>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. (intense music) >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante in theCUBE, and as you know, I've been doing a CEO series, and welcome to the isolation economy. We're here at theCUBE's remote studio, and really pleased to have Charlie Giancarlo, who is the CEO of PureStorage. Charlie, I wish we were face-to-face at Pure Accelerate, but this'll have to do. Thanks for coming on. >> You know, Dave, it's always fun to be face-to-face with you. At Pure Accelerate when we do it in person is great fun, but we do what we have to do, and actually, this has been a great event for us, so appreciate you coming on air with me. >> Yeah, and we're going to chat about that, but I want to start off with this meme that's been going around the internet. I was going to use the wrecking ball. I don't know if you've seen that. It's got the people, the executives in the office building saying, "Eh, digital transformation; "not in my lifetime," complacency, and then this big wrecking ball, the COVID-19. You've probably seen it, but as you can see here, somebody created a survey, Who's leading the digital transformation at your company? The CEO, the CTO, or of course circled is COVID-19, and so we've seen that, right? You had no choice but to be a digital company. >> Well, there's that, and there's also the fact that the CEOs who've been wanting to push a digital transformation against a team that wants to stick with the status quo, it gives the CEO now, and even within our own company in Pure, to drive towards that digital transformation when people didn't really take up the mantle. So no, it's a great opportunity for digital transformation, and of course, the companies that have been doing it all along have been getting ahead during this crisis, and the ones that haven't are having some real trouble. And you and I have had some really interesting conversations. Again, that's, I think, the thing I miss most, not only having you in theCUBE, but the side conversations at the cocktail parties, et cetera. And we've talked about IP, and China, and the history of the US, and all kinds of interesting things there, but one of the things I want to put forth, and I know you guys, Kix especially, has done a lot of work on Tech For Good, but the narrative pre-COVID, PC I guess we'd call it, was really a lot of vitriol toward big tech especially, but you know what? That tech lash... Without tech, where would we be right now? >> Well, just think about it, right? Where would we be without videoconferencing, without the internet, right? We'd be sheltered in place with literally nothing to do, and all business would stop, and of course many businesses that require in-person have, but thank God you can still get goods at your home. You can still get food, you can still get all these things that today is enabled by technology. We've seen this ourselves, in terms of having to make emergency shipments during our first quarter to critical infrastructure to keep things going. It's been quite a quarter. I was saying to my team recently that we had just gotten everyone together in February for our sales kickoff for the year, and it felt like a full year since I had seen them all. >> Well, I had interviewed, I think, is it Mike Fitzgerald, your head of supply chain. >> Yes. >> In March, and he was saying, "No. "We have no disruptions. "We're delivering for clients," and we certainly saw that in your results in the quarter. >> Yeah, no, we're very fortunate, but we had been planning for doing our normal business continuity disaster planning, and actually, once we saw COVID in Asia in January we started exercising all those muscles, including pre-shipping product around to depos around the world in case transportation got clogged, which it in fact did. So we were well-prepared, but we're also, I think, very fortunate in terms of the fact that we had a very distributed supply chain. >> Yeah, I mean you guys obviously did a good job. You saw in Dell's earnings they held pretty firm. HPE, on the other hand, really saw some disruption, so congratulations to you and the team on that. So as we think about exiting this isolation economy, we've done work that shows about 44% of CIOs see a U-shaped recovery, but it's very fragmented. It varies by industry. It varies by how digital the organizations are. Are they able to provide physical distancing? How essential are these organizations? And so I'm sure you're seeing that in your customer base as well. How are you thinking about exiting this isolation economy? >> Well, I've certainly resisted trying to predict a U- or a V-shape, because I think there are many more unknowns than there are knowns, and in particular, we don't know if there's a second wave. If there is a second wave, is it going to be more or less lethal than the first wave? And as you know, maybe some of your audience knows, I contracted COVID in March. So I've done a lot of reading on not just COVID, but also on the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. It's going to take a while before this settles down, and we don't know what it's going to look like the rest of the year or next year. So a lot of the recovery is going to depend on that. What we can do, however, is make sure that we're prepared to work from home, work in the office, that we make sure that our team out in the field is well-placed to be able to support our customers in the environment, and the way that we're incenting our overall team now has less to do with the macro than it does with our specific segment, and what I mean by that is we're incenting our team to continue to build market share, and to continue to outperform our competition as we go forward, and also on our customer satisfaction figure, which you know is our Net Promoter Score, which is the highest in the industry. So that's how we're incenting our team. >> Yeah, and we're going to talk about that, and by the way, yes, I did know, and it's great to see you healthy, and I'd be remiss if I didn't also express my condolences, Matt, the loss of Matt Danziger, your head of IR, terrible tragedy. Of course Matt had some roots in Boston, went to school in Maine. >> Yeah. >> Loved Cape Cod, and so really sad loss, I'm sure, for all of the Puritans. >> It's affected us all very personally, because Matt was just an incredible team member, a great friend, and so young and vital. When someone that young dies for almost unexplainable reasons. It turned out to be a congenital heart condition that nobody knew about, but it just breaks... It just breaks everyone's heart, so thank you for your condolences. I appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Okay, so let's get into the earnings a little bit. I want