And he says, changing in the Koven era. >>Yeah, it's pretty interesting, and I would like to call it an example off. You know, what we see is is that you themselves during the corporate times, you know, it also came in the pets close to 90% of the workforce. We're 100% productive. Uh, and, uh, they have a plan to go 75% of the employees, you know, but go being remote by 2025. So that's the journey they're taking on. And another thing that you notice there's a lot of the, you know, During the corporate times, many of the customers were looking for solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure. So they wanted their employees to be productive, bi directional and in the other area of focus was like a TCP, you know, how do I kind of make sure on the applications are available to you, the customers and also do their internal organizations? So we've seen a lot off. I would say engagement with that is I could picture team and also the solution team toe address This requirements off the market jointly >>when we look at certain things that now might even be more important with this new normal, if you will, that the fact that most companies are still in phase one of this work, everyone works from home trying to get to a face to that might see some some maybe by function groups coming back to the office and then getting to this third. Maybe it's the new nirvana of some hybrid workforce, where there's gonna be some that come back permanently, and some that Don't and Tony Unirea chose, I saw was quoted last month as saying, I think that 50% of the workforce will only 50% will come back. So in this new not only hybrid I T environment in which your customers love, but now this new pending hybrid workforce environment, how are you addressing some of the concerns together with respect to the network connectivity security, >>I I'll just take the cost anything. It's a very, very interesting at least when we all ended up in this pandemic in March. We really very, very nervous, actually, because everyone has to operate remotely on we are. We are dealing with the customer data. It's ah, it's very, very important that we have a secure environment to access the information and at the same time maintain the integrity of the data and also the quality off the plate. Those other two primary objective for us. We don't want to compromise on quality. We don't want to compromise on security from a cloud perspective. So the solution we have put in really I just give you one example there was on the airline Ah, UK basically are living in the spirit of the company which they need that workforce overnight. They want everybody to go remote because you know you cape on. They just put up a condition that nobody can work from the office overnight on the entire or ports as toe work from home, PTC is implemented the solution for them on our clothes overnight and make that 1000 employees store from home the next day morning all of them started working with the full quality of services and also with a full security aspect of it has been taken care or made on the solution. We are deployed. Very interesting case study on The important thing we have done is use the technology to the poor. Use all kinds of technology to make sure that the employees that work from home we took care of the network connectivity. We took our eye off the security aspects off the data from security aspects. We've implemented all the security functions from a media perspective. Actually stop perspective, Andi. Make the workforce enable that. But now you are talking about millions off millions of workers going to work from home. Right, Because it is one example for one company we have done that note easiest themselves has got more than 400 1000 employees, and we are talking about millions off work force going to work from home on going forward. So that is, I'm seeing this as a big opportunity. It's not that everybody has are just this. At this point in time, I'm seeing this as an opportunity where on the cloud easiest cloud kind off. The solution is going to help them to achieve this, and this is a great opportunity for not only for PCs but also for HP because the solution we're putting together with the HP is more on the digital or course how we can enable the people to work from home, not compromising on as I mentioned from a security you're in from millions perspective. So I'm seeing this as an opportunity for both the organization, and it's a long way to go is we need to work on this. It's not. We don't have a magic want to make the millions off workers to work from home, but it is going to have all soon and probably in the next step. Yeah, so we may achieve this. Impair people's off. The workforce is going to go remotely on this list. So that's that. And my take on this >>is so the impact that HP and TCS herb being able to make for customers who have had to massively transform their entire workforce overnight, as he said, to work from home to talk about some of the new maybe new solutions or new business opportunities that HPC is partnering with TCS shells, we'll start with you in this new era, >>Yeah, so if you look at it, I just taking it again on extension, offered up by just what you just mentioned about the percentage of employees going Lisa across industries today. I would say less than 20% of the employees are actually working remote or they have the ability. But the organizations have the ability to support the employees going, and if you have to take it to 50% so you can look at the kind of opportunity we have both as HP and as PCs. So we bring in a lot of best in breed infrastructure from for enabling the employee workforce to know where it is. I would say capacity off workloads and it's all workload specific. And what business does is over when people pretty easy as we kind of bundle that creating a reference architecture or a giant architect architecture addressing the customers by industry body. So because one what suits for one vertical may not be really suiting well for a different world, right? For example, if you take a banking sector, our traded workstation solution would look very different from somebody's doing remote in a retail. So we kind of continuously engage with the PCs, and that's where both of us have joint lab as well, where our technologies and pieces technologies come together, working on joint solutions and assisting the market in terms of the opportunity lights. And we offer this as part of A C is our digital workplace offerings. >>Are your conversations Dr Additional go to you or your conversations when you're jointly selling, changing in terms of who your audience is? Is this now a C level conversation? Since these leaders and we've heard leaders of Google and Facebook already last month saying Work from home extended still 2021. Is this now at the C suite level, where you guys are helping them really understand how to completely change and digitize their entire way of doing business? >>Absolutely. I think it's a great question, and it's actually the opportunity goes beyond the work from home solution. As you rightly I want to know that it is. It is all about digitization. It is all about digitizing their whole business process. It is not anymore infrastructure. Our application solution. It is more about really finding that business process be defending. The way the business is going to operate in future is the discussion we are having so a lot of these discussions are happening at a very, very high level on with the business team. Also directly, so earlier you used to interact with the technology partners off our organization. But now we are interacting directly with the head of business are the C level except of the company. And that is the reason the exact reason is Ah, you. If you want your ports to be productive remotely, you can't just offer them on network on. You can't offer them just a solution to work from home, But you need to really find your whole business process you need. You need to digitize your infrastructure. You need to digitize your application. You need to rethink your whole process off. You're operating on it, so that's what I'm seeing. It's not only an opportunity for our players like PCs cloud, but it is the opportunity for a bigger opportunity