>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with the que were in Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco definite create. We've been covering definite create for a number of years, I think since the very first show. And Susie, we and the team really built a practice, built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting Debs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and developing solutions and using brain power that's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have our next guest. Ah, partner for someone is Brad Haas. He is the engineering director for Dev Ops at Presidio. Brad, great to see you. >>Hey, Jeff. Great to be here. >>Absolutely. And joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect, Francisco Definite partners. And he has been driving ah, whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here. Looking forward to this conversation. >>Absolutely. So let's let's >>start >>with you, Chuck. Because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, you know, software defined networking has been talked about for a long time, and, you know, it's really seems to be maturing. And software to find everything right has been taking over, especially with with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability, custom ability in software and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is toe have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, Absolutely. So along this whole journey of definite, where we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of versus co platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners, and what we hear from our customers and our partners is they wanna our customers one away to be able to identify. Does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey. I'm trying to do do a new implementation. I wanna automate that. How can I find a partner? Thio, Get there. And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this definite journey with us for the last six years. They really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and given edge to my customers to show them that, Yes, I have these capabilities. I built a business practice. I have technology. I have technologists that really understand this capability, and they have the definite certifications to prove it helped me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what are definite partner. Specialization is all about >>right, that's great. And, Brad, you're certainly one of those partners. And I want to get your perspective because partners are often times a little bit closer to the customer because you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on. We know what happened back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home on You can't goto work, so you know there's all the memes and social media about who you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation. The CEO of the CMO or cove it. And we all know what the answer is. Whatever you can share some information. So what happened then? And really, for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it. Six months plus and and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How is the customer? Attitudes kind of change now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment. And really, we need to put in place, um foundation to carry forward for a very long time. Potentially. >>Yeah, it was really quite interesting, actually. You know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests. Thio help with automation of provisioning our customers. And in the whole, you know, digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there, and I'd say it became or of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers. Thio. You know, new topology is where instead of the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly and waited. Have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and program ability building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers. Thio get up and running really fast on. But that is what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit, you know, Now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my office is in a different way, You know, for example, you know how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my e? My conference rooms are there, Uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information like, how many people are in the building at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that? You know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So? So the conversations really changed in ways that you couldn't have imagined before march. >>Now, I wonder with you, Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view. I mean, the network is amazing. It had had co vid struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly. Entertainment, Um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality. But for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if you know, kind of from your perspective, as suddenly, you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, definite with with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space is good spaces. You could be giving this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation. And as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So for myself. I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years this is you know, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore. But my day to day functions are are still the same, and it's built because of the capabilities we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry as faras kind of moving to that application type of economy as we go to micro services as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud. Those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this to this covitz situation, and I think it's helped to to justify the investments that that our customers have made. A swell is what our partners have been being able to do to deliver on that multi cloud capability to take those applications, get him closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable. Thio users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls, >>right, right, it's interesting. And Brad, you made a comment on another interview I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of applications. Now, being first class citizens was was what you said, and it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now? Really, it's the infrastructure, that response back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that APS first is the way to go, because that gives people the competitive advantage that gives them the ability to react in the marketplace to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's a It's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push the cloud was really interesting In the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to you change our applications to be cloud first, you know, And then I think the terminology changed over time. I've, um, team or cloud native. So when we when we look at what Cloud has done over the past five years, with customers moving, you know, there their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center. But what it's really become is a place thio host your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're no longer talking about you know, the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what what did those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially what with the whole move to cloud native and micro services in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure. As code you're now able toe, bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application as infrastructure is code, the application in this the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are all are wrapped together and you've got changed control, version control. Um, and it's all automated, you know, it's it's a beautiful thing, and I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking. I think everybody was trying to figure it out, and they didn't really fully understand what that meant. Now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like, as it's as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's terror, former answerable, whatever that might be. Whatever method or tool that you're using Thio to bring it all together. It Z you know, it's really interesting. You know, I think I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than you know, when those early days of S d. N, we're out, you know, it was a positive controller. Is it the new version of S and M. P? You know, now it makes sense. It's actually something tangible, >>right? Right. But still, Chuckas, you said, right? There's still a lot of AP ice, and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off. The network that all have to fit, uh, have to fit together. You know, we cover pager duty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the problems are within a very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned the shopping cart or whatever the particular applications. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability. Super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of. And they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely, Jeff. So the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference? I mean, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the Internet, the amount of people necessary to to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale. It's automation that makes that possible. That allows us to look higher up the ability to do that. Automatic provisions provisioning. Now that we're in micro services, now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to to better to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we could very quickly spend something up to to take that load off where traditionally it was. Open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there. Let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution. Go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team. They just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability in a point that Brad Maeda's faras you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it, I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the A p, i s from the infrastructure and then the ability to tie that into other systems like an I p address management or a change control or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made in infrastructure changed and now I can automatically do that. Documentation up Dayton record. I know who did it. I know when they did it, and I know what they did. And I know what the test results were even five years ago. That was fantasy land. Now, today, that's just the new normal. That's just how we all operates. >>Right? Right, Right. So I want to get your take on the other trend, which is cloud Multi Cloud, Public Cloud. You know, as I think you said, Brad, When Public Cloud first came out, there was kind of this this Russian to we're gonna throw everything in there than for for different reasons. People decided. Maybe that's not the best, the best solution. But really, it's horses for courses, right? And I think it's pretty interesting that that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're gonna put their workloads. And, oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right? It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my my initial Dev and an Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I wanna move it into my data center, and then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something. I wanna flex capability. So from from your perspective and helping customers work through this because still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multi cloud, what is hybrid cloud? And, you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through? You know, everybody talks about their journey. I think they're still, you know, kind of bumbling down, bumbling down past, trying to find new things. What works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. >>Yeah, no doubt is still early days. And you know, I e go back Thio being applications centric because, you know, being able thio understand that application. When you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like. When you when you move it over there, you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service, while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service, and some of it might still be in your data center. Those applications are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier. Those resource is wherever they are and be defined in that infrastructure is code and automation. But you know, decide from provisioning. I think we focus a lot about provisioning when we talk about automation. We also have these amazing capabilities on on the side of operations to like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability Thio gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before or at least in the, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name. Like, maybe it was something from the Hobbit. Right now you've got things coming up in spinning, spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place in that thing. You used to know what that waas Now you have toe quickly. Figure out where it went, so the observe ability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody, um, should be paying attention, attention to moving forward with. Regards, Thio when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers Or, you know, in your premise, um, breaking that in a micro services you really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, program ability in a p I s and, you know, yang models or tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many break things coming out of this, you know? And it's all like a data structure that that people who are going down this path and the definite path they're learning these data structures and be able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or a switch. Um, Amazon. You know, it doesn't matter. You're you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great, Chuck. I want to shift gears a little bit because there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about about, you know, definite really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as really more of a software software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you could put a little more color on that, Um, because