to just pull up one of the charts that shows roughly, I have approximately Q1 because some companies like NetApp, Dell, HPE, are sort of staggered, but the latest results you saw IBM growing at 19%. Now we know that was mainframe-driven in a very easy compare. Pure plus 12, and then everybody else in the negative. Dell, minus five, so actually doing pretty well relative to NetApp and HPE, who, as I said, had some challenges with deliveries. But let's talk about your quarter. You continue to be the one sort of shining star in the storage business. Let's get into it. What are your big takeaways that you want us to know about? >> Well, of course I'd rather see everybody in the black, right, everybody in the positive, but we continue to take market share and continue to grow 20 to 30% faster than the rest of the industry combined, and it's quarter after quarter. It's not just a peak in one quarter and then behind in another quarter. Every quarter we're ahead of the rest of the industry, and I think the reasoning is really quite straightforward. We're the one company that invests in storage as if it's high technology. You do hear quite often, and even among some customers, that storage is commoditized, and all of our competitors invest in it, or don't invest in it, as if it's a commoditized market. Our view is quite straightforward. The science and the engineering of computing and data centers continues to evolve, continues to advance, has to advance if we continue down this path of becoming more of a digital economy. As we all know, processors advance in speed and capability. Networking advances in terms of speed and capability. Well, data storage is a third of data center spend, and if it doesn't continue to advance at the same pace or faster than everything else, it becomes a major bottleneck. We've been the innovator. If you look at a number of different studies, year after year, now over six or seven years, we are the leader in innovation in the data storage market, and we're being rewarded for that by penetrating more and more of the customer base. >> All right, let's talk about that. And you mentioned in your keynote at Accelerate that you guys spend more on R&D as a percentage of revenue than anybody, and so I want to throw out some stats. I'm sorry, folks, I don't have a slide on this. HPE spends about 1.8 billion a year on R&D, about 6% of revenues. IBM, I've reported on IBM and how it's spending the last 10 years, spent a huge amount on dividends and stock buybacks, and they spent six billion perpetually on R&D, which is now 8% of revenue. Dell at five billion. Of course Dell used to spend well under a billion before the EMC acquisition. That's about 6% of revenue. And NetApp, 800 million, much higher. They're a pure play, about 13%. Pure spends 430 million last year on R&D, which is over 30% of revenue on R&D, to your point. >> Yeah, yeah, well, as I said, we treat it like it's high technology, which it is, right? If you're not spending at an appropriate level you're going to fall behind, and so we continue to advance. I will say that you mentioned big numbers by the other players, but I was part of a big organization as well with a huge R&D budget, but what matters is what percent of the revenue of a specific area are you spending, right? You mentioned Dell and VMware. A very large fraction of their spend is on VMware. Great product and great company, but very little is being spent in the area of storage. >> Well, and the same thing's true for IBM, and I've made this point. In fact, I made this point about Snowflake last week in my breaking analysis. How is Snowflake able to compete with all these big whales? And the same thing for you guys. Every dime you spend on R&D goes to making your storage products better for your customers. Your go-to-market, same thing. Your partner ecosystem, same thing, and so you're the much more focused play. >> Right, well I think it boils down to one very simple thing, right? Most of our competitors are, you might call them one-stop shops, so the shopping mall of IT gear, right? The Best Buy, if you will, of information technology. We're really the sole best of breed player in data storage, right, and if you're a company that wants two vendors, you might choose one that's a one-stop shop. If you have the one-stop shop, the next one you want is a best of breed player, right? And we fill that role for our customers. >> Look it, this business is a technology business, and technology and innovation is driven by research and development, period, the end. But I want to ask you, so the storage business generally, look, you're kind of the one-eyed man in the land of the blind here. I mean the storage business has been somewhat on the back burner. In part it's your fault because you put so much flash into the data center, gave so much headroom that organizations didn't have to buy spindles anymore to get to performance, the cloud has also been a factor. But look, last decade was a better decade for storage than the previous decade when you look at the exits that you guys had and escape velocity, Nutanix, if you can kind of put them in there, too. Much larger than say the Compellents or 3PARs. They didn't make it to a billion. So my question is storage businesses, is it going to come back as a growth business? Like you said, you wish everybody were in the black here. >> Right, well a lot of what's being measured, of course, is enterprise on-prem storage, right? If we add on-prem and cloud, it actually continues to be a big growth business, because data is not shrinking. In fact, data is still growing faster than the price reduction of the media underneath, right, so it's still growing. And as you know, more recently we've introduced what we call Pure as-a-Service and Cloud Block Store. So now we have our same software, which we call Purity, that runs on our on-prem arrays, also running on AWS, and currently in beta on Azure. So from our point of view this is a... First of all, it's a big market, about $30 to $40 billion total. If you add in cloud, it's another $10 to $15 billion, which is a new opportunity for us. Last year we were about 1.65 billion. We're still less than, as you know, less than 10% of the overall market. So the opportunity for us to grow is just tremendous out there, and whether or not total storage grows, for us it's less important right now than the market share that we pick up. >> Right, okay, so I want to stay on that for a minute and talk about... I love talking about the competition. So what I'm showing here with this kind of wheel slide is data from our data partner ETR, and they go out every quarter. They have a very simple methodology. It's like Net Promoter Score, and it's very consistent. They say relative