>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. >> All right, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Day 4 of coverage MWC 23. We've been talking all week about the disaggregation of the telco networks, how telcos need to increase revenue how they're not going to let the over the top providers do it again. They want to charge Netflix, right? And Netflix is punching back. There maybe are better ways to do revenue acceleration. We're going to talk to that topic with Dave Trigg who's the Global Vice President of Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. And Ken Burns, who's a global telecom partner, sales lead. Guys, good to see you. >> Good to see you. Great to be here. >> Dave, you heard my, you're welcome. You heard my intro. It's got to be better ways to, for the telcos to make money. How can they accelerate revenue beyond taxing Netflix? >> Yeah, well, well first of all, sort of the promise of 5G, and a lot of people talk about 5G as the enterprise G. Right? So the promise of 5G is to really help drive revenue enterprise use cases. And so, it's sort of the promise of the next generation of technology, but it's not easy to figure out how we monetize that. And so we think Dell has a pretty significant role to play. It's a CEO conversation for every telco and how they accelerate. And so it's an area we're investing heavily into three different areas for telcos. One is the IT space. Dell's done that forever. 90% of the companies leaning in on that. The other places network, network's more about cost takeout. And the third area where we're investing in is working with what we call their line of businesses, but it's really their business units, right? How can we sit down with them and really understand what services do they take to market? Where do they go? So, we're making significant investments. So one way they can do it is working with Dell and and we're making big investments 'cause in most Geos we have a fairly significant sales force. We've brought in an industry leader to help us put it together. And we're getting very focused on this space and, you know, looking forward to talking more about it. >> So Ken, you know, the space inside and out, we just had at AT&T on... >> Dave Trigg: Yep. >> And they were saying we have to be hypersensitive because of our platinum brand to the use of personal information. >> Ken: Yeah. >> So we're not going to go there yet. We're not going to go directly monetize, but yet I'm thinking well, Netflix knows what I'm watching and they're making recommendations and they're, and and that's how they make money. And so the, the telcos are, are shy about doing that for right reasons, but they want to make better offers. They want to put, put forth better bundles. You know, they don't, they don't want to spend all their time trying to figure that out and not being able to change when they need to change. So, so what is the answer? If they're not going to go toward that direct monetization of data? >> Ken: Yeah. >> How do they get there? >> So I, I joined Dell in- at the end of June and brought on, as David said, to, to build and lead this what we call the line of business strategy, right? And ultimately what it is is tying together Dell technology solutions and the best of breed of what the telecoms bring to bear to solve the business outcomes of our joint customers. And there's a few jewels inside of Dell. One of it is that we have 35,000 sellers out there all touching enterprise business customers. And we have a really good understanding of what those customer needs are and you know what their outcomes needs to be. The other jewel is we have a really good understanding of how to solve those business outcomes. Dell is an open company. We work with thousands of integrators, and we have a really good insight in terms of how to solve those business outcomes, right? And so in my conversations with the telecom companies when you talk about, you know combining the best assets of Dell with their capabilities and we're all talking to the same customers, right? And if we're giving them the same story on these solutions solving business outcomes it's a beautiful thing. It's a time to market. >> What's an example of a, of a, of a situation where you'll partner with telcos that's going to drive revenue for, for both of you and value for the customer? >> Yeah, great question. So we've been laser focused on four key areas, cyber, well, let me start off with connected laptops, cyber, private mobility, and edge. Right? Now, the last two are a little bit squishy, but I'll I'll get to that in a bit, right? Because ultimately I feel like with this 5G market, we could actually make the market. And the way that we've been positioning this is almost, almost on a journey for IOT. When we talk about laptops, right? Dell is the, is the number one company in the world to sell business laptops. Well, if we start selling connected laptops the telcos are starting to say, well, you know what? If all of those laptops get connected to my network, that's a ton of 5G activations, right? We have the used cases on why having a connected workforce makes sense, right? So we're sharing that with the telcos to not simply sell a laptop, but to sell the company on why it makes sense to have that connected workforce. >> Dave Vellante: Why does it make sense? It could change the end customer. >> Ken: Yeah. So, you know, I'm probably not the best to answer that one right? But, but ultimately, you know Dell is selling millions and millions of laptops out there. And, and again, the Verizon's, the AT&T's, the T-mobile's, they're seeing the opportunity that, you know, connecting those laptops, give those the 5G activations right? But Dave, you know, the way that we've been positioning this is it's not simply a laptop could be really a Trojan horse into this IOT journey. Because ultimately, if you sell a thousand laptops to an enterprise company and you're connecting a thousand of their employees, you're connecting people, right? And we can give the analytics around that, what they're using it for, you know, making sure that the security, the bios, all of that is up to date. So now that you're connecting their people you could open up the conversation to why don't we we connect your place and, you know, allowing the telecom companies to come in and educate customers and the Dell sales force on why a private 5G mobility network makes sense to connecting places. That's a great opportunity. When you connect the place, the next part of that journey is connecting things in that place. Robotics, sensors, et cetera, right? And, and so really, so we're on the journey of people, places, things. >> So they got the cyber angle angle in there, Dave. That, that's clear benefit. If you, you know, if you got all these bespoke laptops and they're all at different levels you're going to get, you know, you're going to get hacked anyway. >> Ken: That's right. >> You're going to get hacked worse. >> Yeah. I'm curious, as you go to market, do you see significant differences? You don't have to name any names, but I imagine that there are behemoths that could be laggards because essentially they feel like they're the toll booth and all they have to do is collect, keep collecting the tolls. Whereas some of the smaller, more nimble, more agile entities that you might deal with might be more receptive to this message. That seems to be the sort of way the circle of life are. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing the big ones? Are you seeing the, you know, the aircraft carriers realizing that we got to turn into the wind guys and if we don't start turning into the wind now we're going to be in trouble. >> So this conference has been absolutely fantastic allowing us to speak with, you know, probably 30 plus telecom operators around this strategy, right? And all of the big guys, they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in their 5G network and they haven't really seen the ROI. So when we're coming into them with a story about how Dell can help monetize their 5G network I got to tell you they're pretty excited >> Dave Nicholson: So they're receptive? >> Oh my God. They are very receptive >> So that's the big question, right? I mean is, who's, is anybody ever going to make any money off of 5G? And Ken, you were saying that private mobility and edge are a little fuzzy but I think from a strategy standpoint I mean that is a potential gold mine. >> Yeah, but it, for, for lot of the telcos and most telcos it's a pretty significant shift in mentality, right? Cause they are used to selling sim cards to some degree and how many sim cards are they selling and how many, what other used cases? And really to get to the point where they understand the use case, 'cause to get into the enterprise to really get into what can they do to help power a enterprise business more wholly. They've got to understand the use case. They got to understand the more complete solution. You know, Dell's been doing that for years. And that's where we can bring our Salesforce, our capabilities, our understanding of the customer. 'cause even your original question around AT&T and trying to understand the data, that's just really a how do you get better understanding of your customer, right? >> Right. Absolutely. >> And, and combined we're better together 'cause we bring a more complete picture of understanding our customers and then how can we help them understand what the edge is. Cause nobody's ever bought an Edge, right? They're buying an Edge to get a business outcome. You know, back in the day, nobody ever bought a data lake, right? Like, you know, they're buying an outcome. They want to use, use that data lake or they want to use the edge to deliver something. They want to use 5G. And 5G has very real capabilities. It's got intrinsic security, which, you know a lot of the wifi doesn't. It's got guaranteed on time, you know, for areas where you can't lose connectivity: autonomous vehicles, et cetera. So it's got very real capabilities that helps deliver that outcome. But you got to be able to translate that into the en- enterprise language to help them solve a problem. And that's where we think we need the help of the telcos. I think the telcos we can help them as well and, and really go drive that outcome. >> So Dell's bringing its go to market expertise and its technology. The telcos obviously have the the connectivity piece and what they do. There's no overlap in terms of the... >> Yeah. >> The, the equipment and the software that you're selling. I mean, they're going to, they're going to take your equipment and create new networks. Beautiful. And, and it's interesting you, like, you think about how Dell has transformed prior to EMC, Dell was, you know, PC maker with a subpar enterprise business, right? Kind of a wannabe enterprise business. Sorry Dell, it's the truth. And then EMC was largely, you know, a company sold storage boxes, but you owned VMware and then brought those two together. Now all of a sudden you had Dell powerhouse leader and Michael Dell, you had VMware incredibly strategic and important and it got EMC with amazing go to market. All of a sudden this Dell, Dell technologies became incredibly attractive to CIOs, C-level executives, board level. And you've come out of that transition VMware's now a separate company, right? And now, but now you have these relationships and you got the shops to be able to go into these edge locations at companies And actually go partner with the telcos. And you got a very compelling value proposition. >> Well, it's been interesting as in, in this show, again most telcos think of Dell as a server provider, you know? Important, but not overly strategic in their journey. But as we've started to invest in this business we've started to invest in things like automation. We've brought together things in our Infra Blocks and then we help them develop revenue. We're not only helping 'em take costs out of their network we're not helping 'em take risk out of deploying that network. We're helping them accelerate the deployment of that network. And then we're helping 'em drive revenue. We are having, you know, they're starting to see us in a new light. Not done yet, but, you know, you can start to see, one, how they're looking at Dell and two, and then how we can go to market. And you know, a big part of that is helping 'em drive and generate revenue. >> Yeah. Well, as, as a, as a former EMC person myself, >> Yeah? >> I will assert that that strategic DNA was injected into Dell by the acquisition of, of EMC. And I'm sticking... >> I won't say that. Okay I'll believe you on that. >> I'm sticking with the story. And it makes sense when you think about moving up market, that's the natural