for PCs and be not only in terms off on infrastructure in our cloud business, it goes beyond that. So that is that is the kind of an opportunity we're seeing, especially in the in the sectors of healthcare you're seeing major reforms are happening in the healthcare industry as we speak on, obviously, manufacturing is going to go through a lot of changes. Also from that. And retail obviously has gone through a lot of changes already in terms of online, uh, stuff, but know that also going to goto changes in this new era? Yes, >>I have to ask you shelled talking about redefining? That's a word that we've seen so many years in a row at tech conferences, right, this technology redefining this business or that industry. And now, of course, we're being redefined by an invisible virus. But how is how is the sales process being redefined? Is it a lot more accelerated because businesses have to put together new plans to continue operations? >>Yeah, again, a great question. Is this how you have? You know, I would say it's divided by industry body. It's not a uniform thing. By, as the British was saying, every industry has got its own, its own set of challenges and its own set of opportunities, and some of them are really actually doing well even in times like and some of them have seen, Really. I mean, like, travel our transportation or, you know, some of those industries are and even hospitality that's kind of affected big time. So our view of you know, the entire sales engagement of the processes we're spending more time on there. We really need to focus and which can help improve the businesses. Right? So the conversation's ready from How do I take the cost out in terms of how can I make a little more investment to get greater returns from the business? So it's like it's a completely I would say, an interesting pain and engaging compositions and decisions are happening. So we, if you look at us from an automatic perspective, the sales team is armed with various virtual tools, like We know you zoom views Skype using SMS teens. So all the tools available to make sure that we're able to connect with all our partners and customers on do enable joint business together. >>I just want oh, I add to it, Lisa, 111 point. I want to ride Really interesting change I'm seeing on the sales is normally we respond to ask from a customer that is a sales happens. I want this many days do it and then what you can do with a solution That is the normal sales process. What I have seen that has changed completely. Yes, we go and tell the customer, Is this what you need Actually, to make you yourself your business? Better? This is the new offerings I'm having good. And this offering is going to help you to solve the problem what you are having today. So we are engaging a different level off sales conversation today with our customers. We know the problem of the customer because we are working with them for many years and we know exactly what they're going through. And we also know what new offerings we are having in this. So we are engaging the discussion with the customer doing that. This is my new offering. This is going to help you to solve this problem. But that is a different angle of sales we have seen nowadays in this. A friend of it, >>the last question shells to you. We started our interview today talking about the HP TCS relationship. You talked about how it's evolved. Last question. You talked to me about H B's strategy. How does it match TCS Alfa Cloud offering? >>Yeah, so again, a great question, Lisa, if you look at our strategy is to accelerate the enterprises with it. Centric and cloud enable solutions which are workload optimized and delivered everything as a service. And whatever you heard from Dr Rogers through this entire conversation was about how do we give as a service model you gave an example of Hana? You give an example off, you know, going optimizing workloads for VD I and getting employees to be able to be productive remotely and all of that kind of extremely resonate well with you know, what pieces are defined to. Price cloud offering is bringing to the table for the customer and the underlying platform. You know, we can have yeah, extensively and closely with the easiest architecture being tohave the HP portfolio off. You know, the compute and storage portfolio integrated as part of their offering, and we go together to market, you know, addressing and kind of an ask service model. 1,000,000,000. >>Excellent. Well, shells Dr Rajesh, pleasure talking with you both today about what UCS and H e are doing together in some of the ways that you're really helping businesses move forward in these uncertain times, we appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank you. For instance. Thanks. >>Thank you. Dr Rajesh. >>My guest. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Thanks for watching. >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's "theCUBE." Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to this week's episode of "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," I want to look into Cisco. You know theCUBE is in Barcelona this week to cover Cisco Live. There's an expected attendance of about 17,000 people. Now today, Cisco is a company in transition. It remains a leader in key segments, but it's refocusing its business for the next decade, having exited a number of areas over the last several years. Allow me to briefly give you my perspective and review how we got here. Near the end of the dot-com bubble, Cisco was the most valuable company in the world, with a $500 billion market cap. It was one of the four horsemen of the internet, remember that? Along with Oracle, Sun, and EMC. Cisco really rose to prominence by betting big on ethernet. Old reliable TCP/IP was the linchpin of the internet, and allowed Cisco to power the wave that virtually decimated the mini-computer industry in the 1990s. There were many levers that Cisco pulled, brilliantly, during its ascendancy, and I want to call out two big ones. First was it created an army of network engineers. Literally hundreds of thousands of professionals trained on installing, configuring, managing, and optimizing Cisco gear. Cisco created very complex solutions and thrived on this complexity, and the Cisco Certified Inter-network Experts, or CCIEs, deeply understood the dark art of networking, and Cisco was their beacon. The second was acquisitions. Under the leadership of CEO John Chambers, Cisco completed about 180 acquisitions over a roughly 20-year period. This enabled TAM expansion, growth, and maintained Cisco's relevance to customers, who very typically and often were the generator of acquisition ideas. Cisco diversified quickly into a conglomerate with a portfolio that spanned video, set-top boxes, telepresence, compute, collaboration, security, wireless. At one point, Chambers talked about dozens of adjacent businesses, each of which would account for a billion dollars of incremental revenue for Cisco. Many, if not most, didn't pan out, and Chambers slashed and burned prior to handing the reins over to current CEO, Chuck Robbins. Now, under Robbins, Cisco was a more focused company, kind of going back to the basics. They're betting on what I would say are more sure bets, including data center, wireless, collaboration, security, and the Edge. Cisco is also evolving its model towards software subscriptions. Now today, I want to look at how some of those bets are performing. I'll discuss the impact of cloud on Cisco's business, and then I want to drill in to the performance in some areas like networking, collaboration, security, and then close on hyper-converged. And then the last thing I'm going to do is share some things that I'm watching as barometers of success, over the next 18 to 24 months. Now the first thing I want to do is give you a snapshot of Cisco's financials today. What this chart shows is some KPIs on a trailing 12-month basis. Cisco is about a $50 billion company with a $200 billion market value. That's a 4X revenue multiple, which is pretty good for a company that's generally viewed as a traditional hardware player. Now Cisco is guiding analysts on a flat to down year, and talking about a challenging macro environment, despite the stock