>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering your red hat. Some twenty nineteen. You buy bread. >> Oh, good afternoon. And welcome back as the Cube continues our live coverage. Exclusive coverage of Redhead Summit twenty nineteen here in Boston. Some nine thousand strong attendees here. Key notes have been jam packed, but we just finished our afternoon session not too long ago again. Very well attended. Dynamic speakers stew Minimum. John Walls. We're joined now by Lee Dae. Who's the Vice president of Marketing Communications? That Red Hatley. Good to see you. I see you and Michael brats, who was a teacher of English as a second language of Franklin Middle School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mr B. Good to see you, sir. And that's what your your students call you, Mr B. Is that right? What they do, we saw that way. Might just follow through on that tradition right now. All right, let's talk about why the two of you are here together. And I know you're Michael School has an interesting history that they've been kind of following somewhat independently, you know, in terms of open source and work. And only you found them through your marketing work some really very interesting. Two avenues that you have on your platform. So tell me a little bit about how how you got here. And then we'LL get into it after that. >> Okay, Great. So Red Hat has a program called co lab and this sir program where we go into schools and we teach kids how to code. So we do things like circuit boards and programming on raspberry pies. Kids have program raspberry pies into cameras to go around cities and take pictures. And we have had collapse in many cities, and we hadn't hit the Midwest. And we chose Minneapolis. And we found, fortunately, Franklin Middle School in that great group of girls and two awesome teachers that are very inspirational on, So the relationship didn't stop it. That week of coal lab, we have stayed in touch, and here at the summit, we've showcased the work in the police ship that we have together. Yeah, >> and I know a lot of the focus that the program is toward, uh, appealing to younger ladies. You know, young girls trying to get them or involved in stem education. We just had the two award winners for the women and open source with us just a few moments ago. So this is Ahh, a company wide. Durant wants a directive initiative that you said, Okay, we we have a responsibility, and we think we have a role here to play >> absolutely well. It's important to us to see the next generation of technologists. And when you feel like women, especially young women sometimes feel like technology is inaccessible to them, and they're not often in technology programs and university. So it's our initiative. Teo help young people feel comfortable and good about technology and that they can actually code. And they can actually do things that they didn't think were possible to them previously. >> So, Mr B. Help us understand how this fixing curriculum and give us a little bit of the story of how it went down. >> Well, it's funny asset. I mean, this opportunity for us is a home run out the part because we're a steam school science, technology, engineering, arts in math. So today, not only did our students perform on the main stage a song that we were able to collaborate right and go through a >> whole production process >> with music were also able to on there right now as we speak down running a booth, building circuits, presenting those circuits, presenting those circuit boards, and collaborating altogether down there with attendees of this conference right now. So, I mean, we're covering every one of those steam components, basically, in one project, one large scale technology project. So this opportunity homeland out the >> part. >> I love that because that was the first thing I went to mind. I heard photography involved. You say steam and so much, you know, we can't just have tech for Tex take. You know, I worried I studied engineering and, like, things like design and those kind of things right weren't in the curriculum. But you know what? I went to school. Creative side. Yeah. How important is that? You kind of get especially think young people get the enthusiasm going. That creative side would, you know, get them deeper into it. >> Well, you know, I always look att, individual students. Everybody has their individual gifts and talents, and it's about, you know, finding those leadership skills within each one of those gifts. And so within this, you're able to find someone that might be more creative in one area, maybe more technical and more, you know, logic orientated in other areas. So with that, you're able to just have Mohr a broader spectrum to be ableto find people's individual gives in towns and for them to in the collaboration also contribute their gifts and talents in different avenues instead of it just being one lane like just this part of technology or just this part of production and just this part of design were able to kind of integrate all of that into one thing and to take it one step further. After we did the, um So Cola came out with their mobile container to US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it was right downtown, right outside of where our football team players brand new stadium Super Bowl is is there two years ago now And, um, so with our students being there after we got done with that, that cold lamb, when they were asking us, you know, to take it a step further in the classroom are students actually designed with our future boys Lo Bill Future Girls logo a card and then presented it to Red hat and they ended up printing off the cars and they were able to use it to build the circuit. So we weren't just using the coal lab cars. But we also got to design our own, too. >> So, you know, you said future boy's feet. So that's that's a new organization, the club that you formed the school Future Boys and Girls Club for the express purpose of what? >> Well, so we actually tie in all different content areas into assault. Obviously, this is just the future girls that are here in Boston and did the technology side with us and that parts of Spain the cold because it's an initiative for girls in technology but of the future boys and girls, uh, overall program. We encompass a lot of different continent as we integrate performing arts with academics and all the components of esteem school, um, into learning. And we do interest based learning. We do project based learning, and basically, you know, kids are learning a lot without realizing how much they're really learning, you know, and we make it fun and relevant. But we also teach the leadership skills in the hard work that goes in with it. And I mean, even just coming out here to Boston for this, uh, for this opportunity here in this summit, I mean, the amount of work that it took for the students to get here and the process, the ups and downs, especially with middle school students. You know, the marathon, not a sprint mentality, you know, has been absolutely amazing. >> Good luck with that eye. Well, >> I always say I >> haven't had a bad day yet. Just an overstimulating one. >> So lately, you know, we love having stories on the Cube and especially tech for good is something that we always get a good dose here at Red had some it. You know what else can share some of the open tour stories that were going on around the event? >> We're really thrilled. Today. We're launching our newest open source story, which is about agriculture and which we choose topics with open source stories that are important every everyone so medicine, helping to find cures for cancer, even our government and artificial intelligence. And today it's about open hardware and open agriculture. And we're launching a new film this afternoon. >> It's all future farming, right? Right. That that's the viewing today. >> Yes, and we had someone showing their their farming computer on our stage, and it's actually done in Summit >> Show for today. So you've got the open studio, you know, working and you have a number of projects. I assume this fell into one of those slots right where you were Using one of those platforms to feature great work of future farming is another example of this, But But you have some, I think, pretty neat things that you've created some slots that give you a chance to promote open source in a very practical and very relatable way. >> Yes, exactly. So our Opens our open studio is our internal creative community agency. But we do get ideas from everyone around, you know, around the world. So wait, get ideas about open agriculture, eh? I, uh, what we can do with kids and programming with kids. And then we take those ideas into the open studio and it is a meritocracy. So the best ideas when and that's what we choose to bring to life. And we have designers and writers and filmmakers and strategist and a whole group of people that make up the open studio inside a red hat >> And you've done a new feature, Frank. >> Yes. So, yeah. We work together to create the container that doctor be mentioned and to create the container. And then we work. When >> you have you >> have. You know, one of the girls Taylor actually taught me just now I am not technical. I will just give that caveat. But they they make, they made circuit boards, and they're making circuit boards here. Some issue and mine doesn't work. So don't That's okay. Just, basically were you can see here we have different designs that are attendees can choose from, and then we have electrical tape that you are sorry, competent and an led light. And so the idea is to toe form a circuit and to have led light item the card. That's great. So one of the one of the girls actually taught me how to make it, but I think I didn't follow >> her. Instructed you to go back to school. Wouldn't be the first time that I would have fallen apart either on that. So where Michael, Where would you be now without red hat? Or, you know, you were doing your own thing right independently. But now you've received some unexpected support. Where would you be? You think was out that help. And how much of a difference have they made >> you? Well, let me tell you. I mean, you know, when we look at it being an after school program, the amount of enrichment and opportunities that redhead has created for us has been, honestly, just unbelievable. It's been first class, and we're so appreciative. I mean, even even in our meeting with the future girls last night, we just talked about gratitude and how grateful we are for it. I mean, when you look at this circuit, this is an abbreviated version of what the students actually participate in. This is, you know, just a one one, uh, one led light and a small formation our students were doing. I think there were seven or eight on ours. And so the amount of learning in the modern opportunity that this presented to him not only have they learned how to do the technical piece of it, they've learned howto present. They've learned howto speak and present. They've learned howto call lab, collaborate, work together on huge levels, and I mean, they learned what they can take on an airplane, you know, coming out here. So I mean, the amount of things that through the learning process of, like, eye color, large scale technology project that we've been participating since October since they brought the mobile lab out to Minneapolis. I called a large scale tech, you know, technology project, and going through that whole process has been huge. And let me tell you this as a teacher and those that are parents you're competing was so much in this day and age to keep kids attention, right? I mean, everything is swiped the phone every which way and everything. So instant gratification. So for students to actually engage in this cola program for to be set up so well from Red Hat and to actually stick with it and stay engaged with it really speaks volumes denying the program. But also, you know, our students staying engaged with it, but they've they've stuck with it, they've been engaged, and it's very interest based, the project I've seen it through. But then also the renewed opportunities and being ableto one of the things on our rubric as the teacher is toe expand and extend the learning I don't mean to be long winded, but we wanted, you know, expand on the learning that's already taken place and being out here, it's just it's just a continuous continuation of the learning, you know, not just one level going to next level going on next long light, next level. And that's that, honestly, is where the real learning really takes place. >> So, Michael, you know, from its very nature being an open source company, you know, Red Hat talks a lot about it. Ecosystem in community. If I five red right in the notes, they're you know, your student really getting the value and understanding of community. There's something about they wrote a song. Talk >> about that. We become stronger. Yeah, that's the name of the song is we become stronger And you know what the idea was. We were looking at the power point for this summer and for this summit, and in that there was, uh there was a phrase that said ideas become stronger and that's the collaboration. And so we started tossed around ideas and things like that were like, Well, we liked the idea of stronger, and then we're like, Well, this is more of the coal lab experience, not just the ideas of the technical side. And that's why we become stronger. And yet we developed a song specifically for this summit. I think you go top for, you know. >> Yeah, the performance was amazing. >> Yeah, you don't want >> one top forty, to be honest with you, but no. I mean, uh, you know, and that was another whole another phase, you know, like, I talked about the steam side of the school. Um uh, integrating the arts in and the whole production side of that, you know, it was a lot of work and another project, but it was another area of content that we're able to integrate into this project, and, uh, and we're able to perform it on stage. So, like I said, they literally just got off stage performing. We become stronger singing the whole production of song a dance routine choreography and then went straight to the boot to now present circuits and teach attendees here at the summit howto build a circuit. I don't know how much better can get in that. >> That is so cool. That's great. Now is this the song that you recorded in the same studio. Lenny Kravitz. Atlantis More. Tell me you didn't like that, huh? >> I mean, you know, it's all right. >> That's good. That's great. Congratulations, Roy. On this collaboration, it's really it is exciting to see what they're doing to inspire young people on Michael. I can tell you like your job. Don't you love it? I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, keep up the great work. And we appreciate the time here. And I look forward to hearing that song. Maybe if it hits, you know, the ice store. You know, Apple Store, maybe, You know, maybe good things will happen, right? Hey, you never know. She's Vice president marketing. We're gonna figure this. I'm checking out. I tio go by weight, become stronger. Thanks, Michael. We appreciate Lee. Thank you for having me back with more. Here on the Cube. You're watching our coverage, right? Had some twenty nineteen, but

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

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (soft electronic music) >> And welcome back here on The Cube which, of course, is the flagship broadcast of Silicon Angle TV. Proud to be here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We've been live Monday, now today Tuesday, back live again tomorrow. Hope you join us for all three days of coverage. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're joined by Jim Franklin who's the director of solution management at Dell EMC. Jim, good to see you this afternoon. >> Hey, nice to see you as well. >> How's the show been for you so far? >> Fantastic, and there's always a lot of energy at Dell World. It's always exciting to be around, see our partners, our customers, hear our executives speak, gives us some clarity on what we're doing at my level. [Men Laugh] So it's a fun time, it's energetic, it's Vegas. >> Get's ya. >> Good combination right? >> Yeah, so. (laughs) Get you energized. >> So before we jump in, what are you hearing from customers now? Because we've been talking to a lot of folks in your shoes at Dell and just kind of curious what are people bending your ear about? What are they most curious about? >> Yeah, so a lot of our customers and our partners are interested in, I'll call them hot trends. So what from my perspective are we seeing, where are there problems? So for that, things like how do I continue to try and outpace the data that keeps coming, because like death and taxes, the data keeps growing and growing and growing so they're looking at it going, how do I start to consume all this data? Can you help out? Hey but what about this cloud and how do I make the cloud a reality? Several of them haven't actually even started on a cloud strategy, so they're saying, hey what's the best way to look at that? And then they're looking at it saying, if they're the infrastructure guy or if they're the backup administrator, they're saying, how do I actually flip my economic model from a cost model to a profit model? So these are the sorts of conversations we're seeing, not only with our customers, but our partners are trying to help them out as well. >> So take us back. Let's go to the most simple or at least maybe the most elementary stage and say they're not even thinking of a cloud strategy yet or they're just now embarking on that. >> Jim: Just sniffing out. >> Yeah, walk us through that. What do you do because you would think by now obviously, their awareness is viable. We should be there, but they don't know where to go. >> So most customers know that this is now trusted technology, a trusted operating model. The problem has to be is how do you actually get there? What does that journey look like and what choices do I have? So even those early adopters that jumped out to public cloud for sort of a quick fix, we see them especially for my area, which is business critical applications, SAP Oracle, Splunk, they're coming back to an on-premise cloud for reasons like being able to recover out of that or this now they've discovered is their intellectual property and there's a little bit of reluctance just to go send that out to sort of an unknown place, so we see a lot of customers that are not bringing it back, but they now learn how that economic model can work, so they're trying to go in with sort of a cloud mentality. So still do the operational, the show back, the charge back, but maybe bring that in house, so you're more comfortable with it, so you can innovate on that. >> So as we're talking about these traditional, mission-critical apps, SAP, Splunk, Oracle Suite, these applications that are very rigid. The cash register, SAP, the cash register of the world. We don't want to change, you get the product guy. He's like, hey we want access to the mission-critical data. We want to be able to change it on the fly. You have the SAP guys going back and saying, no, no, no. >> Jim: Wait a minute, yeah. >> Wait a minute, we'll give you N+1 environment to develop in and then you prove to us, but it takes nine months to get an N+1 environment so you can do the development. How is Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, helping solve that agility problem for these legacy applications? >> So the first thing that we have to do, if you're going to keep it on premise is we advise our customers, modernize the infrastructure, because a lot of times you'll come up on a server or a storage refresh, right? This is the plumbing, right? This is underneath the guts of the house. It's not exactly attractive stuff, so if you can actually move to speed based technologies, things like Flash, right, fantastic technology. If you can virtualize it, if you can start to consider scale out and scale up technologies that are ready to go. Software Define has been a boon for these things. SAP is now adopting this like Software Define. That's fantastic for our folks, I guess. You guys know the advantages of Software Define. It can spin up, spin out, scale up, scale, in a much more pragmatic, quicker way. So these are sort, see now we're entering into things like VX Rack, VX Rail, and they have the resiliency, the stability, the scale in order to support these applications. They're built now solid enough that you can trust them to run, so now you get those operational efficiencies, you get that ability to scale, you get the performance, and you get it at a little bit better price point as well, so I think that's where customers are starting to be less reluctant to move those big humongous SAP, Oracle workloads, because it can be trusted. It's now that technology's aged enough and is resilient enough, then now customers are doing it and they're doing it quite rapidly. >> So step two of this is once I get some agility, what I thought was, traditional rational, you know what, Dell should never move SAP to the cloud, because it's static, it doesn't change, and it's costly. Well I now have these use cases where I'm spinning up N+1s all the time and I'm bringing them down. That's elastic. That sounds like the cloud. How do you help make that transition? >> So SAP actually, as one of the trigger points is this move to HANA, the memory database. And the economic model was, it's a little pricey, that software, right? So SAP has actually gone in with a cloud-first mentality. So they've actually helped us out here. They've promoted them as, so HANA enterprise cloud, for instance, is a way for you to get in on HANA at a price point that's a little better, the subscription based model. And you can start to migrate some, like a BW app, something a little smaller. Remember back in the days when we first virtualized? You wouldn't virtualize your mission-critical app right off the bat. You picked something small that you could eat. We don't eat our meal one big hunk at a time, right, we eat little bites of it, so we're doing the same thing with-- >> Keith: Unless you have four brothers. >> What's that? Unless-- (laughs) >> You have four brothers. >> You eat quickly. >> You use those. >> You do it all, right. >> Or you get real quick with your elbows. So we advise our customers, take a small BW app that you got on Oracle right now, flop it over there, put it in the cloud. You'll be able to cost-justify this much, much better and then with the work on tangible use cases, start to pull in more data-rich, hydrate that really fast, awesome analytics engine, and start to use it for the power of good. It's a super hero. It's a super hero technology, so we want to invoke it. We want to bring it alive. We want to apply it towards new innovations and that's what our customers are doing now. Financial services, health care, the retail market. So now our customers are starting to say, hey how can I apply this super awesome, super hero technology to my retail space. How can I inflate my tires 5 PSI more so I save my company 10 million dollars? So these, all these use cases now are coming. Now I call this, my personal thing, I call it now cool IT. We're no longer in the trenches doing the plumbing for SAP, we're now moving on to cool IT where we can start to do data analytics, we can start to apply use cases, start to ingest more data, maybe that oil rig out there in the gulf, I can start to pull in more of that data, I can start to do analytics on it. I can start to show the business that I'm meaningful, that I am a profit center, I know what's going on. >> Yeah, what's from the big jump there in terms of opening people's eyes, opening a company's eyes to how rich that data is for them and how applicable it is and how actionable it is, because that's been one of the bugaboos, right? People were like, I got all this data, where there's treasure there. >> Jim: There is. >> You got to find it, you got to get there. >> Right, right. So that advancement, some of the technology, like HANA's a hardened database now, not hardened in terms of its access, but hardened in terms of the technology itself, so I can actually put more in it and ingest it. The other thing that's happened is we've moved out to the edge, things like the gateways and things like that. Now I can apply that technology, but I don't have to suck it all in. And we'll go back to the original point, the cloud has enabled a lot of this traffic, the data traffic to go out there and what we see our customers now doing is now they're able to actually quiesce the data and just, we always could do this, but it never came together in such a way that it was cohesive, that I could have universal translators of all this different data coming in and I could actually quiesce it. And now, to me, the part that always matters, the UI work, like I can actually visualize and then SAP, and Oracle, and all the, they can now make it visual. I think that's the key. So if I'm a CFO or I'm a CEO and I'm talking to my CIO and I don't need to talk about numbers. I can literally visualize the data on my screen, on my iPad or whatever device I have. That now, what we see with our eyes, is much more believable than what we hear with our ears. >> John: Absolutely. >> So you can see it. And that's, I think, that's the big differentiator I've seen is we don't do customer presentations anymore. We show them with their own data. So we used to do that design thinking way back in the day, but now you can actually apply that with the technology we have and I can visualize it. >> John: Seeing is believing, right? >> Immediately customers, you don't have to do a business justification. They see it. They see it right there in front of their own eyes. It's fantastic. >> So, talking about design theory or design approach, there has to be a point where industry-wide or even within your practice where you're at the 50, 60% of the solution for most customers and there's a customization point. Where are you guys at in that? Is it 50, 60, 70, 80% at that point? What-- >> Well that's what makes it fun for a guy like me, because in solutions we can validate, we can do performance optimization and that's, for the most part you're talking servers, network storage, stuff we've always done and we can optimize that to a large extent, but once you flip the script and you look from the application down, you can start to tune from that perspective, so we can get about 70, 80% of this well constructed. It's that last 20% where the customer's saying, hey I'm a financial services arm and I'm trying to catch the flashboys or the stock traders that are manipulating the market. Well that requires a new set of tools, right, a new set of approach to how to do this, how to analyze your data, how to introduce automation, so for us, the last mile, particularly with our SI partners, who are really good at doing this. SAP is really good at doing this design thinking session. We could sit down with a customer now, we could ask them where do they want to make money. How do you want to invest in IT so that your analytics is fully realized, your data is fully realized, and they have wonderful use cases. So now we're not talking about how does widget X work with application Y, we're talking about how do I apply this data in the direction of the use case you're trying to solve for and that's the last 20% or something like that. >> Is that where art meets science in a way? All of the sudden, like you said, you've got your 80%, this is the way it's going to be. >> Now, now. >> This stuff works. >> Now we're going to fine tune. >> Jim: Yeah. >> So there is some art maybe that comes into play there. >> There is. We found that it tends to be vertical specific and there is an art form to it, which is why our global system integrators are wonderful, because they're artists. We could go in with them and we could have that conversation. We could sit down for, you could even sit down just for a couple hours and pretty soon you're having a great conversation, understanding really what the customer's business is like and then targeting that particular use case and making it tangible. >> So that's pretty interesting. You say you sit down. Who exactly are you sitting down with, because traditionally Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, talked to the infrastructure group. You're talking about a completely different level. This sounds like application level folks, analysts, not the traditional Dell contact. >> Yeah, which makes us a little bit specialized. So you still want to sell to the back of the house, the infrastructure guys, the folks that are-- >> Keith: It's going to need a PowerMax. >> Right, and it's a completely different conversation though and I'll connect the two in just a minute, but we go in and we'll talk to the VP of applications, we'll talk to the DBA. These are the folks that actually, they're not worried about the widget, the disc behind it. We'll sell them a VMAX, or a PowerMax, excuse me, at the end of the day, but they're not so worried about that. They're worried about how do I get fiduciary responsibility out of this? How do I control my regulations? What do I do about data locality? How do I look at the pressure on that oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico and make sure it's not going to burst? How do I proactively send out my maintenance man, not on every month, but when I know on the 5,000th open of that train door, that I need to proactively go do that, because at 5,000 open and closes, it's going to fail. We've done that with analytics. We know that. So for us, most of those conversations tend to be at the, you look for the DBA or the VP of applications or the CIO and in this way, this is the beauty of how this all, we're actually going in with the Rainmaker ISV. So we're going in with SAP, we're going in with Oracle, and now we combine what traditionally has been Dell, the infrastructure guys with SAP and we never used to call, we used to call six months detached from each other. Not anymore. Design thinking, IOT, use case, data analytics has brought us right together and we're in the glide path together now. It's a much different partnership now with those guys. >> Yeah, good recipe, right? >> It's fabulous. >> It really is. >> It's great, it's a fun time. >> Yeah I can tell, I can tell. And thank you for being with us. We appreciate the birds-eye view but as you said, this is kind of an exciting time, right? Because you're able to, you're transforming your business and other businesses at the same time. >> Jim: Yeah, best thing to do, yeah, love it. >> Very cool. Jim, thanks for being with us, appreciate your time. >> Yeah, appreciate it, thanks for having me. >> Joining us for Dell EMC. Back with more from Dell Technologies World 2018. We're live here in Las Vegas. (soft upbeat electronic music)