to last year, are you adopting the platform, that's the lime green, and so this is Pure's data. Are you increasing spend by 6% or more? That's the 32%, the forest green. Is spending going to be flat? Is it going to decrease by more than 6%? That's the 9%. And then are you replacing the platform, 2%. Now this was taken at the height of the US lockdown. This last survey. >> Wow. >> So you can see the vast majority of customers are either keeping spending the same, or they're spending more. >> Yeah. >> So that's very, very strong. And I want to just bring up another data point, which is we like to plot that Net Score here on the vertical axis, and then what we call market share. It's not like IDC market share, but it's pervasiveness in the survey. And you can see here, to your point, Pure is really the only, and I've cited the other vendors on the right hand, that box there, you're the only company in the green with a 40% Net Score, and you can see everybody else is well below the line in the red, but to your point, you got a long way to go in terms of gaining market share. >> Exactly, right, and the reason... I think the reason why you're seeing that is really our fundamental and basic value is that our product and our company is easy to do business with and easy to operate, and it's such a pleasure to use versus the competition that customers really appreciate the product and the company. We do have a Net Promoter Score of over 80, which I think you'd be hard-pressed to find another company in any industry with Net Promoter Scores that high. >> Yeah, so I want to stay on the R&D thing for a minute, because you guys bet the company from day one on simplicity, and that's really where you put a lot of effort. So the cloud is vital here, and I want to get your perspective on it. You mentioned your Cloud Block Store, which I like that, it's native to AWS. I think you're adding other platforms. I think you're adding Azure as well, and I'm sure you'll do Google. >> Azure, Azure's in beta, yes. >> Yeah, Google's just a matter of time. Alibaba, you'll get them all, but the key here is that you're taking advantage of the native services, and let's take AWS as an example. You're using EC2, and high priority instances of EC2, as an example, to essentially improve block storage on Amazon. Amazon loves it because it sells Compute. Maybe the storage guys in Amazon don't love it so much, but it's all about the customer, and so the native cloud services are critical. I'm sure you're going to do the same thing for Azure and other clouds, and that takes a lot of investment, but I heard George Kurian today addressing some analysts, talking about they're the only company doing kind of that cloud native approach. Where are you placing your bets? How much of it is cloud versus kind of on-prem, if you will? >> Yeah, well... So first of all, an increasing fraction is cloud, as you might imagine, right? We started off with a few dozen developers, and now we're at many more than that. Of course the majority of our revenue still comes from on-prem, but the value is the following in our case, which is that we literally have the same software operating, from a customer and from a application standpoint. It is the same software operating on-prem as in the cloud, which means that the customer doesn't have to refactor their application to move it into the cloud, and we're the one vendor that's focused on block. What NetApp is doing is great, but it's a file-based system. It's really designed for smaller workloads and low performance workloads. Our system's designed for high performance enterprise workloads, Tier 1 workloads in the cloud. To say that they're both cloud sort of washes over the fact that they're almost going after two completely separate markets. >> Well, I think it's interesting that you're both really emphasizing cloud native, which I think is very important. I think that some of the others have some catching up to do in that regard, and again, that takes a big investment in not just wrapping your stack, and shoving it in the cloud, and hosting it in the cloud. You're actually taking advantage of the local services. >> Well, I mean one thing I'll mention was Amazon gave us an award, which they give to very few vendors. It's called the Well-Architected AWS Award, because we've designed it not to operate, let's say, in a virtualized environment on AWS. We really make use of the native AWS EC2 services. It is designed like a web service on EC2. >> And the reason why this is so important is just, again, to share with our audience is because when you start talking about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, you want the same exact experience on-prem as you do in the cloud, whether it's hybrid or across clouds, and the key is if you're using cloud native services, you have the most efficient, the highest performance, lowest latency, and lowest cost solution. That is going to be... That's going to be a determinate of the winner. >> Yes, I believe so. Customers don't want to be doing... Be working with software that is going to change, fundamentally change and cause them to have to refactor their applications. If it's not designed natively to the cloud, then when Amazon upgrades it may cause a real problem with the software or with the environment, and so customers don't want that. They want to know they're cloud native. >> Well, your task over the next 10 years is something. Look it, it's very challenging to grow a company the size of Pure, period, but let's face it, you guys caught EMC off-guard. You were driving a truck through the Symmetrics base and the VNX base. Not that that was easy. (chuckling) And they certainly didn't make it easy for ya. But now we've got this sort of next chapter, and I want to talk a little bit about this. You guys call it the Modern Data Experience. You laid it out last Accelerate, kind of your vision. You talked about it more at this year's Accelerate. I wonder if you could tell us the key takeaways from your conference this year. >> Right, the key takeaway... So let me talk about both. I'll start with Modern Data Experience and then key takeaways from this Accelerate. So Modern Data Experience, for those that are not yet familiar with it, is the idea that an on-prem experience would look very similar, if not identical, to a cloud experience. That is to say that applications and orchestrators just use APIs to be able to call upon and have delivered the storage environment that they want to see instantaneously over a high speed network. The amazing thing about storage, even today, is that it's highly mechanical, it's highly hardware-oriented to where if you have a new application and you want storage, you actually have to buy an array and