>> Hello. My name is Ron Kafka, and I'm the senior director for Partner Scale Initiatives for HBE Ezmeral. Thanks for joining us today at Analytics Unleashed. By now, you've heard a lot about the Ezmeral portfolio and how it can help you accomplish objectives around big data analytics and containerization. I want to shift gears a bit and then discuss our Ezmeral Technology Partner Program. I've got two great guest speakers here with me today. And together, We're going to discuss how jointly we are solving data analytic challenges for our customers. Before I introduce them, I want to take a minute to talk to provide a little bit more insight into our ecosystem program. We've created a program with a realization based on customer feedback that even the most mature organizations are struggling with their data-driven transformation efforts. It turns out this is largely due to the pace of innovation with application vendors or ICS supporting data science and advanced analytic workloads. Their advancements are simply outpacing organization's ability to move workloads into production rapidly. Bottom line, organizations want a unified experience across environments where their entire application portfolio in essence provide a comprehensive application stack and not piece parts. So, let's talk about how our ecosystem program helps solve for this. For starters, we were leveraging HPEs long track record of forging technology partnerships and it created a best in class ISB partner program specific for the Ezmeral portfolio. We were doing this by developing an open concept marketplace where customers and partners can explore, learn, engage and collaborate with our strategic technology partners. This enables our customers to adopt, deploy validated applications from industry leading software vendors on HPE Ezmeral with a high degree of confidence. Also, it provides a very deep bench of leading ISVs for other groups inside of HPE to leverage for their solutioning efforts. Speaking of industry leading ISV, it's about time and introduce you to two of those industry leaders right now. Let me welcome Daniel Hladky from Dataiku, and Omri Geller from Run:AI. So I'd like to introduce Daniel Hladky. Daniel is with Dataiku. He's a great partner for HPE. Daniel, welcome. >> Thank you for having me here. >> That's great. Hey, would you mind just talking a bit about how your partnership journey has been with HPE? >> Yes, pleasure. So the journey started about five years ago and in 2018 we signed a worldwide reseller agreement with HPE. And in 2020, we actually started to work jointly on the integration between the Dataiku Data Science Studio called DSS and integrated that with the Ezmeral Container platform, and was a great success. And it was on behalf of some clear customer projects. >> It's been a long partnership journey with you for sure with HPE. And we welcome your partnership extremely well. Just a brief question about the Container Platform and really what that's meant for Dataiku. >> Yes, Ron. Thanks. So, basically I'd like the quote here Florian Douetteau, which is the CEO of Dataiku, who said that the combination of Dataiku with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform will help the customers to successfully scale and put machine learning projects into production. And this basically is going to deliver real impact for their business. So, the combination of the two of us is a great success. >> That's great. Can you talk about what Dataiku is doing and how HPE Ezmeral Container Platform fits in a solution offering a bit more? >> Great. So basically Dataiku DSS is our product which is a end to end data science platform, and basically brings value to the project of customers on their past enterprise AI. In simple ways, we can say it could be as simple as building data pipelines, but it could be also very complex by having machine and deep learning models at scale. So the fast track to value is by having collaboration, orchestration online technologies and the models in production. So, all of that is part of the Data Science Studio and Ezmeral fits perfectly into the part where we design and then basically put at scale those project and put it into product. >> That's perfect. Can you be a bit more specific about how you see HPE and Dataiku really tightening up a customer outcome and value proposition? >> Yes. So what we see is also the challenge of the market that probably about 80% of the use cases really never make it to production. And this is of course a big challenge and we need to change that. And I think the combination of the two of us is actually addressing exactly this need. What we can say is part of the MLOps approach, Dataiku and the Ezmeral Container Platform will provide a frictionless approach, which means without scripting and coding, customers can put all those projects into the productive environment and don't have to worry any more and be more business oriented. >> That's great. So you mentioned you're seeing customers be a lot more mature with their AI workloads and deployment. What do you suggest for the other customers out there that are just starting this journey or just thinking about how to get started? >> Yeah. That's a very good question, Ron. So what we see there is actually the challenge that people need to go on a pass of maturity. And this starts with a simple data pipelines, et cetera, and then basically move up the ladder and basically build large complex project. And here I see a very interesting offer coming now from HPE which is called D3S, which is the data science startup pack. That's something I discussed together with HPE back in early 2020. And basically, it solves the three stages, which is explore, experiment and evolve and builds quickly MVPs for the customers. By doing so, basically you addressed business objectives, lay out in the proper architecture and also setting up the proper organization around it. So, this is a great combination by HPE and Dataiku through the D3S. >> And it's a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier about leveraging the ecosystem program that we built to do deeper solutioning efforts inside of HPE in this case with our AI business unit. So, congratulations on that and thanks for joining us today. I'm going to shift gears. I'm going to bring in Omri Geller from Run:AI. Omri, welcome. It's great to have you. You guys are killing it out there in the market today. And I just thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what is so unique and differentiated from your offerings. >> Thank you, Ron. It's a pleasure to be here. Run:AI creates a virtualization and orchestration layer for AI infrastructure. We help organizations to gain visibility and control over their GPO resources and help them deliver AI solutions to market faster. And we do that by managing granular scheduling, prioritization, allocation of compute power, together with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform. >> That's great. And your partnership with HPE is a bit newer than Daniel's, right? Maybe about the last year or so we've been working together a lot more closely. Can you just talk about the HPE partnership, what it's meant for you and how do you see it impacting your business? >> Sure. First of all, Run:AI is excited to partner with HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and help customers manage appeals for their AI workloads. We chose HPE since HPE has years of experience partnering with AI use cases and outcomes with vendors who have strong footprint in this markets. HPE works with many partners that are complimentary for our use case such as Nvidia, and HPE Container Platform together with Run:AI and Nvidia deliver a world class solutions for AI accelerated workloads. And as you can understand, for AI speed is critical. Companies want to gather important AI initiatives into production as soon as they can. And the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, running IGP orchestration solution enables that by enabling dynamic provisioning of GPU so that resources can be easily shared, efficiently orchestrated and optimal used. >> That's great. And you talked a lot about the efficiency of the solution. What about from a customer perspective? What is the real benefit that our customers are going to be able to gain from an HPE and Run:AI offering? >> So first, it is important to understand how data scientists and AI researchers actually build solution. They do it by running experiments. And if a data scientist is able to run more experiments per given time, they will get to the solution faster. With HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, Run:AI and users such as data scientists can actually do that and seamlessly and efficiently consume large amounts of GPU resources, run more experiments or given time and therefore accelerate their research. Together, we actually saw a customer that is running almost 7,000 jobs in parallel over GPUs with efficient utilization of those GPUs. And by running more experiments, those customers can be much more effective and efficient when it comes to bringing solutions to market >> Couldn't agree more. And I think we're starting to see a lot of joint success together as we go out and talk to the story. Hey, I want to thank you both one last time for being here with me today. It was very enlightening for our team to have you as part of the program. And I'm excited to extend this customer value proposition out to the rest of our communities. With that, I'd like to close today's session. I appreciate everyone's time. And keep an eye out on our ISP marketplace for Ezmeral We're continuing to expand and add new capabilities and new partners to our marketplace. We're excited to do a lot of great things and help you guys all be successful. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, Ron. >> What a great panel discussion. And these partners they really do have a good understanding of the possibilities, working on the platform, and I hope and expect we'll see this ecosystem continue to grow. That concludes the main program, which means you can now pick one of three live demos to attend and chat live with experts. Now those three include day in the life of IT Admin, day in the life of a data scientist, and even a day in the life of the HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric, where you can see the many ways the data fabric is used in your life today. Wish you could attend all three, no worries. The recordings will be available on demand for you and your teams. Moreover, the show doesn't stop here, HPE has a growing and thriving tech community, you should check it out. It's really a solid starting point for learning more, talking to smart people about great ideas and seeing how Ezmeral can be part of your own data journey. Again, thanks very much to all of you for joining, until next time, keep unleashing the power of your data.

>> Hello. My name is Ron Kafka, and I'm the senior director for Partner Scale Initiatives for HBE Ezmeral. Thanks for joining us today at Analytics Unleashed. By now, you've heard a lot about the Ezmeral portfolio and how it can help you accomplish objectives around big data analytics and containerization. I want to shift gears a bit and then discuss our Ezmeral Technology Partner Program. I've got two great guest speakers here with me today. And together, We're going to discuss how jointly we are solving data analytic challenges for our customers. Before I introduce them, I want to take a minute to talk to provide a little bit more insight into our ecosystem program. We've created a program with a realization based on customer feedback that even the most mature organizations are struggling with their data-driven transformation efforts. It turns out this is largely due to the pace of innovation with application vendors or ICS supporting data science and advanced analytic workloads. Their advancements are simply outpacing organization's ability to move workloads into production rapidly. Bottom line, organizations want a unified experience across environments where their entire application portfolio in essence provide a comprehensive application stack and not piece parts. So, let's talk about how our ecosystem program helps solve for this. For starters, we were leveraging HPEs long track record of forging technology partnerships and it created a best in class ISB partner program specific for the Ezmeral portfolio. We were doing this by developing an open concept marketplace where customers and partners can explore, learn, engage and collaborate with our strategic technology partners. This enables our customers to adopt, deploy validated applications from industry leading software vendors on HPE Ezmeral with a high degree of confidence. Also, it provides a very deep bench of leading ISVs for other groups inside of HPE to leverage for their solutioning efforts. Speaking of industry leading ISV, it's about time and introduce you to two of those industry leaders right now. Let me welcome Daniel Hladky from Dataiku, and Omri Geller from Run:AI. So I'd like to introduce Daniel Hladky. Daniel is with Dataiku. He's a great partner for HPE. Daniel, welcome. >> Thank you for having me here. >> That's great. Hey, would you mind just talking a bit about how your partnership journey has been with HPE? >> Yes, pleasure. So the journey started about five years ago and in 2018 we signed a worldwide reseller agreement with HPE. And in 2020, we actually started to work jointly on the integration between the Dataiku Data Science Studio called DSS and integrated that with the Ezmeral Container platform, and was a great success. And it was on behalf of some clear customer projects. >> It's been a long partnership journey with you for sure with HPE. And we welcome your partnership extremely well. Just a brief question about the Container Platform and really what that's meant for Dataiku. >> Yes, Ron. Thanks. So, basically I like the quote here Florian Douetteau, which is the CEO of Dataiku, who said that the combination of Dataiku with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform will help the customers to successfully scale and put machine learning projects into production. And this basically is going to deliver real impact for their business. So, the combination of the two of us is a great success. >> That's great. Can you talk about what Dataiku is doing and how HPE Ezmeral Container Platform fits in a solution offering a bit more? >> Great. So basically Dataiku DSS is our product which is a end to end data science platform, and basically brings value to the project of customers on their past enterprise AI. In simple ways, we can say it could be as simple as building data pipelines, but it could be also very complex by having machine and deep learning models at scale. So the fast track to value is by having collaboration, orchestration online technologies and the models in production. So, all of that is part of the Data Science Studio and Ezmeral fits perfectly into the part where we design and then basically put at scale those project and put it into product. >> That's perfect. Can you be a bit more specific about how you see HPE and Dataiku really tightening up a customer outcome and value proposition? >> Yes. So what we see is also the challenge of the market that probably about 80% of the use cases really never make it to production. And this is of course a big challenge and we need to change that. And I think the combination of the two of us is actually addressing exactly this need. What we can say is part of the MLOps approach, Dataiku and the Ezmeral Container Platform will provide a frictionless approach, which means without scripting and coding, customers can put all those projects into the productive environment and don't have to worry any more and be more business oriented. >> That's great. So you mentioned you're seeing customers be a lot more mature with their AI workloads and deployment. What do you suggest for the other customers out there that are just starting this journey or just thinking about how to get started? >> Yeah. That's a very good question, Ron. So what we see there is actually the challenge that people need to go on a pass of maturity. And this starts with a simple data pipelines, et cetera, and then basically move up the ladder and basically build large complex project. And here I see a very interesting offer coming now from HPE which is called D3S, which is the data science startup pack. That's something I discussed together with HPE back in early 2020. And basically, it solves the three stages, which is explore, experiment and evolve and builds quickly MVPs for the customers. By doing so, basically you addressed business objectives, lay out in the proper architecture and also setting up the proper organization around it. So, this is a great combination by HPE and Dataiku through the D3S. >> And it's a perfect example of what I mentioned earlier about leveraging the ecosystem program that we built to do deeper solutioning efforts inside of HPE in this case with our AI business unit. So, congratulations on that and thanks for joining us today. I'm going to shift gears. I'm going to bring in Omri Geller from Run:AI. Omri, welcome. It's great to have you. You guys are killing it out there in the market today. And I just thought we could spend a few minutes talking about what is so unique and differentiated from your offerings. >> Thank you, Ron. It's a pleasure to be here. Run:AI creates a virtualization and orchestration layer for AI infrastructure. We help organizations to gain visibility and control over their GPO resources and help them deliver AI solutions to market faster. And we do that by managing granular scheduling, prioritization, allocation of compute power, together with the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform. >> That's great. And your partnership with HPE is a bit newer than Daniel's, right? Maybe about the last year or so we've been working together a lot more closely. Can you just talk about the HPE partnership, what it's meant for you and how do you see it impacting your business? >> Sure. First of all, Run:AI is excited to partner with HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and help customers manage appeals for their AI workloads. We chose HPE since HPE has years of experience partnering with AI use cases and outcomes with vendors who have strong footprint in this markets. HPE works with many partners that are complimentary for our use case such as Nvidia, and HPE Ezmeral Container Platform together with Run:AI and Nvidia deliver a word about solution for AI accelerated workloads. And as you can understand, for AI speed is critical. Companies want to gather important AI initiatives into production as soon as they can. And the HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, running IGP orchestration solution enables that by enabling dynamic provisioning of GPU so that resources can be easily shared, efficiently orchestrated and optimal used. >> That's great. And you talked a lot about the efficiency of the solution. What about from a customer perspective? What is the real benefit that our customers are going to be able to gain from an HPE and Run:AI offering? >> So first, it is important to understand how data scientists and AI researchers actually build solution. They do it by running experiments. And if a data scientist is able to run more experiments per given time, they will get to the solution faster. With HPE Ezmeral Container Platform, Run:AI and users such as data scientists can actually do that and seamlessly and efficiently consume large amounts of GPU resources, run more experiments or given time and therefore accelerate their research. Together, we actually saw a customer that is running almost 7,000 jobs in parallel over GPUs with efficient utilization of those GPUs. And by running more experiments, those customers can be much more effective and efficient when it comes to bringing solutions to market >> Couldn't agree more. And I think we're starting to see a lot of joint success together as we go out and talk to the story. Hey, I want to thank you both one last time for being here with me today. It was very enlightening for our team to have you as part of the program. And I'm excited to extend this customer value proposition out to the rest of our communities. With that, I'd like to close today's session. I appreciate everyone's time. And keep an eye out on our ISP marketplace for Ezmeral We're continuing to expand and add new capabilities and new partners to our marketplace. We're excited to do a lot of great things and help you guys all be successful. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you, Ron. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of HPE's Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to be joined by Harshul Asnani, the Global Head of the Technology Business at HPE partner, Tech Mahindra. Harshul, great to have you on the program. >> Glad to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So, tell me about Tech Mahindra. I see on the website abbreviated as Tech M, give our audience an overview of Tech Mahindra, what you guys do. >> Sure. So Tech Mahindra is digital transformation consulting and technology services company operating at the intersection of IT engineering networks and BPO services. We have about 125,000 people operating in our 90 countries with about 5.2 billion in revenue, and have about 1,000 customers across key strategic verticles our largest being communications, media, and entertainment. And then we have other strong word because like technology, manufacturing, HLS, BFSI, the retail, and energy, and utilities. So that's broadly what we do, being in existence for well over 30 years now. >> And tell me about your role as the Head of the Global Technology Business. What have you seen transpire and evolve over the last few years, and especially the last three months with COVID? >> Sure. No, absolutely. I think, you see, we have organized a company around six strategic business units. They are these customer facing business units and I lead the one that focuses on technology and the high tech industry, if you will. I'm based in the Bay Area. And in this business unit, a large part of our business is, in some sense, 360 degree relationship with our customers, where not only do we sell into our customers, we also sell with and sell through our customers and also buy from them. So in that sense, it's a little different model in which we operate as compared to, say, other verticals that we have like manufacturing or BFSI or healthcare, but the relationship is largely customer and a supplier relationship. We have a full blown 360 degree relationship. It's very unique from that standpoint. And things have, you know, in some sense, dramatically shifted in the last three years, rather three months where we are seeing that, you know, amount of digital transformation, which was to happen over the next two years, has kind of happened in the last two months. So this is kind of pivoting a lot of enterprises, and including the tech sector, into an era where we are saying, how do we reposition ourselves to bring in more COVID-related solutions, both from a commercial standpoint, as well as a humanitarian standpoint, to deal with this crisis. So that it does in terms of changes that are happening out there in the industry, as well as in Tech Mahindra, as we can't forget ready fore-global and post -lobal. >> If you look at some of the specific trends that you're seeing during the COVID crisis, in the high tech segment, what are they? >> So, a couple of things have, we've looked at very differently. Supply chain for example, which is very crucial to high tech, is undergoing, in some sense, a metamorphoses shift. It's undergoing a seismic shift in the way supply chains are kind of reconfiguring themselves. You're also seeing customer experience kind of dramatically changing. Another thing that is coming in very, very strongly from a change perspective, it's kind of a storm that is brewing out there is, is how do we enable people to work remotely? We at Tech Mahindra, ourselves, had to enable 80,000 people in India who work remotely in a matter of weeks. And it's by no means an easy task to do which in a country where working from home is not really a culture. And also where we work, out of secure customer premises, even in India, our secure offshore locations in India, and all those people have now moved to their homes, and work out with their living rooms and bedrooms. And that was a sizable shift in the way we had to deal with our engagements, and with our customers. And so far so good, knock on wood, We have not had any issues. >> So Harshul, pivoting so quickly, as Tech M did to get your 80,000 employees in India to be able to work from home connectivity, all the challenges associated with that, goes hand in hand with your business, being able to deliver an exceptional customer experience, customer experience being an issue that you say is a rising trend amongst your customers. Customer experience and work from home these days go hand in hand, right? >> Absolutely. No, I think we also surprised ourselves with the pace at which we could move these 80,000 people to work from home in a matter of days, as I was saying, and as without missing customers. Our task was unimaginable in the pre-COVID era. And we will also surprised ourselves at the pace at which we could turn around COVID-related solutions so quickly with the help of partners like HPE that are today helping us pivot ourselves from one kind of old age solutions to the new age solutions, to the new normal today. And yeah, of course, and at the same time, we are to ensure that we enable the customer experience, and doing this on that while we repurpose our people to work from home. It was a challenge, and frankly, we surprised ourselves the way we did. >> So Harshul, talk to me about what, in these COVID crisis times, HPE and Tech Mahindra are doing together to help your customers accelerate, maybe adoption of new technologies that they need to for their businesses to thrive. >> Yeah, sure. No, that's a great question, Lisa. Let me start by saying that HPE is a very strategic partnership for us, and we see it as a coming together of two market leaders to deliver a very differentiated playbook of solutions for our customers. There is a robust set of products and solutions and edge offerings, edge gateways, converged edge systems, and clear analytics, combined with HPE's great GreenLake offers, which is around flexible consumption-based services, which helps align our customers' IT spend to deliver pretty much everything as a service. We kind of have already robust partner in HPE. And when you combine this with a Tech Mahindra's industry domain and technology depth, and the systems integration wherewithal that we bring in, it makes form, I believe, a very potent combination to drive, serious value to our customers, right? And given the COVID situation, we have kind of defined our relationship along three broad vectors based on the mutual synergies and where we believe we can quickly drive value. Firstly, what the solution white spaces that we want to address together? Secondly, what are the geographies that you want to operate in and third is, what are the industry verticals that we believe we can quickly focus on? So from a solutioning standpoint, there are four broad trust areas that we want to sharply focus on. Firstly IoT. It's been a strong partnership with HP with IoT. And we would like to continue that followed. With HBE's edge offerings, and converged edge systems, we have kind of demonstrated the possibilities of IoT solutions across smart cities, factories of the future, of energy and utilities and of Costa Rico. And we have some good success stories we already have with HPE that would like to build on, we have won some for significant smart city projects in India, in four different cities of India. And we also, by the way, won the Systems Integrator Award for Edge and IoT from HPE last year, and also the SI Partner of the Year for HPE last year. So we would like to continue to build on that. We all see already have a COE on IoT set up in Bangalore. It's a very unique COE that we're built up where we have showcasing solutions around a smart city or IoT, and also brought in Aruba gear as well, but solutions that are smart campuses, so on and so forth. So, that's number one. Number two is data center transformation. As hybrid cloud kind of takes root through our customers are now looking at transforming their data centers as well. And particularly with HPE's GreenLake, it becomes a very strategic commercial tool for us to bring on demand paper, use models, elasticity, kind of the, as I was talking about, the flexible consumption services model, which is so unique today, as we help customers reduce their capex and get them to pay by the drink, if you will. Now that becomes very, very relevant in the COVID times. And last but not the least, our focus is also on network of the future. When I say that our partnership with HPE is really pivoted around 5G, as DNFE and private LTE solutions. For example, you know, HPE's private LTE network, which is essentially powered by HPE's EL300 and EL4000 converged edge systems. It's kind augmented by our industrial IoT expertise. And it includes a reintegrated, off the shelf, industrial IoT application from Tech Manhira. It's a kind of an end to end solution that uses the breakthrough innovation such as small sales EPC, and smart multi-access edge compute. So, we are staying sharply focused on these areas. And we started seeing the results, and given the goals in this scenario, we have evolved a bunch of use cases very quickly in multiple industry areas. And bought from a commercial library standpoint, and also importantly, on a humanitarian level, what we can do together. For example, in Italy, as the pandemic was raging. As many of you will know, a ship force can order into a hospital, probably 1,000 bed hospital, and HPE stepped in, and they brought in the Aruba gear to put up network together, the infrastructure and the connectivity to bring together, and take Manhira, which has a rapid response healthcare solution who help with remote patient diagnostics and monitoring. Kind of brought in that solution along with HPE, to bear in Italy as the pandemic was raging. So that's just an example of how we are partnering at multiple levels. You know, created a solution around workspace as a service, as an remote working becomes a new normal. >> Right. >> With HPE on that. So a bunch of other solutions as well, Lisa. >> Sounds like you guys have done a great job of, as you mentioned in the beginning of our time here, rapidly pivoting within Tech Mahindra, as you said, it actually kind of surprised ourselves to what you were doing with HPE to deploy rapidly in Italy, to I can only imagine helping customers accelerate projects like smart cities and smart factories where suddenly we need sensors on more things. Harshul, I thank you so much for spending time with us on theCUBE today. Exciting topics. We can't wait to see where this goes. >> Well, thank you so much, Lisa, for your time. It was great talking to you. >> Excellent. My pleasure. For Harshul, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering HPE's Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of HPE discover Virtual Experience. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, we're here in the Palo Alto Studio for the remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HPE, Alice Taylor, Vice President of Content Innovation with studioLAB at Disney. And Soumyendu Sarkar, distinguished technologist director of AI at HPE. Thanks for coming on Alice. Samandiyu thank you for taking the time. >> No worries. Great to be here. Hi. >> Hi >> I love this story. I think it's an innovation story and I think it's going to be one that we'll experience in our life going forward, and that is media, video, and its experiences and these innovation about AI, It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney studioLAB, Alice, that you're running, and it's super, super important and fun as well and very relevant and Cool. So first before we get started, Alice, take a minute to explain a little about yourself and how StudioLAB came about. >> Oh my goodness. StudioLAB is just in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say three years ago, And at the time, just previously before that, I had a startup company that came through the Disney accelerator. So I was already inside the building and the team there said well, the CTO there, and the boss said, you know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology. And that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said, yes. And then since then we've been growing a team. We opened the lab in may of 2018 and here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, but it has grown like crazy. It's just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >> And it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get at some of that. Talk about your experience as an entrepreneur, how you got into this position, because you came in as an entrepreneur, you're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >> Yeah. Okay. Well, so as you can tell, I'm British. My actual background started, my whole career started in technology in the mid 90s. As I started as a trainee video editor, but then switched very quickly in 95 to building websites and from there on, and it was internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling and I, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So I was five years at the BBC in their R and D department. And I'm actually out here as VP of digital media for them, and then Channel 4 as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yeah, slight side story and doing a startup, which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for children. And then I came round Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to make films and episodic content, even more, you name it faster, better, more exciting, using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it. >> The lab that you're doing, it's an accelerant almost for new technologies. Your job is to what? look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out? >> Yeah >> what's next. It's not a structured thing. You have some reign to be creative and experiment? >> Well, yeah, I mean, the studioLAB, at the studios, well, Disney has eight studios at the moment, And what we do is we look at actually the whole breadth of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world, and we segregate that whole breadth into three categories; Ideate, when, you know, the process of generating the idea and building it, Make, how we make it, where we make it, what we make it with and then Experience. How we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole slew of projects, the studio level works with some of the best technology companies in the world. And we call those our innovation partners and we sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call Superpowers to the system. We like to think that the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney, you know, in this case, for instance, working with HPE, like producing something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HBE couldn't necessarily do on his own either. So yeah, it's a huge remit and we don't look quite so far out, generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigate it then and get a bit of a headstart. >> Well, it's great to have HPE as partner and having that bench of technology, software, and people, and it's just a nice power source for you as well. >> Exactly So Soumyendu talk about HPE relationship with Disney, because you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role, you guys sitting around you riffing and put a whiteboard together and say, Hey, we're going to solve these big problems? ... Here's the future of consumption, here's the future of video... What goes on? Tell us the relationship between you guys. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At HPE We can not only make the servers, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the Artificial Intelligence solutions and algorithms on the GPUs and scale it across Servers. So this opportunity came up from Disney where Disney came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As you know, there are a lot of blemishes in the Video that can come up and Disney wanted to fix all of them. And they came up with great algorithm, but what happens is, like with great algorithm comes a huge amount of computational complexity which needs quite a bit of heterogeneous input in both in Parallel Processing and in Sequential Processing. So we thought that it's a perfect, I'd say combination of two skillsets to make this video quality software execute at speeds which are needed for production in Disney. >> So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to, you guys have some great technology. We'll hear a lot more from the Execs at HPE. On our reporting Alice, we want to to get your thoughts. We're covering some of those new edge technologies, we're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago called the new creative class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cellphone, you know, really easy to set up a studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how the studioLAB collaborates with filmmakers and the Execs to push the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh, Because the sign of the times, are Instagram and Tik Tok, this is just very elementary, the quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine driven, but you can almost imagine that the range of quality that's going to come, so access to more people, certainly more equipment and cameras, et cetera. What's next? How do you guys see And what some examples can you share? >> Oh, that's an amazing question. I mean, where working on Films and Episodics rather than very short form content , Obviously. But you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads, using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability to generate photometrical models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then getting that data into a 3-D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme of what we want to do. It's like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions, aren't having to slog through something that's and tedious. They want to get to the storytelling and the art and the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for the QC process to finish is what we want to kind of get rid of. So they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster. And just going back to what Soumyendu was saying about the AI project here, I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on the screen when we do all finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans are the best, or historically have been the best at finding dead pixels, but what a job to have to do at the end of the process. To go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print, right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks for those automatically. And then HPE came in and sped that whole process up by 9X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prints. >> You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10, 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe and then become mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster, take away that heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand, whether its creative or writing software. This is kind of a a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still, like software, it's kind of the same thing almost. >> Yeah >> So you know, when you see these new technologies, I'd love to get both of your reactions to this. One of the big misses, that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. >> Yes >> And we're kind of seeing that now with Covid and everyone's like no way I could've seen this. No, no one predicted it. So what's an example of something that people might be misunderstanding. That's super relevant, that might become super important very quickly. Any thoughts? >> Gosh, that's a great one. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then come and potentially gone, except it hasn't. You'll see. It's VR. So it came whenever it was, 20 years ago and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world. And then it reappeared again, six years ago. And again, everybody said it was going to change the world. And in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed. I think, because out in the market, everyone is expecting VR to have been a huge consumer success. And I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, We are using VR on a daily basis in film production, Virtual production is one of the biggest emerging processes that is happening. If you've seen anything to do with Jungle Book, Lion King , the Mandalorian, anything that industrial light and magic work on, you're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on the screen. And it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm going to have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. AI and ML is a huge area. Obviously, we're scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to to say that it's going to come and go this one. This is huge, but we're already just beginning to see where and how we can apply AI and ML. >> Yeah. >> So Soumyendu, did you want to jump in on that one? >> Yeah, Let me take it from the technology standpoint. I think Alice sort of puts out some very cool trends. Now what happens in tHE AI and ML spaces, people can come up with creative ideas, but one of the biggest challenges is how do you take those ideas for commercial usage and make it work at a speed, as Alice was mentioning, makes it feasible in production. So accelerating AI/ML and making it in a form, which is usable is super important. And the other aspect of it is, just see, for instance, video quality, that Alice was mentioning. Dead pixel is one type, And I know that Disney is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes, but there is a whole variety of these blemishes and with human operators, Its kind of impossible to scale up the production and to find all these different artifacts, and especially now, as you can see, the video is disseminated in your phones, in your iPads. Like, you know, in just streaming. So this is a problem of scale and to solve this is also like, you know, a lot of computers, and I'd say a lot of collaboration with complementary skillsets that make AI real. >> I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employee. He's now retired, good friend. And we were talking about, you know, all the dev apps, agile, go fast, scale up. And he made a comment. I want to get your reaction to it. He said, "you know, what we're missing is craft." And software used to be a craft game. So when you have speed, you lose craft. And we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterate, and then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies, where, you can kind of build crafting into it. >> Yap Alice, what's your reaction to that? >> One of our favorite anecdotes from the lion King is, so Jon Favreau the director, built out the virtual production system with his team to make the film. And it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shorten the time to make the film, what the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time. So effectively Jon had more tapes and more material to make his final film with. And that's what we want people to have. We want them to not ever to have to say, Oh, I missed my perfect shot because of, I don't know what, you know, we ran out of time, so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it, that's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material as possible in the most efficient way, basically at the end of the day for our our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >> So Soumyendu, this is an example of the pixel innovation, the video QC, it's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it, you can automate that. That's back to some of the tech trends. A lot of automation action in there. >> Yeah, absolutely. And as Alice was mentioning, if