>>I've got Mada Mykola here with me, commerce architect at PepsiCo Mada. Welcome to the program, >>Lisa. >>So we're going to be talking about the solution that you implemented, um, that helped with the global supply chain. So let's talk though, first about your role commerce architect. Help me understand that a little bit better. >>So Frito, uh, PepsiCo is pretty big. It's a conglomerate of multiple product lines. So I worked for Frito-Lay, which is basically all the salty snacks. And then we have, uh, the Quaker products as well in our portfolio. So I oversee all the architecture for all the commercial IOT solutions, uh, in the CFNA portfolio. >>Got it all the commercial lines. So we all know the last 18 months major challenges with the global supply chain component shortages. We've seen a huge increase in the cost of raw materials, um, limited labor, but you guys actually started to tackle this challenge before the pandemic happened. So talk to me about the catalyst that PepsiCo, what you saw to modernize field service and supply chain application. >>Yeah, so we have a pretty old system that our field force, our frontline users are using. So we have a world-class supply chain system where we go into the stores and place orders and deliver products, the us, and then we penetrate, I think, more than 95% of the households with our products. So we need to have a robust supply chain as well as a good frontline sales application, to be able to manage the orders and be able to deliver the products. Right? So the system that we have is almost 20 year old system running on a video data technology. There've been trying to replace that for a while now. And finally, we started this, uh, early last year to completely replace the solution with a brand new iPhone based app. Uh, and then that gives our frontline the ability to go place orders, do deliveries to retail execution in the store, like checking checkout, build displays. There are so much functionality that our RSRs or Franklin users do in the stores and this app enables them to do much more efficient. >>And we're going to break into that, but you mentioned you had a 20 year old technology. Talk to me about some of the challenges that that likely presented to those frontline workers. >>Yeah. I mean, there are multiple challenges for one, we cannot enable new business models. So business wants to come up with new ideas for, um, to be able to implement in the field, but with our system being so old, it's so hard to implement anything on that one. And then even the physical device is not scaling. We had a lot of memory issues, so it's time for it to kind of retire. And also the technology we use the 3g technologies retiring pretty soon at the next year. So we were definitely need to move to a new solution. And this is one of the most things we have to do, but right away. So that's where we started the project and we are in pilot phase right now. >>What would have been some of those negative consequences? Had you not undertaken the effort? I imagine from a competitive perspective, knowing how much competition is out there, what would some of those challenges have been if this had persisted? >>Yeah. So one is the stability of the application, right? So, uh, the frontline users have to spend more time because the app is not stable, the current one. So that reduces the efficiency of our Salesforce. Right? And then on the other hand, we also not able to put new features or new business models enable new business models on top of the existing ones. So we are losing out on some of them because of our outdated system. So that's one thing we want to solve with the new one. >>So this is really critical to really evolve PepsiCo's business at, at its baseline. Right? >>That's true. Yeah. It is very critical application that we're building and this will enable us to do a lot more things in future. And we can come up with new ideas, including like virtual reality or connecting to multiple systems. There are so many new ideas that we want to enable once we have this in place. >>Awesome. Talk to me about why Couchbase, and then tell us more about, you started to talk a little bit about the solution, but let's go ahead and dig in and unpack the actual solution that you implemented. >>Yeah. So this is, eh, we call it an ERP and a mobile device because it has so much functionality as a company three. Totally. We have been, uh, over a hundred years, uh, in this business, right. We have so many, uh, optimized process, uh, that we have that kind of led to some digital in the system because we want to do in a particular way, because that's the best way to do it as part of our business process. So what we're trying to do here is take that business process and also provide an app that will enhance it and then connect to more, more systems. So that's what we're trying to do here. And then on top of that one, we will replace all the existing peripherals that we use with the new technology, like Bluetooth and also, so that, uh, the, they are much more faster, and it's a lot more productive for our frontline force. >>Sounds like a lot of sales folks are going to be a lot more productive. Talk to me about where Couchbase is as an integral component to this new system. >>Yeah. So one of the key requirements for this app is an offline mode. What that means is, uh, one of our Salesforce who go from our system, uh, from our DC to all the stores, should be able to run the whole day without any, uh, major disruption, even if they're not connected, let's say because when they go into big stores, typically there's no connection. There are metal boxes. So the cellular reception is not there, but most of our work that we do from our frontline is within the store. So it has to be a full offline where we have to have all the data within the device, and we should be able to place artists create inventory that records or adjust inventory, and then create invoices. All the majority of the things that we do are in the store and they should be able to do without, um, the kind of connection. So that's where we explored multiple options and kind of zeroed in on Couchbase where we bring all the data into Couchbase based database on the device, and then sync it when there is connection, but there's no connection. We still have all the data on the device and we can go do all of our duties in the stores without any issues, even if it is not connected. >>So the sales folks can be in the stores with their mobile device, doing all the transactions that they need to do with the stores, regardless of if there's connectivity. Talk to me about what happens when they get back to connectivity in that and the Couchbase database sync. >>Yeah. And, uh, the other big thing we want is instant connect. I mean, when there's connectivity, we want instant sync with the backend, right? If there's new data that comes, we'll need that in the device at the same time, if I place an order, I want to send it back immediately to our backend systems for that our fulfillment stacks for those. So that's very critical when we have a lot of cutoff times for our artists. So we need artists as soon as we've placed to be going to the backend systems. So what happens when it gets connected, as soon as the sales folks come out of the store, or when within the store, they got connectivity, these codebase technology that we are using using the sync gateway immediately syncs the data back and forth. Uh, if there is any new data that's available. So that is key for us in this particular app. >>So our transactions happening in, in real time or near real time. >>Yeah. So the data flow happens in real time when this kind of gritty, but when it is not connected still, it doesn't have any issue with the actual transactions with the artists that can go complete anything that they would >>Got it. Okay. So there's no impediment there. In fact, it's a productivity enhancer. It sounds like for all of those sales folks out on the frontline TA. So, so millions of documents go through the system, tens of billions of dollars. Talk to me about the volume of data and the actual monetary value. That's traversing the system. >>Yeah. It's huge. Again, this is kind of weak. It's the lifeline of the company. The seals are always the life of any company, right? So most of the goes through our system. And, um, we're talking anywhere between hundreds of thousands of dollars that flow through back and forth, uh, between, uh, between the device and the server. So there's a lot of master data that comes like products place from customers, all that information that comes from the backend to the device and all the orders, inventory, and everything that gets created on the device gets flown back to the subtler. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's a very complex system. And also from the volume perspective, it's huge. So we had to build a massive infrastructure on the backend to be able to handle all this. One of the key feature is again, we have this massive data that we need to sync to the devices, but each device should only get the portion of the data that they want because a particular Salesforce only goes to a small set of 20 stores, let's say. So the data that we seem to that device is only for those 20 stores. So that's the key here. So Couchbase allows us to do that. The codebase sync, where we can subset the data into different portions and only send the data that is relevant for a particular device. >>So then from a, from a latency perspective, it must be pretty low latency, pretty fast to be able to get this data back to the device and to the sales person that is in the middle of a transaction. >>Yes. Uh, I mean, it's pretty, the sink is very fast. The Cosby's sink, especially user's web sockets. And we do continuous replicators where if I complete an order, the next instant it's on the stairwell. So it's, it's we observed the speeds improve a lot. So the technology that we are using users are things for a long, long time compared to code based. And that's another productivity gain for our Salesforce. >>What were some of the differentials? You mentioned some of the technology requirements that PepsiCo had in rearchitecting, the infrastructure, but what were some of the key technology differentiators that really made Couchbase stand out as the obvious choice? >>Yeah, so we, when we started this project, we all know the sink is the key for this whole project, because we thought that data going back and forth, we cannot really build a robust, um, uh, offline app. So we looked at multiple, uh, options, other providers that are doing the sink. And we also looked at building our own sink. Uh, in-house using API APIs, but then we did lots of, uh, performance testing across all the, uh, options that we had at that time. And then Ottawa cost base came above. All of them are pretty handle it. So obviously we can coach base takes care of the sink, and then we can focus on our business process. So we can go build all the business process and not worry about how we build a single. And then that is itself a big effort. So that's what caught me is prior to seeing instant sync engine. And then we were able to focus more on our, uh, the app application, the frontline application, the sales application, >>And those business processes. Let's talk about some of the business outcomes. We've mentioned a few already in our conversation, increased in productivity. The sales forces increased in that as well, but I imagine there's a lot of benefits for the end-user customer in terms of being able to get the transactions completed faster. What are some of those positive business outcomes that PepsiCo is seeing as a result of implementing Couchbase? >>Yeah. So you hit on a couple of them when the sink times are definitely a big factor with that will directly give more time for the sales folks to go either go to most stores or even they go to the existing stores, they can do more, spend more time with the customer merchandising and making sure everything is correct. So that's one also the new app users, uh, connect with a lot of new peripherals that are not available on the previous platform. Um, also the, uh, our folks are very, uh, enthusiastic about using a new app, right? So it's like coming into the 21st century for them using such an old lab for a long time. So a lot of things that they see, they can see the images of the bags while ordering, which was not a feature earlier. Some of them are small, but they make a huge impact on our users. >>Um, so yeah, I mean, and then this is just a start that we are doing. And then once we are able to completely implement this one, we have a lot more going into, in future. I was just talking about, we can do virtual reality or show them how to sell using what filter do. We can show a display to a store manager saying, Hey, I want to put a display here. And this is how it looks. They can show it on the phone that Dan just explaining and showing some paper images. So there's a lot of possibilities, >>A lot of improvements to the customer experience. It sounds like, it sounds like adoption is quite high for your folks who are used to 20 year old technology, probably being very, uh, excited that they have a modern app. But talk to me a little bit about the appetite of the organization to continue modernizing the application infrastructure and presuming going from older technology to that 21st century, like you talked about. >>Yeah. So in other parts, we are already modernized some of these. So we have been on the journey for the last four or five years building multiple digital platforms. So one of the example I can give is when COVID hit, there's a lot of disruption for everybody, for the consumers. So they are not able to find the products in the stores, but people are afraid to go to the stores to even buy products. So we reacted very quickly and opened a consumer of a website called snacks or calm, which Pepsi never sold it to the directly. We always go through our stores, but the first time we open the consumer channel and base powered some of it for the backend purpose. So this is not a mobile app, it's just a desktop app, but we already have been on the district has mission journey even before we quickly turned into COVID for the snacks.com. >>And similarly, we are, you are doing this for our retail execution portion of it, um, using this product. So, and then we'll be continuing to do this going forward, or to enable a lot of functionality for, uh, I mean, for all of our sales, as well as, uh, supply chain and other systems, so that we can be more efficient. We can be more elastic saying if there is more demand, our backend should be able to handle all that, uh, which was not the case before extra. Now we built a state of the art backend system on cloud. So there's a lot of transmission, digital transmission going on within PepsiCo. And I'm really proud to be part of this project so that we took this to the next level. And then this is just a start. We can do a lot more, >>Right? This is just the beginning. That sounds like a great transformation for a history company that we all, everybody knows PepsiCo and all of its products. But it sounds like when the pandemic hit, you had the infrastructure in place to be able to pivot quickly to launch that direct to consumer, which of course consumers, patients has been quite thin in the last year and a half. Talk to me a little bit about the impact to the overall organization as a result of being able to, to get more direct with those consumers. >>Yeah. So till now, again, we are, the business model is we sell to the stores and then go to the customer. So we'd never get a direct, uh, sense of what consumer, uh, liking is. I mean, we get through some surveys and stuff, but we don't have a direct channel with the consumer, which this particular product enabled us next.com. So we know the consumer behavior, how they, um, buying patterns, browsing patterns, which ones they like and including with geography. And also we learned a lot from a consumer behavior point of view for the project. And then we kept on enhancing. So one new thing we introduced was called multipack where the consumers can come and make their own market practices. They can say, okay, I need this many of this particular product, this product per I can make that multipack. And we ship them the customized market back. >>And it was such a huge hit that we are not able to even fulfill them so much demand was there for that one. So we had to revamp and then get back. And now it's a huge thing on our snacks that complex. So all of this is possible because we had a digital platform underneath that supports this kind of innovation. So the new business models are just coming to life in within weeks or even few months. And that's what we will be trying to do with the new platform that could billing for this app as well, where we'll bring in a lot of new business models. We have >>Excellent, a lot of, uh, transformation. It sounds like at PepsiCo in the last couple of years, I'd love the customization, that personalization route that you're going. I think that's going to be a huge hit for consumers. And as you said, there's a lot of demand letter. Thank you for joining me today, talking about how you are modernizing the field service and supply chain application, the impact it's making for end users for your customers and for the sales folks. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much >>From out of McCullough. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation.

>>from around the >>globe. It's the >>cube with coverage of Kublai >>Khan and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 >>virtual brought to >>you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of coupon 21 Cloud Native Con 21 Virtual, I'm John Ferrier Host of the Cube. We're here with a great gas to break down one of the hottest trends going on in the industry and certainly around cloud native as this new modern architecture is evolving so fast. Richard Hartman, director of community at Griffon, a lab's involved with Prometheus as well um, expert and fun to have on and also is going to share a lot here. Richard, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you >>know, we were chatting before we came on camera about the human's ability to to handle all this new shift uh and the and the future of observe ability is what everyone has been talking about. But you know, some say the reserve abilities, just network management was just different, you know, scale Okay, I can buy that, but it's got a lot more than that. It involves data involves a new architecture, new levels of scale that cloud native has brought to the table that everyone is agreeing on. It scales their new capabilities, thus setting up new architectures, new expectations and new experiences are all happening. Take us through the future of observe ability. >>Mhm. Yes, so um 11 of the things which many people find when they onboard themselves onto the cloud native space is um you can scale along different and new axis, which you couldn't scale along before, uh which is great. Of course, it enables growth, it enables different operating models, it enables you to choose different or more modern engineering trade offs, like the underlying problems are still the same, but you just slice and dice your problems and compartmentalize your services differently. But the problem is um it becomes more spread out and the more classic tooling tends to be built for those more classic um setups and architectures as your architecture becomes more malleable and as you can can choose and pick how to grow it along with which access a lot more directly and you have to um that limits the ability of the humans actually operating that system to understand what is truly going on. Um Obviously everyone is is fully fully all in on A. I. M. L. And all those things. But one of the dirty secrets is you will keep needing domain specific experts who know what they're doing and what that thing should look like, what should be working hard to be working. But enable those people to actually to actually understand the current state of the system and compare this to the desired state of the system. Is highly nontrivial in particular, once you have not machine lifetimes of month or years which he had before, which came down to two sometimes hours and when you go to Microsoft to surveillance and such sometimes even into sub seconds. So a lot of this is about enabling this, this this higher volume of data, this higher scale of data, this higher cardinality of what what you actually attach as metadata on your data and then still be able to carry all this and makes sense of it at scale and at speed because if you just toss it into a data lake and do better analysis like half a day later no one cares about it anymore. It needs to be life it needs or at least the largest part of it needs to be life. You need to be able to alert right now if something is imminently customer facing. >>Well, that's awesome. I love totally agree this new observe ability horizontally scalable, more surface area, more axes, as you point out, changes the data equation on the automation plays a big role in mention machine learning and ai great, great grounds for that. I gotta ask you just well before we move on to the next topic around this is that the most people that come from the old world with the tooling and come from that old school vendor mentality or old soup architecture, old school architecture tend to kind of throw stones at the future and say, well the economics are all wrong and the performance metrics. So I want to ask you so I assume that we believe we do believe because assume that's going to happen. What is the economic picture? What's the impact that people are missing? When you look at the benefits of what this system is going to enable the impact? Specifically whether it's economics, productivity, efficient code, what are some of the things that maybe the VCS or other people in the naysayers side? Old school will, will throw stones at what's the, what's the big upside here? >>Mhm. So this will not be true for everyone and there will still be certain situations where it makes sense to choose different sets of of trade offs, but most everyone will be moving into the cloud for for convenience and speed reasons. And I'm deliberately not saying cost reasons. Um the reason being um usually or in the past you had simply different standard service delineations and all of the proserve, the consulting your hiring pool was all aligned with this old type of service delineation, which used to be a physical machine or a service or maybe even a service and you had a hot standby or something. If we, if we got like really a hugely respect from the same things still need to operate under laying what you do. But as we grow as an industry, more of more of this is commoditized and same as we commoditize service and storage network. We commoditized actually running off that machine and with service and such go even further. Um so it's not so much about about this fundamentally changing how it's built. It's just that a larger or a previously thing which was part of your value at and of what you did in your core is now just off the shelf infrastructure which you just by as much as you need again at certain scales and for certain specific use cases, this will not be true for the foreseeable future, but most everyone um will be moving there simply because where they actually add value and the people they can hire for and who are interested in that type of problem. I just mean that it's a lot more more sensical to to choose this different delineation but it's not cheaper >>and the commoditization and disintermediation is definitely happening, totally agree. And the complexity that's gonna be abstracted away with software is novell and it's also systematic. There's just it's new and there's some systems involved, so great insight there. I totally agree with you. The disruption is happening majority of almost all areas, so in all verticals and all industries, so so great point. I think this is where I think everyone's so excited and some people are paranoid actually frankly, but we cover that in depth on the Cuban other segments. But great point. We'll get back to what you're where you're spending your time right now. Um You're spending a lot of time on open metrics. What is that enabling take us through that? >>So um the super quick history of Prometheus, of course, we need that for open metrics. Promises was actually created in 2012. Um and the wire format which he used to in the exposition format, which he used to transport metrics into Prometheus is stable since 2014. Um But there is a large problem here. Um It carries the promise his name and a lot of competing projects and a lot of competing vendors of course there are vendors which compete with just the project. Um It's simply refused to to to take anything in which carried the promise his name. Of course, this doesn't align with their food um strategy, which they ran back then. So um together with scenes, the f we decided to just have a new different name for just that wire format for the underlying data model for everything which you need to make one complete exposition or a bunch of expositions towards towards permissions. So that's it at the corn, that's been ongoing since 2000 and 15 16 something. Um But there's also changes on the one hand, there is a super careful, a super super careful um Clean up and backwards compatible cleanup of a few things which the permit this exposition former serious here for didn't get right. But also we enable two features within this and as permitted chose open metrics as its official format. We also uplift committees and varying both heads. Obviously it's easier to get the synchronization. Um Ex employers stand out which is a completely new, at least outside of certain large search companies google. Um Who who used who use ex employers to do something different with with their traces. Um it was in 2017 when they told me that for them searching for traces didn't scale by labels. Uh and at that point I wanted to have both. I wanted to have traces and logs also with the same label set as permitting system. But when they tell you searching doesn't scale like they tell you you better listen. So uh the thing is this you have your index