>>Mm. Welcome back to the seaports in Boston City is abuzz. Bruins tonight, Celtics Tomorrow night. We're all excited. We're talking open source, which is a very exciting topic. Every company is using open source. I mean, it is the mainspring of innovation. I'm Dave along with my co host, Paul Dillon. And you're watching the cubes. Coverage of Red Hat. Summer 2022. Raj Raj Masinga is here. He's hybrid and emerging Platforms lead at Accenture and Ghetto Greber. Who's red hats? Business group lead eccentric. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming >>on. Thank you. >>Thank you, Raj. We saw in the keynote up there today with Stephanie. She's coming on tomorrow. Rockstar Stephanie. Cheers. Also a Boston sports fan, and I have to work at it, but you can talk about the history with red hat. How long have you guys been at this? And give us a journey update. >>Well, first of all, thanks for having us here. Um, yes, we are big fans of Red Hat and especially Stephanie. I get to I had the pleasure of working with a very closely, um, our relationship with Red Hat goes many, many years, decades I think. And but Paul, come here will tell you that. You know, we've been focused a lot with the formation of our new business unit in Cloud. First around, migrating to the public cloud. But now, as we focus more and more around how our clients begin to operate in the public cloud in the cloud ecosystem hybrid is coming much more into focus. And Red Hat is very much a key client of a key partner of us. So we go way back. But this is all about us doubling down and increasing our partnership and deepening it with them. >>So, uh, you talked today about hybrid Cloud is everything. And it seems like a couple of years ago there was focuses more on moving to the public cloud and getting off of private infrastructure. Has there been a change in the ways in which customers are thinking, are they gonna be hanging onto their private infrastructure longer, perhaps, than was expected a couple of years ago? >>I think the first of all, it's a very different industry by industry. If you look at retail or consumer goods, I think there's a big movement in terms of percentages of workloads that are getting moved onto public cloud. If you look at industries like banking or utilities or government, more regular financial services, more regulated industries. I think we are finding a much larger percentage of their workloads because of regulatory reasons and security reasons, etcetera. Our need to remain either on premise or in private cloud. So I think it very much depends on the industry. But regardless the hype, you know, especially with the movement to edge now hybrid is going to be, you know, permeating everything. So I think by industry depends. But but the edges driving a whole new flywheel. >>You know, we started the Cuban 2010, so the cloud was, you know, modern cloud. Anyway, it was like, say, four years in into it and at the time, to your point Raj Financial Services, there was an evil word. No way we're ever going to the cloud. No, that's changed, obviously. But then, when the financial crisis hit, >>you >>had so initially it was a lot of tyre kicking experimentation. When the financial crisis hit, you had a lot of CFO saying, Okay, let's shift Capex to Apex and so that was sort of a bridge. And then after we came out, it was like this spate of innovation. And then we saw that during the pandemic, where cloud migration was a high priority and or it was the lifeline. And now it sounds like customers are kind of rethinking to your earlier conversation. What is cloud? It's that operating model. So I wonder if you could sort of Can you confirm that's kind of the journey that customers are taking? Where are they today? What does it mean? There? You know the the operating model. What do they consider cloud? >>Um, you actually, you see it? It's like it's really try forward to the cloud. Uh, but where it was in the beginning, If it doesn't hype about Public Cloud, they become more and more aware that it's hybrid because they have to bring the legacy system and process into the cloud as well. And it takes more time that actually they have fought before. So it's like there was a process of learning and also like in the steps moving forward to the operating model because they also understand I cannot operate a cloud like I was operating in the classical way like my old data centre and everything. It needs all the capabilities it needs, all the skills and especially if you go in a hybrid world. And it's a hybrid operation between the classic traditional but also the new ways of how you operate into a cloud. And you really see also the financial services. Now, uh, we had, uh I mean watch presented at keynote. We had a client in Germany. He made a decision, a very traditional financial services clients providing the service to chairman saving banks. And they did this decision and I would say, if you have spoken to them 10 years ago, they will not go into the cloud. But now they went to the cloud via private cloud, and now they got the confidence about how to operate in it. And now they move forward into a public cloud. But from a private cloud into the public cloud. Today, after security, they have up Skilling on skills and people and they understand the process and what's really required and needed in order to have such an environment. >>Generally, what's the strategy with regard to modernisation organisations? More building like an abstraction layer? Uh, with microservices and then connecting to the cloud. Or are they actually rewriting applications to make them cloud native? What are you What are you advising clients from a strategy standpoint, and I know it depends, but, you know, it's >>a It's a great question. I think the genesis to that strategy is how they view infrastructure, Right? So you know, everyone is, has this kind of, I don't know that this is almost mythical opinion out there with cloud. You don't need to worry about your infrastructure. All the providers will worry about it, and you just need to move it there. But the opposite is true. It's really critical what your infrastructure strategy is as you move to the cloud, because depending on what workload you have, you know it can be on any one of the continuum that you described. So the first thing is, where do you want to house your workload? Is the question and that will drive. How what do you want to do with your application? Whether you want to just maintain it the way it is, Do you want to simply modernise it, keeping where it is, or do you want to completely risk in it or even eliminated. So so I think the entire basically the answer to your question around. Do we? What do we do with the application? Is fundamentally driven by what is your infrastructure strategy and what that workload needs to do for you. >>So I know you want to jump in, but I got to follow up. You're saying hardware matters because we heard Paul Corvino today talking about this hardware renaissance. I'm actually I just ran a power panel called. Does hardware still matter? You're saying it matters? >>Yeah. And and it doesn't. And infrastructure doesn't always. I mean, now that you can do infrastructure as code, right? I mean, I was at the Del summit last time and read That is a huge partner of Dell now, right? Which, you know, uh, was much more, uh, partnered with VM ware. But I think the whole ecosystem is opening up, and even the hardware providers are looking at this in a much more nimble way. But yes, it's very much part of the conversation. They haven't gone away. >>During your keynote. You outlined sort of your strategy. Going forward is called cloud first. Yes. What does cloud first mean? >>Well, um, we we want to make sure that when we talk about transformation of business with our clients, So extension always goes with the idea of an industry lens of solving a specific problem for a client. What is the business problem we solve? And increasingly, what we want to message and drive to our clients is if you're thinking about, regardless of what the business is technologies absolutely critical to whatever transformation you're doing and when. When you look at technology, you have to think cloud first because that's where all the innovation is happening. That's where all the, um um, investments are being driven. Whether it's an I mean, it's a software vendor, but it's a hardware vendor with its uh, so you have to think cloud first when you think about transforming your business. >>Uh, what is How does modernisation play into that? You know, a lot of vendors are throwing a lot of resources that the modernisation market VM ware, Tanzania and IBM and such, uh, how interesting our customers really a Modernising legacy applications >>hugely right, because fundamentally, I think everything is now driven by our experiences. What we now are used to in terms of, uh, interfacing with applications are interfacing with function sets or interfacing with technology. So there is a lot of inherent, um, legacy technology that doesn't have that experience. So when you think about transforming, you have to come at it from an experience point of view. And when you think in those terms modernisation or even rebuilding the same, even if it's the same function set, uh, re skinning it and modernisation is critical for the purposes of engagement. >>What's the number one challenge that customers that you're working with face in terms of modernisation? Is it trying to figure out like Rogers sort of laying out the portfolio? What do I do with it? Do I modernise it? Do I retire it? Do I let it just die on the vine? What's their number one challenge? >>Uh, mainly it depends also on the industry, but it's, uh, I would say, for the highly regulated, certainly regulations. They always have an own interpretation of the regulations. Regulation means for them, but normally it's not really what they understand. But I think this is more and more coming to Annie's and more people understand what it really means, but it's also what we see a lot. They think first about technology, but not what kind of business problem they want, Uh, and they want to solve. So it's like, instead of having a technology neutral discussion is really do want to achieve, um, to have really start on this side and then having this discussion away, which, obviously it's one of the key, even because they start to the cloud even without having a strategy without having a vision. If you have a clear vision, if you have a clear strategy, you know where you want to go, and then you can make your business case. You can make you architecture and then you decide on technology. And then, of course, on this journey, all the things about security compliance coming to the plane, Yeah, and I think I think that's the easiest approach. But clients struggle to understand. Of course, I mean, the technology is changing rapidly. Even new products and release cycle new life cycles, the complexity of all the tools hardware we mentioned before network is changing new working coming up. It's really hard to keep pace or keep up with the base of the technology and what's happening even for us. And then you understand the complexity and bring this complexity back to simplicity, but not without losing. We have this also keynote the efficiency and, uh, flexibility for an engineer, because that's what he needs >>to your clients. Have the skill sets to do all that such a self serving question to you guys. But but no, do they? I mean, there's a skills shortage. There's a a battle for talent. So how are they >>dealing? I mean, it's obvious the battle for talent is here. I mean, everybody is looking for the best talent, and if we need, if you need a full stack. Engineer, for example, is very hard to get a full stack engineer on your ground. You call really cloud native. So you have to up skill people to re skilled people. There's also a change coming into it and the changes not to forget. So it's what we say most time. The technology is an easy part, but the change change the organisation, change up skilled organisation. That's the hard part because you need to change from from one mindset to another, and we know from the from the past. What change? People are not open to change in general, so we need to change the mindset. >>I wanna go back to Hybrid Cloud because we have Dani from Red Hat was on earlier and he said, Edges really redefining the definition of hybrid cloud. It's it's more complex architecture, and it's changing the nature of how we think about hybrid Cloud. Are you seeing that with your customers? Are they changing their thinking about what hybrid means in that context? >>Yeah, completely. You know, I was I was We did a bunch of, uh, research recently, and I had I just wanted to make sure I called this. I mean, there's a flexible report that came out that says 80% of all enterprises now are on hybrid 89% multi cloud redheaded. A report that said 80% of our businesses are expected to, um, uh, increase their use of open source. Right, So So, yes, hybrid is everywhere. Edge is driving it, but there's a There's another critical element to that movement. The complexity of our clients. Estates are increasing because whether it's hybrid or whether it's edge or whatever, they are now. You know, given