>> Announcer: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (pleasant music) >> We're back. This is Dave Vellante for our live coverage of MWC '23 SiliconANGLE's wall to wall, four-day coverage. We're here with Greg Manganello, who's from Fuijitsu. He's the global head of network services business unit at the company. And Ryan McMeniman is the director of product management for the open telecom ecosystem. We've been talking about that all week, how this ecosystem has opened up. Ryan's with Dell Technologies. Gents, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Greg, thanks for coming on. Let's hear Fuijitsu's story. We haven't heard much at this event from Fuijitsu. I'm sure you got a big presence, but welcome to theCUBE. Tell us your angle. >> Thanks very much. So Fuijitsu, we're big O-RAN advocates, open radio access network advocates. We're one of the leading founders of that open standard. We're also members of the Open RAN Policy Coalition. I'm a board member there. We're kind of all in on OpenRAN. The reason is it gives operators choices and much more vendor diversity and therefore a lot of innovation when they build out their 5G networks. >> And so as an entry point for Dell as well, I mean obviously you guys make a lot of hay with servers and storage and other sort of hardware, but O-RAN is just this disruptive change to this industry, but it's also compute intensive. So from Dell's perspective, what are the challenges of getting customers to the carriers to adopt O-RAN? How do you de-risk it for them? >> Right, I mean O-RAN really needs to be seen as a choice, right? And that choice comes with building out an ecosystem of partners, right? Working with people like Fuijitsu and others helps us build systems that the carriers can rely upon. Otherwise, it looks like another science experiment, a sandbox, and it's really anything but that. >> So what specifically are you guys doing together? Are you doing integrations, reference architectures engineered systems, all of the above? >> Yeah, so I think it's a little bit of all of the above. So we've announced our cooperation, so the engineering teams are linked, and that we're combining our both sweet spots together from Fuijitsu's virtual CU/DU, and our OpenRAN radios, and Dell's platforms and integration capabilities. And together we're offering a pre-integrated bundle to operators to reduce that risk and kind of help overcome some of the startup obstacles by shrinking the integration cost. >> So you've got Greenfield customers, that's pretty straightforward, white sheet of paper, go, go disrupt. And then there's traditional carriers, got 4G and 5G networks, and sort of hybrid if you will, and this integration there. Where do you see the action now? I presume it's Greenfield today, but isn't it inevitable that the traditional carriers have to go open? >> It is, a couple of different ways that they need to go and they want to go might be power consumption, it might be the cloudification of their network. They're going to have different reasons for doing it. And I think we have to make sure that when we work on collaborations like we do with Fuijitsu, we have to look at all of those vectors. What is it that somebody maybe here in Europe is dealing with high gas prices, high energy prices, in the U.S. or wherever it's expansion. They're going to be different justifications for it. >> Yeah, so power must be an increasing component of the operating expense, with energy costs up, and it's a power hungry environment. So how does OpenRAN solve that problem? >> So that's a great question. So by working together we can really optimize the configurations. So on the Fuijitsu side, our radios are multi-band and highly compact and super energy efficient so that the TCO for the carrier is much, much lower. And then we've also announced on the rApp side power savings, energy savings applications, which are really sophisticated AI enabled apps that can switch off the radio based upon traffic prediction models and we can save the operator 30% on their energy bill. That's a big number. >> And that intelligence that lives in the, does it live in the RIC, is it in the brain? >> In the app right above the RIC, absolutely. >> Okay, so it's a purpose-built app to deal with that. >> It's multi-vendor app, it can sit on anybody's O-RAN system. And one of the beauties of O-RAN is there is that open architecture, so that even if Dell and Fuijitsu only sell part of the, or none of the system, an app can be selected from any vendor including Fuijitsu. So that's one of the benefits of whoever's got the best idea, the best cost performance, the best energy performance, customers can really be enabled to make the choice and continue to make choices, not just way back at RFP time, but throughout their life cycle they can keep making choices. And so that's really meaning that, hey, if we miss the buying cycle then we're closed out for 5 or 10 years. No, it's constantly being reevaluated, and that's really exciting, the whole ecosystem. But what we really want to do is make sure we partner together with key partners, Dell and Fuijitsu, such that the customer, when they do select us they see a bundle, not just every person for themselves. It de-risks it. And we get a lot of that integration headache out of the way before we launch it. >> I think that's what's different. We've been talking about how we've kind of seen this move before, in the nineties we saw the move from the mainframe vertical stack to the horizontal stack. We talked about that, but there are real differences because back then you had, I don't know, five components of the stack and there was no integration, and even converged infrastructure was kind of bolts that brought that together. And then over time it's become engineered systems. When you talk to customers, Ryan, is the conversation today mostly TCO? Is it how to get the reliability and quality of service of traditional stacks? Where's the conversation today? >> Yeah, it's the flip side of choice, which is how do you make sure you have that reliability and that security to ensure that the full stack isn't just integrated, but it lives through that whole life cycle management. What are, if you're bringing in another piece, an rApp or an xApp, how do you actually make sure that it works together as a group? Because if you don't have that kind of assurance how can you actually guarantee that O-RAN in and of itself is going to perform better than a traditional RAN system? So overcoming that barrier requires partnerships and integration activity. That is an investment on the parts of our companies, but also the operators need to look back at us and say, yeah, that work has been done, and I trust as trusted advisors for the operators that that's been done. And then we can go validate it. >> Help our audience understand it. At what point in time do you feel that from a TCO perspective there'll be parity, or in my opinion it doesn't even have to be equal. It has to be close enough. And I don't know what that close enough is because the other benefits of openness, the innovation, so there's that piece of it as the cost piece and then there is the reliability. And I would say the same thing. It's got to be, well, maybe good enough is not good enough in this world, but maybe it is for some use cases. So really my question is around adoption and what are those factors that are going to affect adoption and when can we expect them to be? >> It's a good question, Dave, and what I would say is that the closed RAN vendors are making incremental improvements. And if you think in a snapshot there might be one answer, but if you think in kind of a flow model, a river over time, our O-RAN like-minded people are on a monster innovation curve. I mean the slope of the curve is huge. So in the OpenRAN policy coalition, 60 like-minded companies working together going north, and we're saying that let's bring all the innovation together, so you can say TCO, reliability, but we're bringing the innovation curve of software and integration curve from silicon and integration from system vendors all together to really out-innovate everybody else by working together. So that's the-- >> I like that curve analogy, Greg 'cause okay, you got the ogive or S curve, and you're saying that O-RAN is entering or maybe even before the steep part of the S curve, so you're going to go hyperbolic, whereas the traditional vendors are maybe trying to squeeze a little bit more out of the lemon. >> 1, 2%, and we're making 30% or more quantum leaps at a time every innovation. So what we tell customers is you can measure right now, but if you just do the time-based competition model, as an organization, as a group of us, we're going to be ahead. >> Is it a Moore's law innovation curve or is it actually faster because you've got the combinatorial factors of silicon, certain telco technologies, other integration software. Is it actually steeper than maybe historical Moore's law? >> I think it's steeper. I don't know Ryan's opinion, but I think it's steeper because Moore's law, well-known in silicon, and it's reaching five nanometers and more and more innovations. But now we're talking about AI software and machine learning as well as the system and device vendors. So when all that's combined, what is that? So that's why I think we're at an O-RAN conference today. I'm not sure we're at MWC. >> Well, it's true. It's funny they changed the name from Mobile World Congress and that was never really meant to be a consumer show, but these things change that, right? And so I think it's appropriate MWC because we're seeing really deep enterprise technology now enter, so that's your sweet spot, isn't it? >> It really is. But I think in some ways it's the path to that price performance parity, which we saw in IT a long time ago, making its way into telecom is there, but it doesn't work unless everybody is on board. And that involves players like this and even smaller companies and innovative startups, which we really haven't seen in this space for some time. And we've been having them at the Dell booth all week long. And there's really interesting stuff like Greg said, AI, ML, optimization and efficiency, which is exciting. And that's where O-RAN can also benefit the Industry. >> And as I say, there are other differences to your advantage. You've got engineered systems or you've been through that in enterprise IT, kind of learned how to do that. But you've also got the cloud, public cloud for experimentation, so you can fail cheaply, and you got AI, right, which is, really didn't have AI in the nineties. You had it, but nobody used it. And now you're like, everybody's using ChatGPT. >> Right, but now what's exciting, and the other thing that Ryan and we are working on together is linking our labs together because it's not about the first time system integration and connecting the hoses together, and okay, there it worked, but it's about the ongoing life cycle management of all the updates and upgrades. And by using Dell's OTEL Lab and Fuijitsu's MITC lab and linking them together, now we really have a way of giving operators confidence that as we bring out the new innovations it's battle tested by two organizations. And so two logos coming together and saying, we've looked at it from our different angles and then this is battle tested. There's a lot of value there. >> I think the labs are key. >> But it's interesting, the point there is by tying labs together, there's an acknowledged skills gap as we move into this O-RAN world that operators are looking to us and probably Fuijitsu saying, help our team understand how to thrive in this new environment because we're going from closed systems to open systems where they actually again, have more choice and more ability to be flexible. >> Yeah, if you could take away that plumbing, even though they're good plumbers. All right guys, we got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you much. >> It's great to have you. >> Appreciate it, Dave. >> Okay, keep it right there. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin, and Dave Nicholson will be back from the Fira in Barcelona on theCUBE. Keep it right there. (pleasant music)

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Oh, great. To have you with us here on the cube, as we continue our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, doing it virtually of course, uh, out of a necessity as I'm sure all of you can appreciate we're joined now by Alex Sanchez, who is the head of cross GDC networks and Fujitsu and Fujitsu provider of global it services and solutions. And so their footprint, um, again, is, is around the world. Uh, Alex, thanks for joining us here on the cube. We appreciate your time. And, uh, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your role first off before we jump in and tell us a little bit about Fujitsu for those who might not be familiar with it. >>Thank you very much, Sean. I really appreciate it. Uh, well, uh, first, uh, let me start by providing some background on Fujitsu. We're a global it digital transformation company offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Uh, we exist to keep our customer's business running and we strive to give the best possible experience across every customer touch point. My role as head of cross CDC networks, uh, makes me in charge of standardizing technology networks across our global delivery centers. And for the past couple of years, I have been working on the standardization of our contact center platform across all of our global delivery centers. >>Yeah, yeah. I mean, you mentioned global delivery centers, so let's, let's jump into that. Uh, first off, what are they, um, you know, how have you structured your business in that respect and, um, ultimately what kind of service or a solution are they providing to your customers? >>Absolutely. So our global delivery centers are interconnected, integrated global teams. Uh, we deliver a broad portfolio of standardized services, which includes cybersecurity workplace and much more. We're based out of, uh, eight different key countries. We serve customers in over 100 and uh, different countries and we provide support in over 40 different languages. Uh, we enabled, uh, those CDCs enabled us to consistently and resilient provide services to our customers, uh, 24 seven 365 days of the year. Uh, the service, uh, that we offer, uh, as, uh, for you to global delivery teams are constructed from fully standardized components. Uh, it allows us to, uh, be configured to meet our customer needs and deliver a flawless global consistency services. >>You just, you were just talking about multiple languages, right? You've got to deal with countries, uh, environments, uh, continents, uh, businesses with different needs of, of all, you know, all over the, over the map. If you might say that, um, how do you balance that? Or how do you approach that when you do have so many customers in a wide variety of venues with a wide variety of needs and yet, you know, you want to provide for them that exemplary service that they expect when they come to Fujitsu? >>Uh, well, yes, as I mentioned, uh, we strive to evolve our contact centers so that it meets that global need that global expansion. And we adapt to our customers' needs. Uh, we have our GDCs with teams that are engaged and enabled so that we can provide customers with, uh, the best customer experience we like to help our customers reimagine their employee experience. >>Yeah. You mentioned, uh, you're talking about the contact centers and I know that you're going through this major transformation right now, in terms of, of, uh, how they're operating, um, before we get into that and, and, and jump a little bit deeper into what you've already touched on, what was the problem before, or, you know, there's always a problem, right? We're always trying to solve something, make something better, put a little finer point on that in terms of, of what you were doing before, you know, where were we? >>Well, uh, if we get to this global delivery organization, uh, tries to build trust at every opportunity we aim to deepen our customer relationships by adding a value of mix, uh, of rock, solid delivery, innovation and collaboration. However, some of our previous systems, the net always offer us the functionality and flexibility that we needed to provide a diverse range of, uh, services to our customers and what they required. So that is the basis of our, uh, challenges and, uh, what we were striving to overcome. >>So you've, you've turned AWS, um, uh, again, Amazon connect, I know that, uh, that you've got widely deployed. What was it that, that attracted you to that in terms of finding the value in it, and then what kind of efficiencies and what kinds of improvement in your operations is, is connect providing you >>Well, uh, being able to, uh, think about the art of the possible adding value to our customers. Introducing next generation features, uh, our road with AWS connected started as a two month proof of concept, uh, with over 150 different agents initially supported out of one of those global delivery centers, providing support and services to, uh, one of the regions. So, uh, we started as a way to innovate and provide next generation functionality. >>Yeah. Proof of concept periods are always interesting, aren't they? Because you, you think you're going to find out some thing and, and you might, but then you sometimes find out something else, right. That, that you're like, okay, well, the, uh, there's another application here. There's another service here. There's another layer here. Um, what was it in that period of time for you then, as far as your takeaways that convinced you that, you know, this is right, this is good. We need this. And, and so we're going to jump in. Absolutely. So, >>Uh, I would say that one of those things is that we made marked improvements in our customer experience. We were able to rapidly onboard new agents and provide automated features, such as call recording sentiment analysis, integrated callback features. We were able to help our customers faster while simultaneously improving the service quality. >>Yeah. COVID, uh, has been, um, certainly wreaking havoc in, in every facet of life. Right. Um, no question personally, professionally unit, multiple industries. So how about the impact on your, in your world first off, just from, from COVID-19, uh, how you've had to assess what your client's needs are, how you, what your needs are and, and first off, how you've, how have you balanced that >>In the past year? Yes, well, uh, Fujitsu was able to move, uh, 95% of our contact survey agents to remote work environment, equipped with the tools that they needed to provide, uh, services while remaining safe and productive. Our contact center agents and operations was not able to persist, but actually thrive during the COVID 19 pandemic and provide the much needed support that our customers were expecting and, uh, provided from, from us. How fast >>Was it, you know, I guess it required, what, how quickly did you have to respond? Cause, uh, you know, I mean, this certainly has caught a lot of, or caught a lot of people by surprise back in early March and April. Um, and I assume that that Fujitsu's no different, right? All of a sudden you have, uh, a pandemic on your hands and you've got to move nimbly and quickly. So just talk about that, if you would, that, that quick transformation that you had to make and in terms of responding to the >>Absolutely. So with AWS connect, we were able to automate and simplify the complex contact center flows that we had previously, a product of this is it's ability to now make ad hoc changes in seconds while avoiding multiple vendors to actually get those implemented. One example of this is that for you to help one of our customers move from 4,500 QS to less than 400 by actually doing call tagging attributes, instead of just creating independent flows for each one of those countries. And this mainly because of the needs from the operation to be able to quickly create reports based on countries and languages. Yeah. >>And I know you were involved or, and, and, and I might still be, I'm not sure a beta testing, uh, with some of the new, um, AWS connect features that were announced recently, you know, here at, uh, during re-invent what, what is, um, what's got you going there, you know, what, what, uh, what's caught your attention and what are you excited about seeing I go into practice on a, on a wider basis? >>Well, John, I would to say that introduction of ado list tasks has greatly helped us improve our agent productivity. We were able to see improvements of around 30% and we expect refine our customer experience even further by adding additional AWS integrations. >>Now, you mentioned, mentioned further, there's always a next step, right? Isn't there Alex. I mean, there's always, it's as good as you are now. You can't afford to sit still. I mean, that's the competitive nature of your landscape. So where do you see yourself in, in terms of rollouts in the future, or if there's an area that you think this is the next, uh, challenge for us, uh, in the, in the short term, what would that be? >>Well, that AC very good question for you to provide, uh, contact center services to around 300 diverse customers with agents speaking dozens of different languages. And we are continually looking to improve those services and experience for our customers, as well as our employees. We believe that if our employees are happy and safe and they have the tools that they need to do their work, that would result in an M in a much more improved, uh, service to our customers as such, uh, for you to source invest money, invest in heavily in the of transformation. Some of those elements would include a location agnostic delivery. This would actually allow us to create virtual teams with so employees working from Fujitsu offices while some will continue working from home. This approach will offer, uh, significantly and greater flexibility for our employees, as well as an improved efficiency of our services. >>Uh, the ability to introduce self service and automation by introducing, uh, virtual assistants, uh, robotics, uh, voice recognition, speech to text conversion, sentiment analysis. It will help us reduce the time it takes for agents or staff in repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on the more important, uh, improvement, adding value to our customers. Being able to add, uh, tasks such as technology upgrades, uh, knowledge and data management, uh, that analytics business recommendations from our customers. This would then, uh, tied into what we're doing with improved planning, uh, as situation changes. And definitely COVID has been one example of that. Uh, Fujitsu needs to respond rapidly to ensure that we continue to provide support to all of our customers, uh, wrote a planning system, provides insights recommendations to help us deal with those changes as well as offering a level of flexibility for employees to align with their personal needs. And, uh, finally, and tying this up with those innovations that we're looking into, uh, being able to take those into employee engagement. We're introducing a proof of concept with gamification on some of our contact center, uh, desks to provide employees with a rewarding environment that offers an increase, uh, find while also doing the work reinforcing behaviors and enhancing customer satisfaction while there's certainly, um, a new >>Order, a new world, right? In, in terms of how we have to operate in a business environment. And I think you hit a key word there it's flexibility, right? Ultimately giving your employees the flexibility to still do their jobs in a very productive environment and a safe environment is critical. And it seems like Fujitsu is committed to doing that. So congratulations on that and thank you for the time today. We really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much, Sean. And thank you for the opportunity.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital, brought to you by SUSE. >> Hi, and welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the CUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Happy to welcome to the program Glenn Fitzgerald, he is the Chief Data Officer for Fujitsu Products in Europe, coming to me from across the pond. Ah, Glenn, great to see you, so thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu, thanks, very glad to be here. >> All right, so, first of all, you know, Fujitsu Products Europe, Chief Data Officer, give us a little bit, your role and responsibility inside Fujitsu. >> Of course, the Fujitsu Products Europe is as the name suggests, that part of the Fujitsu Corporation that is dedicated to delivering our products out through the European geography. Fujitsu's product sets runs the full range of ITC components from... tablets to PCs to servers to big storage devices to networks, which is to integrated systems and the software stacks that sit on top of them. It's a wide profile, yeah. And my role has been to be the Chief Technology Officer for that organization for several years. Recently, we have as an organization adopted a new approach to take to the marketplace. And that has necessitated a slight change in my role to one that's more focused on enabling customers to get value out of their data and their data repositories and the correlation of that data to generate business value. A long description, Stu, but I think necessary. >> Yeah, no, super important, Glenn. One thing we've actually been saying for more than a year on the CUBE now, is when you have that discussion of digital transformation, one of the things that differentiates companies before they've gone digital and if they are truly to call themself, you know, have gone through this transformation, is they need to be data-driven, you know. Data needs to be how they're making their decisions. It was definitely a key theme that we heard from SUSE in the keynote. So maybe talk a little bit about how digital transformation and the partnership with SUSE fits into your world. >> Absolutely. So, in terms of the transformation of our business and the changes that we're trying to make to it, as a product organization, traditionally our relationships with our customers is kind of transactional. You know, we sell stuff and they buy stuff. And that relationship with customers is increasingly less viable. It's increasingly challenged. And I think it's challenged by the many things that have happened in the marketplace. It's a sign of a maturing industry. So, you have the Cloud and you have the ISVs who are providing compute power and storage capacity and network capability to our customers in a different way. They're delivering it on the click of a button on an internet browser. Now, that's suitable for some customers in some situations, it isn't suitable for others, but it's definitely here to stay and it's definitely going to change the way the marketplace works, and it has. So we've recognized inside our organization that we need to leverage some of the capabilities that exists inside the Fujitsu services organizations. Fujitsu is a large company. It also has very significant manage services capabilities, we deliver to huge customers all across Europe in terms of German government, British government, a lot of the big manufacturing industrials in Europe and a lot of the travel and insurance financial sectors. So leveraging some of that to take a more consultant-led approach to our marketplace, to our customers. So what we want to do with them is take them through the story of data transformation. And as you said, and I quite agree, the marketplace is becoming increasingly data-driven. You've only got to look at some of the well-known examples, and I'm not going to rehearse them again because everybody's heard them and knows who they are. But, every organization, however large or small, has to derive business advantage and discrimination from its data. Otherwise, they'll go the way of... I hate to say it, the High Street. You can see, in this recent pandemic, the COVID-19 stuff. I don't know what it's like in the US, but absolutely in the UK and in Europe, those retailers that have been able to provide a online presence have survived, and some of them have thrived. And those retailers that haven't been able to provide that presence aren't here anymore. And that's just, it's a current and rather violent example of this change of how to manage data and get the best value out of it. Now, in order to take that to our customers, the Fujitsu Product team needs to change some of its capabilities, it needs to introduce some of those consulting capabilities into its portfolio, which we do. It needs to work with some of our partners to deliver the capabilities either as an installation or a service and SUSE are one of our prime partners in that sense. Both in terms of delivering the computing platform standards, the SUSE Data Hub, I believe it's changed its name now. The SUSE Data Hub as I know it, is core to our offerings in this space. We have just launched in Germany, for example, a manufacturing optimization application which runs off the SUSE infrastructure and uses the SAP database and database management systems above that to deliver things like predictive maintenance and just-in-time parts delivery, and in-factory automated routine of little robots carrying the bits to the right place. And that's an example of something that was led by a consulting activity between Fujitsu and our customer, in this case, a large manufacturer. We recognized during that consultancy that some of the stuff we needed to do to deliver the solution, that would deliver the data-derived business benefit the customer needed, was not in our immediate scope. We got some of our larger partners, SUSE and SAP in this case, involved in it, and they outcome has been happy for everybody. There are some lessons in all that. The Fujitsu is still learning, if I'm frank, like how to price it. When you have consultant-led activities that are generating very