connect it. It's physical. Where we want to be is just like in the cloud. If you have a new application and you want storage or you want data services, you just write a few APIs in your application and it's delivered immediately and automatically, and that's what we're delivering on-prem with the Modern Data Experience. What we're also doing, though, is extending that to the cloud, and with Cloud Block Store as part of this, with that set of interfaces and management system exactly the same as on-prem, you now have that cloud experience across all the clouds without having to refactor applications in one or the other. So that's our Modern Data Experience. That's the vision that drives us. We've delivered more and more against it starting at the last Accelerate, but even more now. Part of this is being able to deliver storage that is flexible and able to be delivered by API. On this Accelerate we delivered our Purity 6.0 for Flash Array, which adds not only greater resiliency characteristics, but now file for the first time in a Flash Array environment, and so now the same Flash Array can deliver both file and block. Which is a unified experience, but all delivered by API and simple to operate. We've also delivered, more recently, Flash Array 3.0... I'm sorry, Purity 3.0 on FlashBlade that delivers the ability for FlashBlade now to have very high resiliency characteristics, and to be able to even better deliver the ability to restore applications when there's been a failure of their data systems very, very rapidly, something that we call Rapid Restore. So these are huge benefits. And the last one I'll mention, Pure as-a-Service allows a customer today to be able to contract for storage as a service on-prem and in the cloud with one unified subscription. So they only pay for what they use. They only pay for what they use when they use it, and they only pay for it, regardless of where it's used, on-prem or in the cloud, and it's a true subscription model. It's owned and operated by Pure, but the customer gets the benefit of only paying for what they use, regardless of where they use it. >> Awesome, thanks for that run through. And a couple other notes that I had, I mean you obviously talked about the support for the work from home and remote capabilities. Automation came up a lot. >> Yep. >> You and I, I said, we have these great conversations, and one of the ones I would have with you if we were having a drink somewhere would be if you look at productivity stats in US and Europe, they're declining-- >> Yes. >> Pretty dramatically. And if you think about the grand challenges we have, the global challenges, whether it's pandemics, or healthcare, or feeding people, et cetera, we're not going to be able to meet those challenges without automation. I mean people, for years, have been afraid of automation. "Oh, we're going to lose jobs." We don't have enough people to solve all these problems, and so I think that's behind us, right-- >> Yeah, I agree. >> The fear of automation. So that came up. Yeah, go ahead, please. >> I once met with Alan Greenspan. You may remember him. >> Of course. >> This is after he was the chairman, and he said, "Look, I've studied the economies now "for the last 100 years, "and the fact of the matter is "that wealth follows productivity." The more productive you are as a society, that means the greater the wealth that exists for every individual, right? The standard of living follows productivity, and without productivity there's no wealth creation for society. So to your point, yeah, if we don't become more productive, more efficient, people don't live better, right? >> Yeah, I knew you'd have some good thoughts on that, and of course, speaking of Greenspan, we're seeing a little bit of rational exuberance maybe in the market. (chuckling) Pretty amazing. But you also talked about containers, and persisting containers, and Kubernetes, the importance of Kubernetes. That seems to be a big trend that you guys are hopping on as well. >> You bet. It is the wave of the future. Now, like all waves of the future, it's going to take time. Containers work entirely differently from VMs and from machines in terms of how they utilize resources inside a data center environment, and they are extraordinarily dynamic. They require the ability to build up, tear down connections to storage, and create storage, and spin it down at very, very rapid rates, and again, it's all API-driven. It's all responsive, not to human operators, but it's got to be responsive to the application itself and to the orchestration environment. And again, I'll go back to what we talked about with our Modern Data Experience. It's exactly the kind of experience that our customers want to be able to be that responsive to this new environment. >> My last question is from John Furrier. He asked me, "Hey, Charlie knows a lot about networking." We were talking about multi-cloud. Obviously cross-cloud networks are going to become increasingly important. People are trying to get rid of their MPLS networks, really moving to an SD-WAN environment. Your thoughts on the evolution of networking over the next decade. >> Well, I'll tell you. I'm a big believer that even SD-WANs, over time, are going to become obsolete. Another way to phrase it is the new private network is the internet. I mean look at it now. What does SD-WAN mean when nobody's in the local office, right? No one's in the remote office; they're all at home. And so now we need to think about the fact... Sometimes it's called Zero Trust. I don't like that term. Nobody wants to talk about zero anything. What it really is about is that there is no internal network anymore. The fact of the matter is even for... Let's say I'm inside my own company's network. Well, do they trust my machine? Maybe not. They may trust me but not my machine, and so what we need to have is going to a cloud model where all communication to all servers goes through a giant, call it a firewall or a proxy service, where everything is cleaned before it's delivered. People, individuals only get, and applications, only get access to the applications that they're authorized to use, not to a network, because once they're in the network they can get anywhere. So they should only get access to the applications they're able to use. So my personal opinion is the internet is the future private network, and that requires a very different methodology for authentication for security and so forth, and if we think that we protect ourselves now by firewalls, we have to rethink that. >> Great perspectives. And by the way, you're seeing more than glimpses of that. You look at Zscaler's results recently, and that's kind of the security cloud, and I'm glad you mentioned that you don't like that sort of Zero Trust. You guys, even today, talked about near zero RPO. That's an honest statement-- >> Right. >> Because there's no such thing as zero RPO. (chuckling) >> Right, yeah. >> Charlie, great to have you on. Thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Dave, always a pleasure. Thank you so much, and hopefully next time in person. >> I hope so. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (smooth music)