if you're a C i or a C T o. Your estate is really complex now. So one of the things that we now need to do is how do we simplify that? So, you know, we think and we've been talking with red hat about this. We need to come up with a clean, you know, we keep calling it, you know, single pane of glass for a enterprise that allows them to look at their estate in a way that allows them to then simply make some innovative decisions across the entire state. So, yes, edges driving hybrid. But the key thing that we now need to overcome is how do we manage that complexity? >>We have new term. Uh, I call it Super Cloud, but the session is a better word. Medic cloud. That's gonna what I think of that century. I think of deep industry expertise. Of course, we have that, but with the partnership from redhead, it's a very it's horizontal in the sense that it can go anywhere. So how do you guys work in in terms of within Accenture plugging into your deep industry expertise? And how does that horizontal redhead >>fit. That's a really good question. So, you know, one of the things, you know. First of all, we came out with a announcement today about our expanded relationship with Red Hat. One of the key elements in that announcement is how we are looking and bringing in red Hat into our industry business motions. So we actually have decided to pick a certain number of industries. You know, financial services is one. Telco is another. We are thinking about utilities in Europe. Public health is a is another one that we are looking at. And as we come up with our offerings, you heard me and Stephanie talk about joint offerings earlier on the keynote. Um, these offerings are industry offerings, but in those offerings we have embedded and we are, they're powered by redhead technology. Um, that allows these industry solutions to drive innovation through their technology. Um, yes. Red hat can be, for the most part, a horizontal cross industry, you know, technology. But you have to really bring them into specific industrial solutions because of the way we go to market. And I think Red hat brings innovation, uh, in a way that these industries haven't seen before. >>So I mean, how do you stay out of their way? Because they have a services operation that they're trying to grow. And that's your business as well. So where the lines of demarcation >>back to your question? I I don't I don't think there is a limiting opportunity. Read? Had, you know Stephanie Me, Paul, we're all talking about How do we collectively increase both our armies? You know, I I Yes, there might be occasional overlaps in the trenches, but when you look at the bigger picture, it is not a problem at all. >>I wouldn't think so. I mean, the way you're describing Rogers exactly the way it should work. You lead with the business, figure out the business problem, how you're gonna solve that. The technology will take care of itself. Technologies come and they go. And you want to use modern technologies, obviously. But if you don't get the business piece right, forget no technology is gonna save you >>exactly, right. And and the complexities of what the businesses today are facing is getting more and more difficult. And I think actually, technologies like red hat, you know, they're the whole concept of open source, I think is very creative around driving innovations from the market. I >>want to ask you that because Paul Kermie is you know, the storey was sort of an homage to open source. How much do customers really care about open source >>customers care about innovation and and anything that drives innovation to their business, whether it's whether it comes from technology, whether it comes from crowdsourcing, whether it comes from, you know, uh, marketing doesn't matter. I think when you look at the key hunger for innovation and how open source drives innovation, it becomes part of the business conversation. And, uh and I think that's been one of the mantras that Paul has had from day one about how this is such a great platform for innovation. And I think that's >>something customers asked for. They say we must develop this using open source platforms and tool sets. >>Um, it depends. I think I think there are some technology CEO s R c T O s that are much more religious about what? Their technologies that needs to be there are others that are that are much more business oriented. Um, so yes, there are. You know, if it's more in telecom field, I think telecom or some of the more, uh, technology driven fields, they will ask for open source. In others, they we bring, bring it through as part of offering. >>Here's the nuance that I see and you mentioned Paul Cormier. Accenture, especially. I mean, you look at your ascendancy as a company, you for years would take known processes and codify them in software. And you made, you know, a lot of great innovations doing that. And people who made a lot of >>money >>today, this new normal, he calls it. I call it the new abnormal. You don't know what's around the corner. You have to build flexibility into your business, and that is something that open source enables. Uh, so that's sort of this, Really Not really. We don't want to speak about it too much. Business resiliency and flexibility is that that is the new normal. I don't see how you can do it without without open sources expertise. >>I completely agree that I and I think, um, it's actually an asset. So you know, in some ways, selfishly, by having open source in a solution stack some of the innovation gets them much more democratised, right? So? So it can come from a much broader sweet. So the load is not only an extension to come up with all the innovation we can, we can actually come up with a more democratised way of bringing that innovation in. So I think that's that's >>great. And it doesn't always go back to the community. I mean, Amazon built a $70 billion business on open source, but not all right, guys. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you very much for having a pleasure. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for Paul Dillon. The Cubes. Continuous coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022 from the seaport in Boston. We'll be right back. >>Mm mm.

>>Please >>welcome back to HP discover 2021 the virtual version. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube and we're here with Guido appenzeller who's the C. T. O. Of the data platforms group at Intel. Guido. Welcome to the cube. Come on in. >>Thanks. Dave. I appreciate it's great to be here today. So >>I'm interested in your role at the company. Let's talk about that. Your brand new. Tell us a little bit about your background. What attracted you to intel and what's your role here? >>Yeah. So I'm, you know, I grew up in the startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley came from my PhD and and and never left and uh you know, built software companies, worked at software companies worked at the embassy for a little bit and I think my, my initial reaction when the intel recruiter called me, it was like you got the wrong phone number, right? I'm a software guy that's probably not who you're looking for. And uh you know, we had a good conversation I think at Intel, you know, there's a, there's a realization that you need to look at what intel builds more as an overall system from novel systems perspective right, that you have the software stack and then the hardware components that we're getting more and more intricately linked and you know, you need the software to basically bridge across the different hardware components that intel is building. So I'm here now is the CEO for the data platform school. So that builds the data center for Arts here at Intel. And it's a really exciting job. These are exciting times that intel, you know, with, with Pat, you got a fantastic uh you know, CEO at the home, I worked with him before at december, so a lot of things to do. Um but I think a very exciting future. >>Well, I mean the data center is the wheelhouse of intel. I mean of course you, your ascendancy was a function of the pcs and the great volume and how you change that industry. But really data centers is where they, I mean I remember the days of people that until will never be the data center, it's just a toy and of course your dominant player there now. So your initial focus here is is really defining the vision. Uh and and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the future, what the data center looks like in the future, where you see intel playing a role. What what are you seeing is the big trends there. You know, Pat Pat Gelsinger talks about the waves. He says if you don't ride the waves you're gonna end up being driftwood. So what are the waves you're driving? What's different about the data center of the future? >>That's right. You want to surf the waves? Right? That's the way to do it. So look, I like to look at this in sort of in terms of major macro trends. Right? And I think the biggest thing that's happening um in the market right now is the cloud revolution. Right? And I think we're halfway through or something like that and this transition from the classic uh client server type model, uh you know that we're with enterprises running their own data centers to more of a cloud model where something is, you know, run by by hyper scale operators or it may be run you know by uh by an enterprise themselves that message to the absolute there's a variety of different models, but the provisioning models have changed, right? The it's it's much more of a turnkey type service. And when when we started out on this journey, I think the we build data centers the same way that we built them before. Although you know the way to deliver it had really changed. Right? That's going to morph a service model and we're really now starting to see the hardware diverge right there actually. Silicon that we need to build or to address these use cases diverge. And so I think one of the things that is kind of the most interesting for me is really to think through how does intel in the future build silicon? That's that's built for clouds. You know, like on prem clouds. Edge clouds, hyper scale cloud but basically built for these new use cases that have emerged. So >>just kind of quick aside, I mean to me, the definition of cloud is changing. It's evolving. It used to be this set of remote services in a hyper scale data center. It's now, you know, that experience is coming on prem it's connecting across clouds. It's moving out to the edge, it's supporting, you know, all kinds of different workloads. How do you see that? It's evolving Cloud. >>Yeah, I think, I mean, there's the biggest difference to me is that sort of a cloud starts with this idea that the infrastructure operator and the tenant are separate, right? And that is actually has major architectural implications. I mean, just to, you know, this is a perfect analogy, but if I build a single family home, right, where everything is owned by one party, uh you know, I want to be able to walk from the kitchen to the living room pretty quickly, if that makes sense? Right, sorry. In my house here has actually open kitchen, it's the same room essentially. If you're building a hotel where your primary goal is to have guests, you pick a completely different architecture, right? The kitchen from from your restaurants where the cooks are busy preparing the food and the dining room where the guests are sitting there separate. Right? I mean, the hotel staff has a dedicated place to work and the guests have a dedicated places to mingle, but they don't overlap typically. I think it's the same thing with architecture in the clouds. Right? That's you know, initially the assumption was it's all one thing. And now suddenly we're starting to see, you know, like a much much cleaner separation of these different different areas. I think a second major influences that the type of workloads we're seeing. It's just evolving incredibly quickly. Right? I mean, you know, 10 years ago, you know, things were mostly monolithic today. You know, most new workloads are micro service base and that that has a huge impact in uh you know, where where CPU cycles are spent, you know, a way we need to put in accelerators, you know, how we how we build silicon for that too. Give you an idea, I mean there's some really good research out of google and facebook where they run numbers. For example, if you just take a a standard system and you run a micro service based application, written a micro service based architecture, you can spend anywhere from, I want to say 25 in some cases over 80% of your CPU cycles. Just an overhead. Right. And just on marshalling the marshaling the protocols and uh the encryption and decryption of the packets and your service match that sits in between all these things. So I created a huge amount of overhead so for us, 80% go into these, into these overhead functions. Really our focus suddenly needs to be uh how do we enable um, that kind of infrastructure? >>Yeah, So let's talk a little bit more about workloads if we can. I mean the overhead, there's also sort of as the software, as the data center becomes software defined, you know, thanks thanks to your good work at VM where there's a lot of cores that are supporting that software defined