you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization then you have solved the problem. That way, the people who are creative can think and implement something in a very short time. And that's fair, like, you know, some of these scientists come in >> Well, I also very impressed and I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work, >> Alright. >> You guys are in the part of Burbank and all the action. I know you're a little sort of incubate. It's really kind of R and D meet commercially. Commercial is really cool. But I have to ask you what the COVID-19 going on, how are you guys handling the situation? Certainly impacted people coming to work. >> Yeah >> How has your team in been impacted and how are you guys continuing the mission? >> Well, the lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building. But there's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all the team carried on the next day from home. And in fact, we have expanded even, because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work remotely, you name it, folks with bad home connections, wondering if we had some 5G phones hanging around, that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co-location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on then. Not least, coz it was just a round, this kind of, what this has done is accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly, in the beginning of remote teleworking and remote telepresence, and then also ideas coming out of that. So you know, again, the other day I heard Holograms coming up, like, can we have holograms yet? >> Yeah, we can do that, we've done that, Lets do it. Bring that back. >> And so it's that kind of thing. Exactly, that's going to come around again. Yeah. But you know what? The team have all been amazing. But we'll miss each other, you know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology. >> Well, You know, we were talking earlier on theCUBE last week about, the future got pulled to the present, not the present accelerated the future. Which exposes some of these things that are really important and you mentioned it. So I have to ask you Alice, as you guys got more work, obviously it makes sense. What have you learnt as adapting and leading your team through this change? Any learnings you can share with folks? >> Well, yes, that's a good one. But mainly resilience. It's been a nonstop and quite relentless and the news out there is extraordinary. So we're also trying to balance a very full pipeline of work with understanding that people are struggling to balance their lives as well at home, You know, kids, pets, BLM, like you name it, everything is affecting everybody. So resilience and empathy is really top of my mind at the moment as we try to continue to succeed, but making sure that everybody stays healthy and sane. >> Yeah. And in great news, you got a partner here with HPE, the innovation doesn't stop there. You still have to partner. How do you keep up with these technologies and the importance of partners, comments, and Soumyendu your comment as well. >> Yeah. So HPE has been a great leader in accommodating all HPE employees to work from remote and in the process, what we also discovered is, we humans are innovative. So we discover the innovative ways where we can still work together. So we increased the volume of our virtual collaborations, and I have worked with Erica from Disney, who is a tremendous facilitator and a technologist of mine, to have this close collaboration going, and we almost missed nothing. But yes, we would like to, you know the feel each other to be in close proximity, look at each other's eyes. Probably that's the only missing thing, a crest of it, You know, we created an environment where we can collaborate and work pretty well. And to Alice's point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote considering the community of Silicon Valley. >> You know, I'd love. The final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technologies that you're excited about. But some Soumyendu, you know, we were talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around, you know, what Virtualization... Server Virtualization has done. And HPE knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business, that created cloud, because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers, but I think this COVID-19 and the future beyond it, virtualization of life, an immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlighted a few of them. This virtualization of life, society, experiences, play, work. It's not just work it's experiences. So Internet of Things, devices, how I'm consuming, how I'm producing, it's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your, both of your thoughts on this kind of "virtualization of life" because it certainly impacts studioLAB, because you think about these things, Alice, and HP has to invent the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do you think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >> Wow. Goodness, me. I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do, video conferencing, that you don't have the same subtle cue as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like VR and similar, are not going to solve that immediately. So what will have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think though, fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips and then what's missing, we're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out. As people understand this new paradigm and what they can do to solve, for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back-to-back nine hours of etc a day. And by the end of the day, I can barely walk. What are we going to do about that? I think we're going to see, >> Holograms, I like that Idea. >> right, we're going to see home exercise equipment combined with like, you know, really good ones. Like you've seen pellets on the shares going crazy. There's going to be tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually been held back by other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like, we have to fix this problem. >> Well, you got a great job. I want to come, just quit my job and come join studio lab, sounds like that's a playground of fun. They have great stuff. >> Ton of fun. >> Soumyendu, close this out here. What are you excited about as we virtualize. You're in the labs, creating new technology, you're a distinguished technologist and director of AI. I Wean, you're on the cutting edge. You're riding the wave too. What's your take on this virtual center? >> I think, you know the COVID experience, what it has done is it has pushed the edge to the home. So now, if you really see a home is one of the principle connectivity to the outside world, as far as professionalism goes. And with that, what AI also offers is like a better experience. Right now we are all Gaga about zoom being able to do a video conferencing, but as Alice was pointing out, there is that ER, and the VR. Now consider combining the augmented reality. And the way that we do review a conference and all the other AI innovations that we can bring in so that the interactions becomes much more real. And that is like, you know, I'd say, where the world is moving. >> I can't let this go. I have to go one more step in because you guys brought that up. Alice, you mentioned the fatigue and all these things. And if you think about just the younger generations, we have to invest in our communities and our young people. I mean, think about all the kids who have to go back to school in September, in the fall, what their world's like. And you talk about, you know, we can handle video, but learners? So the transformation that's going to come down the path really fast is how do you create an experience for education and for learning and connecting. This is huge. Thoughts and reactions to that. So it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, but I'm sure a lot of other parents have as well. >> My take on that, kids, I've worked a lot with kids and kids media. And over the years, you often find that when a new media does come in, there's a lot of fear around it, but kids are plastic and incredibly good at adapting to new media and new technology and new ways of working. The other thing is, I think this generation of kids have really had to live through something, you know, and it's going to have, with luck, taught them some resilience. I think, if there's one thing that teachers can be focusing on, it is things like resilience and how to cope under very unusual and very unpredictable circumstances, which is never good for things like anxiety. But it's also the reality of the world, you know, be adaptive and learn, keep learning. These are great messages to give to kids. I think if anything, they are the ones who'll figure out how to socialize online successfully and healthily. So we're going to have to learn from them. >> Yeah. They're going to want to make it to be fun too. I mean, you have to make it entertaining. I mean, I find my personal experience, if it's boring, it ain't going to work. Thank you so much, Alice. Well, thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoy. Congratulations on studioLAB, you got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. Soumyendu thank you very much for sharing the insights on HPE's role in that. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> Thanks. It's nice. >> Okay. >> Thanks John. >> This is theCUBE virtual covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Stay tuned for more coverage from HPE Discover Virtual Experience after this break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back inside the Sands. We are in Las Vegas. We are live here on theCUBE along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2019 by welcoming in Erik Kaulberg, VP of cloud solutions at Infinidat. Erik, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks, it's nice to see you too. >> So share a little bit at home for the folks who might not be too familiar with Infindat. I know you guys, big in the, in data storage, in terms of what's happening in the enterprise, but shed a little bit of light on that for us. >> Yeah, so Infinidat's all about re-inventing the next generation of data storage at multi-petabyte scale, whether that's for on-prem appliances where we have over 5.4 exabytes deployed now around the world, large enterprises, or whether that's through our cloud services like Neutrix Cloud, which we're talking a lot about today and through the conference, we're solving large data challenges for customers with blocker file storage requirements. We're doing that through technology that gets the price point of hard drives with the performance capabilities of solid state media, DRAM and flash, and we're doing it at very large scale, even though we kind of fly under the radar a bit from a marketing standpoint. >> So there's a lot of interesting things going on. Good storage demand. There's no question that the cloud is eating away at some of the traditional on-prem, and there's very few companies that are gaining share rapidly. You happen to be one of them. You know, Pure Storage grew 15% this quarter. Much, much lower. You know, generally HBE's shrinking. I think Delium C grew a little bit. You know, IBM has been down. I don't think they've announced yet. So you're seeing a couple of things. Cloud eating away, and then all this injection of flash. You're really the only guys who can make spinning disk run faster, as fast as flash. Everybody else is just throwing flash at the problem. And that's created headroom. So what are you guys seeing, 'cause you're clearly growing. You're a market share gainer. You have the advantage of being new and smaller. Talk about your business and how you're growing and why you're growing. >> It's nothing but growth, and it comes from this increase in the overall data that, requirements that customers have, and it comes from the economic aspects of that data. Fundamentally, data storage is all about economics, and we're able to deliver through our technical advantage of blending disk, flash, and DRAM an order of magnitude cost basis advantage, and that translates into direct financial benefits that allow ultimately enterprises to do more with their data. That's what we're all about. >> So as workloads shift to the cloud, there's an on-prem component. We're going to talk about cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera. But you've got a product called Neutrix. Talk about that and where it fits into this big macro trend that we've just been talking about. >> Absolutely. So Neutrix fits into the broader landscape in a couple of ways. First of all, many of the clients that we deal with are large enterprises, and they're in their relatively early stages of cloud transformation. So Neutrix provides an easy on ramp for them to come from our best in class on-prem infrastructure and make that data accessible in one or multiple clouds. And that kind of, maybe it's for test dev. Maybe it's for a disaster recovery, a pilot light scenario, or a couple other use cases for general purpose primary data storage. That's their on ramp to then taking advantage of the more strategic value of Neutrix, which is allowing clouds to compete for the business on the compute side of things. >> You kind of hit a key word in there. I'm talking about transform. And we've talked about that a lot, transformation versus transition, in terms of storage capabilities, enterprise storage capabilities, whatever. Take us through that transformation, if you will, and not the transition, and what's the paradigm change? What's going on in that space that's requiring people tom ake this dive into the deep end, if you will, and not just tickling the water with their toes. >> Well, I think there's two elements to it. There's a business and kind of a philosophical reorientation around taking advantage of flexible resources and allowing infrastructure to change over time and pay opex-based business models, that sort of stuff, and getting comfortable with that honestly is a journey into and of itself, because many procurement organizations, especially large organizations, they don't know what to do with a monthly bill or an uncommitted reserve amount or things like that. So part of it is being able to walk with the customer as they transform on the business side of things, and then the other side is accepting and going down the path of variable workloads, being able to accommodate large varieties of mixed data environments, and be agile on the technology side so that you can put the data where it needs to be with the performance that it needs to be and with the capabilities that it needs to be. >> All right, so we're pressed for time, so I really want to get a few topics in. For now, I see three main opportunities, broadly. One is on-prem, stealing market share. We talked about that a little bit. Two is this multicloud thing, and we'll talk about that, as well. If you're an on-prem company, you got to have a multicloud strategy, and even if you're a pure cloud company, you got to have a multicloud strategy. And the third is the cloud. You've got to embrace the cloud. If you deny the cloud, you're denying the biggest trend. So let's start with the cloud. What's your cloud strategy? What's your relationship with AWS and how are you taking advantage of that? >> So we're all about delivering our data services in whatever means, whatever physical infrastructure, whatever underlying business model the customer requires. With that in mind, we deliver Neutrix Cloud as a service for use with major public cloud environments, including AWS, and our relationship with AWS, you know, they recognize, I think, they would say that we bring access to large-scale, tier one environments all around the world coming from our base on the on-prem, and they're very interested in obviously working with the customers on cloud transformation at the scale that we operate, as well, so it's a mutually beneficial partnership. We're proud to be an APN member and all of that sort of thing. >> Yeah, I mean, if you can put your stack in the AWS cloud, which is what you're doing, it's going to drive other services, right? It's going to drive ML and SageMakers and backup and all kinds of great things. >> Absolutely. >> So the storage guys at AWS may not love you, but everybody else at AWS is going to be happy because you're driving other services. All right, let's talk about multicloud. It's obviously a controversial topic. We've got, John Furrier every year does a exclusive interview with Andy Jassy, and he's on the record, and I think he's right. He says, look it, multicloud is going to be more complex, less secure, and more expensive. He's right. And he goes, but he also recognizes that there are multiple clouds out there, and so organizations have to participate in multicloud strategies. I've predicted, as have Stu Miniman and John Furrier, Amazon's going to participate in that someday. They're going to do what they're doing in hybrid. So Amazon looks at multicloud as multiple public clouds and on-prem as hybrid. Coming back to Infinidat, what's your multicloud strategy? >> So the great thing about our strategy is that we're able to deliver the same data in whatever public cloud environments the customer wants to deploy. So we actually run our own independent infrastructure that sits just outside the walled gardens of all the major public clouds, and then we can provide network connectivity using their direct connect interfaces or similar private network interconnects, all API-driven, customer doesn't have to think about the underlying infrastructure, and fundamentally it allows them to subscribe to our storage as a service directly in whatever public clouds they choose. >> And now let's talk about the on-prem piece of that, which is the hybrid component, using Jassy's sort of definitional framework. You've got Flex. That extends your on-prem story. Talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely. So our customers are saying, "Hey, I want the public cloud business model "on the on-prem environment," and Flex is our answer to that kind of question. So we deliver essentially hardware independence, price per gig per month. We maintain title to the asset, all that sort of stuff. And we're in charge of refreshing the infrastructure every three years, and we back it with a more than public cloud level availability guarantee, 100% availability guarantee for the Flex business model. >> We've seen companies, flash-based products as backup targets. Infinidat uses a combination of flash and spinning disks to keep costs down, and you've got math magic to make it as performant. One of the things I like what you're doing is you're partnering with I think most of, if not all the backup software vendors and opening up new market opportunities and expanding your TAM by partnering with those guys. Talk a little bit about, can you give us some specifics there? >> Absolutely. So, for example, we were presenting at the Veeam booth earlier this week about the intersection between InfiniBox and the Veeam backup software suite, and we have similar capabilities with some of the other backup platforms, as well. So two sides to that, one using the on-prem or cloud environments as a source, and there we have integrations with our snapshot technology specifically, and then two, using our InfiniGuard product on the on-prem side as a target, and there we have deep integration at an API level with the various backup platforms. So it's a cohesive universe where customers can take primary data, they can put it on Infinidat, they can use whatever enterprise backup platform. They can also put it as a target on Infinidat technology. >> And we're talking a lot about today. What about tomorrow? I mean, you know, what's the bigger picture down the road? What's your crystal ball telling you in terms of future complexities and challenges and what you see where this is headed? >> I think from a storage standpoint, at least, obviously lots of other complexities beyond that universe, but from a storage standpoint, people want to stop thinking about infrastructure. They want to think about cloud data services. They want to think about essentially going from storage arrays to storage clouds. We're doing that on on-prem, we're doing that in public cloud environments, and we're knitting it all together with our initiative called the Elastic Data Fabric. Our ultimate goal there and what we think customers really want is to be able to get the data services that they want at any given instant through the business model they care about independent of the underlying infrastructure, and that's what we're set up to deliver over the next couple of years at Infinidat. >> Well, Erik, thank you for the time. We appreciate that. By the way, Erik has become a very important Cuber, a VIC. His sixth appearance here on theCUBE. I wish we had a plaque or something to give you, but how about just an attaboy? >> Thanks very much. >> We appreciate that. >> Thanks, Erik. >> Back with more coverage here from AWS re:Invent 2019. You're watching us live. We're here on theCUBE. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Introducer: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VM Ware, and it's ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, from VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, 10 years of theCUBE, covering VMworld. A lot's changed, a lot's happening, 10 more years. Two great guests here from Veeam. Carey Stanton is VP of Global Alliances and Ken Ringdahl who is the VP of Global Alliance Architecture. Both with Veeam. Love the green. >> Good to see you gents. >> Epic party last night. You guys are known for the legendary party. >> Yes. Andy Rammer? Did you? It was great. We had 2,500 people waving, shouting. Yeah it was great. >> So welcome back to theCUBE. So what's the news for you guys? You're always popping some news out. What's going on here for you guys at VMworld 2019? Top story. >> Top story for us I think is continuation of what we're doing with VMware on VMC and AWS, you know we continue to be the number one data protection workload on VSAN, working with them on their new marketplace as a design partner that they just launched this week as well, so I would say that we are always everything to VMware and then we just continue to ratch it up with continuing to grow out their ACF platform with VSAN and the new marketplace which is their VCPP, which is a big part of our business. >> And the cloud's certainly a big part of the equation for VMware this year. I mean you've seen the announce cloud native support, kubernetes on Vsphere, so they're starting to get their software mojo down on trying to build that next generation platform. You guys are kind of there with your solution. What's the big takeaway technically that's going on that customers should care about in your mind Ken? What do you think? >> Yeah, you know. Certainly this, is a big push towards Cloud I think. You know as Ratmir our co-founder would tell you, "hey, we track VMware." So when VMware started on print we would track along, they've now moved into the public cloud, and we're following along there, so whether it's VMC and AWS, the new relationships with Azure and Google, you know, goodness for us because we provide inherent support there. But you know some of the next generation things, a lot of news about project Pacific, and kubernetes, and next generation cloud native applications and, yeah we're here to support our customers, you know we're looking at all the new things that are there, we've done a lot of things recently about adopting object storage for cloud storage, etc. A lot of things we're doing from a product and technology perspective. >> So Pat Gelsinger, on theCUBE one time said, "If you don't ride the waves you're going to become driftwood." You guys have always been wave riders. When you see something like the project Pacific, what does that mean to you? How do you respond to that? Do you talk to customers? Do you sort of huddle internally and start designing? >> We do. We certainly take a lot of feedback, you know as we all know in tech, there's a lot of things that come and go, some of these things are great ideas, and at VM where you can look at vCloud Air right? You know, it was great momentum for a while and VMware made a very good pivot right? They understood that, we shouldn't compete in the space, we should partner in this space, and so we do the same thing, we look at when we're evaluating new technologies, kubernetes, etc., I mean I think at this point we know kubernetes is here to stay right? That's not a fad. It's very clear, the adoption is clear, so we're evaluating how we participate there. Our customers are largely, on-prem customers but moving to the cloud it's a real hybrid story, and so when we go in and implement our support and look at how we're going to integrate that, it's all about how we help our customers in that world. So when you see a new trend you say what, "We can protect that." Right? It's anything, everything needs to be protected. How do you think about protecting containers? Yeah so we look at it and say, hey look, the way that containers are delivered it's inside of a system regardless so, sometimes it's inside a VM, sometimes it's within a physical system. We can protect what support's there and we're looking at how can we help customers today. A lot of customers are moving their workloads. Similar to when server virtualization came up, it was a little bit of a lift in shift right, I'm going to take what was working on physical, move it to virtual. A lot of customers today are moving what they have in legacy apps and they're just putting 'em into containers just to get there, and then they're building new applications, they're moving in a more stateless fashion. We can support the customers today when they move to a stateful system. And we're evaluation how we support more the stateful longterm view of kubernetes. >> But Carey so you obviously know VMware very well. Yes sir. I've spent some time there. When you think about how the ecosystem's evolving, VMware now is a networking company, they're a storage company, obviously they compute, but they haven't sort of aimed the cannon at data protection, they've left that to the eco system. Your thoughts on how the ecosystem is evolving, your relationship with VMware, and the broader. >> Yeah I think it's not dissimilar to, if we just pick vSAN, storage, primary workload, they don't play in the secondary storage, and they allow their customers to work with reference architectures that we create to say which data protection partner would you like to have. We're fortunate to be number one, if you look at HBE, right, again, they have a lot of partners, we're number one with them, NetApp, Cisco and the like, so you know, VMware's not any dissimilar, so we're fortunate to have that Tier 1 relationship with them that they're looking to us as serving their customers. And then we also have a very close working relationship with them on the engineering side to ensure that we're always protecting their customers, and we have lots of other great meetings this week and lots of other things to be announced in the weeks ahead with working with them and their customers so we're very excited on what they're doing in that space and how we can solve their customers. >> That's interesting. None of the big platform players really have attacked ever, historically, back up, I mean I guess IBM kind of, but that's for different reasons. They'd probably say, "Okay, we've replicated, we're good." Why do you think that is? Is this cause it's so hard? You guys as an industry are that far ahead of the functionality? It's a tough business? >> Well I think it's.. It's big, it's a large business I think it is. It's a 6+ billion dollar town. I think that it's also a legacy. I mean if you look at where Veeam came in and we were disrupters when VMware was it and doing the virtualization, we were disrupting the legacy players without saying all the names what we did, and I believe that with the two decade plus world the data protection has been in, and the evolution, that it would take a lot of work on their part to want to come in and say that they're going to get into that space and try and have a solution that is as credible as Veeam is in the marketplace. So again we're fortunate, we stay very close with them and you know we continue to see them as one of our Tier 1 partners as well. >> Talk about the integration aspect because you're Tier 1, you guys are number 1 recommended with these guys, relationship's strong, integration's are key, for you guys and with VMware but also as customers, look at the Cloud 2.0 world, and you guys are following VMware with multi-Cloud, you guys can play everywhere. You're going to be integrating a lot, so that has to be a core competence for you guys. Can you just talk about, how you guys view your integration with VMware and then, from a customer standpoint, why is it important? >> I'll take the first crack and then pass it Ken, but if you look at two years ago with VMC on AWS when they made those announcements, we were a design partner in, and then they started to evolve that and doing those pilot, we're starting to see those pilots turn into large enterprises deployments. You hear Pat and Sanjay talking about the evolution that they're having and we're seeing the result of that, the customer's saying, "I need what was using on-pram." And that's moving to the Cloud and it just works, the Veeam slogan, it just works. So we're seeing a lot of those deployments for customers taking those enterprise solutions that they had on AWS and scaling them out, and we're going to continue to do that across all of, you know, what Ken was just talking about kubernetes, the Pacific project and others that were.. Again, we're at the table working with them, but I don't think that Veeam is going to stay away, we're only going to get closer as go into new technologies. >> You have to and the tech's getting better too. >> Yeah, what I'll say also is, Veeam, when you look at the data protection landscape we're a pure play ISV. That actually makes us pretty unique because all of our competitors either sell their software on a piece of hardware, or it's at least an option. We have no Veeam whitebox option that you'll see a Veeam label on it, and it really resonates with out partners. We're totally non-competitive, or non-overlapping with our partners and so, they welcome us with open arms as a result of that, and it really helps us drive in. But the integrations are critical and just to quickly make a comment about the last question about sort of the point solutions and why doesn't the big platform players. I'll give you two examples, two public Cloud examples: Azure and AWS, the two primary hyperscale Cloud vendors. They both have backup solutions, AWS has site recovery, sorry, Azure has site recovery, AWS come out with AWS backup. About a year ago they announced that at Reinvent. They need that for point solutions for customers that are looking for a checkbox. Customers, really that more the developer that just needs the base level protection. But they partner with folks like ourselves, for the broader support, for the hybrid support, because silicon angle right? I just read an article yesterday, or two days ago on silicon angle. It's a hybrid cloud world. You guys, talking all about it. That's where our strength is and that's why we have these partners coming to us. You know they build point solutions on their own, again for that checkbox, we're not checkbox, we're deep integrations, we're hybrid cloud, portability, flexibility, reliability. >> And that's smart of the cloud guys to do that because some people want end to end or compliance reasons they have to use the cloud's solution, or it's a requirement, but look at Cloud Trail, and data job's going public. You got New Relic. You got these companies that are winning in adding value with their products through leadership. Not necessarily. Amazon's got a solution out there but they're not really, going down that road. >> And John, and what I would say is also they see, the number of customers and the size of the petabytes that we're driving on the respective clouds, again back to Ken's point on AWS and Azure, I mean that business for us is growing 30 to 35%, month over month, and so they understand the number of customers, and they see that this is a hybrid play, the customers tiering off data to the cloud, but their primary workload is on-prem >> That will give you more EC2 cycles. I mean, crank up the EC2 baby. >> And they know that we're coming out with cloud native solutions as well so, I mean we're doing all the heavy RD investment, solving their customer problems, so again reason number 452 as to why they would want to go in and be disrupted to that? >> As you guys do these integrations, a lot of cloud action, you got VMC on AWS, Cloud Tier with AWS and Azure, you have a bunch of stuff going on with VMware solutions with Cloud Simple. As you work in this multi-cloud world, how are you changing your licensing and pricing models to adapt? Yeah a think Ratmir and Danny were on this week and talking about instances, so we're moving the portability of the license no longer, making the customer have to make a hard decision on the day of licensing with Veeam, is we're saying, hey, the license, it's an instance, it's on-prem, it's an instance in the cloud, you determine what's right for your business and move those licenses. So we were the first to really make that giant leap and we're going to continue to evolve that solution and make it even easier for them to do that, and then another thing that Veeam is there's no tax, we don't charge the customer any money if you want to move those data environments up into the public cloud, and again that's Veeam differentiating as it were, that customer company. We're always focused on what's right for the customer, from the product, right down to the licensing model. Yeah you're tag line is it just works. And I don't know it that's the tag line but that's what customers always say. >> It was for many years. And it's more than just a product, it's the business model. You guys have always been, pretty innovative in that regard. And especially with partners, you and I have talked about this in terms of how you make a transparent for the partner, for the sales reps. On the partner's side, to not care, whether it's they're selling on-prem or if it's a cloud solution. >> And it's been well received as you know we have global resell agreement with the Cisco's and HP's and NetApp's of the world and they're very appreciate to the way that we make it easy for them to sell to their customers and allow them to have that portability of the licenses. >> It's been great following you guys and your events, and getting to see you guys be successful, the product does the talking, and the customers are the references. I mean they vote with their wallets. You know and you guys are a Tier 1 partner. Congratulations. >> Yeah. Thank you very much. >> Final question for you, is the event successful in your mind for you guys? What do you think is happening here? What's the top story coming out of the event overall for the folks that didn't make it here? >> So, first and foremost, huge success, we're 100% back here next year trying to make it even bigger, and I would say that what's coming out of it is just the, the success that our customers show by coming to our booth and showing us that they're looking to keep with Veeam on the journey as they go with VMware. And Ken touches on kubernetes and look at all the new solutions, and so we have an overwhelming support to customers saying, "Hey, I've been with you for the last decade, I want to be with you on the journey." And so that's, we've hear that over and over again this week so very strong. >> Yeah, I think I'll second what Carey said and maybe I'll give you a broader picture. I mean if you look at what VMware's done over the last 12 to 15 months. Last year at VMworld they announced the Cloud Health acquisition, they acquired Security Company, Pivotal, you know they're really broading and they're seeing that hey look, it's not just about on-prem server virtualization, we need to have a very broad story. We need to be relevant in the public cloud, we need to provide some management and multi-cloud capabilities. We're doing the same, but I think VMware is clearly in a period of transition and figuring out.. You know I think VMC and AWS is a great step. You know having the CloudSimple relationship and virtustream for Azure, you know runnig VMware, and Azure, and Google, but I think you'll continue to see that evolve and I think they've put the breadcrumbs down so that as we go forward here in the coming months, weeks, and next year when we're here at VMworld, you'll see that continue. >> And it's certainly a great growth in terms of infrastructure's, code. You're starting to see the Enterprise Cloud start to stand up a little bit. Hybrid cloud's got visibility. It's not as easy as leaving stuff in the cloud, getting the enterprise to work, you guys know that first hand. And Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you very much. Appreciate it >> VMworld 2019 CUBE coverage. Here live in San Francisco, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante. Day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We got two sets called theCube Cannon. We've got the Cannon of Content, interviews all day long, out at night at the analyst briefings, meet-ups, receptions, talking to all the executives at Dell Technologies VMware and across the industry. Stu, Dave, today is product announcements on the keynotes. Yesterday was the grand vision with Michael Dell and the big reveal on the Microsoft partnership with Satya Nadella's surprise visit onstage, unveiling new Azure-VMware integrations with Dell Technologies. Dell announced the Dell Cloud, which is a little bit of Virtustream, but they're trying to position this cloud, I guess it's a cloud if you want to call it a single cloud of glass. Dave, single pane in the glass with a variety of other things, unified workspace and some other things. This is Dell trying to be a supplier end-to-end. This is the pitch from Dell Technologies. We'll be talking to Michael Dell, also Pat Gelsinger, the CO of VMware. Dave, were you impressed, were you shocked, were you surprised with yesterday's big news and as the products start coming online here, what's your analysis? >> Well yesterday, John, was all about the big strategic vision, Michael Dell laying out check for good and then the linchpin of Dell strategy which of course is VMware for cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, kind of VMware everywhere. I was surprised that Satya Nadella flew down from Seattle and was here on stage in person. Didn't come in from the big screen. So I thought that was pretty impressive. You had the three power players up on stage. Today of course was all about the products. Both Dell and EMC have always been very practical in terms of their engineering. Stu, you used to work there. Their R&D is a lot of D. It's sort of incremental product improvements to keep the customers happy, to keep ahead of the competition, to keep the lifecycle going. They had like 10 announcements today. I can go through 'em real quick if you want, but they range from new laptops to talking about new branding on servers, new storage devices. You had PowerProtect which is their new rebranded backup and data protection and data manage portfolio, an area where Dell EMC has been behind. So lots of announcements. Another kind of mega launch tradition and again, a lot of incremental but important tactical improvements to the product line. >> Last year, what we heard from Jeff Clarke is they're looking to simplify that portfolio. Back in the EMC days, it was oh my gosh, look at the breadth of this. Every category, they had two or three offerings and you know, the stated goal is to simplify that and that means most categories are going to get one product. It's interesting. You talk about networking just got rebranded with that Power branding. I kind of said there there's marketing behind it. If you know what that product is because it's the Power brand and they put it out there. So you know, PowerMax, has been their tiered storage. They had a good update for Unity. It's Unity XT. Doesn't have a power name yet so maybe there's still some dry powder left in the product portfolio there, but they're making progress going through this 'cause these things don't happen overnight. It's great to spin up the clouds, but in the storage world, customers, they trust, they have the code, they test it out. So going to new generations, making that change, does take time but you've seen that progress. The tail end of that integration between Dell and EMC on the product side. >> Stu, what's your analysis of the products so far 'cause again like Dave said, it's a slew of announcements. What's resonating, what's popping out, what's boiling up to the surface? >> Yeah so look, the area that I spent so much time on, John, that hyper-converged infrastructure. If you look at a lot of the pieces underneath it all, it's VxRail. One of the things we've had a little bit of a challenge squinting through is oh wait, there's this managed service stack, it's VxRail underneath. Oh wait I've taken the appliance and I put VCF. Oh that's VxRail and then I've got this other, it's like I see three or four solutions and I'm like is it all just VxRail with like a VMware stack on top of it? But it's how do I package it, what applications live on it, how is it consumed, manage service, op ex, cap ex. So they've got that a little bit of complexity when VxRail itself is you know, dirt simple and really there so they're making progress on the cloud piece. Dell is the leader in hyper-converged. I'll point out, you don't hear anybody talking about Nutanix here, but Dell still has a partnership on the XC Core. They're going to sell a lot of Dell servers into Nutanix environment so I expect you'll still have the Nutanix show. John you're going to be at that next week. They're still going to talk about Dell. I'm sure you'll talk to Dheeraj. Yes they made a partnership with HP, but that does not kill the relationship with Nutanix just like Microsoft, heck. I'm going to see Satya Nadella on stage at Red Hat Summit next week and you're like oh well VMware and Red Hat. Red Hat's here. Red Hat's a Dell-ready partner. If you want to put open shift on top of their stack, they can do that so hardware and software, everybody's got their pieces, everybody's got their pieces, everybody competes a lot, but they partner across the board. IBM Global Services is here. There's so many companies here. Dell's a broad company, deep partnerships. The question I have is Pat Gelsinger was just on stage saying that this SDDC will be the building block for the future. I said kudos to them. They've got it on AWS, they've got it announced with Azure, we announced it with Google, but that is not necessarily the end state. VMware is a piece of the puzzle. I don't know if VMware will be the leader in multicloud management. vCenter was the leader in virtualization management so how much of that will there or do I get an Amazon and then start moving some stuff over? Do I get to Azure and start modernizing my environment so that I don't need to pay VMware and I don't need virtualization. VMware and Dell are going to containerize everything so in the future, are they containerware, you know? That's the competition kind of post-it note. They are VMware at their core. VMware is centra of the strategy and there's still some work to go, but they're making some good progress. >> I want to get your thoughts, guys, on the role VMware is playing here at the show. Normally they're here, usually they're here, but this year it seems to be much more smoother integration of talking points, messaging, product integrations. The show's got a good beat to it. Pretty packed, but the role of VMware, Dave, Stu, what's your reaction and thoughts? We've seen them dance all the time. Obviously VMware, Dave as you pointed out yesterday, a big part of the valuation of Dell Technologies, but what's your observation on the presence of VMware here at Dell Technologies World? >> I mean I've said many times