market's seemingly insurmountable rise. Cisco is a very profitable company, with a 33% operating margin, and very nice, 66%, roughly, gross margin. Cisco throws off a lot of cash, around $15 billion annually in free cashflow. They make a big deal that 70% of its software revenue is now coming from subscriptions. And Cisco is mandating a new consumption model that is subscription-based. Now it's somewhat hard to tell exactly how large Cisco's software revenue is, as they're opaque in that detail, but I'm pegging it at between 11 and 12 billion by the end of this year. Today it's probably seven to eight billion. Cisco is riding some big waves, adding software to its portfolio, security grew at 22% last quarter, Wi-Fi 6, 5G, which by 2021 should start kicking in, it uses a chunk of its cash of course to buy back stock to keep the street happy, and it's leveraging a leadership position to compete. Now finally, I want to make some comments, later actually, on how they're approaching developers in a strategy that I really like. Now there are some headwinds that Cisco's facing, namely cloud, this macro picture that they talk about, which is not positive for them evidently, the company's overall complex portfolio, the competitive dynamics, and the perception that they have an aging, or that they are an aging hardware company, and they're really still touting, selling ports. So, let's drill into some of the spending data, and I want to start with this notion of leadership. This chart shows Cisco's position in its core networking segment. The chart depicts market share over time, which remember is a measure of pervasiveness into each ETR dataset. Now look at what happens. Look how Cisco maintains its leadership, far outpacing the others in this networking sector each quarter. I'm going to make some comments on the sector overall, but notice the net score in the blue bars, which is a measure of spending velocity. It holds firm at 25%. Not great, but holding steady. And you can see the pie chart of the public cloud's impact on the sector, and I'm going to make some comments there later as we go on. But first let's look at the networking sector overall. ETR just released its January survey, and here's what they said in their sentiment on networking. So, when you see the networking space, it's been sort of down for a while, and ETR has been somewhat negative on the entire space, but what this shows is really net score, which is spending velocity, and the January 2020 results, with previous periods within Fortune 500 buyers. And you can see there's an uptick in momentum for networking generally, and Cisco is really cited as rebounding. But now look at the blue call-out. It's from an ETR VENN discussion, with an IT buyer, who essentially says, "Look, as we move to the cloud, "we are going to spend less on networking gear." And given that Cisco is the leader, we want to understand how the public cloud is affecting Cisco's networking business. So to answer that, what I'm showing here is data from the latest ETR January spending survey. And I'm filtering the data on organizations that are spending on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platform, and showing Cisco's performance measured in market share, or pervasiveness. You see, that's what's happening now in these big cloud accounts. There's an N of 809 cloud customers, and 480 Cisco customers within those accounts. And you can see the impact that the cloud is having on Cisco, much the same way it is affecting virtually every large supplier of on prime infrastructure. A slow, steady decline over the past 10 years. And you can see a net score, which measures spending intensity, in the upper right-hand corner, of almost 30%, which is somewhat lower than Cisco's average in the ETR dataset. But the story's not just about cloud. There are other waves in the industry, of what I've referred to in the past as innovation cocktail ingredients, namely data, plus AI, plus cloud. So the next question I want to pose is, how is Cisco doing in leveraging these waves? So here we have 916 customers in these superpower segments of data, AI, and cloud, that are combined, and we show the market share, or pervasiveness, over time, of Cisco, as compared to VMware's NSX, HPE, and Dell EMC. What the data shows is a couple of points. One is that Cisco is the most pervasive competitor shown in these customer segments. Its net score is 37%, four points higher, meaningfully, than the cloud-only chart. Actually seven points higher than I showed earlier. Only NSX has a higher net score, and relatively speaking, NSX is much newer, and should be growing much faster than Cisco, so that makes sense. So I would say that Cisco is holding its own here. Its challenge really, in my view, is to use data and AI to create better customer experiences. So, be a consumer of AI, if you will, as a means of better serving customers, and compete in the multi-cloud market directly with these players and others, none of whom own a public cloud. Okay, so I spoke earlier about Cisco's portfolio, so let's look at some of the ETR data, and see how various parts of Cisco's business are doing. This chart shows the net score, or remember, spending velocity, across Cisco's offerings, and includes Meraki, which is wireless, AppDynamics, AppD, is application performance management, we're showing here Cisco overall, Cisco Umbrella, which is cloud and DNS security, and Springpath, which comprises infrastructure for Cisco's hyper-converged offering. And as you can see, the segments in which Cisco plays, there are 10 in the ETR taxonomy, spanning analytics, security, mobile, device management, infrastructure, video conferencing, et cetera, et cetera. In the interest of time, I will say just the following. Red is bad, green is good, and gray is neutral. And again, Cisco is holding its own in these major segments, with decent spending velocity. So now, let's take a look in an area that I think is going to get a lot of attention in Cisco Live, and that's collaboration. This ETR chart that I ran shows net score, or spending velocity, for video conferencing platforms. And you can see, Cisco, they got some work to do. It's sort of teetering on the red zone. So I would expect some continued enhancements there. Now comparatively, you can see GotoMeeting losing steam, and Skype really falling off a cliff in January, but look at Microsoft Teams, that blue dot, with very very strong momentum. So what Microsoft's doing is they're migrating Skype and Lync, their install base, to Teams, and they're really really well-positioned there. And you can see as well, newcomer Zoom is right there in the mix, across this sample of 500 buyers. Now, I want to turn your attention to a really important sector, which of course is security. This chart that I'm showing here shows net score, again, spending velocity, in the cyber security sector. And Cisco is both large and credible in this space. Its security business grew 22% last quarter, as I said, and it's at a $3.2 billion run rate. So, spending momentum, maybe not as strong as Palo Alto Networks, which I'm showing here, and it's not as high as the rocket ship companies, like CrowdStrike, or Okta, or CyberArk, or SailPoint, or some of the others that I've highlighted in previous "Breaking Analysis" episodes, but Cisco's pretty solid. And you can see the likes of IBM and Symantec, by comparison, these guys are leaders in security, but their spending momentum is in the red. So once again, the steam of Cisco as a large player who has credibility, this story is playing out. And clearly this is going to be an area of focus at Cisco Live. So this next data point is kind of interesting, and looks at Cisco's data center business, and specifically, I'm trying to better understand what's going on in hyper-converged, the software-defined platforms that bring together storage, compute, and networking. Now the power of the ETR platform is that I can ask the question, how are the hyper-converged players doing inside of Cisco accounts? So what I've done is I've filtered on 458 Cisco accounts across three sectors, storage, compute, and networking, and I've isolated on Nutanix, VMware, or VMware's vSAN, Cisco itself, and Dell EMC with VxRail. And what