data center and then >>that's exactly right as >>well. You mentioned micro services, container based applications, but but as well, you know, aI is coming into play and what it is, you know, a i is this kind of amorphous, but it's really data oriented workloads versus kind of general purpose CRP and finance and HCM So those workloads are exploding and then we can maybe talk about the edge. How are you seeing the workload mix shift and how is intel playing there? >>Look, I think the trend you're talking about is definitely Right, Right. We're getting more and more data centric, you know, shifting the data around becomes a larger and larger part of the overall workload in the data center. Ai is getting a ton of attention. Right? It's look, if I talked to the most operators, aI is still emerging category. Right. I mean, we're seeing, I'd say five, maybe 10% percent of workloads being A. I. Um it's growing the very high value workloads right now, very challenging workloads. Um but you know, it's still a smaller part of the overall mix. Now, Edge edge is big and it's too big. It's big. And it's complicated because of the way I think about edges. It's not just one homogeneous market, it's really a collection of separate sub markets, right? It's very heterogeneous, you know, it runs on a variety of different hardware. All right. It can be everything from, you know, a little a little server that's families that's strapped to a phone, telephone pole with an antenna on top of, you know, to greater micro cell. Or it can be, you know, something that's running inside a car, Right. I mean, you know, uh, modern cars has a small little data center inside, it can be something that runs in the industrial factory floor, right. The network operators, there's a pretty broad range of verticals that all looks slightly different in, in their requirements. And uh, you know, and it's, I think it's really interesting, right? It's one of those areas that really creates opportunities for, for vendors like, like HPV right to, to, to really shine and and address this, this heterogeneity with a, with a broad range of solutions. Very excited to work together with them in that space. >>Yeah, I'm glad you brought HP into the discussion because we're here at HP discover I want to connect them. But so my question is, what's the role of the data center in this, this world of edge? How do you see it? >>Yeah. Look, I think in a sense, what the cloud revolution is doing is that it's showing us a leads to polarisation of a classic data into edge and clout. That makes sense. Right. It's splitting right before this was all mingled a little bit together. If my data centers in my basement anyways, you know what the edge, what's data says the same thing. Right? At the moment I'm moving some workloads in the clouds. I don't even know where they're running anymore than some other workloads that have to have a certain sense of locality. I need to keep closely. Right. And there's some workloads, you just just can't move into the cloud, right? I mean, there's uh if I'm generating a lot of time on the video data that I have to process, it's financially completely unattractive to shift all of that, you know, to, to essential location. I want to do this locally. Right? Will I ever connect my smoke detector with my sprinkler system via the cloud? No, I won't write just for if things go bad, right, they may not work anymore. So I need something that does this locally. So I think as many reasons, you know, why, why you want to keep something on, on premises And I think it's, I think it's a growing market, right? It's very exciting. You know, we're doing some some very good stuff with friends at hp. You know, the they have the pro line dl 1, 10, 10, 10 plus server with our latest third generation z johnson them uh, the open ran, you know, which is the radio access network for the telco space HP Edge Line service. Also, the third generation says it's a really nice products there that I think can really help addressing enterprises carriers, a number of different organizations. You know, these these alleged use cases, Can you >>explain you mentioned open randy rand. So we essentially think of that as kind of the software to find telco. >>Yeah, exactly. It's a software defined cellular. Right. I mean, actually, I learned a lot about that of the recent months, You know, when, when, when I was taking these classes at stanford, you know, these things were still dying down in analogue, Right. That basically a radio signal will be processed in a long way and, and digested. And today, typically the radio signal is immediately digitized and all the processing of the radio signal happens happens digitally and uh, you know, it happens on servers, right? Um, something HP servers and uh, you know, it's, it's a really interesting use case where we're basically now able to do something in a much, much more efficient way by moving it to a digital, more modern platform. And it turns out you can actually visualize these servers and, you know, run a number of different cells inside the same server. Right? It's really complicated because you have to have fantastic real time guarantees, very sophisticated software stack. But it's, it's really fascinating news case. >>You know, a lot of times we have these debates and it may be somewhat academic, but I'd love to get your thoughts on the debate is about, okay, how much data that that is, you know, processed and inferred at the edge is actually gonna come back to the cloud most of the day, is going to stay at the edge. A lot of it's not even gonna be persisted. And the counter to that is so that's sort of the negative for the data center. But the counter that is, they're gonna be so much data. Even a small percentage of all the data that we're going to create is going to create so much more data, you know, back in the cloud, back in the data center. What's your take on that? >>Look? I think there's different applications that are easier to do in certain places. Right? I mean, look, going to a large cloud has a couple of advantages. You have a very complete software ecosystem around you, you know, lots of different services. Um, you have four. If you need very specialized hardware. If I want to run a big learning task where something need 1000 machines. Right. And then this runs for a couple of days and then I don't need to do that for for another month or two. Right. For that is really great. There's on demand infrastructure, right? Having having all this capability up there, uh you know, at the same time it costs money to send the data up there, Right. If I just look at the hardware cost is much, much cheaper to to build myself, you know, in my own data center or in the edge. Um so I think we'll we'll see, you know, customers picking and choosing what they want to do. Where. Right. And and there's a role for both. Right. Absolutely. And so, you know, I think there's there's certain categories, I mean, at the end of the day, um, why do I absolutely need to have something at the edge? And there's a couple of, I think good, good use cases. I mean one is, let me ask you a few phrases, but I think it's three primary reasons. Right? Um, one is simply a bandwidth, Right? What I'm saying? Okay, my my video data, like I have have 100 and four K video cameras, you know, with 60 frames a second feet, there's no way I'm going to move into the cloud. It's just cost prohibitive. I have a hard time getting a line that allows you to do this right. Um, there might be latency, right. If I don't want to reliably react in a very short period of time, I can't do that in the cloud. I need to do this locally with me. Um, I can't even do this in my data center. This has to be very, very closely coupled. And then there's this idea of faith sharing, I think, you know, that if I want to make sure that if things go wrong right, uh, the system is still intact, right. You know, anything that's an emergency kind of backup, emergency type procedure, right? If things go wrong, I can't rely on there'll be a good internet connection, I need to handle things things locally. Like, you know, that's the smoke detector and sprinkler system. Right? And so for for, for all of these, right, there's good reasons why we need to move things close to the edge. So I think there'll be a creative tension between the two, Right? But both are huge markets and I think there's, there's great opportunities for, for hp ahead to uh, you know, to, to work on these two cases. >>Yeah, for sure. Top brand in that compute business. So before we wrap up today, you know, thinking about your, your role, I mean part of your role is the trend spotter. You're right, you gotta, you're, you're kind of driving innovation, riding, surfing the waves as you said, you know, skating to the park, all >>the all my perfect crystal ball right here, Yeah, got all the cliches. >>Right? Yes, yeah. Right foot's a little pressure on you. But so what are some of the things that you're overseeing that you're, you're looking towards in terms of innovation projects, particularly obviously in the data center space, what's really exciting you >>look, I mean there's a lot of them and I pretty much all the, you know, the interesting ideas I get from talking to customers, right? You talk to to the sophisticated customers, you try to understand the problems that are trying to solve that they cancel right now and that that gives you ideas to just to pick a couple. Right? I mean, one thing, what area I'm probably thinking about a lot is how can we built in a sense, better accelerators for the infrastructure functions. Right. So, so no matter if I run an edge cloud or I run a big public cloud, I want to find ways how I can, I can reduce the amount of CPU cycles I I spent on, you know, Microsoft's marshalling the marshaling service mesh, you know, storage acceleration and these things like that. Right? So clearly, if this is a large chunk of the overall uh cycle budget, right? We need to find ways to, to to shrink that right to to make this more efficient. Right? So that I think so this basically infrastructure function acceleration, it sounds probably as unsexy as any topic could sound, but I think this is actually really, really interesting area. One of the big levers we have right now in the data set. >>I would agree. I think that's actually really exciting because you actually can pick up a lot of the wasted cycles now and that's that drops right to the bottom line. But >>exactly. I mean it's you know, it's kind of funny. I mean we're still measuring so much with speck and rates of Cpus right performances like, well, They may actually make measuring the wrong thing, right? If 80% of the cycles of my upper spent an overhead right then the speed of the CPU doesn't matter as much. Right? It's other functions that end. So that's one um the second big one is memory is becoming a bigger and bigger issue. Right? And and it's it's memory cost because you know, memory prices, they used to have declined the same rate that, you know, our core counts and and and you know, Fox speeds increased. That's no longer the case. That we've run to some scaling limits there some physical scaling limits where memory prices are becoming stagnant and this is becoming a major pain point for everybody was building servers. Right. So I think we need to find ways how we can leverage memory more efficiently. Right, share memory more efficiently. We have some really cool ideas and in that space that we're working on. >>Yeah, let me just sorry to interrupt. But Pat hinted to that and your big announcement, I mean you talk about system on package I think is what he used to talk about what I call disaggregated memory and better sharing of that memory resource. And I mean that seems to be a clear benefit of value creation for the industry. >>Exactly, right. I mean, if this becomes a larger for our customers, this becomes a larger part of the overall cost, right? We want to help them address that issue. And you know, and then the third one is um, you know, we're seeing more and more data center operators effectively power limited. Right? So we need to reduce the overall power of systems or, you know, uh maybe to some degree, just figure out better ways of cooling these systems. But I think there's a there's a lot of innovation that can be done their right to both make these data centers more economical, but also to make them a little more green today, data centers have gotten big enough that if you look at the total amount of energy that we're spending in this world is mankind. Right. A chunk of that is going just to data centers. Right. And so if we're spending energy at that scale, right. I think we have to start thinking about how can we build data centers that are more energy officials? I'll do the same thing with less energy in the future. >>Well, thank you for for laying those out. I mean you guys have been long term partners with with HP and now of course H P E. I'm sure Gelsinger's really happy to have you on board Guido. I would be and thanks so much for coming on the cube. >>It's great to be here. Great to be at the HP show. Thanks >>For being with us for HP Discover 2021 the virtual version. You're watching the Cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Right back.