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back >> to M I. T. Everybody watching the Cube, The leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Volonte here with Paul Guillen. My co host, Tom Davenport, is here is the president's distinguished professor at Babson College. Huebel? Um, good to see again, Tom. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be here. So, yeah, this is, uh let's see. The 13th annual M I t. Cdo lucky. >> Yeah, sure. As this year. Our seventh. I >> think so. Really? Maybe we'll offset. So you gave a talk earlier? She would be afraid of the machines, Or should we embrace them? I think we should embrace them, because so far, they are not capable of replacing us. I mean, you know, when we hit the singularity, which I'm not sure we'll ever happen, But it's certainly not going happen anytime soon. We'll have a different answer. But now good at small, narrow task. Not so good at doing a lot of the things that we do. So I think we're fine. Although as I said in my talk, I have some survey data suggesting that large U. S. Corporations, their senior executives, a substantial number of them more than half would liketo automate as many jobs as possible. They say. So that's a little scary. But unfortunately for us human something, it's gonna be >> a while before they succeed. Way had a case last year where McDonald's employees were agitating for increasing the minimum wage and tThe e management used the threat of wrote of robotics sizing, hamburger making process, which can be done right to thio. Get them to back down. Are you think we're going to Seymour of four that were maybe a eyes used as a threat? >> Well, I haven't heard too many other examples. I think for those highly structured, relatively low level task, it's quite possible, particularly if if we do end up raising the minimum wage beyond a point where it's economical, pay humans to do the work. Um, but I would like to think that, you know, if we gave humans the opportunity, they could do Maur than they're doing now in many cases, and one of the things I was saying is that I think companies are. Generally, there's some exceptions, but most companies they're not starting to retrain their workers. Amazon recently announced they're going to spend 700,000,000 to retrain their workers to do things that a I and robots can't. But that's pretty rare. Certainly that level of commitment is very rare. So I think it's time for the companies to start stepping up and saying, How can we develop a better combination of humans and machines? >> The work by, you know, brain Nelson and McAfee, which is a little dated now. But it definitely suggests that there's some things to be concerned about. Of course, ultimately there prescription was one of an optimist and education, and yeah, on and so forth. But you know, the key point there is the machines have always replace humans, but now, in terms of cognitive functions, but you see it everywhere you drive to the airport. Now it's Elektronik billboards. It's not some person putting up the kiosks, etcetera, but you know, is you know, you've you've used >> the term, you know, paid the cow path. We don't want to protect the past from the future. All right, so, to >> your point, retraining education I mean, that's the opportunity here, isn't it? And the potential is enormous. Well, and, you know, let's face it, we haven't had much in the way of productivity improvements in the U. S. Or any other advanced economy lately. So we need some guests, you know, replacement of humans by machines. But my argument has always been You can handle innovation better. You can avoid sort of race to the bottom at automation sometimes leads to, if you think creatively about humans and machines working as colleagues. In many cases, you remember in the PC boom, I forget it with a Fed chairman was it might have been, Greenspan said, You can see progress everywhere except in the product. That was an M. I. T. Professor Robert Solow. >> OK, right, and then >> won the Nobel Prize. But then, shortly thereafter, there was a huge productivity boom. So I mean is there may be a pent up Well, God knows. I mean, um, everybody's wondering. We've been spending literally trillions on I t. And you would think that it would have led toe productivity, But you know, certain things like social media, I think reduced productivity in the workplace and you know, we're all chatting and talking and slacking and sewing all over the place. Maybe that's is not conducive to getting work done. It depends what you >> do with that social media here in our business. It's actually it's phenomenal to see political coverage these days, which is almost entirely consist of reprinting politicians. Tweets >> Exactly. I guess it's made life easier for for them all people reporters sitting in the White House waiting for a press conference. They're not >> doing well. There are many reporters left. Where do you see in your consulting work your academic work? Where do you see a I being used most effectively in organizations right now? And where do you think that's gonna be three years from now? >> Well, I mean, the general category of activity of use case is the sort of someone's calling boring I. It's data integration. One thing that's being discussed a lot of this conference, it's connecting your invoices to your contracts to see Did we actually get the stuff that we contracted for its ah, doing a little bit better job of identifying fraud and doing it faster so all of those things are quite feasible. They're just not that exciting. What we're not seeing are curing cancer, creating fully autonomous vehicles. You know, the really aggressive moonshots that we've been trying for a while just haven't succeeded at what if we kind of expand a I is gonna The rumor, trawlers. New cool stuff that's coming out. So considering all these new checks with detective Aye, aye, Blockchain new security approaches. When do you think that machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors? Well, I think you know, in a very narrow sense in some cases, that could do it now. But the thing is, first of all, take a radiologist, which is one of the doctors I think most at risk from this because they don't typically meet with patients and they spend a lot of time looking at images. It turns out