clearly, as you said partners Air super important, it's your primary go to market and and Presidio's, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world. That's and you know, you said, there's some There's some, you know, nontraditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner, that suddenly you guys were playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yes, Jeff, that's exactly right. So as we've been talking to folks with Devon, it's whether it be at one of the Cisco Live events in the Definite zone or the prior definite create events will have. We'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views as a as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resale market. This what we're doing with the definite specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem share them with are extremely large, definite community so they can get access to those to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there. But they may come into into a scenario where it's working with their vertical or working with the technology piece that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint goto markets where so they could go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack that brings us to this business, outcomes of the customers are looking for a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it zits unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the Cisco definite shows you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of information sharing and, you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers Museum, I think, the last couple of years. And in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. Hope maybe, maybe for next year's event. But thank you very much for for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. >>You have a happy to be here. All >>right, Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco. Definite live coverage on the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube presenting, accelerating automation with dev net brought to you by Cisco, >>Everybody Jeffery here with the Q we're in our Palo Alto studio with ongoing coverage of Cisco dev net create we've been covering dev net create for a number of years. I think since the very first show and Susie, we and the team really built, uh, a practice built a company, built a lot of momentum around software in the Cisco ecosystem and getting devs really to start to build applications and drive kind of the whole software defined networking thing forward. And a big part of that is partners and working with partners and, and developing solutions and, you know, using brain power. That's outside of the four walls of Cisco. So we're excited to have, uh, our next guest, uh, a partner for someone is Brad Hoss. He is the engineering director for dev ops at Presidio, Brad. Great to see you. >>Hey Jeff, great to be here, >>Julie and joining him is Chuck Stickney. Chuck is the business development architect for Cisco dev net partners, and he has been driving a whole lot of partner activity for a very long period of time. Chuck, great to see you. >>Thanks Jeff. Great to be here and looking forward to this conversation. >>So let's, let's start with you Chuck, because I think, um, you know, you're leading this kind of partner effort and, and, you know, software defined, networking has been talked about for a long time and you know, it's really seems to be maturing and software defined everything right. Has been taking over, especially with, with virtualization and moving the flexibility and the customer program ability customability in software and Mo and taking some of that off the hardware. Talk about, you know, the programs that you guys are putting together and how important it is to have partners to kind of move this whole thing forward, versus just worrying about people that have Cisco badges. >>Yeah, Jeff, absolutely. So along this whole journey of dev net where we're, we're trying to leverage that customization and innovation built on top of our Cisco platforms, most of Cisco's business is transacted through partners. And what we hear from our customers and our partners is they want to, our customers want a way to be able to identify, does this partner have the capabilities and the skills necessary to help me go down this automation journey? I'm trying to do, do a new implementation. I want to automate that. How can I find a partner to, to get there? And then we have some of our partners that have been building these practices going along this step, in that journey with us for the last six years, they really want to say, Hey, how can I differentiate myself against my competitors and give an edge to my customers to show them that, yes, I have these capabilities. I've built a business practice. I have technology, I have technologists that really understand this capability and they have the double net certifications to prove it, help me be able to differentiate myself throughout our ecosystem. So that's really what our Danette partner specialization is all about. Right. >>It's great. And Brad, you're certainly one of those partners and I want to get your perspective because partners are oftentimes a little bit closer to the customer cause you've got your kind of own set of customers that you're building solutions and just reflect on, we know what happened, uh, back in March 15th, when basically everybody was told to go home and you can't go to work. So, you know, there's all the memes and social media about who, you know, who pushed forward your digital transformation, the CEO, the CMO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer is, whatever you can share some information as to what happened then, and really for your business and your customers, and then reflect now we're six months into it, six months plus, and, and you know, this new normal is going to continue for a while. How's the customer attitudes kind of changed now that they're kind of buckled down past the light switch moment and really we need to put in place some foundation to carry forward for a very long time, potentially. >>Yeah, it's really quite interesting actually, you know, when code first hit, we got a lot of requests to help with automation of provisioning, our customers and the whole digital transformation got really put on hold for a little bit there. And I'd say it became more of, of the workplace transformation. So we were quickly, uh, you know, migrating customers to, you know, new typologies where instead of the, the, you know, users sitting in those offices, they were sitting at home and we had to get them connected rapidly in, uh, we, we didn't have a lot of success there in those beginning months with, you know, using automation and programmability, um, building, you know, provisioning portals for our customers to get up and running really fast. Um, and that, that was what it looked like in those early days. And then over time, I'd say that the asks from our customers has started to transition a little bit. >>You know, now they're asking, you know, how can I take advantage of the technology to, you know, look at my offices in a different way, you know, for example, you know, how many people are coming in and out of those locations, you know, what's the usage of my conference rooms. Um, are there, uh, are there, um, situations where I can use that information? Like how many people are in the building in a, at a certain point in time and make real estate decisions on that, you know, like, do I even need this office anymore? So, so the conversations have really changed in, in, in ways that you couldn't have imagined before March. Right. >>Right. And I wonder with, with you Chuck, in terms of the Cisco point of view, I mean, the network is amazing. It had had, COVID struck five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, clearly there's a lot of industries that are suffering badly entertainment, um, restaurant, business, transportation, they, you know, hospitality, but for those of us in kind of the information industry, the switch was pretty easy. Um, you know, and, and the network enables the whole thing. And so I wonder if, you know, kind of from your perspective as, as you know, the importance of the network, the importance of security and the ability now to move to this new normal very quickly from a networking perspective. And then on top of that, having, you know, dev net with, with the software defined on top, you guys were pretty much in a good space as good as space as you could be given this new challenge thrown at you. >>Yeah, Jeff, we completely agree with that. Uh, Cisco has always pushed the idea that the network is transformational. The network is the foundation, and as our customers have really adopted that message, it is enabled that idea for the knowledge workers to be able to continue on. So, uh, for myself, I've, I've worked for home the entire time I've been at Cisco. So the last 13 years, this is, you know, the, the change to the normalcy is I never get on a plane anymore, but my day to day functions are still the same. And it's built because of the capabilities that we have with the network. I think the transition that we've seen in the industry, as far as kind of moving to that application type of economy, as we go to microservices, as we go to a higher dependency upon cloud, those things have really enabled the world really to be able to better respond to this, to this COVID situation. And I think it's helped to, to justify the investments that our customers have made, as well as what our partners have been, being able to do to deliver on that multicloud capability, to take those applications, get them closer to the end user instead of sitting in a common data center and then making it more applicable to, to users wherever they may be, not just inside of that traditional four walls. >>Right. Right. It's interesting that Brad, you, you made a comment on another interview. I was watching getting ready for this one in terms of, uh, applications now being first class citizens was, was what you said. And it's kind of interesting coming from an infrastructure point of view, where before it was, you know, what do I have and what can I build on it now, I really it's the infrastructure that responds back to the application. And even though you guys are both in the business of, of networking and infrastructure, it's still this recognition that apps first is the way to go, because that gives people a competitive advantage, that it gives them the ability to react in the marketplace and to innovate and move faster. So, you know, it's, it's a really interesting twist to be able to support an application first, by having a software defined in a more programmable infrastructure stack. >>Yeah, no doubt. And, you know, I think that the whole push to cloud was really interesting in the early days, it was like, Hey, we're going to change our applications to be cloud first. You know? And then I think the terminology changed over time, um, to more cloud native. So when we, when we look at what cloud has done over the past five years with customers moving, you know, their, their assets into the cloud in the early days that we were all looking at it just like another data center, but what it's really become is place to host >>Your applications. So when we talk about cloud migrations with our customers now, we're, we're no longer talking about the assets per se. We're talking about the applications and what, what do those applications look like? And even what defines an application right now, especially with the whole move to cloud native and microservices in the automation that helps make that all happen with infrastructure as code. You're now able to bundle the infrastructure with those applications together as a single unit. So when you define that application, as infrastructure, as code the application in the definition of what those software assets for the infrastructure are, all are wrapped together and you've got change control, version control, um, and it's all automated, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing. And I think it's something that we've all kind of hoped would happen. You know, when I look back at the early definitions of software defined networking, I think everybody was trying to figure it out and they didn't really fully understand what that meant now that we can actually define what that network infrastructure could look like as it's, as it's wrapped around that application in a code template, maybe that's Terraform or Ansible, whatever that might be, whatever method or tool that you're using to, to bring it all together. >>It's, it's, you know, it's really interesting now, I think, I think we've gotten to the point where it's starting to make a lot more sense than, you know, those early days of SDN, uh we're out, you know, it was, was it a controller or is it the new version of SNMP? You know, now it makes sense it's actually something tangible. >>Right, right. But still check, as you said, right. There's still a lot of API APIs and there's still a lot of component pieces to these applications that are all run off the network that all have to fit, uh, that have to fit together. You know, we cover PagerDuty summit and you know, their whole thing is trying to find out where the, where the problems are within the very few microseconds that you have before the customer abandoned their shopping cart or whatever the particular application. So again, the network infrastructure and the program ability super important. But I wonder if you could speak to the automation because there's just too much stuff going on for individual people to keep track of, and they shouldn't be keeping track of it because they need to be focusing on the important stuff, not this increasing amount of bandwidth and traffic going through the network. >>Yeah, absolutely. Jeff said the bandwidth that's necessary in order to support everybody working from home to support this video conference. I mean, we, we used to do this sitting face to face. Now we're doing this over the internet. The amount of people necessary to, to be able to facilitate that type of traffic. If we're doing it the way we did 10 years ago, we would not scale it's automation. That makes that possible. That allows us to look up >>The ability to do that automatic provisional provisioning. Now that we're in microservices now that everything is cloud native, we have the ability to better, to better adjust to and adapt to changes that happen with the infrastructure below hand. So if something goes wrong, we can very quickly spend something up to take that load off