(soft music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, my name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE and we're here with Guido Appenzeller, who is the CTO of the Data Platforms Group at Intel. Guido, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. >> Aww, thanks Dave, I appreciate it. It's great to be here today. >> So I'm interested in your role at the company, let's talk about that, you're brand new, tell us a little bit about your background. What attracted you to Intel and what's your role here? >> Yeah, so I'm, I grew up with the startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley, I came from my PhD and never left. And, built software companies, worked at software companies worked at VMware for a little bit. And I think my initial reaction when the Intel recruiter called me, was like, Hey you got the wrong phone number, I'm a software guy, that's probably not who you're looking for. And, but we had a good conversation but I think at Intel, there's a realization that you need to look at what Intel builds more as this overall system from an overall systems perspective. That the software stack and then the hardware components are all getting more and more intricately linked and, you need the software to basically bridge across the different hardware components that Intel is building. So again, I was the CTO for the Data Platforms Group, so that builds the data center products here at Intel. And it's a really exciting job. And these are exciting times at Intel, with Pat, I've got a fantastic CEO at the helm. I've worked with him before at VMware. So a lot of things to do but I think a very exciting future. >> Well, I mean the, the data centers the wheelhouse of Intel, of course your ascendancy was a function of the PCs and the great volume and how you change that industry but really data centers is where, I remember the days people said, Intel will never be at the data center, it's just the toy. And of course, you're dominant player there now. So your initial focus here is really defining the vision and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the future what the data center looks like in the future where you see Intel playing a role, what are you seeing as the big trends there? Pat Gelsinger talks about the waves, he says, if you don't ride the waves you're going to end up being driftwood. So what are the waves you're driving? What's different about the data center of the future? >> Yeah, that's right. You want to surf the waves, that's the way to do it. So look, I like to look at this and sort of in terms of major macro trends, And I think that the biggest thing that's happening in the market right now is the cloud revolution. And I think we're well halfway through or something like that. And this transition from the classic, client server type model, that way with enterprises running all data centers to more of a cloud model where something is run by hyperscale operators or maybe run by an enterprise themselves of (indistinct) there's a variety of different models. but the provisioning models have changed. It's much more of a turnkey type service. And when we started out on this journey I think the, we built data centers the same way that we built them before. Although, the way to deliver IT have really changed, it's going through more of a service model and we really know starting to see the hardware diverge, the actual silicon that we need to build and how to address these use cases, diverge. And so I think one of the things that is probably most interesting for me is really to think through, how does Intel in the future build silicon that's built for clouds, like on-prem clouds, edge clouds, hyperscale clouds, but basically built for these new use cases that have emerged. >> So just a quick, kind of a quick aside, to me the definition of cloud is changing, it's evolving and it used to be this set of remote services in a hyperscale data center, it's now that experience is coming on-prem it's connecting across clouds, it's moving out to the edge it's supporting, all kinds of different workloads. How do you see that sort of evolving cloud? >> Yeah, I think, there's the biggest difference to me is that sort of a cloud starts with this idea that the infrastructure operator and the tenant are separate. And that is actually has major architectural implications, it just, this is a perfect analogy, but if I build a single family home, where everything is owned by one party, I want to be able to walk from the kitchen to the living room pretty quickly, if that makes sense. So, in my house here is actually the open kitchen, it's the same room, essentially. If you're building a hotel where your primary goal is to have guests, you pick a completely different architecture. The kitchen from your restaurants where the cooks are busy preparing the food and the dining room, where the guests are sitting, they are separate. The hotel staff has a dedicated place to work and the guests have a dedicated places to mingle but they don't overlap, typically. I think it's the same thing with architecture in the clouds. So, initially the assumption was it's all one thing and now suddenly we're starting to see like a much cleaner separation of these different areas. I think a second major influence is that the type of workloads we're seeing it's just evolving incredibly quickly, 10 years ago, things were mostly monolithic, today most new workloads are microservice based, and that has a huge impact in where CPU cycles are spent, where we need to put an accelerators, how we build silicon for that to give you an idea, there's some really good research out of Google and Facebook where they run numbers. And for example, if you just take a standard system and you run a microservice based an application but in the microservice-based architecture you can spend anywhere from I want to say 25 in some cases, over 80% of your CPU cycles just on overhead, and just on, marshaling demarshaling the protocols and the encryption and decryption of the packets and your service mesh that sits in between all of these things, that created a huge amount of overhead. So for us might have 80% go into these overhead functions really all focus on this needs to be on how do we enable that kind of infrastructure? >> Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about workloads if we can, the overhead there's also sort of, as the software as the data center becomes software defined thanks to your good work at VMware, it is a lot of cores that are supporting that software-defined data center. And then- >> It's at VMware, yeah. >> And as well, you mentioned microservices container-based applications, but as well, AI is coming into play. And what is, AI is just kind of amorphous but it's really data-oriented workloads versus kind of general purpose ERP and finance and HCM. So those workloads are exploding, and then we can maybe talk about the edge. How are you seeing the workload mix shift and how is Intel playing there? >> I think the trends you're talking about is definitely right, and we're getting more and more data centric, shifting the data around becomes a larger and larger part of the overall workload in the data center. And AI is getting a ton of attention. Look if I talk to the most operators AI is still an emerging category. We're seeing, I'd say five, maybe 10% percent of workloads being AI is growing, they're very high value workloads. And they're very challenging workloads, but it's still a smaller part of the overall mix. Now edge is big and edge is two things, it's big and it's complicated because of the way I think about edge is it's not just one homogeneous market, it's really a collection of separate sub markets It's, very heterogeneous, it runs on a variety of different hardware. Edge can be everything from a little server, that's fanless, it's strapped to a phone, a telephone pole with an antenna on top of it, to aid a microcell, or it can be something that's running inside a car, modern cars has a small little data center inside. It can be something that runs on an industrial factory floor, the network operators, there's pretty broad range of verticals that all looks slightly different in their requirements. And, it's, I think it's really interesting, it's one of those areas that really creates opportunities for vendors like HPE, to really shine and address this heterogeneity with a broad range of solutions, very excited to work together with them in that space. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you brought HPE into the discussion, 'cause we're here at HPE Discover, I want to connect that. But so when I think about HPE strategy, I see a couple of opportunities for them. Obviously Intel is going to play in every part of the edge, the data center, the near edge and the far edge, and I gage HPE does as well with Aruba. Aruba is going to go to the far edge. I'm not sure at this point, anyway it's not yet clear to me how far, HPE's traditional server business goes to the, inside of automobiles, we'll see, but it certainly will be at the, let's call it the near edge as a consolidation point- >> Yeah. >> Et cetera and look the edge can be a race track, it could be a retail store, it could be defined in so many ways. Where does it make sense to process the data? But, so my question is what's the role of the data center in this world of edge? How do you see it? >> Yeah, look, I think in a sense what the cloud revolution is doing is that it's showing us, it leads to polarization of a classic data into edge and cloud, if that makes sense, it's splitting, before this was all mingled a little bit together, if my data centers my basement anyways, what's the edge, what's data center? It's the same thing. The moment I'm moving some workloads to the clouds I don't even know where they're running anymore then some other workloads that have to have a certain sense of locality, I need to keep closely. And there are some workloads you just can't move into the cloud. There's, if I'm generating lots of all the video data that I have to process, it's financially a completely unattractive to shift all of that, to a central location, I want to do this locally. And will I ever connect my smoke detector with my sprinkler system be at the cloud? No I won't, this stuff, if things go bad, that may not work anymore. So I need something that's that does this locally. So I think there's many reasons, why you want to keep something on premises. And I think it's a growing market, it's very exciting, we're doing some very good stuff with friends like HPE, they have the ProLiant DL, one 10 Gen10 Plus server with our latest a 3rd Generation Xeons on them the Open RAN, which is the radio access network in the telco space. HP Edgeline servers, also a 3rd Generation Xeons there're some really nice products there that I think can really help addressing enterprises, carriers and a number of different organizations, these edge use cases. >> Can you explain, you mentioned Open RAN, vRAN, should we essentially think of that as kind of the software-defined telco? >> Yeah, exactly. It's software-defined cellular. I actually, I learned a lot about that over the recent months. When I was taking these classes at Stanford, these things were still done in analog, that doesn't mean a radio signal will be processed in an analog way and digest it and today typically the radio signal is immediately digitized and all the processing of the radio signal happens digitally. And, it happens on servers, some of them HPE servers. And, it's a really interesting use case where we're basically now able to do something in a much, much more efficient way by moving it to a digital, more modern platform. And it turns out you can actually virtualize these servers and, run a number of different cells, inside the same server. And it's really complicated because you have to have fantastic real-time guarantees versus sophisticated software stack. But it's a really fascinating use case. >> A lot of times we have these debates and it's maybe somewhat academic, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. And debate is about, how much data that is processed and inferred at the edge is actually going to come back to the cloud, most of the data is going to stay at the edge, a lot of it's not even going to be persisted. And the counter to that is, so that's sort of the negative is at the data center, but then the counter that is there going to be so much data, even a small percentage of all the data that we're going to create is going to create so much more data, back in the cloud, back in the data center. What's your take on that? >> Look, I think there's different applications that are easier to do in certain places. Look, going to a large cloud has a couple of advantages. You have a very complete software ecosystem around you, lots of different services. You'll have first, if you need very specialized hardware, if I wanted to run the bigger learning task where somebody needed a 1000 machines, and then this runs for a couple of days, and then I don't need to do that for another month or two, for that is really great. There's on demand infrastructure, having all this capability up there, at the same time it costs money to send the data up there. If I just look at the hardware cost, it's much much cheaper to build it myself, in my own data center or in the edge. So I think we'll see, customers picking and choosing what they want to do where, and that there's a role for both, absolutely. And so, I think there's certain categories. At the end of the day why do I absolutely need to have something at the edge? There's a couple of, I think, good use cases. One is, let me actually rephrase a little bit. I think it's three primary reasons. One is simply a bandwidth, where I'm saying, my video data, like I have a 100 4K video cameras, with 60 frames per second feeds, there's no way I'm going to move that into the cloud. It's just, cost prohibitive- >> Right. >> I have a hard time even getting (indistinct). There might be latency, if I need want to reliably react in a very short period of time, I can't do that in the cloud, I need to do this locally with me. I can't even do this in my data center. This has to be very closely coupled. And, then there's this idea of fade sharing. I think, if I want to make sure that if things go wrong, the system is still intact, anything that's sort of an emergency kind of a backup, an emergency type procedure, if things go wrong, I can't rely on the big good internet connection, I need to handle things, things locally, that's the smoke detector and the sprinkler system. And so for all of these, there's good reasons why we need to move things close to the edge so I think there'll be a creative tension between the two but both are huge markets. And I think there's great opportunities for HP ahead to work on all these use cases. >> Yeah, for sure, top brand is in that compute business. So before we wrap up today, thinking about your role, part of your role is a trend spotter. You're kind of driving innovation righty, surfing the waves as you said, skating to the puck, all the- >> I've got my perfect crystal ball right here, yeah I got. >> Yeah, all the cliches. (Dave chuckles) puts a little pressure on you, but, so what are some of the things