we're doing is we're showing net score, or spending intensity, spending velocity. And the first thing to point out is that all of the vendors are in the green, and that's because this is a growing market that still has legs. Nutanix has noticeable spending momentum, ahead of vSAN, ahead of Cisco, and Dell EMC. Now here's the thing about Cisco. On the one hand, it's putting forth its own HyperFlex platform, based on the Springpath acquisition. But it has to tread carefully because it partners with converge players, like NetApp with FlexPod and IBM with VersaStack. And its HyperFlex, as an HCI play, is essentially designed to replace converge platforms like these. Now the same is true for VBlock, the business with Dell EMC, the old VCE business, but Cisco and Dell are at each other's throats, so, neither really cares that it's replacing them. Okay, long segment, a lot to cover, I got to wrap, but I want to end by saying what to look for over the next sort of 18 to 24 months as barometers. First thing is the pace of transition to software. The second thing that I'm watching is the uptake of the new core announcement that Cisco just made for big routers, silicon, and optics. This is Cisco's wheelhouse, and I expect that the 5G rollout in 2021 is really going to start to pick up and be a tailwind for Cisco. You know the macro should be a concern. Cisco is saying its business is soft, kind of across the board, there's China, there's Brexit, but the S and P is on fire. Now does that mean upside for Cisco? In other words, are they sandbagging a little bit? Or, are there more fundamental, structural, or execution issues? I think personally, Cisco may have a little bit of upside here, but they're big and exposed, so that's something to watch. The other thing is the impact of cloud on Cisco's business, and the company's ability to compete in multi-cloud, including how it embraces Kubernetes. Cisco, and I've said this before, has to position itself as the best, the most cost-effective, the most secure, and highest performance network to connect hybrid and multi-clouds. Now as well, the company's got to hold serve in networking, which I fully expect it to do. We're seeing a little uptick in Juniper, Arista's doing okay, but they're sort of smaller in the grand scheme of things relative to Cisco. Now the wild card here is VMware's NSX. So we'll be watching that and what impact it has. A lot of customers have both. Finally, I want to talk about developers. Cisco DevNet, as I've said many times, I really like what Cisco is doing there. I think they've outshone some of the traditional players. They are retraining hundred of thousands of CCIEs to code in Python, and really, code Cisco infrastructure. So Cisco has an infrastructure-as-code strategy that's going to help propel them in multi-cloud, the Edge, new Workloads, and they're leveraging this engineering force that they have. So, very long segment here. Watch the coverage at Cisco Live on theCUBE and on SiliconANGLE. It's a big chewy company, and a lot for me to swallow in one of these segments. So tweet me @DVellante if I've missed something, or comment on my LinkedIn feed, or you can email me at David.Vellante@SiliconANGLE.com. Thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis, "theCUBE Insights," powered by ETR. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017, Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. >> The sun is shining here in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Happy to welcome back to the program two guests that we have had on before, Bob Wallace with Nutanix and Wilfredo Sotolongo who's with Lenovo. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, we're gettin' towards the end of another Nutanix .NEXT show. I've had the pleasure of being in all five of the shows, so a lot to kind of go through. Bob, we've had you on the program a couple of times. You've been involved with all the OEM relationships there. Bring us up to speed as to kind of you know, where does OEM fit in the overall Nutanix story? >> It's a big part of how we're going to market now. It really ties in with our interest in providing customers with choice like we do from a hypervisor perspective. We also do from a platform perspective to give customers the ability to, they love the goodness, let's say, of Nutanix and all the things that the Nutanix solution brings and then they get the opportunity to then connect with, connect that with the relationship they may have with Lenovo as a partner to tie in with that to truly work through the Lenovo goodness from a support perspective and everything like that. So, we see it as a broader theme in how Nutanix kind of goes to market which is providing a maximum amount of choice to our customers. >> So, Wilfredo, we've had the pleasure of kind of documenting some of the changes going on. You came in to Lenovo through the IBM X86 acquisition. We've watched Lenovo build out the data center group. I've interviewed Kirk Skaugen three times this year already and you know, have seen partner events at Lenovo events so talk to us just a little bit about how's your role changed and how do we think of Lenovo today, before we even get into the Nutanix piece of it. >> Well, Lenovo has a very different approach to the segment, right. We see a tremendous opportunity in tripling of our addressable market, primarily driven by the shift to software define architectures with Nutanix being one of the primary software define architectures and we see ourselves as having a technology disrupter responsibility, i.e., rather than being the legacy provider with protecting the status quo, we see ourselves as the challengers trying to shift the discussion to the future. And, it actually feeds right in to why we partner with Nutanix almost two years ago now, right. We saw Nutanix as an emerging, aggressive, forward looking provider of technology and new options and with that common vision and common role in the industry we decided to partner with them to accelerate the process. So, different role, new relationship, actually not as new anymore, almost two years, but the same common desire. >> What I think and I'd just build on that, it ties in perfectly with Nutanix disruptive technology and approach and I personally as a sales leader and sales rep myself overtime you should have a perspective and Lenovo has made choices to have a perspective in how they're approaching the market with the technology rather than some of the vendors that have kind of a menu approach and I think it's the right thing that serves the customers needs to be able to be a trusted advisor to the customer and not say, I can offer you anything, but to say, here's what I believe is the right solution for you, and Lenovo does a great job at that. >> Wilfredo, we've heard from Nutanix a lot this week. Their goal is to be an iconic software company. So, that means they're going to need hardware, they're going to need someone to help complete some of the pieces there. Why is Nutanix best in partnership with Lenovo? >> Okay, that's a perfect question, but you said something that triggered a comment that I made to you earlier today. I like the shift I'm seeing in the messaging and the strategy and the product direction that Nutanix has embarked upon the last six to 12 months because aspiring to be much more than a hyperconversion of such a provider is key, right, for the success. This multi-cloud hybrid environments, right, you need to play, to be much more than just the virtual storage player, right. Now, with that said, we got together with Nutanix and we started building our portfolio, right. The first few months of the relationship we were just trying to catch up to what was already there. The good news is we've been investing consistently in this two years and now instead of trying to catch up we're actually leading the transformation. So, to answer your very specific question, point number one, we're the first ones to market with Skylake, Intel Skylake versions of their solution. Even your own is not going to, is coming in a few months. Ours is already in market since last month. Point number two, we recognize the need to virtualize not only the server and the storage capability but also the network. And we