that this company and I said this about EMC, it's kind of a boring company without VMware. You put VMware in the mix and all of a sudden, it becomes very strategic and very interesting from a lot of standpoints. Certainly from a financial standpoint. Remember, the Class V transaction that took Dell public was the result of an $11 billion dividend because of VMware. They took VMware's cash and they said okay, we're going to give nine billion to the shareholders. Without VMware, that wouldn't have happened. As well, the multicloud strategy, the underpinning of that multicloud strategy is VMWare. What strikes me, John and Stu, is that the cultural change. You had Dell, you had EMC. They said ah yeah the companies are compatible, but they're different companies. They maybe had shared kind of goals and values, but they had different cultures and really in a short timeframe, Michael Dell and his team have put these two companies together and they have aligned in a big way. I mean they are basically saying VMware and Dell, boom. That's how we're going to market and you know, Pat's coming on later today and I'm sure he'll say hey we love NetApp, we love HBE, we love IBM, but it's clear what the preferred partnership is. >> Dave, when the acquisition happened, there was talks of synergies and we were like oh where are they going to cut everything? If I look around here, they've got the seven logos of the primary companies. It's Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks, Virtustream and VMware. They're one company. Michael Dell will go on calls for any of them. Friends of mine at Pivotal says you talk to Michael quite a bit. You know, he's out there. We talked about it yesterday. Dell and VMware are closer and tighter aligned than EMC and VMware ever were. Now on the one hand, EMC kept them separate because the growth of virtualization required that. Today in this cloud environment, it's a different world and it's matured so VMware, sure, there's still work on HP and IBM and all this other stuff, but Dell leads that move as you said, Dave. >> John, you're big on culture. This is a founder culture. What's your take on what Michael Dell has accomplished and how does it stand to compare with sort of other great cultural transformations that you've seen? >> Well I think HBE is a great example of a culture that split, was uncharged there. We know what happened there and I think they're hurting, they're losing talent and they're not winning in categories across the board like Dell is. I think Michael Dell, the founder-led approach that he's having 'cause he told us years ago, if you guys remember, here on the record, also privately that I'm going to take this off the table with EMC and I'm going to do all these things. We're going to execute. So he brought his execution mojo and ecos of Dell and become Dell Technologies, as Stu pointed out, a portfolio of multiple companies under one umbrella and he brought the execution discipline and this is a theme, Dave. Last night at the analysts reception, as I was talking to other analysts and talking to some of the execs, both from VMware and Dell Technologies, that the execution performance across the board both on product integration, which was a weak spot as you know, is getting better, the business performance discipline. We're going to have the CFO on here to talk more about it, they're executing. Howard Elias is going to be on this afternoon. He called this three years ago when he was talking about the integration that they saw synergies, they saw opportunities and they were going to unpack those. They stayed relentless on that. So I think this is a great example of keeping the founders around for all the VC-backed companies. You're thinking about getting rid of founders. Never let a founder leave a company. They bring the vision, they bring also some guts and grit and they bring a perspective and you can put great talent and team around that, that attract and retain great executives like Michael's done and he's poaching HPE, other companies and pulling talent in 'cause they're executing. They pay well, it's a great place to work according to the statistics. So again, this is all because of the founder and if the founder's not around, you have all the fiefdoms and the policists who kick in and then it becomes kind of sideways. So that's kind of what I see other companies that don't have founders around and HP lost their founders obviously and then the culture kind of went a little bit sideways. So they're trying to get back in the game, seeing them go back to their roots. We'll see how they do. We don't do that show anymore and again we don't have a lot of visibility into what HP's doing but we do know, Dave, that they do not have a lot of the pieces on the board that Dell does. So if you want to have an end-to-end operating model, and you're missing key value activities of an end-to-end value chain, that's going to be hard to automate, it's hard to be a performant, it's going to be hard to be successful. So I think Dell is showing the playbook of how to be horizontally scalable operationally and offer perspectives and data-driven specialism in any industry in any vertical. >> Yeah Dave, if I can just on the cultural piece 'cause it's really interesting. You talked about EMC, East Coast hard driving versus VMware, software, Silicon Valley company. While they're working together, a lot of it, you know, I talk to VMware people and they're like well it's great the Dell force is just selling our stuff. It's not like I'm having storage shoved down my throat or we have to have our arms twisted. It's the product portfolio that they're selling, the vSAN, NSX, the management software suite and those pieces, things like SD-WAN, there's some good synergies there. So the product portfolio is a nice fit that just jointly go out to market that they just really line up well together and Dell's a very different cultural beast than EMC was. >> Well again, staying on culture for a moment, when I discussed with some of the folks that I know out of Hopkinton the narrative early on was oh Dell's ruining EMC, tearing it apart and so forth. When you talk to people today, they say, you know what, it was painful. Dell came in and said okay, you're going to be accountable, really had an accountability culture, but now they've come out the other side, the narrative is it was the right thing to do. Jeff Clarke came in and sort of forced this alignment. There's like no question about it. People, this is a guy who you know, his calendar's set for the year. People know where he's going to be, what meeting he's going to have, what's expected and they're prepared and it seems to be taking hold. I mean if a $90 billion company that's growing at 14% in revenues, in profitable revenues, that's quite astounding when you think about it and I think it's a big result of the speed at which Dell has brought in its operating model to the broader EMC and transformed itself. It's quite amazing. >> Awesome show, guys. We've got clips out there on the #DellTechWorld on Twitter. We've got a lot of videos. We've got two sets here, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Final word on this intro for day two, guys. Thoughts on the show? It's not a boring show. It's a lot of activities, a lot of things. They've got an Alienware eSports gaming studio which I think is totally badass. A lot of kind of cool things here. It's not the glitz and glam that we've seen in other EMC Worlds before or Dell Worlds, but it's meat and potatoes and it's got a spring to its step here. I feel it's not, it feels good. That's my takeaway. >> Well the big theme is hybrid cloud and multicloud. Jon Rowe as we were leaving the room today that we were early with that multicloud. Thanks for everybody else in the industry for hopping on board. The reality is the first time I heard the sort of hybrid cloud was called private cloud. Chuck Hollis wrote a blog back in the mid to late 2000s. Now I will make an observation in the customers that I talk to. Multicloud is not thus far, has not thus far has been a deliberate strategy. In my opinion, it's been the outcropping of multivendor, shadow IT, lines of business and I think the corner office is saying hold on, we need to reign this in, we need to have a better understanding of what our cloud strategy is, build a platform that is hybrid and sure, multicloud, to build our digital transformation. We need IT to basically help us build this out to make sure we comply with the corporate edicts and that's what's happening. It is early days. There's a long way to go. >> Yeah, as Dave, as you know, I sat right down the hallway from Chuck Hollis when he wrote that piece and I went and I called up Chuck and I was like hey Chuck, this sure sounds like my next generation virtual data center stuff that I joined the CTO office to work on and he's like yeah, yeah, new marketing branding and I wrote a piece, exactly what you said, Dave, on Wikibon.com, hybrid and multicloud were a bunch of pieces, you know. It's not a cohesive strategy. The management's not there. We're starting to see maturation. Some of the point products, you know, developed really fast. When we talk about VMware on AWS, that happened really fast. I heard if you stop by the VMware booth here at the show, they're showing outposts and I said is a diagram? No, no, I've got customers in production running this. I'm like hold on, I need to hear about this. Outpost in production? But that strategy as you said, hybrid and multicloud, we're starting to get there, starting to pull it together. David Foyer wrote a phenomenal piece about hybridcloud taxonomy. We've spent a lot of time on the research side. Really what does the industry need to do, how should customers think about all of the layers? You know, data and networking and all of these components to help make not just a bunch of pieces but actually drive innovation and help be better than the sum of its parts. >> Well ironic followup on that post, the Chuck Hollis post was around they called it the private cloud and it was all about homogeneity and now multicloud is everything but homogeneous. Outpost, however, is. Same hardware, same software, same control plane, same data plane so interesting juxtaposition. >> We'll see Amazon Outpost. Guys, go to SiliconAngle.com, Wikibon.com. Great hybridcloud, multicloud analysis coverage and news. And some of the headlines hitting the net here. Dell Technologies makes VMware linchpin of hybrid cloud, data center as a service, end user strategies from Zdnet. eWEEK, Dell makes major hybrid cloud push. Obviously great analysis, guys, right on the number. Day two, CUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman. We've got two sets. Rebecca Knight, Lisa Martin and more. Stay tuned for more coverage of day two after the short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to day three of Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our kickoff of day three, we got a little analyst roundtable, Keith Townsend is with me, Stu Miniman, Peter Burris, the co-host, tri-hosts, quad-hosts of this show, long-time Dell EMC watchers and guys, let's unpack what's going on here. We're a couple years in now, the merger between Dell and EMC. I've said all along this was inevitable because of the pressures of cloud. It's very clear that Michael Dell is taking control of this company, it's the Dell brand, Dell Technologies, Dell Technologies World, EMC is sort of fading into the past, we'll talk about that Stu, we'll talk about the culture and the implications there, but I want to start with you Keith, let's talk about the customer perspective. What are you hearing from customers? What are the challenges that they're facing? Some of the concerns they may have with Dell and some of the positives? >> So one of the challenges, customers were worried that Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, would just be another HPE too big to solve their challenges, just how do you find solutions in the company with such a large portfolio? In reality, customers are pleasantly surprised that Dell Technologies has been able to surface up solutions, and not just focus on solutions, and also partner with their existing ecosystem of vendors, which is a surprise. One of the things I challenged Michael on as a customer, was hey you know what, this deal with Nutanix, this deal with XE, what are you leaning with from a hyperconverged solution perspective? Dell has been able to walk that line extremely well, We had a Datrium customer on day one, couldn't be happier with the relationship, then we talked to a couple of folks from the product team, 62% of the client meetings this week has been about VxRail, VxRack. Talked to another Fortune 500 customer that's all in on VxRail VxRack, not just for standard workloads, for SAP HANA which is not even certified for VxRail VxRack, so customers really happy with the overall ability of Dell to bring solutions to the table. I've seen, though we still have some time to tell if they'll be able to keep that momentum as they grow, as they continue to partner, and if they can continue to find solutions to challenges. >> Keith, if I can actually just follow up on one thing there, it's very clear that Dell will streamline the portfolio. Had Michael Dell, Jeff Clark, people from the marketing organization said absolutely, and we're telegraphing to customers as soon as we've sorted everything out we're gonna communicate it. Is there any concern from the customers? Michael said, we won't leave any customer behind, but absolutely the past of what EMC had with so many storage products they couldn't figure it out, there will be a lot less of them by the time we get to next year. >> So I think one of the things that you hit on when you talk about culture, I think customers still are very happy with the EMC brand, I think Dell did a really great job of not just getting rid of the EMC brand, customers still very much trust EMC. EMC had an extremely capable support organization, there's question about whether that support, that white glove support that we've gotten in the past from EMC will exist going forward. You know, Dell got rid of EMC cold, they brought Scale IO to a hardware-only solution versus the open ecosystem, so there's questions around where the cost-cutting will impact customer operations and support, but overall customers are happy with the progression. >> Peter Burris, one of the questions that Stu asked both Michael Dell and Clark yesterday is look you've got some of your bigger hardware competitors like IBM, like HP and HPE running away from head-to-head and I think Jeff Clark said "well I don't know how you can do end-to-end without both heads." So from your standpoint, from a customer perspective, is there an advantage to that head-to-head? We certainly heard it over the years, we used to hear it from HP a lot, we used to hear it from IBM a lot, they've retreated from that, Dell's sort of banging that end-to-end drum, does it matter from a customer perspective? >> Well of course, but it matters not just for what the customer wants but also the applications required. So, look, the biggest challenge, the most obvious, best end-to-end solution, if you take a very narrow view, it's gonna be AWS, Azure, some of these others. But the question is, is all of your data going to be in that public cloud? So the fundamental engineering challenge that every enterprise is gonna have is where am I gonna put my data? Some of the data is naturally gonna go to the public cloud, some of the data is not. What Dell needs to do over the course of the next couple of years is pick up on that as aggressively as they possibly can, try to not just convince people, but to show them that their organization of their digital business increasingly is going to be defined in terms of where their data assets are located, the practical realities of what that means, and therefore what types of fundamental support are they going to have to bring to bear on it? Keith, you said something interesting about HPE. The reason why Dell was not HPE, a little bit less so on IBM, is that Dell, Dell EMC have over the past 10, 15 years have made good bets, HP did not make good bets. You want to understand the history of HP over the last 10 years and why they're not the same, it's because HP gyrated all over the place to try to buy companies that were kind of at that moment a good price, let's just go for scale as best as we can, and Dell hasn't done that. Well Michael and his team have stayed relatively close to a simple vision of what types of engagement model they want, they've delivered on that vision, and they've got the assets that they can put into play now, but they just have to convince the enterprise that the play is where do you put your data, because you're gonna put your processing close to your data, and you're not gonna put it all in one place, right customer? And that's not going to be an easy, that's going to be a very challenging set of conversations over the next few years. We think how it's gonna play out is that Dell EMC is gonna be just fine because the enterprises are not gonna want to give all of their data up, and they can't give all their data up, so we'll see what happens. >> Well Stu let's talk about that, I mean Dell's cloud strategy is pretty clear, they want to be an arms dealer to the cloud. HPE, that's really their only choice, obviously IBM owns a cloud so it's a little different there, Oracle owns its own cloud, and they have software, that's a whole different ballgame. Dell clearly is comfortable being a high-volume, lower margin supplier, throwing off cashflow, throwing off profits. What's your take on the lack of a public cloud and are there issues there? >> Yeah, well you know Peter talked a little bit end-to-end and you see what Azure and AWS are doing. One of the surprising things for me is to see pieces of the public cloud and how the Dell Technologies portfolio are fitting into it. So being we're a native US, we absolutely understood. There's actually an isilon with Google cloud, a solution that I had an interesting discussion with Manuvir Das on day one here, really explained that you know scale out architecture, really get into the cloud. IBM cloud, there's a booth for them, they're here on the expo floor, so we've seen that maturation as hybrid cloud is not that transferring state that people thought but as that pits out we know data and applications are going to live lots of places and a company like Dell needs to be able to live in many of those environments. Edge of course, IOT, a hot issue that they're talking about, but they have portfolio products that will live in many of those places, so good maturation, public cloud is not enemy number one but of course they are a little bit more toward the private cloud, they highlight a bunch that if you go all in your prices are gonna be bad, we're gonna pull it back, Keith mentioned the EMC code team kind of got killed. A bunch of them are actually over at VMware now with an enhanced team, so it's still, we're not at the steady state of where the shift from my data center to public cloud is but it is definitely matured and nuanced and Dell has a lot of good partnerships that are growing. >> Well and selling servers to tier one cloud guys is not a great business, HP exited the business, Dell's in the business but it can't be a high market, it's not a great business I mean we know that. But, you know, nonetheless there's a lot of non-tier one clouds up there. You had a point to make, Pete? >> Yeah really quickly, the thing I was gonna say is, and we've talked about this in the past, and if we think about two things about Dell's portfolio, first off if we look back at what happened with the minicomputer business, and everybody says "oh the microprocessor killed it" well that probably contributed, but what really killed the minicomputer business was TCPIP and CISCO, that's what killed the minicomputer business because before a Dell or a Deck executive or a DG executive would walk into a shop with stuff all over the shop floor and the customer would say "I want to integrate this, you know, bridge it" and CISCO said, flatten the whole thing, bring TCPIP, and all those minicomputer companies went away. There is a gem in this portfolio which is NSX, and the degree to which Vmware, NSX can in fact become that technology for flattening the cloud network, cause that, to me, that's what the next big play in this industry is gonna be. AWS is gonna have its approach, Azure is gonna have its approach, you're gonna have bunch of on-premise stuff, the question is are you gonna be able to flatten those networks and really achieve that end-to-end? And if there's one good option on the table right now in the industry, it's VMware NSX for doing that. The second thing that I would say is, and I had a couple conversations with some folks about this this morning, we're talking about end-to-end, we're talking about greater conversions, hyperconversions, etc, yet Dell is still organized by server, storage, network, and it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves over the course of the next few years as customers increasingly do want a leverage that's end-to-end, diminish the distinctions and take advantage of convergence and whether or not we see Dell have a series of inter-nexian warfares about where that ends up. Because we know Dell does not wanna be RCA, right? >> Well that's really interesting because some of near-term moves that they've made are basically to take some of that converged stuff and put it in- >> That's right. So I love that now the TCPIP and NSX completely agree with you, the one thing that Dell is definitely missing from a customer perspective is the control plane glue they want to lead with the VMware story, you know any workload any cloud, I'm not gonna take my VMware approach to Google, I'm not gonna take that to Azure. So this any workload, any cloud thing, I'm not buying. I don't think customers are buying that. HPE is leading I think with a pretty good message on offering cloud services. It's a really, really difficult problem. >> The Oncenter story, you're talking about. >> The Onecenter story. It's a very difficult problem, enterprise customers want a single solution