where, you know, traditionally it was open up a ticket. Let me get someone in there, let me fix it. Now it's instantaneously identify the solution, go to my playbook, figure out exactly what solution I need to deploy and put that out there. And the network engineering team, the infrastructure engineering team, they just simply need to get notified that this happened. And as long as there's traceability, in a point that Brad made, as far as you being able to go through here doing the automation of the documentation side of it. >>I know when I was a network engineer, one of the last things we ever did was documentation. But now that we have the API is from the infrastructure. And then the ability to tie that into other systems like an IP address management or a change control, or a trouble ticketing system, that whole idea of I made an infrastructure change. And now I can automatically do that documentation update and record. I know who did it. I know when they did it and I know what they did, and I know what the test results were even five years ago, that was fantasy land. Now, today that's just the new normal, that's just how we all operate. >>Right. Right, right. So I want to get your take on the other >>Hybrid cloud, multi cloud >>Public cloud. You know, as, as I think you said Brad, when public cloud first came out, there was kind of this, this rush into, we're going to throw everything in there then for, for, for different reasons. People decided maybe that's not the best, the best solution, but really it's horses for courses. Right. And, and I think it was pretty interesting that, that you guys are all supporting the customers that are trying to figure out where they're going to put their workloads. And Oh, by the way, that might not be a static place, right. It might be moving around based on, you know, maybe I do my initial dev and, and, and Amazon. And then when I go into production, maybe I want to move it into my data center. And then maybe I'm having a big promotion or something I want to flex capability. So from, from your perspective and helping customers work through this, cause still, there's a lot of opinions about what is multicloud, what is hybrid cloud and you know, it's horses for courses. How are you helping people navigate that? And what does having programmable infrastructure enable you to do for helping customers kind of sort through, you know, everybody talks about their journey. I think there's still kind of bumbling down, bumbling down paths, trying to find new things, what works, what doesn't work. And I think it's still really early days and trying to mesh all this stuff together. Yeah, >>Yeah. No doubt. It is still early days. And you know, I, I, I go back to it being application centric because you know, being able to understand that application, when you move to the cloud, it may not look like what it used to look like when you, when you move it over there and you may be breaking parts off of it. Some of them might be running on a platform as a service while other pieces of it are running as infrastructure as a service. And some of it might still be in your data center. Those >>Are becoming much more complex than they used to be because we're breaking them apart into different services. Those services could live all over the place. So with automation, we really gain the power of being able to combine those things. As I mentioned earlier, those resources, wherever they are, can be defined in that infrastructure as code and automation. But you know, the side from provisioning, I think we focus a lot about provisioning. When we talk about automation, we also have these amazing capabilities on, on the side of operations too. Like we've got streaming telemetry in the ability to gain insights into what's going on in ways that we didn't have before, or at least in the, in, you know, in the early days of monitoring software, right? You knew exactly what that device was, where it was. It probably had a friendly name, like maybe it was, uh, something from the Hobbit right now. >>You've got things coming up and spinning and spinning up and spinning down, moving all over the place. And that thing you used to know what that was. Now, you have to quickly figure out where it went. So the observability factor is a huge thing that I think everybody should be paying attention to attention, to moving forward with regards to when you're moving things to the cloud or even to other data centers or, you know, in your premise, I'm breaking that into microservices. You really need to understand what's going on in the, you know, programmability and API APIs and, you know, yang models are tied into streaming telemetry. Now there's just so many great things coming out of this, you know, and it's all like a data structure that, that people who are going down this path and the dev net path, they're learning these data structures and being able to rationalize and make sense of them. Once you understand that, then all of these things come together, whether it's cloud or a router or switch, um, Amazon, you know, it doesn't matter. You're, you're all speaking a common language, which is that data structure. >>That's great. Check. I want to shift gears a little bit. Cause there was something that you said in another interview when I was getting ready for this one about, about Deb, not really opening up a whole different class of partners for Cisco, um, as, as really more of a software, a software lead versus kind of the traditional networking lead. I wonder if you can put a little more color on that. Um, because clearly as you said, partners are super important. It's your primary go to market and, and Presidios, I'm sure the best partner that you have in the whole world that's and you know, you said there's some, there's some non traditional people that would not ever be a Cisco partner that suddenly you guys are playing with because of really the software lead. >>Yeah. Jeff that's exactly right. So as we've been >>Talking to folks with dev nets and whether it'd be at one of the Cisco live events in the dev net zone or at the prior dev net create events, we'll have, we'll have people come up to us who Cisco today views us as a customer because they're not in our partner ecosystem. They want to be able to deliver these capabilities to our customers, but they have no interest in being in the resell market. This, what we're doing with the dev net specialization gives us the ability to bring those partners into the ecosystem, share them with our extremely large dev net community so they can get access to those, to those potential customers. But also it allows us to do partner to partner type of integration. So Brad and Presidio, they built a fantastic networking. They always have the fantastic networking business, but they built this fantastic automation business that's there, but they may come into a con into a scenario where it's working with a vertical or working with the technology piece, that they may not have an automation practice for. We can leverage some of these software specific partners to come in there and do a joint, go to markets where, so they can go where that traditional channel partner can leverage their deep Cisco knowledge in those customer relationships that they have and bring in that software partner almost as a subcontractor to help them deliver that additional business value. On top of that traditional stack, that brings us to this business outcomes of the customers are looking for and a much faster fashion and a much more collaborative fashion. >>That's terrific. Well, again, it's a, it's, it's unfortunate that we can't be in person. I mean, the, the Cisco DevNet shows, you know, they're still small, they're still intimate. There's still a lot of, uh, information sharing and you know, great to see you. And like I said, we've been at the computers museum, I think the last couple of years and in, in San Francisco. So I look forward to a time that we can actually be together. I hope maybe, maybe for next year's event, but, uh, thank you very much for stopping by and sharing the information. Really appreciate it. Happy to be here. All right. Thanks a lot. That's Brad and Chuck. I'm Jeff. You're watching Cisco dev net live coverage on the cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners okay welcome back everyone we live in Las Vegas with a cube tech cue coverage of Dell technology world I'm Jean for @d Volante we're here in Cuba Lumley MERIS house who's the president and chief commercial officer Dell technologies great to see you again always great to be here sir so the the movie just gets better and sequels and Dell 3 into the year 3 of the acquisition I love look I love the script and we're gonna keep going you guys are access to the Game of Thrones it's not going to end it's gonna one of the themes I want to get your thoughts on first of all welcome back to look you good to see you what's going on right now give us an update Mars you've you've seen the chessboard of MMA of big firms on the private equity side you worked at HP during those days you came to Dell with Michael early on partnering on the going private and then looking at the overall plan which is now in full execution mode at the integration part of integrating it all together it's working really good mill the fairway revenues at ninety plus billion where are we right now well I'll tell you I think you and I were just discussing it a second ago scale does matter but if you can align scale with ax in your portfolio that it's so well aligned to the trends in the industry and you're representing an opportunity for a customer to select a partner like Dell technologies to help them solve their key business channel and just not just for today we're into the future and then if you can do at scale right portfolio at the velocity we're doing it's a trifecta that we love it's a that you know I recently talked to Tom Tom sweet we grew the business eleven billion dollars on an already big number just last year alone so and we're gaining sharing all of our key lines of business so the Folies aligning really well customers have been extraordinary and obviously building those big trusted relationships not just now to the but into the future that's you guys ready and you guys got a great team the ability to attract the talent has been phenomenal give you guys props on that but I keep coming back to we had a few years ago which is okay the big waves coming everyone kind of got cloud they saw the scale of Amazon great gel sign that continues to do great for AWS now it's multi cloud now IT the original consolidation of IT that you guys were going after had good growth and value creation just out of the box and now the tail winds as you mentioned so I got to ask you about this end to end this is a land grab this end to end operational consistency thing because it's a very unique it's hard to copy it's in the middle if you can continue to pull that off that's going to be a great opportunity that's gonna feed up up the stack if you will talk about the challenges and why you guys are going this end to end and the benefits the customers there's there is no doubt that the customers are getting smarter every day in understanding what workloads what applications what data sets ought to reside in which ecosystems to better serve them and to better align to their overall economic needs and desires that they want and their flexibility and agility to be able to move those workloads in that data seamlessly to best address their particular needs the beauty of what we've been able to do is integrate the VMware architecture into the public cloud ecosystems and we've got many others that are ready knocking on the door to the beat want to be part of it so now what a customer can have is that true agility that true flexibility of moving applications and data seamlessly but all control through one mechanism because at the end of the day what's going to happen is they're gonna have their day to resign on multiple different sources but they want to be able to see it they want to be able to accident they want to be able to analyze it and once you're able to analyze it regardless of where it resides and then draw the conclusions from it that's what's enables them to then create a predictive model that almost a cost to zero so on day one of the keynotes Michael said he showed the be of a video he said if you're you know bank with two trillion and assets or your two-story farmhouse we care about you know that's kind of music to your ears you obviously you're a big part of that what's different about the commercial customers and and what's going on in that base in terms of their transformation their trends and how is that different from I mean in commercial customers Lisa my and my patch I've got the biggest of the public-sector account so I've got them of all different sizes and shapes and different stages of the journey and that's what we're finding everywhere even if you're a big account small account medium account everyone is on there's digital transformation journey and there's an intersection that we can play a very big part of in and then enabling them to create a playbook as to how do I go through this journey effectively but what we're finding is when we took the overall architecture kind of or indeed tenants if you will around making sure that we have a scale out architecture model it doesn't able to have our customers adopt things and then be able to scale it out as their economic or as their business grows as an example so you can jump into having leading-edge capabilities and technology to help you drive your your company today but know that we're there with you all the way to then scale at whatever rate you want to scale at Mars I got to ask you we had Tom sweet on as you just mentioned CFO he talked about the multiple levers to create multiple levers you guys are pulling to create shareholder value which is ultimately comes from free cash flow which is happy customers great to pay down the debt that's his job margin expansion get good product development increase go to market efficiencies okay and then so philosophy supply chain go to market efficiencies this is your wheelhouse as you guys go talk to the customers and go to the market now with the sets of partnerships one of the changes that we're seeing is in IT it shifted the conversation shifted from not just cost reduction but revenue generating so with these new tailwind is creating a business model opportunity for your customers this is not the old school best in breed got great storage low cost I I've you know low cost per storage gigabyte this is about I don't want