invested in software in our switches, in the Lenovo switches that allow us to virtualize all three of them in Nutanix implementations. So, as a Nutanix system administrator you have the choice now with Lenovo, and only with Lenovo, to manage even the network and when there are unfortunate circumstances that create a failure all of that, the migration, all the workloads are completely automated including the networking changes required, right. Number three, this one I didn't even know til one of my Nutanix colleagues pointed it out today, is our latest version of hardware where we run the Nutanix workloads has unique resiliency and availability features that none of my competitors have, like unstoppable fans. Fans are actually the number one item that breaks in infrastructure. So, unstoppable fans makes a big difference for them, right. And then last but not least, there is the one that has characterized us the most over the almost two year long relationship is support, right. We come from a heritage of enterprise great support, right. Things don't go down. The quality of the hardware, the quality of the software, the quality of the support structure, that make sure that the client has peace of mind in terms of if anything goes wrong. Four points. >> Bob, one of the reasons of course Nutanix partners with companies like Lenovo is to help with reach. Can you speak to kind of the global go to market that they help with? >> Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, I've recently also taken on our channel organization from the sales perspective and from my perspective we really have, we have regional partners, we have national partners and we have global partners, and those global partners are OEMs like Lenovo. They had the ability to allow us to engage with global customers that have operations all over the world to not only get the right product in the right place, but also from a support perspective support those customers in place because just like Lenovo, Nutanix and we talk a lot about our NPS score and our support organization, but it really is that ties together in such a good way. Our 90 plus NPS score our customers depend and count on us for that and when they're looking at the underlying hardware platform they need something that keeps that level of commitment to the customer there and that's what Lenovo brings. And, from a global perspective, it gives us a reach frankly a company the size that we've been over the last two years, just couldn't serve some areas of the world. >> In a specific area where I think we can make a big difference together is in global Fortune 500. This is also part of my responsibility inside Lenovo and which I picked up recently, in the last few months, and as the Nutanix technology is maturing and proven into the largest, most complex environments, we're helping support their reach into those biggest accounts where we already tend to be a large provider of either PC or server technology, right. So, and it happens to be by the way, one of the strongest capabilities that Lenovo has as compared to what I expected when I first came in here, right. We're pretty good in terms of the global accounts program. >> Wilfredo, I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit 'cause absolutely goin' up market. You know every company wants to go up market. Is the enterprise, have they just not felt the maturity was there? Are they a little nervous about young companies or why is it now ready for those type of engagements? >> I'm not seeing that much resistance anymore. To be very candid I'm not sure why there was any resistance in the first place, maybe because of a young company. Right now it's more about the discipline to come in, pick a use case, demonstrate into approval concept and execute it flawlessly, right. Where we do that, which by the way, we most of the time do through systems integrators, like IBM, like Capgemini, like APMG, it works very well and we're beginning to see some I'm going to say, fairly large deployments that we hope to build on for the future. >> We had some meetings here this week with some of those, a lot of those customers here, those large organizations that we're partnering up on. >> Any specific verticals or geographies that you're especially excited for kind of catchin' fire lately? >> Well, AMIA, I think we've AMIA for Lenovo is the, if I had to rank the fastest growing market for Lenovo and I think we've had a lot of, Wilfredo and our team, have been working closely together over the last two years to really build that out. So, I'd say AMIA is very strong. I think we're seeing a lot of growth. But, with Lenovo clearly Asia, the Asian region, PRC is a huge market for them. It's, they obviously have a deep legacy there. So, we're doing a lot in Apak as well. >> From an industry perspective I actually don't pick up a pattern. I see your, our, technology quite applicable in almost all industries. I mean, earlier in the conference we had one of our customers speak, right, one of our young customers speak, right, one of the hospital in a server, right. Healthcare, state of the art hospital, state of the art IT infrastructure, running everything, running everything, right, from the hospital information system to the medical imaging OEM software, everything, right and we see more and more institutions, right, making the migration, making the jump to state of the art architectures technologies and running the totality of the workloads. >> And, that's a core government project and very important project for the government of Azerbaijan and having a trusted partner in Lenovo in that scenario not only gives us the reach to reach into Azerbaijan but to have the trust level with an institution that ultimately has to be successful. A hospital, you just, there's no room for error. >> Want to give you both really the final word here. Wilfredo, if somebody didn't come to the event, what might they not know about HX and the offering of that that you'd want to make sure that they dig in and learn a little more about? >> Lenovo is all about disrupting the status quo and helping you get to the future faster. Nutanix is about the same thing. Together we've actually created an offering now that is differentiated against all the OEMs. Come talk to both of us about it. >> I'd say if you weren't here at the show the thing you might have missed is Nutanix bringing our one click simplicity that we're known for to the cloud era and really helping customers manage what we call an enterprise cloud that includes multiple cloud offerings on prem and public cloud with our one click simplicity and removing a lot of the barriers and complexity that customers are dealing with today as they look at how to manage their infrastructure between the different clouds that are out there. >> Bob Wallace, Wilfredo Sotolongo, thank you gentlemen both for joining us again. We're getting towards the end of two days of live coverage but be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage for this and all upcoming shows. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're here live in Palo Alto for SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE's new studio, 4500 square feet in Palo Alto. Just moved in less than a month ago, and we're bringing you all the in-studio coverage of what's going on in Barcelona, Spain at Mobile World Congress. This is day two of two days of coverage. Here in the studio we're bringing people in that's in Silicon Valley into the studio, experts, entrepreneurs, venture capitalist investors, angel investors, and of course, analysts here from our own team, and we have Peter Burris with me here. And we're covering all the action. Of course, we have reporters and analysts and friends on the ground doing call-ins in Barcelona, bringing you all the action, and really, bringing the big story that's not being told, which is AI, IOT, and cloud-ready, cloud-native action is happening. This is the disruptor, the calm before the storm as we were saying earlier yesterday. Peter Burris, great to see you. We were talking yesterday morning on the kickoff, let's take that to the next level. Cloud-native, IOT, really the big story that's not being told at Mobile World Congress this year, mainly because it's just in everyone's face right now, and people are making sense of it. Your thoughts on this as you are looking at the research, looking at the marketplace, this is reality. The IOT is real. >> Oh, it's very much real, John. Let's start with why cloud and mobile are so important together. In many respects, the thing that made the cloud real is mobility because the minute that you don't know where your device is going to connect, where the termination point's going to be, then you don't want to have to control and own that network. And so in many respects, the whole concept of mobility catalyzed the need for the cloud because you didn't want to have to utilize a, you didn't want to have to build your own network to support people as they moved around. So the cloud as a front end, or as a set of capabilities that supports mobility is really crucial to this whole concept, and it's somewhat surprising that it's not more closely tied together at Mobile World Congress. But the most important thing that we could talk about obviously is that IOT is going to have a major impact on all kinds of different factors. It's going to have a major impact on the devices that are manufactured, it's going to have a major impact on what the scale efficiencies that you have in manufacturing, the nature of the sensors, the nature of microprocessors, how much memory gets put on stuff, how much flash memory is going to be manufactured over the next decade. All these things are going to have a significant impact on the concept of mobility and what it means and the networks it provided over the course of the next 10 years. >> Peter, I want to bring up something that you brought up yesterday, and I think this is important, that's why I wanted to do a real drill down on what seems to be a major paradigm shift and inflection point. We've been talking about autonomous vehicles, media entertainment, smart cities, smart homes. Those are all the sexy demos at Mobile World Congress. But the real change, as pointed out by Val Bercovici who just came in as CTO is that the sea change underneath it, and you pointed out yesterday the convergence between enterprise and consumers coming together is that this internet of things and people, IOTP, or IOTNP, 'cause things can be sensors and devices, are changing it, and what's obvious to us and now coming out of Mobile World Congress as it's just starting to be seen by the mainstream press and media and community is that the TelCos aren't used to dealing with rapidly provisioning things. They're used to a subscriber who buys a phone, dials up a service, gets provisioned and connected, and they have a number, and then they try to connect to the base station and get on the internet. That's simple, and those connections we all know fail, but now imagine that multiplied by millions and millions of devices that are going to be turned on and connected. This is a scale problem, this is a network problem, this is a physics problem. >> Well, it's a physics problem-- >> Explain your theory on this. >> Yeah, it's a physics problem at a very, very base level. Just talking about the TelCos for a second. You're absolutely right, John. We're talking about, when we talk about the scale problem in the TelCos, it's not that they don't know what to do with their networks, it's not that they don't know how to connect devices to the networks. They just don't know how to provide it at a service level. It's going to be demanded by the scale of the devices moving into and out of networks as we think about IOT and P, the TelCos have historically thought about, they've thought about the assets that they have in place, the rates that they charge for those assets, the returns they generate, the tariff rules they work with with governments around the globe. They tend to focus on, good or bad, 10, 20-year time horizons. >> And their P is phone, not people. >> That's right, their P is absolutely. Their P is phone, and I can, and you were probably around. I can remember when you could not buy a phone that didn't have, on a particular company's network, you still can't buy a phone on a network today. You buying a mobile phone and it goes, it's associated with-- >> You're buying a carrier. >> That's right, that's exactly right. And that's how TelCos want to work. Now, they're hoping that eventually they're going to find themselves in the position to be able to spin up devices very quickly, but the reality is that's not how provisioning works in the real world. It's one of the reasons why TelCos continue to get their lunches eaten by companies that are building out their own networks and doing a much better job of rapid provisioning. >> You and I were talking last night off-camera about this notion of IOT and P, and of course, we all believe in and we're passionate about it, but you made a comment that was interesting. It was that we're going to look back at this time in history as a moment where before and after kind of, before Christ, after Christ, however you want to look at it. I mean, there's always that AD, BC kind of thing going on where before, I always call it before Steve Jobs and iPhone. Now it's going to a whole other level with the societal changes from little things, like we had a guest on talking about waste disposal efficiency. Traffic light management, healthcare, every single digital service. NTT Docomo's investor was on yesterday. She was talking about investing in services and bringing AI as a service, not network services, lifestyle services. What do you mean by that, that this is going to be something that we're going to look back 50 years from now and say this was the moment? Can you expand your? >> Yeah, absolutely, John, and it's really actually pretty simple. If you take a look at how executives are starting to think, what's happening is for the first time, we're really starting to look at data as an asset. That's a big question, but let me try to break it down and be a little bit more concise about what I mean by that. When we think about IOT and P, we're thinking about the idea that we can distribute enormous, billions of devices that are going to be sources of data. They're going to be going into the analog world, put into the analog world, and they're going to take analog signals and turn them into, and transduce them into digital signals. Once those signals become digital, then they hit big data, they hit AI, they hit machine learning. That's what's catalyzing a lot of the social concerns about, well, what does it mean for machines to be more autonomous, to take more responsibility? What's going to happen with business accountability when business are increasingly relying on machines that quote, "think." When we think about these big societal changes, we're talking about the ability that IOT's providing, IOT and P is providing, that for the first time how we're going to capture enormous net-new data, how we're going to process that enormous net-new data, and then ultimately, what we call systems of enaction, how we're going to enact specific events back in the real world as a consequence of what machines say is the right thing to do. That is a demarcation point. It moves from a machine being regarded as a tool, and almost exclusively as a tool, something that performs work better but having that work be very well described and very well articulated and the concept clear to something that might actually introduce new work or do work differently. Take responsibility for how it performs work. That's a major sea change. And so when we say that it's going to be, we'll look back and say, "It was before this time "and after this time," it's because we are now in the position to economically be able to gather these streams of data, process them in ways that are unprecedented, and then have the results of that processing enact in unpredictable ways, and that's a major change. >> I don't know if we can talk about some of your research that's coming out, I dunno, can we touch on some of the points? This has yet to be released research from the Wikibon team headed up by Peter with SiliconANGLE Media. I want to just point out, 'cause I find this interesting, you say that there's a architectural decision point within IOTP, a new phrase, hashtag IOTP if