to consume all files, they want that TCPIP set of protocols, standards- >> They want the cloud to be flat. >> They want the cloud to be flat. NSX flattens it from a networking perspective but from a controlled plane API perspective the industry is a long way before that and I don't think Dell even has any plans for it. >> So, Stu, you know well when people were talking about you know, Michael's gonna sell VMware, you were very vocal about it, "no he's not, only an idiot would think that, I mean there's no way that's gonna happen." I mean, what a gem, in the portfolio, talk about end-to-end. The other thing I wanted to bring up is if you look at Dell's business, about half is the client business, it's doing better than expected so it's throwing off more cash than expected, especially with the storage business being soft, Dell's been pretty transparent about that, well I guess it has to be, but nonetheless there's upside there, but VMware is about 10% of the revenues, it throws off half of the operating cash, so why would you get rid of that, right? It's such a strategic asset 500,000 customers, a key part of the end-to-end, and it just makes this such a more interesting business. >> Yeah I mean Dave, I know you love teasing apart this complex, the tracking stock, all the things there, one of the interesting nuggets out of the Michael Dell interview was oh he said "the tax changes really had no impact, you know that's not it." You know, people really misunderstand, they understand these finances, it's not that they're hurting for cash, they can't make cash positions. >> So with my senses it's probably a slight negative but with the tax legislation, you're right, it's basically a net neutral for these guys. It's way overblown. >> Yeah, but you know, what's changed, we knew, when Dell went private, there were a bunch of changes in-company, I knew a lot of people that left the company for different things. The EMC acquisition, it's been a lot of change in the last 18 to 24 months, it'll still be rolling out there, you know, I live right in the heart of the old EMC country and there's some changes there, who's running it, you see a lot of former Dell executives, legacy Dell executives, there's still some strong people from the EMC side but Jeff Clark, very strong engineering culture, actually the more I've gotten to know him the more he reminds me of what EMC was 10 or 15 years ago in a good way, sharp, technical, getting on it. So I think the EMC brand, by the time we come here next year will be gone, but it doesn't mean the EMC people or products like the powermac are gonna be going anywhere. >> Well let me push at that a little bit, cause one of the things that Jeff Clark is doing is he's simplifying the portfolio, and Joe did the opposite, he complexified the portfolio because he said overlaps are better than gaps. And Jeff Clark's taking a different approach, is there a concern for customers? Wow, I might be left behind. They've got to be a little bit careful with that message, don't they? >> Yeah, but I mean we've touched on it a little bit, Dave, there's still some of the core product, you know powermac comes out there, this is the legacy of b macs, still supports the mainframe, you know, there's a business for this, and they're not gonna leave their customers behind. But what we said, Dave, when they put this portfolio together they need to turn the crank a little bit to get the operating margins where they need to be, not be overlapping so much with marketing and some of these other places. So, they're going to be very smart in how they do this, they say they're going to overcommunicate to not only their customers but their partner. I've talked to a bunch of (inaudible) partners, pretty happy. You know, there were a little bit of bumps over the last 18 to 24 months as to "oh wait I had this account rep and now they brought in this overlay and then they flopped who owned it." So it's been interesting to watch some of those and- >> Well look. >> It's a people business, and some of that changed- >> At the end of the day, Dell's portfolio can all be placed in service to the customer with relevance and competency today. That's a much better problem to have than a company that has either been building a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter or has bought a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter. It means if they can sustain a degree of focus that allows them to pay down their debt and do the financial engineering and Tom Sweet's a stud, the CFO's a stud, it means that they can listen to customers and continue to service what the customer needs because their portfolio is easily applied to customer problems unlike a lot of other companies. That's a pretty decent position. They can pursue all of these things because the portfolio is relevant. Now, are there gonna be some challenges? Well, one of the reasons why EMC complexified the portfolio was because they had salespeople who were deeply engaged in their accounts and they used that as an advantage, and so the salespeople said "I need something" and so Dell EMC, like CISCO did for years, went off, or EMC, went off and found it. Dell still has a different channel organization and a different channel approach, much more partnership-oriented, if there's tension in the model, I don't know what you think about this, Keith If there's tension in the model it's we're going through a major transformation in the industry right now. How close do you have to be to the customer, is this going to be a partner-led transformation or are you gonna want your people handling the transformation? EMC's approach was your people led the complex portfolio. Dell's approach, simplify the portfolio, are you making the relationships more complex as a result? >> That's a great point, we touched on this with Marius, because essentially, in Marius' organization you have an overlay EMC salesforce which is used to belly-to-belly, and he said "look we're working it out" and it requires great leadership. >> It's gotta be somewhere, is it gonna be in the portfolio or the engagement model? >> And from the engagement model, just look at the Dell Technologies family themselves. When I was a EMC VMware customer, I didn't have combined meetings with EMC and VMware, two belly-to-belly relationships. When that Dell EMC merger took place, Dell came in and flexed the muscle, you know desktops, laptops, end-to-end vision, VMware became, you know, you could sense the tension in the room. I just talked to another big Dell EMC VMware customer and they'll say you know what at VMworld, Dell Technologies World, the messaging here has been incredible. You get in the real world, you talk to your Dell Technologies or Dell EMC rep, one set of products, you talk to the VMware rep, a completely different set of products. >> And then you talk to partners, and what are they saying? So where's the complexity gonna be? EMC said the complexity's gonna be in the portfolio, the engagement model is gonna be simple. Dell's saying the portfolio is gonna be more simple, but what's gonna happen to the engagement model? Because customers, this transformation stuff we're talking about is hard. >> Let's break down, we've got a couple minutes left, let's break down the competitive landscape, the horses in the track as we like to say. We obviously got AWS, you know the megatrend factor sucking up a lot of demand. Everybody says that people are coming back on prem, more people are going to the cloud. 49% growth. So that's clear, but you got traditional server competitors which really is I guess HPE and Lenovo, right? We're gonna focus on the enterprise stuff because that's kind of our wheelhouse. You've got the storage guys, you know that app seems to be back, Pure is continuing to do its thing, small in the grand scheme of 80 billion dollars. >> Their best friend will be Nutanix. >> Right, yeah right, and you got that funky relationship, you got an interesting CISCO relationship going on, so how do you describe the competitive landscape? Start with you, Stu. >> Yeah, it's a little bit complicated. Listen to what Peter was saying there, EMC was pretty cut and dry, you know. Storage, that's where we're gonna live, and everything else, we're gonna partner, even all the server companies that need to sell storage, they have great partnerships with IBM and HP and everything like that with the first one you had to partner with EMC because they were dominant in that space. Dell at the core of it, server company still so it was interesting, one of the interviews I did, it was, you know, VxRail, if you're not in hyperconverted space, if you don't own the server, you're not in the right thing. And I'm like, we got Datrium and Nutanix and all these other partners that are here in the ecosystem that are living on top of the Dell platform, so there's a little bit of that give and take, it's more coopatition than I used to see, you used to go to Dell World, they'd have that rack of OEMs with all those different vessels out there, so you know, where does Dell want to go? How do they maximize, you know, the investment that they made in the biggest merger in tech history? So it's still playing out, I hear relatively good things from the partners, and the customers at least aren't getting stuck in the middle. You know, with CISCO sometimes it was really a punch in the face and if we're not 100% on board we're not gonna let you have it and then the channel would just sort it out themselves. >> I mean AWS and the cloud, it is what it is. The VMware partnership, you know good move, gives them some near-term maybe even mid-term runway, we'll see what happens long-term. In the server business it's HBE, right? Is the main competitor. What do you guys think? >> We got IBM. >> Yeah, IBM for sure, yeah. >> The powermacs that just got announced, when that comes out the second half of this year, that goes right after CISCO UCS. Not a lot of talk about CISCO, the VxBlock business is a three to four billion dollar business between the Dell family and the CISCO family and this is gonna put them at loggerheads really soon. >> Yeah I talked to customers, they love the Dell EMC certainly, powermacs has been one of the top conversations, they can't wait to connect their powermacs to their HPE blades, that's gonna be awesome. Which is good. The other piece of that is the NetApp story. NetApp did a great job of talking about data fabric and being a data copy, I don't know if they're there yet, did a great job talking about it. Dell EMC- >> Good investments, they hired great people, so they're on that path. >> Two men in my peer community, a man and woman said NetApp's cloud story is legit, they're good. >> They're a software company. >> They're a software company. Dell EMC's cloud story, specifically around storage, you know, the isilon announcement was a partnership but you know I think customers are really looking at that again, that API is about the data and how do I move my data on-prem, off-prem, I don't know if Dell EMC has their story yet and they have the product portfolio to back it. >> So, here's what I'd say Dave. At the end of the day, there's a whole bunch of transformations and I'll try to be as succinct as I can. First off, data has to be acknowledged as an asset. Number one. That's a transition in itself. Number two. Investment in technology has to be regarded as an investment in improving the value of that data asset which means that ultimately the money in this industry is gonna follow the value of the data, that's the simplest most straightforward way of thinking about this. So, when we think about, for example, the server business, we're saying "you're not gonna put all your data up in a public cloud because the data's not gonna allow you to do that." Well, what's the difference between saying you're not going to put all your data in a public cloud and saying oh you're going to move all of your data to some server somewhere? There's, yeah it's a little bit more approximate, but it's still not, you're gonna move your data closer to more intelligent storage, more intelligent networks, and they'll go find the compute that they need. And that's not how Dell is set up today. That's just not how they're set up today. So if we think about five to ten years, we're talking about a whole bunch of processing power being moved closer and closer and closer to the data in the form of, you know, routines that are being run right there at the storage machine. We're talking about much more programmable control planes, data-driven data-first control planes, that are being in the network and defined by what the network can do, and the compute is increasingly gonna be regarded as important, not unimportant, but it's gonna be an increasingly distributed world where you can't have your cake and eat it too, you can't say don't go up to the public cloud but go up to our big honking server. There's something that doesn't quite watch there. >> Well, great analysis Peter, and to your point organizational structures really matter and I think today Dell's organization is really optimized for the continued integration, streamlining that piece, getting that right, making sure the processes are there, and then we'll see how it goes over time. Alright, thanks you guys. That was awesome. Good kickoff for day three. Okay, this is day three, you're watching theCUBE, keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

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

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we're live here, day three of three days of coverage of theCUBE at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Paul Gillin and special guest on our day-three opening, Peter Burris, head of research of SiliconANGLE Media, general manager of wikibon.com research. Guys, good to see you on day three. We're goin' strong. I mean, I think I feel great, a lot of activity. So many story lines to talk about. Obviously the big one is the combination, not merger, I slipped yesterday, or acquisition, the combination of equals, Dell, EMC. Some will question did EMC acquire Dell or Dell acquire EMC? Certainly Michael Dell's still captain of the ship. But that's the top story. But a lot of product line conversations. Not a lot of overlap. Peter, you've been at all the analyst sessions. We had David Furrier on yesterday, teasing it up, but I'd like to get you, your perspective and reaction to your thoughts as you look at the giants in the industry. Michael Dell bought EMC for a record 60 billion plus. You've been around the block. You've seen many waves. You've analyzed many generations of the computer industry. What does this actually mean. Where are they, what's your thoughts and reaction? >> So John, I'll give you three different story lines here, right? The meta-picture, the good, and the what the hell's goin' on kind of picture. The first one, the meta-picture is, and SiliconANGLE said this, it was a really well written article, you might have even written it Paul, that there has never really been a successful mega-merger in the tech industry. And historically I think that's because, well here's the bottom line. This one may actually work. And it may actually work nicely. And the reason is is that most of the other mergers or combinations were companies with problems and companies that didn't have problems. Or companies with problems and companies with problems. And if you take a look at Dell and EMC, neither of them had problems. They weren't buying each other's problems. It was a nice combination and complimentary in that EMC had a great consumer business, great channel business, and had a pretty strong financial position. And EMC had a great enterprise business, great, you know-- >> Sales organizations. >> Great sales organization. And they had, they were strong in where the industry's going around how do you handle data and how do you handle storage. So it's got, what we're seeing here is everybody singing out of the same hymnal. I'm not seeing any tension. And that is an indication that this one may actually go well. I think it's a very, very good early sign. >> Paul, you and I were talking on the day one open and also, we kind of hit it a little bit yesterday with David Furrier, talking about this mega-merger. Compare and contrast that to HBE, which is been kind of, being de-positioned by some of the Dell executives. They don't actually call 'em out by name, but HP Enterprise is taking a different approach. They're taking a, you know, smaller is better approach. Obviously, Michael Dell has a complete different philosophy. We're still going to analyze that as well. We've got HPE Discover coming up as well. Thoughts on the compare and contrast, guys, reaction to the strategies of HPE, smaller, faster, as they say. Or Dell, bigger, more powerful. >> I think both are viable strategies. It's just a matter of if they can pull it off. I mean, HP, you talk about bad mergers, Peter, I mean you think of HP Compact, HP Autonomy, this is a company that has had a terrible track record of big mergers. Although they've had some successful ones certainly. >> By the Meg Whitman inherited those. >> Yes. >> Prior to Meg Whitman coming on board. >> Oh she was a board member for some of them. >> Okay, so she was at the table. Now, we don't know, okay but your thoughts, continue. >> But Dell, clearly going the other direction. They, I mean, they're building sort of an IBM-like model, the way IBM was in the '80s when it dominated every market that it played in. And it played at even more markets than Dell does now. So I think that the model makes sense. I think Peter's absolutely right, I'm not sensing any tension at this conference. There seems to be, the most important thing is there seems to be a lot of communication going on. The executives are spending a lot of time with each other and they're talking a lot to the people. And when you look back, and I live, and Peter, you remember the DEC, you know, the fiasco with DEC being purchased by Compaq. That was clearly a takeover. And that was Compaq came in, took over the company and didn't tell anybody anything. And the DEC people were living in the dark and it was clear that they had no value to the acquiring company. That, clearly, they're not making those mistakes here. >> For the younger, for the younger audience, DEC is Digital Equipment Corporation which was a behemoth winner in the micro, mini-computer era and then now defunct company. >> Except the one, one thing I'd add to that, Paul, is that, and this is why, it's why this first sign is so important. That they are seem to be, that executives here seem to be collaborating and working together. DEC had been one of those mini-computer companies dominated by an OEM business, which means you had a common set of components and then everybody was competing for customers with how you put those components together. So there was, it was a, it was a maelstrom of internal competition at DEC. When Compaq got ahold of DEC, that DEC sense of internal competition took over Compaq. And then when Compaq, when HP acquired Compaq, that maelstrom and internal competition took over HP. >> They didn't know what they were getting into. >> We used to call it the red-blue wars and it was ugly. And that's not happening here. That's a first sign. >> Yeah, I would agree Peter. I want to get your thoughts to all that. I would agree that this is, I've been tryin' to sniff out where the wind's blowin' on this for a year and to my knowledge, and my insight and sources, it's not going bad at all. It's going great. The numbers are performing, they're winning some deals, but let's compare to HP because I asked Mark Heard at their Oracle media event last week, cause they were touting number one in every market. So I said, "Well, there's a digital transformation "going on, a whole new way to do business "for the next 33 years, "not looking back at the past 33 years." Which metrics are you using? Everyone's claiming to be number one at something. So, the question is, maybe HP does have it right. Maybe their strategy will work. What are the, what are going to be those metrics for this next generation? If cloud becomes the connective tissue to data, value of data, and that apps are going to be very agile. Maybe this decentralized approach from HP might be a better strategy for the growth. Thoughts. >> Well, look, let's, so let's, I want to get back to the, what's good about what we're seeing and some other things that probably need to be worked on, but, but here's what I'd say, John. And this is what Wikibon believes. That customers is always going to be the most important metric. So, the first metric is, is HP gaining customers? Is HP losing customers? Is Dell gaining customers? Or is Dell losing customers? That's the number one most important metric. Always will be as far as I'm concerned. But the second one is, and this, and I'll pre-say something I'm going to talk about in a little bit. The second one is, I'll call it data under management. If we think about, if we think about this notion of data as an asset, data as a source of value, how much does HP, through it's customers, how much data does, does HP have under management? How much data does Dell/EMC have under management? And I think that's going to be an important way of thinking about the intensity of the relationships, which relationships are going to steer towards which types of environments. Is it going to be a procurement relationship or a real strategic relationship? By procurement, I mean, it's fundamentally focused on driving cost out of the deal. Strategic, I mean it's fundamentally focused by jointly creating value. So this notion of data under management, to me, is going to be something we're going to be talking about in five years. >> So, Bill Schmarzo, friend of both of ours, was, came by the set before we came on here and he's the dean of big data as coined by theCUBE but now he's takin' on it his own, like he's actually a dean now teaching big data. We are talking about some of the research that you're doing and taking a stand on, it's important, I want to put a plug in for the Wikibon research team that you're leading, is the business value of data. >> Peter: Oh absolutely. >> And that you're looking at data as a valuation