great benefit for your client, it's not too great for the supplier to still be charging that just on consultant day-rate. That can lead you to not getting the value out of what you're providing to your client. So there's lessons there. There's lessons in how to interact between ourselves and some of our services partners and clients. And making sure that the optimum route to market is delivered. But that essentially, Stu, is the story. It's a change from a transactional approach to a consultant-led approach, and the generation of a large ecosystem of partners, like SUSE, like SAP, with the capabilities to build stuff with us and deliver business outcomes to clients, not a stack of tin. >> Excellent. So, Glenn, what about kind of emerging requirements, what you're hearing from your customers, you know, AI is an area that we heard quite a bit in the keynote from SUSE. Where do you see that fitting into the entire discussion? Obviously, the key, leverage of data, when you talk about AI. >> Absolutely, and to talk about that in two ways. The first way, the first issue with that is exactly the point you make, Stu, around data. So, AI, which is not artificial and not intelligent, it's just maths. It's statistical mathematics acting upon a large set of data. And if you have a large set of the right data, it can produce fantastic results for the client. But without that data, it is a relatively meaningless exercise. Once that data are assembled, we're beginning to see very significant results produced by the application of new networking, the machine learning. To technology-based, data-derived solutions for our clients, and there are many examples. I'll give you just one or two. We are working with a large financial institution in the city of London that wants to produce, basically, an artificial knowledge base that will perform the task of insurance underwriting. Don't ask me how that works, I'm not a financial guy. But apparently, insurance underwriting is a relatively mechanical task. You have a set of actuarial tables, you have a set of risks, you compare one with the other and produce a premium. We're working with them on that. There is a lot in the manufacturing space, and a surprising amount in healthcare. One of the most personally rewarding examples I've been involved with was the delivery of intelligent heart monitoring to clients with pacemakers. So, the pacemaker is made intelligent and it dumps to a Bluetooth-connected device in the patient's home, and that uploads to an AI-based knowledge system in the Cloud, and the Cloud says, "Sit down, you're going to have a heart attack." And the important element of that is that it says, "Sit down, you're going to have a heart attack" before you've had the heart attack, so you don't have one. A really fantastic example of human-centric interest. So, I think, as a separate subject, AI is largely of academic interest. But as a component of a data-driven solution for a customer, it's rapidly emerging as an important element in our armory, as indeed some other technologies. Like data annealing, and like data analytics, and to a slightly lesser extent at the moment, but I think it will come, blockchain. >> Excellent. So, Glenn, one of the things we always like talking about when we talk to a CDO is how are companies getting along with their data strategy? And I think back four or five years ago when we were first hearing about CDO as a role, it was, you know, the CDO, where do they fit compared to the CIO, what is the changing role of the CIO? So, like you were saying about some of these things, data often can be an afterthought or not necessarily connected, but just as we were saying, data needs to be a critical piece of how companies plan. You gave a great example of medical, obviously. You know, the data can really help transform lives in that environment. So, bring us inside what you're hearing from customers, how are they structuring, and are they really being, I guess, data-driven is one of the terms that I... >> That's a very good question. And the answer is yes to everything. So, one of the most difficult things to estimate, if you're going in to a customer with a client, especially if it's a client that you don't know very well, is exactly what their point of reference is going to be, what their comfort with some of these things is. As a result, we at Fujitsu invested a good deal of effort in going out to our client base and asking them the necessary questions to generate a thing we call the Data Maturity Model. Now the Data Maturity Model is not a new concept, it's a very solid and sound concept, it's been around for a long time. I think what we're trying to do is bring more rigor to that with a very large sample base of our customers. And the model is what you'd expect. There are five levels within it from at Level 1, what is data? To Level 5, where data is continually monitored, continually exploited, and continually developed as part of the business that the organization delivers. So there's a spectrum. In my experience, slightly controversially perhaps, the state of organizations on that Maturity Index varies with geography. And I think it's something to do with acceptance of risk, I think it's something to do with security concerns and liabilities. It's my observation that in the Anglophone world, in England and in the US certainly, there is a higher average awareness of the importance of data and the need to derive business benefit from it than there is, for example, in the Germanophone world, where there are more concerns around security and more regulations around security. They're quite constraining. And as a result, where organizations are a bit more traditional and a bit less aware of the value to be derived from the data. So, people, organizations hit everywhere on this scope, this plane of awareness of data and its potential. But it's definitely the case that the average is always going up. >> Yeah-. >> You only have to look at some of the public stocks, under the stuff in the public domain, to observe that that's happening all the time. >> Yeah, Glenn, I'm curious with the global pandemic happening, are you seeing any impact on that? I've heard some anecdotal data that you talk about some of the companies that are, you know, might not be interested in doing Cloud adoption because they're concerned about security, and all of a sudden realizing they need to take advantage of certain solutions. Or if you look at something like the tracking and tracing, obviously, people are rightfully concerned about personal information and having rights infringed upon. So, what will, in your opinion, are you seeing any early indications as to what this impact will be on how we think about data? >> I think there, again, there are two different dimensions. There's a Darwinian element in the attitudes towards commercial data. As we said right at the start of the conversation, in the current environment, you can see large retailers disappearing at a rate of knots because they haven't been data-aware and data-adopting. That lesson is not lost on other retailers. So, retailers are beginning to do things that in the past they wouldn't have done because of that sort of security concern, but also because of concerns about things like function and performance... and the sheer security that you have in owning your own stuff and therefore being certain of its ownership by you and your retention of the IPR involved. So there is definitely a slackening of that concern and a faster adoption of data exploitation technologies in the commercial sector. In the domestic sector, I think it's very mixed. And again, extremely geography different. In the UK, we have, if I could just talk about my own country for a second, we have this trial of a smartphone COVID-19 tracking app going on on the Isle of Wight. The British media is full to brimming with discussions of the implications of that upon individual liberty, of whether or not it's the nanny state gone mad, of whether or not we should all be not cooperating with it and catching the damn disease anyway because it's a step too far. In Germany, they just implemented it. And everybody went, "Right." (makes click sound) So there are all these different cultural adoptions of these things. But always and forever the trend is upwards. Similar debates around video surveillance technology. So you've got the pressure of security and protecting the public, against intrusion and violation of individual rights. And that debate has got to the stage now where there have been some pilots for threat detection based on video surveillance in the UK that have been stopped. Not so much in Germany. In the US, I don't know, but I guess, you're even more Libertarian than we Brits are, so it's probably more the other way. But with all of these discussions of differences, of culture and nation and area and geography, the trend is definitely upward. So, however the British people resolve that stress, you have to have a tracking app if you want to beat this disease. And that will happen in due course. >> Excellent. Well, Glenn, I'll give you the final takeaway, SUSECON '20, talk about the importance of the Fujitsu and SUSE partnership. >> I think it's a growing part of the base of an ecosystem that's required for all organizations like Fujitsu, like SUSE, that want to reach out and deliver solutions to our customers' business problems, which is after all, what we're here for and what we're all about. Because let's face it. In any sizable organization, the data landscape is unbelievably complicated. You have different formats of data, in RBDs, in unstructured file store, in whatever floats around employees' devices, on social media, for God's sake. Getting all of that out, understanding its relationship to infrastructure, understanding its relation through infrastructure, through application stacks, and service delivery, and then being able to transform that into new applications and new service paradigms that deliver the business benefits that our customers are looking for, is an incredibly complex act. And no one organization is going to be able to do it on its own. So I see the future as one of these growing ecosystems of people that work together some of the time, compete some of the time. Are in what we might call a frenemy relationship. Because we all have to work together to deliver what the customers need. Fujitsu is working with SUSE and our other partners at the forefront of that trying to build economic and commercial and technical partnerships. And I'm sure that will continue through SUSECON '20 and into the future. >> All right, well, Glenn Fitzgerald, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate the updates. >> I've enjoyed it. Thank you for having me. >> All right, much more coverage from SUSECON '20 Digital. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the CUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Keith Townsend, and we are in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are excited to welcome to theCUBE, Ray Russ from Fujitsu, the Senior Director of SAP Solutions. Ray, this is your 21st SAPPHIRE. >> That's correct. >> This event is enormous. There's upwards of 20,000 people here, in Orlando, but what Bill McDermott, their CEO, said in his key note, is they're expecting about a million people to engage. For a software company, that sells an invisible product, that's really incredible. You've been involved, you've been at Fujitsu for a few years, but you've been involved with SAP for a long time. Talk to us about your, kind of the history that you've seen with SAP, and now what you're doing with them at Fujitsu. >> Yeah, so you know I go back 20, 22 years ago as an end-user. Started in the manufacturing space, a company that was implementing SAP for the first time, and then my second end-user, before I got into consulting. I'd seen a lot of change in the companies I worked for and wanted to go and help other companies go through the transition. I really got involved right before Y2K, and if you think about digital transformation, I kind of think of it that way. Digital transformation, when talks about it, is like this new buzz word, but as an SAP expert and as a company, we've been doing digital transformation for years, we just didn't quite call it that, right? To the point where CIO's say, "Stop calling it digital, just tell me how I'm gonna, "fix my business, "or help me become more efficient in my business." So I've seen it change quite a bit. One of the, you know, some of the big things that have changed now is technology that's allowing companies to actually get out outside their four walls, and extend that enterprise, to supply chains, or assets. So that's something that we focus on at Fujitsu. You know, my background has been in manufacturing, and while Fujitsu focused on a lot of different industries, a big part of our business is in the manufacturing space. We're a manufacturer, we run SAP in our own plants, as well as 84% of our customers globally are in the manufacturing space. So we work very closely with companies in this particular space, helping them understand the journey for S/4HANA, what does that mean for them? Would there be operational efficiency? But also extended beyond their enterprise. Some of the challenges that we see with companies right now is that over the years, they've continued to upgrade their SAP systems. My first implementation was 3.1I, I believe, and now it's ECC 6.0, before S/4HANA. They've continued to upgrade, and maybe not take advantage of new functionality, and the new version of SAP, the enhancement packs, and that. So they've kinda still got some custom code going on, and now they are asking SAP, and partners like us, okay, S/4HANA, we really wanna see the value, not just an IT business case, but what is the business to the company's and organization's strategic goals. So part of our job, and part of our role is to go and help these companies understand the business value, whether it be reduction in closing the books, or overall equipment effectiveness in their plant, right? You see, those overall outcomes to the business and help them define the business case, and when the move to S/4HANA would come. The other area of expertise for us, Industrial IoT. We've been doing this, we've been really one of the global leaders in SAP, in what they call digital manufacturing, which is now part of the Leonardo family. We've been doing Leonardo IoT for years, we just, no one called it that, okay, right? (laughs) And that's one of the things we're showcasing here. We work very closely with SAP's Leonardo team, that's in the digital manufacturing space. Some of the solutions customers might know is MII or ME. We're doing co development with our customers, I'm sorry with SAP, as well as our customers as well, in innovation projects, and seeing what they can get out of Industrial IoT for their projects. We were here, at the Leonardo event on Monday. Some of the things we're showcasing in our booth this week, and talking to customers about, is something we call our Smart Factory. Many times we've seen IT-led IoT projects, whether it be a shop-floor application, or something at a plant-level, and I said it last year, I spoke in SAPPHIRE last year, and I said it, I go, "I hear from CIOs all the time, "If we're going to fail, fail fast." And I really believe now that, why fail at all? And actually, talking to Gartner this week, as well, he said the same thing, C-level executives don't wanna hear that anymore. They wanna understand the roadmap, and there was this concept of throwing a project to a developer, having them develop something without the business, and then taking that down to a plant, or something to a user, they were like, this is not exactly what we wanted, we don't see the business outcome. So what we do now in our framework is actually help these companies build their long-term roadmaps. So going in and talking to the C-level executives in the business side and saying, what are your expected outcomes? Let's start with the outcome, not the technology, right? Whether it be reduction of labor, improve quality, again, overall equipment effectiveness, and help them understand what their strategic goals are, and then work with the business units, and the users as well to help define what their needs are, at the plant level or at the corporate level. And part of our methodology and approach is build a maturity model, where they sit at that time, and then also using a result chain process to actually build in every initiative or IoT project, with the business cases, or where is the real value, right? And then making sure there's outcome based approach to this, and build that long-term roadmap. >> So yesterday on stage, Bill McDermott talked about the value of augmenting people with technology, but the importance of process. So Fujitsu, obviously, big manufacturing and operations, outside of servers and IT equipment, there's always been this battle, traditionally, between what we call OT, traditional manufacturing operations, and IT. Obviously, as part of this transformation, organizations need to go through CIOs, plant managers, that traditional line of business has to have this new way of working together. Can you shed light on how that's changed within Fujitsu, and then with customers? >> You hit it right on the head, and IT-OT integration has been a challenge for a lot of companies over the years. In fact, I think one of the biggest challenges CIOs have had with shadow IT is at the plant level, right? Because maybe the IoT projects weren't being rolled out fast enough as corporate was trying to focus on the ERP application. I think the plants didn't think of SAP as an OT-type application. >> And so there are a lot of challenges, next thing you know you had major companies, with multiples plants, having multiple different applications, but none of them rolled up, so a COO could actually see the operations of all of his plants, right? With this, some of the acquisitions SAP's done and some of the development they've done, and the advances in IoT, now when I talked about some of those problems with the CIOs, trying to, failing fast, what we do is go and work with these companies, and actually go down to the plant level and work with them. So we talk to them, what you are your business process like? When you got a developer up in corporate, trying to design something for a plant operator, or a plant manager and doesn't know the process, you're never gonna give them what they need, or what they want. >> You can't automate a process that doesn't exist. >> Exactly, exactly. So working with them, we helped define what those processes are and then actually build applications that fits their needs. Whether it be condition-based maintenance applications, which you need to do before you can do predictive analytics. Some of the innovative things we're doing, and we're showing today, are we've augmented a HoloLens, into the process where, for example, even in our own plant, down at Richardson, Texas, we make network communication equipment, which is a complex assembly, and an operator has to look at a manual sheet, and actually look at the numbers and figure out what slot it goes in. With the HoloLens augmented reality, I can see a digital overlay, and pick up a part and plug it right in, it tells them, and we've been able to reduce cycle time on that assembly by 42%. So, I mean, that's huge. >> That is huge. So you mentioned business outcomes a number of times, and you're talking to the C-Suite, and the CDO who needs to drive digital transformation, and cultural change, and the CMO who needs technology to drive marketing and align it to sales. Give us an example of one that you think really articulates what Fujitsu and SAP are delivering, that's impacting a customer's business, whether it's developing a new product, increasing revenue, increasing profits. >> So good point. So a good example of one we've just done recently, and I actually spoke on this recently, the four major outcomes this customer is looking for in this roadmap was reduction in labor hours, right? Reduction of machine time, right? The big two areas for them was improvement in quality. So, by being able to monitor and get real time information, on our application for the plant, we're getting information to plant managers real time, it's not the next shift or the next day, right? We were able to actually improve quality in a lot of our customers' plants by anywhere between 30 to 40%. And then customer satisfaction is huge as well. You mentioned customer again. One of the things we're doing too, now, is actually being able to, servitization is kind of a new buzzword, it's been around for awhile actually, right, but as companies are looking, in the manufacturing area, how do we create new routes to market, right? There's a customer of ours, we actually put sensors in some of their high-end assets, they sell to their customers as well, we're able to get that information now, and actually help them monitor their equipment. And we can actually help them, then, reduce their customers' maintenance costs and so forth, and that's adding value to not only our customer, but our customer's customer. Those are some of the big things we're seeing in manufacture right now. >> So, talk about the value of partnerships, especially with a company like, we're in a NetApp booth, so NetApp would be a great example. When we're talking edge, which is where all IoT data is happening, industrial data happens at the edge, core, where some of that data needs to be processed, and then back to cloud. How does Fujitsu partner with SAP, NetApp, the customer, to bring value from all three of those end-points? >> You got it, and you know, it's interesting, over the years, somebody asked me the other day if I ever worked, I never worked for SAP, but I've been in the ecosystem forever. I get accused, if you caught me I'd bleed blue, and I've found over the years is that every company is realizing they can't do it all. You gotta do what you do well, right? And so, SAP realizes that we work, and NetApp's been a strong partner of ours for a long time, right? So you know, I talk about Smart Factory framework, one of the things we try to do when we go in is actually look at the business outcomes and then the domain areas, line of business we're gonna focus on and that, but then we look at the technology. And if it's technology that's not our core competency, we want to make sure we bring in the right partner. NetApp's one of those partner, SAP is one of those partners, and we have a group of partners that we bring in, to make sure we're bringing the best solution to our customer, right? If we can't do it well, then we're gonna make sure we work with a partner that has strength in that area. >> I may expect that choice, that, flexibility, right? That word is used, flexibility, agility, at every, you can't go to a trade show without hearing those at least 50 times each, but it's really the customers that are driving that, and their needs. We've heard a lot of that in the last day and a half that we've been here, a lot of that value articulated through the customer, as well as the importance, and it sounds like SAP does this well, of listening to the customer. What are you needing that we're not doing? Who should we be partnering with, to be able to deliver this solution that you need, to your point, that's going to drive these business outcomes, because that's where the conversation, this day and age, needs to be. >> Exactly, yep. >> Well Russ, Ray. Ray Russ. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing what you're doing with Fujitsu. Fujitsu and SAP have been partners for 40 years, you've got 8,000 plus customer and counting, and I imagine that you're going to carry the momentum forward that you're feeling here at SAPPHIRE, and your 22nd SAPPHIRE next year. >> Absolutely, I appreciate it. Have a great show guys, thank you very much. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW, in the NetApp booth in Orlando. Lisa Martin, Keith Townsend, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We're in Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. We're in the NetApp booth, and we are now talking to Wolfgang Hopfes, the Head of the SAP Business EMEIA for Fujitsu. Wolfgang, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Great to meet you. So Fujitsu and SAP have been partners, global partners in technology in services and hosting for over 40 years. Fujitsu runs SAP, SAP runs Fujitsu. You guys have about 8,000 joint customers worldwide. We are at an enormous event. This is not just 20-plus thousand people, but this event location is about 16 American football fields. >> Really? >> It's huge. Tell us about what's new with Fujitsu and SAP. What excites you about this longstanding partnership? >> Number one, we are building, or we are trying to build additional business on our strong foundation, which has been growing over 40 years. So we are coming from very early days, where we were named Fujitsu and transformed several times into that. Nevertheless, the customer requirements to a company like us are kind of stay the same and stable. Also, everybody's evolving. So what we are trying to do is, we are trying to accompany our customers in a way where their customer requirements transform quicker than they are able to react, where all the technology is filling in quicker than we can expect, software technologies, artificial intelligence, and we try to be a company that helps the customer managing all these complexities in a really powerful IT world. >> So, let's talk about that from a practical sense. Fujitsu, if the average would think, "Oh, Fujitsu, servers; NetApp, storage; "SAP, software; we understand your relationship." But the relationship is much more complex than that. Fujitsu not only provides the physical infrastructure, but you guys offer services as well. >> What are some of the services that you offer? How does that feed back to the infrastructure? >> So general, and this is really something that at the moment we are trying to fundamentally change, because we are coming this is based on history from a strong technology foundation, yeah? Over the time, we added some system integration and consulting capabilities and skills across Europe, and this is what we are trying to change at the moment. So we tried to make out of at least two to three distinct business areas. We tried to glue them together and start thinking from a customer perspective. So because the customer no longer buys technology, the customer buys the functionality. And look maybe 20 years back. Maybe it's a little bit longer, but when I was young, when I bought my car, I bought a car, and then I started to integrate different things: a stereo, speaker systems, whatsoever kind of fancy things. And you did it by your own. Today, you order a car in a completely different way. You have a configuration tool at your manufacturer of choice, and you say, "I wanna have leather seats, seat heater, "whatsoever kind of things," and then you click, and you get the car which is perfectly designed for you in a different way of standards. And this is exactly my vision of what I wanna achieve in the IT world. So I wanna make the complexity and the technology consumable for the business units and not for IT guys. So that means that we glue together our services capabilities, our technology capabilities, to provide the customer an SAP system for his future needs. That will include all these fancy stuff, like artificial intelligence, blockchain, analytics, big data, all these kind of things are coming together. And we heard an announcement today from SAP, the HANA database management suite, which is, my understanding so far, kind of an umbrella kind of thing gluing different functional building blocks together. And you need more integrating, technology integration, application integration, capabilities in your company, to make your customers landscape-run, and this is what we are trying to achieve. >> So there's two similar, I think, adjacencies to your example. The first, you know, when I got my first car a little bit ago, five years ago I just got my license five years ago. You know, I'm so young. I'd have those challenges. I'd buy a stereo or I'll buy a after-market something to improve or customize my car. However, when it was time to upgrade or do maintenance, I'd take it into the shop, and they'll look at this thing and say, "Oh, it's not standard. "We can't fix it, "because you've modified it in a way that breaks it." One of the challenges with SAP is that customers in the past modified the solution to fit their needs. One of the challenges with SAP and infrastructure in general is that it's very bespoke, and I've designed a server, storage, and compute model that was very bespoke to my business. Talk about how Fujitsu is helping customers, through the relationship with SAP, deal with this modernization of their datasets. >> So there are a couple of different aspects in the whole thing. The first one is, so when we're talking about NetApp and Fujitsu, so, the two companies sat together maybe a year ago, maybe a little bit longer, and came up with the concept that is called NFLEX, which is an integrated system that reduces already this complexity, because it glues the compute and the storage power together. Also, some networking kind of things. And this gives the customer already a ready-to-run platform just from a technical point of view. So if you use this building block and find different and we are working on that on the application side, different building blocks And we're really we can deliver the whole stack that is, the foundation is built on Fujitsu and NetApp compute and storage power. So we are combining the different technology worlds with the special needs for our customers. This is what we are doing. >> So along those lines, I just read that Fujitsu was named the Competitive IT Strategy Company for 2018. So I'm curious, what is it that Fujitsu is driving towards in 2018 to deliver this competitive IT strategy, like what you just talked about. How does that