that you're overseeing that you're looking towards in terms of innovation projects particularly obviously in the data center space, what's really exciting you? >> Look, there's a lot of them and I pretty much all the interesting ideas I get from talking to customers. You talk to the sophisticated customers, you try to understand the problems that they're trying to solve and they can't solve right now, and that gives you ideas to just to pick a couple, one thing what area I'm probably thinking about a lot is how can we build in a sense better accelerators for the infrastructure functions? So, no matter if I run an edge cloud or I run a big public cloud, I want to find ways how I can reduce the amount of CPU cycles I spend on microservice marshaling demarshaling, service mesh, storage acceleration and these things like that. And so well clearly, if this is a large chunk of the overall cycle budget, we need to find ways to shrink that to make this more efficient. So then I think, so this basic infrastructure function acceleration, sounds probably as unsexy as any topic would sound but I think this is actually really, really interesting area and one of the big levers we have right now in the data center. >> Yeah, I would agree Guido, I think that's actually really exciting because, you actually can pick up a lot of the wasted cycles now and that drops right to the bottom line, but please- >> Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of funny we're still measuring so much with SPEC and rates of CPU's performances, it's like, well, we may actually be measuring the wrong thing. If 80% of the cycles of my app are spent in overhead, then the speed of the CPU doesn't matter as much, it's other functions that (indistinct). >> Right. >> So that's one. >> The second big one is memory is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and it's memory cost 'cause, memory prices, they used to sort of decline at the same rate that our core counts and then clock speeds increased, that's no longer the case. So we've run to some scaling limits, there's some physical scaling limits where memory prices are becoming stagnant. And this has become a major pain point for everybody who's building servers. So I think we need to find ways how we can leverage memory more efficiently, share memory more efficiently. We have some really cool ideas in that space that we're working on. >> Well, yeah. And Pat, let me just sorry to interrupt but Pat hinted to that and your big announcement. He talked about system on package and I think is what you used to talk about what I call disaggregated memory and better sharing of that memory resource. And that seems to be a clear benefit of value creation for the industry. >> Exactly. If this becomes a larger, if for our customers this becomes a larger part of the overall costs, we want to help them address that issue. And the third one is, we're seeing more and more data center operators that effectively power limited. So we need to reduce the overall power of systems, or maybe to some degree just figure out better ways of cooling these systems. But I think there's a lot of innovation that can be done there to both make these data centers more economical but also to make them a little more Green. Today data centers have gotten big enough that if you look at the total amount of energy that we're spending, this world as mankind, a chunk of that is going just to data center. And so if we're spending energy at that scale, I think we have to start thinking about how can we build data centers that are more energy efficient that are also doing the same thing with less energy in the future. >> Well, thank you for laying those out, you guys have been long-term partners with HP and now of course HPE, I'm sure Gelsinger is really happy to have you on board, Guido I would be and thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here and great to be at the HP show. >> And thanks for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, you're watching theCUBE the leader in digital tech coverage, be right back. (soft music)

(soft music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, my name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE and we're here with Guido Appenzeller, who is the CTO of the Data Platforms Group at Intel. Guido, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. >> Aww, thanks Dave, I appreciate it. It's great to be here today. >> So I'm interested in your role at the company, let's talk about that, you're brand new, tell us a little bit about your background. What attracted you to Intel and what's your role here? >> Yeah, so I'm, I grew up with the startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley, I came from my PhD and never left. And, built software companies, worked at software companies worked at VMware for a little bit. And I think my initial reaction when the Intel recruiter called me, was like, Hey you got the wrong phone number, I'm a software guy, that's probably not who you're looking for. And, but we had a good conversation but I think at Intel, there's a realization that you need to look at what Intel builds more as this overall system from an overall systems perspective. That the software stack and then the hardware components are all getting more and more intricately linked and, you need the software to basically bridge across the different hardware components that Intel is building. So again, I was the CTO for the Data Platforms Group, so that builds the data center products here at Intel. And it's a really exciting job. And these are exciting times at Intel, with Pat, I've got a fantastic CEO at the helm. I've worked with him before at VMware. So a lot of things to do but I think a very exciting future. >> Well, I mean the, the data centers the wheelhouse of Intel, of course your ascendancy was a function of the PCs and the great volume and how you change that industry but really data centers is where, I remember the days people said, Intel will never be at the data center, it's just the toy. And of course, you're dominant player there now. So your initial focus here is really defining the vision and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the future what the data center looks like in the future where you see Intel playing a role, what are you seeing as the big trends there? Pat Gelsinger talks about the waves, he says, if you don't ride the waves you're going to end up being driftwood. So what are the waves you're driving? What's different about the data center of the future? >> Yeah, that's right. You want to surf the waves, that's the way to do it. So look, I like to look at this and sort of in terms of major macro trends, And I think that the biggest thing that's happening in the market right now is the cloud revolution. And I think we're well halfway through or something like that. And this transition from the classic, client server type model, that way with enterprises running all data centers to more of a cloud model where something is run by hyperscale operators or maybe run by an enterprise themselves of (indistinct) there's a variety of different models. but the provisioning models have changed. It's much more of a turnkey type service. And when we started out on this journey I think the, we built data centers the same way that we built them before. Although, the way to deliver IT have really changed, it's going through more of a service model and we really know starting to see the hardware diverge, the actual silicon that we need to build and how to address these use cases, diverge. And so I think one of the things that is probably most interesting for me is really to think through, how does Intel in the future build silicon that's built for clouds, like on-prem clouds, edge clouds, hyperscale clouds, but basically built for these new use cases that have emerged. >> So just a quick, kind of a quick aside, to me the definition of cloud is changing, it's evolving and it used to be this set of remote services in a hyperscale data center, it's now that experience is coming on-prem it's connecting across clouds, it's moving out to the edge it's supporting, all kinds of different workloads. How do you see that sort of evolving cloud? >> Yeah, I think, there's the biggest difference to me is that sort of a cloud starts with this idea that the infrastructure operator and the tenant are separate. And that is actually has major architectural implications, it just, this is a perfect analogy, but if I build a single family home, where everything is owned by one party, I want to be able to walk from the kitchen to the living room pretty quickly, if that makes sense. So, in my house here is actually the open kitchen, it's the same room, essentially. If you're building a hotel where your primary goal is to have guests, you pick a completely different architecture. The kitchen from your restaurants where the cooks are busy preparing the food and the dining room, where the guests are sitting, they are separate. The hotel staff has a dedicated place to work and the guests have a dedicated places to mingle but they don't overlap, typically. I think it's the same thing with architecture in the clouds. So, initially the assumption was it's all one thing and now suddenly we're starting to see like a much cleaner separation of these different areas. I think a second major influence is that the type of workloads we're seeing it's just evolving incredibly quickly, 10 years ago, things were mostly monolithic, today most new workloads are microservice based, and that has a huge impact in where CPU cycles are spent, where we need to put an accelerators, how we build silicon for that to give you an idea, there's some really good research out of Google and Facebook where they run numbers. And for example, if you just take a standard system and you run a microservice based an application but in the microservice-based architecture you can spend anywhere from I want to say 25 in some cases, over 80% of your CPU cycles just on overhead, and just on, marshaling demarshaling the protocols and the encryption and decryption of the packets and your service mesh that sits in between all of these things, that created a huge amount of overhead. So for us might have 80% go into these overhead functions really all focus on this needs to be on how do we enable that kind of infrastructure? >> Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about workloads if we can, the overhead there's also sort of, as the software as the data center becomes software defined thanks to your good work at VMware, it is a lot of cores that are supporting that software-defined data center. And then- >> It's at VMware, yeah. >> And as well, you mentioned microservices container-based applications, but as well, AI is coming into play. And what is, AI is just kind of amorphous but it's really data-oriented workloads versus kind of general purpose ERP and finance and HCM. So those workloads are exploding, and then we can maybe talk about the edge. How are you seeing the workload mix shift and how is Intel playing there? >> I think the trends you're talking about is definitely right, and we're getting more and more data centric, shifting the data around becomes a larger and larger part of the overall workload in the data center. And AI is getting a ton of attention. Look if I talk to the most operators AI is still an emerging category. We're seeing, I'd say five, maybe 10% percent of workloads being AI is growing, they're very high value workloads. So (indistinct) any workloads, but it's still a smaller part of the overall mix. Now edge is big and edge is two things, it's big and it's complicated because of the way I think about edge is it's not just one homogeneous market, it's really a collection of separate sub markets It's, very heterogeneous, it runs on a variety of different hardware. Edge can be everything from a little server, that's (indistinct), it's strapped to a phone, a telephone pole with an antenna on top of it, to (indistinct) microcell, or it can be something that's running inside a car, modern cars has a small little data center inside. It can be something that runs on an industrial factory floor, the network operators, there's pretty broad range of verticals that all looks slightly different in their requirements. And, it's, I think it's really interesting, it's one of those areas that really creates opportunities for vendors like HPE, to really shine and address this heterogeneity with a broad range of solutions, very excited to work together with them in that space. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you brought HPE into the discussion, 'cause we're here at HPE Discover, I want to connect that. But so when I think about HPE strategy, I see a couple of opportunities for them. Obviously Intel is going to play in every part of the edge, the data center, the near edge and the far edge, and I gage HPE does as well with Aruba. Aruba is going to go to the far edge. I'm not sure at this point, anyway it's not yet clear to me how far, HPE's traditional server business goes to the, inside of automobiles, we'll see, but it certainly will be at the, let's call it the near edge as a consolidation point- >> Yeah. >> Et cetera and look the edge can be a race track, it could be a retail store, it could be defined in so many ways. Where does it make sense to process the data? But, so my question is what's the role of the data center in this world of edge? How do you see it? >> Yeah, look, I think in a sense what the cloud revolution is doing is that it's showing us, it leads to polarization of a classic data into edge and cloud, if that makes sense, it's splitting, before this was all mingled a little bit together, if my data centers my basement anyways, what's the edge, what's data center? It's the same thing. The moment I'm moving some workloads to the clouds I don't even know where they're running anymore then some other workloads that have to have a certain sense of locality, I need to keep closely. And there are some workloads you just can't move into the cloud. There's, if I'm generating lots of all the video data that I have to process, it's financially a completely unattractive to shift all of that, to a central location, I want to do this locally. And will I ever connect my smoke detector with my sprinkler system be at the cloud? No I won't (Guido chuckles) this stuff, if things go bad, that may not work anymore. So I need something that's that does this locally. So I think there's many reasons, why you want to keep something on premises. And I think it's a growing market, it's very exciting, we're doing some very good stuff with friends like HPE, they have the ProLiant DL, one 10 Gen10 Plus server with our latest a 3rd Generation Xeons on them the Open RAN, which is the radio access network in the telco space. HP Edgeline servers, also a 3rd Generation Xeons there're some really nice products there that I think can really help addressing enterprises, carriers and a number of different organizations, these edge use cases. >> Can you explain, you mentioned Open RAN, vRAN, should we essentially think of that as kind of the software-defined telco? >> Yeah, exactly. It's software-defined cellular. I actually, I learned a lot about that over the recent months. When I was