to deal with infrastructure anymore you guys handle that this is what you're going after how are you guys going to market under the new reality that customers are critical do you agree with that and how are you going to market with this new shift in the customers mindset Mike the mindset is now that change or dying if I don't drive the digital transformation within my company someone else will do it and more than likely will be a competitor so you see it having on the the uber front air B&B front you can go down the list every single one of these industries are figuring out I better Drive this aggressively and make sure that I take advantage of what's happening in the technology landscape in order to progress and grow my business to be more relevant and more differentiated so instead of IT being a let me lower my cost structure model IT is now the enabler of changing the business model the enabler of a scaling at a much faster rate to take advantage of the options and how does that change the customer selection on vendor supplier because obviously this is obviously gonna probably good for saying you know one supplier gel but that's gonna change how they evaluate procure consume and they're partnering how is that going to change their selection they they want to move more and more towards having the conversation around what do we need to do to scale our business and again create a differentiated advantage right well last thing they want to be is a systems integrator of all the different IT suppliers so when you have a partner like Dell technologies that truly does have the broadest and and and what I'd say best capabilities on the planet to then become that partner of choice for them to move them in this direction faster that's a very simple decision for them to make and how is that dynamic translating into public sector where you know there's a lot of turnover in terms of administration's you might have edicts in terms of you know multi vendor what are you seeing there but I think this is consistent we have a built a a practice what we call smart digital cities that we seeing the need everywhere at the end of the day regardless what public sector entity you go to what country you go to whatever mean it's about you go to every single one of them are thinking about how can I create more jobs how can I create build and grow the economic engine of my city my state my country and guess what they're leaning on technology to do that so everywhere we go it's a conversation about how can we drive efficiencies and productivity improvements across all the things you do and provide a greater level of service to every one of your it's constituencies through technology anything from securing the environment driving protecting our citizens to providing better health care services to providing better traffic management to providing better education and reach waste management you just go down the list every single city every single Enterprise a public sector entity around the globe is thinking about it and what's again the beautiful thing is we can come in we can bring in our overall partner ecosystem because it is a broader ecosystem that is needed in order to be able to deliver those end-to-end capabilities but very much on demand everywhere I gotta ask you about first of all is on the IT side those four public sector entities have a huge job ahead of them and they're not IT huge that staffs they need nimbleness and they need horsepower basically out of the gate and the beauty of what we are able to do is we share the best practices of what we see around the world you can imagine that a city of Dubai very progressive right clearly have the budget clearly have less restrictions on data privacy clearly have less restrictions on legacy integrations into past solutions so they can move pretty quickly with a pretty broad base view as to where they want to go so you take those ideas take those best practices and then you you showcase that to the rest of the world it's - ok what can we use what can they use - to move their agenda forward quickly I want to switch gears talk about competition I saw the Tom sweets presentation the analyst briefing around competition I didn't see any cloud vendors on their office T going multi cloud with your own cloud I see that but just in the traditional IT space the numbers are great in your and you got bigger bigger is better so HPE when smaller they thought that focus would be better for them maybe it is but now you have existing competitors from the classic IT market it's a new new ground you're going after you got Alienware here it's a gaming world you're partnering with it's a beautiful set up so that's the future of TCS so you're in all these markets what's the competitive view how did you talk about your companies for competitive strategy - what we first talked about if you if you've got scale and you have a broad broad portfolio they can address the the core trends that are emerging for the next decade or two and you can do it at speed I'd say a very nice formula and that's what we're starting to really operate at that kind of cadence with the the the strategically aligned businesses like VM were like like pivotal like secure works that are all coming together very nicely to be able to drive these transformations collectively as one portfolio where's the partner coopertition kind of thing going on because you think Cisco for instance you know you guys partner with Cisco in some level but also at the same time NSX on the VMware family side looking like us competing directly with Cisco so this is this you're going to have direct competition and then other ones that are coopertition where you're working as a partner or maybe and it's evolving so how do you guys bet to have those balance conversations it's it's been like that for decades right and there's you you've got big players in the market at the end of the day as long as you service your customer and deliver to them what they want and how they want it at the end of the day we need to collaborate to make that happen - same exact reason why we announced our partnership with Microsoft and Azure earlier this week customer draw was there they said we want you to be that single that single broker that enables me to move my my data in my application seamlessly and securely containerized to any public cloud well guess what Azure needs to be part of that equation so when the customer drives it and it's clearly aligned to their particular needs the the IT ecosystem comes together the best serve that when you have when you meet with the top customers and the top senior people what's the pitch Mario's when you go in and say hey you know here's get we're just gel technology we've got all the puzzle pieces they'll be be successful what's your pitch when you go in what's the mean message that you guys say to those customers I like for the last couple of years we've been talking about that the transformations that are happening right at the highest level it's just a digital transformation journey that people are on the work force transformation they're doing the overall IT transformation that enables that then of course how do you the whole environment on top of that they're having the conversation about okay let's go build the blueprint as to what that looks like for me as a customer and then show me how I'm gonna you're gonna deliver to me the platforms that enables me to grow and make sure that I'm making the right batch long term right I don't want a solution that's just there for today I want to make sure that I've got a solution that good that that will take me into the future and that makes me ultra competitive so when you think about it if I wanted a an app development platform that clearly needs to be cloud native in mind I need to have agile development capabilities and I need to be able the time to value needs to continue to shrink well guess what we got that with pivotal right you want to be able to now do your data management ecosystem seamlessly and and across multiple platforms clearly we have assets like Bumi that enable that to happen very very well and and then you want to virtualize your overall infrastructure layer as much as possible so you truly can scale up or scale down any of your infrastructure capabilities in order to meet the needs of that particular workload seamlessly when you have the data platform when you have the app platform when you have the virtualization platform and you have all of the infrastructure platform so well aligned to the overall trends and transformations our customers are doing it's almost a no-brainer I mean it is an IQ test that all of our customers are clearly passing and okay and what you just laid out it's probably like a ten year he's gonna play out over the next ten years and there's still a lot of invention to be required if you guys aren't doing a lot of M&A right now you know paying down the debt tom was clear on that but as an M&A person I want if we can pick your brain and I'm more familiar with the tech M&A it's where myspace but most M&A much of it anyway fails and and from your perspective why is that and why are some successful why or some not I think it is the how do you how do you when you add a new entity into the broader entity what are the synergies that you're aligning to to make sure that that new entity has the opportunity scale and grow right and that's why you have meant you have sometimes smaller deals are interesting from an IP perspective but if you don't tie it back into how are you gonna go scale to go to market to make it available to your broader set of customer base you or it gets lost in the equation that's a problem and I think what we've done is a very good job making sure that we understand how each piece of the IP portfolio comes together and is aligned to our overall approach and how we how we how we help you have the conversation with the customer that we've been able to see what we call our cross synergies of all the acquisitions we've made significantly exceed any and all of our expectations and and that's important part to do ahead of time before you make the acquisition know not just how it fits into the IP stack but how it fits into your overall go to market stack and how it fits in your overall value proposition to the customer Marcus thanks for spending the time know you're really busy coming on the cube I got to ask you one final question of this showed here Dell technology world over three days what are the three top highlights that happened to you that give a tell sign of the next 10 years with Dell technology I mean we've always said that we do what we say so I think and I've had many of analyst tell us that my god you guys consistently have delivered what you said you would deliver so the early skepticism of hey this this is a big company there's multiple cultures not sure that operationally you will execute well guess what I think it's fair to say the teams are executing and then when you see the results of taking share in every line of business you see the results where the customer satisfaction is higher than it's ever been our partner satisfaction is higher than it's ever been our partner growth is higher is the fastest-growing route to market for us all of that is just a testament that we are operating on all cylinders but what's more exciting is the yet to come part and and the fortuity so big right the market is what three and a half trillion ninety billion is a fraction of that so this is what our our team members see it's what our customers see our partners see so that momentum it's just a tsunami that's just gonna keep on growing well the cube barometer certainly showing activity to sets when we get four you know you're doing well so we're gonna keep an eye on the pulse of the cube pan and we got here Mari it's great to see you always a pleasure great insight thanks for sharing John awesome grant appeared a virus awesome thank you so much Myers house president chief commercial officer Dell technologies Friends of the cube great executive tech athlete as we say live coverage day three here the cube coverage of Delta knows we will be right back with more after the short break [Music]

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching the Cube and our continuous coverage of Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Marius Hass is here, he's the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Dell EMC. Great to see you again. >> Dave, great to see you and Stu, wonderful. >> You're lookin' good. Business is good. The commercial business is cranking. Particularly impressive in servers and networking but the whole business is just really booming. What's going on? >> We're very pleased with the progress that we're making and I think from, you look at it last year and the share gain that we'll be able to have in all the key lines of business. The transformation stories are real and enabling our customers to progress in the journeys that they're on into a digital transformation movement and to an IT transformation movement. A workforce transformation security transformation. Every one of our portfolio elements plays a role in that. And it's resonating well. We're doing, we're aligning our team members to best serve our customers. Our partner community has really stepped up and performed really well around the globe as well. So we see every region doing quite nicely. >> And just to clarify for our audience, the commercial businesses, not the top of the pyramid, it's sort of everything else. Maybe you could just quantify it. >> If you think about it, take the top 3,000 accounts around the globe, it's the top of the pyramid it's at. So everything below that, so you take all public sector, you take some federal, and then here in the US also, department of defense, we've got a big customer, NATO in Europe is an example. All commercial accounts, and then in addition to that, I also have the pleasure of hosting our channel program. So we wanted to make sure we had two amazing channel teams when we brought the company together. We wanted to have one channel team, one program, driving simplicity, driving a predictable engagement model, and obviously making it extremely profitable for our partners. So that was the objective and it's all starting to come together very nicely. >> So a channel obviously a critical component of your business. Maybe talk a little bit more about that. You brought in sort of EMC's channel piece, your channel piece. Those things evolve, I mean, every five years the whole channel business changes. The Cloud changed everything. So how have you dealt with that? How would you describe this