where you store all your data or your where you have the reference to enter your database and you have these label sets and they are super efficient and and quite powerful when compared to more traditional systems but they still carry a cost and that cost becomes non trivial at scale. So instead of storing the same labels for your metrics and your logs and your traces, the idea is to just store an I. D. For your trace which is super lightweight and it's literally just one idea. So your index is super tiny. Um And then you touch this information to your logs to your metrics and in the meantime also two year to year logs. Um So you know already that trace has certain properties because historically you have this needle estate problem. You have endless amounts of traces and you need to figure out what are the useful are they are the judicial and interesting aero state highlight and see some error occurring whatever if that information is already attached to your other signals. That's a lot easier. Of course. You see you're highlighting see bucket and you see a trace ID which is for that high latency bucket. So going into that trace, I already know it is a highlight and see trace for for a service which has a high latency, it has visited that labor. It was running this in that context, blah blah blah blah blah. Same for logs. There is an error. There is an exception, maybe a security breach, what have you and I can jump directly into a trace and I have all this mental context and the most expensive part is the humans. So enabling that human to not need to break mental uh train of thought to just jump directly from all the established state which they already have here in debugging just right into the trace, went back and just see why that thing behave that way. It's super powerful and it's also a lot cheaper to store this on the back and a four year traces which in our case internally we just run at 100% something. We do not throw data way, which means you don't have the super interesting thing. And by the way the trace just doesn't exist for us a good job. And that's the one thing to to from day one this intent to to marry those three pillars more closely. The other thing is by having a true lingua franca. It gave that concept of of of promises compatibility on the wire, its own name and it's its own distinct concept. And that is something which a lot of people simply attached to. So just by having that name, allow the completely different conversation over the last half decade or so and to close >>them close it >>up and to close that point because I come from the network, from the networking space and, and basically I T f r f C s are the currency within the networking space and how you force your vendors to support something, which is why I brought open metrics into the I. D. F. To to give it an official stamp of approval in Rfc number which is currently hopefully successful. Um So all of a sudden you can slip this into your tender and just tell your vendor, ex wife said okay, you need to support this. But I've seen all of a sudden by contract they're bound to to support communities native. So >>I support that Rfc yet or no, is that still coming? >>I, so at the last uh TF meeting, which was virtual, obviously I presented everything to the L. A W G. Um there was very good feedback. Um they want to adopt it as an informational uh I. D. Reason being it is most or it is a documentation of an already widely existed standard. So it gets different bits and pieces in the heather. Um Currently I'm waiting for a few rounds of feedback on specific wording how to make it more clear and such. Um looking >>good. It's looking good. >>Oh yes while presenting it. They actually told me that I have a conference with promises and performance. Well >>that's how you get things done in the old school internet. That's the way it was talking to Vince serving all of my friends and that generation we grew up, I mean I was telling a story on the clubhouse, just random that I grew up in the era. We used to pirate software used to deal software back in the old days. Pre open source. This is how things get done. So I gotta ask you the impact question. The, the deal with open metrics potentially could disrupt all those startups. So what, how does this impact all these stars because everyone is jockeying for land grabbing the observe ability space? Is that just because it's just too many people competing for one spot or do they all have differentiation? What happens to all those observe ability startups that got minted and funded? >>So I have, I think we have to split this into two answers, the first one open metrics and also Prometheus we're trying really hard to standardize what we're doing and to make this reusable as much as we possibly can um simply because premises itself does not have any any profit motivation or anything, it is just a project run by people. Um so we gain by, by users using our stuff and working in the way, which we think is a good way to operate. So anyone who just supports all those open standards, just on boards themselves onto a huge ecosystem of already installed base. And we're talking millions and millions and millions of installations, we don't have hard numbers, but the millions and millions I am certain of and thats installations, not users, so that's several orders of magnitude more. Um, so that that actually enables an ecosystem within which to move as to the second question. It is a super hot topic. So obviously that we see money starts coming in from all right. Um, I don't think that everyone will survive, but that is just how it usually is. There is a lot of of not very differentiated offerings, be the software, be they as a service, be their distributions? Well, you don't really see much much value and not not a lot of, not a lot of much anything in ways of innovation. So this is more about about making it easier to run or or taking that pain away, which obviously makes you open to attack by by all the hyper scale. Of course, they can just do this at a higher scale than you. Um, so unless you actually really in a way in that space and actually shape and lead in that space, at least to some extent, it will probably be relatively hard. That being said. >>Yeah, when you ride, when you ride the big waves like this, I mean, you you got to be on the right side of this. Uh, Pat Gelsinger's when he was that VM Where now is that intel told me on the cube one time. If you're not, you don't get it right on these waves, your driftwood, Right? So, so, you know, and we've seen this movie before, when you start to see the standards bodies like the I E T. F. Start to look at standards. You start to think there's a broader market opportunities, a need for some standards, which is good. It enables more value, right value creation, whether it's out in the open or if it's innovative from a commercialization standpoint, you know, these are good things and then you have everyone who's jockeying around from the land grab incomes, a standard momentum, you gotta be on the right side of these things. We know what we know it's gonna look like. If you're not on the right side of the standard, then your proprietary, >>precisely. >>And so that's the endgame. Okay, well, I really appreciate the impact. Final question. Um, as the world evolved post Covid as cloud Native goes mainstream, the enterprises in the cloud scale are demanding more things. Enterprises are are, you know, they want more stuff than just straight up in the cloud startups, for instance. So you start to see, you know, faster, more agility obviously, uh, with deploying modern apps, when you start getting into enterprise grade scale, you gotta start thinking, you know, this is an engineering and computer science discipline. Coming together, you've got to look at the architecture. What's your future vision of how the next gen programmable infrastructure looks like? >>You mean, as in actually manage those services or limited to observe ability to >>observe ability, role, observe ability. Just you're in the urine. The survivability speaks to the operating system of what's going on, distributed computing you're looking at, you gotta have a good observe ability if you want to deploy services. So, you know, as it evolves and this is not a fringe thing anymore. This is real deal. This observe abilities a key linchpin in the architecture. >>So, um, maybe to approach us from two sides. One of the things which, which, I mean I come from very much non cloud native background. One of the things which tends to be overlooked in cloud native is that not everything is green field. Matter of fact, legacy is the code word for makes actual money. Um, so a lot of brownfield installations, which still make money, which we keep making money and all of those existence, they will not go away anytime soon. And as soon as you go to actually industry trying to uplift themselves to industry that foreign, all those passwords you get a lot more complexity in, in just the availability of systems than just the cloud native scheme. So being able to to actually put all of those data types together and not just have you. Okay, nice. I have my micro service events fully instrumented and if anything happens on the layer below, I'm simply unable to make any any effort on debugging um things like for example, Prometheus course they are so widely adopted enable you to literally, and I did this myself um from the Diesel Genset of your data center over the network down to down to the office. If if someone is in there, if if if your station and your pager is is uh stepped in such to the database to the extra service which is facing your end customers, all of those use the same labels that use the same metadata to actually talk about this. So all of a sudden I can really drill down into my data, not only from you. Okay. I have my microservices, my database. Big deal. No, I can actually go down as deep in my infrastructure as my infrastructure is. And this is especially important for anyone who's from the more traditional enterprise because most of them will for the foreseeable future have tons and tons and tons of those installations and the ability to just marry all this data together no matter where it's coming from. Of course you have this lingual franklin, you have these widely adopted open standards. I think that is one of the main drivers in >>jail. I think you just nailed the hybrid and surprised use case, you know, operation at scale and integrating the systems. So great job Richard, thank you so much for coming on. Richard Hartman, Director of community Griffon A labs. I'm talking, observe ability here on the cube. I'm john for your host covering cube con 21 cognitive content. One virtual. Thanks for watching. Mhm Yeah. Mhm.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the Global .NEXT Digital Experience brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Digital Experience. We've got two of the c-suite here to really dig into some of the strategy and partnerships talked at their annual user conference. Happy to welcome back to the program two of our CUBE alumni first of all, we have Tarkan Maner. He is the Chief Customer Officer at Nutanix and joining us also Rajiv Mirani, he is the Chief Technology Officer, CTO. Rajiv, Tarkan, great to see you both. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Great to be back. >> Good to see you. >> All right. So Tarkan talk about a number of announcements. You had some big partner executives up on stage. As I just talked with Monica about, Scott Guthrie wearing the signature red polo, you had Kirk Skaugen from Lenovo of course, a real growing partnership with Nutanix, a bunch of others and even my understanding the partner program for how you go to market has gone through a lot. So a whole lot of stuff to go into, partnerships, don't need to tackle it all here upfront, but give us some of the highlights from your standpoint. >> I'll tell this to my dear friend Rajiv and I've been really busy, last few months and last 12 months have been super, super busy for us. And as you know, the latest announcements we made the new $750 million investment from Bain capital, amazing if by 20 results, Q4, big results. And obviously in the last few months big announcements with AWS as part of our hybrid multicloud vision and obviously Rajiv and I, we're making sale announcements, product announcements, partner announcements at .NEXT. So at a high level, I know Rajiv is going to cover this a little bit more in detail, but we covered everything under these three premises. Run better, run faster and run anywhere. Without stealing the thunder from Rajiv, but I just want to give you at a high level a little bit. What excites us a lot is obviously the customer partner intimacy and all this new IP innovation and announcement also very strong, very tight operational results and operational execution makes the company really special as a independent software vendor in this multicloud era. Obviously, we are the only true independent software vendor to do not run a business in a sense with fast growth. Timed to that announcement chain we make this big announcement with Azure partnership, our Nutanix portfolio under the Nutanix cluster ran now available as Bare-Metal Service on Azure after AWS. The partnership is new with Azure. We just announced the first angle of it. Limited access customers are taking it to look at the service. We're going to have a public preview in a few months, and more to come. And obviously we're not going to stop there. We have tons of work going on with other cloud providers, as well. Tying that, obviously, big focus with our Citrix partnership globally around our end user computing business as Rajiv will outline further, our portfolio on top of our digital infrastructure, tying the data center services, DevOps services, and you user computing services, Citrix partnership becomes a big one, and obviously you're tying the Lenovo and HP partnership to these things as the core platforms to run that business. It's creating tons of opportunity and I'll cover a little bit more further in a bit more detail, but one other partnership we are also focusing on, our Google partnership and on desktop as a service. So these are all coming to get around data center, DevOps, and user competent services on top of that amazing infrastructure Rajiv and team built over the past 10 years. I see Rajiv as one of our co-founders and one side with the right another. So the business is obviously booming in multiple fronts. This, if by 2020 was a great starting point with all this investment, that bank capital $750 million, big execution, ACD transition, software transition. And obviously these cloud partnerships are going to make big differences moving forward. >> Yeah, so Rajiv, want to build off what Tarkan was just saying there, that really coming together, when I heard the strategy run better, run faster, run anywhere, it really pulled together some of the threads I've been watching at Nutanix the last couple of years. There's been some SaaS solutions where it was like, wait, I don't understand how that ties back to really the core of what Nutanix does. And of course, Nutanix is more than just an HCI company, it's software and that simplicity and the experience as your team has always said, trying to make things invisible, but help if you would kind of lay out, there's a lot of announcements, but architecturally, there were some significant changes from the core, as well as, if I'm reading it right, it feels like the portfolio has a little bit more cohesion than I was seeing a year or so ago. >> Yeah, actually the theme around all these announcements is the same really, it's this ability to run any application, whether it's the most demanding traditional applications, the SAP HANA, the Epics and so on, but also the more modern cloud native application, any kind of application, we want the best platform. We want a platform that's simple, seamless, and secure, but we want to be able to run every application, we want to run it with great performance. So if you look at the announcements that are being made around strengthening the core with the Block Store, adding things like virtual networking, as well as announcements we made around building Karbon platform services, essentially making it easier for developers to build applications in a new cloud native way, but still have the choice of running them on premises or in the cloud. We believe we have the best platform for all of that. And then of course you want to give customers the optionality to run these applications anywhere they want, whether that's a private cloud, their own private data centers and service providers, or in the public cloud and the hyperscalers. So we give them that whole range of choices, and you can see that all the announcements fit into that one theme: any application, anywhere, that's basically it. >> Well, I'd like you to build just a little bit more on the application piece. The developer conversation is something we've been hearing from Nutanix the last couple of years. We've seen you in the cloud native space. Of course, Karbon is your Kubernetes offering. So the line I used a couple of years ago at .NEXT was modernize the platform, then you can modernize all of your applications on top of it, so where does Nutanix touch the developer? You know, how does that, building new apps, modernizing my apps tie into the Nutanix discussion? >> Yeah great question, Stu. So last year we introduced Karbon for the first time. And if you look at Karbon, the initial offering was really targeted at an IT audience, right? So it's basically the goal was to make Kubernetes management itself very easy for the IT professional. So essentially, whether you were creating a Nutanix, sorry, a Karbon cluster, or scaling it out or upgrading Kubernetes itself. We wanted to make that part of the life cycle very, very simple for IT. For the developer we offered the Vanilla Kubernetes system. And this was something that developers asked us for again and again, don't go around mucking around with Kubernetes itself, we want Vanilla Kubernetes, we want to use our Kube Cuddle or the tools that we're used to. So don't go fork off and build the economic Kubernetes distribution. That's the last thing we want. So we had a good platform already, but then we wanted to take the next step because very few applications today are self contained in the sense that they run entirely within themselves without dependence on external services, especially when you're building in the cloud, you have access, suppose you're building an Amazon, you have access to RDS to manage your databases. Don't have to manage it yourself. Your object stores, data pipelines, all kinds of platform services available, which really can accelerate development of your own applications, right? So we took the stand said, look, this is good. This is important. We want to give developers the same kind of services, but we want to make it much more democratic in the sense that we want them to be able to run these applications anywhere, not just on AWS or not just on GCP. And that's really the genesis of Kubernetes platform services. We've taken the most common services people use in the cloud and made them available to run anywhere. Public cloud, private cloud, anywhere. So we think it's very exciting. >> Tarkan, we had, you and I had a discussion with one of your partners on how this hybrid cloud scenario is playing out at HP discover, of course, with the GreenLake solution. I'm curious from your standpoint, all the things that Rajiv was just talking about, that's a real change, if you think about kind of the traditional infrastructure people they're needing to move up the stack. You've got partnerships with the hyperscalers. So help explain a little bit the ripple effect as Nutanix helps customers simplify and modernize, how your partners and your channel can still participate. >> So perfect, look, as you heard from Rajiv, this is like all coming super nicely together. As Rajiv outlined, with the data center, operations and services, DevOps services, to enable that faster time to market capable, that Kubernetes offering and user services, our desktop services on top of that classical industry-leading, record-breaking digital infrastructure. That hybrid cloud infrastructure we call today. You play this game with devoting a little bit, as you remember, we used to call hyper-converged infrastructure. Now we call it of the hybrid cloud infrastructure, in a sense. All those pieces coming together nicely end-to-end, unlike any other vendor, and from a software only perspective, we're not owned by a hardware company which is making a huge difference. Gives us tremendous level of flexibility, democratization, and freedom of choice. Cloud to us is basically is not a destination. It's an operating model. You heard me say this before, as Rajiv also said. So in our strategy, when you look at it, Stu, we have a three pronged approach on top of our on-prem, marketplace on-prem capable. There's been 17,000+ customers, 7,000+ channel and strategic partners. Also as part of this big announcement, this new partner program we called Elevate, on the Elevate brand, bringing all the channel partners, ISEs, platform partners, hyperscalers, Telco XPSs, and our global market partners all in one bucket where we manage them, simply the incentives. It's a very simple way to execute that opposite Chris Kaddaras, our Chief Revenue Officer, as well as Christian Alvarez, our Chief Partner Officer sort of speaking on global goal, the channels, working together tightly with our organization on the product front to deliver this. So one key point I want to share with you, tying to what Rajiv said earlier on the multicloud area, obviously we realize customers are looking for freedom of choice. So we have our own cloud, Nutanix cloud, under the XI brand. X-I, XI brand, which is basically our own logistics, our own basically, serviceability, payment capability and our software, running off our portal partnerships like Equinix delivering that software as a service. We started with disaster recovery as a service, very fast growing business. Now we announced our GreenLake partnership with HPE in the backend that data center as a service might be actually HP GreenLake if the customer wants it. So that partnership creates huge opportunities for us. Obviously, on top of that, we have these Telco XSP partnerships. As we're announcing partnerships with some amazing source providers like OBH. You heard today from college Sudani in society general, they are not only using AWS and Azure and Nutanix on-prem and Nutanix clusters on Azure and AWS for their internal departments, but they also use a local service provider in France for data gravity and data security reasons. A French company dealing with French business and data centers, with that kind of data governance requirements within the country, within the borders of France. So in that context we are also the service provider partnerships coming in. We're going to announce a partnership with OVHS vault, which is a big deal for us. And tying to this, as Rajiv talked about, our clusters portfolio, our portfolio basically running on-prem on AWS and Azure. And we're not going to stop there obviously. So give choice to the customers. So as Rajiv said, basically, Nutanix can run anywhere. On top of that we announced just today with Capgemini, a new dev test environment is a service. Where Rajiv's portfolio, end-to-end, data center, DevOps, and some of the UC capabilities for dev test reasons can run as a service on Capgemini cloud. We have similar partnerships with HCL, similar partnerships with (indistinct) and we're super excited for this .NEXT in FI21 because of those reasons. >> Rajiv, one of the real challenges we've had for a long time is, I want to be able to have that optionality. I want to be able to live in any environment. I don't want to be stuck in an environment, but I want to be able to take advantage of the innovation and the functionality that's there. Can you give us a little bit of insight? How do you make sure that Nutanix can live these environments like the new Azure partnership and it has the Nutanix experience, yet I can take advantage of, whether it be AI or some other capabilities that a Google, an Amazon or a Microsoft has. How do you balance that? You have to integrate with all of these partners yet, not lock out the features that they keep adding. >> Right, absolutely, that's a great point, Stu. And that's something we pride ourselves on, that we're not taking shortcuts. We're not trying to create our own bubble in these hyperscalers, where we run in an isolated environment and can't interact with the rest of the services they offer. And that's primarily why we have spent the time and the effort to integrate closely with their virtual networking, with the services that they provide and essentially offer the best of both worlds. We take the Nutanix stack, the entire software stack, everything we build from top to bottom, make it available. So the same experience is there with upgrades and prism, the same experience is available on-prem and in the cloud. But at the same time, as you said, we want people to have full speed access to cloud services. There's things the cloud is doing that will be very difficult for anybody to do. I mean, the kind of thing that, say Google does with AI, or Azure does with databases. It's remarkable what these guys are doing, and you want to take advantage of those services. So for us, it's very, very important, that access is not constrained in any way, but also that customers have the time to make this journey, right? If they want to move to cloud today, they can do that. And then they can refactor and redevelop their applications over time and start consuming these sales. So it's not an all or nothing proposition. It's not that you have to refactor it, rewrite before you can move forward. That's been extremely important for us and it's really topical right now, especially with this pandemic. I think one thing all of IT has realized is that you have to be agile. You have to be able to react to things and timeframes you never thought you needed to, right. So it's not just disaster recovery, but the amount of effort that's gone in the last few months in enabling a distributed workforce, who thought it would happen so quickly? But it's a kind of agility that, an optionality that we are giving to customers that really makes it possible. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right now, things are moving pretty fast. So let me let both of you have the final word. Give us a little bit viewpoint, as things are moving fast, what's on the plate? What should we be expecting to see from Nutanix and your ecosystem through the rest of 2020, Tarkan? >> So look, heard from us, Stu, I know you're talking to multiple folks and you had this discussions with us, end-to-end, and look for the company to be successful, customer partner intimacy, IP innovation, and execution, and operational excellence. Obviously, all three things need to come together. So in a sense, Stu, we just need to keep moving. I give this analogy a lot, as Benjamin Franklin says, the human beings are divided in three categories, you know? The first one is those who are immovable. They never move. Second category, those who, you know, are movable, you can move them if you try hard. And obviously third category, those who just move. Not only themselves, but they move others, like in a sense, in a nice way to refer to Benjamin Franklin, with one of our key founders in the US, in a sense as the founders of this company, with folks like Rajiv and other executives, and some of the newcomers, we a culture, which just keeps moving and the last 12 months, you've seen some of these. And obviously going back to the announcement day, AWS, now Azure, the Capgemini announcement then test as a service around some of the portfolio that Rajiv talked about or a Google partnership on desktop as a service, deep focus on Citrix globally with Azure, Google, and ourselves on-prem, off-prem. And obviously some of the big moves were making with some of the customers, it's going to continue. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally Rajiv and I are doing these .NEXT conferences, announcements, and so on. We're actually doing calls right now to basically execute for the next 12 months. We're planning the next 12 months' execution. So we're super excited now with this new Bain Capital investment, and also the partnership, the product, we're ready to rock and roll. So look forward to seeing you soon, Stu, and we're going to have more news to cover with you. >> Yeah, exactly right, Tarkan. I think as Tarkan said we are at the beginning of a journey right now. I think the way hybrid cloud is now becoming seamless opens up so many possibilities for customers, things that were never possible before. Most people when they talk hybrid cloud, they're talking about fairly separate environments, some applications running in the public cloud, some running on premises. Applications that are themselves hybrid that run across, or that can burst from one to the other, or can move around with both app and data mobility. I think the possibilities are huge. And it's going to be many years before we see the full potential of this platform. >> Well Rajiv and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates, congratulations on the progress, and absolutely look forward to catching up in the near future and watching the journey. >> Thanks, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And stay with us for more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo ALTO, California It is a cute conversation. >> Hello and welcome to this Special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California Cubes Studios Jon for your host of the Q. We retreat embodies the founder and CEO of H 20 dot ay, ay, Cuba Lem hot. Start up right in the action of all the machine learning artificial intelligence with the democratization, the role of data in the future, it's all happening with the cloud 2.0, Dev Ops 2.0, great to see you, The test. But the company What's going on, you guys air smoking hot? Congratulations. You got the right formally here with a I explain what's going on. It started about seven >> years ago on Dottie. I was was just a new fad that arrived into Silicon Valley. Today we have thousands of companies in the eye and we're very excited to be partners in making more companies becoming I first. And our region here is to democratize the eye and we've made simple are open source made it easy for people to start adapting data signs and machine learning and different functions inside their large and said the large organizations and apply that for different use cases across financial service is insurance healthcare. >> We leapfrog in 2016 and build our first closer. It's chronic traveler >> C I. We made it on GPS using the latest hardware software innovations Open source. I has funded the rice off automatic machine learning, which >> further reduces the need for >> extraordinary talent to build machine learning. >> No one has time >> today and then we're trying to really bring that automatic mission learning a very significant crunch. Time free, I so people can consuming. I better. >> You know, this is one of the things I love about the current state of the market right now. Entrepreneur Mark, as well as start of some growing companies Go public is that there's a new breed of entrepreneurship going on around large scale, standing up infrastructure, shortening the time it takes to do something like provisioning like the old eyes. I get a phD and we're seeing this in data science. I mean, you don't have to be a python coder. This democratisation is not just a tagline. It's actually the reality is of a business opportunity of whoever can provide the infrastructure and the systems four people to do. It is an opportunity. You guys were doing that. This is a real dynamic. This isn't a new way, a new kind of dynamic in the industry. The three real character >> sticks on ability to adopt. Hey, Iris Oneness Data >> is a team, a team sport, which means that you gotta bring different dimensions within your organization to be able to take advantage of data and the I and, um, you've got to bring in your domain. Scientists work closely with your data. Scientists were closely with your data. Engineers produce applications that can be deployed and then get your design on top of it. That can convince users are our strategist to make those decisions. That delays is showing up, so that takes a multi dimensional workforce to work closely together. So the rial problem, an adoption of the AI today is not just technology, it's also culture. And so we're kind of bringing those aspects together and form of products. One of our products, for example, explainable. Aye, aye. It's helping the data. Scientists tell a story that businesses can understand. Why is the model deciding? I need to take discretion. This'll direction. Why's this moral? Giving this particular nurse a high credit score? Even though she is, she has a very she doesn't have a high school graduation. That kind of figuring out those Democratic democratization goes all the way down there. It's wise, a mortal deciding what's deciding and explaining and breaking that down into English, which which building trust is a huge aspect in a >> well. I want to get to the the talent in the time and the trust equation on the next talk track, but I want to get the hard news out there. You guys are have some news driverless a eyes, your one of your core things. What's the hard Explain the news. What's the big news? >> The big news has Bean, that is, the money ball from business and money Ball, as it has been played out, has been. The experts >> were left out of the >> field and all garden is taking over and there is no participation between experts, the domain scientists and the data scientists and what we're bringing with the new product in travel see eyes, an ability for companies to take away I and become a I companies themselves. The rial air races not between the Googles and the Amazons and Microsoft's and other guy companies, software companies. The relay race is in the word pickles. And how can a company, which is a bank or an insurance giant or a health care company take a I platforms and become, take the data, monetize the data and become a I companies themselves? >> You know, that's a really profound state. I would agree with 100% on that. I think we saw that early on in the big data world round Doop doop kind of died by the wayside. But day Volonte and we keep on team have observed and they actually predicted that the most value was gonna come from practitioners, not the vendors, because they're the ones who have the data. And you mentioned verticals. This is another interesting point. I want to get more explanation from you on Is that APS are driven by data data needs domain specific information. So you can't just say I have data. Therefore, magic happens. It's really at the edge of the domain speak or the domain feature of the application. This is where the data is this kind of supports your idea that the eyes with the company's not that are using it, not the suppliers of the technology. >> Our vision has always being hosted by maker customer service for right to be focused on the customer, and through that we actually made customer one of the product managers inside the company. And the way that the doors that opened from working where it closed with some of our leading customers was that we need to get them to participate and take a eyes, algorithms and platforms that can tune automatically. The algorithms and the right hyper parameter organizations, right features and amend the right data sets that they have. There's a whole data lake around there on their data architecture today, which data sets them and not using in my current problem solving. That's a reasonable problem in looking at that combination of these Berries. Pieces have been automated in travel a, C I. A. And the new version that we're not bringing to market is able to allow them to create their own recipes, bring your own transformers and make that automatic fit for their particular race. Do you think about this as a rebuilt all the components of a race car. They're gonna take it and apply for that particular race to win. >> So that's where driverless comes in its travels in the sense of you don't really need a full operator. It kind of operates on its own. >> In some sense, it's driver less, which is in some there taking the data scientists giving them a power tool that historically before automatic machine learning your valises in the umbrella automatic machine learning they would find tune learning the nuances off the data and the problem, the problem at hand, what they're optimizing for and the right tweaks in the algorithm. So they have to understand how deep the streets are gonna be home, any layers off, off deep learning they need what particular variation and deploying. They should put in a natural language processing what context they need to the long term, short term memory. All these pieces, they have to learn themselves. And they were only a few Grand masters are big data scientist in the world who could come up with the right answer for different problems. >> So you're spreading the love of a I around. So you simplifying that you get the big brains to work on it and democratization. People can then participate in. The machines also can learn both humans and machines between >> our open source and the very maker centric culture we've been able to attract on the world's top data scientists, physicists and compiler engineers to bring in a form factor that businesses can use. And today it one data scientist in a company like Franklin Templeton can operate at the level of 10 or hundreds of them and then bring the best in data science in a form factor that they can plug in and play. >> I was having a cautious We can't Libby, who works with being our platform team. We have all this data with the Cube, and we were just talking. Wait higher data science and a eye specialist and you go out and look around. You get Google and Amazon all these big players, spending between 3 to $4,000,000 per machine learning engineer, and that might be someone under the age of 30. And with no experience or so the talent war is huge. I mean the cost to just hire these guys. We can't hire these people. It's a >> global war. >> There's no there's a talent shortage in China. There's talent shortage in India. There stand shortage in Europe and we have officers in in Europe and in India. The talent shortage in Toronto and Ottawa writes it is. It's a global shortage off physicists and mathematicians and data scientists. So that's where our tools can help. And we see that you see travelers say I as a wave you can drive to New York or you can fly to me >> off. I started my son the other days taking computer science classes in school. I'm like, Well, you know, the machine learning at a eyes kind like dog training. You have dog training. You train that dog to do some tricks that some tricks. Well, if you're a coder, you want to train the machines. This is the machine training. This is data science is what a. I possibilities that machines have to be taught. Something is a base in foot. Machines just aren't self learning on their own. So as you look at the science of a I, this becomes the question on the talent gap. Can the talent get be closed by machines and you got the time you want speed low, latent, see and trust. All these things are hard to do. All three. Balancing all three is extremely difficult. What's your thoughts on those three variables? >> So that's where we brought a I to help the day >> I travel A. C. I's concept that bringing a I to simplify it's an export system to do a I better so you can actually give it to the hands of a new data scientists so you can perform it the power off a Dead ones data centers if you're not disempowering. The data sent that he is a scientist, the park's still foreign data scientist, because he cannot be stopped with the confusion matrix, false positives, false negatives. That's something a data scientists can understand. What you're talking about featured engineering. That's something a data scientists understand. And what travelers say is really doing is helping him may like do that rapidly and automated on the latest hardware. That's what the time is coming into GPS that PTSD pews different form off clouds at cheaper, faster, cheaper and easier. That's the democratization aspect, but it's really targeted. Data Scientist to Prevent Excrement Letter in Science data sciences is a search for truth, but it's a lot of extra minutes to get the truth and law. If you can make the cost of excrement really simple, cheaper on dhe prevent over fitting. That's a common problem in our science. Prevent by us accidental bites that you introduced because the data is last right, trying to kind of prevent the common pitfalls and doing data science leakage. Usually your signal leaks. And how do you prevent those common those pieces? That's kind of weird, revolutionize coming at it. But if you put that in the box, what that really unlocks is imagination. The real hard problems in the world are still the same. >> Aye aye for creative people, for instance. They want infrastructure. They don't wanna have to be an expert. They wanted that value. That's the consumer ization, >> is really the co founder for someone who's highly imaginative and his courage right? And you don't have to look for founders to look for courage and imagination that a lot of intra preneurs in large companies were trying to bring change to that organization. >> You know, we always say that it's intellectual property game's changing from you know I got the protocol. This is locked and patented. Two. You could have a workflow innovation change. One little tweak of a process with data and powerful. Aye, aye, that's the new magic I P equation. It's in the workforce, in the applications, new opportunities. Do you agree with that? >> Absolutely. That the leapfrog from here is businesses will come up with new business processes that we looked at. Business process optimization and globalization can help there. But a I, as you rightfully said earlier, is training computers, not just programming them. Their schooling most of computers that can now with data, think almost at the same level as a go player. Right there was leading Go player. You can think at the same level off an expert in that space. And if that's happening now, I can transform. My business can run 24 by seven at the rate at which I can assembled machines and feed a data data creation becomes making new data becomes the real value that hey, I can >> h 20 today I announcing driverless Aye, aye. Part of their flagship problem product around recipes and democratization. Ay, ay, congratulations. Final point take a minute to explain for the folks just the product, how they buy it. What's it made of? What's the commitment? How did they engage with you >> guys? It's an annual license recruit. License this software license people condone load on our website, get a three week trial, try it on their own retrial. Pretrial recipes are open source, but 100 recipes built by then Masters have been made open source and they could be plugged and tried and taken. Customers, of course, don't have to make their software open source. They can take this, make it theirs. And our region here is to make every company in the eye company. And and that means that they have to embrace it. I learn it. Ticket. Participate some off. The leading conservation companies are giving it back so you can access in the open source. But the real vision here is to build that community off. A practitioners inside large formulations were here or teams air global. And we're here to support that transformation off some of the largest customers. >> So my problem of hiring an aye aye person You could help you solve that right today. Okay, So it was watching. Please get their stuff and come get a job opening here. That's the goal. But that's that's the dream. That is the dream. And we we want to be should one day. I have watched >> you over the last 10 years. You've been an entrepreneur. The fierce passion. We want the eye to be a partner so you can take your message to wider audience and build monetization or on the data you have created. Businesses are the largest after the big data warlords we have on data. Privacy is gonna come eventually. But I think I did. Businesses are the second largest owners of data. They just don't know how to monetize it. Unlock value from it. I will have >> Well, you know, we love day that we want to be data driven. We want to go faster. I love the driverless vision travel. Say I h 20 dot ay, ay here in the Cuban John for it. Breaking news here in Silicon Valley from that start of h 20 dot ay, ay, thanks for watching. Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Woman Voiceover: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California, CUBE Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here with Sri Ambati. He's the founder and CEO of H20.ai. CUBE Alum, hot start up right in the action of all the machine learning, artificial intelligence, with democratization the role of data in the future, it's all happening with Cloud 2.0, DevOps 2.0, Sri, great to see you. Thanks for coming by. You're a neighbor, you're right down the street from us at our studio here. >> It's exciting to be at theCUBE Com. >> That's KubeCon, that's Kubernetes Con. CUBEcon, coming soon, not to be confused with KubeCon. Great to see you. So tell us about the company, what's going on, you guys are smoking hot, congratulations. You got the right formula here with AI. Explain what's going on. >> It started about seven years ago, and .ai was just a new fad that arrived that arrived in Silicon Valley. And today we have thousands of companies in AI, and we're very excited to be partners in making more companies become AI-first. And our vision here is to democratize AI, and we've made it simple with our open source, made it easy for people to start adapting data science and machine learning in different functions inside their large organizations. And apply that for different use cases across financial services, insurance, health care. We leapfrogged in 2016 and built our first closed source product, Driverless AI, we made it on GPUs using the latest hardware and software innovations. Open source AI has funded the rise of automatic machine learning, Which further reduces the need for extraordinary talent to fill the machine learning. No one has time today, and then we're trying to really bring that automatic machine learning at a very significant crunch time for AI, so people can consume AI better. >> You know, this is one of the things that I love about the current state of the market right now, the entrepreneur market as well as startups and growing companies that are going to go public. Is that there's a new breed of entrepreneurship going on around large scale, standing up infrastructure, shortening the time it takes to do something. Like provisioning. The old AIs, you got to be a PHD. And we're seeing this in data science, you don't have to be a python coder. This democratization is not just a tag line, actually the reality is of a business opportunity. Whoever can provide the infrastructure and the systems for people to do it. It is an opportunity, you guys are doing that. This is a real dynamic. This is a new way, a new kind of dynamic and an industry. >> The three real characteristics on ability to adopt AI, one is data is a team sport. Which means you've got to bring different dimensions within your organization to be able to take advantage of data and AI. And you've got to bring in your domain scientists, work closely with your data scientists, work closely with your data engineers, produce applications that can be deployed, and then get your design on top of it that can convince users or strategists to make those decisions that data is showing up So that takes a multi-dimensional workforce to work closely together. The real problem in adoption of AI today is not just technology, it's also culture. So we're kind of bringing those aspects together in formal products. One of our products, for example, Explainable AI. It's helping the data scientists tell a story that businesses can understand. Why is the model deciding I need to take this test in this direction? Why is this model giving this particular nurse a high credit score even though she doesn't have a high school graduation? That kind of figuring out those democratization goes all the way down. Why is the model deciding what it's deciding, and explaining and breaking that down into English. And building a trust is a huge aspect in AI right now. >> Well I want to get to the talent, and the time, and the trust equation on the next talk, but I want to get the hard news out there. You guys have some news, Driverless AI is one of your core things. Explain the news, what's the big news? >> The big news has been that... AI's a money ball for business, right? And money ball as it has been played out has been the experts were left out of the field, and algorithms taking over. And there is no participation between experts, the domain scientists, and the data scientists. And what we're bringing with the new product in Driverless AI, is an ability for companies to take our AI and become AI companies themselves. The real AI race is not between the Googles and the Amazons and the Microsofts and other AI companies, AI software companies. The real AI race is in the verticals and how can a company which is a bank, or an insurance giant, or a healthcare company take AI platforms and become, take the data and monetize the data and become AI companies themselves. >> Yeah, that's a really profound statement I would agree with 100% on that. I think we saw that early on in the big data world around Hadoop, well Hadoop kind of died by the wayside, but Dave Vellante and the WikiBon team have observed, and they actually predicted, that the most value was going to come from practitioners, not the vendors. 'Cause they're the ones who have the data. And you mentioned verticals, this is another interesting point I want to get more explanation from you on, is that apps are driven by data. Data needs domain-specific information. So you can't just say "I have data, therefore magic happens" it's really at the edge of the domain speak or the domain feature of the application. This is where the data is, so this kind of supports your idea that the AI's about the companies that are using it, not the suppliers of the technology. >> Our vision has always been how we make our customers satisfied. We focus on the customer, and through that we actually make customer one of the product managers inside the company. And the doors that open from working very closely with some of our leading customers is that we need to get them to participate and take AIs, algorithms, and platforms, that can tune automatically the algorithms, and have the right hyper parameter optimizations, the right features. And augment the right data sets that they have. There's a whole data lake around there, around data architecture today. Which data sets am I not using in my current problem I'm solving, that's a reasonable problem I'm looking at. That combination of these various pieces have been automated in Driverless AI. And the new version that we're now bringing to market is able to allow them to create their own recipes, bring their own transformers, and make an automatic fit for their particular race. So if you think about this as we built all the components of a race car, you're going to take it and apply it for that particular race to win. >> John: So that's the word driverless comes in. It's driverless in the sense of you don't really need a full operator, it kind of operates on its own. >> In some sense it's driverless. They're taking the data scientists, giving them a power tool. Historically, before automatic machine learning, driverless is in the umbrella of machine learning, they would fine tune, learning the nuances of the data, and the problem at hand, what they're optimizing for, and the right tweaks in the algorithm. So they have to understand how deep the streets are going to be, how many layers of deep learning they need, what variation of deep learning they should put, and in a natural language crossing, what context they need. Long term shot, memory, all these pieces they have to learn themselves. And there were only a few grand masters or big data scientists in the world who could come up with the right answer for different problems. >> So you're spreading the love of AI around. >> Simplifying that. >> You get the big brains to work on it, and democratization means people can participate and the machines also can learn. Both humans and machines. >> Between our open source and the very maker-centric culture, we've been able to attract some of the world's top data scientists, physicists, and compiler engineers. To bring in a form factor that businesses can use. One data scientist in a company like Franklin Templeton can operate at a level of ten or hundreds of them, and then bring the best in data science in a form factor that they can plug in and play. >> I was having a concert with Kent Libby, who works with me on our platform team. We have all this data with theCUBE, and we were just talking, we need to hire a data scientist and AI specialist. And you go out and look around, you've got Google, Amazon, all these big players spending between 3-4 million per machine learning engineer. And that might be someone under the age of 30 with no experience. So the talent bore is huge. The cost to just hire, we can't hire these people. >> It's a global war. There's talent shortage in China, there's talent shortage in India, there's talent shortage in Europe, and we have offices in Europe and India. There's a talent shortage in Toronto and Ottawa. So it's a global shortage of physicists and mathematicians and data scientists. So that's where our tools can help. And we see Driverless AI as, you can drive to New York or you can fly to New York. >> I was talking to my son the other day, he's taking computer science classes in night school. And it's like, well you know, the machine learning in AI is kind of like dog training. You have dog training, you train the dog to do some tricks, it does some tricks. Well, if you're a coder you want to train the machine. This is the machine training. This is data science, is what AI possibility is there. Machines have to be taught something. There's a base input, machines just aren't self-learning on their own. So as you look at the science of AI, this becomes the question on the talent gap. Can the talent gap be closed by machines? And you got the time, you want speed, low latency, and trust. All these things are hard to do. All three, balancing all three is extremely difficult. What's your thoughts on those three variables? >> So that's why we brought AI to help with AI. Driverless AI is a concept of bringing AI to simplify. It's an expert system to do AI better. So you can actually give to the hands of the new data scientists, so you can perform at the power of an advanced data scientist. We're not disempowering the data scientist, the part's still for a data scientist. When you start with a confusion matrix, false positives, false negatives, that's something a data scientist can understand. When you talk about feature engineering, that's something a data scientist can understand. And what Driverless AI is really doing is helping him do that rapidly, and automated on the latest hardware, that's where the time is coming into. GPUs, FPGAs, TPUs, different form of clouds. Cheaper, right. So faster, cheaper, easier, that's the democratization aspect. But it's really targeted at the data scientist to prevent experimental error. In science, the data science is a search for truth, but it's a lot of experiments to get to truth. If you can make the cost of experiments really simple, cheaper, and prevent over fitting. That's a common problem in our science. Prevent bias, accidental bias that you introduce because the data is biased, right. So trying to prevent the flaws in doing data science. Leakage, usually your signal leaks, and how do you prevent those common pieces. That's where Driverless AI is coming at it. But if you put that in a box, what that really unlocks is imagination. The real hard problems in the world are still the same. >> AI for creative people, for instance. They want infrastructure, they don't want to have to be an expert. They want that value. That's the consumerization. >> AI is really the co founder for someone who's highly imaginative and has courage, right. And you don't have to look for founders to look for courage and imagination. A lot of entrepreneurs in large companies, who are trying to bring change to their organizations. >> Yeah, we always say, the intellectual property game is changing from protocols, locked in, patented, to you could have a workflow innovation. Change one little tweak of a process with data and powerful AI, that's the new magic IP equation. It's in the workflow, it's in the application, it's new opportunities. Do you agree with that? >> Absolutely. The leapfrog from here is businesses will come up with new business processes. So we looked at business process optimization, and globalization's going to help there. But AI, as you rightfully said earlier, is training computers. Not just programming them, you're schooling them. A host of computers that can now, with data, think almost at the same level as a Go player. The world's leading Go player. They can think at the same level of an expert in that space. And if that's happening, now I can transform. My business can run 24 by 7 and the rate at which I can assemble machines and feed it data. Data creation becomes, making new data becomes, the real value that AI can- >> H20.ai announcing Driverless AI, part of their flagship product around recipes and democratizing AI. Congratulations. Final point, take a minute to explain to the folks just the product, how they buy it, what's it made of, what's the commitment, how do they engage with you guys? >> It's an annual license, a software license people can download on our website. Get a three week trial, try it on their own. >> Free trial? >> A free trial, our recipes are open-source. About a hundred recipes, built by grand masters have been made open source. And they can be plugged, and tried. Customers of course don't have to make their software open source. They can take this, make it theirs. And our vision here is to make every company an AI company. And that means that they have to embrace AI, learn it, tweak it, participate, some of the leading conservation companies are giving it back in the open source. But the real vision here is to build that community of AI practitioners inside large organizations. We are here, our teams are global, and we're here to support that transformation of some large customers. >> So my problem of hiring an AI person, you could help me solve that. >> Right today. >> Okay, so anyone who's watching, please get their stuff and come get an opening here. That's the goal. But that is the dream, we want AI in our system. >> I have watched you the last ten years, you've been an entrepreneur with a fierce passion, you want AI to be a partner so you can take your message to wider audience and build monetization around the data you have created. Businesses are the largest, after the big data warlords we have, and data privacy's going to come eventually, but I think businesses are the second largest owners of data they just don't know how to monetize it, unlock value from it, and AI will help. >> Well you know we love data, we want to be data-driven, we want to go faster. Love the driverless vision, Driverless AI, H20.ai. Here in theCUBE I'm John Furrier with breaking news here in Silicon Valley from hot startup H20.ai. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE, joined by Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, as we wrap up our coverage here of the Red Hat Summit here in 2019. We've been here in Boston all week, three days, Stu, of really fascinating programming on one hand, the keynotes showing quite a diverse ecosystem that Red Hat has certainly built, and we've seen that array of guests reflected as well here, on theCUBE. And you leave with a pretty distinct impression about the vast reach, you might say, of Red Hat, and how they diversified their offerings and their services. >> Yeah, so, John, as we've talked about, this is the sixth year we've had theCUBE here. It's my fifth year doing it and I'll be honest, I've worked with Red Hat for 19 years, but the first year I came, it was like, all right, you know, I know lots of Linux people, I've worked with Linux people, but, you know, I'm not in there in the terminal and doing all this stuff, so it took me a little while to get used to. Today, I know not only a lot more people in Red Hat and the ecosystem, but where the ecosystem is matured and where the portfolio is grown. There's been some acquisitions on the Red Hat side. There's a certain pending acquisition that is kind of a big deal that we talked about this week. But Red Hat's position in this IT marketplace, especially in the hybrid and multi-cloud world, has been fun to watch and really enjoyed digging in it with you this week and, John Walls, I'll turn the camera to you because- >> I don't like this. (laughing) >> It was your first time on the program. Yeah, you know- >> I like asking you the questions. >> But we have to do this, you know, three days of Walls to Miniman coverage. So let's get the Walls perspective. >> John: All right. >> On your take. You've been to many shows. >> John: Yeah, no, I think that what's interesting about what I've seen here at Red Hat is this willingness to adapt to the marketplace, at least that's the impression I got, is that there are a lot of command and control models about this is the way it's going to be, and this is what we're going to give you, and you're gonna have to take it and like it. And Red Hat's just on the other end of that spectrum, right? It's very much a company that's built on an open source philosophy. And it's been more of what has the marketplace wanted? What have you needed? And now how can we work with you to build it and make it functional? And now we're gonna just offer it to a lot of people, and we're gonna make a lot of money doing that. And so, I think to me, that's at least what I got talking to Jim Whitehurst, you know about his philosophy and where he's taken this company, and has made it obviously a very attractive entity, IBM certainly thinks so to the tune of 34 billion. But you see that. >> Yeah, it's, you know, some companies say, oh well, you know, it's the leadership from the top. Well, Jim's philosophy though, it is The Open Organization. Highly recommend the book, it was a great read. We've talked to him about the program, but very much it's 12, 13 thousand people at the company. They're very much opinionated, they go in there, they have discussions. It's not like, well okay, one person pass this down. It's we're gonna debate and argue and fight. Doesn't mean we come to a full consensus, but open source at the core is what they do, and therefore, the community drives a lot of it. They contribute it all back up-stream, but, you know, we know what Red Hat's doing. It's fascinating to talk to Jim about, yeah you know, on the days where I'm thinking half glass empty, it's, you know, wow, we're not yet quite four billion dollars of the company, and look what an impact they had. They did a study with IDC and said, ten trillion dollars of the economy that they touch through RHEL, but on the half empty, on the half full days, they're having a huge impact outside. He said 34 billion dollars that IBM's paying is actually a bargain- >> It's a great deal! (laughing) >> for where they're going. But big announcements. RHEL 8, which had been almost five years in the works there. Some good advancements there. But the highlight for me this week really was OpenShift. We've been watching OpenShift since the early days, really pre-Kubernetes. It had a good vision and gained adoption in the marketplace, and was the open source choice for what we called Paths back then. But, when Kubernetes came around, it really helped solidify where OpenShift was going. It is the delivery mechanism for containerization and that container cluster management and Red Hat has a leadership position in that space. I think that almost every customer that we talked to this week, John, OpenShift was the underpinning. >> John: Absolutely. >> You would expect that RHEL's underneath there, but OpenShift as the lever for digital transformation. And that was something that I really enjoyed talking to. DBS Bank from Singapore, and Delta, and UPS. It was, we talked about their actual transformation journeys, both the technology and the organizational standpoint, and OpenShift really was the lever to give them that push. >> You know, another thing, I know you've been looking at this and watching this for many many years. There's certainly the evolution of open source, but we talked to Chris Wright earlier, and he was talking about the pace of change and how it really is incremental. And yet, if you're on the outside looking in, and you think, gosh, technology is just changing so fast, it's so crazy, it's so disruptive, but to hear it from Chris, not so. You don't go A to Z, you go A to B to C to D to D point one. (laughing) It takes time. And there's a patience almost and a cadence that has this slow revolution that I'm a little surprised at. I sense they, or got a sense of, you know, a much more rapid change of pace and that's not how the people on the inside see it. >> Yeah. Couple of comment back at that. Number one is we know how much rapid change there is going because if you looked at the Linux kernel or what's happening with Kubernetes and the open source, there's so much change going on there. There's the data point thrown out there that, you know, I forget, that 75% or 95% of all the data in the world was created in the last two years. Yet, only 2% of that is really usable and searchable and things like that. That's a lot of change. And the code base of Linux in the last two years, a third of the code is completely overhauled. This is technology that has been around for decades. But if you look at it, if you think about a company, one of the challenges that we had is if they're making those incremental change, and slowly looking at them, a lot of people from the outside would be like, oh, Red Hat, yeah that's that little Linux company, you know, that I'm familiar with and it runs on lots of places there. When we came in six years ago, there was a big push by Red Hat to say, "We're much more than Linux." They have their three pillars that we spent a lot of time through from the infrastructure layer to the cloud native to automation and management. Lots of shows I go to, AnsiballZ all over the place. We talked about OpenShift 4 is something that seems to be resonating. Red Hat takes a leadership position, not just in the communities and the foundations, but working with their customers to be a more trusted and deeper partner in what they're doing with digital transformation. There might have been little changes, but, you know, this is not the Red Hat that people would think of two years or five years ago because a large percentage of Red Hat has changed. One last nugget from Chris Wright there, is, you know, he spent a lot of time talking about AI. And some of these companies go buzzwords in these environments, but, you know, but he hit a nice cogent message with the punchline is machines enhance human intelligence because these are really complex systems, distributed architectures, and we know that the people just can't keep up with all of the change, and the scope, and the scale that they need to handle. So software should be able to be helping me get my arms around it, as well as where it can automate and even take actions, as long as we're careful about how we do it. >> John: Sure. There's another, point at least, I want to pick your brain about, is really the power of presence. The fact that we have the Microsoft CEO on the stage. Everybody thought, well (mumbles) But we heard it from guest after guest after guest this week, saying how cool was that? How impressive was that? How monumental was that? And, you know, it's great to have that kind of opportunity, but the power of Nadella's presence here, it's unmistakable in the message that has sent to this community. >> Yeah, you know, John, you could probably do a case study talking about culture and the power of culture because, I talked about Red Hat's not the Red Hat that you know. Well, the Satya Nadella led Microsoft is a very different Microsoft than before he was on board. Not only are they making great strides in, you know, we talk about SaaS and public cloud and the like, but from a partnership standpoint, Microsoft of old, you know, Linux and Red Hat were the enemy and you know, Windows was the solution and they were gonna bake everything into it. Well, Microsoft partnered with many more companies. Partnerships and ecosystem, a key message this week. We talked about Microsoft with Red Hat, but, you know, announcement today was, surprised me a little bit, but when we think about it, not too much. OpenShift supported on VMware environments, so, you know, VMware has in that family of Dell, there's competitive solutions against OpenShift and, you know, so, and virtualization. You know, Red Hat has, you know, RHV, the Red Hat Virtualization. >> John: Right, right, right. >> The old day of the lines in the swim lanes, as one of our guests talked about, really are there. Customers are living in a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world and the customers are gonna go and say, "You need to work together, before you're not gonna be there." >> Azure. Right, also we have Azure compatibility going on here. >> Stu: Yeah, deep, not just some tested, but deep integration. I can go to Azure and buy OpenShift. I mean that, the, to say it's in the, you know, not just in the marketplace, but a deep integration. And yeah, there was a little poke, if our audience caught it, from Paul Cormier. And said, you know, Microsoft really understands enterprise. That's why they're working tightly with us. Uh, there's a certain other large cloud provider that created Kubernetes, that has their own solution, that maybe doesn't understand enterprise as much and aren't working as closely with Red Hat as they might. So we'll see what response there is from them out there. Always, you know, we always love on theCUBE to, you know, the horse is on the track and where they're racing, but, you know, more and more all of our worlds are cross-pollinating. You know, the AI and AI Ops stuff. The software ecosystems because software does have this unifying factor that the API economy, and having all these things work together, more and more. If you don't, customers will go look for solutions that do provide the full end to end solution stuff they're looking for. >> All right, so we're, I've got a couple in mind as far as guests we've had on the show. And we saw them in action on the keynotes stage too. Anybody that jumps out at you, just like, wow, that was cool, that was, not that we, we love all of our children, right? (laughing) But every once in awhile, there's a story or two that does stand out. >> Yeah, so, it is so tough, you know. I loved, you know, the stories. John, I'm sure I'm going to ask you, you know, Mr. B and what he's doing with the children. >> John: Right, Franklin Middle School. >> And the hospitals with Dr. Ellen and the end of the brains. You know, those tech for good are phenomenal. For me, you know, the CIOs that we had on our first day of program. Delta was great and going through transformation, but, you know, our first guest that we had on, was DBS Bank in Singapore and- >> John: David Gledhill. >> He was so articulate and has such a good story about, I took outsourced environments. I didn't just bring it into my environment, say okay, IT can do it a little bit better, and I'll respond to business. No, no, we're going to total restructure the company. Not we're a software company. We're a technology company, and we're gonna learn from the Googles of the world and the like. And he said, We want to be considered there, you know, what was his term there? It was like, you know, bank less, uh, live more and bank less. I mean, what- >> Joyful banking, that was another of his. >> Joyful banking. You don't think of a financial institution as, you know, we want you to think less of the bank. You know, that's just a powerful statement. Total reorganization and, as we mentioned, of course, OpenShift, one of those levers underneath helping them to do that. >> Yeah, you mentioned Dr. Ellen Grant, Boston Children's Hospital, I think about that. She's in fetal neuroimaging and a Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. The work they're doing in terms of diagnostics through imaging is spectacular. I thought about Robin Goldstone at the Livermore Laboratory, about our nuclear weapon monitoring and efficacy of our monitoring. >> Lawrence Livermore. So good. And John, talk about the diversity of our guests. We had expats from four different countries, phenomenal accents. A wonderful slate of brilliant women on the program. From the customer side, some of the award winners that you interviewed. The executives on the program. You know, Stefanie Chiras, always great, and Denise who were up on the keynotes stage. Denise with her 3D printed, new Red Hat logo earrings. Yeah, it was an, um- >> And a couple of old Yanks (laughing). Well, I enjoyed it, Stu. As always, great working with you, and we thank you for being with us as well. For now, we're gonna say so long. We're gonna see you at the next Red Hat Summit, I'm sure, 2020 in San Francisco. Might be a, I guess a slightly different company, but it might be the same old Red Hat too, but they're going to have 34 billion dollars behind them at that point and probably riding pretty high. That will do it for our CUBE coverage here from Boston. Thanks for much for joining us. For Stu Miniman, and our entire crew, have a good day. (funky music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube! (funky electronic music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante! >> Welcome, everybody, to this Cube conversation here in our Marlborough offices. I am very excited today, I spent a number of years at IDC, which, of course, is owned by IDG. And there's a new book out, relatively new, called Future Forward: Leadership Lessons from Patrick McGovern, the Visionary Who Circled the Globe and Built a Technology Media Empire. And it's a great book, lotta stories that I didn't know, many that I did know, and the author of that book, Glenn Rifkin, is here to talk about not only Pat McGovern but also some of the lessons that he put forth to help us as entrepreneurs and leaders apply to create better businesses and change the world. Glenn, thanks so much for comin' on theCube. >> Thank you, Dave, great to see ya. >> So let me start with, why did you write this book? >> Well, a couple reasons. The main reason was Patrick McGovern III, Pat's son, came to me at the end of 2016 and said, "My father had died in 2014 and I feel like his legacy deserves a book, and many people told me you were the guy to do it." So the background on that I, myself, worked at IDG back in the 1980s, I was an editor at Computerworld, got to know Pat during that time, did some work for him after I left Computerworld, on a one-on-one basis. Then I would see him over the years, interview him for the New York Times or other magazines, and every time I'd see Pat, I'd end our conversation by saying, "Pat, when are we gonna do your book?" And he would laugh, and he would say, "I'm not ready to do that yet, there's just still too much to do." And so it became sort of an inside joke for us, but I always really did wanna write this book about him because I felt he deserved a book. He was just one of these game-changing pioneers in the tech industry. >> He really was, of course, the book was even more meaningful for me, we, you and I started right in the same time, 1983-- >> Yeah. >> And by that time, IDG was almost 20 years old and it was quite a powerhouse then, but boy, we saw, really the ascendancy of IDG as a brand and, you know, the book reviews on, you know, the back covers are tech elite: Benioff wrote the forward, Mark Benioff, you had Bill Gates in there, Walter Isaacson was in there, Guy Kawasaki, Bob Metcalfe, George Colony-- >> Right. >> Who actually worked for a little stint at IDC for a while. John Markoff of The New York Times, so, you know, the elite of tech really sort of blessed this book and it was really a lot to do with Pat McGovern, right? >> Oh, absolutely, I think that the people on the inside understood how important he was to the history of the tech industry. He was not, you know, a household name, first of all, you didn't think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and then Pat McGovern, however, those who are in the know realize that he was as important in his own way as they were. Because somebody had to chronicle this story, somebody had to share the story of the evolution of this amazing information technology and how it changed the world. And Pat was never a front-of-the-TV-camera guy-- >> Right. >> He was a guy who put his people forward, he put his products forward, for sure, which is why IDG, as a corporate name, you know, most people don't know what that means, but people did know Macworld, people did know PCWorld, they knew IDC, they knew Computerworld for sure. So that was Pat's view of the world, he didn't care whether he had the spotlight on him or not. >> When you listen to leaders like Reed Hoffman or Eric Schmidt talk about, you know, great companies and how to build great companies, they always come back to culture. >> Yup. >> The book opens with a scene of, and we all, that I usually remember this, well, we're just hangin' around, waitin' for Pat to come in and hand out what was then called the Christmas bonus-- >> Right. >> Back when that wasn't politically incorrect to say. Now, of course, it's the holiday bonus. But it was, it was the Christmas bonus time and Pat was coming around and he was gonna personally hand a bonus, which was a substantial bonus, to every single employee at the company. I mean, and he did that, really, literally, forever. >> Forever, yeah. >> Throughout his career. >> Yeah, it was unheard of, CEOs just didn't do that and still don't do that, you were lucky, you got a message on the, you know, in the lunchroom from the CEO, "Good work, troops! Keep up the good work!" Pat just had a really different view of the culture of this company, as you know from having been there, and I know. It was very familial, there was a sense that we were all in this together, and it really was important for him to let every employee know that. The idea that he went to every desk in every office for IDG around the United States, when we were there in the '80s there were probably 5,000 employees in the US, he had to devote substantial amount-- >> Weeks and weeks! >> Weeks at a time to come to every building and do this, but year after year he insisted on doing it, his assistant at the time, Mary Dolaher told me she wanted to sign the cards, the Christmas cards, and he insisted that he ensign every one of them personally. This was the kind of view he had of how you keep employees happy, if your employees are happy, the customers are gonna be happy, and you're gonna make a lot of money. And that's what he did. >> And it wasn't just that. He had this awesome holiday party that you described, which was epic, and during the party, they would actually take pictures of every single person at the party and then they would load the carousel, you remember the 35-mm. carousel, and then, you know, toward the end of the evening, they would play that and everybody was transfixed 'cause they wanted to see their, the picture of themselves! >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) >> I mean, it was ge-- and to actually pull that off in the 1980s was not trivial! Today, it would be a piece of cake. And then there was the IDG update, you know, the Good News memos, there was the 10-year lunch, the 20-year trips around the world, there were a lot of really rich benefits that, you know, in and of themselves maybe not a huge deal, but that was the culture that he set. >> Yeah, there was no question that if you talked to anybody who worked in this company over, say, the last 50 years, you were gonna get the same kind of stories. I've been kind of amazed, I'm going around, you know, marketing the book, talking about the book at various events, and the deep affection for this guy that still holds five years after he died, it's just remarkable. You don't really see that with the CEO class, there's a couple, you know, Steve Jobs left a great legacy of creativity, he was not a wonderful guy to his employees, but Pat McGovern, people loved this guy, and they st-- I would be signing books and somebody'd say, "Oh, I've been at IDG for 27 years and I remember all of this," and "I've been there 33 years," and there's a real longevity to this impact that he had on people. >> Now, the book was just, it was not just sort of a biography on McGovern, it was really about lessons from a leader and an entrepreneur and a media mogul who grew this great company in this culture that we can apply, you know, as business people and business leaders. Just to give you a sense of what Pat McGovern did, he really didn't take any outside capital, he did a little bit of, you know, public offering with IDG Books, but, really, you know, no outside capital, it was completely self-funded. He built a $3.8 billion empire, 300 publications, 280 million readers, and I think it was almost 100 or maybe even more, 100 countries. And so, that's an-- like you were, used the word remarkable, that is a remarkable achievement for a self-funded company. >> Yeah, Pat had a very clear vision of how, first of all, Pat had a photographic memory and if you were a manager in the company, you got a chance to sit in meetings with Pat and if you didn't know the numbers better than he did, which was a tough challenge, you were in trouble! 'Cause he knew everything, and so, he was really a numbers-focused guy and he understood that, you know, his best way to make profit was to not be looking for outside funding, not to have to share the wealth with investors, that you could do this yourself if you ran it tightly, you know, I called it in the book a 'loose-tight organization,' loose meaning he was a deep believer in decentralization, that every market needed its own leadership because they knew the market, you know, in Austria or in Russia or wherever, better than you would know it from a headquarters in Boston, but you also needed that tightness, a firm grip on the finances, you needed to know what was going on with each of the budgets or you were gonna end up in big trouble, which a lot of companies find themselves in. >> Well, and, you know, having worked there, I mean, essentially, if you made your numbers and did so ethically, and if you just kind of followed some of the corporate rules, which we'll talk about, he kind of left you alone. You know, you could, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted, you could stay in any hotel, you really couldn't fly first class, and we'll maybe talk about that-- >> Right. >> But he was a complex man, I mean, he was obviously wealthy, he was a billionaire, he was very generous, but at the same time he was frugal, you know, he drove, you know, a little, a car that was, you know, unremarkable, and we had buy him a car. He flew coach, and I remember one time, I was at a United flight, and I was, I had upgraded, you know, using my miles, and I sat down and right there was Lore McGovern, and we both looked at each other and said right at the same time, "I upgraded!" (laughs) Because Pat never flew up front, but he would always fly with a stack of newspapers in the seat next to him. >> Yeah, well, woe to, you were lucky he wasn't on the plane and spotted you as he was walking past you into coach, because he was not real forgiving when he saw people, people would hide and, you know, try to avoid him at all cost. And, I mean, he was a big man, Pat was 6'3", you know, 250 lbs. at least, built like a linebacker, so he didn't fit into coach that well, and he wasn't flying, you know, the shuttle to New York, he was flyin' to Beijing, he was flyin' to Moscow, he was going all over the world, squeezing himself into these seats. Now, you know, full disclosure, as he got older and had, like, probably 10 million air miles at his disposal, he would upgrade too, occasionally, for those long-haul flights, just 'cause he wanted to be fresh when he would get off the plane. But, yeah, these are legends about Pat that his frugality was just pure legend in the company, he owned this, you know, several versions of that dark blue suit, and that's what you would see him in. He would never deviate from that. And, but, he had his patterns, but he understood the impact those patterns had on his employees and on his customers. >> I wanna get into some of the lessons, because, really, this is what the book is all about, the heart of it. And you mentioned, you know, one, and we're gonna tell from others, but you really gotta stay close to the customer, that was one of the 10 corporate values, and you remember, he used to go to the meetings and he'd sometimes randomly ask people to recite, "What's number eight?" (laughs) And you'd be like, oh, you'd have your cheat sheet there. And so, so, just to give you a sense, this man was an entrepreneur, he started the company in 1964 with a database that he kind of pre-sold, he was kind of the sell, design, build type of mentality, he would pre-sold this thing, and then he started Computerworld in 1967, so it was really only a few years after he launched the company that he started the Computerworld, and other than Data Nation, there was nothing there, huge pent-up demand for that type of publication, and he caught lightning in a bottle, and that's really how he funded, you know, the growth. >> Yeah, oh, no question. Computerworld became, you know, the bible of the industry, it became a cash cow for IDG, you know, but at the time, it's so easy to look in hindsight and say, oh, well, obviously. But when Pat was doing this, one little-known fact is he was an editor at a publication called Computers and Automation that was based in Newton, Massachusetts and he kept that job even after he started IDC, which was the original company in 1964. It was gonna be a research company, and it was doing great, he was seeing the build-up, but it wasn't 'til '67 when he started Computerworld, that he said, "Okay, now this is gonna be a full-time gig for me," and he left the other publication for good. But, you know, he was sorta hedging his bets there for a little while. >> And that's where he really gained respect for what we'll call the 'Chinese Wallet,' the, you know, editorial versus advertising. We're gonna talk about that some more. So I mentioned, 1967, Computerworld. So he launched in 1964, by 1971, he was goin' to Japan, we're gonna talk about the China Stories as well, so, he named the company International Data Corp, where he was at a little spot in Newton, Mass.