taking these classes at Stanford, these things were still done in analog, that doesn't mean a radio signal will be processed in an analog way and digest it and today typically the radio signal is immediately digitized and all the processing of the radio signal happens digitally. And, it happens on servers, some of them HPE servers. And, it's a really interesting use case where we're basically now able to do something in a much, much more efficient way by moving it to a digital, more modern platform. And it turns out you can actually virtualize these servers and, run a number of different cells, inside the same server. And it's really complicated because you have to have fantastic real-time guarantees versus sophisticated software stack. But it's a really fascinating use case. >> A lot of times we have these debates and it's maybe somewhat academic, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. And debate is about, how much data that is processed and inferred at the edge is actually going to come back to the cloud, most of the data is going to stay at the edge, a lot of it's not even going to be persisted. And the counter to that is, so that's sort of the negative is at the data center, but then the counter that is there going to be so much data, even a small percentage of all the data that we're going to create is going to create so much more data, back in the cloud, back in the data center. What's your take on that? >> Look, I think there's different applications that are easier to do in certain places. Look, going to a large cloud has a couple of advantages. You have a very complete software ecosystem around you, lots of different services. You'll have first, if you need very specialized hardware, if I wanted to run the bigger learning task where somebody needed a 1000 machines, and then this runs for a couple of days, and then I don't need to do that for another month or two, for that is really great. There's on demand infrastructure, having all this capability up there, at the same time it costs money to send the data up there. If I just look at the hardware cost, it's much much cheaper to build it myself, in my own data center or in the edge. So I think we'll see, customers picking and choosing what they want to do where, and that there's a role for both, absolutely. And so, I think there's certain categories. At the end of the day why do I absolutely need to have something at the edge? There's a couple of, I think, good use cases. One is, let me actually rephrase a little bit. I think it's three primary reasons. One is simply a bandwidth, where I'm saying, my video data, like I have a 100 4K video cameras, with 60 frames per second feeds, there's no way I'm going to move that into the cloud. It's just, cost prohibitive- >> Right. >> I have a hard time even getting (indistinct). There might be latency, if I need want to reliably react in a very short period of time, I can't do that in the cloud, I need to do this locally with me. I can't even do this in my data center. This has to be very closely coupled. And, then there's this idea of fade sharing. I think, if I want to make sure that if things go wrong, the system is still intact, anything that's sort of an emergency kind of a backup, an emergency type procedure, if things go wrong, I can't rely on the big good internet connection, I need to handle things, things locally, that's the smoke detector and the sprinkler system. And so for all of these, there's good reasons why we need to move things close to the edge so I think there'll be a creative tension between the two but both are huge markets. And I think there's great opportunities for HP ahead to work on all these use cases. >> Yeah, for sure, top brand is in that compute business. So before we wrap up today, thinking about your role, part of your role is a trend spotter. You're kind of driving innovation righty, surfing the waves as you said, skating to the puck, all the- >> I've got my perfect crystal ball right here, yeah I got. >> Yeah, all the cliches. (Dave chuckles) puts a little pressure on you, but, so what are some of the things that you're overseeing that you're looking towards in terms of innovation projects particularly obviously in the data center space, what's really exciting you? >> Look, there's a lot of them and I pretty much all the interesting ideas I get from talking to customers. You talk to the sophisticated customers, you try to understand the problems that they're trying to solve and they can't solve right now, and that gives you ideas to just to pick a couple, one thing what area I'm probably thinking about a lot is how can we build in a sense better accelerators for the infrastructure functions? So, no matter if I run an edge cloud or I run a big public cloud, I want to find ways how I can reduce the amount of CPU cycles I spend on microservice marshaling demarshaling, service mesh, storage acceleration and these things like that. And so well clearly, if this is a large chunk of the overall cycle budget, we need to find ways to shrink that to make this more efficient. So then I think, so this basic infrastructure function acceleration, sounds probably as unsexy as any topic would sound but I think this is actually really, really interesting area and one of the big levers we have right now in the data center. >> Yeah, I would agree Guido, I think that's actually really exciting because, you actually can pick up a lot of the wasted cycles now and that drops right to the bottom line, but please- >> Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of funny we're still measuring so much with SPEC and rates of CPU's performances, it's like, well, we may actually be measuring the wrong thing. If 80% of the cycles of my app are spent in overhead, then the speed of the CPU doesn't matter as much, it's other functions that (indistinct). >> Right. >> So that's one. >> The second big one is memory is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and it's memory cost 'cause, memory prices, they used to sort of decline at the same rate that our core counts and then clock speeds increased, that's no longer the case. So we've run to some scaling limits, there's some physical scaling limits where memory prices are becoming stagnant. And this has become a major pain point for everybody who's building servers. So I think we need to find ways how we can leverage memory more efficiently, share memory more efficiently. We have some really cool ideas in that space that we're working on. >> Well, yeah. And Pat, let me just sorry to interrupt but Pat hinted to that and your big announcement. He talked about system on package and I think is what you used to talk about what I call disaggregated memory and better sharing of that memory resource. And that seems to be a clear benefit of value creation for the industry. >> Exactly. If this becomes a larger, if for our customers this becomes a larger part of the overall costs, we want to help them address that issue. And the third one is, we're seeing more and more data center operators that effectively power limited. So we need to reduce the overall power of systems, or maybe to some degree just figure out better ways of cooling these systems. But I think there's a lot of innovation that can be done there to both make these data centers more economical but also to make them a little more Green. Today data centers have gotten big enough that if you look at the total amount of energy that we're spending, this world as mankind, a chunk of that is going just to data center. And so if we're spending energy at that scale, I think we have to start thinking about how can we build data centers that are more energy efficient that are also doing the same thing with less energy in the future. >> Well, thank you for laying those out, you guys have been long-term partners with HP and now of course HPE, I'm sure Gelsinger is really happy to have you on board, Guido I would be and thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here and great to be at the HP show. >> And thanks for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, you're watching theCUBE the leader in digital tech coverage, be right back. (soft music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Hello, welcome back everyone. We're live here at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. We're actually in the hang space, broadcast booth It's theCube's SilliconANGLE's flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier and my co-host Stu Meneman, our next guest, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Great to see you again. Every VMworld, every year that we've done the VMworld, you've been on theCube. >> Well, it's always a pleasure. You guys are fun. You do your homework. I enjoy our time together, and I can't imagine VMworld without theCube. Look, we are really impressed with the vision you've laid out, because the number one question we get asked on theCube and in backchannels like CrowdChat and Twitter, is VMware ecosystem is looking for the straight and narrow, they want that, they want to see the path, the 90-mile stair if you will, so they can actually accelerate their business. >> Pat: Yeah. >> Can you laid that out, and just quickly review what your key points were for the folks that didn't capture the full keynote. >> Well, clearly we said, boy, we gave clear data with regard to what the cloud market looks like, what it's going to look like today, 2021, 2030, crossover points, and really the key summary of that is it's a complex world. It's going to be a multi-cloud environment for our customers, and they want to know, how do I not only build hybrid clouds, private clouds, and how do I take advantage of public clouds? And we gave a comprehensive view of what that looks like, the cross-cloud architecture. Here's a way that we can bring all cloud embodiments into a common framework. Cross-cloud architecture, two big components are part of it, build your private cloud, enable that as a service, that's a cloud foundation, bring it together, vSAN, vSphere, NSX, along with new lifecycle management capabilities, making that easy, do it as a service with IBM and our partnership that we announced there, but we expect many more of those with other vCloud Air Network partners, and then the cool new Cross-Cloud Services. Make those available, embrace any cloud, and then give our enterprise customers the tools to manage in this cross-cloud or multi-cloud environment. >> John: What's the catalyst for this announcement? Was it an epiphany, was it more that the market was ready for it? Because now, multi-cloud, but how you talk about it, any device anywhere, that's been the previous message. But now it catalyzes around this positioning. What was the moment of truth where you said okay, this is, we're going with this. It doesn't seem like you're betting the ranch on this, but it is betting the ranch on this in a way, because this is, as you said, the future, and it's going to be mostly your journey. So why did it come together? >> A couple of things happened. If you remember last year's VMworld, we did this little NSX demo where it says, we can connect NSX onto the cloud, you remember that? >> Yeah. >> Literally, Guido comes into Raghu and I, about two weeks before VMworld last night, and he says "we've got to work it. And can I demo it in my session?" Right, at the thing. Raghu looked at each other and he says, "Okay, let's do it. Let's see how people respond to it." So that was one catalyst. The second catalyst, we had a couple of customer meetings where the customer said to us, and he says, "This is my best. I'm doing this on Amazon, I'm exploring Azure over here, I've got a boatload of VMware, I'm doing this many- help me solve these problems. So it was clearly customer feedback, and there's a vibrant response we had from this little last-minute demo that we did at last year's VMworld, and sort of out of that, we said, "Let's really take this seriously. Let's go dive deeply into it." And as Guido said in the keynote, we've now talked to about a couple hundred customers and a huge response, and some, you know, usually when you do a cool new product, people say let me try that. In this case, the response we've gotten is, I need that now. I mean, it's a very definitive response. These are the kind of things I need to manage today's problems, so I guess Guido's already late in getting it done, so I've got to crack the whip harder and get this in the market. >> So it's not so much retooling, though we did talk about yesterday at the things, you're kind of mid-flight but you're adjusting to the market. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And clearly our cloud journey's been one where, you know, if you go back and I gave some of the data 2011, no one expected the public cloud to be where it was, where it is today. I mean, it clearly accelerated faster, some of the ease of use, efficiency characteristics, hey, this is a capability that nobody quite expected to grow this rapidly. And it's now permeated Enterprise customers who are starting to take advantage of it. But they don't have the tools to really take advantage of it. >> So some key leads we were reading yesterday in your keynote, you know we always like to read between the lines, kind of like the messaging inside of it. >> Sometimes you get it right, sometimes, you know. >> We get it right most of the time. Your comment, your sit-down with Michael Dell was really interesting, okay. Because this is an open ecosystem play. His first point was about open ecosystem. You've been banging on this from day one since you've been CEO of VMware, since the throw of the first pitch of the NetApp event that got viral with that jersey on. >> I went to the NetApp customer partner event last night, every year I'm there as well. Just like theCube, I go to the NetApp event. >> He could say that you have been hardcore about open ecosystem from day one, and with the merger now set for the 7th, the merger that you can transact on the 7th, you still want to be independent. The open ecosystem is super important to you, and Michael, I heard it right from his mouth. Share some color on why and how that's going to evolve. Will everyone have untempered access to VMware, will all partners have the same level of access and visibility? >> The simple answer is yes. We're going to continue exactly on that strategy as we go forward. And clearly I'm going to do more with Michael and the Dell team, you know, as we see that going forward. But it's incumbent upon us, even as we do more with Dell, that we lean in more aggressively to our HP, to our Lenovo, to our Fujitsu, and our other partners as well. So we see that as a critical part. And I say the VMware ecosystem is evolving. Five years ago, would you have had the cadre of security and networking vendors? No. Would you have expected to have all the system integrators? No. I mean, we're clearly expanding. Service provider partners, our ecosystem has broadened our product portfolio, it's becoming a broader statement as well. So that's a commitment. We're going to remain a platform play, an ecosystem play, and obviously, with Michael's comments onstage, he's cheering us on. He's saying, I'm going to grow my business with VMware faster, and I hope all of the other ecosystem partners grow