state of your channel business? >> I think, let me start by, the first thing you want to make sure that you do is that you align every single one of your core assets, which is inclusive of our team members as well as our partner team members, towards how do we best cover the total TAM. It's a 3 1/2 billion, almost 3 1/2 trillion dollar addressable market, large account-based, well over 500,000 that we've got as named accounts around the globe. And then you can imagine all the other small, medium businesses as well. So first thing we did is ensure that we understood how do we best cover those accounts with our team members? And then how do you best augment with a complementary coverage model with our partners? And then, now that you have the ability to get more at-bats with more customers, then how do you make sure that you present the best possible plays or solutions that solve their key business problems? And being able to do all of that refining, all of that, takes a lot of time and effort. But once you've got those levers and pulling them right, you just start to see the progression and then the nice momentum that we for example see today. >> Marius, what are some of the key concerns that you're hearing from the consumer clients that you have? Is it the digital transformation that we heard in they keynote? How much is that pervasive across every company these days? >> Oh, there's no doubt, I think every customer in every industry is going through some transformation today. They're choosing Dell Technologies as a partner of choice for them. The first question is, help me assess where I am in that journey, and then how do I translate, or how do I intersect that journey with the right technology so that I can now move forward? And many a time, it starts with the conversation around, how do I become a digital company? How do I transform my applications into a native Cloud application-based model that can reside on any OS, on any Cloud, anywhere? You talked to Pat earlier today from VMware. Clearly a big push for what they're doing. That conversation is typically the first one we have. But then very quickly it translates also into well what other core infrastructure components that I need in order to be able modernize it, automate it, and then start to orchestrate service levels so that I've got the best optimized infrastructure to be able to deliver those applications and those services to my constituencies. >> So your relationship with clients since the integration has evolved. I mean when you think about Dell, the Dell brand, EMC's long-term relationships. VMware, and then the other business, RSA, Pivotal, Dell Financial Services. You bring a lot to the table. Maybe talk about how you use that as a competitive weapon. >> I think it's the ability that we have now to transform the business problem conversation into here's how you solve it with technology and here are all the components and solutions that we have. And we bring that together in a business problem solving manner. That's where, it's what we call the art of the possible. It's truly transformed the way we have a conversation with our customers. And truly puts us in a position of being a strategic partner of choice. >> And how about the cross selling, the cohort selling. How has that transpired? How much of a lift is that to your business? Maybe you could give us some color there. >> I'll give you a little bit of a sense. One of the things obviously we did during the integration planning when we still had to operate as two separate companies was, how can we dissect all the accounts that we have? How much of our, in every one of these accounts, how many of our lines of business have we sold into those accounts? So from a planning perspective, we were able to get ready for the cross sell enablement as soon as we became one company. That truly put us in a position where once the clock started ticking the teams went off and running. They knew exactly which accounts to go pursue. They knew exactly what solutions to be offering to the customers. And our team members came together very nicely. We compensated them to go bring together a single architecture strategy. So all of those pieces were all part of the planning cycle that once we were able to execute, people were running at it at a fast, fast pace. >> So that requires some leadership. We were sort of talking off camera about some of the complexities of bringing two large organizations together. EMC for years, belly-to-belly, those guys love account control. You've had your organization, and you were hit in a groove swing before the merger, so how did you address that cultural mix? >> Well I think what, the cultures were a lot more similar than people expected. I think, we've talked about this before where we put all of our cultural traits and asked every single one of our team members, I think it went out to 75,000 of our team members and said, rank these 27 cultural traits in order. And the top five were exactly the same and in exact same order. From both cultures, which was impressive. And the first thing was always about embrace the customer. So then when we then go through and said to our team members, okay, we're going to align by our customers. And then make sure that we've got an account exec, we've got a pre-sales team, we've got a specialty organization, that is all aligned towards how do we best serve this customer? And then make it a very scalable model. All of a sudden you see that engine started clicking. You start the team members starting to realize that we're going to win together, as long as we win the hearts and minds of our customers. And that was a truly a differentiator in the process. >> Marius, one of the themes in the keynote this morning Michael talked about the pace of change. I want you to address how the channel is dealing with this pace of change. Because I think about when conversion infrastructure first rolled out, as Cloud over the last 10 years has come out. It's been challenging for some of the channel to work their way through. Where they add value, where they make dollars. What are you seeing out there, and how are you helping the channel through their own transformation? >> So we're kicking off our global channel summit today, this afternoon. Joyce Mullen is our channel chief. She's going to have Michael on stage. Willie Scannell and myself will be there with her as well. You see over 60% of what we call our metal partners, so these are titanium and so forth, grew well into the double-digits with us. So these are the majority of our partners that have understood how to embrace a solution orientation with our full portfolio. They're selling more lines of business, we added and re-activated 54,000 customers just this past year alone. That's a big number. And so, what they're finding is, again, embracing the transformations, embracing the portfolio, and becoming a lot more relevant to the customer journey. And we've seen nothing but success so far. So we've been very, very happy. >> So you have to position yourself with a channel obviously as relevant, and then of course at the end of the day, they care about margin, they care about things like deal registration. How complicated was it to bring those two different systems together? And it seems like you've done it pretty quickly but. >> We've done a good job, and we had plenty of time to get ready for it too. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Now as systems go, you know that it's never perfect. Right, so there was still opportunities for us to improve the deal registration process. We got well over 70% of the inquiries coming in are getting approved right away. And then you've still got to work long tail of the 30%. And how do you try to do that in a frictionless manner as quickly as possible? We've got SLAs that we've deployed for every one of our partners, so they know exactly how long it'll take to get a deal reg done, and some instances it's automatic where they've got lined-up business encompassing for example. So trying to put as many rules into the process to make sure that we have a very efficient, effective engine. Now we're still in the process of consolidating all our quoting and config engines site. I think you're familiarized with the EMC engine was an SAP-based model, the Dell core engine is an Oracle-based model. Well, bringing those configurations engines together isn't something that you do overnight. So what can we do to mask some of that complexity to our partners? By giving them an SLA that truly enables them to compete effectively across the globe. And we get better, and better, and better at it. To the point that our partners are feeling, obviously able to grow, obviously be in a position to be extremely competitive with us. >> So I'm guessing you masked that with people in process, right? >> Some of that, yes, and we continue to invest significantly in our IT infrastructure to continue to improve that. >> Right, right, okay so, what's going on this show? You talked about the partner summit. What else should we know about? >> Well, obviously you heard Michael's keynote. He was signaling some of the new technology announcements that will be made tomorrow. Jeff Clarke is going to have an amazing keynote and he's going to launch a number of new products, new solutions, new updates. Basically across the whole portfolio. Pay close attention. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up Jeff Clarke because he's not been shy about talking about simplifying, I mean you've done very well despite the fact that storage business is not held up to expectations. So you got some upside there. Jeff has come in and said we're going to simplify this. And so that could potentially add fuel to the fire in the next 12 months. >> And he'll certainly help for sure. And it's all about how do we simplify? How do we streamline? How do we accelerate the pace of innovation? How do we create a more consistent management orchestration layer across all of our storage assets is an example. And he is marching down that path at a feverous pace. So we're extremely excited about all of the things that are going to really enable us in sales and make us to present an even better portfolio to our customers. But, look, in the fourth quarter we grew storage. We've seen that same momentum continuing in the first quarter. So we're feeling pretty bullish about where we're heading. And we're pretty bold in our communications to our channel partners. Say hey, this ought to be a refuse to lose it approach. We're number one in storage today. Our customers have voted to have us as part of their solution. So, let's make sure that we embrace 'em. Let's make sure we bring 'em the best technology possible. >> Marius, one of the things people on the outside often don't notice some of the big changes that happen inside a company. We remember back when you joined Dell, gone through the whole privatization, we've had this huge merger. How is Dell different today than it was when you joined just a few years back? >> Can you believe it? It's been six years ago. I think that's when we probably first met, right? And it's again the, the magnitude shift, and what this portfolio can now do for our customers. It's mind-boggling. It's just unimaginable six years ago. Yes, we had great technology on the client side. We were making great strides on the compute side. We were starting to make hay in the networking side. Starting to progress on the storage side. And we've just now completely changed the industry landscape. Where I don't have a conversation today with a customer where there isn't an opportunity that they want to engage with. Not a single customer says I'm not interested in working with Dell Technologies. It just doesn't exist. So I think the stat is 99% of our Fortune 500 customers are Dell customers. Dell Technologies' customers. >> Well, it's hard not to bump into Dell when you walk into an account. I mean it's virtually impossible in some way, shape, or form. >> Marius: That's a good thing right? >> That's true. >> Yes. >> When your customers, particularly in the commercial area, go home, and they write up their trip report, what are their takeaways? What do you want them to take away from this event? >> I'd say it's a place your bets on Dell Technologies. That's the right partner for you. It's going to move you and your company into being future-ready all the time. Michael's got the right vision of where this is going. He's got the right technology to do it. And we've got great team members to help you get there. >> Marius, you look great, you got a winning spring in your steps. >> Love it. >> So congratulations. I know there's a lot more to go. You're not done yet, and we'll be watching. So thanks so much coming-- >> There's always more to do. Dave, Stu, awesome. >> Great to see you again. All right, you're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we will be back, right after this short break. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a Cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. And we're going to be digging into P4, which is, the programming protocol independent packet processors. And to help me with that, first time guest on the program, Mario Baldi, he is a distinguished technologist with Pensando. Mario, so nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting. >> Alright, so Mario, you have you have a very, you know, robust technical career, lot of patents, you've worked on, you know, many technologies, you know, deep in the networking and developer world, but give our audience a little bit of your background and what brought you to Pensando. >> Yeah, yes, absolutely. So I started my my professional life in academia, actually, I worked for many years in academia, about 15 years exclusively in academia, and I was focusing both my teaching in research on computer networking. And then I also worked in a number of startups and established companies, in the last about eight years almost exclusively in the industry. And before joining Pensando, I worked for a couple of years at Cisco on a P4 programmable switch and that's where I got in touch with P4 actually. For the occasion I wore a T shirt of one of the P4 workshops. Which reminds me a bit of those people when you ask them, whether they do any sports, they tell you they have a membership at the gym. So I don't just have membership, I didn't just show up at the workshop. I've really been involved in the community and so when I learned what pensando was doing, I immediately got very excited that the ASIC that Pensando has developed these is really extremely powerful and flexible because it's fully programmable, partly programmable, with P4 partly programmable differently. And Pensando is starting to deploy these ASIC at the edge and Haas. And I think such a powerful and flexible device, at the edge of the network really opens incredible opportunities to, on the one hand implement what we have been doing in a different way, on the other hand, implement completely different solution. So, you know, I've been working most of my career in innovation, and when when I saw these, I immediately got very excited and I realized that Pensando was really the right place for me to be. >> Excellent. Yeah, interesting, you know, many people in the industry, they talk about innovation coming out of the universities, you know, Stanford often gets mentioned, but the university that you, you know, attended and also were associate professor at in Italy, a lot of the networking team, your MPLS, you know, team at Pensando, many of them came from them. Silvano guy, you know, written many books, they're, you know, very storied career in that environment. P4, maybe step back for a second, you know, you're you're deep in this group, help us understand what that is, how long it's been around, you know, and who participates in it with P4? >> Yeah, yeah. So as you were saying before, one of the few P4 from whom I've heard saying it, because everyone calls it P4 and nobody says what it really means. So programming protocol, independent packet processor. So it's a programming language for packet processors. And it's protocol independent. So it doesn't start from assuming that we want to use certain protocols. So P4 first of all allows you to specify what packets look like. So what the headers look like, and how they can be parsed. And secondly, because P4 is specifically designed for packet processing, and it's based on the idea that you want to look up values in tables. So it allows you to define tables, in keys that are being used to look up those tables and find an entry in the table. And when you find an entry, that entry contains an action and parameters to be used for that action. So the idea is that the package descriptions that you have in the program, define how the package should be processed. Header fields should be parsed, values extracted from them, and those values are being used as keys to look up into tables. And when the appropriate entry in the table is found, an action is executed and that action is going to modify those header fields, and these happens a number of times, the program specifies a sequence of tables that are being looked up, header fields being modified. In the end, those modified header fields are used to construct new packets that are being sent out of the device. So this is the basic idea of a P4 program. You specify a bunch of tables that are being looked up using values extracted from packets. So this is very powerful for a number of reasons. So first of all, its input, which is always good as we know, especially in networking, and then it maps very well on what we need to do, when we do packet processing. So writing a packet processing program, is relatively easy and fast. Could be difficult to write a generic programming in P4, you could not, but the packet processing program, it's easy to write. And last but not least, P4 really maps well on hardware that was designed specifically to process packet. What we call domain specific processes, right. And those processes are, in fact designed to quickly look up tables that might have decamping side, they might have processes that are specialized in performing, in building keys and performing table lookup, and modifying those header fields. So when you have those processors that are usually organized in pipelines to achieve a good throughput, then you can very efficiently take a P4 program and compile it to execute it very high speed on those processors. And this way, you get the same performance of a fixed function ASIC, but it's fully programmable, nothing is fixed. Which means that you can develop your features much faster, you can add features and fix bugs, you know, with a very short cycle, not with a four or five year cycle of baking a new ASIC. And this is extremely powerful. This is the strong value proposition of P4. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that that resonates Mario, you know, I used to do presentations about the networking industry and you would draw timelines out there in decades. Because from the standard to get deployed for, you know, the the hardware to get baked, the customers to do the adoption, things take a really long time. You brought up, you know, edge computing, obviously, you know, we are, you know, it is really exciting, but it is changing really fast, and there's a lot of different, you know, capabilities out there. So if you could help us, you know, connect the dots between what P4 does and what the customers need. You know, we talked about multi-cloud and edge. What is it that you know, P4 in general, and what Pensando is doing with P4 specifically, enables this next generation architecture? >> Yeah, sure. So, Pensando has developed these card, which we call DSC distribute services card, that is built around an ASIC, that has a very very versatile architecture. It's a fully programmable. And it's fully programmable it's various levers, and one of them is in fact P4. Now this card and has a PCIE interface. So it can be installed in horse. And by the way, this is not the only way this powerful as you can be deployed. It's the first way Pensando has decided to use it. And so we have this card, it can be plugged into a host, it has two network interfaces. So it can be used as a network adapter. But in reality, because the card is fully programmable and it has several processors inside, it can be used to implement very sophisticated services. Things that you wouldn't even dream of doing with the typical network adapter, with a typical NIC. So in particular, this card, this ASIC contains a sizable amount of memory. Right now we have two sizes four, an eight gig but we are going to have versions of the card with even larger memory. Then it has some specialized hardware for specific functions like cryptographic functions, compression, computation of CRCs and if sophisticated queueing system with packet buffer with the queuing system to end the packets that have to go out to the interfaces or coming from the interfaces. Then it is several types of processors. It has generic processors, specifically arms, arm processors that can be programmed with general purpose languages. And then a set of processors that are specific for packet processing that are organized in a pipeline. In those, idea to be programmed with P4. We can very easily map a P4 program, on those pipeline of processor. So that's where Pensando is leveraging P4, is the language for programming those processes that allow us to process packets at the line rate of our 200 gigabit interfaces that we have in the card. >> Great. So Mario, what about from a customer viewpoint? Do they need to understand you know, how to program in P4, is this transparent to them? What's the customer interaction with it? >> Oh yeah, not at all. The Pensando platform, Pensando is offering a platform that is a completely turnkey solution. Basically the platform, first of all, the platform has a controller with which the user interacts, the user can configure policies on this controller. So using an intent based paradigm, the user defines policies that the controller is going to push those policies to the cards. So in your data center in your horse, in your data center, you can deploy thousands of those cards. Those cards implement distributed services. Let's say, just to give a very simple example, a distributed stateful firewall implemented on the all of those cards. The user writes a security policy, says this particular application can talk to these other particular application, and then translate it into configuration for those cards. It's transparently deployed on the cards that start in force the policies. So the user can use this system at this very high level. However, if the user has more specific needs, then the system, the platform offers several interfaces and several API's to program the platform through those interfaces. So the one at the highest level, is a REST API to the controller. So if the customer has an orchestrator, they can use that orchestrator to automatically send policies to the controller. Or if a customer already have their own controller, they can interact directly with the DSCs with the cards on the horse, with another API's that's fully open, is based on GRPC. And in this way, they can control the cards directly. If they need something even more specific, if they need a functionality that Pensando doesn't offer on those card, hasn't already ever written software for the cards, then customers can program the card, and the first level at which they can program it is the ARM processors. We have ARM processors, those are running in version of Linux, so customers can program it by writing C-code or Python. But if they have very specific needs, like when they write a software for the ARM processor, they can leverage the P4 code that we have already written for the card for those specialized packet processors. So they can leverage all of the protocols that our P4 program is already supported. And by the way because that's software, they can pick and choose in a Manga library of many different protocols and features we support, and decide to deploy them and then integrate them in their software running on the ARM processor. However, if they want to add their own proprietary protocols, if they want, if they need to execute some functionalities at very high performance, then they that's when they can write P4 code. And even in that case, we are going to make it very simple for them. Because they don't have to write everything from scratch. They don't have to worry about how to process AP packets, how to terminate TCP, we have to solve the P4 code for them. They can focus just on their own feature. And we are going to give them a development environment that allows them to focus on their own little feature and integrate it with the rest of our P4 program. Which by the way, is something that P4 is not designed for. P4 is not designed for having different programmers, write different pieces of the program and put them together. But we have the means to enable this. >> Okay, interesting. So, you know, maybe bring us inside a little bit, you know the P4 community, you're very active in it, when I look online, there's a large language consortium, many of, you know, all the hardware and software companies that I would expect in the networking space are on that list. So what's Pensando's participation in the community? And you were just teasing through, you know, what does P4 do and then what does Pensando, maybe enable, you know, above and beyond what, you know, P4 just does on its own? >> Yeah, so yes Pensando is very much involved in the community. There has been recently an event, online event that substituted the yearly P4 workshop. It was called the P4 expert round-table series. And Pensando had very strong participation. our CTO, Vipin Jain, had the keynote speech. Talking about how P4 can be extended beyond packet processing. P4, we said, has been designed for packet processing, but today, there are many applications that require message processing, which is more sophisticated then. And he gave a speech on how we can go towards that direction. Then we had a talk that was resulting from a submission that was reviewed and accepted on in fact, the architecture of our ASIC, and how it can be used to implement many interesting use cases. And finally, we participated into a panel in which we discussed how to use P4 in mix-ins Martin at the edge of the network. And there we argued with some use cases and example and code, how before it needs to be extended a little bit because NICs have different needs and open up different opportunities rather than switches. Now P4 was never really meant only for switches. But if we looked at what happened, the community has worked mostly on switches. For example it is defined that what is called the PSA, portable switch architecture. And we see that the NICs have an edge devices, have a little bit different requirements. So, one of the things we are doing within the communities working within one of the working groups, is called the architecture work group. And they are working in there to create the definition of a PNA, Portable NIC Architecture. Now, we didn't start this activity, this activity has started already in 2018. But it did slow down significantly, mostly because there wasn't so much of a push. So now Pensando coming on the market with this new architecture really gave new life to this activity. And we are contributing, actively we have proposed a candidate for a new architecture which has been discussed within the community. And, you know, just to give you an example, why do we need a new architecture? Because if you think of the switch, there are several reasons but one, it's very intuitive. If you think of a switch, you have packets coming in, they've been processed and packets go out. As we said before, there's the PMA then sorry, PSA architecture is meant for these kinds of operation. If you think of a NIC, it's a little bit different because yes, you have packets coming in, and yes, if you have multiple interfaces like our card, you might take those packets and send them out. But most likely what you want to do, you want to process those packets, and then not give the packets to the host. Otherwise the host CPU will have to process them again, to pass them again. You want to give some artifacts to the host, some pre-processed information. So you want to, I don't know take those packets for example, assemble many TCP messages and provide a stream of bytes coming out of this TCP connection. Now, these requires a completely different architecture, packets come in, something else goes out. And goes out, for example, through a PCI bus. So, you need the some different architecture and then you will need in the P4 language, different constructs to deal with the fact that you are modifying memory, you are moving data from the card to the host and vice versa. So again, back to your question, how are we involved in the workgroups? We are involved in the architecture workgroup right now to define the PNA, the Portable NIC Architecture. And also, I believe in the future we will be involved in the language group to propose some extensions to the language. >> Excellent. Well, Mario, thank you so much for giving us a deep dive into P4, where it is and you know some of the potential futures for where it will go in the future. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watching the Cube. (gentle music)