-- >> Right, right. >> So, he had a vision. You said in your book, you mention, how did this gentleman get it so right for so long? And that really leads to some of the leadership lessons, and one of them in the book was, sort of, have a mission, have a vision, and really, Pat was always talking about information, about information technology, in fact, when Wine for Dummies came out, it kind of created a little friction, that was really off the center. >> Or Wine for Dummies, or Sex for Dummies! >> Yeah, Sex for Dummies, boy, yeah! >> With, that's right, Ruth Westheimer-- >> Dr. Ruth Westheimer. >> But generally speaking, Glenn, he was on that mark, he really didn't deviate from that vision. >> Yeah, no, it was very crucial to the development of the company that he got people to, you know, buy into that mission, because the mission was everything. And he understood, you know, he had the numbers, but he also saw what was happening out there, from the 1960s, when IBM mainframes filled a room, and, you know, only the high priests of data centers could touch them. He had a vision for, you know, what was coming next and he started to understand that there would be many facets to this information about information technology, it wasn't gonna be boring, if anything, it was gonna be the story of our age and he was gonna stick to it and sell it. >> And, you know, timing is everything, but so is, you know, Pat was a workaholic and had an amazing mind, but one of the things I learned from the book, and you said this, Pat Kenealy mentioned it, all American industrial and social revolutions have had a media company linked to them, Crane and automobiles, Penton and energy, McGraw-Hill and aerospace, Annenberg, of course, and TV, and in technology, it was IDG. >> Yeah, he, like I said earlier, he really was a key figure in the development of this industry and it was, you know, one of the key things about that, a lot publications that came and went made the mistake of being platform or, you know, vertical market specific. And if that market changed, and it was inevitably gonna change in high tech, you were done. He never, you know, he never married himself to some specific technology cycle. His idea was the audience was not gonna change, the audience was gonna have to roll with this, so, the company, IDG, would produce publications that got that, you know, Computerworld was actually a little bit late to the PC game, but eventually got into it and we tracked the different cycles, you know, things in tech move in sine waves, they come and go. And Pat never was, you know, flustered by that, he could handle any kind of changes from the mainframes down to the smartphone when it came. And so, that kind of flexibility, and ability to adjust to markets, really was unprecedented in that particular part of the market. >> One of the other lessons in the book, I call it 'nation-building,' and Pat shared with you that, look, that you shared, actually, with your readers, if you wanna do it right, you've gotta be on the ground, you've gotta be there. And the China story is one that I didn't know about how Pat kind of talked his way into China, tell us, give us a little summary of that story. >> Sure, I love that story because it's so Pat. It was 1978, Pat was in Tokyo on a business trip, one of his many business trips, and he was gonna be flying to Moscow for a trade show. And he got a flight that was gonna make a stopover in Beijing, which in those days was called Peking, and was not open to Americans. There were no US and China diplomatic relations then. But Pat had it in mind that he was going to get off that plane in Beijing and see what he could see. So that meant that he had to leave the flight when it landed in Beijing and talk his way through the customs as they were in China at the time with folks in the, wherever, the Quonset hut that served for the airport, speaking no English, and him speaking no Chinese, he somehow convinced these folks to give him a day pass, 'cause he kept saying to them, "I'm only in transit, it's okay!" (laughs) Like, he wasn't coming, you know, to spy on them on them or anything. So here's this massive American businessman in his dark suit, and he somehow gets into downtown Beijing, which at the time was mostly bicycles, very few cars, there were camels walking down the street, they'd come with traders from Mongolia. The people were still wearing the drab outfits from the Mao era, and Pat just spent the whole day wandering around the city, just soaking it in. He was that kind of a world traveler. He loved different cultures, mostly eastern cultures, and he would pop his head into bookstores. And what he saw were people just clamoring to get their hands on anything, a newspaper, a magazine, and it just, it didn't take long for the light bulb to go on and said, this is a market we need to play in. >> He was fascinated with China, I, you know, as an employee and a business P&L manager, I never understood it, I said, you know, the per capita spending on IT in China was like a dollar, you know? >> Right. >> And I remember my lunch with him, my 10-year lunch, he said, "Yeah, but, you know, there's gonna be a huge opportunity there, and yeah, I don't know how we're gonna get the money out, maybe we'll buy a bunch of tea and ship it over, but I'm not worried about that." And, of course, he meets Hugo Shong, which is a huge player in the book, and the home run out of China was, of course, the venture capital, which he started before there was even a stock market, really, to exit in China. >> Right, yeah. No, he was really a visionary, I mean, that word gets tossed around maybe more than it should, but Pat was a bonafide visionary and he saw things in China that were developing that others didn't see, including, for example, his own board, who told him he was crazy because in 1980, he went back to China without telling them and within days he had a meeting with the ministry of technology and set up a joint venture, cost IDG $250,000, and six months later, the first issue of China Computerworld was being published and within a couple of years it was the biggest publication in China. He said, told me at some point that $250,0000 investment turned into $85 million and when he got home, that first trip, the board was furious, they said, "How can you do business with the commies? You're gonna ruin our brand!" And Pat said, "Just, you know, stick with me on this one, you're gonna see." And the venture capital story was just an offshoot, he saw the opportunity in the early '90s, that venture in China could in fact be a huge market, why not help build it? And that's what he did. >> What's your take on, so, IDG sold to, basically, Chinese investors. >> Yeah. >> It's kind of bittersweet, but in the same time, it's symbolic given Pat's love for China and the Chinese people. There's been a little bit of criticism about that, I know that the US government required IDC to spin out its supercomputer division because of concerns there. I'm always teasing Michael Dow that at the next IDG board meeting, those Lenovo numbers, they're gonna look kinda law. (laughs) But what are your, what's your, what are your thoughts on that, in terms of, you know, people criticize China in terms of IP protections, etc. What would Pat have said to that, do you think? >> You know, Pat made 130 trips to China in his life, that's, we calculated at some point that just the air time in planes would have been something like three and a half to four years of his life on planes going to China and back. I think Pat would, today, acknowledge, as he did then, that China has issues, there's not, you can't be that naive. He got that. But he also understood that these were people, at the end of the day, who were thirsty and hungry for information and that they were gonna be a player in the world economy at some point, and that it was crucial for IDG to be at the forefront of that, not just play later, but let's get in early, let's lead the parade. And I think that, you know, some part of him would have been okay with the sale of the company to this conglomerate there, called China Oceanwide. Clearly controversial, I mean, but once Pat died, everyone knew that the company was never gonna be the same with the leader who had been at the helm for 50 years, it was gonna be a tough transition for whoever took over. And I think, you know, it's hard to say, certainly there's criticism of things going on with China. China's gonna be the hot topic page one of the New York Times almost every single day for a long time to come. I think Pat would have said, this was appropriate given my love of China, the kind of return on investment he got from China, I think he would have been okay with it. >> Yeah, and to invoke the Ben Franklin maxim, "Trading partners seldom wage war," and so, you know, I think Pat would have probably looked at it that way, but, huge home run, I mean, I think he was early on into Baidu and Alibaba and Tencent and amazing story. I wanna talk about decentralization because that was always something that was just on our minds as employees of IDG, it was keep the corporate staff lean, have a flat organization, if you had eight, 10, 12 direct reports, that was okay, Pat really meant it when he said, "You're the CEO of your own business!" Whether that business was, you know, IDC, big company, or a manager at IDC, where you might have, you know, done tens of millions of dollars, but you felt like a CEO, you were encouraged to try new things, you were encouraged to fail, and fail fast. Their arch nemesis of IDG was Ziff Davis, they were a command and control, sort of Bill Ziff, CMP to a certain extent was kind of the same way out of Manhasset, totally different philosophies and I think Pat never, ever even came close to wavering from that decentralization philosophy, did he? >> No, no, I mean, I think that the story that he told me that I found fascinating was, he didn't have an epiphany that decentralization would be the mechanism for success, it was more that he had started traveling, and when he'd come back to his office, the memos and requests and papers to sign were stacked up two feet high. And he realized that he was holding up the company because he wasn't there to do this and that at some point, he couldn't do it all, it was gonna be too big for that, and that's when the light came on and said this decentralization concept really makes sense for us, if we're gonna be an international company, which clearly was his mission from the beginning, we have to say the people on the ground in those markets are the people who are gonna make the decisions because we can't make 'em from Boston. And I talked to many people who, were, you know, did a trip to Europe, met the folks in London, met the folks in Munich, and they said to a person, you know, it was so ahead of its time, today it just seems obvious, but in the 1960s, early '70s, it was really not a, you know, a regular leadership tenet in most companies. The command and control that you talked about was the way that you did business. >> And, you know, they both worked, but, you know, from a cultural standpoint, clearly IDG and IDC have had staying power, and he had the three-quarter rule, you talked about it in your book, if you missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you were in trouble. >> Right. >> You know, one quarter, hey, let's talk, two quarters, we maybe make some changes, three quarters, you're gone. >> Right. >> And so, as I said, if you were makin' your numbers, you had wide latitude. One of the things you didn't have latitude on was I'll call it 'pay to play,' you know, crossing that line between editorial and advertising. And Pat would, I remember I was at a meeting one time, I'm sorry to tell these stories, but-- >> That's okay. (laughs) >> But we were at an offsite meeting at a woods meeting and, you know, they give you a exercise, go off and tell us what the customer wants. Bill Laberis, who's the editor-in-chief at Computerworld at the time, said, "Who's the customer?" And Pat said, "That's a great question! To the publisher, it's the advertiser. To you, Bill, and the editorial staff, it's the reader. And both are equally important." And Pat would never allow the editorial to be compromised by the advertiser. >> Yeah, no, he, there was a clear barrier between church and state in that company and he, you know, consistently backed editorial on that issue because, you know, keep in mind when we started then, and I was, you know, a journalist hoping to, you know, change the world, the trade press then was considered, like, a little below the mainstream business press. The trade press had a reputation for being a little too cozy with the advertisers, so, and Pat said early on, "We can't do that, because everything we have, our product is built, the brand is built on integrity. And if the reader doesn't believe that what we're reporting is actually true and factual and unbiased, we're gonna lose to the advertisers in the long run anyway." So he was clear that that had to be the case and time and again, there would be conflict that would come up, it was just, as you just described it, the publishers, the sales guys, they wanted to bring in money, and if it, you know, occasionally, hey, we could nudge the editor of this particular publication, "Take it a little bit easier on this vendor because they're gonna advertise big with us," Pat just would always back the editor and say, "That's not gonna happen." And it caused, you know, friction for sure, but he was unwavering in his support. >> Well, it's interesting because, you know, Macworld, I think, is an interesting case study because there were sort of some backroom dealings and Pat maneuvered to be able to get the Macworld, you know, brand, the license for that. >> Right. >> But it caused friction between Steve Jobs and the writers of Macworld, they would write something that Steve Jobs, who was a control freak, couldn't control! >> Yeah. (laughs) >> And he regretted giving IDG the license. >> Yeah, yeah, he once said that was the worst decision he ever made was to give the license to Pat to, you know, Macworlld was published on the day that Mac was introduced in 1984, that was the deal that they had and it was, what Jobs forgot was how important it was to the development of that product to have a whole magazine devoted to it on day one, and a really good magazine that, you know, a lot of people still lament the glory days of Macworld. But yeah, he was, he and Steve Jobs did not get along, and I think that almost says a lot more about Jobs because Pat pretty much got along with everybody. >> That church and state dynamic seems to be changing, across the industry, I mean, in tech journalism, there aren't any more tech journalists in the United States, I mean, I'm overstating that, but there are far fewer than there were when we were at IDG. You're seeing all kinds of publications and media companies struggling, you know, Kara Swisher, who's the greatest journalist, and Walt Mossberg, in the tech industry, try to make it, you know, on their own, and they couldn't. So, those lines are somewhat blurring, not that Kara Swisher is blurring those lines, she's, you know, I think, very, very solid in that regard, but it seems like the business model is changing. As an observer of the markets, what do you think's happening in the publishing world? >> Well, I, you know, as a journalist, I'm sort of aghast at what's goin' on these days, a lot of my, I've been around a long time, and seeing former colleagues who are no longer in journalism because the jobs just started drying up is, it's a scary prospect, you know, unlike being the enemy of the people, the first amendment is pretty important to the future of the democracy, so to see these, you know, cutbacks and newspapers going out of business is difficult. At the same time, the internet was inevitable and it was going to change that dynamic dramatically, so how does that play out? Well, the problem is, anybody can post anything they want on social media and call it news, and the challenge is to maintain some level of integrity in the kind of reporting that you do, and it's more important now than ever, so I think that, you know, somebody like Pat would be an important figure if he was still around, in trying to keep that going. >> Well, Facebook and Google have cut the heart out of, you know, a lot of the business models of many media companies, and you're seeing sort of a pendulum swing back to nonprofits, which, I understand, speaking of folks back in the mid to early 1900s, nonprofits were the way in which, you know, journalism got funded, you know, maybe it's billionaires buying things like the Washington Post that help fund it, but clearly the model's shifting and it's somewhat unclear, you know, what's happening there. I wanted to talk about another lesson, which, Pat was the head cheerleader. So, I remember, it was kind of just after we started, the Computerworld's 20th anniversary, and they hired the marching band and they walked Pat and Mary Dolaher walked from 5 Speen Street, you know, IDG headquarters, they walked to Computerworld, which was up Old, I guess Old Connecticut Path, or maybe it was-- >> It was actually on Route 30-- >> Route 30 at the time, yeah. And Pat was dressed up as the drum major and Mary as well, (laughs) and he would do crazy things like that, he'd jump out of a plane with IDG is number one again, he'd post a, you know, a flag in Antarctica, IDG is number one again! It was just a, it was an amazing dynamic that he had, always cheering people on. >> Yeah, he was, he was, when he called himself the CEO, the Chief Encouragement Officer, you mentioned earlier the Good News notes. Everyone who worked there, at some point received this 8x10" piece of paper with a rainbow logo on it and it said, "Good News!" And there was a personal note from Pat McGovern, out of the blue, totally unexpected, to thank you and congratulate you on some bit of work, whatever it was, if you were a reporter, some article you wrote, if you were a sales guy, a sale that you made, and people all over the world would get these from him and put them up in their cubicles because it was like a badge of honor to have them, and people, I still have 'em, (laughs) you know, in a folder somewhere. And he was just unrelenting in supporting the people who worked there, and it was, the impact of that is something you can't put a price tag on, it's just, it stays with people for all their lives, people who have left there and gone on to four or five different jobs always think fondly back to the days at IDG and having, knowing that the CEO had your back in that manner. >> The legend of, and the legacy of Patrick J. McGovern is not just in IDG and IDC, which you were interested in in your book, I mean, you weren't at IDC, I was, and I was started when I saw the sort of downturn and then now it's very, very successful company, you know, whatever, $3-400 million, throwin' off a lot of profits, just to decide, I worked for every single CEO at IDC with the exception of Pat McGovern, and now, Kirk Campbell, the current CEO, is moving on Crawford del Prete's moving into the role of president, it's just a matter of time before he gets CEO, so I will, and I hired Crawford-- >> Oh, you did? (laughs) >> So, I've worked for and/or hired every CEO of IDC except for Pat McGovern, so, but, the legacy goes beyond IDG and IDC, great brands. The McGovern Brain Institute, 350 million, is that right? >> That's right. >> He dedicated to studying, you know, the human brain, he and Lore, very much involved. >> Yup. >> Typical of Pat, he wasn't just, "Hey, here's the check," and disappear. He was goin' in, "Hey, I have some ideas"-- >> Oh yeah. >> Talk about that a little. >> Yeah, well, this was a guy who spent his whole life fascinated by the human brain and the impact technology would have on the human brain, so when he had enough money, he and Lore, in 2000, gave a $350 million gift to MIT to create the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. At the time, the largest academic gift ever given to any university. And, as you said, Pat wasn't a guy who was gonna write a check and leave and wave goodbye. Pat was involved from day one. He and Lore would come and sit in day-long seminars listening to researchers talk about about the most esoteric research going on, and he would take notes, and he wasn't a brain scientist, but he wanted to know more, and he would talk to researchers, he would send Good News notes to them, just like he did with IDG, and it had same impact. People said, "This guy is a serious supporter here, he's not just showin' up with a checkbook." Bob Desimone, who's the director of the Brain Institute, just marveled at this guy's energy level, that he would come in and for days, just sit there and listen and take it all in. And it just, it was an indicator of what kind of person he was, this insatiable curiosity to learn more and more about the world. And he wanted his legacy to be this intersection of technology and brain research, he felt that this institute could cure all sorts of brain-related diseases, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. And it would then just make a better future for mankind, and as corny as that might sound, that was really the motivator for Pat McGovern. >> Well, it's funny that you mention the word corny, 'cause a lot of people saw Pat as somewhat corny, but, as you got to know him, you're like, wow, he really means this, he loves his company, the company was his extended family. When Pat met his untimely demise, we held a crowd chat, crowdchat.net/thankspat, and there's a voting mechanism in there, and the number one vote was from Paul Gillen, who posted, "Leo Durocher said that nice guys finish last, Pat McGovern proved that wrong." >> Yeah. >> And I think that's very true and, again, awesome legacy. What number book is this for you? You've written a lot of books. >> This is number 13. >> 13, well, congratulations, lucky 13. >> Thank you. >> The book is Fast Forward-- >> Future Forward. >> I'm sorry, Future Forward! (laughs) Future Forward by Glenn Rifkin. Check out, there's a link in the YouTube down below, check that out and there's some additional information there. Glenn, congratulations on getting the book done, and thanks so much for-- >> Thank you for having me, this is great, really enjoyed it. It's always good to chat with another former IDGer who gets it. (laughs) >> Brought back a lot of memories, so, again, thanks for writing the book. All right, thanks for watching, everybody, we'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. You're watchin' theCube. (electronic music)