thing. What's, what's what's nearly impossible is to say, we sell semi-trucks but we want to get into the personal pickup truck market. That's that, that doesn't work. Going the other way works. >> Dave Trigg: Yeah. >> Now, now back to the conversation that you had with, with, with AT&T. I'm not buying this whole, no offense to AT&T, but I'm not buying this whole story that, you know, oh we're concerned about our branded customer data. That sounds like someone who's a little bit too comfortable with their existing revenue stream. If I'm out there, I want to be out partnering with folks who are truly aggressive about, about coming up with the next cool thing. You guys are talking about being connected in a laptop. Someone would say, well I got wifi. No, no, no. I'm thinking I want to sim in my laptop cause I don't want to screw around with wifi. Okay, fine. If I know I'm going to be somewhere with excellent wifi connectivity, great. But most of the time it's not excellent. >> That's right. >> So the idea that I could maybe hit F2 and have it switch over to my sim and know that anywhere that I've got coverage, I have high speed connections. Just the convenience of that. >> Ken: Absolutely. >> I'd pay extra for that as an end user consumer. >> Absolutely. >> And I pay for the service. >> Like I tell you, if it interests AT&T I think it's more not, they ask, they're comfortable. They don't know how to monetize that data. Now, of course, AT&T has a media >> Dave Nicholson: Business necessity is the mother of invention. If they don't see the necessity then they're not going to think about it. >> It's a mentality shift. Yes, but, but when you start talking about private mobility and edge, there's there's no concern about personal information there. You're going in with basically a business transformation. Hey, your, your business is, is not, not digital. It's not automated. Now we're going to automate that and digitize that. It's like the, the Dell booth with the beer guys. >> Right. >> You saw that, right? >> I mean that's, I mean that's a simple application. Yeah, a perfect example of how you network and use this technology. >> I mean, how many non-digital businesses are that that need to go digital? >> Dave Nicholson: Like, hundred percent of them. >> Everyone. >> Dave Nicholson: Pretty much. >> Yeah. And this, and this jewel that we have inside of Dell our global industries group, right, where we're investing really heavily in terms of what is the manufacturing industry looking for retail, finance, et cetera. So we have a CTO that came in, that it would be the CTO of manufacturing that gives us a really good opportunity to go to at AT&T or to Verizon or any telco out there, right? To, to say, these are the outcomes. There's Dell technology already in place. How do we connect it to your network? How do we leverage your assets, your manager professional services to provide a richer experience? So it's, there's, you said before Dave, there's really no overlap between Dell and, and our telecom partners. >> You guys making some serious investments here. I mean I, I've been, I was been critical over the years of, hey, you can't just take an X86 block, put a name on it that says edge something and throw it over the fence because that's what you were doing. >> Dave Trigg: And we would agree. >> Yeah. Right. But, of course, but that's all you had at the time. And so you put some... >> We may not have agreed then, but we would agree. >> You bought, brought some people in, you know, like Ken, who really know the business. You brought people into the technical side and you can really see it happening. It's not going to happen overnight. You know, I mean, you know if I were an investor in Dell, I'd be like, okay when are you going to start making money at this business? I'd be like, be patient. You know, it's going to take some time but look at the TAM. >> Yep. >> You know, you guys do a good, good TAM. Tennis is a pro at this stuff. >> We've been at, we've been at this two, three years and we're just now coming with some real material products. You've seen our server line really start to get more purpose-built, really start to get in there as we've started to put out some software that allows for quicker automation, quicker deployments. We have some telcos that are using it to deploy at 10,000 locations. They're literally turning up thousands of locations a week. And so yeah, we're starting to put out some real capability. Got a long way to go. A lot of exciting things on the roadmap. But to your point, it doesn't, you know the ship doesn't turn overnight, you know. >> It could be a really meaningful portion of Dell's business. I'm, I'm excited for the day that Tom Sweet starts reporting on it. Here's our telco business. Yeah. The telco business. But that's not going to happen overnight. But you know, Dell's pretty good at things like ROI. And so you guys do a lot of planning a lot of TAM analysis, a lot of technical analysis, bringing the ecosystem together. That's what this business needs. I, I just don't, it's, it feels unstoppable. You know, you're at this show everybody recognizes the need to open up. Some telcos are moving faster than others. The ones that move faster are going to disrupt. They're going to probably make some mistakes, you know but they're going to get there first. >> Well we've, we've seen the disruptors are making some mistakes and are kind of re- they're already at the phase where they're reevaluating, you know, their approach. Which is great. You know, you, you learn and adjust. You know, you run into a wall, you, you make a turn. And the interesting thing, one of the biggest learnings I've taken out of the show is talking to a bunch of the telcos that are a little bit more of the laggards. They're like, Nope, we, we don't believe in open. We don't think we can do it. We don't have the skillset. They're maybe in a geo that it's hard to find the skillset. As they've been talking to us, and we've been talking about, there's almost a glimmer of hope. They're not convinced yet, but they're like, well wait, maybe we can do this. Maybe open, you know, does give us choice. Maybe it can help us accelerate revenue. So it's been interesting to see a little bit of the, just a little bit, but a little bit of that shift. >> We all remember at 2010, 2011, you talked to banks and financial services companies about, the heck, the Cloud is happening, the Cloud's going to take over the world. We're never going to go into the Cloud. Now they're the biggest, you know Capital One's launching Cloud businesses, Western Union, I mean, they're all in the cloud, right? I mean, it's the same thing's going to happen here. Might, it might take a different pattern. Maybe it takes a little longer, but it's, it's it's a fate are completely >> I was in high school then, so I don't remember all that. >> Sorry, Dave. >> Wow, that was a low blow, like you know? >> But, but the, but the one thing that is for sure there's money to be made convincing people to get off of the backs of the dinosaurs they're riding. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> And also, the other thing that's a certainty is that it's not easy. And because it's not easy, there's opportunity there. So I know, I know it's, it, it, it, it, it all sounds great to talk about the the wonderful vision of the future, but I know how hard the the road is that you have to go down to get people, especially if you're comfortable with the revenue stream, if you're comfortable running the plumbing. If you're so comfortable that you can get up on stage and say, I want more money from you to pump your con- your content across my network. I love the Netflix retort, right Dave? >> Yeah, totally Dave. And, but the, the other thing is, telco's a great business. It's, they got monopolies that print money. So... >> Dave Nicholson: It's rational. It's rational. I understand. >> There's less of an incentive to move but what's going to be the incentive is guys like Dish Network coming in saying, we're going to, we're going to disrupt, we're going to build new apps. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Well and it's, you know, revenue acceleration, the board level, the CEO level know that they have to, you know, do things different. But to your point, it's just hard, and there's so much gravity there. There's hundreds of years literally of gravity of how they've operated their business. To your point, a lot of them, you know, lot- most of 'em were regulated and most Geos around the world at one point, right? They were government owned or government regulated entities. It's, it's a big ship to turn and it's really hard. We're not claiming we can help them turn the ship overnight but we think we can help evolve them. We think we can go along with the journey and we do think we are better together. >> IT the network and the line of business. Love the strategy. Guys, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> All right, for Dave, Nicholson, Dave Vellante here, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio banging out all the news, keep it right there. TheCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and we always love when we get to talk to practitioners, and not just any practitioner. CIOs, obviously under huge pressures in general, but in today's day and age, lots of pressures on the CIO. So, I'm happy to welcome to the program Rich Gagnon. He is the CIO from the city of Amarillo in Texas. Rich, thank you so much for joining us. >> Glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >> All right, so, you know, CIO in a city in Texas, why don't you give us a little bit of what your role entails, a little bit of your background, and looking forward to the conversation. >> So, my background is actually more from the private sector side of the house. Previous to coming to the city of Amarillo, I was the Vice President of Systems Engineering for Palo Alto Networks, for the Americas. Before that, the Global Vice President of Systems Engineering for F5 Networks, and before that, the Director of Global Infrastructure for GameStop. So I stepped into government with a very private-sector, profit-centered mindset, if you will, coming from very high-growth companies. My role with the city is really to be an enabler for local government, to drive not only IT direction, but as a smaller community, I also have to wear the CSO hat, and the Data Privacy Officer hat. Pretty much anything when it comes to leadership of IT and technology, as an enabler to the government, that role falls on me. >> Wow, so a pretty broad mandate that you have there. Rich, give us a little bit, how does that span? How many constituents do you have in your infrastructure, your IT? Maybe you can sketch that out a little bit for us, too. >> Sure, so, I've had peers from the private sector ask me, "What's it like to actually lead in local government?" And the best comparison I can come up with is someone like GE. I have 49 different subsidiaries, different departments that operate as individual business units, only I don't have GE's money or their staff. We have 200,000 people and the departments we support span everything, from the obvious, like public safety, police, fire. We have an airport, a public clinic, water treatment plants, public health. There are streets, all the infrastructure departments. It's very diverse. >> Wow. And with all of those constituents that you have, why don't you give us the pre-COVID-19 discussion first, which is, what are some of those pressures there, from a budgeting standpoint? Are there specific initiatives you've been driving? And how are you responding to all those variables? >> Sure. Well, coming in, it was a little jarring. City leadership was very transparent that the city had sort of stood still for about a decade. I come from a high-growth environment where money was not the precious resource, really. It was always time. It was about speed to market. How do we get competitive advantage and move fast enough to maintain it? That was not the case here. I stepped into an environment where the limitations were Cat 3 cable and switches that still ran CatOS. The year before I came in, the big IT accomplishment was finally completing the migration to Windows 7 and Office 2007. That's where we started. So, for the past three years, I guess I'm starting my fourth year, we have undergone massive transformation. I think my staff thinks I'm a bit of a maniac, because we've run like we were being chased by a rabid dog. We have updated, obviously, the Layer 1 infrastructure, replaced the entire network. We've rolled out a new data center that's all hyper-converged. That enabled us to move our security model from the traditional Layer 3 firewall at the edge to a