>>Yeah, it's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020 Brought to You by vertical. >>Welcome back, everybody. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching the Cube's coverage of the verdict of Virtual Big Data conference. The Cube has been at every BTC, and it's our pleasure in these difficult times to be covering BBC as a virtual event. This digital program really excited to have Joy King joining us. Joy is the vice president of product and go to market strategy in particular. And if that weren't enough, he also runs marketing and education curve for him. So, Joe, you're a multi tool players. You've got the technical side and the marketing gene, So welcome to the Cube. You're always a great guest. Love to have you on. >>Thank you so much, David. The pleasure, it really is. >>So I want to get in. You know, we'll have some time. We've been talking about the conference and the virtual event, but I really want to dig in to the product stuff. It's a big day for you guys. You announced 10.0. But before we get into the announcements, step back a little bit you know, you guys are riding the waves. I've said to ah, number of our guests that that brick has always been good. It riding the wave not only the initial MPP, but you you embraced, embraced HD fs. You embrace data science and analytics and in the cloud. So one of the trends that you see the big waves that you're writing >>Well, you're absolutely right, Dave. I mean, what what I think is most interesting and important is because verdict is, at its core a true engineering culture founded by, well, a pretty famous guy, right, Dr Stone Breaker, who embedded that very technical vertical engineering culture. It means that we don't pretend to know everything that's coming, but we are committed to embracing the tech. An ology trends, the innovations, things like that. We don't pretend to know it all. We just do it all. So right now, I think I see three big imminent trends that we are addressing. And matters had we have been for a while, but that are particularly relevant right now. The first is a combination of, I guess, a disappointment in what Hadoop was able to deliver. I always feel a little guilty because she's a very reasonably capable elephant. She was designed to be HD fs highly distributed file store, but she cant be an entire zoo, so there's a lot of disappointment in the market, but a lot of data. In HD FM, you combine that with some of the well, not some the explosion of cloud object storage. You're talking about even more data, but even more data silos. So data growth and and data silos is Trend one. Then what I would say Trend, too, is the cloud Reality Cloud brings so many events. There are so many opportunities that public cloud computing delivers. But I think we've learned enough now to know that there's also some reality. The cloud providers themselves. Dave. Don't talk about it well, because not, is it more agile? Can you do things without having to manage your own data center? Of course you can. That the reality is it's a little more pricey than we expected. There are some security and privacy concerns. There's some workloads that can go to the cloud, so hybrid and also multi cloud deployments are the next trend that are mandatory. And then maybe the one that is the most exciting in terms of changing the world we could use. A little change right now is operationalize in machine learning. There's so much potential in the technology, but it's somehow has been stuck for the most part in science projects and data science lab, and the time is now to operationalize it. Those are the three big trends that vertical is focusing on right now. >>That's great. I wonder if I could ask you a couple questions about that. I mean, I like you have a soft spot in my heart for the and the thing about the Hadoop that that was, I think, profound was it got people thinking about, you know, bringing compute to the data and leaving data in place, and it really got people thinking about data driven cultures. It didn't solve all the problems, but it collected a lot of data that we can now take your third trend and apply machine intelligence on top of that data. And then the cloud is really the ability to scale, and it gives you that agility and that it's not really that cloud experience. It's not not just the cloud itself, it's bringing the cloud experience to wherever the data lives. And I think that's what I'm hearing from you. Those are the three big super powers of innovation today. >>That's exactly right. So, you know, I have to say I think we all know that Data Analytics machine learning none of that delivers real value unless the volume of data is there to be able to truly predict and influence the future. So the last 7 to 10 years has been correctly about collecting the data, getting the data into a common location, and H DFS was well designed for that. But we live in a capitalist world, and some companies stepped in and tried to make HD Fs and the broader Hadoop ecosystem be the single solution to big data. It's not true. So now that the key is, how do we take advantage of all of that data? And now that's exactly what verdict is focusing on. So as you know, we began our journey with vertical back in the day in 2007 with our first release, and we saw the growth of the dupe. So we announced many years ago verdict a sequel on that. The idea to be able to deploy vertical on Hadoop nodes and query the data in Hadoop. We wanted to help. Now with Verdict A 10. We are also introducing vertical in eon mode, and we can talk more about that. But Verdict and Ian Mode for HDs, This is a way to apply it and see sequel database management platform to H DFS infrastructure and data in each DFS file storage. And that is a great way to leverage the investment that so many companies have made in HD Fs. And I think it's fair to the elephant to treat >>her well. Okay, let's get into the hard news and auto. Um, she's got, but you got a mature stack, but one of the highlights of append auto. And then we can drill into some of the technologies >>Absolutely so in well in 2018 vertical announced vertical in Deon mode is the separation of compute from storage. Now this is a great example of vertical embracing innovation. Vertical was designed for on premises, data centers and bare metal servers, tightly coupled storage de l three eighties from Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Dell, etcetera. But we saw that cloud computing was changing fundamentally data center architectures, and it made sense to separate compute from storage. So you add compute when you need compute. You add storage when you need storage. That's exactly what the cloud's introduced, but it was only available on the club. So first thing we did was architect vertical and EON mode, which is not a new product. Eight. This is really important. It's a deployment option. And in 2018 our customers had the opportunity to deploy their vertical licenses in EON mode on AWS in September of 2019. We then broke an important record. We brought cloud architecture down to earth and we announced vertical in eon mode so vertical with communal or shared storage, leveraging pure storage flash blade that gave us all the advantages of separating compute from storage. All of the workload, isolation, the scale up scale down the ability to manage clusters. And we did that with on Premise Data Center. And now, with vertical 10 we are announcing verdict in eon mode on HD fs and vertically on mode on Google Cloud. So what we've got here, in summary, is vertical Andy on mode, multi cloud and multiple on premise data that storage, and that gives us the opportunity to help our customers both with the hybrid and multi cloud strategies they have and unifying their data silos. But America 10 goes farther. >>Well, let me stop you there, because I just wanna I want to mention So we talked to Joe Gonzalez and past Mutual, who essentially, he was brought in. And one of this task was the lead into eon mode. Why? Because I'm asking. You still had three separate data silos and they wanted to bring those together. They're investing heavily in technology. Joe is an expert, though that really put data at their core and beyond Mode was a key part of that because they're using S three and s o. So that was Ah, very important step for those guys carry on. What else do we need to know about? >>So one of the reasons, for example, that Mass Mutual is so excited about John Mode is because of the operational advantages. You think about exactly what Joe told you about multiple clusters serving must multiple use cases and maybe multiple divisions. And look, let's be clear. Marketing doesn't always get along with finance and finance doesn't necessarily get along with up, and I t is often caught the middle. Erica and Dion mode allows workload, isolation, meaning allocating the compute resource is that different use cases need without allowing them to interfere with other use cases and allowing everybody to access the data. So it's a great way to bring the corporate world together but still protect them from each other. And that's one of the things that Mass Mutual is going to benefit from, as well, so many of >>our other customers I also want to mention. So when I saw you, ah, last last year at the Pure Storage Accelerate conference just today we are the only company that separates you from storage that that runs on Prem and in the cloud. And I was like I had to think about it. I've researched. I still can't find anybody anybody else who doesn't know. I want to mention you beat actually a number of the cloud players with that capability. So good job and I think is a differentiator, assuming that you're giving me that cloud experience and the licensing and the pricing capability. So I want to talk about that a little >>bit. Well, you're absolutely right. So let's be clear. There is no question that the public cloud public clouds introduced the separation of compute storage and these advantages that they do not have the ability or the interest to replicate that on premise for vertical. We were born to be software only. We make no money on underlying infrastructure. We don't charge as a package for the hardware underneath, so we are totally motivated to be independent of that and also to continuously optimize the software to be as efficient as possible. And we do the exact same thing to your question about life. Cloud providers charge for note indignance. That's how they charge for their underlying infrastructure. Well, in some cases, if you're being, if you're talking about a use case where you have a whole lot of data, but you don't necessarily have a lot of compute for that workload, it may make sense to pay her note. Then it's unlimited data. But what if you have a huge compute need on a relatively small data set that's not so good? Vertical offers per node and four terabyte for our customers, depending on their use case, we also offer perpetual licenses for customers who want capital. But we also offer subscription for companies that they Nope, I have to have opt in. And while this can certainly cause some complexity for our field organization, we know that it's all about choice, that everybody in today's world wants it personalized just for me. And that's exactly what we're doing with our pricing in life. >>So just to clarify, you're saying I can pay by the drink if I want to. You're not going to force me necessarily into a term or Aiken choose to have, you know, more predictable pricing. Is that, Is that correct? >>Well, so it's partially correct. The first verdict, a subscription licensing is a fixed amount for the period of the subscription. We do that so many of our customers cannot, and I'm one of them, by the way, cannot tell finance what the budgets forecast is going to be for the quarter after I spent you say what it's gonna be before, So our subscription facing is a fixed amount for a period of time. However, we do respect the fact that some companies do want usage based pricing. So on AWS, you can use verdict up by the hour and you pay by the hour. We are about to launch the very same thing on Google Cloud. So for us, it's about what do you need? And we make it happen natively directly with us or through AWS and Google Cloud. >>So I want to send so the the fixed isn't some floor. And then if you want a surge above that, you can allow usage pricing. If you're on the cloud, correct. >>Well, you actually license your cluster vertical by the hour on AWS and you run your cluster there. Or you can buy a license from vertical or a fixed capacity or a fixed number of nodes and deploy it on the cloud. And then, if you want to add more nodes or add more capacity, you can. It's not usage based for the license that you bring to the cloud. But if you purchase through the cloud provider, it is usage. >>Yeah, okay. And you guys are in the marketplace. Is that right? So, again, if I want up X, I can do that. I can choose to do that. >>That's awesome. Next usage through the AWS marketplace or yeah, directly from vertical >>because every small business who then goes to a salesforce management system knows this. Okay, great. I can pay by the month. Well, yeah, Well, not really. Here's our three year term in it, right? And it's very frustrating. >>Well, and even in the public cloud you can pay for by the hour by the minute or whatever, but it becomes pretty obvious that you're better off if you have reserved instance types or committed amounts in that by vertical offers subscription. That says, Hey, you want to have 100 terabytes for the next year? Here's what it will cost you. We do interval billing. You want to do monthly orderly bi annual will do that. But we won't charge you for usage that you didn't even know you were using until after you get the bill. And frankly, that's something my finance team does not like. >>Yeah, I think you know, I know this is kind of a wonky discussion, but so many people gloss over the licensing and the pricing, and I think my take away here is Optionality. You know, pricing your way of That's great. Thank you for that clarification. Okay, so you got Google Cloud? I want to talk about storage. Optionality. If I found him up, I got history. I got I'm presuming Google now of you you're pure >>is an s three compatible storage yet So your story >>Google object store >>like Google object store Amazon s three object store HD fs pure storage flash blade, which is an object