that the lab experiments that say you know, these air better than human radiologist say I tend to be very narrow, and what one lab does is different from another lab. So it's just it's gonna take a very long time to make it into, you know, production deployment in the physician's office. We'll probably have to have some regulatory approval of it. You know, the lab research is great. It's just getting it into day to day. Reality is the problem. Okay, So staying in this context of digital a sort of umbrella topic, do you think large retail stores roll largely disappeared? >> Uh, >> some sectors more than others for things that you don't need toe, touch and feel, And soon before you're to them. Certainly even that obviously, it's happening more and more on commerce. What people are saying will disappear. Next is the human at the point of sale. And we've been talking about that for a while. In In grocery, Not so not achieve so much yet in the U. S. Amazon Go is a really interesting experiment where every time I go in there, I tried to shoplift. I took a while, and now they have 12 stores. It's not huge yet, but I think if you're in one of those jobs that a substantial chunk of it is automata ble, then you really want to start looking around thinking, What else can I do to add value to these machines? Do you think traditional banks will lose control of the payment system? Uh, No, I don't because the Finn techs that you see thus far keep getting bought by traditional bank. So my guess is that people will want that certainty. And you know, the funny thing about Blockchain way say in principle it's more secure because it's spread across a lot of different ledgers. But people keep hacking into Bitcoin, so it makes you wonder. I think Blockchain is gonna take longer than way thought as well. So, you know, in my latest book, which is called the Aye Aye Advantage, I start out talking by about Tamara's Law, This guy Roy Amara, who was a futurist, not nearly as well known as Moore's Law. But it said, You know, for every new technology, we tend to overestimate its impact in the short run and underestimated Long, long Ryan. And so I think a I will end up doing great things. We may have sort of tuned it out of the time. It actually happens way finally have autonomous vehicles. We've been talking about it for 50 years. Last one. So one of the Democratic candidates of the 75 Democratic ended last night mentioned the chief manufacturing officer Well, do you see that automation will actually swing the pendulum and bring back manufacturing to the U. S. I think it could if we were really aggressive about using digital technologies in manufacturing, doing three D manufacturing doing, um, digital twins of every device and so on. But we are not being as aggressive as we ought to be. And manufacturing companies have been kind of slow. And, um, I think somewhat delinquent and embracing these things. So they're gonna think, lose the ability to compete. We have to really go at it in a big way to >> bring it. Bring it all back. Just we've got an election coming up. There are a lot of concern following the last election about the potential of a I chatbots Twitter chat bots, deep fakes, technologies that obscure or alter reality. Are you worried about what's coming in the next year? And that that >> could never happen? Paul. We could never see anything deep fakes I'm quite worried about. We don't seem. I know there's some organizations working on how we would certify, you know, an image as being really But we're not there yet. My guess is, certainly by the time the election happens, we're going to have all sorts of political candidates saying things that they never really said through deep fakes and image manipulation. Scary? What do you think about the call to break up? Big check. What's your position on that? I think that sell a self inflicted wound. You know, we just saw, for example, that the automobile manufacturers decided to get together. Even though the federal government isn't asking for better mileage, they said, We'll do it. We'll work with you in union of states that are more advanced. If Big Tak had said, we're gonna work together to develop standards of ethical behavior and privacy and data and so on, they could've prevented some of this unless they change their attitude really quickly. I've seen some of it sales force. People are talking about the need for data standard data protection standards, I must say, change quickly. I think they're going to get legislation imposed and maybe get broken up. It's gonna take awhile. Depends on the next administration, but they're not being smart >> about it. You look it. I'm sure you see a lot of demos of advanced A I type technology over the last year, what is really impressed you. >> You know, I think the biggest advances have clearly been in image recognition looking the other day. It's a big problem with that is you need a lot of label data. It's one of the reasons why Google was able to identify cat photos on the Internet is we had a lot of labeled cat images and the Image net open source database. But the ability to start generating images to do synthetic label data, I think, could really make a big difference in how rapidly image recognition works. >> What even synthetic? I'm sorry >> where we would actually create. We wouldn't have to have somebody go around taking pictures of cats. We create a bunch of different cat photos, label them as cat photos have variations in them, you know, unless we have a lot of variation and images. That's one of the reasons why we can't use autonomous vehicles yet because images differ in the rain and the snow. And so we're gonna have to have synthetic snow synthetic rain to identify those images. So, you know, the GPU chip still realizes that's a pedestrian walking across there, even though it's kind of buzzed up right now. Just a little bit of various ation. The image can throw off the recognition altogether. Tom. Hey, thanks so much for coming in. The Cube is great to see you. We gotta go play Catch. You're welcome. Keep right. Everybody will be back from M I t CDO I Q In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stable, aren't they? Paul Gillis, You're watching the Cube?