contextually-based data center with regulation on east-west traffic and segregation. We have rolled out VDI and Office 2016 and Windows 10. It's been a lot. >> Yeah, it really sounds like you went through multiple generations of change there. It's almost like going a decade forward, not just one step forward. Bring us through a little bit, that transformation. Obviously, there should be some clear efficiencies you had, but give us kind of the before and after as you started to deploy some of these technologies. Was there some reskilling? Did you hire some new people? How did that all go? >> Very much so. And like everything, it starts with financials, right? All of the resources at the city within IT were focused on operations, so there was literally no capital budget. As where typically you would update as you go, and update infrastructure, what happened was, as the infrastructure aged, the approach was to hire more staff to try to keep aging infrastructure up and running. That's a failing strategy. So, by moving to HCI, we've actually recovered about 26% of our operating budget, which allowed us to move that money into innovation and infrastructure updating. It took a tremendous amount of reskilling. Fortunately, the one thing that's been, I think, most surprising to me coming to local government, is the creativity of the staff. They were hungry for change. They were excited by the opportunity to move things forward. So, we spent an entire year doing nothing but training. We had a massive amount of budget poured into, "Let's bring the staff up to speed. "Let's get as many vendors in front of them as possible. "Let's get them educated on where the trends are going. "What is hyper-converged architecture "and why does it matter? "What is DevOps and why is the industry heading that way?" So as I said, we started, really, Layer 2-3, established that, built out the new data center, and now our focus is now, we built that platform, and our focus is starting to shift onto business relationship management. We've met with all 49 departments. We do that every six months. We're building 49 different roadmaps for every department, on "What applications are you using? "How do we help you modernize? "How do we help you serve the citizens better?" Because that's how IT serves the community. We serve the community by serving the departments that serve them directly, and being an innovation engine, if you will, for local government, to drive through new applications and ways to serve. So the transition has really started to happen is we've gotten that base platform out of the way and the things that were blocking us from saying, "Yes, and we can do more." >> Wow, so Rich, it's been an interesting discussion as the global pandemic has hit, so many people have talked about, "Boy, when I think about working from home "or managing in this environment, if I was using "10- or 15-year-old technology, "I don't know how, "or if I'd be able to do any of what I had." So, I know Dell brought you over, you're talking HCIs, so I believe you're talking about VxRail as your HCI platform. Talk to us about what HCI enabled as you needed to shift to remote workforce and support, that overall urgent need. >> It's been massive. And it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we matured, I think they embraced the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments, but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so fervently, why it was so urgent to me. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt. With VxRail in place, in a week, we spun up hundreds of instant clones. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business, and now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative are understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> All right, so, Rich, you talked a bunch about the efficiencies that HCI put in place. How about that overall management? You talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. You need to be able to do things much simpler. How does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. In the old environment, one, it took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive when we did make change. It overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. It wasn't cost-efficient. And then, simple things, like, I've worked for multi-billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production. You simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment, and still get the benefit of rolling out non-disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management, because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and reskill them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> Well, it's definitely a great proof point. So often, you deploy a solution, and when push comes to shove, will it deliver on that value that we're hoping for? HCI has been around for quite a while, but a crisis like this, how can you move past, how can your team respond? Congratulations to your team on that. The Dell team has recently done a number of updates on the VxRail platform. I'm curious, as someone who's been using the platform, what particularly is interesting to you, and what pieces of that have the most relevance to your organization? >> There are a few. So we're starting to look at our SCADA environments, industrial controls. And we're looking at some processing at the edge in those environments. So the new organized D series are interesting. There's some plant environments where that might really make sense to us. We've also partnered with our local counties and we have a DR site where being able to extend the network out to that DR site is going to be very powerful for us. And then there's just some improvements in vSphere that will allow us to do a little QA-ing, if you will, on new code before we roll it out, that I think will have a pretty huge impact for us as well. >> Excellent. So, Rich, when you think about the services that you need to deliver to all of your constituencies, walk us through how the pandemic has affected the team, how you're making sure that your employees are taken care of, but that you can still deliver all of those services. >> So from an internal perspective, not running a legacy architecture has made that a whole lot easier. We've remoted most of the IT team. Our entire development team is at home. Most of our support team is at home. Most of the city is still at home. So being able to do that, one, just having the capability has been huge for us. But also, from a business perspective, it's allowed most of our city functions just to keep running. So, modified services, for sure, but we're still functioning, and I just don't think that would have been capable, we wouldn't have been capable of supporting that, even two and a half years ago. >> So, Rich, we've talked a bit about your infrastructure. I'm curious, is the city, are you leveraging any public cloud environments, or any specific SaaS solutions that are enabling some of what you're doing today also? >> Yes, and we could probably have a 30-minute discussion on what is hybrid cloud and what is multicloud. In our instance, we are leveraging quite a bit of SaaS. We've migrated a lot of our services to SaaS offerings. We have spun up several applications in the cloud. I wouldn't call them truly hybrid. In my mind, hybrid is, I am able to take the workload and very seamlessly move it between my private infrastructure and one or more clouds. This is more, workloads specifically assigned to a public cloud. But yes, we've leveraged that. Simple things like Office365 and Outlook, but just as powerful for us has been VDI and being able to offer Horizon to our employees at home. And, with my other hat on, still maintain the contextual-based security, right? So I didn't have to open up the kingdom. I can still maintain the control that I need to to be able to sleep at night. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the questions I love to ask someone in your position is the role of data, how you think of security, how you think of the technology and put those together. Does it help that you wear both the CSO hat and the CIO hat? How do you think about leveraging data? Is there anything that you're sharing with other municipalities, without giving up, of course, personal information? >> Sure. It causes a lot of internal arguments, right? Because there's the two halves of my brain: the CIO half that wants to roll out as much service as I can and be innovative, and the CSO half of my brain that thinks about the exposure of the service that I'm about to roll out. That's part of where we're migrating now as we start to look into our whole approach to data. We've got the platform in place. We're now really migrating our thinking into revamping the way we look at data. I have seven sources for the same data. How do I consolidate and have one source of truth, and where does that reside? My development team is really starting to migrate out of classic development and more into the automation side of the house. How are we interfacing with all of our vendors? That's in review now. And how are we tying to third-party apps? Yeah, that's really the point we're at in our maturity that, now that the infrastructure is in place, we're now migrating to, "what is our data plan?" >> Excellent. Final question I have for you, Rich. I'd love your thoughts on the changing role of CIO. I loved the discussion you had at the beginning going from, really, the private sector to the public sector. Obviously, unique pressures on all businesses right now dealing with the global pandemic, but how do you see the role of the CIO today and how has it been changing? >> I think there's an expectation that you bring value to the business, whether that's local government, or retail, or banking. I think the expectation is that you're not just managing an infrastructure or managing a team, and providing service, but how do you bring actual value to the organization that you serve? And that means that you have to understand the business and all aspects of the business. I think you have to, at least I do as a CIO, I have to spend a tremendous amount of time understanding my internal customer and what are they trying to accomplish, and often, to show them a new way that they just may not be aware of. So I think there's a little more expectation as a CIO that you're going to drive value to whatever business that you're serving. >> Well, Rich, thank you so much. Really enjoyed the conversation. Congratulations on being able to react fast. So glad that you were able to get the transformation project done ahead of this hitting, because otherwise, it would have been a very different conversation. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay safe and thank you for watching theCUBE.

[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Vmworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Vmworld 2018, Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, hey Dave. >> Hey Lisa, how's it going? >> Great, this morning started off with tremendous amount of momentum from Pat Gelsinger, including a new tattoo that he debuted. 20th anniversary of VMware, 20th anniversary of the Rackspace, DellEMC partnership, please welcome to theCUBE a veteran and alumni, Peter Fitzgibbon, the VP and GM of the VMware practice at Rackspace. Peter it's great to have you back. >> It's great to be back here at Vmworld. >> And we're excited to welcome David Trigg to theCUBE, the Global Vice President of Market Development and Service Providers from DellEMC, welcome. >> Thank you, glad to but be here. So happy 20th anniversary to Rackspace and DellEMC. >> Thank you. >> Longstanding partnership, what's going on? A lot of momentum at Dell Tech World just, what, four months ago? What's some of the momentum that you guys have seen in your joint customer space this summer? >> Yeah, so at Dell Technologies World we launched our Rackspace private cloud, R by VMware, our Everywhere edition, as we're referring to it, which is extending Rackspace private clouds into customer data centers and colos. And since that announcement back at Dell Technologies World, we've seen fantastic adoption from both our existing installed base that's interested, and knows the Rackspace brand, and our fanatical experience, as well as new customers that know now we can service them in new locations. >> And then David, for you, Dell Technologies World was all about IT transformation, digital transformation, security transformation, and making it real. How is DellEMC working with Rackspace to help customers make these transformations a successful reality? >> Yeah, well one of the fist things, in my opinion, to highlight is the length of time that we have worked together, and through that length of time, Rackspace has made incredible investments in their skill set, their ability to manage infrastructure, you know, there's a lot of a deep knowledge there, so customers can feel very confident about the ability to provide the services. And as customers go through transformation, customers have more choices now, and more things, as we talk about the edge, and the core, and the cloud, they have to manage infrastructure in more places than they've ever had to manage before. So we're very proud of the relationship that we've had, the investments that they've made, because our customers are needing help in managing through, not only the transformations, but all of the choices that they have to make on where's the best place to put an application? Where's the best place to put a workload, and how do they manage the migrations and the modernization? So yeah, it plays very, very close into our transformation message, and quite frankly, we couldn't do it without partners like Rackspace. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that, because you're talking about more than just a storage partnership, right? Is that, >> Oh, yeah. >> A lot more to its, it's much more comprehensive, >> Absolutely. >> Sets of integration, practices, and areas of expertise, so let's double click on that a little bit. >> Yeah, there's a lot of skill sets that are required to even just do assessments, where I'm really understanding where do the applications go. Really then making sure that they understand, how do you support the infrastructure? How do you monitor the infrastructure and how do you make sure that it's running a lot? And again, Rackspace has made a lot of investments, is one of the best in the world in being able to do a lot of this. >> Let's talk a little bit more about that. Why Rackspace? >> Well, we are offering customers strategic flexibility, really. Whether they want to deploy in a Rackspace data center, a customer data center, get access to our deep expertise, not just a DellEMC, but our 150 plus VMware certified experts that our customers can now tap into, because this world gets more and more complex. And you saw the evening announcements this morning. It was like, how do our customers get the best value from those technologies, and not simply have shelf ware? Tap into Rackspace, with our partnerships with DellEMC and VMware to get the real value out of that expensive technology. >> So from a customer's standpoint, help us understand what's really going on. We asked the question a lot this week, is things like the AWS VMware partnership, is it a one-way trip to the cloud, or is it boom for the data center? And a lot of people are saying the latter. What are customers saying? What do they really want to do? >> Listen, customers are going to be living their data center for a long time yet to come. We've got legacy applications, they've got mainframes, we got client server applications, and then we have direct cloud-native applications, but there's a slew of applications in the middle where customers are kind of unsure about where to go, and they lean on a trusted partner like Rackspace, who really is cloud agnostic to help them figure out should they go public cloud? Should they be private cloud? Or are they in a hybrid cloud journey like everybody is on? So we want to be the Switzerland, where we can help people determine where they should go, and really offer unbiased expertise. >> So you guys announced, kind of along the lines of being Switzerland, at Dell Technologies World, Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere, powered by VMware, Everywhere. I know you've got, what, five data centers in five continents. Talk about that Everywhere. How does it help customers to embrace the reality of multi-cloud, and to actually do so in a way that allows them to understand, working with you guys, where different applications should be placed at different times in the year? >> Yeah so, Everywhere is a natural evolution of what we've offered in our own data centers over time. So now deploying out in customer data centers and colos, well later this year, we hope to launch a formal VMware on AWS software as well. So Everywhere constitutes three parts, really, Rackspace data centers, customer data centers, to get as close to their data as needs be, and VMware on AWS as our product matures, as you saw from a number of announcements this morning. >> And to add on to John's question about the promise of the cloud, I think the original promise, and maybe the threat of the cloud was everything was going at the cloud. Well as we're learning through IoT and other new, emerging trends, that's not realistic. Customers really have to think about the edge, their own data center, because their own data centers are not going away. They have to think about the SLAs that they're providing to their end users, to their employees, and that's where you have to place the application, the workload in the right place to enable the best customer experience for their customers and their employees. And that's were a company like Rackspace, that can really get to the edge, the core, the cloud, by managing that infrastructure regardless. Obviously, the investments that VMware's making to help enable that as well, and being supported by a lot of the DellEMC stuff. It's an exciting time, I think. >> I Want to follow up on that, because Peter, off camera said cloud migration doesn't mean leaving your data center. >> Absolutely. >> This Gartner analyst came out, not that recently, but I think it was last year, and said that 80% of data centers will shut down by 2025, so that caused a lot of, right? Both eye rolling and no way, and et cetera. The Wikibon crew, which is affiliated with theCUBE, a sister company, sister division, just came out with a report that said true private cloud is going to be a $32 billion market this year. So that means on-prem cloud. >> Yep. >> So you have all these countervailing messages going on. Then you see, of course, the epitome of Andy Jassy up on stage today with Pat Gelsinger talking about hybrid cloud. What do you guys make of all of this? What's really happening and going to happen? >> I think customer data centers are going to live for some time to come, as people figure out where should the workload actually go? What can they do with that specific workload? Can they refactor it and rebuild it and go cloud-native? Great. Can they move to a hosted private cloud model with Rackspace rolling racks into a customer data center? Or is it a legacy application that really needs to be kept and maintained over time until the next disruption happens, where they really have to refactor it? >> Yeah, really, in that case there may be no business case. Why lift in and shift it, for what? Just to say, >> Exactly, they get it. >> Hey I'm in the cloud. >> Exactly, I think with cloud migrations, does not mean leaving your data center. I think that's going to continue for some time, where people can get the benefits from Rackspace, moving from a CapEX to an OpEx model with managed services, with industry leading SLAs, but still in their own data center, because they have applications running that cannot be moved. >> Well it's interesting, David to see this equilibrium that's kind of being reached, you know? A few short years ago, there was sort of antagonism between VMware and the AWS. You know, the whole book seller comment. Andy Jassy was like, pfft, on-prem cloud, there's no such thing, and now you see those worlds coming together, underscoring the reality that you can't just shove your business into the public cloud. You can't just move all your data there, and there may not be a business case, or an advantage of doing that. >> Right, right. >> What do you think? >> Well a lot of times the answer to the question in the, one, I'm not an analyst, so it's not my job to really predict where it's going to go. I mean, obviously we watch trends and look where it's going. You know, my job and our job is to help customers deal with the realities that they're dealing with right now, right? And they have data centers. They are thinking about the cloud. They are having to take care of the edge, right? And in time, we've seen some of those shifts, right? There was a lot of the, where are we going with the cloud? Where's it going to go? Are they going to shut down all their data centers? Regardless of that, we will adjust to the market and make sure that we're adjusting the market. But more importantly, we're going to do what's right for our customers, to help enable them to those journeys, and it's still yet to be proven. There's a lot of Predictions out there. Will they shut down all data centers? I'm sure there'll be some consolidation of it, but yeah, it's getting more complex. >> Okay, so VMware, Rackspace, DellEMC, you're not screwed, check. (David laughs) what about the edge? Help us unpack that a little bit, you know, whether VMware at the edge, Rackspace, DellEMC, what do you guys see evolving there? >> I think there's many definitions of the edge, and when you talk about it, everything's IoT initially, but even just deploying smaller data centers in customer locations in partnerships with these guys, to kind of meet customers where they are, and get smaller, roll in racks into different locations is continuing to be something that customers are looking for. >> So there's the hinterland edge, which is a bunch of devices, you know IP cameras, they're going to be instrument, most of the data's going to stay there anyway, but then I think you guys call it, I don't know, the core. There's a aggregation point, >> Well the core, >> if you will. >> which is typically what we refer to as kind of the customer data center, and then there's the cloud, right? So kind of the two different, customer data center versus the cloud, and then, truly, the edge, capturing, And it started, and we referred to everything from laptops, phones, as well as, really a lot of the sensors that are going to be out there, and your ability to have to process and analyze and react real time at the edge. And so a lot of use cases, public safety use cases, where, you know, when an event happens, that connection back to a place where you would analyze it. Obviously the autonomous cars, right? They can't have to connect to a data center every time it wants to make a left turn. So a lot of that ability has to be pushed out to the edge, but yet, then also being able to bring that data back, be able to manage that, and be able to update those computers, or those data centers. I mean, an autonomous car is basically a mini data center. Someone's got to manage that, patch that, make sure it's running, and manage that. So yeah, to your point, the edge is beginning to mean a lot of different things. There are the hinterlands, I think was the word you used, and some of those things, but then there are the more traditional work cases, and even just running a phone app is now considered an app, versus, you know, and that's were people start to really look at, is how do you deliver that experience on a phone, and that's an application. >> A lot of data. Well, I like to follow the data, you know? A lot of data at the edge. There's a lot of data, like I say, at the aggregation point, and then if you want to do some hardcore modeling, go to the cloud, and that cloud can be your own, on-prem data center. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Yeah, there's just so much data being generated, and data is power, I think was one of the key taglines of DellEMC Worlds. And I was like, it truly is. Where the data is, is where the power is. So some has to be transferred back to the core. Some may be pushed up to the cloud for deep processing with AI and ML type processing, but there'll be data at all these different points. >> Well that's the other point, is it's just like the innovation engine no longer is Moore's Law in this industry. it's the data, applying machine intelligence, and then cloud scale. And then, you got to, as suppliers in this business, you better be playing in some way, shape, or form, in all three of those, right? >> Absolutely. >> So how, and speaking of that, I think Pat Gelsinger talked about it this morning in the context of superpowers. He talked about autonomous vehicles, AI machine learning, advanced analytics, IoT. How is DellEMC and their technology, Peter, helping to enable Rackspace to optimize your offerings to be able to take advantage of machine learning AI? To be able to deliver on customer expectations? >> Yeah, we're deeply partnered with these guys from those announcements you head earlier this year, that we're already investigating the different capabilities they're having from an AIML perspective, and really seeing what sort of technologies are they launching that we can then put into our private cloud practice, and offer to our customers. So it's our deep partnership allows us to kind of get a front seat at that and working closely to investigate and to do a lot of R&D with the new capabilities they're coming out with so. >> What superpower does that give Rackspace? In terms of differentiation? >> Uh, you've stumped me on that one. (laughs) >> Well customers have, we talked about, everybody wants flexibility. They also have choice. >> Yeah. >> What are some things that this 20 year partnership infuses into Rackspace to give you those differentiation points? >> Yeah, it's the deep partnership, and knowing, working so long together that we know who to pick up the phone to solve some of these complex problems. >> Yeah, and of us, from my perspective, we always start with out joint customers in mind first. So it's our job to bring the advance technologies, the advanced capabilities that we're making big investments in, and make sure that Rackspace is able to support and leverage those within their business so that we'd provide a better experience for the end customer, but then also making sure that we show Rackspace how they make money on that, and how they can run a business on that, that's really, is differentiated to your point. Because a lot of, you know, you painted a very pretty vision of what the world might look like. Most customers aren't there yet. Most customers aren't taking advantage of AI and deep learning. They're still dealing with some very traditional legacy issues, and it's that gap that becomes very, we love talking about the cool, new, exciting stuff, but for a lot of customers, they're stuck somewhere in the middle, and that's were partnerships like this, because you can not only help them with the legacy, old stuff. How do you migrate, and then how do you take advantage of the really new stuff? Or how do start at least thinking about that and exploring that and looking. A lot of the original IoT use cases, the ROI wasn't known. They're setting up projects, then they hoped they'd get a benefit out of it, right? And that's continuing to emerge and evolve as time goes on. >> Well it's hard, too. I mean, everybody's afraid of getting Uberized and disrupted, et cetera, et cetera, but they, at the same time, if you over rotate, to a new, you can spend bunch of money and not get any return. >> Yeah. >> Everybody's trying to get digital right, it seems, but it's unclear what that means. So they look to partners like you to help them figure that out. >> Well, it's a scary journey to your point, because they obviously have existing revenue streams. It's the inventor's dilemma, right? It's they have existing revenue streams, but how do they digitize their business? How do they reach customers in a different way? And so they don't become Uberized or Airbnbed, or whatever, what term you want to use. Every CIO, every executive is thinking about that. IT for a long time was about taking cost out of the business which, after a while, that's no fun, because that usually means head count reductions, that usually, I mean, that's not a fun conversation to have every single day. Now with the digital transformations mode, how do you generate new revenue streams? How do you, in a way, a lot of companies never, one of the most older industries, being taxis, a little bit not that exciting. It's gotten reinvigorated through some of these things. So it's kind of cool. >> Yeah, and you said digital transformation, right? What does that really mean? Cloud transformation, security transformation, app transformation, so there's many different factors. And companies like Rackspace can offer expertise in all those different areas, where some of our competitors may only hit on one of those. They're only a security company, or only a VMware shop, or only an AWS shop. >> Helping customers really glean the power from that data, because if they can't, it's not powerful. Gentlemen, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Dave and me. We appreciate hearing what's going on with Rackspace and DellEMC. >> Thanks guys. >> Thank you so much, I appreciate it. >> Thanks very much. I appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin. We're at VMworld day one. Stick around, we'll be back after break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE! Covering HBE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Calls off just Rebecca. Hi, everybody, welcome back to Madrid. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Peter Burris. Day two of HPE Discover Madrid, 2017. Beena Ammanath is here. She's the Global Vice President of Big Data AI and new tech innovation at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Beena, welcome to theCUBE, it's great to have you on. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Dave: First time on The Cube, right? >> Yes, thank you Dave, thank you Peter. I'm very glad to be here. >> Ah, you're very welcome. So, let's talk about what Hewlett Packard Enterprise is doing in AI, and you're new to the company, they brought you in. Why did Hewlett Packard tap your expertise? >> I think a lot of it is based on my previous experience and, honestly there is so much buzz going on with AI, and the hype around it, right? There is so much that we need to do with AI. There's so much potential and we are not tapping into it as much as we should. That was one of the big reasons and especially what Hewlett Packard Enterprise is doing now. We are going through this transformation, we can help our customers start on their AI journey, help them build out end to end solutions with AI, which is going to be one of my biggest charters. >> Well when we were young and started in this business, AI was the buzz, in the early to mid eighties. >> Beena: Yes. >> And that was the fifth or sixth time around with AI. >> Oh, yeah, yeah. >> That was 40 years ago. >> Yeah. >> It just obviously died, the processing power wasn't there, and I guess the data. >> Beena: Yeah. >> Why AI, why now? >> Yeah, so you know, I'll date myself here. When I was doing my undergrad, post-grad, we had AI as one of the courses and nobody wanted to do it because it was considered this very futuristic thing, never going to happen. Self-driving cars, boom. Personalized ads, even that was considered so hypothetical because we didn't have the compute, we didn't have the processing power, we didn't have the amount of data accessible to us. >> The acquisition of data was harder, the compute power wasn't there, So it was just, it was just always a science project. >> It was always a science project, it was a research, it was more ideas and it wasn't doable, but today, with the advances we've seen with cheap storage, easy access to compute, the whole game has changed. Lot of things we could only dream about is now becoming real, we are able to experiment more. And speaking to what you were saying earlier, AI has been through this hype cycle several times. If you think back, AI, the term itself was coined in 1956, and then we see those hype cycles when there is massive investment and there is nothing delivered, then it wanes down, so the AI winters keep happening. And now, I think it's again on a rise, but this time, we are actually seeing results. We are seeing self-driving cars, we are seeing first-rise marketing taken to a whole new level. We are seeing drones making deliveries, right? But if you think about it, when you started the business, you've seen about AI too right? It's still the narrow-intelligence part, right? It's not a super-intelligence or general-intelligence that scale that we've reached out to, and I think, given what I know about the analytic techniques available today or even the compute power available today, we are still going to be dabbling around in narrow-intelligence for at least the next few years, before we expand out to the next level. >> So that raises an interesting issue because, I first heard about AI back in the '70s reading Flagibon's fifth Generation Systems book, which, by then, they were talking about multiple generations of AI that supposedly already happened, but AI has, for technical reasons, for technology, for the acquisitions, has disappointed. Now, it's not disappointing, but there's still this perception of how much change is coming, and the impact of a change and let's talk about the people's side of this, Because the success of AI is going to be very closely tied to whether or not social groups abandon it because it doesn't deliver what was expected, or the impacts are greater in ways that weren't anticipated. Yeah. >> What's the people side of this change, the innovation, the social changes side? >> Yeah, yeah. So I like to look back at history, history always gives us an indication of where technology is taking us. And if you look back at the early 19th century, actually, the early 20th century when the steam engine was invented, right? What did it do? It enabled humans to expand their physical abilities. To move things, to drive things forward, so it was increasing the human muscle-power. And that whole industrial revolution that happened around that time with steam engine and the automation of lot of work that was being done by humans manually, right? And we see a similar revolution happening now because it's fundamentally changing how we work, how economies are made, and that causes a lot of fear and insecurities and, who knows, our jobs might be replaced or changed over the next few years, we don't know because this technology is coming at us very fast. The reason is because there are so many companies investing so heavily in AI. What that makes us do is it accelerates the development of the technology, it comes at us smarter and faster. And we are not prepared for it, like if you look back at our whole lives, right? I'm talking about a time when I was in my twenties and just thinking about AI, it was mythical and futuristic, and now, today, there are self-driving cars. It's happening in our lifetime where things have changed so rapidly and we don't know what it's going to look like 20 years from now. The piece that I am optimistic about is, unlike a number of luminaries who are spelling doom of mankind and elimination of human race and jobs and so much more, for me, it seems like, look, at the end of the day, we are building AI. We have the power to shape it the way we want. The fear exists because there is so much unknown. And it is also because it's a select few group of people who are shaping AI. So, how do we actually get more people involved? How do we truly democratize AI so that we get different view points? Like, should a computer scientist be building an AI product in isolation, without full partnership from a lawyer or for similar domain products? The domain experts have to be involved. And today that's not happening. So we don't, and if you're building... And I stick to legal just because something I can relate to is if a lawyer is actively involved in building an AI Legal product, he or she knows all the checks and balances we need to put in place so that AI doesn't go rogue. When a pure computer science person is driving that product and building the product, he or she may not be aware of all the checks and balances. And we may not put the right guard rails in place to prevent that program from going rogue. At the end of the day, AI is something that we own, and we should be able to build it in a way with the right guard rails in place. And if you look at, we are all so dependent on our phones, and what is that? That is AI today. But we are not afraid of it, we use it, we leverage it. And that's how I think AI will be 20, 30 years from now. Is really helping us extend our brain power, right? Remove the monotonous tasks we have to do and help us be more creative and really elevate the human aspects of all of us. >> So, let's carry that through. >> Beena: Yeah. >> So you mentioned the industrial revolution? >> Beena: Yeah. >> Machines have always replaced humans at certain tasks. >> Peter: There's always been substitution. >> Always. >> M-hm. >> But, for the first time, it's happening with cognitive tasks. >> M-hm. >> So, people get scared. And then you quote the statistics, median income in the United States has dropped since the late '90s from $55,000 down to $50,000. >> Yeah. >> Part of that is you can see it, and you know there aren't paper hangers on billboards anymore, or barely there are. Or you go the airports and kiosks have replaced tickets issuers. Hopefully, they can replace-- (laughing) And so people are concerned, as you rightly pointed out. But you also said that we have the opportunity to shape this so the answer, many of us feel, is education around creativity, how to combine different inputs to create value, but many people are afraid, they say, "Let's stop progress." That's not gonna happen. >> Right, yes. >> We know that, so what has to happen from a socio-economic, a public policy standpoint in order to create those borders that you talked about? >> Right, right. I think education itself has to fundamentally change where we infuse more creativity into the education system, where we start to allow it to be more focused on the science or math aspect, which is where you go for computer scientists, but you need that human aspect like built out in all of us, right? And so, but it's also an opportunity for us to leverage AI to make our education better. So, more personalized education. But, from a social aspect, I think one of the things that's missing is really the policy aspect. We don't know, this technology is coming at us so fast, we don't have all the policies figured out. We are building out the policies as the technology evolves. And, that is kind of causing that fear of friction, so to speak. So, I think there needs to be this group, or the governments actually need to take more ownership and start putting in those guard rails into place from a policy perspective and that needs to come from the industry themselves, right? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> There needs to be these thought leaders. I think everybody who is scared of AI should be starting to take an active role to understand it and drive this policy forward. >> Well, it has to be bipartisan too. >> Beena: Yes. >> Which, right now, doesn't look too-- >> Well, whatever the partisan is 'cause in other areas it's not just bipartisan like it is in the US but, coming back to this question, I've got a couple quick questions for you. One is that you mentioned earlier that the computer scientists probably should not be the one that's necessarily making a decision about a legal issue. It suggests that there is going to be a renaissance of cross-disciplinary skills required within a, certainly within computing, so, for example, the people that are best at describing how human interactions evolve and maintain, might be philosophers, which gets turned into law. Talk a little bit about the renaissance of the whole promise of cross-discipline thinking in computing because we're attacking new kinds of problems that just aren't algorithmic. >> Exactly and you need to have deep domain experts deeply involved in building out these AI products, which is kind of a gap today, so I think you're absolutely right. >> So second thing is, related to that, is we've done some research and we're in the midst right now of a pretty sizeable project on envisioning what we call, or the needs and how it will be structured, we call Systems of Agency, so, you observe the collection of the data, the turning the data into value through big data, and then to have a consequential action in the real world, we think there are three different ways that's gonna happen. I won't bore you right now. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But really, we're asking these systems to do something on behalf of the brand. >> Ah. >> And increasingly do something in a complex, human-centered environment. >> Yes. >> What does, and so effectively the agents for the brand. We know how to distribute authority. I'm sorry, we know how to distribute data and we know how to distribute processing; how do we think about distributing authority? >> Mmm. >> Using AI, is that something people are starting to think about in your estimation, as we think about the people problems associated with this? >> I think so. I think people are beginning to think about it. There's a lot of investments going on, not only in the technology development part, but also the human side of things. It just doesn't get as much publicity as the technology piece does, right? A robot beating somebody at a goal is much more newsworthy than-- >> Doesn't have huge-- >> Yeah. >> Moral implications for something else. So I've got one more question. >> Dave: Well, wait, in a narrow sense, would fraud detection be an example of distributing authority? >> No, because, well, I'll ask you. Is fraud detection an example of distributing authority? >> It's narrow. >> Beena: Yeah. >> It's somebody, it's a machine making a decision not to fulfill a transaction. >> Right. But the machine is not making a decision to bring an indictment against someone >> Beena: Exactly. >> And were they doing fraud? So all the machine's doing is-- >> Flagging. >> Is seeing a pattern that might indicate a problem and taking a prophylactic step to avoid it, the machine is not declaring fraud. >> No, and there are two things to it, right? The machine, before it declares fraud, it's being trained, it's being built by a human, it's being trained by human, right? Before it declares, before it goes into production and declares fraud, there has been a lot of training done by human where they're saying yes, no, this is right, this is wrong. So that training is crucial, that comes from humans, and also once this is in production, there's a human in the loop who's watching it. >> Peter: Who still has agency rights. >> Exactly. So the human is still there. >> So I've got one more question, one more question. And that other question is, at least in the US, 'cause AI is software, at least in the US, most software is covered under copyright law. Which means what software does is a speech act, which has implications for whether or not you can go after a company because their software did something wrong. >> M-hm, m-hm. >> AI as an agent can't be a speech act. There's gotta be some other remediation, we have to expect more from brands that deploy this. How is that going to evolve in your estimation? >> I think the policy part, that's where it becomes more important, right? And if you recently heard the news of a robot being given citizenship, I mean, besides the marketing and hype, what does that entail? Making us question fundamental things and the policy aspect has to cover a lot of new scenarios which we just haven't had to think about-- >> Peter: Right. >> In our whole life, right? It's just arising a lot of new scenarios that are going to make us create new policies around it. >> Dave: So, I mean, this is a very interesting discussion and when I hear it I think about what can humans do that machines can't do? And you go back, it wasn't long ago that machines couldn't climb stairs. >> Beena: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they can do-- >> Yeah, now they can, sort of. >> Gymnastics. >> Yeah, right. Okay, so. I don't know, do you think in those terms. >> Yes. >> I mean, there's empathy. There's maybe negotiation, there's things like, ya know, decisions on a jury that require a human. >> Oh yes, I'll give you the simplest one. What it cannot do, even today, it can write music, which you probably see-- >> Sure. >> But, AI still can't tell a joke. (Dave laughs) It can't write a joke because-- >> Peter: It doesn't know irony. >> It doesn't know, it doesn't understand sarcasm. And it doesn't really have that human aspect of connecting with people, and taking conversations forward, like just talking to you, I have something called an intuition or perception which helps me guide this conversation. A machine can't do that. It's just black and white, it goes by data. >> Dave: Strange, yes. >> It's strange. >> Responses. >> Yes. >> So, I always struggled with the term Artificial Intelligence. I feel like machine intelligence is more-- >> Yeah. >> More accurate. >> I don't struggle with the artificial, I struggle with the intelligence. >> Beena: Yes, it's how you define intelligence. >> Alright, we have to leave it there. Last word, on a, let's bring it back to Discover 2018. >> Beena: Yes. >> Tie it into your future vision. >> Oh, yes, I am so excited to be here and be, and I don't know if you've had a chance to walk through the floors but we're doing some amazing things with AI, with Big Data, and really looking forward to helping our customers start and execute on their AI journeys. >> Beena, thanks very much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> It was great to meet you. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, Dave Vellante. From Peter Burris, live from HPE Discover, Madrid 2018. You're watching theCUBE. (light music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SapphireNow. Headlines sponsored by SAP Hana Cloud, the leader in platform as a service, with support from Console, Inc., the Cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier, and Peter Burris. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Orlando, Florida, for SAP Sapphire coverage from SiliconANGLE Media, theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events, and extract the signal for the noise. Want to give a shout out to our sponsors, who allow us to get here, SAP Hana Cloud platform, Console, Inc., EMC, Cap Gemini, thanks for supporting us. We appreciate it. Our next guest is Mitch Kick, Global Vice President, Head of Strategy and Programs for SAP Global Ecosystem. We love strategy guys because, they get the chess board. And they look like they're always playing chess, 3-D chess. Been looking at the landscape, looking at the horse on the track. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you very much. Good to be here. >> It's an evolving ecosystem. It's fluid, but yet, active. The Apple announcement, certainly notable news for SAP. Certainly, the Cloud, mobile, social data trend, the confluence of those things, causing massive innovation surge. So you, got a lot going on. >> Absolutely. >> What is the current ecosystem? >> Well, you know, when you think about the way SAP looks at it's ecosystem, I mean certainly we have those traditional types of partners, who resell our product. But, when we talk about our global ecosystem, we're really talking about those partners who are either strategic service partners, technology partners, some emerging partners and names that you mentioned, like Apple, Uber, Facebook, some of these, they're not your grandfathers, SAP partners. And so, we're really moving to partner in new ways. To co-innovate new types of solutions, that take advantage of the trends in the digital landscape. >> John: Like what are you doing with Facebook? >> Well, Facebook is an example, it's something where we said, "Look, there's all this social data," "that's out there. How do we put that together with" "our Hybris, CEC, types of solutions," "our commerce solutions?". To basically allow marketers to do one-to-one marketing, that leverages the power of Facebook data, and your enterprise data, brings it together in a very manageable tool. >> That must've been a very hard deal, because they're very controlled about their data. And also, each person has their profile settings. So, that's awesome. >> Yeah, and it's something that allows for marketers to just do much more targeting, much more insightful targeting. You know, we announced that last year and over the course of the last year had a number of really interesting pilot examples. >> Can developers get involved in that Or is this more of SAP directly, kind of thing? >> Well that, is an example of where we are creating a solution that sort of packages it turnkey. But, you know when you think something like in Apple, the beauty of that one is, not only are we developing these beautiful industry applications, that are going to be in targeted industries, and I don't know if you saw them, they were out on the floor here. >> Yeah, impressive. >> With regard to retail, or with regard to.. >> Well start-ups will come out of the woodwork just in a short time, have hundreds of employees, with this ecosystem. >> Well, exactly. I guess the point I was making with the Apple deal, is not only are we working with to design some really incredible industry apps, but then we're also creating the software developer kit, making that into the Hana Cloud platform, so that if you're developing on Hana Cloud platform, it now becomes another compelling reason you can leverage these beautiful interfaces, and these beautiful tools, that take full advantage of native capabilities on the Apple devices. And so it's a way that our partnership not only delivers, kind of near-term solutions that matter for us, but enables our broader ecosystem of solution partners to capitalize. >> It's fastest to innovation. I mean, you're going to get more R and D, and then real production apps faster that way. >> Absolutely. >> From the developer. So that's Core. David Valente and I always talk about courses for horses, which is, you know, certain things fit certain ways. There seems to be now, with the Cloud platform, an opportunity for developers to come in. So I want you to explain how Hana fits in. 