you're interested in working with us, just hit us up at Twitter. But there's really four points you point, physics, the law, legal, of course, everything's legal. Physics, legal, economical, economics, and then, authority. >> Right. >> What do you mean by those four? Can you just take us through conceptually these are dimensions, they interplay, are they dependencies, are they interdependent, are they all intertwined? What's the rationale behind these architectural forces? >> When people think about information systems historically, they've been relatively well circumscribed. So, I have an employee that I'm going to provide a service to from a network that I control that has latency requirements and aren't that big a problem because at the end of the day a human being doesn't operate at nanosecond kind of levels, and I got a machine that's mine, and I own running an application that I've licensed. That is a very, very tightly bound unit. When we start introducing IOTP and some of these other things, now we're talking about emergent behaviors that might be far away that we don't control, we're working with partners, et cetera, and the basic architectural challenge of thinking about what do we have to do to get a handle on the requirements of the processing, 'cause at the end of the day these things are still computers, and they still have operational characteristics that have to be accommodated. We think that there's going to be four factors that are going to influence how what we call the edge zone expands or compresses based on the work that needs to be conducted. One is physics. You're not going to go faster than the speed of light, and in fact, generally speaking, if you look at the distance that you have to travel, you're going to be outside the automation zone. You're going to be outside the automation zone if light has to travel, at best, you're going to be about a 10th of the speed of light, so if your automation zone, if you want your automation zone to be about 100 miles, then it means that from there and back with the speed of light you're not going to be able to automate anything that takes longer than that, just for example. Physics is one. >> Physics and wireless is a great example of physics. >> Wireless is, yeah. >> And moving packets around. >> None of this stuff works without physics, right. The second one is legal, that the reality is is that while the laws of physics are relatively immutable as far as we know, there are also government regulations that are what they are, and that could include privacy, it can include requirements for disclosing things, and so, those also, borders are going to have an impact on this notion of automation zones, or edge zones as we call them. Economics is another one. It costs money to move data from point A to point B, and the question is how much data's going to move. A lot of people think that everything's going to go up to the cloud, it's going to be processed up there, and then some instruction's going to come down for automation. That's probably not the way it's going to work. Our findings are suggesting-- >> Not only is it the cost of data, I would argue that also the product design criteria will be impacted economically on that decision point. >> Absolutely. But that's based on how much does it cost to move the data around. The operational characteristics of a product or service are fundamentally, a digital product or service, are fundamentally tied to the cost of moving data. We think that 95-plus percent of the data's actually going to stay in the edge. And the last one is authority, and we kind of touched upon this a second ago in that we're now suggesting that machines are going to take actions without human intervention. Not just actions, but they're actually going to change the scope and nature of the actions that are going to be taken. What does that mean? What does it mean for a machine to act on behalf of a brand? Or on behalf of a person? People use a simple explanation, "Does the autonomous car take out the old lady "or the cub scouts if you got a problem? "Or does it do something else?" It's those kinds of things that we don't know the answer to. A lot of the questions of authority and how we distribute authority and how we codify authority and how we track authority is going to have a major impact on what limits to behavior we put on these things. >> There's also the security angle alone is another one, too, just like basic stuff. These are interesting. And you see these architectural forces. Are you calling them forces, factors, variables? >> Just factors simply because the concept of factor, or you can call it constraints, is the idea that your decision has to factor these things, so we're just calling 'em factors right now. >> Alright, so let's step back now, and look at some of the commentary from this week in Mobile World Congress and our interviews here in theCUBE as well as the remotes. Certainly the hallway conversation is the business model of the TelCos. Saar Gillia who was on yesterday brought up a point of, hey, where's the use cases? Show me the use case, and then I'll say yes. And it's this too complicated, he was not seeing the use cases, and he was saying, "I'd prefer more battery life than "more one gigabit wireless right now" given that's his current situation. The balancing of where to get started seems to be the number one theme. What do I do next, what's the first step? Will the bridge collapse that I'm trying to cross to this future? Or I can't see the other side? Is the world flat or round? These are kind of more personal feelings that people have around taking that leap of faith into this new world? How do you advise and package that together and assimilate that? I mean, do you, how should people look at that? >> I think it's a great question, and I wasn't part of the conversation yesterday, but let's look at that for example. Today, if you're using your phone, you effectively have a relatively simple number of sensors in your phone, relatively simple number of transducers, right. You have a chip that turns your analog voice into a digital signal, so there's that in there. You have some neat stuff that presents the screens, so there's that in there. You have a microphone, et cetera, that kind of stuff, but when we start thinking about 5G and what networking could become, as we talked about yesterday, it's not so much the absolute bandwidth speeds, and it certainly is not going to have any impact on latency for the most part. It really is the number of devices that you can support at one time. It allows for greater density of sources. Now, without looking at 5G, we can talk about a phone being able to support not just a few generators, or a few sources of data on that phone, but maybe dozens, so maybe things that, you know, the whole concept of wearables. Again, do I want to get involved in the use case? No, you and I are sitting here being analysts, and that's not our business. But are there going to be use cases for more wearable technology? Well, if you're sick, if you have a chronic disease, just for example, yeah, that's a use case. I could see people actually living much higher quality lives because they can support more sensors as a result of 5G, with greater security. Again, we go to the autonomous car. There's going to be a lot of sensors in an autonomous car. Most of them are going to operate locally, but having said that, it might be nice if we could actually have a very, very fast low-cost network with inside the car itself to handle a lot of that work. I think we've, human beings, developers, have always found new use cases when given more compute, more memory, and more networking. I don't think that's going to change. I think we're going to see more of that. >> Peter, what's your thoughts, if you had to summarize and encapsulate it into a narrative, Mobile World Congress 2017, now looking back at day two kind of coming to a close, seeing what's out there, how do you look at that? How would you tell someone here is the story of Mobile World Congress? Tell that story. >> To me, John, having looked at the stuff come over the transom and you know, a lot of new devices being talked about and generating a little bit of excitement, a lot of new this