give you a competitive edge? >> Yeah. So first of all, we have and this is based in our headquarters in Japan. We have really a lot of things to talk about when it comes to artificial intelligence, deep learning, blockchain and big data. So the company is investing heavily in these things. And this is what we are trying to tie together, because this gives us a uniqueness in the market. These are elements that everybody needs for the digital transformation. And today, you often hear some sentence like, "It's running on a platform." "It's running on a SAP platform." The reality is that about 90% of today's S/4HANA customers are still running on premise. So we see a move into cloud environments. We see a move into hybrid or multi-cloud engagements in customers, and this is exactly When we just look onto the application or this digital side of the business, we forget that the customer has a business and a technology foundation, too. And this is where we are taking care of. And this gives us this advantage where we think this is needed from the customer. >> So, talking about customer experiences, customer relationships, what are some of the key considerations as customers look at Fujitsu? I will call this infrastructure is Fujitsu's wheelhouse. >> Yeah. >> What are some of the key differentiators customers need to look at as they examine potential infrastructure solutions? >> You need to differentiate and this brings me back to my car comparison. If you wanna have just building blocks, and it's the customer's responsibility to, number one, get them to run, and number two, operate them over a certain period of time with a service level. So within Fujitsu, we are prepackaging and we are taking care of the customer. So, first of all, we are not delivering components. We are delivering an up-and-running platform. And secondly, we are taking the risk away from the customer. So that means we give service levels, we give maintenance, we offer managed services so that the customer can really focus on their business instead of wasting energy on his IT systems, because this is what we are good at, and this is what we are offering to the customer. So this is a really big difference. We are providing a ready-to-run system, and we are taking care on the maintenance, regardless of what components are in the system. So we are also taking care, if we put on NetApp storage and the Fujitsu server together, Fujitsu is taking care on the maintenance issues. Whenever something may go wrong with the system, it's one face to the customer. And this give us a very strong position. >> So for that managing servers, how deep does that stack go? I mean, one of the appeals to customers when it comes to cloud is that, you know what, all the way, to some cases, BASIS is handled by someone else. I'm just laying my application. I'm installing my application. I'm making the modifications that SAP kind of says, "These are the guardrails we'll make." And from every other system, you can count on consistently from SAP platform the SAP platform. How far does Fujitsu go in managing service for SAP? >> So we are offering many services, starting technology foundation, starting going into SAP BASIS, going into the complete application. So we are offering the complete stack also on the managed services side. The customer can start with an easy, just managing his hardware, managing his platform, managing his whole system. So the whole landscape can be under contract of Fujitsu. And it's just a consumption model for the customer. Risk-free, that's all what he needs to take care of. So we are really taking based on customer needs, requirements, and desires, we are taking the risk on the Fujitsu side that the customer has an up-and-running SAP landscape. >> So one of the big challenges that enterprises face when it comes to SAP in general and it's not just SAP, it's all big enterprise apps. On the stage floor, Bill McDermott said this morning and I was taken aback, I don't know if this is, in my experience, it hasn't been quite the experience that he had a customer from discussion to implementation to all business processes, six weeks to implement S/4. That was a bit of a dream. >> Absolutely. >> Not typical of the experience, but even, let's say, a lot less complex than just raising a developing environment, where customers just want to experiment, they wanna fail fast, they wanna take a copy of production, put it into development, create an application, see if it works. How does Fujitsu help speed agility of customers who just simply wanna get up a faster-running development environment? >> So, in this case, we'd definitely recommend. So these are use cases where we would recommend going into a cloud-like environment. So, easy. In an Amazon or other world, you get one-terabyte HANA system within 24 hours later. So you just need a credit card; that's all you need. The interesting part starts when you exactly go through this exercise, and did your experience, and then you wanna take whatever you experienced back into your production system, because then, the complexity for the customer starts. Because what you get in these hyperscaler clouds isn't platform. But you're not getting service to get your results back onto your production system. And this is where are taking care on. So we are going beyond this "just a platform" or "just a device" or "just a server," because the agility to get a platform is not necessary. You can have this everywhere. The luxury to get your results, your data, back and forth from your production system, make a copy, move them, transform them into an Amazon and back again, after you've made your four-weeks development cycle, that's something where the value for our customer is in. So sometimes, it's not only about the speed and the time and the agility. Sometimes it's about the completeness of getting the whole thing back again so that you can use your results, use your experience that you made over this short period of time, and bring it into your production system. That's a key message. >> Yeah, well I'm glad you answered I think that's legitimately how customers look at it. The cloud is for a short burst, I need to get it up and ready and quick. Steady state, SAP HANA, SAP in the cloud, and especially hyperscaler specifically, probably doesn't make any sense because those are known steady workloads that are probably best suited for the private data center. >> Not only that, so it's about the stability. So my experiences in talking to customers and I know at least two, and both are in the Middle East. Two customers who decided to go out of the cloud again because of, it does not make sense for them. So cloud is especially for this use case, try something, start something, four weeks, collapse it and do something else again. The important part is, normally customers wanna be sure of where their data is. This is a big issue at these times, especially GDPR, especially in Europe. So I've seen customers asking me somewhere in Russia or the Middle East, "Can you ensure that my data "is stored in Western Europe? "Or, even better, in Germany?" So, yes we can, with our concept. And most of these customers are likely to wanna have control over their production systems. So the core, where the customers' data are located, they wanna have this somewhere where they can go and feel and touch it. So this is important for them. Everything else can be in the cloud. So that means two-third of today's SAP landscapes have the ability to be moved in a cloud. But the stable core, which is S/4HANA core business, should be somewhere where the customer can get feel it again. >> Get their hands on it. Wolfgang, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what's new with Fujitsu and SAP, and we appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. >> We wanna thank you for watching theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend from Orlando at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Fira in Barcelona, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23, day one of that coverage. We have four days of wall-to-wall action going on, the place is going crazy. I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Today's ecosystem day, and we're really excited to have Manish Singh who's the CTO of the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell Technologies. He's joined by Doug Wolf who's the head of strategy for the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell. Gents, welcome. What a show. I mean really the first major MWC or used to be Mobile World Congress since you guys have launched your telecom business, you kind of did that sort of in the Covid transition, but really exciting, obviously a huge, huge venue to match the huge market. So Manish, how did you guys get into this? What did you see? What was the overall thinking to get Dell into this business? >> Manish: Yeah, well, I mean just to start with you know, if you look at the telecom ecosystem today, the service providers in particular, they are looking for network transformation, driving more disaggregation into their network so that they can get better utilization of the infrastructure, but then also get more agility, more cloud native characteristics onto their, for their networks in particular. And then further on, it's important for them to really start to accelerate the pace of innovation on the networks itself, to start more supply chain diversity, that's one of the challenges that they've been having. And so there've been all these market forces that have been really getting these service providers to really start to transform the way they have built the infrastructure in the past, which was legacy monolithic architectures to more cloud native disaggregated. And from a Dell perspective, you know, that really gives us the permission to play, to really, given all the expertise on the work we have done in the IT with all the IT transformations to leverage all that expertise and bring that to the service providers and really help them in accelerating their network transformation. So that's where the journey started. We've been obviously ever since then working on expanding the product portfolio on our compute platforms to bring Teleco great compute platforms with more capabilities than we can talk about that. But then working with partners and building the ecosystem to again create this disaggregated and open ecosystem that will be more cloud native and really meet the objective that the service providers are after. >> Dave Vellante: Great, thank you. So, Doug the strategy obviously is to attack this market, as Manish said, from an open standpoint, that's sort of new territory. It's like a little bit like the wild, wild west. So maybe you could double click on what Manish was saying from a, from a strategy standpoint, yes, the Telecos need to be more flexible, they need to be more open, but they also need this reliability piece. So talk about that from a strategy standpoint of what you guys saw. >> Doug: Yeah, absolutely. As Manish mentioned, you know, Dell getting into open systems isn't something new. You know, Dell has been kind of playing in that world for years and years, but the opportunity in Telecom that came was opening of the RAN, the core network, the edge, all of these with 5G really created a wide opening for us. So we started developing products and solutions, you know, built our first Telecom grade servers for open RAN over the last year, we'll talk about those at the show. But you know, as, as Manish mentioned, an open ecosystem is new to Telecom. I've been in the Telecom business along with Manish for, you know, 25 plus years and this is a new thing that they're embarking on. So started with virtualization about five, six years ago, and now moving to cloud native architectures on the core, suddenly there's this need to have multiple parties partner really well, share specifications, and put that together for an operator to consume. And I think that's just the start of really where all the challenges are and the opportunities that we see. >> Where are we in this transition cycle? When the average consumer hears 5G, feels like it's been around for a long time because it was hyped beforehand. >> Doug: Yeah. >> If you're talking about moving to an open infrastructure model from a proprietary closed model, when is the opportunity for Dell to become part of that? Is it, are there specific sites that have already transitioned to 5G, therefore they've either made the decision to be open or not? Or are there places where the 5G transition has taken place, and they might then make a transition to open brand with 5G? Where, where are we in that cycle? What does the opportunity look like? >> I'll kind of take it from the typology of the operator, and I'm sure Manish will build on this, but if I look back on the core, started to get virtualized you know, back around 2015-16 with some of the lead operators like AT&T et cetera. So Dell has been partnering with those operators for some years. So it really, it's happening on the core, but it's moving with 5G to more of a cloud-like architecture, number one. And number two, they're going beyond just virtualizing the network. You know, they previously had used OpenStack and most of them are migrating to more of a cloud native architecture that Manish mentioned. And that is a bit different in terms of there's more software vendors in that ecosystem because the software is disaggregated also. So Dell's been playing in the core for a number of years, but we brought out new solutions we've announced at the show for the core. And the parts that are really starting that transition of maybe where the core was back in 2015 is on the RAN and on the edge in particular. >> Because NFV kind of predated the ascendancy of cloud. >> Exactly, yeah. >> Right, so it really didn't have the impact that people had hoped. And there's some, when you look back, 'cause it's not same wine, new bottle as the open systems movement, there are a lot of similarities but you know, you mentioned cloud, and cloud native, you really didn't have, back in the nineties, true engineered systems. You didn't really have AI that, you know, to speak of at the sort of volume of the data that we have. So Manish, from a CTO's perspective, how are you attacking some of those differences in bringing that to market? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean, I think you touched on some very important points there. So first of all, the duck's point, a lot of this transformation started in the core, right? And as the technology evolution progress, the opportunities opened up. It has now come into the edge and the radio access network as well, in particular with open RAN. And so when we talk about the disaggregation of the infrastructure from the software itself and an open ecosystem, this now starts to create the opportunity to accelerate innovation. And I really want to pick up on the point that you'd said on AI, for example. AI and machine learning bring a whole new set of capabilities and opportunities for these service providers to drive better optimization, better performance, better sustainability and energy efficiency on their infrastructure, on and on and on. But to really tap into these technologies, they really need to open that up to third parties implementation solutions that are coming up. And again, the end objective remains to accelerate that innovation. Now that said, all these things need to be brought together, right? And delivered and deployed in the network without any degradation in the KPIs and actually improving the performance on different vectors, right? So this is what the current state of play is. And with this aggregation I'm definitely a believer that all these new technologies, including AI, machine learning, and there's a whole area, host area of problems that can be solved and attacked and are actually getting attacked by applying AI and machine learning onto these networks. >> Open obviously is good. Nobody's ever going to, you know, argue that open is a bad thing. It's like democracy is a good thing, right? At least amongst us. And so, but, the RAN, the open RAN, has to be as reliable and performant, right, as these, closed networks. Or maybe not, maybe it doesn't have to be identical. Just has to be close enough in order for that tipping point to occur. Is that a fair summarization? What are you guys hearing from carriers in terms of their willingness to sort of put their toe in the water and, and what could we expect in terms of the maturity model of, of open RAN and adoption? >> Right, so I mean I think on, on performance that, that's a tough one. I think the operators will demand performance and you've seen experiments, you've really seen more of the Greenfield operators kind of launch. >> Okay. >> Doug: Open RAN or vRAN type solutions. >> So they're going to disrupt. >> Doug: Yeah, they're going to disrupt. >> Yeah. >> Doug: And there's flexibility in an open RAN architecture also for 5G that they, that they're interested in and I think the Brownfield operators are too, but let's say maybe the Greenfield jump first in terms of doing that from a mass deployment perspective. But I still think that it's going to be critical to meet very similar SLAs and end user performance. And, you know, I think that's where, you know, maturity of that model is what's required. I think Brownfield operators are conservative in terms of, you know, going with something they know, but the opportunities and the benefits of that architecture and building new flexible, potentially cost advantaged over time solutions, that's what the, where the real interest is going forward. >> And new services that you can introduce much more quickly. You know, the interesting thing about Dell to me, you don't compete with the carriers, the public cloud vendors though, the carriers are concerned about them sort of doing an end run on them. So you provide a potential partnership for the carriers that's non-threatening, right? 'Cause you're, you're an arms dealer, you're selling hardware and software, right? But, but how do you see that? Because we heard in the keynote today, one of the Teleco, I think it was the chairman of Telefonica said, you know, cloud guys can't do this alone. You know, they need, you know, this massive, you know, build out. And so, what do you think about that in terms of your relationship with the carriers not being threatening? I mean versus say potentially the cloud guys, who are also your partners, I understand, it's a really interesting dynamic, isn't it? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean I think, you know, I mean, the way I look at it, the carriers actually need someone like Dell who really come in who can bring in the right capabilities, the right infrastructure, but also bring in the ecosystem together and deliver a performance solution that they can deploy and that they can trust, number one. Number two, to your point on cloud, I mean, from a Dell perspective, you know, we announced our Dell Telecom Multicloud Foundation and as part of that last year in September, we announced what we call is the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks. The first one we announced with Wind River, and this is, think of it as the, you know, hardware and the cashier all pre-integrated with lot of automation around it, factory integrated, you know, delivered to customers in an integrated model with all the licenses, everything. And so it starts to solve the day zero, day one, day two integration deployment and then lifecycle management for them. So to broaden the discussion, our view is it's a multicloud world, the future is multicloud where you can have different clouds which can be optimized for different workloads. So for example, while our work with Wind River initially was very focused on virtualization of the radio access network, we just announced our infrastructure block with Red Hat, which is very much targeted and optimized for core network and edge, right? So, you know, there are different workflows which will require different capabilities also. And so, you know, again, we are bringing those things to these service providers to again, bring those cloud characteristics and cloud native architecture for their network. >> And It's going to be hybrid, to your point. >> David N.: And you, just hit on something, you said cloud characteristics. >> Yeah. >> If you look at this through the lens of kind of the general world of IT, sometimes when people hear the word cloud, they immediately leap to the idea that it's a hyperscale cloud provider. In this scenario we're talking about radio towers that have intelligence living on them and physically at the base. And so the cloud characteristics that you're delivering might be living physically in these remote locations all over the place, is that correct? >> Yeah, I mean that, that's true. That will definitely happen over time. But I think, I think we've seen the hyperscalers enter, you know, public cloud providers, enter at the edge and they're dabbling maybe with private, but I think the public RAN is another further challenge. I think that maybe a little bit down the road for them. So I think that is a different characteristic that you're talking about managing the macro RAN environment. >> Manish: If I may just add one more perspective of this cloud, and I mean, again, the hyperscale cloud, right? I mean that world's been great when you can centralize a lot of compute capability and you can then start to, you know, do workload aggregation and use the infrastructure more efficient. When it comes to Telecom, it is inherently it distributed architecture where you have access, you talked about radio access, your port, and it is inherently distributed because it has to provide the coverage and capacity. And so, you know, it does require different kind of capabilities when you're going out and about, and this is where I was talking about things like, you know, we just talked, we just have been working on our bare metal orchestration, right? This is what we are bringing is a capability where you can actually have distributed infrastructure, you can deploy, you can actually manage, do lifecycle management, in a distributed multicloud form. So it does require, you know, different set of capabilities that need to be enabled. >> Some, when talking about cloud, would argue that it's always been information technology, it always will be information technology, and especially as what we might refer to as public cloud or hyperscale cloud providers, are delivering things essentially on premises. It's like, well, is that cloud? Because it feels like some of those players are going to be delivering physical infrastructure outside of their own data centers in order to address this. It seems the nature, the nature of the beast is that some of these things need to be distributed. So it seems perfectly situated for Dell. That's why you guys are both at Dell now and not working for other Telecom places, right? >> Exactly. Exactly, yes. >> It's definitely an exciting space. It's transformed, the networks are under transformation and I do think that Dell's very well positioned to, to really help the customers, the service providers in accelerating their transformation journey with an open ecosystem. >> Dave V.: You've got the brand, and the breadth, and the resources to actually attract an ecosystem. But I wonder if you could sort of take us through your strategy of ecosystem, the challenges that you've seen in developing that ecosystem and what the vision is that ultimately, what's the outcome going to be of that open ecosystem? >> Yeah, I can start. So maybe just to give you the big picture, right? I mean the big picture, is disaggregation with performance, right, TCO models to the service providers, right? And it starts at the infrastructure layer, builds on bringing these cloud capabilities, the cast layer, right? Bringing the right accelerators. All of this requires to pull the ecosystem. So give you an example on the infrastructure in a Teleco grade servers like XR8000 with Sapphire, the new intel processors that we've just announced, and an extended array of servers. These are Teleco grade, short depth, et cetera. You know, the Teleco great characteristic. Working with the partners like Marvel for bringing in the accelerators in there, that's important to again, drive the performance and optimize for the TCO. Working then with partners like Wind River, Red Hat, et cetera, to bring in the cast capabilities so you can start to see how this ecosystem starts to build up. And then very recently we announced our private 5G solution with AirSpan and Expeto on the core site. So bringing those workloads together. Similarly, we have an open RAN solution we announce with Fujitsu. So it's, it's open, it's disaggregated, but bringing all these together. And one of the last things I would say is, you know, to make all this happen and make all of these, we've also been putting together our OTEL, our open Telecom ecosystem lab, which is very much geared, really gives this open ecosystem a playground where they can come in and do all that heavy lifting, which is anyways required, to do the integration, optimization, and board. So put all these capabilities in place, but the end goal, the end vision again, is that cloud native disaggregated infrastructure that starts to innovate at the speed of software and scales at the speed of cloud. >> And this is different than the nineties. You didn't have something like OTEL back then, you know, you didn't have the developer ecosystem that you have today because on top of everything that you just said, Manish, are new workloads and new applications that are going to be developed. Doug, anything you'd add to what Manish said? >> Doug: Yeah, I mean, as Manish said, I think adding to the infrastructure layers, which are, you know, critical for us to, to help integrate, right? Because we kind of took a vertical Teleco stack and we've disaggregated it, and it's gotten a little bit more complex. So our Solutions Dell Technology infrastructure block, and our lab infrastructure with OTEL, helps put those pieces together. But without the software players in this, you know, that's what we really do, I think in OTEL. And that's just starting to grow. So integrating with those software providers with that integration is something that the operators need. So we fill a gap there in terms of either providing engineered solutions so they can readily build on or actually bringing in that software provider. And I think that's what you're going to see more from us going forward is just extending that ecosystem even further. More software players effectively. >> In thinking about O-RAN, are they, is it possible to have the low latency, the high performance, the reliability capabilities that carriers are used to and the flexibility? Or can you sort of prioritize one over the other from a go to market and rollout standpoint and optimize one, maybe get a foothold in the market? How do you see that balance? >> Manish: Oh the answer is absolutely yes you can have both We are on that journey, we are on that journey. This is where all these things I was talking about in terms of the right kind of accelerators, right kind of capabilities on the infrastructure, obviously retargeting the software, there are certain changes, et cetera that need to be done on the software itself to make it more cloud native. And then building all the surrounding capabilities around the CICD pipeline and all where it's not just day zero or day one that you're doing the cloud-like lifecycle management of this infrastructure. But the answer to your point, yes, absolutely. It's possible, the technology is there, and the ecosystem is coming together, and that's the direction. Now, are there challenges? Absolutely there are challenges, but directionally that's the direction the industry is moving to. >> Dave V.: I guess my question, Manish, is do they have to go in lockstep? Because I would argue that the public cloud when it first came out wasn't nearly as functional as what I could get from my own data center in terms of recovery, you know, backup and recovery is a perfect example and it took, you know, a decade plus to get there. But it was the flexibility, and the openness, and the developer affinity, the programmability, that attracted people. Do you see O-RAN following a similar path? Or does it, my question is does it have to have that carrier class reliability today? >> David N.: Everything on day one, does it have to have everything on day one? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, like again, the Greenfield operators I think we're, we're willing do a little bit more experimentation. I think the operators, Brownfield operators that have existing, you know, deployments, they're going to want to be closer. But I think there's room for innovation here. And clearly, you know, Manish came from, from Meta and we're, we've been very involved with TIP, we're very involved with the O-RAN alliance, and as Manish mentioned, with all those accelerators that we're working with on our infrastructure, that is a space that we're trying to help move the ball forward. So I think you're seeing deployments from mainstream operators, but it's maybe not in, you know, downtown New York deployment, they're more rural deployments. I think that's getting at, you know, kind of your question is there's maybe a little bit more flexibility there, they get to experiment with the technology and the flexibility and then I think it will start to evolve >> Dave V.: And that's where the disruption's going to come from, I think. >> David N.: Well, where was the first place you could get reliable 4K streaming of video content? It wasn't ABC, CBS, NBC. It was YouTube. >> Right. >> So is it possible that when you say Greenfield, are a lot of those going to be what we refer to as private 5G networks where someone may set up a private 5G network that has more functions and capabilities than the public network? >> That's exactly where I was going is that, you know, that that's why you're seeing us getting very active in 5G solutions that Manish mentioned with, you know, Expeto and AirSpan. There's more of those that we haven't publicly announced. So I think you'll be seeing more announcements from us, but that is really, you know, a new opportunity. And there's spectrum there also, right? I mean, there's public and private spectrum. We plan to work directly with the operators and do it in their spectrum when needed. But we also have solutions that will do it, you know, on non-public spectrum. >> So let's close out, oh go ahead. You you have something to add there? >> I'm just going to add one more point to Doug's point, right? Is if you look on the private 5G and the end customer, it's the enterprise, right? And they're, they're not a service provider. They're not a carrier. They're more used to deploying, you know, enterprise infrastructure, maintaining, managing that. So, you know, private 5G, especially with this open ecosystem and with all the open run capabilities, it naturally tends to, you know, blend itself very well to meet those requirements that the enterprise would have. >> And people should not think of private 5G as a sort of a replacement for wifi, right? It's to to deal with those, you know, intense situations that can afford the additional cost, but absolutely require the reliability and the performance and, you know, never go down type of scenario. Is that right? >> Doug: And low latencies usually, the primary characteristics, you know, for things like Industry 4.0 manufacturing requirements, those are tough SLAs. They're just, they're different than the operator SLAs for coverage and, you know, cell performance. They're now, you know, Five9 type characteristics, but on a manufacturing floor. >> That's why we don't use wifi on theCUBE to broadcast, we need a hard line. >> Yeah, but why wouldn't it replace wifi over time? I mean, you know, I still have a home phone number that's hardwired to align, but it goes to a voicemail. We don't even have handset anymore for it, yeah. >> I think, well, unless the cost can come down, but I think that wifi is flexible, it's cheap. It's, it's kind of perfect for that. >> Manish: And it's good technology. >> Dave V.: And it works great. >> David N.: For now, for now. >> Dave V.: But you wouldn't want it in those situations, and you're arguing that maybe. >> I'm saying eventually, what, put a sim in a device, I don't know, you know, but why not? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, and Dell offers, you know, from our laptop, you know, our client side, we do offer wifi, we do offer 4G and 5G solutions. And I think those, you know, it's a volume and scale issue, I think for the cost structure you're talking about. >> Manish: Come to our booth and see the connected laptop. >> Dave V.: Well let's, let's close on that. Why don't you guys talk a little bit about what you're going on at the show, I did go by the booth, you got a whole big lineup of servers. You got some, you know, cool devices going on. So give us the rundown and you know, let's end with the takeaways here. >> The simple rundown, a broad range of new powered servers, broad range addressing core, edge, RAN, optimized for those with all the different kind of acceleration capabilities. You can see that, you can see infrastructure blocks. These are with Wind River, with Red Hat. You can see OTEL, the open telecom ecosystem lab where all that playground, the integration, the real work, the real sausage makings happening. And then you will see some interesting solutions in terms of co-creation that we are doing, right? So you, you will see all of that and not to forget the connected laptops. >> Dave V.: Yeah, yeah, cool. >> Doug: Yeah and, we mentioned it before, but just to add on, I think, you know, for private 5G, you know, we've announced a few offers here at the show with partners. So with Expeto and AirSpan in particular, and I think, you know, I just want to emphasize the partnerships that we're doing. You know, we're doing some, you know, fundamental integration on infrastructure, bare metal and different options for the operators to get engineered systems. But building on that ecosystem is really, the move to cloud native is where Dell is trying to get in front of. And we're offering solutions and a much larger ecosystem to go after it. >> Dave V.: Great. Manish and Doug, thanks for coming on the program. It was great to have you, awesome discussion. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We're seeing the disaggregation of the Teleco network into open ecosystems with integration from companies like Dell and others. Keep it right there for theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back. (upbeat tech music)

(inspirational music) >> The history of high performance computing is unique and storied. You know, it's generally accepted that the first true supercomputer was shipped in the mid 1960s by Controlled Data Corporations, CDC, designed by an engineering team led by Seymour Cray, the father of Supercomputing. He left CDC in the 70's to start his own company, of course, carrying his own name. Now that company Cray, became the market leader in the 70's and the 80's, and then the decade of the 80's saw attempts to bring new designs, such as massively parallel systems, to reach new heights of performance and efficiency. Supercomputing design was one of the most challenging fields, and a number of really brilliant engineers became kind of quasi-famous in their little industry. In addition to Cray himself, Steve Chen, who worked for Cray, then went out to start his own companies. Danny Hillis, of Thinking Machines. Steve Frank of Kendall Square Research. Steve Wallach tried to build a mini supercomputer at Convex. These new entrants, they all failed, for the most part because the market at the time just wasn't really large enough and the economics of these systems really weren't that attractive. Now, the late 80's and the 90's saw big Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu entering the fray and governments around the world began to invest heavily in these systems to solve societal problems and make their nations more competitive. And as we entered the 21st century, we saw the coming of petascale computing, with China actually cracking the top 100 list of high performance computing. And today, we're now entering the exascale era, with systems that can complete a billion, billion calculations per second, or 10 to the 18th power. Astounding. And today, the high performance computing market generates north of $30 billion annually and is growing in the high single digits. Supercomputers solve the world's hardest problems in things like simulation, life sciences, weather, energy exploration, aerospace, astronomy, automotive industries, and many other high value examples. And supercomputers are expensive. You know, the highest performing supercomputers used to cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe $30 million. And we've seen that steadily rise to over $200 million. And today we're even seeing systems that cost more than half a billion dollars, even into the low billions when you include all the surrounding data center infrastructure and cooling required. The US, China, Japan, and EU countries, as well as the UK, are all investing heavily to keep their countries competitive, and no price seems to be too high. Now, there are five mega trends going on in HPC today, in addition to this massive rising cost that we just talked about. One, systems are becoming more distributed and less monolithic. The second is the power of these systems is increasing dramatically, both in terms of processor performance and energy consumption. The x86 today dominates processor shipments, it's going to probably continue to do so. Power has some presence, but ARM is growing very rapidly. Nvidia with GPUs is becoming a major player with AI coming in, we'll talk about that in a minute. And both the EU and China are developing their own processors. We're seeing massive densities with hundreds of thousands of cores that are being liquid-cooled with novel phase change technology. The third big trend is AI, which of course is still in the early stages, but it's being combined with ever larger and massive, massive data sets to attack new problems and accelerate research in dozens of industries. Now, the fourth big trend, HPC in the cloud reached critical mass at the end of the last decade. And all of the major hyperscalers are providing HPE, HPC as a service capability. Now finally, quantum computing is often talked about and predicted to become more stable by the end of the decade and crack new dimensions in computing. The EU has even announced a hybrid QC, with the goal of having a stable system in the second half of this decade, most likely around 2027, 2028. Welcome to theCUBE's preview of SC22, the big supercomputing show which takes place the week of November 13th in Dallas. theCUBE is going to be there. Dave Nicholson will be one of the co-hosts and joins me now to talk about trends in HPC and what to look for at the show. Dave, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too, Dave. >> Oh, you heard my narrative up front Dave. You got a technical background, CTO chops, what did I miss? What are the major trends that you're seeing? >> I don't think you really- You didn't miss anything, I think it's just a question of double-clicking on some of the things that you brought up. You know, if you look back historically, supercomputing was sort of relegated to things like weather prediction and nuclear weapons modeling. And these systems would live in places like Lawrence Livermore Labs or Los Alamos. Today, that requirement for cutting edge, leading edge, highest performing supercompute technology is bleeding into the enterprise, driven by AI and ML, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So when we think about the conversations we're going to have and the coverage we're going to do of the SC22 event, a lot of it is going to be looking under the covers and seeing what kind of architectural things contribute to these capabilities moving forward, and asking a whole bunch of questions. >> Yeah, so there's this sort of theory that the world is moving toward this connectivity beyond compute-centricity to connectivity-centric. We've talked about that, you and I, in the past. Is that a factor in the HPC world? How is it impacting, you know, supercomputing design? >> Well, so if you're designing an island that is, you know, tip of this spear, doesn't have to offer any level of interoperability or compatibility with anything else in the compute world, then connectivity is important simply from a speeds and feeds perspective. You know, lowest latency connectivity between nodes and things like that. But as we sort of democratize supercomputing, to a degree, as it moves from solely the purview of academia into truly ubiquitous architecture leverage by enterprises, you start asking the question, "Hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we could have this hooked up into our ethernet networks?" And so, that's a whole interesting subject to explore because with things like RDMA over converged ethernet, you now have the ability to have these supercomputing capabilities directly accessible by enterprise computing. So that level of detail, opening up the box of looking at the Nix, or the storage cards that are in the box, is actually critically important. And as an old-school hardware knuckle-dragger myself, I am super excited to see what the cutting edge holds right now. >> Yeah, when you look at the SC22 website, I mean, they're covering all kinds of different areas. They got, you know, parallel clustered systems, AI, storage, you know, servers, system software, application software, security. I mean, wireless HPC is no longer this niche. It really touches virtually every industry, and most industries anyway, and is really driving new advancements in society and research, solving some of the world's hardest problems. So what are some of the topics that you want to cover at SC22? >> Well, I kind of, I touched on some of them. I really want to ask people questions about this idea of HPC moving from just academia into the enterprise. And the question of, does that mean that there are architectural concerns that people have that might not be the same as the concerns that someone in academia or in a lab environment would have? And by the way, just like, little historical context, I can't help it. I just went through the upgrade from iPhone 12 to iPhone 14. This has got one terabyte of storage in it. One terabyte of storage. In 1997, I helped build a one terabyte NAS system that a government defense contractor purchased for almost $2 million. $2 million! This was, I don't even know, it was $9.99 a month extra on my cell phone bill. We had a team of seven people who were going to manage that one terabyte of storage. So, similarly, when we talk about just where are we from a supercompute resource perspective, if you consider it historically, it's absolutely insane. I'm going to be asking people about, of course, what's going on today, but also the near future. You know, what can we expect? What is the sort of singularity that needs to occur where natural language processing across all of the world's languages exists in a perfect way? You know, do we have the compute power now? What's the interface between software and hardware? But really, this is going to be an opportunity that is a little bit unique in terms of the things that we typically cover, because this is a lot about cracking open the box, the server box, and looking at what's inside and carefully considering all of the components. >> You know, Dave, I'm looking at the exhibitor floor. It's like, everybody is here. NASA, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Intel, HPE, AWS, all the hyperscale guys, Weka IO, Pure Storage, companies I've never heard of. It's just, hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors, Nvidia, Oracle, Penguin Solutions, I mean, just on and on and on. Google, of course, has a presence there, theCUBE has a major presence. We got a 20 x 20 booth. So, it's really, as I say, to your point, HPC is going mainstream. You know, I think a lot of times, we think of HPC supercomputing as this just sort of, off in the eclectic, far off corner, but it really, when you think about big data, when you think about AI, a lot of the advancements that occur in HPC will trickle through and go mainstream in commercial environments. And I suspect that's why there are so many companies here that are really relevant to the commercial market as well. >> Yeah, this is like the Formula 1 of computing. So if you're a Motorsports nerd, you know that F1 is the pinnacle of the sport. SC22, this is where everybody wants to be. Another little historical reference that comes to mind, there was a time in, I think, the early 2000's when Unisys partnered with Intel and Microsoft to come up with, I think it was the ES7000, which was supposed to be the mainframe, the sort of Intel mainframe. It was an early attempt to use... And I don't say this in a derogatory way, commodity resources to create something really, really powerful. Here we are 20 years later, and we are absolutely smack in the middle of that. You mentioned the focus on x86 architecture, but all of the other components that the silicon manufacturers bring to bear, companies like Broadcom, Nvidia, et al, they're all contributing components to this mix in addition to, of course, the microprocessor folks like AMD and Intel and others. So yeah, this is big-time nerd fest. Lots of academics will still be there. The supercomputing.org, this loose affiliation that's been running these SC events for years. They have a major focus, major hooks into academia. They're bringing in legit computer scientists to this event. This is all cutting edge stuff. >> Yeah. So like you said, it's going to be kind of, a lot of techies there, very technical computing, of course, audience. At the same time, we expect that there's going to be a fair amount, as they say, of crossover. And so, I'm excited to see what the coverage looks like. Yourself, John Furrier, Savannah, I think even Paul Gillin is going to attend the show, because I believe we're going to be there three days. So, you know, we're doing a lot of editorial. Dell is an anchor sponsor, so we really appreciate them providing funding so we can have this community event and bring people on. So, if you are interested- >> Dave, Dave, I just have- Just something on that point. I think that's indicative of where this world is moving when you have Dell so directly involved in something like this, it's an indication that this is moving out of just the realm of academia and moving in the direction of enterprise. Because as we know, they tend to ruthlessly drive down the cost of things. And so I think that's an interesting indication right there. >> Yeah, as do the cloud guys. So again, this is mainstream. So if you're interested, if you got something interesting to talk about, if you have market research, you're an analyst, you're an influencer in this community, you've got technical chops, maybe you've got an interesting startup, you can contact David, david.nicholson@siliconangle.com. John Furrier is john@siliconangle.com. david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I'd be happy to listen to your pitch and see if we can fit you onto the program. So, really excited. It's the week of November 13th. I think November 13th is a Sunday, so I believe David will be broadcasting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Really excited. Give you the last word here, Dave. >> No, I just, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'm really, really excited about this. It's cutting edge stuff and I'm really going to be exploring this question of where does it fit in the world of AI and ML? I think that's really going to be the center of what I'm really seeking to understand when I'm there. >> All right, Dave Nicholson. Thanks for your time. theCUBE at SC22. Don't miss it. Go to thecube.net, go to siliconangle.com for all the news. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and for Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you in Dallas. (inquisitive music)

>> Male's Voice: From around the globe, its theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. (soft music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special announcement for Nutanix, about some new product releases in the public cloud. To help us kick this off for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome to the program Jordan Reizes, who's the vice president of marketing, for APJ and Nutanix. Jordan, help us introduce it. Thanks Stu. So today we're really pleased to announce Nutanix Clusters, availability in Asia Pacific and Japan, at the same time as the rest of the world. And we think this technology is really important to our geographically dispersed customers, all across the region, in terms of helping them, On-Ramp to the cloud. So, we're really excited about this launch today. And Stu, I can't wait to see the rest of the program. And make sure you stay tuned at the end, for our interview with our CTO, Justin Hurst. Who's going to be answering a bunch of questions that are really specific to the APJ region. >> All right, thank you so much Jordan, for helping us kick this off. We're now going to cut over to my interview with Monica and Tarkan, with the news. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed. And that has changed some of the priorities, for many companies out there. Acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe, or thinking about, where they were going to cloud. And of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers, and the like. So, we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening, and make sure that our workforce, and our customers are all taken care of. So, one of the front seats of this, is of course, companies working to help modernize customers out there. And, Nutanix is part of that discussion. So, I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix. I have two of our CUBE alumnus. First of all, we have Monica Kumar. She's the senior vice president of product, with Nutanix. And Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer. Second time on theCUBE, in his new role many time guests. Previously, Tarkan is the chief commercial officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right. So, Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that, IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general. But in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So, why don't you explain to us, the special cloud announcement. Tell us, what's Nutanix launching, and why it's so important today. >> So, Stu first of all, thank you. And glad to be here with Monica. And basically you and I, spend some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you, the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we never seen before. Especially with this pandemic backdrop, as we're going through. And obviously, all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously, health challenges and across the world, all the pain it creates. But also it creates some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers, and commercial customers, and in a public sector customers, in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains, and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context, Monica knows as well as she's our leader. You know, our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-class strategy as a company. As you know, is too well, Nutanix wrote the book, in digital infrastructures with its own private, (mumbles) infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level, via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions, and end user computer solutions. Now, the multicloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So, in this launch, we have our new, hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available in the AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms, and customers, and partners at sealable executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important, because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus what's important for them, save money for them, and making sure they streamlined their IT operation. So it's a huge launch for us. And we're super excited about it. >> Yeah. And the one thing I would add too, what Tarkan said too is, look, we talk to a lot of customers, and obviously cloud is the constant, in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation? But really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we are excited about is we're bringing, making really a hybrid cloud reality, across public and private cloud. But also making sure customers, get the cost efficiency they need, when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed, watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI Space and Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that, true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multicloud, simplicity is not the first thing that I think of. So, Tarkan has helped us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done, for so long now in the data center, into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu you're spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about Nutanix executive team, you're very customer-driven. And I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So, just recently I was with a senior executive, C level executive of an airline. Right before that, Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris. Right before the pandemic, we were actually traveling. Talking to, not all the CIO, the chief operating officer on one of these huge banks. And the biggest issue was, how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop with the economic stress. And obviously, now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, he was an airline executive. "Look Tarkan, in the next four months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less, in so many different ways, while I'm cutting costs." So it's a tough time. So, in that context is to... Your actually right. Multicloud is in a difficult proposition, but it's critical, for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us, is not a destination, it's a means to an ends. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is still the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures, to deliver, end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to making sure to take advantage of, these VDI decibels service topic capability. So in that context, what we are providing now to this CIOs who are going through, this difficult time is, a platform, in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud, based on their needs, with freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank. They have a workloads on AWS, they have workload on Azure, they have workloads on Google, workloads on (indistinct), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany. They have workloads providers in Asia, in Taiwan, and other locations. On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for VR. And then, this is not just in this nation. This is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use, all these operating models and move our data, and applications from cloud to cloud? In simple terms, can we get, some kind of a flexibility with commits as well as we pay credits they paid for so far? And, those are things we're working on. And I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail, as we talk to this. You are super excited, to start this journey with AWS, with this launch, but you're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just kind of discussed with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds, both on-prem and off-prem, for our customers to cut costs, and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add, to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multicloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more detail, but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement, and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers, and how do they decide, what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud? It's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So, when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect, or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure. And as we talk to customers too, this clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to, build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud, right? In case of, a demand of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say a VDI environment. or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply, and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR, and we saw with COVID, right? Business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly, in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, of which many customers talk about is, can I lift and shift my applications as is, into the cloud? Without having to rewrite a single line of code, or without having to rewrite all of it, right? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is, how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services, that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course. But in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, right? VDI, which is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and is a computing, and also databases. More and more of our customers, don't want to invest in again having, on-premises data center assets sitting there idly. And, wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to what Tarkan was talking about, really their three key reasons, why the current hybrid cloud solutions, haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough, to actually put into real execution. You know, with Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within, under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters, which you have on-premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon, under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan, that we offer on-prem, that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then, you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you're going to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs, making sure you know, how you're going to incur costs. How about, if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We allow the... We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing, where to place which workload. Which workload goes into public cloud, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called beam, that gives the customers that ability to assess, which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this. You know, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell. You know, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand of course? You're probably going to need to anonymize. But, I'd like to understand, how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia, I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine, if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row, well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they are getting ready with now clusters, to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud, in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS, and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event-driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer, who is in the insurance business. For them, DR is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry in every business. But for them, they realize that they need to be able to, transparently run the applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using non Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of the database applications into, AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring, their a part of the data center estate, and moving that completely to AWS, with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as a backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity, and spin up hundreds and thousands of remote employees, using clusters into AWS cloud. Using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for the solution. Because now it's so easy to use. We have customers, really surprised going, "Wait, I now have built a whole hybrid card within an hour. And I was able to scale from, six nodes, to 60 nodes, just like that, on AWS cloud from on-prem six nodes, to 16 in AWS cloud. Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use, and how quickly they can scale, using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah. Tarkan I have to imagine that, this is a real change for the conversation you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partner with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix, at the reinvent show. But, cloud is definitely front and center, in a lot of your customer's conversations. So, with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect, to the conversations that you can have. >> Actually Stu, as you heard from Monica too. As I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers, right? I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, there's an open end model. If it's an open end model they want to take advantage of, to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard, even in this conversation, there is many pinpoint in this. Like again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations. Again, as Monica suggested, making the apps, and the data relating those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities. All those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So we're hearing constantly, from the enterprises is small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different. Clearly they have options. They want to have the freedom of choice. Some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off prem. And off prem is going to have, tons of different radiations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skews to 17,000 customers around the world. It's a $2 billion software business run rate is as you know. And, a lot of those questions on-prem customers now, also coming to our own cloud services. With cloud partners, we have our own cloud services, with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities. With a credit card, you can actually, you can do DR. (mumbles) a service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS, or Azure, or to a local service provider. Sometimes it's US companies, we think US only. But think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want to DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider, within the country. Because of the new data governance, laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us, to go outside of the boundaries of the country. In some cases, in the same continent, if you're in Switzerland, not even forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure, we give capabilities for customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, just you know Stu, you're not alone in this, we can not do this alone. We have, tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see in the new announcements. From HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing. You're partnering with Palo Alto networks for security, Azure partners, as you know we support (indistinct). We have partners like Red Hat, whose in tons of work in the Linux front. We partnered with IBM, we partner with Dell. So, the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially with this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points, to help the customers innovate the cut costs, in this difficult backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is, tremendous so to speak adoption, of this multicloud approach that you're focusing on right now. >> Yeah, and let me add, I know our partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course. The WebPros, and HCL, and TCS, and Capgemini, and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And, for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu, which I forgot to mention earlier, and Tarkan reminded me is a superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers, right? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now, and work across multiple clouds. And, we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS is, it's built in native network integration. And what that means is, if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs, in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services. And we bypass any, complex and latency issues with networking, because we are exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, the Amazon credits, with the way we've architected this. And we allow for bringing your own license, by the way. That's the other true part about simplicity is, same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix, can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And now of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only. But I want to point out that DVIOL is something that we are very proud of. It's truly enabling, bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move, from an appliance primarily to a software model. And, as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like, that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have, when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, and cloud as popular. So, customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine. Or they can bring their existing on-prem license, to AWS. Or we also have a commit model, where they commit for a certain capacity for the year, and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers. We offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring your own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah. Well, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there. If I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all of the hybrid solutions. So, every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So, architecture you talked a bit about. Anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand, as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd, when it comes to hybrid cloud. >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego. But really, I mean, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we, speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So, building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plan, being able to move apps and data, with one click in many cases. And last but not least, the license portability. All of that together. I think the way, (indistinct) I've talked about this as, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe they are the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Tarkan and I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So, with Monica kind of alluded to, anybody that kind of digs underneath the covers is, it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had, that enabled this, and now you're taking advantage of it. What do you feel when you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit what should we be looking for, when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond. >> Thank you Stu. Actually, is spot on question. Most companies in the space, they follow these buzzwords, right? (indistinct) multicloud. And when you killed on, you and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services, and you actually own some kind of a marketplace. And you're one of the 19,000 services. We don't see this as a multicloud. Our view is, complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government clouds success with our customers. We've got enterprise commercial and public sector customers. Also delivered to them choice, with Nutanix is own cloud as I mentioned earlier. With our own billing payment, we're just as capable starting with DR as a service, Disaster Recovery as a service. But take that to next level, the database as a service, with VDI based up as a service, and other services that we deliver. But on top of that also, as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have, with service providers, like Yoda in India, a lot going on with SoftBank in Japan, Brooklyn going on with OBH in France. And multiple countries that we are building this XSP (indistinct) telco relationships, give those international customers, choice within that own local region, in their own country, in some cases in their city, where they are, making sure the network latency is not an issue. Security, data governance, is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multilayer stool is, hyperscalers themselves like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner, working with Doug (indistinct), Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos, biggest super partners. Obviously, that bare metal service capability, is huge differentiator. And with the typical AWS simplicity. And obviously, with Nutanix simplicity coming together. But given choice to our customers as we move forward obviously, our customer set a multicloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called Silk Roads. It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout the history, those empires, those countries who have been successful, partnered well, connect the dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history. Connecting dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier. Working with companies that with Wipro. And we over deliver to the end user computer service called, best of a service door to desk. Database as a service, digital data services get that VA to other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure, as we move forward in upcoming weeks and months, you're going to see, these announcements coming up, one partner at a time. And obviously we are going to measure success, one customer at a time as we more forward with the strategy. >> All right. So Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud, in under an hour. I guess final question I have for you is, number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud. and leverage some capabilities? And, whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely. We are all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing. So if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects, and customers the ability to go try this out. Either just take a tour, or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out. They can just get spun up in the cloud completely, and then connect to on-premises if they choose to. Or just, if they choose to stay in public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say this is really, only the beginning for us as Tarkan was saying. I mean, I'm just really super excited about our future, and how we are going to enable customers, to use cloud for innovation going forward. In a really simple, manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning. So, we look forward to, talking to you, your partners, and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you Stu. Thank you, Monica. >> Hi, and welcome back. We've just heard Nutanix's announcement about Nutanix Clusters on AWS, from Monica and Tarkan, And, to help understand some of the specific implications for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome Justin Hurst, who is the CTO, for APJ with Nutanix. Justin, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks Stu. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So, we know Justin of course, 2020, has had a lot of changes, for everyone globally. Heard some exciting news from your team. And, wondering if you can bring us inside the APJ region. And what will the impact specifically be for your customers in your region? >> Yeah, let's say, that's a great question. And, it has been a tremendously unusual year, of course, for everyone. We're all trying, to figure out how we can adapt. And how we can take this opportunity, to not only respond to the situation, but actually build our businesses in a way, that we can be more agile going forward. So, we're very excited about this announcement. And, the new capabilities it's going to bring to our customers in the region. >> Justin, one of the things we talk about is, right now, there's actually been an acceleration of how customers are looking to On-Ramp to the cloud. So when you look at the solution, what's the operational impact of Nutanix Clusters? And that acceleration to the cloud? >> Well, sure. And I think that, is really what we're trying to accomplish here, with this new technology is to take away a lot of the pain, in onboarding to the public cloud. For many customers I talk to, the cloud is aspirational at this point. They may be experimenting. They may have a few applications they've, spun up in the cloud or using a SaaS service. But really getting those core applications, into the public cloud, has been something they've struggled with. And so, by harmonizing the control plan and the data plan, between on-premises and the public cloud, we just completely remove that barrier, and allow that mobility, that's been, something people have really been looking forward to. >> All right, well, Justin, of course, the announcement being with AWS, is the global leader in public cloud. But we've seen the cluster solution, when has been discussed in earlier days, isn't necessarily only for AWS. So, what can you tell us about your customer's adoption with AWS, and maybe what we should look at down the road for clusters with other solutions? >> Yeah, for sure. Now of course, AWS is the global market leader, which is why we're so happy to have this launch event today of clusters on AWS. But with many of our customers, depending on their region, or their regulatory requirements, they may want to work as well, with other providers. And so when we built the Nutanix cluster solution, we were careful not to lock in, to any specific provider. Which gives us options going forward, to meet our customer demands, wherever they might be. >> All right. Well, when we look at cloud, of course, the implications are one of the things we need to think about. We've seen a number of hybrid solutions out there, that haven't necessarily been the most economical. So, what are the financial considerations, when we look at this solution? >> Yeah, definitely. I think when we look at using the public cloud, it's important not to bring along, the same operational mindset, as traditional on-premise infrastructure. And that's the power of the cloud, is the elasticity. And the ability to burst workloads, to grow and to shrink as needed. And so, to really help contain those costs, we've built in this amazing ability, to hibernate workloads. So that customers can run them, when they need them. Whether it's a seasonal business, whether it's something in education, where students are coming and going, for different terms. We've built this functionality, that allows you to take traditional applications that would normally run on-premises 24/7. And give them that elasticity of the public cloud, really combining the best of both worlds. And then, building tooling and automation around that. So it's not just guesswork. We can actually tell you, when to spin up a workload, or where to place a workload, to get the best financial impact. >> All right, Justin, final question for you is, this has been the works on Nutanix working on the cluster solution world for a bit now. What's exciting you, that you're going to be able to bring this to your customers? >> Yeah. There's a lot of new capabilities, that get unlocked by this new technology. I think about a customer I was talking to recently, that's expanding their business geographically. And, what they didn't want to do, was invest capital in building up a new data center, in a new region. Because here in APJ, the region is geographically vast, and connectivity can vary tremendously. And so for this company, to be able to spin up, a new data center effectively, in any AWS region around the world, really enables them to bring the data and the applications, to where they're expanding their business, without that capital outlay. And so, that's just one capability, that we're really excited about. And we think we'll have a big impact, in how people do business. And keeping those applications and data, close to where they're doing that business. >> All right. Well, Justin, thank you so much for giving us a look inside the APJ region. And congratulations to you and the team, on the Nutanix Clusters announcement. >> Thanks so much for having me Stu. >> All right. And thank you for watching I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely has been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and commercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know Stu well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hyperconverged infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said Stu is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. Well, I can tell you Nutanix Clusters is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HCI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executive of an airline right before that Monica and I spent time with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is through the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these VDI desktop-as-a-service capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on Trans Telecom, the local SP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for DR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on-prem and off-prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the Cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say, VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that are available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, end user computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idly and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there are three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters which you have on premises, the same exact Cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plane that we offer on-prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plane, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called Beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging Clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our Clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using Clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using Clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there isn't any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off-prem and off-prem is going to have tons of different variations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus SKUs to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, on-prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and apps to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew of partners, as you know we support VMware ESXi. We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at end of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So, Tarkan also we have the global size, of course, the Wipro and HCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring Clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yotta. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected Clusters with AWS it's a built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that BYOL is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the Clusters solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on-prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. Because you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Dheeraj our CEO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at Clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Stu, actually spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you drill-down and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, logistics capabilities starting with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yotta in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Doug Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like Wipro and we all deliver an end user computing service called desktop-as-a-service virtual desk, database as a service, digital data services we have, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage, have a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and infomercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know too well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hybrid infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new multi-cloud infrastructure, clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said too is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executives of an airline right before that Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is to the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these EDI disability service topic capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on (mumbles), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on Prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for BR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on Prem and off Prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers,. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my let's say a VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, and there's a computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idlely and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there're three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up new data clusters which you have on premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan that we offer on Prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on premises. We have an amazing tool called beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanics at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there's any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on prem, some of them off prem and off prem is going to have tons of different reactions. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skells to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew partners, as you know we support VMware is excited, We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course, the WebPros and FCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zinsser, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up still, which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS it's built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that (indistinct) is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Durage RCO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Tsu, actually is spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you (indistinct) down and you find out, Okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, we'll just escapable these started with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yoda in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like WebPro and we all deliver an end user company service called database service go to desk, database as a service, digital data services with MBA, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis I want to talk to you about what I learned this week at Dell Technology's financial analyst meeting in New York. They gathered all the financial analysts, Rob Williams hosted it, he's the head of IR, Michael Dell of course was there. They had Dennis Hoffman who is the head of strategic planning, Jeff Clarke who basically runs the business and Tom Sweet, of course, who was the star of the show, the CFO, all the analysts want to see him. Dell laid out its longterm goals, it provided much clearer understanding of its strategic direction, basically focused on three areas. Dell believes that IT is getting more complex, we know that, they want to capitalize on that by simplifying IT. We'll talk about that. And then they want to position for the wave of digital transformations that are coming and they also believe, Dell believes, that it can capitalize on the consolidation trend, consolidating vendors, so I'll talk about each of those. And so let me bring up the first slide, Alex, if you would. The takeaways from the Dell financial analyst meeting. Let me share with you the overall framework that Tom Sweet laid out. And I have to say, the messaging was very consistent, these guys were very well-prepared. I think Dell is, from a management perspective, very well-run company. They're targeting three to 5% growth on what they're saying is a 4% GDP forecast. Or sorry, 4%, I have GDP here, it's really 4% industry growth. GDP's a little lower than that obviously. So this is IDC data, Gartner data, 4% industry growth. So that's an error on my part, I apologize. The strategies to grow relative to their competition. So grow share on a relative basis. So whatever the market does, again, not GDP, but whatever the market does, Dell wants to grow faster than the market. So it wants to gain share, that's its primary metric. From there they want to grow operating income and they want to grow that faster than revenue, that's going to throw off cash. And then they're going to also continue to delever the balance sheet. I think they paid down 17 billion in debt since the EMC acquisition. They want to get to a two X debt to EBITA ratio within 18 months. And what they're saying is, you know, they talked about, Tom Sweet talked about this consistent march toward investment-grade rating. They've been talkin' about that for awhile. He made the comment, we don't need to have a triple A rating but we want to get to the point where we can reduce our interest expense, and that will, 'cause they'll drop right into the bottom line. So they talked about these various levers that they can turn, some of them under the P and L, gaining share, some are their operating structure and their organizational structure, and one big one is obviously their debt structure. The other key issue here is will this cut the liquidity discount that Dell faces? What do I mean by that? Well, VMware has about a $60 billion valuation. Dell owns about 80% of VMware, which would equate to 48 billion. But if you look at Dell's market cap, it's only 37 billion. So it essentially says that Dell's core business is worth minus 11 billion. We used to talk about this when EMC owned VMware. Its core business only comprised about 40% of the overall value of the company, in this case because of the high debt, Dell has a negative value. And it's not just the high debt. Michael Dell has control over the voting shares, it's essentially a conglomerate structure, there's very high debt, and it's a relatively low margin business, notwithstanding VMware. And so as a result, Dell trades at a discount relative to what you would think it should trade at, given its prominence in the market, $92 billion company, the leader in every category under the sun. So that's the big question is can Dell turn these levers, drop EBITA or cash to the bottom line, affect operating income, and then ultimately pay down its debt and affect that discount that it trades at? Okay, bring up, if you would, Alex, the next slide. Now I want to share with you the takeaways from the Dell line of business focus. This really was Jeff Clarke's presentations that I'm going to draw from. Servers, we know, they're softer demand, but the key there is they're really faced tough compares. Last year, Dell's server business grew like crazy. So this year the comparisons are lessened. But there's less spending on servers. I'll share with you some of the ETR data. Storage, they call it holding serve, you saw last quarter I did an analysis, I took the ETR data and the income statement, it showed Pure was gaining share at like 22% growth from the income statement standpoint. Dell was 0% growth but is actually growing faster than its competitors. With the exception of Pure. It's growing faster than the market. So Dell actually gained share with 0% growth. Dell's really focused on consolidating the portfolio. They've cut the portfolio down from 80, I think actually the right number is 88 products, down to 20 by May of 2020. They've got some new mid-range coming, they've just refreshed their data protection portfolio, so again, by May of next year, by Dell Technologies World they'll have a much, much more simplified portfolio. And they're gaining back share. They've refocused on the storage business. You might recall after the acquisition, EMC was kind of a mess. It was losing share before the acquisition, it was so distracted with all the Elliott Management stuff goin' on. And kind of took its eye off the ball, and then after the acquisition it took awhile for them to get their act together. They gained back about 375 basis points in the last 18 months. Remember a basis point is 1/100th of 1%. So gaining share and their consistent focus on trying to do that. Their PC business, which is actually doin' quite well, is focused on the commercial segment and focused on higher margins. They made the statement that the PCs are kind of undersupply right now so it's helping margins. There's a big focus in Jeff Clarke's organization on VMware integration. To me this makes a lot of sense. To the extent that you can take the VMware platform and make Dell hardware run VMware better, that's something that is an advantage for Dell, obviously. And at the same time, VMware has to walk the fine line with the ecosystem. But certainly it's earned the presence in the market now that it can basically do what I just said, tightly integrate with Dell and at the same time serve the ecosystem, 'cause frankly, the ecosystem has no choice. It must serve VMware customers. The strategy, essentially, is to, as I say, capitalize on vendor consolidation, leverage value across the portfolio, so