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco it's The Cube covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my cohost Stu Miniman. Ray Smith is here. He is the Assistant Director for Technology at the Mississippi Community College Board. Ray, thanks for coming to The Cube, it's good to see you. >> Glad to be here. >> We were having a good conversation off camera. Tell us a little bit about the college board. >> Well, Mississippi Community College Board is... We are the board that coordinates with the 15 community colleges in the state of Mississippi. Part of our job is to make sure that enrollment figures are taken care of. We look at budgets, we work with the legislature, and more importantly we work with the community colleges in helping to develop good outcomes for our students. >> Okay, so it's obviously a public institution, public funded, you've got a responsibility to report to the public. Do you also have responsibility for, well what services do you have responsibility for? You said enrollment, but.. >> I am, for instance, I'm responsible for a statewide network. The community colleges are a little different than some entities in that we have a shared network. In which all 15 community colleges they are connected back to the board office. We act as the ISP for the colleges. The colleges submit data to us. We also have in place a longitudinal data system in the state of Mississippi in which we collect information and we report that information up the line for our longitudinal data. But more importantly what we do is that we count students and we pay based upon enrollment. >> Community colleges play such a critical role today in education. Which we all know, anybody who has kids know how expensive it is to educate. And the colleges are way more open these days about accepting community college student transfers, allowing students to take summer classes at community colleges. My son, for instance, goes to GW, he's taking some math classes at community college. It really helps address the cost. It helps people who aren't ready to go to college. Talk a little bit about the mission and the role that your college plays. >> Our system, or the board office, what we do again is that we coordinate each community college as a separate entity amongst themselves, governed by a local board. But from the state level, we administer the payment based upon students. And one of the things that we do is we're heavily involved in the workforce. That's a real big issue in our system right now. To train more people for the jobs that we're trying to bring in to Mississippi. In addition to that, we have strong academics in which our students take two year academic courses that transfer to our universities. But more than anything our purpose is to try to make a better Mississippi, in providing our services, education and training to the people of Mississippi. >> You're a feeder system, in essence. It's a fast turnover, it's a two year cycle. So your job of enrollment has a lot of pressure on it. Now what kind of pressure does that put on the technology infrastructure. >> Well, a couple of things. Number one, community colleges are education based institutions but at the same time, people come there because of the lifestyle. Because coming out of high school, a lot of students aren't quite ready for the big universities. So, they come to the community colleges looking for a lot of the things that they have at home. Internet, fast internet, for instance, and also the ability to.. (laughs) that's the big one, and also the ability to have online classes where they don't have to come on campus or so forth. But our students want everything that the major universities have and they want everything they're used to as home as well as within coming out of K-12. >> Okay, so, let's get into the relationship with Pure Accelerate, let's talk about it. What led you to them? Talk about your journey, give us the before and after. >> Well, first of all, I have a real small staff at our agency, and we have a lot of big things to do. >> Dave: What's small? >> Small, three people including myself. >> Oh wow, for 15 colleges? >> 15 colleges for a statewide network, etc, etc. What we were looking for was a system that would allow us to bring all of our technical resources into a smaller unit. We looked at the converge systems of some other competitors to Pure early on. And what we were really wanting to see and what we needed help with was more of a technical infrastructure more than anything. But what we found, it was way too complex. And it actually required all of the additional services that you received in terms of technical support. When we moved to Pure, we looked at the Pure Storage, and one of the main reasons we did that was our current system was coming up for renewal. The renewal itself was triple what it was the year before. >> Dave: The maintenance renewal? >> The maintenance renewal. And it was the traditional forklift. We weren't ready to forklift. So looking at Pure, what we were looking for was number one, simplicity, we were looking for more speed, we were looking for all of those things that would make life easier for us. What we ended up getting was a situation where we were able to purchase the Pure array for the cost of maintenance of what we were looking at before. >> Dave: Wow. >> The cost of mainenance. We got the Pure array with three year maintenance on it. So it was a no brainer from our standpoint. >> And let me just put a point on that. When you say simplicity a lot of people what they say, "Oh well, give you more time to work, "but you're going to pay for it more upfront." But you're saying from a capital expense standpoint this was now a savings for you compared to keeping your old gear. >> Understand this, the Pure array is the first piece of technology equipment that I've ever purchased that would not be classified as an expense. It's an investment, simple as that. Because what we purchased, we will not have to throw it out when we upgrade. We simply, as we saw today in the presentation, we upgrade our software, we get same pieces and parts in place. It is, it's an investment. >> Can you walk us through that a little bit? Because you've got the full converged infrastructure solution. Were you using Cisco before or was that something you added? >> I was using Cisco from a UCS standpoint. But I was using another manufacturer's storage. We actually, we moved to the flat stack on our first conversion we kept our UCS, but we removed the storage and our converted it all to a flat stack. Then we subsequently purchased an additional flat stack. But what it has bought us is exactly what you mentioned earlier. We now have time to do things as opposed to just being a technology person. >> Ray, one thing when you talk about upgrades. You've got your computer, your storage, and your network. Storage sounds like you can upgrade it and move there, with converge you can upgrade it. Your network, too? Because network tends to be install it and don't breathe on it because I don't want to mess it up. So, does the full solution get upgraded or how do you manage it? Do you manage it as a stack or as the individual components? >> We manage our stack itself. Now from the infrastructure standpoint