'Cause this, Hana Cloud and then this Hana Cloud platform. What's the difference between the two? Can you just quickly share what that means to the ecosystem? >> Well, Hana as a database, I mean, the thing about the Hana Cloud Platform is that, that creates platform for our solution partners to extend, and integrate, as well as build and develop on it. And you'd say, "Well, as a platform as a service," "are you guys using HCP, to go out there and win" "the past wars?" In the generic sense of the past, that's really not the intention. The intention is, we've got this huge installed base. We've got these service partners, who are working very closely with their customers to innovate on top of, so that once our customers move to that digital core of S4 Hana, they can use HCP as that extension and integration platform, to tie together a number of different things. And a lot of the things that are, you know, when you think about digital transformation, there is so much activity, and discussion around the customer experience, and architecting a beautiful customer experience, with mobile devices, with you know, targeted types of commerce on the front end. But, what people are coming to realize, I think, is the importance of having that end-to-end. Because, you aren't going to be able to deliver the beautiful experience. And so, the example with, you know I was on a panel yesterday with Uber and Tumi. As an example, Tumi, luxury retailer that wants to create, not only a compelling customer experience that embodies the best of its luxury brand, but also is facing the threat of Amazon Prime Same-Day delivery, in metropolitan areas. And the beauty is, by partnering with Uber, and SAP, we are able to incorporate that seamlessly, as an option for Same-Day delivery. They can deliver in 30 minutes, for seven dollars, it's game-changing. That's an example of where we provide, here at this event, an early window into the type of co-innovation that we are doing. It's sort of like, in the past where you'd think, "Well, SAP has a certain solution footprint," "and we're going to partner with other software companies," "who can plug-in to that footprint.". Now you have, in the new world, where there are industry ecosystems like Uber, platforms that you can capitalize on, it's the business network. You can plug-in business networks to, an overall solution to customers, that's really compelling and that delivers opportunities in ways that we couldn't have imagined a few years ago. >> I want to build on that. So, historically, strategy has been three to five years, tied to asset values, mainly fixed asset values, and how are we going to generate a return in those fixed asset, over an extended period of time. You're describing a world where, whereas especially as those assets become more programmable, they can be applied to a broader array of activities, and opportunities, where the horizon starts to shrink pretty dramatically, the strategic horizon. And it becomes more, "What capabilities do we have?", and "How do we improve those capabilities," "and drive them forward?". And that's a crucial way of thinking about partnerships, is partnerships, as capabilities. I think that's where you were going. >> Absolutely. >> Are you thinking now about partnerships in the ecosystem as crucial capabilities, not only for SAP, but for SAP customers? >> They've always been, in many ways, when you think about, customers need a whole solution. In the past, even when the on-prem software world, you didn't get the whole solution by just buying the software package, it required a lot of additional service. With the Cloud model's that are emerging, it's much more easy to consume the software functionality, but there still is a tremendous amount of on-going innovation, differentiation, customization. And that's why when you look at, a lot of where we're going with our solution, you can hear Mike Getlin talking about our success factors product, and the fact that, "Well, how do partners help us?", "Do our service partners help us in the same way" "of just implementing software?". No. There role is really in integrating and extending it, and creating micro-services on top of it, that then say, "This is a really unique capability" "that's essential for delivering value" "to this particular customer or client.". So, you're now finding that because of our ecosystem, that is getting plugged into these new ways of contributing, we can now have a broad array of contribution. People understand how they can plug-in and capitalize on that, and deliver real innovation and benefit to the end customer. >> So you look a lot at industry trends. As you walk the floor here, what trends are starting to emerge, for you, and what is getting you excited, as a strategist? >> From my standpoint, when you think about digital transformation, and honestly, we were joking a lot about this whole term, because when it first game out, it was sort of like, "I'm not familiar with anyone who's actually" "doing analogue transformation.". All IT is digital. We've been doing digital things for years. And transformation, I mean, I was involved in the early '90s and the big re-engineering wave. Right? Where you're re-engineering, using technology and what not, so what is really different here? And I think what we see, is that, through all these trends, there's sort of confluence of them, and people map out a dozen, two dozen different trends that are going to change the world, they speak breathlessly about all these things. But in the end, what difference does it really make? From my standpoint, it's really three. One is you're starting to see all these things change the customer experience, fundamentally. Right? To the real-time, mobile devices, one-to-one. That's being enabled now. You're also seeing the difference in how value is delivered, in terms of IOT, instrumenting the broader landscape, etc. And you're seeing a difference in business models, in terms of how value is captured. You can think about it as, "Well, how is value consumed?", "How is value being delivered?", "How is value being captured?". The real, so what, is that all these different individual technology trends are combining to make those differences happen, that enable completely different ways of making money, of growing of opportunity. >> It changes the analogue, where, the analogue piece used to be the transactional, digital then hands off to analogue, or vice versa. That whole thing, end-to-end you just talked about, is an end-to-end digital. But the analogue role of the person, is augmented differently. So what you said is interesting because, I think people look at it differently and say, "Hey, if it's digital end-to-end," "where does analogue fit in?". Well still, people walking around here at the show, we're face-to-face, so I think it's interesting when you look at the optimization of digital. I'll take sales leads, for instance or marketing automation. You know, get the form, pass the leads to the sales people, they go knock on the door, call, email, that's analogue transaction. That's now digital. >> Mitch: Right. >> But the still, analogue components. What's your thoughts on that? How do you look at it? 'Cause you still got to do business, the people still are going to be involved. >> That really hit home when we were talking about this Uber example, because everybody talks about Tumi, they were talking about, "Well, its a beautiful experience." for somebody to be able to then say, "I got a one-hour delivery.". We can all identify with going to a retail outlet and they say, "Oh, I'm sorry, we don't have any more" "of those in the store, but we've got one" "that's 40 minutes away, if you want to go drive there.". Well, what if now all of the sudden you can get the product in to this store, in the next 30 minutes? Or, deliver it to wherever you happen to be, in 30 minutes? That changes the game. >> John: And that's user experience. >> Yeah. But, the thing is, so that's nifty, that's great, it's really compelling. But, when you start thinking about what it would take to work this, okay? Well now, you're going to have to have an implication for those retail store people. And so, this notion of, "How are we making this" "a beautiful experience for the retail clerk?", who now, instead of just serving the store, is going to get pinged because, "Hey, wait a minute," "we've got some deliveries that you're going to have to" "pick and pack, to get ready for some Uber driver" "to come in." That's a change to them. So, when you talk about implication, that highlights all of the, "change management", all of the, "how does it make a difference" "in individuals work?", and there's always going to be that last mile engagement that is needed. And that's really when you start talking about trends, how do we see things changing, I think about our service partners, I see their role changing to enable the real business change. >> Well that's it, that's it. The impact is clear. Totally agree, 100%. It's the confluence that magnifies that change, and its massive. It's frickin' awesome. Everyone can look at it and say, "Damn, its going to be big!". My final question to you is, given that impact, what advice are you sharing with your ecosystem, in terms of how to prepare for it? How to be ready not to go out of business, or help your customers not go out of business? And enable them to actually compete, digitally, in the transformation. >> Well, when we look at it, part of the challenge is that the ecosystem is so diverse, that you know, often your guidelines are speaking to specific people. The one thing I would say is, everybody is going out and talking a digital message, we need to be on the same song sheet. So when your solution partner, or service partner, and you've got your own offerings, your own reference architecture's, et cetera, let's work together to make sure that we are all singing from the same sheet. Second thing is, it's really imperative that we, basically migrate our installed base, to the digital core. So, S4 Hana, getting enabled around that, making that change happen, that enables all sorts of other benefits. And the third thing would be, the importance of then leveraging Hana Cloud platform. Because, the integrations that were hard coded, from yesterday, are no longer valid. So, if you leverage Hana Cloud platform from integration standpoint, you're really allowing for this much more agile, and fluid, innovation cycle to happen, in a much faster clip. And that's really what our customers are going to need, and it's going to take all of us working together to deliver that promise, of digital transformation. >> Well the Apple deal puts you guys front and center, on the user experience side, consumerization of IT. The chess board, multiple dimensions of chess, going on at the SAP ecosystem. Mitch, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Welcome to The Cube Alumni Club. This is The Cube here live at Sapphire, we'll be right back. You're watching, The Cube.