faster than I do. >> Is this going to be a persona change? Because now, if you look at VMware's ecosystem, which has been robust, there's some good salivation going on, there's a change-up as the ecosystem shifts. vCenter was once the big thing, now you've got NSX and all this other stuff in the cloud. Is there a persona changeover in who the target customers are in the ecosystem? >> Well, clearly, I mean, the customer's the same. It remains sort of that IT buyer, which increasingly, as I talked about in the keynote, is becoming a business buyer, but it's that core IT Enterprise customer. We're not a consumer company, we're not an app company, we're an infrastructure company and we're going to satisfy that broadly across the industry. >> John: Yeah. >> But in that context, I mean, look at it. You know, over here we have the Internet of Things. Wow, you know, we have the NFV zone. We're having a broader and broader set of who is our ecosystem, and that's absolutely going to continue as we go forward because solutions to things that we do are permeating more and more of the entire business landscape as we go forward. It's a really fun time. You know, even though I like to joke with Michael that he was younger when I first met him. And against that, you know, he and I have both been at this for over three decades. But in many regards, it feels like we're just getting started. It really is a fun period. >> So Pat, the management suite has been a challenge for the industry in general. VMware has, as John said, strong presence with vCenter. As you start reaching out to some of these environments, why does VMware kind of have the right to think that it's going to be at the center of this discussion for some of your customers, especially as they talk about like Microsoft, they've got strong pieces there. Big partners like Intel, Amazon in the play, so why VMware? >> Well, I think there's a couple of aspects to it. And, who is better to be a neutral player, to enable people to have cloud freedom? Right? If you just start with that question, and we'd say hey, we enable people to have hardware freedom. It's in our ethos to have this platform play, to have a broader ecosystem, open APIs, it's what we do. And in the cloud world, hmm, Amazon, okay, they have a legitimate role. But are they going to be the best ones to do private and public, or enable Azure or AliCloud? I think we have a very legitimate position there to say, hey, we're a neutral player, we can be cross-player, cross-industry. Secondly, the technology assets that we have, what we demonstrated on stage yesterday with Guido, think if you didn't have NSX and vRealize and some of the storage assets? That was many, many years of engineering and we pulled all of those pieces together for a comprehensive demonstration of all of those pieces in nine months. That's because we have a rich set of technologies that we can bring to this Cross-Cloud Services. >> So VMware's got a pretty sophisticated stack there, lots of customer options. When we look at the cloud native states, things change a lot. You've got a lot of open source in there, most customers don't buy shrink-wrapped software, they take a lot of components, they tend to put some things together. There's been a little open source, but we've talked for many years about, open source isn't one of the primary revenue drivers for VMware. It's not kind of core to the business. Is that changing? How do you keep making money in the open source world? How do you compete? >> I think there's two different aspects to that that I'd like to, you know, one is, essentially our strategy is, enable these new environments on the VMware franchise. So what's my revenue model? I'm going to keep selling vSphere, I'm going to sell NSX, I'm going to sell vSAN, our management tools, et cetera, even as I add more open source components into those environments. And hey, I'm pretty happy. What's the price point of it going to be? It's free, if you're an Enterprise Plus customer. We're just adding it as another set of capabilities on top of it. It's all open source bits, you've, you know, Stu, have you downloaded it yet off GitHub? >> I have not. >> Pat: You have not? I'm disappointed to hear that. Get on it, right? Get back to work. >> You've got to code tonight, Stu. No party. >> Right? You know. Too much partying for you, Stu. But it's going to be available. We're engaging this open source community, in an open source way, but we're adding our industry rock-hard components, and that's important. Because enterprises are going to start deploying containerized applications. And then you're going to start asking questions. Are they secured? Are they managed? Do you have, like it said onstage, are they monitored? How are you going to network them? And all of the sudden, it's not going to be some lightweight stateless application, you're going to start saying, this is a better way to do stateful applications. What about resilience for that? Get back to the rock-hard questions that infrastructure guys know how to handle. So this is a way to saying yes to those problems but also saying yes to these cool new developer things as well. And in our sense, you know, we think we're well-positioned to go do it, but hey, some of it may be open source projects, and hey, we're showing that we're going to support those, we're going to deliver those, we're going to embrace those as well. So I'm sure that we hired Dirk Hohndel, a longtime friend. I hired him before at Intel, so now we brought him over here to VMware. Because we clearly see, we have to enhance our position overall in the open source community. Not a strong point for VMware in the past, and we're quite committed to changing that perception going forward. >> A lot of great code in the open source, but you mentioned those things about the infrastructure. I want to get back to that point. Those complex things. Automations now playing a big role, we saw the demo today with vSAN,Yanbing was just, one push of a button, a lot of policy, automatic policy automation, that's a great direction. >> Pat: Oh, yeah. >> So, I like that direction. But now I want to bring that back to Cross-Cloud. NSX with security and automation, and protection with the vSphere and then Cross-Cloud. How do you look at this? Because I know you're a strategist, so I think we'll get the strategist angle here. It's like the inter-networking data, I was riffing with Stu earlier about inter-networking has spawned because of all these networks needed to be connected together. And that became >> A whole industry. >> A huge industry. A lot of wealth created, a lot of innovation. Inter-clouding, or Cross-Cloud as you call it, is that dynamic. How do you play well? IBM's onstage, there's no Amazon onstage. I didn't see Microsoft. Are we going to see the other clouds come in to the fold, or are you going to go to them and partner with them? >> So let's, you know, one of the architectural principles of Cross-Cloud is public APIs. So I'm not requiring any unique support from Amazon and Azure, and that's an important statement as well, because now I go to a customer who's taken advantage of Amazon, and they can look at some of those Cross-Cloud Services and then says, well, what if Amazon doesn't support you in the future? And we say, these are standard APIs. They're supporting hundreds of customers on those APIs. It's important, right, that we're engaging with, I'll say, the way that the cloud is being presented to customers and giving them better tools to manage. Now that does not mean I'm not going to do more work in integrating more deeply and partnering with them. >> So does that support like the Amazon S3 API then? >> Pat: Of course. >> Okay. >> John: Well, Sling API's a little bit different. >> Management APIs is actually more appropriate to look at it in that respect as well. How do you spawn, how do you stop, how do you manage VMs, how do you do availability cells, those are the things more appropriate to a management tool in that regard. But those are public API, public interfaces, we're taking advantage of all of those. And we are going to work more closely with the Azures and the Amazons as well, we're going to invest in those partnerships. And there may be areas that we compete with them, but we're going to go do as much as we can, because that's what our customers are asking us to do. Give me better support for those environments, which workloads can I put there? Can I network? Can I secure? Maybe in some cases I don't want my groups using nonpub, or non, you know, multi-cloud APIs. Another case is, hey, I am fully comfortable saying, >> Pick the right cloud for the job kind of thing. >> Absolutely. Right >> Is your philosophy. So slinging APIs is pretty trivial relative to interfacing with the cloud, but the customer might want to go deeper, and, because that might create a complexity issue around, and also functionality might not be as robust as, say, deeper stack integration for data management and whatnot. Are you worried, or we're watching, certainly, like Microsoft, if they feel the proprietary aspect of their stack around data for instance, that's the holy grail, it can get sticky, but still be quote 'open' but not proprietary. >> Yeah. >> So the lock inspect is the lack of openness, per se, to say with data. >> And by the way, you know, I mean, in that respect, what we want to do is present to customers the tools that they can manage those decisions. For instance, a customer may say, hey, I love that machine learning API that Google offers. It's giving me a great competitive advantage, it's not available on any other cloud, and we're going to say, hey, it's proprietary API, if you use it and your data's there, you've picked that service, but we're still going to help you manage and secure it. Another workload, the customer might say, Hey, this workload, I want to make sure has multi-cloud landing zones associated with it. So we're going to help him manage those decisions as well, because if you stay in this domain, I can make it run anywhere, I'll be able to do cross-optimize it, maybe geo-optimize it, et cetera. So it's giving them the tools to manage those decisions. Because I think, hey, you know, Microsoft, they're going to do really well with things related to collaboration of 365. I think Google, I think they're going to do really well around data machine learning. IBM Enterprise, great cloud. Amazon, hey, they've won this round of the developer cloud. Each of them has sort of staked turfs that are very clear, they're going to present value to customers, and our view is, we're going to make those all more readily consumer, suitable for enterprises to run, manage, secure, and connect their workloads into those environments. And build the connectivity into their private clouds, their vCloud Air Networks, their manage clouds as well, that's what we can uniquely do. >> Amazon is going strong in the enterprise. I agree they've won the developer cloud, but they're aggressively going after the enterprise. Mainly Oracle for now, but I'm sure they might think about speech ed that you have. >> Oh, sure. Sure, absolutely. But, you know, in that space, moving a lightweight application, okay, done. Right, you do an OEF conversion, you're done, man, you sell it like that. Oh, you've got to move the full network configuration, IP address ability, right? I've got to deal with different- oh my gosh. Those are hard things to do. The easy stuff moves pretty easy. The hard stuff, okay, that's where we're at now as we address Enterprise customers, and you just don't pick those up and relocate those onto Amazon, Azure, or anyplace else. You know, that's really where the strength of VMware lies. >> So Pat, Dave Vellante is, you know, just at this point, he can't be here for the interview, so I'm a surrogate for him. >> I refuse this interview, not having Dave here. >> John: He says, Pat, I love you forever. That's what he says. >> He asked me to have your commentary on the new era of IT. Officially announced today, the Dell EMC deal, September 7th it will go down, you know, of course that has ramifications on VMware. HP split recently. Lots of, I mean, major signal changes to the industry. What's your take? >> Yeah, you know, as I described before, this is a very disruptive period of the IT industry. Consolidation of portions of it, we think as the hardware industry has matured, stabilized, you know, not growing, still cashflow rich but not growing, we think consolidation is a very natural phase of that industry's maturation. And against that, the Dell move, it's a very bold move given the size of it, but if you look at the cashflows of the companies, as Michael says, it's pretty easy math. It wasn't that hard to, you know, this is how much the cashflow is, this is how much the debt payment is, the math works. Do the deal. >> And Michael said, if you don't understand that VMware is hugely important to that, you don't understand the math. >> Right. For that, you know, clearly, having a controlling interest there, he gets it. We have a lot of growth potential as well, evaluation increase, potential strategic role, but he also realizes that the independence of VMware is critical as well. A software company is very different than a hardware company and our position in the industry, the ecosystem, he respects that greatly. We also think that we're far from done with disruptions elsewhere. We just saw Rackspace go private. Wow, you know, that's another structured shift. Changes in the structure of Citrix as a company, at Five, as they go through their transitions in this next phase of growth, Palo Alto, a good friend Mark McLaughlin, they're driving their software and service revenue growth from hardware. Lots of changes in the industry. Collectively, we look at those and we say, boy, this period of change, disruption, radical growth, consolidation of different places, VMware sits now at a very stable and comfortable place. I've got a great battle sheet, I've got a clear path in front of me, going back to the beginning of the interview, and, right, behind my battle sheet, is this huge turbo-charged engines that is cheering for our growth, distributing us, and even a bigger battle sheet behind us. So we sit in a very uniquely wonderful position. >> I have a final question for what a great, I know you've got another point, and thanks for, first of all, thanks for your time again. What's the biggest disruption that you're watching that's motivating you, whether it's lighting a fire under your feet, or just something that you see that's so epic, and get out for that next week, as you said, if you're not out for that next week, you're driftwood. >> Can I give you two? >> John: Yeah. >> So the one that I think is clearly the biggest is the shift to the public cloud. And I'll just say, that's why the Cross-Cloud announcement was so critical. Also, I wanted to demystify some of the numbers in the keynote. So we went out there and said, very specifically, this is where it's going to be, SaaS, and IaaS, and where it's going to be at different points in time, because I think there's been all sorts of numbers floating around the industry of what it's going to look like over time. But clearly, this public cloud's becoming a big deal. If we have to present ourselves as relevant and critical to our customers in that transition, so I'll say that's the one that we have to navigate through to really position VMware for the next couple decades. The other one that I point out is really, as we talked about, the IoT and the device picture. Wow, we're going to have more machine-connected devices in 2019, >> Love that stat, by the way. >> Than human-connected devices. And that presents enormous business opportunity, right, security threats and opportunities, data infrastructure to go with it, IT, as I would say, IT has left the nest. It's now permeated, >> And software's, a primary function of all the new software that has to be written to handle those situations. >> And in that sense, you want to say, even though I'm three and a half decades in the industry, it sort of feels like we're just getting started. >> You had a spring in your step until you had a cast on it, so you still, you've got to be careful you don't break down. As you get older, your bones get a bit more hard to recover. >> That's right. >> Pat, thanks so much for spending the time, great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure. >> Pat Gelsinger, inside theCube, here in VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. >> Mr. Vellante must be here next year. >> Dave, man date. Stu Miniman and I, Stu, you did good. You held your own. Pat, as usual, great. This is theCube, you're watching theCube at VMworld, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman. (techno beat)