whether it's pivotal, VMware integration, the security portfolio, try to leverage that and then differentiate with scale. And Dell really has the number one supply chain in the tech business. Something that Dave Donatelli at HP, when he was at HP, used to talk about. HPE doesn't really talk about that supply chain advantage anymore 'cause essentially it doesn't have it. Dell does. So Jeff Clarke's reorganization, he came in, he streamlined the organization, really from the focus on R and D to product to collaboration across the organization and the VMware integration. I actually was quite impressed with when I first met Jeff Clarke I guess two years ago now, what he and the organization have accomplished since then. No BS kind of person. And you can see it's starting to take effect. So we'll keep an eye on that. The next slide I want to show you, I want to bring in the ETR data. We've been sharing with you the ETR spending intention surveys for the last couple of weeks and months. ETR, enterprise technology research, they have a data platform that comprises 4,500 practitioners that share spending data with them. CIOs, IT managers, et cetera. What I'm showing here is a cut off of the server sector. So I'm going to drill down into server and storage. So these are spending intentions from the July survey asking about the second half of 2019 relative to the first half of 2019. And this is a drill-down into the giant public and private firms. Why do I do that? Because in meeting the ETR, this is the best indicator. So it's big, big public companies and big private companies. Think Uber. Private companies that spend a ton of dough on IT. UPS before it went public, for example. So those companies are in here. And they're, according to ETR, the best indicators. What this chart shows, so the bars show, and I've shared this with you a number of times, the lime green is we're adding, we're new to this platform, we're new adoption. The evergreen is we're spending more, the gray is we're spending the same, the light red or pink is we're spending less, and the dark red is we're leaving the platform. So if you subtract the red from the green you get what's called a net score, and that's that blue line. And this is the overall server spending intentions from that July survey. The end is about 525 respondents out of the 4,500. And this is, again, those that just answered the question on server. So you can see the net score on server spend is dropping. And you can see the market share on server is dropping. The takeaway here is that servers, as a percentage of overall IT spend, are on a downward slope, and have been for quite some time. Back to the January '16 survey. Okay, so that's going to serve us. Let's take a look at the same data for storage. So if, Alex, if you bring up the storage sector slide, You can see kind of a similar trend. And I would argue what's happening here, a couple of things. You've got the CLOB effect, I'll talk about that some more, and you've also got, in this case, the flash, all-flash array effect. What happened was you had all-flash arrays and flash come into the data center, and that gave performance a huge headroom. Remember, spinning disk was the last bastion of mechanical movement and it was the main bottleneck in terms of overall application performance. IO was the problem. Well you put a bunch of flash into the system and it gives a lot of headroom. People used to over-provision capacity just for performance reasons. So flash has had the effect of customers saying, hey, my performance is good, I don't need to over-provision anymore, I don't need to buy so much. So that combined with cloud, I think, has put down the pressure on the storage business as well. Now the next slide, Alex, that I want you to bring up is the vendor net scores, the server spending intentions. And what I've done is I've highlighted Dell EMC. Now what's happening here in the slide, and I realize it's an eye chart, but basically where you want to be in this chart is in the left-hand side. What it shows is the spending intentions and the momentum from the October '18, which is the gray, the April '19, which is the blue, and then the July '19 which is the most recent one. Again, the end is 525 in the servers for the July '19 survey. And you can see Dell's kind of in the middle of the pack. You'd love to be in the left-hand side, you know, Docker, Microsoft, VMware, Intel, Ubuntu. And you don't want to be on the right-hand side, you know, Fujitsu, IBM, is sort of below the line. Dell's kind of in the middle there, Dell EMC. The next slide I want to show you is that same slide for storage. And again, you can see here is that on-- So this is vendor net scores, the storage spending intentions. On the left-hand side it's all the high growth companies. Rubrik, Cohesity, Nutanix, Pure, VMware with vSAN, Veeam. You see Dell EMC's VxRail. On the right-hand side, you see the guys that are losing momentum. Veritas, Iron Mountain, Barracuda, HitachiHDS, Fusion-io still comes up in the survey after the acquisition by Western Digital. Again, you see Dell EMC kind of holding serve in the middle there. Not great, not bad. Okay, so that's kind of just some other ETR data that I wanted to share. All right, next thing we're going to talk about is the macros market summary. And Alex, I've got some bullet points on this, so if you bring up that slide, let me talk about that a little bit. So five points here. First, cloud continues to eat away at on-prem, despite all this talk about repatriation, which I know does happen. People try to throw everything to the cloud and they go, whoa! Look at my Amazon bill, yeah, I get that. That's at the margin. The main trend is that cloud continues to grow. That whole repatriation thing is not moving the on-prem market. On-prem is kind of steady eddy. Storage is still working through that AFA injection. Got a lot of headroom from performance standpoint. So people don't need to buy as much as they used to because you had that step function in performance. Now eventually the market will catch up, all this digital transformation is happening, all this data is flowing through the system and it will catch up, and the storage market is elastic. As NAN prices fall, people will, I predict, will buy more storage. But there's been somewhat of a lull in the overall storage market. It's not a great market right now, frankly, at the macro level. Now ETR does these surveys on a quarterly basis. They're just about to release the October survey, and they put out a little glimpse on Friday about this survey. And I'll share some bullet points there. Overall IT spending clearly is softening. We kind of know that, everybody kind of realizes that. Here's the nuance. New adoptions are reverting to pre-2018 levels, and the replacements are rising. What does this mean? So the number of respondents that said, oh yes, we're adopting this platform for the first time is declining, and the replacements are actually accelerating. Why is that? Well I was at ETR last week and we were talking about this and one of the theories, and I think it's a good one, is that 2016, 2017 was kind of experimentation around digital transformation. 2018, people started to put things into production or closer to production, they were running systems in parallel, and now they're making their bets, they're saying, hey, this test worked, let's put this heavy into production in 2019, and now we're going to start replacing. So we're not going to adopt as much stuff 'cause we're not doing as much experimentation. We're going to now focus and narrow in on those things that are going to drive our business, and we're going to replace those things that aren't going to drive our business. We're going to start unplugging them. So that's some of what's happening. Another big trend is Microsoft. Microsoft is extending its presence throughout. They're goin' after collaboration, you saw the impact that they had on Slack and Slack stock recently. So Slack Box, Dropbox, are kind of exposed there. They're goin' after security, they've just announced a SIM product. So Splunk and IBM, they're kind of goin' after that base. The application performance management vendors. For instance, New Relic. Microsoft goin' after them. Obviously they got a huge presence in cloud. Their Windows 10 cycle is a little slower this time around, but they've got other businesses that are really starting to click. So Microsoft is one of the few vendors that really is showing accelerated spending momentum in the ETR data. Financial services and telcos, which are always leading spender indicators, are actually very weak right now. That's having a spillover effect into Europe, which is over-banked, if I can use that term. Banking heavy, if you will. So right now it's not a pretty picture, but it's not a disaster. I don't want to necessarily suggest this as like going back to 2007, 2008, it's not. It's really just a matter of things are softening and it's, you know, maybe taking a little breath. Okay, so let me summarize the meeting overall. Again, it was a very well-run meeting. Started at 9:00, ended at 12:00, bagged lunch, go home. Nice and crisp. So these guys are very well-prepared. I think, again, Dell is a extremely well-managed company. They laid out a much clearer vision for Wall Street of its strategy, where it's headed. As they say, they're going after IT complexity. I want to make a comment on this. You think about Legacy EMC. Legacy EMC was not the company that you would expect to deal with complexity. In fact, they were the culprit of complexity. One of the things that Jeff Clarke did when he came in, he said, this portfolio's too complex, needs to be simplified. Joe Tucci used to say, overlap is better than gaps. Jeff Clarke said we got too much overlap. We don't have a lot of gaps so let's streamline that portfolio. Taking advantage of vendor consolidation, this is an interesting one. Ever since I've been in this business, which has been quite a long time now, I've been hearing that buyers want to consolidate the number of vendors that they have. They've really not succeeded in doing that. Now can they do that now 'cause there are less vendors? Well, in a sense, yes, there are less sort of on-prem big vendors. EMC's no longer in the market, you don't have companies like Sun and Digital anymore, Compact is gone. HP split in two, but still. You're not seeing a huge number of new vendors, at scale, come into the market. Except you've got AWS and Google as new players there. So I think that injects sort of a new dynamic that a lot of people like to put cloud aside and kind of ignore it and talk about the old on-prem business, but I think that you're going to see a lot of experimentations and workload ins and outs, particularly with AWS and Google and of course Azure, which is in itself, their cloud is almost a separate force. So we'll see how that shakes up. As I say, servers right now, Dell's got a very tough compare. I think Dell will be fine in the server space. Storage, it's all about simplifying the portfolio, they've got a refreshed portfolio focused on regaining share. They've rebranded everything Power, so their whole line is going to be Power by, if it's not already, by May of next year, Dell Technologies World. It's a much more scalable portfolio. And I think Dell's got a lot of valuation levers. They're a $92 billion company, they've got their current operations, their current P and L, their share gains, their cross-company synergies, particularly with VMware, they can expand their TAM into cloud with partnerships like they're doing with AWS and others, Google, Microsoft. The Edge is a TAM expansion opportunity to them. And also corporate structure. You've seen them. VMware acquired Pivotal. They're cleaning that up. I'm sure they could potentially make some other moves. Secureworks is out there, for example. Maybe they'll do some things with RSA. So they got that knob to turn and they can delever. Paying down the debt to the extent that they can get back to investment grade, that will lower their interest rates, that'll drop right to the bottom line, and they'll be able to reinvest that. And Tom Sweet said, within 18 months, we'll be able to get there with that two X ratio relative to EBITA, and that's when they're going to start having conversations with the rating agencies to talk about you know, hey, maybe we can get a better rating and lower our interest expense. Bottom line, did Wall Street buy the story? Yes. But I don't think it's going to necessarily change anything in the near term. This is a show me from Missouri, prove it, execute, and then I think Dell will get rewarded. Okay, so this is Dave Vellante, thanks for watching this Cube Insights powered by ETR. We'll see ya next time. (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live! From Anahiem, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.next 2019 Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next, here in Anaheim California, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host John Furrier. We're joined by Sunil Potti, he is the chief product and development officer here at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Glad to be here. >> So we are talking about the era of invisible infrastructure and this morning on the main stage there was many many different announcements, new products and adjustments, augmentations to products. Can you walk our viewers a little bit, walk our viewers through a little bit what you were talking about today? >> Yeah, I mean (inaudible) so in fact, our vision really hasn't materially changed over the last few years. In fact, my team always teases me that all I do is essentially change the timeline but the same slideshow is up. But you know, something about vision being consistent and we sort of have broken that up into two major phases, the first phase is essentially to move cloud from being a destination to being an experience. What do I mean by that? Essentially, everyone knows about cloud as being something served by Amazon, or Google, or (inaudible) and ultimately, our belief has been that if we do an honest job of what Amazon or Google provided natively But bring cloud to the customers rather than having the customers go to a destination, Then they can essentially get maybe 60 or 70 percent of that experience but maybe at a tenth of the price or a tenth of the time. And most human beings as you guys know, is that once you get 60 or 70 percent, You're happy and you move on other things. And that's really the first act of this company is to sort of bring cloud to the customers. And in doing so, in my opinion solves one of clouds biggest, you know, perennial issues, which is migration. Because that's essentially what lift and shift, gets in the way, that I've gotta change something that I've invested 20 years in and I've gotta lift and shift it. And if something comes to you, that gap is dramatically reduced, right? And sure, we don't do everything that public clouds do but, like I said, if you can do an honest job of that 60 % then it turns out that most customers now adopt Nutanix looking at public cloud as more of a tailwind instead of a headwind because the more they taste amazon outside the more they want amazon inside. And so, so, that's really the first act of the company. A series of products that allow us to build out a full blown IA stack but also a bunch of services such as desktops, databases, all the usual services. So it's all about increasing the layers of abstraction to the user so they can do one take operations. So, that's the first act. And the second act which is much more a longer term bet for the next decade or so is that if the first act was about bringing cloud to you to replatform the data center, customers are also going to redesign their apps and when they redesign their apps Do you want to do it on an operating system that locks you only into one public cloud? Or do you want to do it in something that can moves across clouds? And that's our second act of the company. And there's a lot of details there. >> John Furrier: So hyper-convergence was a great concept and proved it out, great customer base, core business is humming along, solid, but the growth is gonna come from essentials which is the enterprise in multiple clouds. So I get that. As you guys look and build those products and you're the chief product officer, you have the keys to the kingdom, it's all on you. >> It's in my guide to work out. >> So you're a team. But this is a big pressure, this is the opportunity. As you think about a software company as you guys are shifting from being hardware to software things start to be different so as you start thinking about the act two the convergence of clouds. That really is a key part of it, what you did for the data center, HCI, >> Yeah, totally. >> You're doing HCI for the cloud. >> Yeah, like what does that actually mean? >> So explain that concept. >> No, it's a great question. So, and some of this, obviously, we are struggling through ourselves. But we are not afraid of making mistakes in this transition as you've seen other the last year, we've gone from being in the plans company to a software that runs on third party to being a subscription company, to now running on clouds. All within a span of 12 months, while building a business, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes we pick up ourselves and learn from mistakes and go but to your point I think, we're not afraid to become an app on somebody else's operating system. Just like Microsoft said "Look I'm gonna release office, "on Mac or Ipad before I even do it on Windows," that kind of thinking has to permeate and pretty much, in my opinion, every technology will end up going forward. A good example of that is look, if somebody wants to consume their applications that they built on Nutanix on premise but their idea was look they don't wanna be in the data center business tomorrow without changing the apps they should be able to take that entire infrastructure and applications and consume it inside Amazon's fabric because they provide a bunch of other services as well as data centers. So, a recent announcement of Nutanix in AWS not on AWS for a reason is an example of us becoming an app on somebody else's operating system. That's an example of us transforming further away from being an infrastructure only or an appliance only company. >> What does this mean for your customers and your partners because you guys have taken an open strategy with partnering, the HPE announcements, very successfully off the tee, in the middle of the fair way as we say, looking good. That seems to be the trend, others taking a different approach, you know that is, owning it all. >> Yeah yeah, in fact I would say that look, in some way, internally we joke about ourselves, as we have to prove the... You know, we always used to think about ourselves as a smart phone for the enterprise, consumerizing the data center. But we had to prove that model by owning the full stack like Apple did, but over a period of time, to democratization happens, by distribution. And so in some ways, we have to become more of an android like company while retaining the best practices of the delight and the security of an apple device. So that's the easiest analogy where, We're trying to work with partners like Dell, Lenovo, and now increasingly, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Inspur, Intel, everybody is signed up, just because everybody now knows that the customers want an experience. And now the lastest relationship with HP takes it to the next level now where we want to bring essentailly super micro like appliance goodness one click from away upgrades, support, everything. But with a HPE backed platform, that both companies can benefit from. >> You know, one of the big complaints from customers, I hear, on theCUBE, and also privately is there's so many tools, and management software, I've got management plane for this, I got this over here, >> For sure... >> So there's kinda this toolshed mentality of, you know, a new hire, learn this tool for that software, people don't want another tool, they don't want another platform. So, how do you see that, how do you address that with going forward, this act two, as you continue to build the products what's the strategy and what's the value proposition for customers? >> I mean, think it's no different than I think how we sort of launched the company in the first place which is there's no way you can say we'll simplify your life without removing parts. That was the original Steve Jobs thing, right? The true way to simplify is to remove parts, right? And essentially that's what hyper-convergence has done, it just we're doing this not just for infrastructure but for clouds because when you use Nutanix you throw away old computer, you throw away old storage, you throw away old (inaudible) I mean, that's the only way to converge your experience down to one tool. You can't stitch together ten tools into this magical fabric, I mean it doesn't work that way. But that's hard, because not every customer is ready to do that, every partner is ready to do that they've got their own little incumbencies. But that's the journey we're on, it's a right of passage for us, we have to earn it the old fashioned way and we've done reasonably well so far. >> So you mentioned Steve Jobs, he also said, when he was alive, in an interview, on the lost interviews on Netflix, I watched that recently. He said, also software gives you the opportunity to move the needle on efficiencies, and change the game, much more significantly then managing a process improvement which can give you maybe 30% yield. He's saying you can go 60s, 80% changeover with software. This is part of your strategy, how do you guys see Nutanix in the future, with the software lead or approach, changing the game for IT? >> I think clearly, software is fundamental, I mean the whole point of us, our product was I think, we have some folks on the platform group that help make sure that the software runs because software has to run somewhere, by the way. It doesn't run in air, it runs on hardware. So let's not under emphasize hardware for that reason, but, most of our IP has been in software. But I would say that the real thing for us that has kept us going is design of software which is essentially also, when you go back to the Apple thing, because a lot of software renders out that too. It's how you design it, starting with why, rather than just going to the how, is how we see ourselves differentiating what we deliver to our customers over the next 5 years. >> Rebecca Knight: I want to ask you about innovation and your process because here you are, you're the Chief product officer at this very creative company, I wanna know, what sparks you're creativity, where do you get your ideas? Of course you're gonna say, "I talk to customers, "and I find out their problems", but where do you go for inspiration? >> Yeah, I think it's an age old problem I'll give you my personal answer, I don't think it's representative of everyone in the company obviously. And that's one of the good things with Nutanix each of us have their own point of view and things, right? We have this term of "let chaos reign and then reign in chaos". Right? To some extent. That has been done well at other companies like Google, and so forth. So, I've always believed in a couple of vectors for inspiration. The most obvious one is to listen to others. More than talk. Whether it's listening to customers, listening to partners, listening to other employees with other ideas and have a curated way to do that because if you only listen to customers you build faster horses not carts, as Henry Ford said, okay? So that's the what I would call a generic theme and you'd think that it's easy to do so, but it's very hard to truly listen from signal from the noise by the way. So there's an art there that one has to get better at. But the DNA has to be there to listen that's the first thing I would say. The second thing which I think is maybe deeper, and that's probably more in the... The first one applies to maybe 1% The second one, probably applies to .001% which is having intuition of what's right. And this ability, people call it, I don't know, big words like vision and so forth the ability to see around corners and anticipate, you know, my old manager, a guy that I respect a lot, Mark Templeton who was the CEO for Citrix, used to always ask this question "Do you know why Michelin has three stars? "The first star is for food, obviously, "there has to be good food. "The second star is for service. "The third star, not many people know why it's for" According to him, and I haven't really checked it yet, I haven't really eaten in too many Michelin three star restaurants, is anticipation. And product strategy is a little bit like that, right? So to me, that's where Nutanix really trumps the competition. Is that second dimension of intuition. More so than even, listening to customers. >> It's seeing around those corners, and knowing which way the winds are blowing. >> Totally. >> One of the other things that we're talking about a lot about, here on theCUBE, particularly at this conference, is the importance of culture. Nutanix...we had Dheeraj on this morning talking about the sort of playful nature that he tries to bring to the company, and that really has filtered down, how would you describe the Nutanix culture and how do you maintain the culture? >> So I think, we... I'll tell you personally, the journey that I was on, that there were a couple of things that I brought to the table, a couple things that I learned myself, as well as what I could see, a couple things that you'll see in a company that has been built by founders, in my opinion, I'm not a founder, or entrepreneur myself, but I've seen them in action now, is they bring one dimension that I've not seen in big company leaders, which is continuous learning. Because that's the only way they can stay in the company when it goes from 0 to ninety, right? And the folks that continuously learn, stay. If they don't, they leave and we get professional leaders. So, continuous learning, if it can be applied, to the generic company becomes an amplifying effect now. People can learn how to grow, look around the corners, they can learn things, that otherwise they aren't born with, in my opinion. So I think that's one unique dimension that Nutanix I think, inculcates in a lot of people, is this continuous learning. The other dimension, which I think, everybody knows about Nutanix being this humble, hungry, honest, with heart, you know those four words sort of capture the, a sense of, the playful, authenticity. But I think we're not afraid to be wrong. And, we're not afraid to make fun of ourselves. We're not afraid to be, I guess, ourselves, right? And that, I think is easy to say, but very hard to do. >> John Furrier: You learn through your mistakes as they say, learn through failure. So, you mention intuition. What does your intuition tell you about the current ecosystem as the market starts to really accelerate with multi cloud on premise private cloud, which by the way, good intuition, of course we keep on, at the first private cloud reports dominion and team, they got that right. The waves are coming and they look different. There's gonna be more integration we think. What does your intuition tell you about these next couple waves that are gonna come in to the landscape of the tech industry? >> Yeah, I mean I think, since I do want to come back on theCUBE again and again, and have something left over, I will say one thing though, is I think the gain in multi cloud is going to move up the stack, okay? That's where the next set of cloud wars are going to be fought. Is whose going to provide not just a great database as a service, but a great database itself. Because, Oracle's time's up, as far as I'm concerned, right? And you're going to see that with many traditional software stacks, some of them are Sass stacks that have been around for 20 years, by the way. Some of the largest Sass companies have been around for 20 years. It's time for a reboot for most of those companies. >> How about the Edge? What does the intuition tell you on the Edge? Certainly very relevant, you've got power, you've got connectivity expanding, Wifi 6 around the corner, we've seen that. 5g, okay, I buy it. But as it really starts to figure itself out, it's just another note on the network. What's your intuition tell you? >> Yeah, I mean, this is one area that I'm not too deep in, I've got other guys in my team who know a lot more, but, my intuition tells me, the more things change, the more they'll remain the same, in that area, right? So don't be surprised if they just end up being another smart phone. You know, its got an operating system, it runs apps, it's centrally controlled, talks to services in the back end, I see no reason why the Edge should be any different, if that make sense. >> John Furrier: Yeah, exactly. Then data, big part of it. Big part of your strategy, the data piece, >> Of course, of course, yeah. I mean I think data being a core competency of any company is going to stand out, I think in the next 5, 10 years. >> John Furrier: Awesome. What's going on at the show? What's been your hottest conversation in the hallways, talking to customers, partners, employees, what's some of the trending conversation? >> I don't know, this conversations pretty interesting! (laughs) >> Of course! >> Rebecca Knight: We agree! (Laughs) >> My intuition is telling me this is a good conversation! Hope it comes out good! >> Keep using that word man. >> I love it! >> Anyway, always great to be with you guys. >> Sunil, thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Anytime. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, we will have much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell World Technologies here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We have two guests on this segment. Both CUBE veterans, so. (laughs) We have Varun Chhabra. He is the VP, Product Marketing, Cloud Dell EMC and Muneyb Minhazuddin, VP Solutions Product Marketing at VMware. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we just had the keynote address. We heard from Michael Dell, Sachin Adela, Pat Gelsinger. It's a real who's who of this ecosystem. Break it down for us. What did we hear? What is sort of the most exciting thing from your perspective, Varun? >> So, Rebecca, what we hear from customers again and again is it's a multicloud world, right? Everybody has multiple cloud deployments. We saw Pat mention five on average, cloud architectures in customer environments. And what we keep hearing from them is there are operational silos that develop as part of the tool set, the SLAs that are different, the machine formats. All of these things just lead to a lot of operational silos and complexity. And what customers are overwhelmingly asking Dell EMC as well as VMware, is that how do we reduce this complexity? How do we be able to move work loads together? How do we manage all of this in a common framwork and reduce some of that complexity, so that really they can take advantage of the promise of multicloud. >> So Muneyb, theCUBE goes to, you know, all the big industry shows. >> Right. >> I feel like everywhere I go used to be, you know, it's like Intel and NVIDIA up on stage with the next generation. Well, for the last year, it felt like, you know, Pat and Sanjay were, you know, somebody like that, you know, up on stage. We have the Google cloud event a couple of weeks ago. There was Sanjay up on stage. You come here, there's Sachin Adela up on stage. So, let's talk about that public cloud piece. You know, we know the relationship with AWS, VMware cloud on AWS sent ripples through the industry. And, you know, the Google cloud piece. So tell us what's new, anything different about the Microsoft piece when it comes to public cloud. And how does that fit in relation to all the other clouds? >> Sure, no, I'll amplify what Varun said, right. We think about customer's choice first. And really customer choice as you know, you got multiple cloud providers. We've seen customers makes this choice of, I need to make this, you know, a multi-cloud world. Why are they going towards the multi-cloud world is because applications are going there. And really VMware's strategy has been to say how do we empower customers with that choice? Our, you know, AWS partnership is as strong as ever. We continue to innovate there. And that was our first kind of choice of platform. And Pat alluded to this on the stage. We have 4,000 cloud provider partners, right. And the 4,000 cloud provider partners we've built over the years, and that include, you know, not small names. They include IBM. Like you know they've got Rackspace, some of the biggest cloud providers. So our strategy has always been how do we take our stack and land it in as many public clouds as possible? So we took the first step of IBM, then about 4,000 other cloud providers, be it Rackspace, Fujitsu, Hitachi. Then came Amazon, Amazon being the choice of destination for a lot of public clouds. Today, we kind of further extend that with Microsoft, and you know a few weeks ago with Google. So this is really about customer choice and customers when they want the hybrid multi-cloud piece, it's app-driven. Right, you got two worlds. You got an existing application and you're looking to get some scale out of that existing application. And you're building a lot of native cloud, native applications. They want this, you know, in multiple places. >> All right, so if I could just drill down one level deep. So if I'm going to ask your customer today, my understanding is the VMware's DDC Stack, what does that mean, what do I use, how is that look and feel compared, do I use the Microsoft system center, am I using vCenter, you know. >> Sure, this is really, again, an app-driven conversation, right. There were multiple announcements in here, just to unpack them. It was like, hey, we have the Dell Technologies cloud platform. The Dell Technologies cloud platform is powered by DELL EMC infrastructure and VMware Cloud Foundation on top, virtualizing your full compute network storage with vShere, vSAN, NSX, and management, right. And the second part was really we've got VMware Cloud on a Dell EMC. This is to bring cloud to the work loads, which did in public clouds. We're seeing this repatriation of work loads back on the data center or the edge. This is really driven by a lot of customers who have built native IP in the public cloud, be it Amazon, be it Azure, who want to now bring some of those work loads closer to the data center or the edge. Now this comes to, how do I take my Azure work loads and bring it closer to the edge or my data center? Why is that a need? You know we have large customers, large customers, multi-national, they have 500,000 employees 90 locations worldwide who've built IP, or when I say IP applications natively in cloud. Suddenly for 500,000 employees in 90 locations, they're going ingress egress traffic to the cloud, public cloud, it's huge. How do I bring it closer to my data centers, right? And this is where taking Azure work loads, bringing them on prem, closer, solves that big problem for them. Now, how do I take that work loads and bring them closer, is that's where we landed in the VMware on Dell EMC infrastructure because this brings you closer to the data center, gives me either low latency, data governance, and control, as well as flexibility to bring these work loads back on prem, right? So the two tangents that you're driving, both your cloud growth and back to the edge, the second tangent of growth or explosion is cloud native work loads. You're able to bring them closer to your data center is purely the value proposition, right. >> Well, we heard so much about that on main stage this morning, about just how differently the modern workforce works, in terms of the number of devices they use, the different locations they are when they are doing the tasks of their job. Can you talk a little bit about the specifics in terms of customers you're working with, you don't need to name names, but just how you are enabling those people to be more productive, be more collaborative, and to get their jobs done. >> You know, we get feedback from customers in all industries, so Muneyb can share a few as well. We have large banks that are, you know, they're standardized their work loads on VMware today, as have many more organizations and they're looking for the flexibility to be able to move stuff to the cloud or move it back on premises and not have to reformat, not have to change their machine formats and just make it a little bit easy. They want the flexibility to be able to run applications in their bank branches in the cloud. But then they don't necessarily want to adopt a new machine format or a new standardized platform. That's really what the Azure announcement helps them do. Just like with Data Blue S can now move work loads seamlessly to Azure, use vCenter, use your other tools that you're familiar with today already to be able to provision your work loads. >> All right, Varun, wonder if we can drill into the stack a little bit here. I went to the Microsoft show last year and it was like, oh, WSSD is very different than Azure Stack, even if you look at the box, then it's very much the same. Underneath the covers, there was a lot of discussion of VxRail. We know how fast that's been growing. Can you, I believe there was two pieces to this, there's the VCF on VxRail and then, you know, help explain some of the differences. >> Yeah, so for the Dell Technologies cloud platform announcement, which is, as you said, VxRail HCI infrastructure with VMware Cloud Foundations tightly integrated. So that that the storage, compute, and networking capabilities off of VMware Cloud Foundation are all incorporated and taken advantage of within the HCI infrastructure. This is all about making things easier to consume, reducing the complexity for customers. When they get VxRail, they overwhelmingly tell us they want to use VMware Cloud Foundations to be able to manage and automate those work loads. So we're packaging the sup out of the box. So when customers get it, they have the cloud experience on premises without the complexity of having to deploy it because it's already integrated tightly. The engineering teams have actually worked together and then you can then, as we mentioned, extend those work loads to public cloud using the same tools, the same VMware Cloud Foundation tools. >> And you know, we built on Cloud Foundation for a while. I'm sure you followed us on the Cloud Foundation. And that has been, when, yes, we talk about consistent infrastructure, consistent operations in this hybrid cloud world. And what we really mean is that VMware Cloud Foundations stack. Right, so when we talk about VMC on AWS, is that Cloud Foundation stack running inside of Amazon. When we talk about, you know, our partnership with Azure is that VMware Cloud Foundation stack running on Azure. When we talk about these 4,000 partners, cloud certified, IBM, it is the Cloud Foundation stack. And the key components being the full stack, vSphere, vSAN, NSX, and there's a critical bar in Cloud Foundation call life cycle management. It's missed quite easily, right. The benefit of running a public cloud, they key three attributes you get is you get everything as a service, you get all your infrastructure as software, and the third part is you don't spend any time maintaining the inter-operability between your compute, network, storage. And that is a huge deal for costumers. They spent a lot of time just maintaining this inter-op. And VMware Cloud Foundation has this life cycle manager which solves that problem. That is key. >> Thank you for bringing that up, because, right, one of the big differences you talk about public cloud, go talk to your customer and say, hey, what version of Microsoft Azure are you running? And they'll laugh at you and say, like, well, Microsoft takes care of that for me. Well, when I differentiate and I say, Oh, okay, I want to run the same stack in my environment, how do I keep that up-to-date. We know that VMware customer, it's like, there's lot of incentives to get them there but oftentimes they're N minus one, two, or something like that. So how do we manage and make sure that it is more cloud-like and up-to-date? >> Yeah, absolutely, so there's two ways to do that. One of them is, because the VMware and Dell EMC teams are working on engineering closely together, we're going to have the latest version supported right out of the gate. So you have an update, you know that it's going to work on your hardware, or vice versa. So that's one level. And then with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, we're also providing the ability to basically have hands-off management and have that infrastructure run in your data center or your edge locations, but at the same time not have to manage it. You leave that management to Dell Technologies and to VMware, to be able to manage that solution for you. So really, as Muneyb said, bringing that public cloud experience to your on-premise locations as well. >> And I think that's one of the big differentiators that's going to come, right? People want to get that consumption model, and they're trying to say, hey, how do I build my own data center, maintain it, but at the same time I want to rely on Dell and VMware to come and help us build it together, right. And the second part of the announcement was really, hey, VMware, Dell, on a Dell EMC, is that manage service offer. The demo you saw from June Yang was being able to have a consumption interface where you can kind of click of a button roll it back into a data center as well as an edge. 'Cause you have really literally very little IT skill sets where in the edge environment, and as edge compute needs become more prolific with 5G, IoT devices, you need that same kind of data governance model and data center model there as well. And that really the beauty of coming to VMware and Dell DMC, Dell Technologies' power, is to maintain that everywhere, right? >> I want to ask you about innovation. One of the things that was really striking during the keynote was the Bank of America executive saying I rely on Dell Technologies to be thinking about four steps ahead of me, even though I obviously have my own customers' needs that I need to be thinking of. I need Dell to be four steps ahead. So how are you, how are you getting in the heads of these obvious problems. >> I think it really comes down to listening to customers, right. As Dell Technologies, as VMware, we have the advantage of working with so many customers, like hundreds of thousands of customers around the world. We get to hear and listen and understand what are the cutting-edge things that customers are looking for. And then we can now take that back to customers like Bank of America, who may have thought about certain scenarios that we would learn from, but they might not have thought about other industries where things could be applicable to their industry. So that drives a lot of our innovation. We are very proud about the fact that we are customer-focused. Our innovation is really driven by listening to customers and having smart people just work on those problems. >> And, you know, customer voice is a big deal. Customer choice, that's why we're doing what we're doing with multiple cloud providers, right? And I think this is really a key to, if you just look at VMware's innovation, we're already talking about this multi-cloud world, where it's like, hey, you've got work loads natively, so how do you manage those? We're already ahead in thinking about Kubernetes with acquisition of Heptio. And you think about it, we've done this innovation in the cloud space, established this hybrid credibility, and we've launched it with Dell Technology now. We're already ahead in this multi-cloud operational model, we're already ahead in this Kubernetes evolution. We'll bring it back with the family and listen to the customers for choice because at the end of the day, we're here to solve customer problems, right? >> I think that's another dimension of choice that we offer, which is both traditional applications as well as applications of the future that will increasingly be customer container based. >> Yeah, I'm just wondering if you can expand on a little bit. You know, one of the things I said, VMware is great, it really simplified the environment. I go back 15 years ago. One of the things it did is, let me take my old application that was probably long in the tooth to begin with, my hardware's out of date, my operating system out of date, stick it in a VM and leave it for another five years. And the users of that are like, oh my gosh, I need an update. How do we get beyond that and allow this joint solution to be an accelerant for applications? >> Yeah, and I think that application is probably the crux of the business, right, we're-- >> It's a long pole in the tent for making change, but uh. >> And applications have evolved. This is actually the evolution journey of IT itself, is where there used to be support systems, now they become actually translate to business dollars, 'cause you know the first thing that your customer, often customer touches, is an application. And you can drive business value from it. And customers are thinking about these old applications and new applications, and they have to start thinking about where do I take my applications, where do they need to land, and then make the choice of what infrastructure is the best platform for it. So really you're going to flip the thing on, don't think infrastructure first and then retrospect apps to it, think app first and then make a choice on infrastructure based on your application need. And really, like you said, VMware kind of took the abstraction layer away from infrastructure and made sure that your VMs could from everywhere. We're taking the same for applications to say, doesn't matter if it's a VM-based, it's a cloud native, we'll give you the same consistent infrastructure and operations. >> Okay, Varun, last thing, could you just tell us of the announcements that are made. What's available today? What's coming later this year? >> Absolutely, so the Dell Technologies cloud platform that's based on VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation is available now as an integrated solution. The VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, the fully managed offer, is available in the second half of this year. It's in beta right now and, as you saw, we have really good feedback from our customers. And then I think the Azure VMware Solutions offer will be available soon as well. >> All right, well, Varun and Muneyb, congratulations on the progress. We look forward to talking to the customers as they roll this out, and Rebecca and I will be back with lots more coverage here at Dell Technologies World 2019, wall-to-wall coverage, two sets, three days, tenth year of theCUBE at EMC and Dell World. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the cubes Live coverage of Del World Technologies Here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have two guests on the seven, both both Cube veterans. So we have Varun Cabra. He is the VP product Marketing Cloud Delhi Emcee and Moeneeb unit. Minute Soudan VP Solutions Product marketing at VM. Where. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having >> thanks for having us. So we just had the keynote address we heard from Michael Dell Satya Nadella Pack Girl Singer It's a real who's who of this of this ecosystem. Break it down for us. What? What did we hear? What is what is sort of the most exciting thing from your perspective? >> So, Rebecca, what? What we hear from customers again and again is it's a multi cloud world, right? Everybody has multiple cloud deployments, but we saw that mentioned five on average cloud architectures in customer environments and what we keep hearing from them is they There are operational silos that developed as part of the to set the fellas that are different. The machine formats. All of these things just lied a lot of lead to a lot of operational silos in complexity, and the customers are overwhelming or willingly asking William C. As well as being Where is that? How do we reduce this complexity? How do we we'll be able to move, were close together? How do we manage all of this in a common framework and reduce some of the complexity? So there's really they could take advantage off the promise of Monte Club. >> Yeah, so many. The Cube goes to all the big industry shows. I feel like everywhere I go used to be, you know, it's like intel and in video, up on stage for the next generation. Well, for the last year, it felt like, you know, patent Sanjay, or, you know, somebody like that, you know, up on stage with Google Cloud of a couple of years ago, there was Sanjay up on St Come here. They're searching Adela up on stage. So let's talk about that public cloud piece China. We know you know the relationship with a wsbn were clad in a ws sent ripples through the industry on you know, the guru cloud piece. So tell us what's new and different peace when it comes to come up to public clouded. How does that fit with in relation to all the other clouds? >> Sure, no, I'll amplify. You know what Aaron said, Right? We think about customer choice first. Andrea Lee, customer choice. As you know, you got multiple cloud providers. We've seen customers make this choice off. I need to make this, you know, a multi cloud world. Why're they going towards the multi clothing world? It's because applications air going there on really well, where strategy has bean to say, How do we empower customers without choice? Are you know, eight of us partnership is as strong as ever, but we continue to eat away there, and that was their first going to choice a platform. And Patty alluded to this on the stage. We have four thousand cloud provider partners right on the four thousand block provider partners we've built over the years, and that includes, you know, not small names. They include IBM. They, like, you know, they've got in Iraq space. Some of the biggest cloud providers. So our strategy is always being. How do we take our stack and and lighted and as many public laws? It's possible. So we took the first step off IBM. Then you know, about four thousand. You know, other plot providers being Rackspace, Fujitsu, it's Archie. Then came Amazon. I'm is on being the choice of destination for a lot of public clouds. Today we kind of further extend that with Microsoft and, you know, a few weeks ago with Google, right? So there's really about customer choice and customers when they want the hybrid multi Claude fees his abdomen right. You got two worlds, you couldn't existing application and you're looking Just get some scale out of that existing application and you're building a lot of, you know, native cloud native applications. They want this, you know, in multiple places. >> All right, so if I could just drilled down one level deep, you know? So if I'm in as your customer today, my understanding it's Veum or STD. Sea Stack. What does that mean? You know what I use, You know? How is that? You can feel compare? Do I use the Microsoft? You know System Center. Am I using V Center? You know, >> shark now, and this is really again in an abdomen. Calm conversation, right where they were multiple announcements in here just to unpack them there. It's like, Hey, we had the Del Technologies Cloud platform. The Del Technologies clock platform is powered by, you know, Delhi emcee infrastructure and be aware Cloud Foundation on top, where slicing your full computer network storage with the sphere of visa and a sex and management. Right. And the second part was really We've got being where cloud on a deli emcee. The system brings a lot of the workloads which stood in public clouds. We're seeing this repatriation off workloads back on. You know, on the data center are the edge. This is really driven by a lot of customers and who have built native I pee in the public cloud beyond Amazon beat ashore who want to now bring some of those workloads closer to the, you know, data center or the edge. Now this comes to how do I take my azure workloads and bring it closer to the edge or my data center? Why's that? I need you know, we have large customers, you know. You know, large customers multinational. They have, you know, five hundred thousand employees, ninety locations will wide. Who built to I p or when I say I p applications natively in cloud suddenly for five thousand employees and ninety locations, they're going ingress egress. Traffic to the cloud public cloud is huge. How do I bring it closer to my data centers? Right. And this is where taking us your workloads. Bringing them, you know, on prime closer salts. That big problem for them. Now, how do I take that workloads and bring them closer? Is that where we landed in the Veum wear on Del, you know AMC Infrastructure? Because this big sea closer to the data center gives me either Lowell agency data governance and you know, control as well as flexibility to bring these work clothes back on. Right? So the two tangent that you're driving both your cloud growth and back to the edge The second tangent of growth or explosion is cloud native workloads. We're able to bring them closer. Your data center is freely though the value proposition, right? >> Well, we heard so much about that on the main stage this morning about just how differently with modern workforce works in terms of the number of devices that used the different locations they are when they are doing the tasks of their job. >> You talk a little bit about the >> specifics in terms of customers you're working with. You don't need a name names. But just how you are enabling the >> way get feedback from customers in all industries, right? So you don't even share a few as well Way have large banks that are, you know, they're standardized their workloads on VM where today, right as as have many Morgan is ations, and they're looking for the flexibility to be able to move stuff to the cloud or moving back on premises and not have to reformat, not have to change that machine formats and just make it a little easy. They want the flexibility to be able to run applications in their bank branches right in the cloud, right? But then they don't they don't necessarily want adopt a new machine format for a new standardized platform. That's really what Thie azure announcement helps them do, Just like with eight of us, can now move workloads seamlessly to azure USVI center. Use your other you know, tools that you're familiar with today. Already to be ableto provision in your work clothes. All >> right, so for and what? Wonder if we could drill into the stack a little bit here? You know, I went to the Microsoft show last year, and it was like, Oh, WSSD is very different than Azure Stack even if you look at the box and it's very much the same underneath the covers, there was a lot of discussion of the ex rail. We know how fast that's been growing. Can you believe there's two pieces? This there's the VCF on Vieques rail and then, you know, just help. Help explain >> s o for the Del Technologies Cloud Platform announcement, which is, as you said, VX rail in first hcea infrastructure with Mia McLeod foundations tightly integrated, right, so that the storage compute and networking capabilities of off the immortal foundation are all incorporated and taken advantage off it. In the end structure. This is all about making things easier to consume, right, producing the complexity for customers. When they get the X trail, they overwhelmingly tell us they want to use the metal foundations to be able to manage and automate those workloads. So we're packaging this up out of the box. So when customers get it, they have That's cloud experience on premises without the complexity of having to deploy it because it's already integrated, cited the engineering teams have actually worked together. And then you can then, as we mentioned, extend those workloads to public loud, using the same tools, the same, the MSR foundation tools. >> And, you know, uh, we built on Cloud Foundation for a while, and I'm sure you followed us on the Cloud Foundation. And that has bean when you know yes, we talk about consistent infrastructure, consistent operations, this hybrid cloud world and what we really mean. Is that really where? Cloud foundation stack, right? So when we talk about the emcee on eight of us, is that Cloud foundation stack running inside of Amazon? When we talk about you know, our partnership with the shore, he's not being where Cloud Foundation stack running on a shore. We talk about this four thousand partners. Cloud certified IBM. It is the Cloud Foundation stack and the key components being pulled. Stack the Sphere v. Santana Sex and there's a critical part in Cloud Foundation called lifecycle management. It's, you know, it's missed quite easily, right? The benefit of running a public cloud. The key through the attributes you get is you know, you get everything as a service, you get all your infrastructure of software. And the third part is you don't spend any time maintaining the interoperability between you compete network storage. And that is a huge deal for customers. They spent a lot of time just maintaining this interrupt and, you know, view Marie Claude Foundation has this life cycle manager which solves that problem. Not not just Kee. >> Thank you for bringing it up because, right, one of the big differences you talk about Public Cloud, go talk to your customer and say, Hey, what version of Microsoft Azure are you running and the laughter you and say like, Well, Microsoft takes care of that. Well, when I differentiate and I say Okay, well, I want to run the the same stack in my environment. How do I keep that up today? We know the VM where you know customers like there's lots of incentives to get them there, but oftentimes they're n minus one two or something like that. So how do we manage and make sure that it's more cloud like enough today? >> Yeah, absolutely. So. So there's two ways to do that to one of them is because the V m. A and L E M C team during working on engineering closely together, we're going to have the latest word in supported right right out the gate. So you have an update, you know that it's gonna work on your your hardware or vice versa. So that's one level and then with via MacLeod and L E M C. We're also providing the ability to basically have hands off management and have that infrastructure running your data center or your eyes locations, but at the same time not have to manage it. You leave that management to tell technologies into somewhere. To be able to manage that solution for you is really, as Moody said, bringing that public loud experience to your own premise. Locations is long, >> and I think that's one of the big, different trainers that's going to come right. People want to get that consumption model, and they're trying to say, Hey, how do I build my own data center, maintain it, but the same time I want to rely on, you know, dull and beyond Where to come and help us build it together. Right? And the second part of announcement was really heavy and wear dull on the d l E M C. Is that Manager's offered the demo you saw from June. Yang was being able to have a consumption interface where you could connect click of a button, roll it back into a data center as well. It's an edge because you have real Italy. Very little skill sets where night in the edge environment and as EJ Compute needs become more prolific with five g i ot devices, you need that same kind of data governance model and data center model. There is well and not really the beauty off, you know, coming to be aware. And Delta, you know Del DMC del. Technology's power is to maintain that everywhere, right? I >> won't ask you about >> innovation. One of the things that's really striking during American executive, Even though I obviously have my own customers, >> I think it really comes down to listening to customers. Write as as Del Technologies is Liam, where we have the advantage of working with so many customers, hundreds of thousand customers around the world we get to hear and listen and understand what are the cutting edge things that customers are looking for? And then we can not take that back to customers like Bank of America who may have taught about certain scenarios right that we will learn from. But they may not have thought about other industries where things could be applicable to their street, so that drives a lot of our innovation. Very. We are very proud about the fact that we're customer focused. Our invasion is really driven by listening to customers on. And, you know, having smart people just work on this one to work on this problems. And, >> you know, customer wise is a big deal customer choice. That's why we're doing what we're doing with multiple cloud providers, right? And I think this is really a key, too. If you just look at being where's innovation were already talking about this multi claude world where it was like, Hey, you've got workloads natively. So we How do you manage? Those were already ahead and thinking about, you know come in eighties with acquisition of Hip Tio and you if you think about it, you know, we've done this innovation in the cloud space established this hybrid credibility on we've launched with Del Technology. Now we're already ahead in this multi cloud operational model. We're already ahead in this coop in eighties. Evolution will bring it back with the family and listen to the customers for choice. Because of the end of the day, we're here to South customer problems. I >> think that's another dimension of choice that we offer, which is both traditional applications as well as applications of the future that will increasingly, because container based, >> yeah, I just wonder if you could spend on a little bit. You know what? One of the things I said via Moore is great. It really simplified and by environment, I go back. Fifteen years ago, one of things that did is let me take my old application that was probably long in the tooth. Begin with my heart was out of date, my operating system at eight, sticking in of'em and leave it for another five years, and the users that are like, Oh my gosh, I'd need an update. How do we get beyond that and allow this joint solution to be an accelerant for applications? >> Yeah, and I think you know the application is probably the crux of the business, right? >> We'Ll call in the tent from >> change applications of Evolve. This is actually the evolution journey of itself is where they used to be, like support systems. Now they become actually translate to business dollars because, you know, the first thing that your customer awful customer touches is an application and you can drive business value from it. And customers are thinking about this old applications and new applications. And they have to start thinking about where do I take my applications? Where do they need to line and then make a choice off? What infrastructures? The best black mom for it. So really can't flip the thing on. Don't think infrastructure first and then retrospect APS to it. I think at first and then make a charge on infrastructure based on the application need and and really look like you said being where kind of took the abstraction layer away from infrastructure and make sure that you'll be EMS could run everywhere. We're taking the same for applications to say. Doesn't matter if it's of'Em based. It's a cloud native will give you the same, you know, inconsistent infrastructure in operations. >> Okay, we're in that last thing. Could you just tell us of the announcements that were made? What's available today? What's coming later this year? >> Absolutely So Del Technologies Cloud Platform that's based on the X Trail and via MacLeod Foundation is available now as an integrated solution via MacLeod and Daddy and see the fully managed offer is available in >> the second half of this >> year. It's invader right now. And as you saw, we have really good feedback >> from our customers. And then I think >> the, uh, the Azure BMR Solutions offer will be available soon as well. >> All right, well, Varun and many Congratulations on the progress. We look forward to talking to the customers as they roll this out, and Rebecca and I will be back with lots more coverage here. Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. Little coverage to sets three days, tenth year, The Cube at M. C and L World. I'm still many men. And thanks so much for watching

>> From the Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Accenture Tech Vision 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco with a brand newly open Salesforce Tower, the 33rd floor, the middle of the brand new Accenture Innovation Hub. We're excited to have our next guest, who's been part of the Innovation Labs and the Innovation Hubs and a lot of innovation in the center for years and years and years. You've seen him before, we're at the 30th anniversary, I think last year. All the way from Paris, is Marc Carrel-Billiard. He is the Senior Managing Director for Accenture Labs. Marc, great to see you again. >> Great to see you Jeff again as well, I'm so happy. >> So, what do you think of the new space here? >> I love it, I just love it. I saw it building and everything and now it's ready, and we open it today, I mean it's just amazing. The stairs, did you see the stairs? >> I saw the stairs, yes. >> Really amazing, everything's good there. I think it's not an office, like Paul already said, it's really something better and I think it's a tool for explaining what is innovation at Accenture at play, I mean, how we use it, how we connect the labs, we use the liquid studio, all the ventures and everything, that's great. >> Great. But now it's all brought together, right? You had a couple satellite locations in the Bay Area-- >> Yeah and I think that with the story of putting all this stuff in what we call the Innovation Center, the Innovation Hub, and so putting everything in the same building and have different floors where we can address different talking with our clients. Are we talking about research? Are we talking about more polythiophene? Are we talking about, I mean ideally, it's all about driving innovation at scale. >> Right, right. >> At scale. >> So, we're here for the technology vision-- >> We are. >> Which will be in, in a little bit and then, Paul and they team will present-- >> Yep, they will. >> Five new transfer for 2018. One of the ones they called is DARQ, D-A-R-Q, >> I know. >> Which is distributed ledger technologies, formerly known as blockchain, but we don't want to call it blockchain. AI, extended reality, which is every kind of form, extended, augmented-- >> Mix relating everything, that's right. >> And quantum computer. >> You bet. >> So, from the labs point of view, from an Accenture kind of innovation looking forward, inventing the future, as you like to say, which I think is a great tagline, what are some of your priorities going forward, now that you got this great new space? Which is one of what I think 11 in the United States, right? >> So, my priorities are all of them, I mean, all of the above! Because I was like, do you remember at the time we were talking about SMAC? Like Social Mobility, there was analytics and cloud. I would say that DARQ is the new SMAC. So, we saw that basically, that technology has evolved and, from analytics, we'd like more AI work and everything, but it's still being combined and everything. You can still think about social media, collaborative stuff, we going to go through immersive reality where we going to continue collaborating. Think about cloud. I mean, just like cloud will bring you height, throughput computing power through the cloud. Well, I mean, also quantum computing can give you like amazing capability in terms of computing power. So I would say probably, like, DARQ is a new SMAC and so the lab has been working on it since, I would say, not since day one, but at the very beginning. And so, well obviously distributed ledger, you know that we have a lab in Sophia Antipolis, they're really spending a lot of time in the blockchains. So there's a couple of things that we're doing. I give you a couple of ideas. One is, maybe people talk about blockchains, and there's bunch of blockchains all over, there's like blockchains for manufacturing, there's blockchains for trade finance, there's blockchains for this and that. Problem is there's no very good interoperability between those blockchains. One thing that the lab is going to be working is how we can interoperate between those different blockchains. So you are basically a supply chain, you want to connect to a financial organization, how their blockchain will connect to your blockchain. Number one. The second thing we're going to be working on is the SMAC contract. The lab believes the SMAC contract is not smart enough. So we going to add more artificial intelligence in the SMAC contract to see what we could do better. Think about this SMAC contract as a stock procedure in database. How we make those stock procedure a little bit better. I mean, it's just analogy type of thing. >> Obviously, the blockchain conversation, any kind of demo, talking about DHL-- >> Yeah, DHL, exactly. >> But is that logistics, that merchandise move through their system, as you said, there's a lot of different touch points with a lot of different systems. So it's not an aggregated system, it's a problem, and the other thing is you don't necessarily need all the data for each person, >> You don't. >> Or transaction all along the line, right? >> You're absolutely right. And I talk about interoperability between blockchains, but there's going to be also interoperability between the blockchain that you're implementing and the legacy environment that you have. And this needs to be addressed as well. So lot of thinking about blockchains, I've always said for me that blockchain is the digital right management of your future. That kind of protocol, and we're working with companies that are basically creating movies and stuff like that, and how we leverage blockchain to change those movies between different parties. I mean, there's going to be a lot of cool stuff that we're going to be able to do. So that's blockchain. The D for distributed ledger. A for artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence obviously is something very beginner labs. We have three labs that are delegated to artificial intelligence. >> Three? >> Yup, out of seven. One here, San Francisco. The other one in Bangalore, and the third one in Dublin, Ireland. And each of them are covering a little part of the things that we want to do with artificial intelligence. It's all about accelerating the artificial intelligence, so how we're going to think about new infrastructure, a new way of doing machine learning, using weak labeling, it's all about explainable AI, how you're going to connect the knowledge graph with machine learning, so that's the probabilistic model will give you an explanation of why they've decided to select this picture, or this information and so forth. And basically the other things we're going to be working on, artificial intelligence, is that human-machine interaction, and one thing that we want to address is what we call the conversational aspect of virtual agents. If you look at virtual agents today, voice comment type of things. >> Right, right. >> You can't really engage in a conversation. I want to look at that. How they're going to understand context, and how you're going to be exchanging better, and how you're going to flow a better conversation with that. One thing that's going to be very important in everything that we're doing is going back to semantic network, knowledge management, knowledge graph. How we combine knowledge graph with all these machine learning capabilities. That's artificial intelligence in the lab. >> Then you get, we'll just work down the list, right, then you've got the extended reality. >> Extended reality. >> So whatever kind of reality it is. >> So we're going to continue doing a lot of stuff for extended reality, immersive learning, we're going to use that, I think what's going to be important for us is that not to look at extended reality just from a vision standpoint, but try to use the combinatorial effect of every immersive sense that you have. So like, basically, hearing, also, smelling, touching the aptic, and how you combine all those senses to change completely, not the vision, but the experience. What you really feel. In fact, if you go to this Innovation Hub, I don't know if you've seen that we have an igloo-- >> We did, I saw the 360. >> That's right the 360, to try to immerse you already in some quantum computing experience, I think it's a good segue way also for quantum. So quantum, is that we've been doing a lot of progress with quantum too, you know, two years ago we started already to work with D-wave and then we have work with this company called 1QBit, so we build a software, so we use their software development kit, to program the quantum computer, and then we work with Biogen to do drug discovery, and changing the way you do that, by accelerating that through quantum computing. But we've continued, we've announced basically some partnership with IBM to look at their platform, we're continuing working with other interesting platform like Fujitsu, their Digital Annealer, and so forth, and what we want to do is that Accenture is very, very agnostic related to all those vendors. What we want to do is that we want to understand more about how you program those different architecture, how you see what type of problems they can solve, and how based you can program them. And so if we use the Abstraction Layer on top of all the others, and we can program on top of that, this is really cool, this is exactly what we want to do. >> So how close is it? How close is it to getting the production ready? I mean, you got it in the new vision for 2019, I mean, what are people just playing with it or is it ready for prime-time. >> No, no, no. >> Where is it these days? >> So first of all, DARQ stuff, all the people, all of our clients-- >> I mean quantum specifically. >> Okay quantum-specific. I think we're talking about three to five years to start to have real solutions. Right now, we have prototype, but we're moving to more pilot, and I think the solution will come soon. Probably in five years time, we're starting to ascend soon. Let me give you another idea. >> So the order of magnitude difference in the way that you can compute, the AI. >> Exactly, and I think that's going to change the game. It's going to change the game on everything. Let me give you maybe a last example that I'm sure you're going to love. And it's all about optimization matchmaking. Our tech vision this year is all about hyper-personalization, plus on-demand delivery, and so that's how at the moment, you know, you're going to change the game. The momentary moment. How you're going to change the reality of people. What you're going to be able to do. I'm going to tell you that, where we're going to use quantum computing. We're going to use quantum computing to do a better matchmaking between a person who is waiting for an organ and an organ that you can transplant to this person. And the moment is the accident that happens on the street. There's going to be someone basically dying on the street, so someone dead and then you need, basically, to get this organ, it could be a kidney, for example, every organs have a time-lapse that you can use basically to transport that to someone else. Now the question is that you have the organ, it's in basically an ice-cubed environment-like box, and then you transplant that to someone, you have like few hours to figure out who are the best receiver. And this is hyper-personalization, because you need to understand the variable of all the body that is going to receive that but all the variables of the organ, until now is all main front to do the matchmaking. We're rethinking that using quantum computing. >> It's just wild, you know, what the cloud really enabled to concept. If you had infinite compute, infinite store, and infinite networking, at basically free, asymptotically approaching free, what would you build? And that's a very different way to think about problems. >> Not only will we build some amazing things, but I think we would change the reality of every people. Every people will have their own reality that they could use product and service the way they want it, and this will be a completely different, not a world, but a game set, that would be completely different. >> Marc, we're almost out of time, but I just want to ask you about Pierre, former CEO of Accenture passed away recently, and I was really struck by the linked investors. So many people, you know, I follow you, I follow Paul, a lot of people posted, what a special man, and what an impact he had, sounds really personally with most of the leadership here in Accenture. I was wondering if you could share a few thoughts. >> Well obviously, I mean, everyone's been very sad that we lost Pierre. I mean, he was just an amazing person. He was really a role model, not only in business, but in life. And he was so fun about fun of innovations, he loved the labs, he loved what we could do in it, I think he was really thinking about better future for the people, better future for the world, and everything, and it was really amazing for that. Everyone was struck really to see that. But I think there was so many testimonials pouring from our people, but what I was even more amazed was our clients. He really moved clients. And his visions is an amazing legacy for Accenture, and we're going to, I mean, this is so precious what he left us and I think that I really want the lab, every day that we're inventing something, I'm always thinking about Pierre and what he would have thought about these things. He was always enthusiastic reading our research paper and everything, so definitely the lab's going to continue to innovate, and I hope that Pierre, wherever he is, will be watching. >> I'm sure he's smiling down. >> And will be happy with that. >> Alright, well Marc, thanks a lot for taking a few minutes and congratulations on this continual evolution of what you guys are doing with labs and Innovation Centers, and now the Innovation Hub here in downtown San Francisco. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Alright. He's Marc, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at downtown San Francisco at the Accenture Innovation Hub as part of the Accenture Technology Vision 2019 presentation. Thanks for watching. See you next time. (light electro music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Brian Cox, he is the director of product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Well thanks for having me, Rebecca, and Stu, it's good to see you again, so-- >> Yes, you're a CUBE alum, an esteemed CUBE alum. >> I've been here before and it's a great experience. >> Great, well, before the cameras were rolling we were talking about how Nutanix really pioneered hyper-converged infrastructure. But, the vision is bigger, Nutanix is about more than hyper-converged. >> Yeah, and we're very, actually, glad to see here at Microsoft Ignite that Microsoft, in the next version of Windows, is touting the whole hyper-converged concept. So, we are seeing validation from one of the most established computing companies in the world. The thing is, when Nutanix got started, we didn't even know what to call it. We never used the term hyper-converged infrastructure. It was one of your colleagues in the analyst community, they coined that term. We were really thinking of something, I think, bigger and beyond, which is, how can we simplify IT, because at the end of the day, all the business cares about are the services that IT delivers. Those get delivered through applications. Everything below that, frankly, the business doesn't care, right? If you're a donut company, you want to make donuts. If you're a shipping company, you want to have trucks and all that logistics to be optimal. IT, and finance, and marketing, and HR, they're all just means to an end. And so, when we looked at this we said, What can we do to just deliver those services and apps, and simplify everything else? Anything that we can do to save time, that we can save money, we get to return that back to the business to help be a better trucking company or a better donut company, right? So with that in mind, we said we need to simplify. >> Brian, great point, I mean, your background, my background, we're on the infrastructure side of things. You know, I got reminded many times in my career, Look, the whole goal of infrastructure is to make those apps run. You know, it's my data and my applications, those are the important things of the business. That doesn't mean that we've, you know, made y'know, IT is not yet a utility, it's not completely commoditized, there's differentiation, so, maybe help explain a little bit, Nutanix in the Microsoft ecosystem and how that fits in the overall view of Nutanix's value in the marketplace. >> Sure, so, the larger vision that Nutanix had is just, Let's simplify everything below the app layer. We did start at one place, which is just to fundamentally clean up and simplify the physical infrastructure, so you have storage arrays over here, servers over here, a sand-fabric in-between, virtualization layered on top of that, all coming from different vendors, not necessarily all tested together. I know because I used to work at the vendors, right? All different management consoles. It's really hard to become a mastermind of all of that, to have it optimized, and not to have points of failure. So we said, The first thing we need to do is eliminate that complexity. So we brought that down into like a single building block appliance, which ultimately got termed hyper-converged infrastructure, but that wasn't our destination. That was just, we needed common building blocks like LEGO pieces, right, that can snap together without any fuss and allow the companies to build that up. Then, from there, we can then raise the level of simplification all the way between the physical infrastructure to the app. So, one of the things that we get an immediate benefit from, when we consolidate storage and servers, the virtualization, is that we improve performance for things like Microsoft SQL or Exchange. So, no longer do you have that long hop from the compute with the servers all the way out to the external storage arrays. It all collapses, performance gets better, we eliminate points of failure, and, in fact, even when you have multiple of these LEGO blocks, this cluster, we try to always associate the data and the compute onto the same node, so there's very little latency at all. So, Microsoft SQL, Exchange performance goes up, the up-time goes up, and then to manage it, is also simpler. >> Alright, so Microsoft business productivity apps live on the Nutanix infrastructure-- >> Yeah, they benefit immediately by going to the simpler infrastructure versus this complex distributed architecture, where there's different pieces from different vendors. >> Alright, so, we hear from Microsoft, and we know customers hear, it's a multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud world, so, how does the Microsoft pieces of that fit in with the Nutanix Story? >> Well, we realize that customers want to have choice. So, if you look at really the three pillars, that come from our founding, is we want to be able to make it simple, we want to make it scalable, and we do want to give you choice. So, when we look at that last one, we're going to give you a choice of, let's say, whatever hyper-visor you wish to use. It could be Hyper-V, it could be DSXI, it could be the Nutanix AHV, it could be XenServer from Citrix. All of those are supported, we support this on multiple different hardware platforms. So, you have Adelium C, Lenovo, IBM, Fujitsu in Europe, we just added Hitachi last week as a partner, we run on Cisco, we run on HPE servers, and that list continues to grow. So, whatever is your standard, we'll go ahead and work with that. We'll give you choices, different clouds, as well. So, the software to manage and optimize is not only just for your on-prem environment, you can use this if you're in a distributed environment, whether it's Robo or Edge sites, like oil rigs and other IOT, we can give the same interface, and then the same interface out to the public cloud as well. So we give you the choice of different clouds, different platforms, different hyper-visors, and then different operating systems. We support everything from a Windows server environment to Linux and even IBM's AIS. All are supported on the platform, so you get to have it fit the way you want to work, versus the other way around. >> How closely do you work with customers in making theses decisions? Because, as you said, your goal is simplification, making it easy for them to choose and deploy, so how do you walk them through the process, and is it ever analysis paralysis, because there are simply so many options? >> Well for some customers who are struggling with that choice, we do offer our own branded appliance. So, it's very simple, you have the computing framework, the Nutanix software's there, it's one single support line to call, and that's a very simple model. Other customers, though, have chosen who their platform of choice is, whether that's on-prem, like a physical server, or it's a public cloud. That choice, oftentimes, has already been made, right? We're just working with that, so, for those who already have an opinion in the customers sight, we'll work with that. If for some reason they don't have an opinion, or they want it even simpler, they can go with the Nutanix branded offering, but we'll work either way. >> Great, Brian, you go to a number of different shows. Tell us, what are you hearing from customers, what are some of the challenges, what are they looking for, and maybe what's different about the customers who are here at the Microsoft show, versus some of the others we might hear. >> Well, it depends on who you're talking to right? So, if you're talking to C-suite, at the end of the day, these are the guys or gals running the donut company, they're running the trucking company, and they view IT just like they view HR, or finance, or whatever. It's like, yes, that's absolutely critical, we need that function, but the goal is to make it more efficient, more effective so I can deliver more shipments, make more donuts, right? So, for the C-suite, they want to see, On my capital that I'm investing, what is the return on this, and do I have to over-commit capital now, because I can only buy it in big chunks?. So we address that by having what we call fractional consumption. Basically, you're buying one LEGO block at a time, so you're not consuming capital that could elsewhere be used in the business. So, C-suite, they have a different, y'know, one set of needs. Then you look at the sys admins, and they are overwhelmed with all of this complexity of infrastructure, it burns all of their time. They're spending all their nights, all their weekends, they're not very happy, they make mistakes. If we can give them back hours in their day, they're going to be more productive. They can actually do higher level tasks. And even for the folks on the dev team, if we can simplify the infrastructure and spin up new instances, whether it's containers, or VMs, and they can even do it through self-service, that makes them more productive. So, we try to address the needs of all those audiences. >> The customers you are referring to, they are different groups of customers, but they're all essentially the same company, so, are they talking to each other? I mean, are the tech people talking to the business people in terms of what are over-arching goals here. >> Yeah, they do talk to each other. Granted, probably the audience we talk to them most frequently are the sys admins, y'know, because we're very operationally tied, and we'll then arm them with arguments to talk to the C-suite, right? So I was just presenting yesterday here, told them, You're going to get your nights and weekends back., but when you got to go talk to the CFO, here are the things that that person's going to care about, right? When you go talk to the dev team, here's the things that you need to share with them. So, we do arm the sys admins, but we do have a growing presence, at the C-suite, for example. We've also started attending a number of developer conferences, saying, Hey, this actually makes sense to you, to get your job done, it's not just the sys admins, it's you as a developer, it's you as a leader of the company. This is transforming the power of IT to help fulfill the organization's mission. >> I'm curious about your perceptions of Microsoft. Right now we have Satya Nadella, who really portrays this company as a company that is open, inclusive, with a growth mindset, Don't be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all. I mean, is that your... Do you feel that as someone who works closely with Microsoft, who rubs up against its colleagues-- >> I think it's an embrace, like what you can't exact in regards to, the reality is customers want choice, and it's not one size fits all, not one cookie-cutter approach. So Satya is saying, Hey, what can we do to integrate with Linux? That never would've been heard, maybe, under the previous regimes, right? What can you do to work more closely in the app development environments that the app developers want to work in? So, there's a lot of affinity, I think, between Nutanix and where Satya's going, and in providing that choice, providing best-in-class wherever you can then let the customer choose, but provide them the pros and cons, so they make an informed decision. >> Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Well, thank you Rebecca, and thank you Stu, it's always great to be here. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)