of what we do with internet service, that's handled with another piece of equipment. But we were able to number one, shut down two full racks of storage equipment down to four U, roughly. And it's changed our whole costing structure inside of our data center. The data center is much cooler. And of course, the whole support piece of it is just unbelievable. There's no one coming in to replace blades every other week. >> I was going to say, too. It had to have an IT labor impact. So what would you have done? You've got a small staff. It's yourself plus three individuals, correct? >> Ray: That's correct. >> What would you have done if you didn't get there? Would you just have to work more nights and weekends? >> That's what we would have done. We would have continued to do that. >> Dave: And you were doing that? >> That's what we were doing. >> Is it fair to say you got a lot of your nights and weekends back? >> Absolutely. >> So, presumably, people are more productive during the day. They're happier because they have more time with their families. >> Absolutely, and access to our data is a lot quicker than it was before. >> So, working less, you get more done. >> Correct. >> That's a good do more with less story, right? Because usually do more with less means you figure out how to work nights and weekends. I mean you remember that cycle of 20, ten, 15 years of hell after the dot come burst. It was like do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. And all it meant was more hours for IT people. I guess we hit the breaking point, and now technology's got us into this problem. Is technology finally getting us out of this problem? >> From our standpoint, it is solved. At least 50% of man hours that we have been using just to keep our systems up and running. Now I work it all from one pane of glass or from my cell phone. >> And here's the thing. What value did that really provide, that extra nights and weekends, to the organization? I guess the value was, if it didn't get done, IT would fail, was the value. But it wasn't incremental value, right? >> Well, what we've been able to do is move more into the job responsibilities that are actually there more along with the technical side. >> Dave: So the strategic stuff? >> Absolutely, I have a developer now that can spend his whole time developing as opposed to responding to some error message on a hard drive or whatever. >> I'll make a prediction. I think it was, it might have been Greenspan, but he said during the 80's, we all went to PC's, they said you see the productivity numbers aren't up ticking. But we're spending all of this money on technology, but you don't see it in the productivity numbers. And of course in the 90's we had this productivity boom. You're kind of seeing some flatness in productivity, but the stories that we get like this, I think we're going to have another boom. Do you feel that way as a technology practitioner? >> Absolutely. Even myself, I deal more with the infrastructure so far as our servers and so forth. I have time to do a whole bunch of things. We're redesigning, for instance, our websites. We're doing a lot of other things now that honestly we didn't have time to do. >> And I think that's a big factor in the flash. It's not just speed. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's something we've been talking about for years, some of the MIT guys. As automation and tools and platforms are actually going to free us up to do more. Stories like your developer wasn't developing and now they are. So, yeah, what are you seeing that's going to enable you to do even more? Is there anything you're asking for from the community that, either some announcements you've seen this week or other things you're looking for? >> Believe it or not, the announcement that I just heard today about the active active scenario, that's it. I have two data centers. >> The multi site replication? >> Absolutely. >> You used to work at EMC in the heyday and they referenced it today. SRDF was kind of the gold standard, expensive, complicated... >> Stu: In 1994 >> Dave: But it changed the business. What I heard, and maybe you alpha geeks can help me, but what I heard is that we're going to dramatically simplify that whole process. So, that's what you heard, but add some color to that. What does that mean for you? >> What that means for me is now my two sites will operate as one. And that I actually have a real active active configuration that I'm not afraid if something goes down that the other one's not going to be there. I don't have to go through the process of rebuilding on the other side because it's all automatic. There are a number of things that were said that if you understood what we have gone through in the past couple of years in working, trying to get together an active active environment, it was just like the creation of fire, as far as I'm concerned. >> It's something we've had in storage forever. The reason we over provision and get such low utilization is because if I have a failure or something goes wrong. If something's a little slow, I have trouble. If I go down, I'm out of a job. >> The traditional vendors weren't able to solve this problem for you. I mean they've been trying for a while, right? But you didn't see anything from those guys. >> If you attempted to do that using hardware base, using software base, it's more than just a notion. I have reasonable assurances, based on what I've seen with Pure that it is going to be as straightforward and as simple as they have described. >> That's great. Alright, Ray, give you the last word. Pure Accelerate, where you here last year? >> Ray: I was not here last year. >> So this is your first year? >> This is my first year, and it's great, it's wonderful. >> Are there things you are seeing that are interesting to you? >> Absolutely, everything, everything. >> Why do you come to these shows? >> Well, number one, I come to learn something new. I like to hear about the announcements number one. And I like to be able to have the opportunity to meet some of the people who actually building, designing, writing the source code for this stuff. It's amazing. >> I got to ask you a personal question. You shared with me you like to funkify, you're a bass player, do you play in a band? >> My band is getting back together for kind of a short reunion here. We have some roots that go back to hip-hop. And it'll be interesting to see Snoop tomorrow night. >> That's awesome, fantastic. Well, Ray, thank you so much for coming to The Cube. >> Appreciate it, appreciate it. >> Alright, keep right there and we'll be back with our next guest. Right after this short break, this is The Cube, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back. (exciting music)