>> Announcer: Live, from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier and my co-host this week, Stu Minniman, for three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next guest is the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, Inc., that's the first time we've actually used that. Congratulations on, I think last Thursday or Wednesday, the name officially became Dell Technology. Michael Dell, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Super excited to be with you and obviously super excited about the formation of Dell Technologies as we bring together Dell and EMC and VMware and Pivotal and RSA and Virtustream and SecureWorks and so many other great organizations. >> So Dell Technology, now it's official, but EMC, Dell EMC is not yet official. Quick, give us the update. That's the number one thing people are asking. What's the update with the merger and the China situation. What's the quick update there from your standpoint? >> You know, we announced this back in October of last year and we're very much on track with the original timeline that we said, which was that we'd close between May and October of this year, and on the original terms. So everything is moving along and we're making great progress. >> Chinese government not playing monkey business with you, looking at the big mega-merger and thinking, whoa, slow down. >> We're continuing to work with them, and as I said, we're on track with the original schedule and terms that we said when we announced it back in October of last year. >> Exciting things on the global landscape, we'll get to that in a second. But I want to get your thoughts on VMworld because this is a geek show and this is a technology show and on the keynote they're showing debugging ports, migrating from the cloud, I mean you don't see that. You usually see the pomp and circumstance, all the glamour. Here, I mean you're a geek, you're always getting down and dirty with the technology. Thoughts on this community, because this is, these guys roll their sleeves up. And by the way, they're very vocal on social media so you can always get the Twitter feed, but your thoughts on VMworld, the culture of this ecosystem? >> I thought the demos that Guido showed were incredibly cool, showing sort of the evolution of virtualization to the software-defined data center to the hybrid cloud to now Cross-Cloud and all the things that you can do. And as you saw, live examples with Citibank and Columbia and J & J, these are real live organizations. And of course at VMworld you have the ecosystem of VMware in all of its glory, with the whole industry coming together and, as you said, a passionate group of individuals that are excited about what they're doing and VMware is kind of a big part of how the industry is evolving. And we're thrilled be an even bigger part of it now than we have been in the past. It's not my first time to come to VMworld, of course. >> But again, with now Dell Technologies looming, and the merger is going to be a big part of that. >> Yes. >> Technologies, and I'll ask that specific question later. But I do want to get your thoughts as someone who has been in the industry as a power broker, founder, CEO, now going private, you've seen all the waves of innovation. The ecosystem has become a really important part of it in your world there was the Wintel and the developer communities during those days, for the software business, aka the computer industry per se, but now we're on a new inflection point where the computer industry-like movement is happening with cloud and data center, hyper-converged environments. What does the ecosystem mean? Because we've seen the ecosystem kind of sitting there kind of waiting for this explosion with the cloud. Your thoughts on what the ecosystem means in this new era, vis-a-vis other times in history? >> You know, I don't see them waiting. You think about the kind of armada of companies that are coming along as the ecosystem evolves. Again, you see it out there on the show floor. You take NSX as an example. There's tremendous growth in software-defined networking. And NSX is kind of leading the way. And you see all the leading networking companies in the world here at VMworld using NSX as the platform for the software-defined network. It's just another great example. The original growth in the hypervisor and then into software-defined storage, software-defined networking and you can, if you look further on the show floor, right, you'll see kind of software-defined everything. And all aspects of the network, layers four through seven, eventually being virtualized. From the cutting edge -- >> John: So, virtualized stack. >> New things all the way to the mainstream and of course there's a lot of growth in our industry around converged and hyper-converged because it's making it easy to deploy these solutions in a rapid fashion and we're right in the middle of all this. >> So Michael, you speak pretty passionately about VMware and their role in the ecosystem. There's still a lot of noise out there that people I don't think understand how you're going to finance the debt and there's many people, like still during the keynote this morning, they're like, as soon as the deal's done, VMware is going to be sold off. Really, hardware companies don't want to do software. >> Absolutely incorrect. That's totally wrong. Anybody that says that has no clue what they're talking about. So look, I think first thing is you've got do do some math. If you look at the combined cash flows of Dell and EMC and VMware, what you find is they're many, many times greater than the debt service. And so we have, in fact, an advantage capital structure that allows us to not only do what we're doing and have tremendous scale and investment in innovation, roughly $4.5 billion annually invested in R & D, the largest enterprise systems company in the world, the strongest supply chain, and also have the speed and flexibility with some of these new startup instances. You guys are familiar with what we're doing with Pivotal and Cloud Foundry and all the great things that are going on there. With SecureWorks, with Boomi, so we've got both the speed and agility of a startup plus the scale and breadth with the broadest ecosystem and access to customers, and while we're here at VMworld, we're not just about VMware, right? Dell Technologies is a company that embraces all of the major ecosystems, be it the Microsoft ecosystem, the Linux and OpenStack and container ecosystems. So the hardware platforms that we're creating allow customers the broadest set of solutions to be able to stand up against their requirements. >> So back at Dell World, Michael, you talked about, you had Satya Nadella up on stage, how Microsoft fits and understanding, you know, in many ways Dell Technologies is an arms supplier to a lot of environments. You've got the enterprise data center. You've got the public cloud. Where do you see VMware in this evolving multi-cloud very varied ecosystem? >> I think if you look at VMware's business in the first half of this year, it's done quite well. And when I look at the trends for the forward outlook and kind of growth characteristics, VMware is making a very nice transition into this emerging cloud world. And it's doing that by taking the whole virtualization and software-defined technologies beyond the hypervisor into the whole software-defined data center. And things like the VMware Cloud Foundations make it a lot easier to do that, whether you're doing it on premise in a private cloud or whether you're a service provider, a telco, an IBM, for example. And I think you'll see others as well. And customers that have embranced VMware and of course there are 500,000 plus around the world, are looking for ways to be able to extend out to the public cloud. And the kinds of announcements you saw today with IBM, with the VMware Cross-Cloud initiative, will allow for this to extend deep into the public clouds. >> We're getting some questions from Twitter. I'll read a few of them here. Two questions. Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like? And two, what of the technologies in the portfolio are you most excited about. And I asked VMware or Dell Technologies and they asked, both. So two questions. Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like? And what technology are you most excited about? >> I have met a number of the distinguished folks over in China for sure, whether it be in one on one meetings or in group meetings and I'm over there on a pretty regular basis. China is the second largest market in the world for Dell to sell its products. So it's also the second largest economy in the world so that shouldn't be too surprising. But we have roughly $5.5 billion business in China, a big part of our supply chain. On the second question, you know, it's kind of like saying >> John: Your favorite child. >> Which of your children do you love the most, right? So that's not, you can get in a lot of trouble with that. But when I look across the whole -- >> We need to categorize here. I'll just rephrase the question because I think that's, I mean that's a political response, I get that. But let's go into, where do you see the disruption coming from? If you had to point out a disruptive enabler that is a lever for the portfolio, where would you look at and say okay, that's going to be a real enabling technology that's going to one, propel Dell on a domestic and global basis, and two, power the ecosystem? >> I think this digital transformation is real. And I think that we are at the very beginning of this period of time where the cost to make things intelligent is approaching zero and the number of them is going to explode. And so the influence and impact that our industry has on the world will expand geometrically as a result. And so the challenge that every organization is going to have, is how do you take all this information in real time and also in time series, because I think there will be some value to the historical data, and turn it into better insights, to be able to make better decisions, to make better products and services. And we're just at the very beginning of that. So, to me, that is the most exciting thing going on and obviously, we're right in the middle of that from lots of different perspectives. >> I've got to ask you a personal question. And I want to get your thoughts on this as someone who's been in the industry and is a chess master, 3D chess player, also running a big business, global business, billions of dollars. In 1994, Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead and he talked about the future and he completely missed the internet in his forward-looking book. And I bring that up because now we're living in a time where IOT and autonomous vehicles, looking at digital state, digital transformation is a big part of that, so I ask the question, do you worry about missing something? I don't mean FOMO, fear of missing out, but there are big moves being made like technology in autonomous vehicles, drones, all this AI going on, machine learning, do you look at that and go hmmm. Is that on your mind, like maybe you might miss something and how do you handle that? >> It's a good point. If you look at all the smartest people in the industry, whatever that means, and you say what's their ability to predict what happens in five years, 10 years, 15 years, it's actually not been very good, right? And so that has been humbling, if somebody included me in that category of people that could try to do that. But we've got a lot of smart folks. I think we have, at the core of our company, this concept of having big ears, which means we want to listen and we want to learn. And our job is to take all these things that we're learning from our customers and all of our understanding of the core molecular elements of technology, and make the magic happen in the middle that go solves the problems that customers have. >> Do you see IOT and cars and this kind of consumer experience very real for Dell Technologies to play in? >> I think there's no question that the elemental cost of computing is declining and whenever you see that happening, you see, it's like a gas, right? It expands to fit the space available. And I think you'll absolutely see this explosion, proliferation, you're already seeing it. We have hundreds of IOT projects going already within our company and we know of many, many others, so it's real. >> It's in the early phase of the hype cycle. Michael, we've got to wrap but I want to ask one final question and then kind of wrap it up. Everyone wants to know, what's the future of VMware in your words, talk to the customers that are watching and the people in the ecosystem and employees and partners. What is the future of VMware in the Dell Technologies vision? >> I think VMware has got a very bright future. I've seen this in the past where people said, Oh, you know, the PC is dead so forget about Dell. Everything's going to the cloud, so forget about all these other companies. I don't think that's quite the way it all works. So what I see in VMware is an incredibly vibrant ecosystem that's getting stronger. I see VMware remaining independent and we're obviously the majority shareholder and helping to ensure the ecosystem stays very, very strong. And I see very exciting new things, like NSX. Extending the reach of virtualization technology well beyond the core original business of VMware which was a great business and continues to actually be a great business. >> Michael, thanks for spending the time, with your busy schedule, to join us on theCUBE. I appreciate it. Great to see you. Michael Dell here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE from SiliconANGLE Media. We'll be right back with more. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.