and a little bit of excitement, I think that the question for me is are we moving into a period where integration's going to matter again? And I think in many respects that's going to be kind of the subtext of what's coming out of Mobile World Congress. Is it good enough to have the best of breed device and this and that, with a software stack that's doing this and that? Or is there going to be more value to the enterprise and ultimately to the consumer by taking more of an end-to-end perspective? Apple from a consumer and an experience standpoint has done that and has, what is it? They're worth $150 billion more than any other company on the planet right now or something crazy like that? Don't quote me on that, but I think that's what somebody told me. >> Trillions of dollars in cash overseas, for sure. >> Yeah, so it's that notion of are we moving back into a world where integration is going to matter because we're going through a period of significant discontinuity. >> Integration is a great point, 'cause I see that, I do see that as a thing, and bring the Apple example. Apple, the way they develop might be different than say, what we see in an open source, for instance. If you look at what Intel's doing, and I look at Intel as a bellwether, and this is from my perspective, because they have such a huge long game in play, they have been the leader in my opinion in the tech industry playing the long game, and they have to because they make chips. And they're looking at the 5G as an ecosystem play, and they're admitting and saying it's not one vendor. They don't say take village, but they're basically saying it takes a village to rise all the tide or float all the boats, if you will. If you look at what Intel's doing, they're essentially saying that it's an integration game through their own moves, which is ecosystem, playing well together. Now, you could fight for best of breed on point solutions, whether it's a Snapdragon Qualcom, or Intel processor on the device. At the end of the day, it's, as we were saying, network function virtualization to make those dynamic networks work seem to be the key. To play in that, if as a society globally, to your four factors, it has to be an integration game. No one company can do those factors. >> You're absolutely right. Here's how I would say it to put a slightly different twist on it. The tech industry has moved from a product orientation to a service orientation, or is moving from a product orientation to a service orientation, from an orientation where we focus on what's the intrinsic value of what we're buying to what's the utility of what we're using. From a "Hey, let's a put a spend a lot of money upfront "and maybe we'll get to some point of time in the future "where it's valuable" to a, "Let's only pay for what we got." It's difficult to imagine the tech industry moving successfully into that service orientation without taking more of an integration approach to it. Certainly that's what Amazon's trying to do or AWS is trying to do, that's what Google is trying to do, that's what all the companies that are trying to move infrastructure into the cloud are trying to do, so I think that this is a general issue. If we're moving to a service orientation, we have to start taking the integration view on things. >> Awesome, great, Peter. You're watching theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE Media, Inc., and SiliconANGLE Media, Inc. comprises of siliconangle.com, led by Rob Hof, that's our publishing journalism, wikibon.com led by Peter Burris and research, and theCUBE, our internet TV led by Jeff Frick, and of course CrowdChat is the data brand and the data science, and we love bringing you this great content. Pete, I'll give you quick plug because I know that you've been doing a ton of work building out the research team at Wikibon and expanding the work behind the firewall, it's a paid subscription. Some premium that we see on siliconangle.com for the most part. A great body of work on the research. I want to congratulate you, but give you an opportunity to share with the folks who are watching what's going on with research and some of the things that you're working on and why they should potentially reach out to Wikibon. >> Yeah, so we're focused on a couple of relatively simple things. We're not a huge team, so we tend to focus less on products, again, the idea of let's take a look at the intrinsic value of products, and we focus more on the impacts. What does it mean to get utility out of things? How do you get utility out of whatever you buy? The other thing we focus on is disruption, and we talked a lot about what are the disrupting factors. IOT, big data, and what we call the systems of enaction, all supported by significant changing infrastructure and new digital business models. So, it's kind of a combination of those five things that we are focusing our time and attention on. Ultimately, we want to be in a position to help our clients make decisions that improve the value of their business by better utilizing data through these digital models, digital business models that require these technology changes to go. >> Great, and it also helped show Mobile World Congress is about cloud-ready. You had a great report on Amazon we posted on siliconangle.com. What was the summary, bottom line that big body of work you did about Amazon that the headline was, "How big can Amazon be?" What was the key findings from your big assembled report on Amazon Web Service? >> The big finding is Amazon's going to get big, but the cloud's also going to get big, and we think that Amazon, the simple finding is, we think Amazon's going to hold share. That may not sound like much, but for the most part, most of the value's going to go into SaaS, most of the value's going to go into the use cases associated with stuff. That's where a lot of the money's going to go. Amazon holding share, given that they're one of the, in many respects, they created this whole thing, is actually a pretty stunning statement. And it all started, John, because when we went and we looked at our semi-annual update to what's going on in the cloud marketplace, the question that kept coming to us was, okay, so we think it's going to go this fast. Well, what's Amazon going to do with that? What's it going to mean to Amazon? How is Amazon's growth going to affect these things? And so, we started with that answer. We built our models and talked to a lot of users, built our scenarios, so we think that Amazon's going to continue to grow very fast, we think it's going to be a $40 billion company, $40 billion-plus company >> John: In revenue. >> In revenue, AWS. >> John: Not Amazon. >> Not Amazon, Amazon's a totally different beast. We'll see what Amazon does. But AWS will be about a $40-plus billion company in four or five years, and still have about eight-plus percent market share in the entire-- >> And Microsoft has changed their game, they're coming right after Amazon. >> Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Google, and when you start talk internationally, Ali Baba, there's going to be a dozen companies that create enormous businesses. >> And there are companies that don't have a cloud that are late to the game and might not have a seat when the music stops in the old musical chair analogy, so certainly we know who they are. >> You know, what's going to happen to the TelCos? Good question. >> The world, we live in very exciting times as the saying goes. Peter Burris, great to have you, great commentary. Love what you're doing, I think the research around IOT and the edge is a fundamental architectural shift. You've got the four forces laid out. Congratulations, looking forward to doing more where there's totally going to be a game-changer. This will impact everything that we live, and it'll make the autonomous vehicles and the drones and the AI and smart cities a reality. Thanks for the commentary. More Mobile World Congress coverage here in Palo Alto, breaking it all down. We've got a couple late night call-ins, so stay with us. Hopefully, folks will be sauced up a bit, and maybe share some of the news and breaking stories from the hallway. More from theCUBE after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)