mechanism, not an accounting, compliance thing. And this is something, I think, is way ahead of the curve. So props to you guys for puttin' the stake in the ground. To your point, the new metric might just be the valuation of how they use data, whether that's customer data, product services data, application development concepts to reconfiguring how they do business. >> And it's the reconfigure that's the smart, that's the absolutely right word. So, from our perspective John, the difference between a business and a digital business is a business uses data one way, a digital business uses data another way. A business uses data as an, something to just handle coordination and administration. >> Paul: Bookkeeping. >> Yeah, exactly. A digital business uses data as a strategic asset to differentiate how to engage to markets. That's where the industry's going, and that's what we want to talk about. >> And by the way, in previous business constructs or business books people have, might have read over the years certainly, you know, the Peter Druckers and so on, management consultants, never actually factored data into the value chains of-- >> Oh they did, they did, they did. They just didn't actually, so Drucker, for example did. >> John: Digital data? >> Oh, he talked about information and the role that information played. >> John: I stand corrected. >> Herbert Simon talked about this kind of stuff 50 years. Unfortunately it all got lost when we went through things like, jeez, you know, there was a very famous economist who said in the late 80s, "Information technology "shows up everywhere but in the productivity numbers." So, you old guys would-- >> I remember that, I remember that quote. >> So, the idea ultimately is we now have to get very discrete and very specific about what that means. And that's a challenge. But let's come back to, let's come back to at least what we think is really working here, if I may. >> John: Absolutely, go ahead. >> So the first thing is, at a more tactical level, number one is the Hyperconvert story is exciting. And it's starting to come together. And again, I'm not, we're not seeing tension between the folks that are selling servers and the folks that are doing Hyperconversion. Both are introducing new technology that are going to create new opportunities for customers, and they're not as, as, as your good friend Michael Dell said, a couple times over the past year, here in theCUBE, "We are not going to "artificially constrain any of our businesses." And, as Amazon said at re:Invent, "If you're going to do it at scale, "eventually you're going to put in hardware." And he wants to demonstrate that all this great software stuff that's happening, that ultimately Dell's going to be the leader at designing these new capabilities into the hardware and he wants to show how that's going to show up in all his product lines. >> That's a great point. I think the most interesting dynamic I've been seeing out of the interviews we've been doing the last two days is that the problem Dell has to struggle with now, and it'll be interesting to watch how they, how they figure this out, is all of their, used to be called the Federation, now they're called the Strategic Business Alliances I think. The, you know, the VMwares, the RSAs, the Pivotals, how are they going to make sense of those in the context of this bigger whole? On the one hand, they've got some competing priorities here. Dell has a very strong relationship with Microsoft, VMware is a competitor to Microsoft. So you got to figure out how to get those, how to make sense of those different alliances. Pivotal is potentially a competitor to Microsoft. >> Potentially? >> Well, Microsoft is in the pass business, yeah. >> No, it is yeah, it's going to compete. >> So you've got a, you've got some paradoxes here in the businesses that Dell has acquired. They really still, I sense they still haven't made sense of what they're going to do with them. >> Yeah, great point. I mean, first of all, you guys are pros and we have a historical view here of the collective intelligence of all of us old guys here. We've seen a lot of ways. But Rob Hof wrote an article on SiliconANGLE, our Editor-in-Chief Rob Hof, who's also an industry veteran and journalist himself. After the Oracle media event, and the headline reads, "In Oracle's Cloud Pitch to Enterprises, "an Echo of a Bygone Tech Era." And his point with this story is, I want to get your reaction to this, cause I think we're seeing a trend here, you guys are teasing out here. We're kind of going back down to the old tech days. You were the Editor-in-Chief of Computerworld back in the day with the mainframe world and then the minis. Seeing Marius Haas on here using words like "Single pain of glass." "One throat to choke." "End to end." We're almost seeing the bygone era coming back again where maybe they might have the rights to it. Certainly Oracle saying, "Hey, you know, "reorganize our sales force." So the question. Is the cloud the de-centralized mainframe. Is it now the new centralized, with edge, intelligent edge, is that, are we going back to the old ways, in a way, not fully but, unifying the sales forces. >> So, the computing industry-- >> Thoughts. >> Has been been on an inexorable march to greater utilization of public infrastructure. What an economist would say is we've always found ways to reduce asset specificities. I buy something, and I apply it to one purpose. I can't apply it to another purpose. Software changes that. Commodity pricing and hardware changes that. Public infrastructure changes that. So we're going to continue to see that inexorable march to the use of public infrastructure or somethin' that looks like public infrastructure. And that's going to continue. And the industry's always been very, very good at that. That does not mean, however, that we're going to have one supplier. So what we're seeing is a lot of FUD right now. Amazon FUD, Dell FUD, Oracle FUD. There is a real tension in the model and the real tension is, more than likely, the future is going to be composites of services operating on multiple different cloud-like instances, including on premise. And who's going to offer the best end-to-end control plane? >> Paul, I want to get your thoughts. Cause you remember goin' back to the days, IBM had SNA network stack, DEC had DECnet, we had, they had propietary stacks. Cloud, Azure stack, this stack, that. Are we seeing this again? Your thoughts. >> Well I think Peter's absolutely right but the variable, and you're right, we are seeing this again. We're seeing a trend of return to simplicity. Because what IT organizations have been wrestling with for the last 20 years is everything is just getting more complex. There's more vendors, there's more piece parts, and they've got to fit them all together, and it sucks. And so they want someone to simplify this. Now, cloud vendors simplify it on one level. But software-defined, on another level. We've been talking here about software defined storage, about software-defined networking, massive virtualization. And that's on an open source or at least an open API-based model. Which I think is the twist here. Are we going back to the days of IBM? Yeah. But IBM, But the IBM may actually be software-defined. >> Or five different companies that look like IBM. >> I know what you're saying Paul, and I'm not going to disagree with you. But here's the opposite-- >> But you disagree with him. >> No, no, but no I'm not going to, I'm going to put a slightly different spin on it. It used to be that the most valuable asset in an IT organization was the mainframe. And the entire organization was organized and the interactions with the business were organized and put in place to handle the value of that mainframe. We are not going back to a day where the IT organization, the way business uses IT is organized around the mainframe as an asset. Or even around the provision of infrastructure as an asset. We are going to start seeing organization and frameworks that are fundamentally built around this idea of data as an asset. And that is going to be a lot more complex with a lot more buyers and a lot more opportunities for differentiation creating value. So we will see more complexity in IT at the software and the use case level, less complexity at the infrastructure levels. >> Which is why machine learning and automation gets a lot of hype, but to Paul, I'm going to get your point and tie Peter's point together and introduce Jeff Bezos' comment last week on NDC. He mentioned that most things take 10 years to bake out in terms of getting things right. Ten year kind of horizon. Kind of an order of magnitude. But he says, "All these startups say they have "disruptive technology, it's not their technology that's "disruptive, it's what's the customer is disrupted." So we're talkin' about customers being disrupted. It's not some company having disruptive technologies. >> And disrupting. >> So are we saying that customers are being disrupted by reconfiguring their businesses, hence with the mainframe disrupted, a new way to do things, we're seeing clouded-data as a new way to do things. So, that's causing some reconfiguration and disruption, allows them to say, "Shit, just when I thought it was simple "it got more complex." >> But the disruptive element is the data as Peter says. >> I mean the machines are becoming, the machines are already a commodity. The, with open source, the platforms are a commodity. What's disruptive is how you use the data in different ways. And to your point Peter, yes, it's going to be a much more complex world. >> Peter: Much more. >> Because there's a lot more data and there's a lot more things we can do with data. >> And data can, that's exactly right. We can do so much more with data. So again, let's go back to the fundamental metric that at least I suggested. Who gets more customers? There are going to be more buyers of this stuff in five years than there are today. More buyers in the sense that within an organization, there's going to be more people involved in the decision and there's going to be more businesses. Because if this stuff actually works, the transaction costs are going to go down and you can then organize your businesses, institutionalize how you do work differently so you can have more partnerships. All that means that fundamentally, what we're talkin' about here is going to lead to greater complexity in business, greater opportunity therefore, but what I've always said, and I don't know if you've heard this Paul, but I know you have John, and I've said it on theCUBE. That the fundamental demarcation is that the first 50 years of this industry featured known process, unknown technology. And what do you we focus on? The technology. What's the next 50 years? Unknown process, known technology. What are we going to focus on? How to build that software, how to handle those data assets. What are we going to focus less attention on? The technology. What does everybody want to talk about at this show? >> The technology. >> Technology. That's a disconnect. So going to one of the things that we now have to think about from a DELL/EMC standpoint is where's the story about how Dell is going to appreciate the value of your data assets over time. We need more of that. >> And let me point out, you now, you didn't mention IBM but one company that is doing that well right now, they aren't getting the business benefit for it yet, is IBM. Where they are really taking, they are not technology, I mean they don't talk about power aid anymore. They talk about Watson, they talk about what you can do with analytics, they talk about a smarter planet. They haven't been able to turn this into a successful business yet but they're doing, I think, exactly what you're talking about. >> Well the product, they have some product challenges. I mean, so let's get back down to the customer thing. I like that angle. You got to have the customer, you got to have the products that customers will be buying. That's the value, exchange that customers will value and then hence by your service or product. Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger, when they did the Amazon deal, VMware. Jassy, Andy Jassy CEO of AWS said to me, "We are customer focused." So I believe that you're right on this 100%. Whoever can get the customers. And this is not about who's the better stack, if the customers like it, they're going to buy it. >> And very importantly, John, they are going to invest in it to make it valuable in their business. And that's what you want. You want to see your customers become a centerpiece of value-creation in your ecosystem. >> And I think Amazon Web Services proves that the dark horse could come out of nowhere and be the behemoth that they are because they served the customers. >> So that's the second thing that I'm missing at this show. And I know, I think I know why, is where is the additional details, even a little bit more, about VMware and AWS. Now, I know that they're going to wait for the VMware World, that's the story. >> They showed a little preview in the keynote, it's still baking out. >> Yeah, but it would be nice to have a little bit more. >> That's one of those tough relationships they need to manage, right? >> Yeah, exactly right. >> I mean VMware and IBM also have an alliance. They are allied with their foes now through the acquisition. The point about, about the value of data, you know, I think Amazon has done a good job of building platforms that are very flexible for customers to use but they abstract a lot of the underlying complexity. >> Alright, so with the data, I want to just double-down on that for a second and get your reaction, thoughts on, obviously, one of the themes here is IOT and we heard Michael Dell saying it's going to be centralized, pushed out to the edge, you got in research from Wikibon intellegent edge. You and David Floy and the rest of the team doing some real amazing work at Wikibon.com. Check it out, subscription required. What's the edge strategy? What does that actually mean for IT practitioners out there? It's, certainly we heard from Bask Iyer, who's the CIO of Dell said, "Most CIOs are conservative "and don't usually jump on these waves." They missed mobile, they missed some other waves. His mandate was, CIOs, don't miss the IOT wave. So what is the IOT, this edge of the network thing mean for a CIO. >> Well, the first thing is in hardcore circumstances, many CIOs aren't even involved in the edge. So if you take a look, if you go into where a lot of the edged domains are really crucial, you see a plant manager that's more responsible for what's going on in the edge than the CIO. The CIO is handling the corporate systems. The plant manager is handling what's actually happening at the edge. The operational technology stuff. So the first thing is we're going to see a slow circling of the IT and OT organizations about who's going to win-- >> OT meaning Operational Technology. >> Operational Technology. Just as we saw a slow circling back in the 1990s when TCPIP came in, and blew away DEC and blew away everybody, and started blowing away the TELECOM divisions, or TELECOM's functions within side large enterprises. >> So you think that IOT is going to be as disruptive as TCPIP was in standardizing in the network layer. >> Oh absolutely, absolutely. It's going to be, it's going to have an enormous impact because there's so many new sources. The data is going to have, how to think about it, and that was the second point I was going to make, John, is we do not currently have architectural standards in place for thinking about how this stuff is going to come together. And it's something that David Furrier and I and the Wikibon team are working on and I hope to come up with, I hope to come out with some research, actually probably next month, on what we call automation zones or data zones or probably edge zones. Which is, how do, just we think about security zones today, how do we think about edge zones. Where the edge zone is defined by a moment, an automation moment, cannot have data outside of that zone. And that needs to become an architectural principle where OT and IT can work together and say, "What data has to be in that zone? "I'll make sure my data gets there, "you make sure you're data gets there. "We'll figure out how control happens, "and that's how we drive this thing forward." >> Well, just to give you a prop here on theCUBE here is, Wikibon was right about Flash, they were right about Hyperconvergence and convergent infrastructure. Big bets early on that were kind of like, people were like, "What?" And certainly Vstand, ServiceStand although some people will disagree with this. >> They were right about the edge. >> Now you're right about, I think you're right on, way right on the edge and you're way right on value of data. >> Yeah. >> I think those are two stands that you're taking that will be-- >> And let's give great props to David Furrier who was a catalyst for thinking many of these things through. >> Alright Paul, final word from you. Obviously, you know, as a veteran, you've covered it all. Okay, what's your take? I mean, what's the, how's the wind blowing, what's your instinct tell you of what's happening. >> I think it's generally good, but it's hard to tell from conferences. As you know John, the reason most conferences are so boring is that there's no tension, there's no conflict. It's all good, it's all everybody's happy and everybody's doin' a great job. That's the very same thing that we're seeing here. >> Rah rah, Kool-aid injection. >> One thing I can't help notice is on the keynote, if you look at the keynote agenda for the three days, there's not a single customer on the, on the keynote agenda. Which I think is a problem. Or I don't think that says good things about where Dell is really focusing it's message right now. You want to have, at most big company conferences, there's lots and lots of customers who come up on stage. I think Dell is still thinking about, I mean it's a technology-focused company. They're thinking about technology integration right now. >> So speeds and feeds. >> Yeah, you hear a lot of speeds and feeds. >> Everybody wants to be the most important thing in the enterprise, and they still want hardware to be the most important thing. >> Well, I think I mean, I would agree with you 100%, but I just think, just, in this acquisition, I mean, sorry, merger of equals, they have a lot of herding cats going on right now. There's a lot of herding of portfolio and not a lot of overlap but I can see them kind of making room on the stage for that. But I do agree, I mean, customers do tell the best story. >> And in the long run, that's, as Peter said, that is what is going to make the difference. Are the customers happy? >> Guys, amazing exchange. Thanks so much, Peter, for comin' out and takin' some time out of your busy schedule to come on theCUBE and share your insight. The daily on-cue Paul, as always, we're havin' another three days. Third day of our three days of coverage here on theCUBE. Great commentary, great analysis, more live coverage from day three of Dell/EMC World 2017. We'll be right back, stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Servicenow Knowledge 17. Brought to you by Servicenow. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to Orlando everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Alante with my cohost Jeff Frick. Mark Toludo is here with Patrick Stonelake, cofounders of Fruition Partners now, a DXC company. Welcome to the Cube, Mark you were one of the first SIs that we ever met in the Servicenow ecosystem, acquired by CSC and now the spin merge with HBE, explain it all, how'd you get here? >> Yeah well that's great so we really grew up in the Servicenow ecosystem, right. That's where really Fruition became really what it was and is. CSC came 2015 so they came, acquired us, we became Fruition Partners with CSC brand. CSC then did an acquisition of UXC, a very large SI out of Australia and with that was Keystone, probably now the largest Servicenow system in the greater Australia so they came into our practice as the Fruition Partners Australia brand. We then went out under CSC and did another acquisition in mainland Europe Aspediens. They covered Switzerland, France, Germany, and Spain. And so now they're the Fruition Europe end. So we still have this Fruition practice inside of CSC at the time and then the HP enterprise services so that's only the EDS group, the services group, not the hardware or software group. So then they choose to spin merge with CSC and form DXC. So we're still the Servicenow practice Fruition Partners DXE technologies company so all the Servicenow, everything you're seeing, that's what we're enabling for customers. >> Now Patrick, how did that all affect the go to market? >> It enables us to be more global right. Part of the reasons why we acquired these companies and continue to look to do so is our customers are demanding from us a very consistent, boots on the ground experience, multiple languages, but all running the same methodologies, running the same accelerators and getting them to the finish line at the same time. So DXC and the kind of checkbook and influence of DXC has really helped us do our part in consolidating that market. But what I think we've really just started to scratch the surface of is how we can empower DXC as you know kind of become the engine that runs the nine major offerings of DXC and start to get service now into support of those offerings, modernize them, make them more efficient, and make them more attractive to customers. >> You guys were early on, you know we've talked about this in the past, kind of placed your bets, paid off. Is this sort of work flow automation the next big thing? It seems now that everybody's glomming onto it. >> Yessir. >> Is it and why now? And where do you see it going? >> So we see this, as Patrick mentioned, DXC has nine service offering families, right and that includes like big data, cyber, vertical applications, certainly the outsourcing business is still significant. But what we're seeing is Servicenow is this workflow backbone middleware that kind of connects us all. So we have the DXC offering family leads coming to us and saying listen we understand that Servicenow can do ITOP for a business process orchestration, we understand it has a SECOPS component, so now we have an ISECOPS offering. So they're seeing that Servicenow is kind of the glue to bring together these various offerings and it helps us go from our traditional relationship with the IT department to now branching out into HR, into security, into that CSM space. Even in the business process automation space, that can be claims process. The total business functions that are automated by this work flow, it's not just the work flow itself, it's that the work flow ties into the other silos so that it's not just email, it's actually intelligent email, intelligent routing. So we see it as the glue to keep all these offerings together. >> And then you guys are starting to build solutions on top of a Servicenow platform and go to market with the solution, versus you already have Servicenow, we're going to be a kind of typical consultant and help you do best practices, et cetera. >> Exactly, you know it's kind of a combination of the two. But I think the best way to think about it is that Servicenow is doing its best to be as horizontal across the enterprise as possible, right? Security is a really excellent example of a place where Servicenow is a natural fit, you connect the cycle with security and IT. But one of the things that we're looking to do is to bring the industry expertise of DXC to some of these Servicenow enabled solutions. Mark talked about our ISECOP solution, which is horizontal managed security services. But we debuted yesterday that we're going to be working with Servicenow and their catalyst program around a healthcare splinter of ISECOPs because there are all kinds of uniquely healthcare provider oriented security concerns that the actual thought leadership and the knowledge of the cyber consultants at DXC really bring a lot to the table. So we could build a solution in conjunction with Servicenow. They rely on us for the industry expertise, and they just keep that security piece humming and up to date and locked in with the rest of the platform. >> You know we have another offering, just to add to that, is out of Europe, one of the consulting groups said environmental health and employee health and safety in manufacturing plants. They said listen there's a product out there in the marketplace, can you do something better or different using the Servicenow platform? So we actually took that subject matter expertise from DXC consulting experience, we've married that with our Servicenow expertise and we actually have another product that we're going to market with. It's an employee health and safety, for manufacturing plants, for slip and fall, for any environmental concerns, any of the safety issues that they have. But that's really combining industry and vertical expertise with Servicenow. >> And that shows somebody might not even know they're buying Servicenow, right. (crosstalk) >> You're essentially OEMing the platform. >> That's what we would like to get to. >> You're not there yet. >> I think there's a lot of, we have a lot of we sell a stand alone on top of a Servicenow platform and it gets built. Tony Beller who's the new GP Alliances coming in with a lot of force, environment experience, and I think he's really charging with some of the bigger partners like us to really lock down that OEM because I think that's where we get a lot of leverage for Servicenow and our customers essentially want to consume as they need it and that makes a lot of sense. >> And are you reselling Servicenow in that solution offering so that they don't have a separate relationship with Servicenow, it's all integrated into that. >> Exactly, yup. >> Correct. >> And do you guys use Servicenow internally? >> We do, yeah. Ourselves we've been big drinkers of the champagne as they say for a really long time. We have a number of systems we use to run our professional services organization. But DXC, particularly in the area of asset management, some of the real ROI driven pieces of IT is taking a very hard look at the successes they've had there and trying to figure out how we can enable that success in the rest of the organization. Purchasing, project management, you know, these are things that I think we're going to do internally and then start to share results with our customers. >> Well we also have something called My Order Style, so there actually is how we do manage service provider outsourcing relationships that's built on Servicenow. And we do that internally as well, so basically when we get support or when we need support for our equipment, whatever, worldwide, that's being logged and tracked in Servicenow. >> And in Servicenow you clearly have very strong messaging around we start with IT, IT service management and then ITOM and then moving into the lines of business. How rapidly are you seeing that in your customer base? And maybe add a little color to that. >> I think we're trying to accelerate that. >> Yeah. >> I think what we're seeing is a shift as infrastructure goes to the cloud, as the IT department moves away from being the T of technology and more the information side, that they're starting to realize this role as more of a service management organization because oftentimes the applications that they're supporting are coming from a third party if it's Servicenow, if it's Work Bay, if it's Sales Force, but they can be the glue that holds it together. They can worry about the releases, the data hierarchy, but it's that IT as they are reinventing themselves. They see themselves going out towards those other departments towards HR, towards CSM, towards field service and saying we actually have a solution we want to bring to you. >> I got to ask you guys, as a consultancy, complexity is your friend. You know when things are chaotic it's like call you guys and solve the problem, but at the same time, you hear from a lot of Servicenow customers, we're trying to minimize the customization, custom modifications. >> Patrick: Yes. >> Mark: Right. >> Is that antithetical to the way you guys typically do things? >> It shouldn't be I don't think. I mean we don't want to do as much work as possible in one project, we want to deliver value over the course of many, many transactions that are shorter in duration. And so the more we can stick to the configurable aspect of Servicenow, the better off we're going to be and the better off our customers are going to be. They'll take releases more smoothly and so forth. And what you can do with configuration and app scoping is really, it's a whole other level than what it was five years ago so we're actually starting to fulfill that promise. >> And so if you can build value on top of the platform using the platform, >> That's the point, yeah. >> Those functions beget the advantage of the upgrade. >> Yeah I would look at this and say when Fruition really got going is when we really embraced Servicenow, not just the technology, but the methodology. Because we knew a lot of other service providers, they want a two year project, they want that SAP three year whatever it was. But we embraced the methodology and said that if we can't show results in four to five months using this technology, we're not going to be invited back. But look at today, we have 400 customers worldwide, about 70 percent of those make up our annual bookings again for the next project and the next project because they see value in these increments and we're delivering that. So I would rather not elongate projects, they need to see things very fast. >> Awesome, guys congratulations, I love your story, and Mark you got to present to the financial analyst group yesterday so well done. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> Keep right there buddy, we'll be back with our next guest right after this.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube, covering Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Fortinet. Now, here's your host, Lisa Martin. >> Hi, welcome back to The Cube. We are Silicon Angle's flagship live streaming program, where we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise, and we bring it right to you. We are in beautiful Las Vegas with Fortinet. Today, or this week is their Accelerate 2017 event, and we've been excited to be chatting with a lot of their folks and technology partners. Today we are joined by two gentlemen from Fortinet. First, we have John Maddison. You are the Senior Vice President of Products and Solutions. >> Indeed. >> Lisa: Hey John. >> Hi. >> Lisa: Thanks for joining us. We've got Joe Sykora who is the Vice President of America's Channels. >> Thanks Lisa. >> So guys, a lot of exciting stuff going on today. I wanted to give the viewers here who haven't had a chance to meet you guys yet, what you're both doing. John, you have a veteran. You're a veteran of over 20 years experience at telecom >> At least. >> At least 20 in IT infrastructure, security industries, you've lived in Europe and Asia and the U.S. and worked in those. Joe, you oversee quite a big channel of over 7400 America's partners and the entire channel strategy. So you guys are kind of busy. >> A little bit. >> Joe, you're probably pretty proud of this. You were named, in 2015, by CRN as one of the 50 Most Influential Channel Chiefs. >> Yes I was. >> Did you get like a button or hat? >> No, I think it's a t-shirt. >> Oh, t-shirt. >> Absolutely. >> Outstanding, so speaking of t-shirts, I have no segue there, wanted to understand, we've been talking to a lot of your folks today, as I mentioned. We talked to your CEO who was talking about this third generation of security and kind of where we are today with that. And then we talked to Drew, the CFO, who was really talking about the criticalness of trusting data. With the announcement today, maybe John I'll throw this to you, the announcement today of the new products and technologies, how are they going to continue to facilitate or enable your customers, direct or indirect to be able to trust their data? >> Yeah, so we announced the fabric last year. Today, we announced our operating system Fi.6, which is extension of the fabric. We also announced something called intent-based network security, which is the next generation of network security that Ken Xie, our founder, talked about. And then we also announced, the third thing is our new security operations solution, which brings together several products for the infosec world. So I think all of these come together to make sure that we're continuing the effort to make sure our customers are safer, that they can integrate the fabric into their infrastructure and obviously, that's very important to their brand. >> That was going to be one of the things I was going to talk about is are you seeing that you're making a difference in the brand of a customer? We were talking, before we started today, and a lot of you are familiar with some of the the big breaches, I mean, breaches are a common, daily occurrence, but when when they start happening in brands it's the consumers know who aren't in technology becomes a suddenly, can I trust this particular brand where I normally go and buy household products. So it sounds like the announcements today are really next generation leading you guys to continue to be able to deliver, not just that comfort level that your customers need in terms of we can trust our data, but also helping them improve their brand so that their customers trust their brand. >> Exactly and so, you know, the fabric has expanded in that we've expanded it across multiple now attack vectors so what used to be really focused on the core network, we can now cover email, we can now cover the web, endpoint and also, you can see some of our partners around here, we've also expanded our fabric-ready so the fabric here has several APIs, multiple APIs that allow different partners to connect into it. And so, we haven't announced it totally yet but we've got six new partners, some big companies like Cisco and HBE, actually joining our fabric-ready program to be part of the fabric. So we can cover the entire infrastructure of any company. >> Fantastic, so speaking, we'll get to that in a minute but one of the topics that's also come out today, as we've seen the evolution of security from perimeter based security in the 90s to you know, web security, cloud security. Moving towards 2020 and the fact that it's 2017, a little scary, we're pretty close to that and we're seeing this explosion and proliferation of mobile devices, of IOT devices, lot of lack of security there. As we get to that point, one of the other themes that we're hearing a lot about here today is that there is a gap in terms of of resources. What is Fortinet doing to help bridge that gap, that your customers are facing? Where it comes to, specifically, network security programs? >> So one of the programs we launched again, a couple of years ago was the Network Security Expert program, NSE, in 2016, we had over 30,000 certificates issued on NSE. It's probably one of the largest security programs, 'cause one of the big issues for customers and our partners is just the skills gap, cybersecurity. We also, actually, use a lot of those materials and assets and give them to Universities who are starting to do their programs as well. That's really essential for our partners to be trained at the lowest level in terms of the basics, but also, we've had about 40 people take part in our Network Security Eight architecture program. You can see them, these are the pins, actually, we have, which are NSE one to seven, but the NSE eight are the red ones and there's about 40 now of what we call security solution architects, who can go into companies and look at their complete infrastructure and give them an update in terms of security. >> Excellent, so want to touch on the channel, for a moment. Ken talked about the security fabric architecture, you mentioned that it was launched last year. What has been the reaction of the channel? >> Oh, it's been absolutely great. It's about mid-year last year's when we announced that. Embraced by the channel, in fact, CRN named it the security product of the year, for 2016. >> Lisa: Oh, fantastic, congratulations. >> Very proud of that. And that's actually the feedback of the channel partners. It resonates. It's creating new opportunities for our partners. Combine that with the training that John just talked about, I mean, they're armed to really just go out there and help solve all those end user programs, problems. >> Thank you, and sorry for interrupting. What are some of the main pain points that you're hearing through the channel, that customers are experiencing as we start to see big attacks have become more and more prevalent, the Dyn attack recently, DdOS being common types of attacks. As more and more things, like critical infrastructures are becoming plugged into corporate networks, and more mobile and more IOT, what are some of the pain points that your customers are experiencing, and how are they, looking to resolve and mitigate some of the challenges that they have leveraging the security fabric architecture? >> Sure, well attacks are going to happen, right. We know they're going to happen. It's how fast can you react to those attacks. And the fabric actually enarms our partners to just have intelligence on what is actionable and what's not actionable. So we're tryin' to automate that. Some of the future stuff that we're going to be doing later in the year is going to even enable them more. But it's all about simplifying it for our partners to react to what needs to be reacted to. >> Are you seeing, from an industry perspective, we were talking with Derek Menke, excuse me, about healthcare really being at the top of the at risk from an industry perspective. But in the general session today, there was a CSO panel and there was Verizon was there, Levi's was there, as well as Lazard. We saw Telefonica throughout the event today, the Steelers. Are you seeing through the channel, and maybe this is a question for both of you, are you seeing particular industries at more risk coming to you through your customers' needs or is it fairly agnostic from a security perspective? >> Yeah, I think on the channel side, obviously, everyone's at risk, right. So I think it's the value of those of the incidences is really more highlighted. So when Derek talks about healthcare, for example, dealing with people's lives is important along with you health records. So that's much more valuable than say, at the Steelers, not being able to get on the guest wifi. So I think everyone's at risk. All of our channel partners have different verticals that they go after, and it's all the same, it really is. >> Yeah, I would say the risk is pretty broad across every vertical, I mean, yes healthcare, the healthcare records are extremely valuable, but also the financial industry. You've also got industrial controls systems, for example. You've also got retail and so, I think every vertical, every industry is taking security very, very seriously. And back to your previous question about how is the fabric helping partners, I think, previously, they had to kind of stitch together a lot of point solutions themselves. I think with the fabric, it gives them an architecture or a framework. It could be mostly Fortinet gear. It could be Fortinet plus some of their other partners. It helps them put that in place across the entire infrastructure. >> You bring up a good point, John, that that was brought up a number of times today and that is the role of the CSO now being, you know, kind of think, is that guy or girl at the lead of the digital army? But that person is inheriting, we were seeing a couple of different reports, North of 25 different security technology, really kind of a patchwork environment. In that kind of situation, where now security is a board level conversation, how is Fortinet direct, and through the channel, helping that CSO? Is that a key buyer for you that you're helping to figure out, I've got this patchwork here, how do I build it into a fabric or a fabric around it? >> What we've seen, what I've experienced in the last 10 plus years in security is, I'd often go into a room and there'll be the network security people on one side of the table, and the security people on the other side of the table with the CSO and the CIO and I think, that gradually over the last three years, I've seen more cooperation. So now, when we have briefings with customers and partners, you'll see both teams together. You'll see a new role inside customers called the Security Architect, that's looking holistically longer term over the security architecture. And one of our announcements today around the security operations center is to do, just do that, bring together the SOC and the infosec world, together with the network security world. We did a demo today on stage showing that bringing together our Forti SIM, our Forti analyzer with our fabric to bring those two worlds together, because as Joe says, you know, there's a report done by Verizon on the breach report that says, within 60 seconds, you can be compromised. You've got basically 60 seconds to stop that threat and so speed is very important. So giving our partners this ability to bring together a fabric, with Fortinet gear, with our partners' gear, that provides very fast protection is very important. >> Excellent, one of the things, too, that I found interesting today was learning about what FortiGuard Labs is doing. I read over the weekend what Derek Menke's team published, the 2017 predictions. Really quite frightening. And he was on the show earlier and saying, that they're already seeing a number of these things already in play. How much more intelligent malware is getting, and the pervasiveness of the threats there. How are some of the new technologies announced today, maybe enhancing or what FortiLabs is doing from a threat intelligence perspective, is that something that was part of? >> Yeah, that's a really important area. I think the vendor community needs to do better in sharing the threat intelligence. I think, today, it's in pockets, but I think long term, it's absolutely essential that threat intelligence get shared across the whole community because, with some of the new threats coming, the machine to machine threats, the scale and the speed's going to be even more. You saw the Dyn attack last year on Ddos. That's going to be small compared to some things coming up. So I think, longer term, the fabric across the infrastructure, and then the security vendors getting together and sharing that threat intelligence so you've got a bigger view of the attack surface is absolutely essential to stop the new type of threats. >> Exactly, and as that attack surface is growing by the day. So last question, before we wrap up here, give you guys both a chance to answer. At the beginning of your fiscal year, here we are in January, what are you most excited about for the channel in 2017, for example? >> Sure, opportunity, right. For our channel partners, we've got probably one of the strongest channel partners just the overall. We're aligning, realigning with our field teams, so just the resources that all of these partners have. I think the opportunity's great, the market's great, like you said, you open up anything now, and you see, okay, it's been infiltrated, it's been hacked. So I think we're all going to have a really good 2017. >> Fantastic, John, what about you? What are you most excited for? >> I was most excited about this interview, actually, that's what I was looking forward to. >> Wow, fantastic, we'll close there. (laughter). >> No, I think it's obviously, rolling out more of our technology, integrating more of our partners, training more of our partners and helping them with their customers. >> Fantastic, well the buzz and the momentum here and also, the passion for both yourselves and your roles and your peers and your colleagues is really palpable. So I want to thank you both for joining us on the Cube today. >> Thank you. >> And we wish you the best of luck at the rest of the event. >> Thanks Lisa. >> Alright, for John and Joe, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the Cube, but stick around, we'll be right back.