>> Voiceover: From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Covering Sapphire Now. Headlines sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service, with support from Console, Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here's your host, Peter Burris. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Peter Burris, and theCUBE is, once again, our flagship platform for bringing what's happening in big events to the community. Today, we're here at SAP Sapphire and I'm being joined by Tom Roberts, who's the Global Vice President of Third-Party Software Solutions. Tom, we're going to spend some time talkin' about how you're working with the ecosystem at SAP to fill in some of those crucial gaps that customers face as they try to create those new outcomes with SAP-related technologies. Tell us a little bit about what your team does. >> Great, Peter, and thanks, appreciate you havin' us here. You know, Peter, one of the key things that Third-Party Solutions does, and what my team does, is we really help complete the solution. Right? So, it's a complex world. We've got customers out there trying to solve some very challenging problems and, of course, SAP brings the bulk of the solution there, but there's going to be some gaps. We've created unique relationships in our ecosystems in order to help fill that and deliver a complete solution. So, for example, you'll hear the name out in the marketplace, Solution Extensions, and that's our external branding. These are solutions that SAP sells on its paper, that have been tested and are supported by SAP, same as our own products, so the customer can buy with confidence and help get that total solution in place. >> So, it's your almost SAP-compliant additional software. >> Yeah, that's right. >> Excellent. That's a really interesting perspective. You know, it's interesting. Over the course of our two days here at Sapphire, and we'll be here tomorrow as well, two things have popped out that are a little bit different from SAP. First off, the tension between whether or not SAP was an applications company or platform company seems to have totally gone away. >> Yes. >> You're a platform company. >> That's correct. >> The second thing that I find very interesting is that SAP has always been the company that kind of, was a little bit more neutral, stood back. When a customer needed us, we'll show up and we'll do it. You're now being a little bit more aggressive about going after business, after some other companies' customers. How are you utilizing this extensions approach to more rapidly create a solutions fabric that can bring, that can rapidly grab new customers for SAP, and your partners? >> Well, Peter, you're right on the money. You know, it's no doubt that the industry has moved rapidly to the cloud. In fact, everybody said it would happen faster and it's happened even faster than they said it would. Everyone is, when they see results, they're always surprised, and cloud growth was even faster than we thought it would be. Now, what a lot of people haven't figured out, but I think SAP has, is that, in a cloud-based solution world, the expectation is that, one, it's seamlessly integrated, and, two, the experience of buying it is seamlessly integrated, and, three, it's supported in a seamlessly integrated way and that's what Solution Extensions delivers in the cloud. So, you take an example of the success we've had with the acquisition of SuccessFactors, growing great, growin' well in the industry, but they have a lot of needs in order to mature the solution and meet the customer's entire wishlist. One example that we use is we've got a relationship with WorkForce Software for time and attendance, so it wasn't something that SAP developed, but it's something that the customers needed and provides high ROI. But, if you go and you look at that solution, you'll look and see that it's directly embedded inside employee central, right on the drop down, so, for the customers, a completely seamless experience, and they can buy that from their SAP account executive. >> So, SAP is installed in a lot of companies, 300 thousand across all industries. >> Right. >> As we move to a digital world, a lot of your customers, a lot of your SAP customers themselves, are starting to envision how software becomes part of their delivery mechanism. >> Right. >> And they're looking at the customers that they serve and saying, I wonder if I can use this software better. Are you startin' to see non-traditional software companies starting to come to you and saying, how can we be part of this program so that we can plug into, or we can enhance, that broad set of solutions for our customers. >> Right. So, look at, everyone likes to talk about Internet of Things, right? So you take a historical business that's asset heavy and, by that I mean, think of like an oil and gas company. You know, traditionally the guys would work out in the field and they didn't carry devices with them. They carried wrenches, (giggles), right? They didn't carry mobile devices that were digitally connected. >> And flasks. (laughter) >> Sometimes. I hope not too often. That's a dangerous line of work. But, if you think about it, now that's changed. Right? They now use the Internet of Things not only to get information back from the field, but they also use it so that when they have to go out and do those repairs, they're getting digital assets that they can see. Now, we have created some relationships, and I'll give you two examples. You'll hear about a relationship that SAP has with OSIsoft, right. They have a well-known reputation for being able to draw that information off Internet of Things, and we've created a link between that and the HANA platform. So that now, you can do that analysis in real-time, because, as you know, HANA is made for the real-time and, if you're going to do Internet of Things, that's the only platform you can really go with. You can't go with, it's not the old batch then analyze later; you need that information happening in real time. That's one example. The other example that I'll give you is you'll see here a Sapphire, you'll see a company called, Utopia. You say, well, alright, I've never heard of this company but they do a unique thing. It's a direct add in into he SAP platform, a solution extension, that allows you to do master data governance around your enterprise assets. And you say, wow, that sounds really complicated. Okay, what is that? This is the ability to look at those documents in a digital way while you're out in the field to understand hey, that bolt there, that needs to be made out of steel, not aluminum, or you're going to have a chemical reaction, for example. That's the kind of thing that can safe lives, save time, and also make the job out in the field easier. And you can't do that just with SAP's software by itself, we need the partners to contribute into that ecosystem and bring that richness there. >> You talked about the rapid adoption of the cloud, in many respects, almost surprising adoption of the cloud. 'Cause you're right, we all knew it was going to happen, many of us didn't necessarily know how fast it was going to be. SAP has a very on-premise and a lot of the programs that SAP put together were initially optimized for that on-premise orientation. >> That's right. >> Are your clients today, when they become part of the SAP extension, or the Solutions Extension program, are they automatically part of both worlds? First off, let me start there. >> Yeah, I mean, it's true that we live in a hybrid world already today. Hybrid happens so quickly. You saw SAP move aggressively forward and acquire some leading cloud companies. >> Yep. >> Right. (mumbles) >> And you did a great job of integrating them, by the way. >> Thank you. I think we did. And I'm really impressed with these properties. I think you saw in the keynote yesterday, a really great representation of some of the leaders of those businesses up there and how tightly they've become part of the SAP family. Now, when you look at Solution Extensions, it mirrors that. We have solutions across all five of the major pillars of the business which, of course, include these cloud properties, and the areas we're seeing the fastest growth, or the most rapid adoption, are in these cloud properties. Because we all went through the era of the best-of-breed became the suite, and then we had the era of the cloud. And if you noticed, when the cloud companies were launched, they were best-of-breed companies and now we're in that period where people want things to move back to the suite because they want integration. >> Or a least at a platform level. >> Sure, because they want efficiency. Efficiency comes from that integration and they get the first round of benefits by moving to the new application in the cloud and they get out of the business of having to operate it themselves. But, then, they want to get back to the business of having that seamlessly integrated with their core operations. So, we live in a hybrid world today but it's clear that the pendulum is moving directly to cloud. >> So are you suggesting to companies that want to be part of the extensions program, that they focus on the cloud first and then everything else second? >> Yes, I would, and here's why. All conversations with customers start with cloud. And they'll look to see if they can do something in the cloud first and it's the default. So, we've really moved past that world where the first conversation's around on-prem and then look to cloud. That changed maybe two to three years ago and today, every conversation starts with the cloud. >> So, I want to go back to that notion of non-traditional software companies creating solutions within the SAP ecosystem for their customers. Do you have companies like that in the extensions program today? >> Well, I think many of these companies are evolving, just like SAP. Now, I tend to deal with the ISVs, so I tend to deal with companies that are in the business of that. But, I will tell you this, what we're seeing with HANA Cloud Platform is exactly what you're talking about. It's that intersection of SAP, our ISV ecosystem, and those non-traditional customers that are, themselves, moving into the digital, and it's that intersection, and you'll see that happen on HCP, where they'll develop applications unique to their own business. I like to remind people this, when we first rolled out our three and then we went to the business suite, companies wrote billions of lines of custom ABAP code to get that system the way they wanted it, in each of these individual companies. Well, as we move to S4, companies are going to revisit what they did to make those systems special and perform just the way they want it to. But they're not going to do that in ABAP, likely. They're likely they're going to do that on HCP, and they're going to build in that platform because that's where they're going to get the integration, that's where they're going to get the benefit of where our ISV ecosystem is headed and tap into the richness of that. So, I think this is why you hear this rebirth of innovation at SAP and it's because it's driven by the customers. That's why we have so many people turn out at Sapphire this week, so much so that even the SAP employees are like, wow, this is really an impressive turnout. >> It's 60,000 plus people, it's one of the most, without question, this is one of most energetic and packed trade shows that I've ever been to. Or customer shows I've ever been to. >> Yes, it's impressive. We're lookin' around here right now and you just, all these, just, bodies. It's incredible. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, if I envision the next couple of years for you, every, we had a partner on yesterday, in fact, and we asked him a couple of pointed questions, as we're asking you, and we asked him, what do you want to see from SAP, as a partner? What would make SAP an even better partner so that you would be that much more willing to tie into the ecosystem? And what they said was, we want to see better road maps to, so that we can see how, where our responsibilities and SAP's responsibilities, our roles and SAP's roles, end. We're still concerned about the platform mentality rolling us. How are you assuaging those ISV concerns about your roadmap as you try to bring even more integrated value into the platform? >> You know, SAP has a brand of trust. And, when you get to road maps, you have to have trust with your partners- who's going to do what. Very clear and transparent conversations. I've seen a lot of maturity from SAP really in the last six to eight months being much more diligent in how they're planning their road maps and how they're involving partners in those road maps. I'll give you an example. You know, Wieland Schriener, who really leads some of the development around S4, in particular, as it relates to initiative that we work on with open text. That's one of our largest partners inside Solution Extensions. We have, right now, about 19 million users who have purchased that through SAP so, really, an incredible relationship, unique in the industry, that we have with them. As they, as we launch S4 and as we push it out into the marketplace, we've seamlessly integrated the open-text capabilities around unstructured content into S4. And, that's happened through the leadership of our development team. By making commitments like that. Weiland presented that on the partner summit on Monday to all the partners in there, really as a message out to them to say, this is how SAP is going to do business in the future with our ISVs and our partners. And it, and we're moving at such a pace it requires that level of coordination. Right? We can't just let it to chance. Or, we can't let it be ambiguous. We have to be clear about we're going to build this and we're expecting our partners to step up here, so that that dance happens the way it should happen. I do respect though, that the partners have that concern, 'cause it's a legacy. >> They're always going to have the concern, but a big piece of it is going to be how well do you share and how well do you work together. >> Yeah. >> Hey, Tom, thank you very much. Tom Roberts, Global Vice President, SAP Solutions Extension program. Thank you very much for being here as part of this great show, talkin' about partnerships and the evolution of the SAP platform and SAP the company. 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