>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit, Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live in Bahrain, for exclusive Amazon coverage. It's theCUBE's first time in the region, we're excited to be here as AWS Public Sector Summit and commercial opportunities are expanding Amazon has announced and will be up and running in 2019 with a new region here in Bahrain in the middle east. It will generate a lot of activity, we expect it to create a tsunami of innovation, data information is the new oil. We're here covering it, this is going to be the beginning of more coverage here in the area for theCUBE. And we're meeting new people, and then we've run into some luminaries, CUBE alumnus, and our next guest is a CUBE alumna, John Wood is the CEO of Telos, also been on theCUBE many times as you might know, is an expert in cybersecurity, just an overall knowledgeable and visionary entrepreneur, good to see you thanks for joining us today. >> Thanks John, I really appreciate it. >> So you're part of the entourage with Teresa and the team as she comes in a cross-pollinates Amazon Web Services public sector seven, what she's done in Washington DC and beyond, here in the region, it's going to be a new formula that Bahrain and the people here have recognized. Like we were in a meeting yesterday, where you weren't pounding the table, but you looked very clearly at the Chief Executive Officer who reports to the king and the crown prince and you said, you don't really know yet, what you got, and you're a visionary, so and we've talked about this and so I want to get it out here on camera, this is a big freaking deal. >> It is. >> Can you explain why, and what your vision is and what will happen with Amazon, 'cause you've been a partner of AWS with Telos, you've been very successful, you've seen the moving parts, you've seen the impact of innovation. >> Yup, absolutely. >> What's your thoughts? >> So you know, the shot heard around the world back at the end of 2013 John was when the Central Intelligence Agency made the decision that the cloud was just secure enough for them. And that kind of made everybody around the world stand up and notice. So yesterday, when we were talking with all of the various people around economic development in Bahrain, you know I said the shot heard around the Middle East is that Amazon is located here in Bahrain. I think just like what happened in America, it's going to have a massive impact from a socio-economic point of view here in the Middle East and specifically in Bahrain. >> What are some of the things that you might expect to see, that they got to be ready for here? >> Well first of all, one thing I'll say is a marked difference from America is that the government here and the business environment here all has agreed it's important to move to the cloud. That in and of itself is a big, big difference than America. In America it's been a lot more fragmented and it's taken more time. I think here, I think the government and the industry is seeing the value of the cloud globally, and they're going to be able to move that much faster than even we did in America. >> They built a Formula 1 race track in 14 months, they don't have a lot of the baggage that America has in terms of older systems. I mean, more tech baggage, or tech legacy, older systems, older databases, kind of a clean sheet of paper. >> They have a bit of a clean sheet of paper, but they also do have legacy John. What they've also done though, is they've given themselves a two year time frame to move everything to the cloud. Now that in and of itself, having a beginning, a middle, and an end, is a really good thing because the journey's going to be relatively rapid and I think the uptick economically as a result is going to be rapid as well. >> So one of the things that you were also involved in here with Teresa and the local Bahrain government and entrepreneurs is you were here with General Keith Alexander, who had to leave last night, we had hoped to have him on theCUBE, four star general, head of the NSA, he's seen his shares of data and scale, he had a unique perspective. What are some of the things that you and General Alexander were discussing with the government here? Can you share with appropriate, some of the things you were talking about? >> I think we can apply best practices here, just like we applied back in America. I think the fact that they've gone to a cloud first policy is a really good thing, the next step I think is to find a standard that you can actually look to from a security point of view, 'cause with that standard you can then have a common lexicon. And that common lexicon allows you to share data between and amongst each other that much more quickly. >> You know, one of the things I overheard you over here and I kind of observed this, and I'm just going to throw it out there because we think the same way with theCUBE is that when you have a cloud model, the benefit of the cloud is you can just actually spin up another instance or thing. It's horizontally scalable, generally speaking. So as you run your business Telos with Amazon in the US and other areas, this is a new opportunity for you. It's almost rinse and repeat, just kind of plug in. And cloud gives you that benefit, so this kind of opens up the conversation of opportunities that Amazon will pull with them to Bahrain and the region. Do you agree with that? How do you see this pull that Amazon might have? >> I think what Amazon can do more than really any other cloud organizations is because they've been at it for such a long time, so much longer than the other cloud providers, they can bring best practices to the table, they can bring best technologies to the table, they can bring best partnerships to the table, which allows people to actually know with confidence that if they move to the cloud it's going to work, and it's going to be more secure. >> The other thing I will also point out at the end of that is then that Andy Jassy and Teresa also bring expertise. They'll do work here on behalf of citizens. >> Well absolutely, you know when Amazon makes a commitment to build a region over a 10 year period it's anywhere between a two to three billion dollar financial commitment to the region, so that in and of itself drives economic value into the region. >> So I got to ask you the tough question, which is obviously the one that's the elephant in the room, is instability in the region, potentially, how does digital disruption impact, say Bahrain and Middle East, you got Horizon, you got crypto-currency we know that markets kind of frothy and somewhat unethical in some areas, that's a red flag, but wants to be legitimate, cybersecurity, a big thing. This is your wheelhouse, cybersecurity, these new emerging areas, you got A.I. booming, you got cloud booming, got the notion these emerging tech, cybersecurity's at the center of the action. What does that mean for Amazon? What does that mean for stability in the region? What's the impact? What's your view on cybersecurity, Middle East, Bahrain, Amazon, can you share, can you unpack that? >> So John, that's an incredibly broad question, so thank you. So from my point of view, I can't deal with the political situations, what we can deal with is what we can control. And we know we can help control the security automation orchestration, we know it works. We've seen the most security conscious organization in the world adopt the security. We and Amazon are the security for the agencies cloud and we know that works. As it relates to the political situation I think here the ruling party understands that's an issue and they're working on it, and I can just leave that to them. >> But you're independent of that, you allow the scale piece on Amazon. And what do you hope to do in the region? What are some of your goals as a commercial opportunity with Bahrain announcing this partnership at the highest levels, this community here, young people want to work here. >> So I see it as a huge work force opportunity for everybody, number one. Number two, I think we can find a way to make sure that everybody can feel confident that it's going to work, so they can feel confident they can move their workload to the cloud. People in Kuwait can feel confident, people in Saudi Arabia can feel confident, and again, that confidence builds stability. With stability, with economic stability, there becomes political stability. That's the other point I'll make, is that at the end of the day, if you have the benefit of having the financial stability it helps in a lot of different ways. >> So what's your advice to the folks, if I had the king sitting here and the crown prince, we had a round table, what are some of the things that you would advise them from your experience, kind of looking back on your career and what you've done now knowing that the regions got a cultural and more of a different economic dynamic, what's your advice to the crown prince, the king, and folks trying to figure this out? >> From a cybersecurity perspective, I would want to do something similar, maybe not the same, but something similar to what the United States government did. When the US government decided to adopt a cybersecurity policy, the so called Cybersecurity Executive Order, there were two parts to it John, the first was cloud first which has been done here, and the second was to adopt the NIST Framework, the NIST Framework gave the common lexicon for all the cybersecurity professionals to be able to push their workloads to the cloud and then guys like me, what we do is, we push automation into that framework, which basically means we get out of the way of the mission and we help make the mission happen much more quickly. >> What about training and support? What's your impression of the economic development board, some of the work they're doing? Obviously they have a transition we heard, maybe some of them in a work force not yet mature, but they got programs in place. How do you see that developing? How would you put them on the progress bar vis-a-vis their aspiration? >> I think in general some of the work force issues that they have here are very similar to the work force issues we have in America. You know, in America, often when kids graduate from college there's a gap between what they get in terms of a degree and what we need in terms of a skill set, that kind of happens everywhere. I think that simple programs like apprenticeships; which have been around for a long time, can be very, very effective in terms of narrowing that gap so that when the kids come out we can actually put them to work and they don't have to be re-trained in the work force. I think that's a big opportunity. I also think there's a big opportunity to bring some of the people here into America to teach best practices, and then bring them back, that they can bring those best practices into the environments here, so they can have that work themselves here. >> What's your take on the eco-system, obviously here we heard start-ups are very active but there's a glass ceiling if you will because cloud's not yet here in full throttle, capital markets mechanics have not yet formed, but there's funds of funds they're just putting this in place, your assessment of the entrepreneurial landscape here. >> I think it's a small, but growing landscape. I think a key point to making an entrepreneurial company successful, you know I started the company back in 1991, which is many, many, many, many moons ago, but anyway, what I can remember is I worked so hard, seven days a week, the joke was it was nine to five, 9 am to 5 am, you're not here on Saturday don't bother coming on Sunday. So fundamentally there's a thing you got to do, what is it Ben Franklin used to say? It's about 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. So hard work does help a lot. Not to say that we don't have that culture here, but I think in general-- >> They were hard working here. >> Entrepreneurial is all about making sure you do the work. >> One of my observations, they're hard working here, so I think that's a good sign. >> Absolutely. >> So let's go back and talk about this, your experience, you mentioned 1991, my first start-up was 1997, and so we've seen a few cycles, and as cycles come and go this one seems to be a bigger cycle in the sense of a lot of combining forces going on; you've got cloud scale, the role of data and now A.I. to automate, and honestly traditional stuff is kind of being moved to a whole 'nother operating model. Given that you've seen so many cycles, what have you learned from those cycles that you could apply here if you were an entrepreneur here, you're now going to do some business hopefully here I think with Amazon. And for people in government trying to get out of the way or figure out policy, given your cycle experience, these guys are jumping into a wave that's coming. >> I definitely have a point of view on this. So for years, back in the United States, I would have one customer, I'd go to this customer, and I'd say, hey, this other customer over here, they've done it this way, and this customer would say, I want to do it a different way. And I'm like, well then everybody's going to be out of sync. Well recently the CIA decided to publish a case study that talked about moving to the cloud and why they moved to the cloud. And the reason they published this case study was for something called reciprocity. I think if more governments, if more industries can work together from a standpoint of reciprocity, then we're going to be able to more quickly ascertain the threat, discover what the vulnerability is, and mitigate it. >> What specifically the reciprocity should they be working on? Data transfer, information, what are some of the specifics? >> I think a specific will be the NIST Framework as an example. The NIST Framework is made up of 1100 different controls, which are lots, and lots of different subsets of other controls around the world, whether you're talking about ISO, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, HIPAA, whatever, they're all derivations of a framework which basically is a common lexicon. So for me that's something that is very specific when I think they should consider here. >> So one of the things I wanted to get your thoughts before we end here, is your observations, as you look around here, you're seeing a cultural shift, a woman's on the supreme court in Bahrain, we went to the women's breakfast that Teresa Carlson held yesterday, packed house, they had to kick us out of our table, us guys. >> They did, they did. >> They got to make room for the workshop, great fireside chat with Mary Camarata, head of Analysts and corporate communication for Andy and Teresa, fireside chat, then they had breakouts, we didn't get kicked out, but we were asked to give up the table for the women to do the workshop. This was a robust, packed house. >> Not just packed John, it was also just positive, optimistic, happy, they see a future, they see possibilities, there was a lot of give and take, I didn't see any of the stuff that you read about, and I tell ya, this is my first time in the Middle East, my first time to come to Bahrain, and I'm so happy I've come, I'm so sad it took me almost 55 years to make it happen. >> Yeah, I feel the same way. I feel like there's an opportunity bubbling that's going to be really big and legit, and I love the diversity here, it surprised me. My daughter, 21 years old, asked me, she said, dad can you, what's the women like over there? Because there's a perception around culture, around the role of women. Packed house yesterday for the Women in Tech Breakfast, inspirational speech by Teresa Carlson, great workshop here, you see women forcing function; cultural shift. >> Cultural shift, but also don't believe everything you read in the paper, right John? So we all know that you got to go sometimes to see what things are really like, and I'm really happy I came. It's a bubbling, growing, active, really active, really cool nightlife, really cool skyline very beautiful beaches, it's a great place. >> The ground truth always trumps fake news and innuendo. Of course theCUBE is bringing you all the action, we are here with entrepreneur, visionary, John Wood, CEO of Telos, a big strategic partner with Amazon, part of the cultural sea change with AWS, Amazon Web Services, announcing a region here in Bahrain, in the Middle East. I'm John Furrier your CUBE co-host, you can reach me on twitter @furrier, F-U-R-R-I-E-R, if you want to reach out and ping me on twitter any time. More coverage live here, in Bahrain, in the Middle East after this short break. (futuristic electronic music)

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group this is the cubes cover of wtg transform 2018 happy to welcome to the program the keynote speaker and first time on the program David singer who's the senior vice president and chief operating officer of storage at Dell EMC David great to see you great to see you Stu thanks for having me all right so I liked we talked a lot about transformation and boy there's a lot of transformations going on from the technology to the workforce you know security is top of my night 'm you know let's start there you know what is what is transformation mean in that with the customers that you're talking to these days transformation for our customers is delivering next generation business outcomes really ensuring that they could find a way to to remould their businesses for the digital economy and figure out how to drive tremendous amounts of value and they understand that it all starts with IT and being digital and so it's one of the key things that we hear from our customers as they as they engage with us and look to move forward yeah it's an interesting conversation because there's there's two things that have kind of struck me as a little bit funny lately number one is data is really important and to WoW intelligence is really going to transform all these environments and the reason I think you kind of agree with me we've been talking about these things for decades I mean you know you and I both started back at EMC back similar times when storing was really one of the main things you're doing but of course that data was very important in the eight years since I left EMC boy you know it's not like a storage isn't any less important but you know it's data and it's everywhere and it's distributed so we speak a little bit to you know the value of data to your customers and we'll keep going with that commerce date data is the next asset class you know and for our customers it should be their gold it's it's not how they just manage their business it's actually how they start making money we called ourselves a storage business and we probably did ourselves a disservice they want to engage and they want ensure their data safe and they want to figure out how to monetize it and monetizing it means retaining it moving it keeping it safe and then ensuring that you can inject it into the right applications and get the right the right knowledge and efficiency out of it and what we've seen in a storage industry over 18 years that the technologies keep changing applications have greater and greater demands there's more and more need to consume adjust and analyze this data and we need to keep up and we need to deliver more intelligent infrastructure and storage solutions that can move this data and help us help applications deliver tremendous performance let's talk about the company itself so when I think about Dell you know I think back you know even talk to my parents you know they know who Dell is they'd use Dell computers for many years over your shoulder this Fenway Park you know the club level is the Dell level you know you've got such a broad portfolio and your keynote you kind of put together this do you know comprehensive everything from Dell and Dell EMC and VMware and pivotal and everything but to you know the global companies or small companies what is you know what where does Dell sit in the picture I think I think the the merger has been a major transformation for the company itself we talk we evangelize transformations for other companies were undergoing one ourselves and the transformation we're undergoing is understanding what other companies needs and applying it to ourselves and drinking our own champagne and making it a reality the the brand Association is changing and customers are starting to realize that we can become the essential infrastructure provider and they could look to us to solve a holistic set of their needs as opposed to pinpoint so their needs and make it an easier journey themselves you spent a bunch of time talking about the operating model when we talk about cloud it's you know use the line actually we've used many times you know cloud is not a destination really is an operating model how does that impact the portfolio you know you're helping to put together really the long-term strategy so the first is the operating model is all about simplicity right we need to make infrastructure more simple for our customers and that means re-engaging and re-architecting our software stacks from the ground up to be more nimble more accessible via api's and other automation engines that that will really drive more value and allow IT professionals to spend more time partnering with the business to drive revenue as opposed to problem-solving and punching out bugs David that was what one of the knocks that competition of you know EMC back in the day always had was MC has a broad portfolio and leadership in many positions but simple was never the word to describe the the offerings how does del and LEM see from a storage perspective how will we be looking at that differently you know come a year or two from now and so I think that's a fair point it's a great point simplicity was probably not a great synonym for what we did but what we did was was accumulate a tremendous amount of intellectual property and assets that we've been able to mold and transform and adapt for the future well when the process of doing is making it simpler for customers to consume it and delivering and deploying it in simpler ways to make that to make it easier to choose and implement and what we're in the process doing is take the lessons of the past integrate the technology from the past and drive something that's going to be easier to understand and to drive value alright help connect the dots we're here at one of one of Dell's uh you know larger partners maybe not larger in size but you know very important partner when the Technology Group was a dell partner of the year for a couple of years what is that you know that simplification and you know change in the portfolio mean you know and how's the relationship changing with the channel so you know very fair the the channel community is extremely important to Dell and and we know that we've not made their lives very easy right they have they have sales engineers and sales sales professionals that are trying to deliver solutions and applications for customers and it's hard for them to choose which building blocks or which piece parts to build and by simplifying and putting together better better technologies and better intellectual properties that are easier for them to consume and understand make it easier for them to do their jobs and and our outcomes for their customers right when I focus a little bit on the customers you know what do you see some of the biggest challenges that they're facing in their business you know not not just from a storage standpoint but you know the business side sure well every business including our own is it's a balance of priorities right the customers know that they want to take their business forward they want to drive growth they want to drive profitability and there's so many different opportunities to go after and just how do you prioritize and and and trying to manage those discrete priorities and ideas and initiatives is is not easy and then implementing actions especially with an IT to go solve some of those problems is resource intensive right and so we need to do a better job of thinking about transformation and simplifying our structure to really really alright so you're an Operations guy you've you've got you know so some business background what one of the things I look at in my career is you know boy you know we've looked at the pace of change but you know technology is an enabler for you know how we change operations has been pretty amazing the last last 20 years of wondering if you have some ruminations on that as to you know what you've been seeing in your career and you know especially over the last you know five years or so yeah the the pace is confusing it really is you know at times we feel like we're moving at light speed and other times we feel like we're gonna crawl and I think the interesting aspect is it's it's a journey and every customer is approaching it differently there are some customers that are in the bleeding edge and looking for us to keep them on the bleeding edge and there are other customers that are that are more more steady in their operations and looking to take baby steps as they transform and it's been a really interesting challenge trying to solve and maximize outcomes for both those types of yeah absolutely I'd say it's usually it's it's dizzying and you need to be careful one of my favorite Ben Franklin lines is you know don't confuse activity with with progress because it's easy to chase the new shiny but you know what am I actually doing to drive the business and drive efficiency of what weird and can actually get any value out of the new shiny there are so many buzzwords that we have in our industry right now some of which customers consume can consume really easily and get a tremendous amount of value some that customers just are having a hard time understanding how they actually implement to get value yeah so you know what's the biggest threat for for businesses these days you talk about them going through transformation there there's everybody's concerned about you know - over the overuse term you're gonna be over eyes or Netflix or you know choose your point you know how do you balance I need to transform and move faster but you know I I don't want to be you know chasing my shadow yeah I think I think the person that had the perfect answer to that would be would be amazingly wealthy right now I think you know that's the dichotomy that we're trying to deal with and the industry has dealt with for a very very long time great point you know we talked about it's not always about chasing the technologies what's interesting you in the marketplace these days - I think that the pace of change in the pace of innovation has really kicked up it goes through cycles and right now the new technologies that are getting introduced by a lot of startup communities and and and and ourselves organically has been amazing and I love the innovative spirit that is coming back together as we formed Dell EMC and the new and the new company and the collaboration that we're seeing with the intellectual property across the family of companies delivers really exciting results right last thing I wanted to ask you really about the merger you know personally you've so you've been with you up from the EMC side of things you know there are many similarities and culture but some significant differences between these two cultures well you know what could you share you know so everything changes right I think we learned a long time ago at EMC and there's probably some acronym about change using the EMC letters you need to be able to adapt to change and both cultures we're very very much the same the businesses are very very interesting and I like to think of them and in a let ik metaphor right there are very different flywheels to the paces of the businesses we have we have a portion of our business that is a flier that spills really really fast and very and very transactional and we have another flywheel that is solution oriented and solution driven it drives a different speed and the miracle the mergers we've been able to figure out how to operate both those flywheel in the same ace David singer definitely the customer flywheels keep a lot of things going and the feedback from our users is one of the flywheels that keeps us going here at the cube so btran sure to check out all the content and as always you can reach us hitting us up on the website hit is up on social media and welcome your feedback so thank you so much for watching the Q

>> CUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBe's Ecosystem Partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage. Wait, we're surrounded by green. I've got two gentlemen from Veeam here. No, but we're not at VeeamON. We're at Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando, happy to welcome back to the program Carey Stanton and Rob Emsley. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Ace too. >> All right, yeah, so I was with you guys not too long ago at the VeeamON conference. I had a lot of fun in Chicago, brought back some of the famous popcorn for my family, but we're here in Orlando, so way bigger convention center, 26,000 people. We're all walking a lot, talking a lot about networking in Multi-Cloud and everything there. Tell us a little bit about your experience here at the show and what you've taken. >> Yeah, it's great, thanks, Stu. We have as you may know a tier-one partnership with Cisco. We're a platinum sponsor at this event and we're here all around our relationships with them on their data protection with their hyper-flex and their 32-60 and S2-40 relationships and we continue to see rapid growth in the channel and we have a direct-dedicated team selling with them on a global basis, so here making a lot of new connections across their other business units. >> Rob, I see the Green Veeam booth at almost every show I go to. >> Absolutely. >> How's Cisco different from some of the other ones that we go to? >> Well, one of the the things that Chuck Robins talked about in his keynote yesterday was how they summarize the focus of the company, and there's two specific areas that Veeam works very closely with Cisco on. One is the powering the Multi-Cloud, and unlocking the power of data. Those are two big focuses for us. You remember in Chicago, we're all about Multi-Cloud, On-Premises, Manage Cloud, Software as a Service, the Public Cloud; that's the reality of where data lives, so we're very much in lock-step with Cisco. We've been working with Cisco for several years. We last year became available through their global price list, so we're actually finding that Cisco in the data sensor, especially when you think about conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure, it's an area where we can really compliment what they're doing with their opportunities. >> Yeah, Carey, it's interesting because we go a lot of shows and we're hearing a lot of similar themes. Even I think the last time I'd come to the Cisco Live US show was 2009. Applications and data, it's like, oh, come on, those are just bits running through our pipes. It's not really a big deal. Well, we're here in the DevNet zone. We're talking about how Cisco's been moving up the stacks, how they're enabling companies to build new application, do cool things with wireless and SD-WAN and everything like that. I'm sure you must be seeing big change in a lot of your infrastructure partners that fits, as Rob said, that power of data and where that fits. >> Yeah, we're seeing it across the board and what we like about the relationship we have with Cisco is they look to us as their data availability experts, right? That we go into the data center conversation and they bring us in as their subject-matter experts, and that's where I think they want to expand their footprint in their TEM with their product lines, and whether it's UCS or hyper-flex, and they're bringing us into those discussions because we solve a unique problem that they otherwise wouldn't be able to solve. >> Yeah, Rob, you saw the keynote yesterday. I think we were a little surprised. Diane Green comes walking out there. Cisco of course, big push in Cloud. I've actually interviewed a number of Cisco executives of things like AWS Reinvent and the like. Does the Veeam partnership with Cisco, do you touch on some of the Public Cloud pieces as well as? >> Yeah, very much so. One of the things that Cisco is very focused on is their SOS provider right to market, so that's an area where we've been very focused over the last probably three to four years, building out and enabling often our resellers to become managers providers themselves, but the reality is that you're starting to look at that Public Cloud tie-in, whether it be Microsoft Azure, whether it be AWS or IBM Cloud, so these are really all areas where we can provide an on-ramp to connect any Cisco data center environment and provide a relationship with the Public Cloud, provide that data management level layer. >> Yeah, I think back. Cisco really helped a lot of the channel community mature their market. Went from being the silo network to building data center businesses back eight years ago when we started talking about conversion infrastructure. Today, this week I've interviewed Presidio and WWT. They're talking a lot about how they're helping customers, enabling that Cloud. I'd love to hear your perspectives on the maturation of the channel and how they fit in this multi-cloud world. >> Yeah, I mean, if you look at Veeam, where there are 55,000 channel partners our brand promises to remain a 100% channel-driven company, but having these relationships that are primary Cisco-predominant partners, like WWT, Presidio, ePlus, I think it's just opening up discussions that we otherwise wouldn't have had, and we're seeing 50% of the opportunities that we're closing in the field are Cisco-led opportunities that are being driven from these new channel partners, and so again, I think this is the one plus one equals three story that we talk a lot about, that we're bringing a lot to the table and 50% of the opportunities for them and vice versa for us. >> Yeah, one of the things that we really like about Cisco is their focus on their partner community is extremely high, both from the enablement perspective and the educational perspective. They have a fully resourced partner marketing team, and we've been doing a lot of work with them. One of the things that Cisco has been transitioning to, it sort of fits into your space, is the whole move to marketing in a digital world and the whole need to change the type of content, and this type of content you can think about the video sort of assets becomes so much more important, so we've been working very closely with them to do joint digital marketing. It's very easy sometimes to do joint event-based marketing, but when you start getting into digital, you really have to think outside the box about how you bring two companies together to meet in the digital world, so we've been really doing that to drive joint opportunities, and that's been something that we've really got some some success with from our relationship with Cisco. >> In fact, you were just in Barcelona. >> Yeah, every year they run a marketing summit for their channel partners and ecosystem partners, and we actually won the Cisco marketing innovation award for a digital marketing always on campaign slope, just full of assets for joint digital, for joint Cisco and Veeam customers. >> Congratulations, I did see some of that on some of the social media. Yeah, it's interesting to look at how marketing changes in this new digital world. I ask every CMO I talk to these days is to, "How is digital changing the way things happen?" >> Yeah, and you mentioned our other infrastructure partners and there's no other partner that we've worked with at the size of Cisco that embraced it day one, so they look to Veeam as, "Okay, we're going "to work with Veeam, we're going to go deeper, "we're going to bring them on our global prices," and day one they were, "How can we get intertwined "into what Veeam does extremely well as our digital marketing machine?" And just from the get-go they've just continued to accelerate through that process. >> Yeah, one of the things I know every partner loves when they come to an event like this, there's a lot of customers here. Give us a little insight if you can, either specific examples or give us some of the themes you're hearing from customers at the show. What's top of mind? What're some of the biggest challenges that they're facing today? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what they're looking at doing is from a refresh of legacy backup solutions and replication solutions into modernizing their data center, and so they're looking to Cisco as their experts through the last decade plus, and now that Veeam is tied directly in with Cisco in some of those relationships, so it's from a refresh standpoint, from a modernizing their data center to the hybrid Cloud strategies that it's intertwined. We fit very well into those discussions, and we're seeing our customers come to us in these large ELAs, where Cisco is bringing us in as part of those discussions, so again, where otherwise we would have had a hard time getting into it, their customers are coming and saying, "What is the relevancy? "Should I really be looking at this," and Cisco's backing up those discussions. >> Certainly, to tap down on the data sensor, conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure is top of mind for a lot of the customers that come in by the booth. Certainly, which works well for us, because some of our relationships with our other storage alliance partners, whether it be Pure or NetOut, big partners of Cisco, so rather than one plus one equals three, it's one plus one plus one equals five quite often. We're going together as a group in order to go after opportunities, so that's definitely an area. If you think about conversion, IP Converge, it's always highly virtualized, so that plays very well to where we've built the company from: a big focus on virtual machine availability, but we're just more moving that now to the whole concept of data management across a Multi-Cloud world. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we talk at all the shows is the pace of change and how receptive are customers to making changes. What are you hearing from the customers here? The storage market has long been it's sticky, it's a little bit entrenched, making changes, and networking we used to measure in decades as to you roll this out and then I'll wait for the next major speed bump before we'll do that, and you'll roll that out over years. Today, we think things are moving faster, but we'd love to hear points or counterpoints that you're hearing. >> Well, I think that the customers are looking to Cisco, indirectly to Veeam from removing complexity, and I think what they've seen in the past is they've deployed solutions that have bogged down their process. They look to the Cloud as an agile environment and they look back with their Legacy systems that they know they can't continue, and so from my standpoint, the customers that we talk to consistently is, "Are you gonna be the platform that's gonna allow me "to embrace a hybrid Cloud and to remove the complexity "that I have and to be agile," and so that's constantly what the Veeam messaging is solving, right? Mission critical backup and recovery workloads and doing it at a fraction of the cost and accelerating that Veeam speed. >> Yeah, I mean, if you just take the Legacy backup market, Legacy back up installed base, it seems that the openness to change is greater now than I've ever seen it, and you know I've been playing around in this space for quite a few years, but certainly recently we've found the openness to people to look for something new. Our friends that gotten it always used to say the three things that people worry about, the three Cs: Cost, complexity, and capabilities, and those are still very much top of mind around what causes a customer to say, "Hey, what I've been doing for the last several years "hasn't quite been getting it done for me." I think the big change is that backup as an insurance policy is no longer good enough. I think the ability to leverage your backup infrastructure and the data contained within it is really driving people to think about, that's more of a value to me than simply having an insurance policy. >> Absolutely, backup was never enough. We do backup, I need to restore, but it's about that data. Want to give you the opportunity. Veeam is I think we said kind of a tweener. You're not what I would consider an old company. You've always been a software company, born in the virtualization age, but there's a bunch of newer developer focused and Cloud-native. How does Veeam stay and fight and compete against some of the new ones coming after this multi-billion dollar market? >> Want to take that? >> Yeah, well, I think that we pride ourselves on innovation. We pride ourselves on iterating very quickly, and we pride ourselves on adhering to our NPS score of 73, where there at 300,000 customers, and what we are gonna continue on our path, on what's made us successful, and we know that there's always competition. There's lots of VC money out there, and it's not that we're looking away from what the competition is doing. It's that we believe with our 4000 customers a month, our 133 customers that we close on a daily basis across all segments of SNB, commercial, and enterprise is indicative that our strategy is working. We're not going to stray away. We're just going to look to partners like Cisco and others to expand our target market, but stay true to the solution that we've provided in that virtualization environment. You were at VeeamON. You saw the announcements that we're making to support additional workloads and additional environments in the days to come. >> Yeah, I think our ability to evolve and adapt is second to none, and some of that is just based upon the structure of the company. We're still private, we're still pretty much driving our own growth, and I think that allows us to make decisions quickly and very strategically to allow us to go into the areas that I think people instinctively know what is needed to evolve in this space around supporting multi-Cloud, supporting data as an asset, leveraging it as an asset, and I think that's where we've been fueling, both in an engineering perspective, in a capacity to meet with customers and grow, and that's certainly what's going to I think sustain us as we keep going forward. >> All right, gentlemen, I want to give you a final word as to key takeaways you see here from Cisco Live 2018. >> That we will be here for the duration of the time, and our relationship with Cisco will continue to expand, and that we look forward to meeting everyone at the Veeam booth and walking through our product solutions and meeting the Veeam team and answering any questions they may have, but we're thrilled to be part of the Cisco family, and hopefully, again, in the years to come that we'll just continue to expand our relationship. >> And I'll leave you with an African proverb. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. >> Absolutely. Rob Emsley, Carey Stanton, always a pleasure to catch up with you. I'll leave with the final aphorism of my own, which is, never confuse activity with progress. Ben Franklin, so I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

kind of amazing inspire when I step back and look at what our customers are doing with our technology and you know we have hundreds of technical sessions here where we get in-depth you know as we've always done that historically you know he MC worlds but we're also taking a broader view and saying hey you know what's what's this really all about what's the impact on the world that the most creative of people from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein Ben Franklin but Steve Jobs and Ada Lovelace whoever they may be all love of the humanities and the science they stand at that intersection of sort of liberal arts technology and that's so important in today's this country is a very special country to immigrants if you work hard and if you're willing to apply yourself and I'm a product of that hard work and now as an Indian American now living in California so I feel very fortunate for all that both the country and people who invested in me over the last many decades have helped me see the human progress is indeed possible through technology and this is the best showcase possible and when you can enable human progress which cuts across boundaries of nationality any other kind I think we are the winning streak service dog training program is built to have dogs help veterans in assimilation and help them with daily activities and post-traumatic stress all sorts of different things and they're different those are therapy dogs so those are dogs that will go everywhere with someone and really take care of them it's a beautiful beautiful donation and experience for the veterans to be able to have that [Music]

welcome to Las Vegas everybody watching the cube the leader in live tech coverage my name is Dave Boehne on time student Leena man he with my co-host Keith Townsend I'm Lisa Meredith John Sawyer coverage of Dell technologies world 2018 thanks so much for having us here and thanks for joining us on the Q how great to be here thank you guys for all the great coverage you always do a wonderful job [Music] loads of people here 14,000 in attendance 6500 partners analysts press you name it it's here talking about all things transformation we have this incredible platform that's been built over the last thirty years but now there are all these new enabling technologies that are going to take it much further as super powers are coming together the compute is now big enough the data is now volume is enough that we can do things never possible before obviously a very good couple of years since the Dell EMC merger it's really helped us there companies have come together right and and the and the offerings have come together together in a much more integrated fashion one of the most funny shows I mean obviously it's important for us to set our vision but you see things like the bean bags and sitting out there as a therapy job they're working so to be able to take a break and just spend some time breathing with some animals really really good and it didn't really experience the fun in the solutions Expo I'm a car guy so you know and talking about the way that we're taking plastic trash out of ocean and making art with it topped off as a great DX rail customer we have gold control try to beat the AI and TVs for a goal and it's a very cool demos vector right behind me we have our partner lounge we're hosting over 800 one-on-one meetings bdellium see executives or the partner executives so it's a combination of technical training networking executive meetings obviously product launches and announcements that we're bringing to market the opportunity to really cultivate it work globally in our global partner summit so it's a pretty active week the power of all of our capabilities we're powering up the modern data center the magnitude shift and what this portfolio can now do for our customers it's mind-boggling we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and a business transformation and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies so things like AI IOT blockchain which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value data is the precious metal ISTE it's the crucial asset the whole world is gonna be wired everything is gonna have sensors outside of data center environments that's where all the data is gonna be produced and that's where decisions are going to be made and be all kinds of data if you've got structured data unstructured data and now it's important that we actually get all the disparate data into a format that can now be executed upon the business strategy really is the IT strategy and for that to happen we really have to bring our IT talent up the stack into where it's really enabling the business and that's usually at that application layer makes it more agile removes cost reduces complexity makes the planet more green we think we've got a long way to go in just building a private cloud making the data center if you like a cloud that's part number one freightin number two extending to the hybrid cloud the benefit of the fact that it is hosted in the cloud means that customers don't have anything to deploy and just like your smartphone you get all of the latest upgrades with no effort at all seamless process to scale quickly when you have new hotels coming online for example from a storage administrator perspective you can focus on much more strategic initiatives you don't have to do the day-to-day management you have to worry about what data sending where you don't to worry about how much of the different media types you've put into that array you just deploy it and it manages itself you can focus on more tasks this is the realest first step of actually trying to be truly autonomous storage it took so much time to do it before that I'd have to run my guys ragged for you know two or three weeks I'm like all right stay up overnight make sure at all companies that means value to customers that's money that they're saving directly there's a portfolio effect where customers look across everything that we're doing you say you know I don't really want to deal with 25 little companies but I wouldn't have a bigger relationship with Dell technologies and of course the dirty secret is is that almost all of the cool new apps are some ugly combination of new and old you don't want to have to have some other interface to go to it just has to be a natural extension of what your day-to-day job is you'll get this dashboard kind of help score across the entire environment then you'll see the red yellow green type markings on what to next the isolation piece of the solution is really where the value comes in you can use that for analysis of that data in that cleanroom to be able to detect early on problems that may be happening in your production environment the alternative one one product for everything we've always chosen not to go that path give them the flexibility to change whether it is nvme drives or any kind of SSD drives GPUs FPGAs the relevance of what we are doing has never been greater if they can sustain a degree of focus that allows them to pay down their debt do the financial engineering and Tom Suites our study I want you to take economics out of your decision about whether you want to go to the cloud or not because we can offer that capacity and capability depends a lot around the customer environment what kind of skill sets do they have are they willing to you know help you know go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process obviously Dell UMC services is there to help them you can't have mission-critical all this consolidations without data protection if they're smart enough to figure out where your backups are you're left with no protection so we really needed to isolate and put off network all that critical data we have built into power max the capabilities to do a direct backup from power max to a data domain and that gets you that second protection copy also on a protection storage it's no longer just about protecting the data but also about compliance and visibility it's about governance of the data it's really about management making it available so those are trends in which I think this this industry is not basically evolved over time in comes the Dell technologies world and you see this amazing dizzying array of new things and you're like wow that sounds great how do I do it right train them enable them package it for them I know the guys offer you where you can go in and so classroom kind of sympathy for today and see it in action before you actually purchase and use it we want them to engage in the hundreds of technical sessions that we have but still come away with I wish I could have gone to some more right and and so we we have all those online and and you know for us this is also big ears we're listening and we're learning we're hearing from our customers no I'm a little maybe a little smaller than some of your others but you still treat me like I'm the head you still listen to me I bring you ideas you say this fits so it's very very exciting to have a partner that does that with you do all of your reference Falls see it for yourself I mean I think quite a number of reference calls if people are in the same boat I was you know I'll scream share with them if they want to see our numbers I'll show them this is the opportunity for all of us embrace whether it's in the cube or through the sessions learn adjust because everybody's modernizing everybody needs to transform this is a great opportunity for them to do that with their skill set in their knowledge in the industry if everything you did work perfectly you're not trying enough stuff you need a change agent need a champion most likely at the senior level that's gonna really ride through this journey first three months didn't make a whole lot of progress I was just yelling like a madman to say Weiss it's not getting done and then you have to go back into I have to hire the right people so let's talk a few thing I made changes to the leadership team need more role models you need to get rid of and totally eliminate the harassment and the bullying and the you know old boys kind of club you got to create places where women in and minorities feel like they can be themselves culture plays a huge huge huge role there's just a wealth of enormously talented people now in our company ultimately creating a shared vision and an inspiring vision for what we want to do in the future you either embrace it okay you either stand on the sidelines or you leave the most creative of people from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein Ben Franklin but Steve Jobs all love of the humanities and the science they stand at that intersection of sort of liberal arts technology you've got to interview Ashton Kutcher yeah which was quite amazing he's an unbelievable people don't maybe don't know no he's an investor he's kind of a geek Yeah right even though he's engineer my training please know that when you bring together a diverse group of individuals Jules always get to better answer for your customer you do place your bets on dell technology that's the right partner for you it's gonna it's gonna move you and your company Michael's got the right vision of where this is going he's got the right technology to do it and we've got great team members to help you get there simple predictable profitable right right keep it it's really that simple we need a few more thousand salespeople so if you're if you're really talented you know how to sell stuff you know it come come come join us at Dell technologies work where I earn more salespeople the future as Bob Dickinson said today we can cool all right everybody that's it from Dell technologies world I love you guys it's always great to be on the cube you guys do a fabulous job they go for a live tech coverage and it really has been a lot of fun we appreciate you and your team being here the next year we're gonna go party for your 10 year anniversary the cube love it we want to thank you for watching the cube again Lisa Martin with John Turner I'm Stu Mittleman this is Keith Townsend thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time [Music] [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you buy Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE's Media Production of theCUBE, live here from Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Walter Isaacson to our program. Author, podcaster, I read every biography that you publish. I listen to every podcast, so thank you. So, Walter, this is a conference of geeks, you know? And I say that lovingly, 14 thousand people. They love technology; they love ideas. You have the chance to study and research some of the, you know, most brilliant minds, that we've had the last couple hundred years. Where do you get your inspiration from? >> You know, I love the fact that the most creative of people, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Einstein, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace, whomever they may be, all love the humanities and the science. They stand at that intersection of sort of liberal acts technology, and that's so important in today's world. We can have enormous amounts of data, and the question is, how do you connect humans to it? How do you add the human factor? And so, that's where I get my inspiration, from people who stand at that interaction of humanities and technology. >> Yeah, one of my favorite books of yours is the Innovators. You talked about history, and there's things that we've been looking at or trying. When you talk about forecasting or predicting something, sometimes we have great ideas, but if I take us, you know, decades or longer to get there, any kind of, you know, big inspirations? What do you say to people that work in the tech world, just how they should think about things like that? >> Well, first of all, things happen sometimes slower than you expect, until that inflection point, when they happen faster than you expect. >> It's like going broke, you know? It happens really slow, and then it happens fast. >> I guess we shouldn't say that in Vegas, here where we are for this conference, but I think that the main thing to do is to be one of those people that has an intuitive feel for how humans are going to find a product or service to be transformative to them. And, you know, we didn't know we needed a thousand songs in our pocket till the iPod came along. You know, likewise, we didn't know we needed transistors until somebody invented the transistor radio, and we could take it along with us. So, what turns us on? What makes us human? >> Yeah, so many things out there. You've been not only writing; you're doing podcasts now. What do you think of kind of the state of content? People say sometimes nobody reads anymore. You do hard research, a team of people. What's your thoughts about content these days? >> Well, I think the business model for journalism and production of content has been decimated at times, partly because it's all ad-driven in terms of journalism and, you know, video, and we need to get back to a time when people valued content and are willing to have a direct relationship with the content provider. About 80% of the revenue now for, say, reported or journalistic content does either the Google, Facebook, Instagram, some aggregator, so I think we have to look at the next way of finding micro-payment subscription models that work in addition to the advertising-driven model. >> Yeah, there's so many people sometimes, they look at all of this change, and they get kind of pessimistic. You know, we're going to have the AI apocalypse, or the robots are going to take over. Shows like here we're, that technology is, I say, by definition, are positive about technology. When I read your writings, you seem to have a very positive outcome. >> Oh, I'm definitely optimistic about where technology takes us. You know, I write in the Innovators, begin with Ada Lovelace, who was Lord Byron's daughter. Her father was a lud eyed, you know, defended the followers of Ned Lot, who was smashing the looms of England, thinking that technology would put people out of work. But Ada was somebody who said, "I get it. The punch card's telling those looms how to do patterns could make a calculating machine be able to do numbers, as well as words, as well as pictures." She envisioned the computer, and the notion of technology increases the number of people in the textile industry in England in the 19th century. And the computer has led to so many more jobs than its destroyed, so I think technology will always augment human creativity, not destroy it. >> So, last thing I wanted to ask you, Walter, is, we're here at Dell Technologies World. 34 years ago, Michael Dell started this. And he's a special individual. We've had the opportunity to talk to him, get to know him. I've told people that, you know, inside the company, if you reach out to him, he actually will respond. He seems very special in today's day in age. You've got background with Michael. Tell me, how do you-? >> I think it practically begins with his parents, his late mother and his father, you know, his father's still alive. Care a lot about education; care a lot about creativity. Deeply humane in the sense that they love all of society, human civil discourse, and that's why there's a humanity I see that Michael Dell is able to embed in his products, whether it's a Dell laptop I always use or the new servers, and Dell EMC, which enables people across platforms to say, "How do we collaborate; how do we be creative?" >> All right, well, Walter, I just say thank you so much. A pleasure having you on the program. And you've been watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. Always check out thecube.net for all of our broadcasts, and we also, like Walter, have a podcast. Check it out on iTunes. >> Walter: Thank you, Stu. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)