store on prim. And we are continuing on this theft because ultimately we know that our customers need the option of having next generation data center architecture, which is sort of shared or communal storage. So all the data is in one place. Workloads can be managed independently on that data, and that's exactly what we're doing. But what we already have in two public clouds and to on premise deployment options today. And as you said, I did challenge you back when we saw each other at the conference. Today, vertical is the only analytic data warehouse platform that offers that option on premise and in multiple public clouds. >>Okay, let's talk about the ah, go back through the innovation cocktail. I'll call it So it's It's the data applying machine intelligence to that data. And we've talked about scaling at Cloud and some of the other advantages of Let's Talk About the Machine Intelligence, the machine learning piece of it. What's your story there? Give us any updates on your embracing of tooling and and the like. >>Well, quite a few years ago, we began building some in database native in database machine learning algorithms into vertical, and the reason we did that was we knew that the architecture of MPP Columbia execution would dramatically improve performance. We also knew that a lot of people speak sequel, but at the time, not so many people spoke R or even Python. And so what if we could give act us to machine learning in the database via sequel and deliver that kind of performance? So that's the journey we started out. And then we realized that actually, machine learning is a lot more as everybody knows and just algorithms. So we then built in the full end to end machine learning functions from data preparation to model training, model scoring and evaluation all the way through to fold the point and all of this again sequel accessible. You speak sequel. You speak to the data and the other advantage of this approach was we realized that accuracy was compromised if you down sample. If you moved a portion of the data from a database to a specialty machine learning platform, you you were challenged by accuracy and also what the industry is calling replica ability. And that means if a model makes a decision like, let's say, credit scoring and that decision isn't anyway challenged, well, you have to be able to replicate it to prove that you made the decision correctly. And there was a bit of, ah, you know, blow up in the media not too long ago about a credit scoring decision that appeared to be gender bias. But unfortunately, because the model could not be replicated, there was no way to this Prove that, and that was not a good thing. So all of this is built in a vertical, and with vertical 10. We've taken the next step, just like with with Hadoop. We know that innovation happens within vertical, but also outside of vertical. We saw that data scientists really love their preferred language. Like python, they love their tools and platforms like tensor flow with vertical 10. We now integrate even more with python, which we have for a while, but we also integrate with tensorflow integration and PM ML. What does that mean? It means that if you build and train a model external to vertical, using the machine learning platform that you like, you can import that model into a vertical and run it on the full end to end process. But run it on all the data. No more accuracy challenges MPP Kilometer execution. So it's blazing fast. And if somebody wants to know why a model made a decision, you can replicate that model, and you can explain why those are very powerful. And it's also another cultural unification. Dave. It unifies the business analyst community who speak sequel with the data scientist community who love their tools like Tensorflow and Python. >>Well, I think joy. That's important because so much of machine intelligence and ai there's a black box problem. You can't replicate the model. Then you do run into a potential gender bias. In the example that you're talking about there in their many you know, let's say an individual is very wealthy. He goes for a mortgage and his wife goes for some credit she gets rejected. He gets accepted this to say it's the same household, but the bias in the model that may be gender bias that could be race bias. And so being able to replicate that in and open up and make the the machine intelligence transparent is very, very important, >>It really is. And that replica ability as well as accuracy. It's critical because if you're down sampling and you're running models on different sets of data, things can get confusing. And yet you don't really have a choice. Because if you're talking about petabytes of data and you need to export that data to a machine learning platform and then try to put it back and get the next at the next day, you're looking at way too much time doing it in the database or training the model and then importing it into the database for production. That's what vertical allows, and our customers are. So it right they reopens. Of course, you know, they are the ones that are sort of the Trailblazers they've always been, and ah, this is the next step. In blazing the ML >>thrill joint customers want analytics. They want functional analytics full function. Analytics. What are they pushing you for now? What are you delivering? What's your thought on that? >>Well, I would say the number one thing that our customers are demanding right now is deployment. Flexibility. What? What the what the CEO or the CFO mandated six months ago? Now shout Whatever that thou shalt is is different. And they would, I tell them is it is impossible. No, what you're going to be commanded to do or what options you might have in the future. The key is not having to choose, and they are very, very committed to that. We have a large telco customer who is multi cloud as their commit. Why multi cloud? Well, because they see innovation available in different public clouds. They want to take advantage of all of them. They also, admittedly, the that there's the risk of lock it right. Like any vendor, they don't want that either, so they want multi cloud. We have other customers who say we have some workloads that make sense for the cloud and some that we absolutely cannot in the cloud. But we want a unified analytics strategy, so they are adamant in focusing on deployment flexibility. That's what I'd say is 1st 2nd I would say that the interest in operationalize in machine learning but not necessarily forcing the analytics team to hammer the data science team about which tools or the best tools. That's the probably number two. And then I'd say Number three. And it's because when you look at companies like Uber or the Trade Desk or A T and T or Cerner performance at scale, when they say milliseconds, they think that flow. When they say petabytes, they're like, Yeah, that was yesterday. So performance at scale good enough for vertical is never good enough. And it's why we're constantly building at the core the next generation execution engine, database designer, optimization engine, all that stuff >>I wanna also ask you. When I first started following vertical, we covered the cube covering the BBC. One of things I noticed was in talking to customers and people in the community is that you have a community edition, uh, free addition, and it's not neutered ais that have you maintain that that ethos, you know, through the transitions into into micro focus. And can you talk about that a little bit >>absolutely vertical community edition is vertical. It's all of the verdict of functionality geospatial time series, pattern matching, machine learning, all of the verdict, vertical neon mode, vertical and enterprise mode. All vertical is the community edition. The only limitation is one terabyte of data and three notes, and it's free now. If you want commercial support, where you can file a support ticket and and things like that, you do have to buy the life. But it's free, and we people say, Well, free for how long? Like our field? I've asked that and I say forever and what he said, What do you mean forever? Because we want people to use vertical for use cases that are small. They want to learn that they want to try, and we see no reason to limit that. And what we look for is when they're ready to grow when they need the next set of data that goes beyond a terabyte or they need more compute than three notes, then we're here for them, and it also brings up an important thing that I should remind you or tell you about Davis. You haven't heard it, and that's about the Vertical Academy Academy that vertical dot com well, what is that? That is, well, self paced on demand as well as vertical essential certification. Training and certification means you have seven days with your hands on a vertical cluster hosted in the cloud to go through all the certification. And guess what? All of that is free. Why why would you give it for free? Because for us empowering the market, giving the market the expert East, the learning they need to take advantage of vertical, just like with Community Edition is fundamental to our mission because we see the advantage that vertical can bring. And we want to make it possible for every company all around the world that take advantage >>of it. I love that ethos of vertical. I mean, obviously great product. But it's not just the product. It's the business practices and really progressive progressive pricing and embracing of all these trends and not running away from the waves but really leaning in joy. Thanks so much. Great interview really appreciate it. And, ah, I wished we could have been faced face in Boston, but I think it's prudent thing to do, >>I promise you, Dave we will, because the verdict of BTC and 2021 is already booked. So I will see you there. >>Haas enjoyed King. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. And thank you for watching. Remember, the Cube is running this program in conjunction with the virtual vertical BDC goto vertical dot com slash BBC 2020 for all the coverage and keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante with the Cube. We'll be right back. >>Yeah, >>yeah, yeah.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back. Everyone's cubes. Live coverage. Day three wrap up of Del Technologies World twenty nineteen Java is Dave a lot. There's too many men on set one. We get set to over there blue set, White said. We got a lot of content. It's been a cube can, in guise of a canon of content firing into the digital sphere. Great gas. We had all the senior executive players Tech athletes. Adele Technology World. Michael Dell, Tom Sweet, Marius Haas, Howard Ally As we've had Pat Kelsey, rco v M were on the key partner in the family. They're of del technology world and we had the clients guys on who do alien where, as well as the laptops and the power machines. Um, we've had the power edge guys on. We talked about Hollywood. It's been a great run, but Dave, it's been ten years Stew. Remember, the first cube event we ever went to was DMC World in Boston. The chowder there he had and that was it wasn't slogan of of the show turning to the private cloud. Yeah, I think that was this Logan cheering to the private cloud that was twenty ten. >> Well, in twenty ten, it was Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud Cloud twenty nineteen. It's all cloud now. That difference is back then it was like fake cloud and made up cloud and really was no substance to it. We really started to see stew, especially something that we've been talking about for years, which is substantially mimicking the public cloud on Prem. Now I know there are those who would say No, no, no, no, no. And Jessie. Probably in one of those that's not cloud. So there's still that dichotomy is a cloud. >> Well, Dave, if I could jump in on that one of the things that's really interesting is when Veum, where made that partnership with a ws It was the ripple through this ecosystem. Oh, what's that mean for Del you know Veum, wherein Del not working together Well, they set the model and they started rolling out bm where, and they took the learnings that they had. And they're bringing that data center as a service down to the Dell environment. So it's funny I always we always here, you know, eight of us, They're learning from their partners in there listening and everything like that. Well, you know, Dylan Veum where they've been listening, they've been learning to in this, and it brings into a little bit of equilibrium for me, that partnership and right, David, you said, you know that you could be that cloud washing discussion. And today it's, you know, we're talking about stacks that live in eight of us and Google and Microsoft. And now, in, you know, my hosted or service lighter or, you know, my own data center. If that makes sense, >> I mean, if you want to just simplify the high order bit, Dave Cloud. It's simply this Amazon's trying to be enterprised everyone, the enterprise, trying to claw Amazon, right? And so what? The what that basically means is it's all cloud. It's all a distributed computer system. OK, Scott McNealy had it right. The network is the computer. If you look at what's going on here, the traditional enterprise of vendors over decades of business model and technology, you know, had full stack solutions from mainframe many computers to PC the local area networking all cobble together wires it up creates applications, services. All that is completely being decimated by a new way to roll out storage, computing and networking is the same stuff. It's just being configured differently. Throw on massive computer power with Cloud and Moore's Law and Data and A. I U have a changing of the the architecture. But the end of the day the cloud is operating model of distributed computing. If you look at all the theories and pieces of computer science do and networking, all those paradigms are actually playing out in in the clouds. Everything from a IIE. In the eighties and nineties you got distributed networking and computing, but it's all one big computer. And Michael Dell, who was the master of the computer industry building PCs, looks at this. Probably leg. It's one big computer. You got a processor and subsystems. So you know this is what's interesting. Amazon has done that, and if they try to be like the enterprise, like the old way, they could fall into that trap. So if the enterprise stays in the enterprise, they know they're not going out. So I think it's interesting that I see the enterprise trying to like Amazon Amazon trying to get a price. So at the end of the day, whoever could build that system that's scalable the way I think Dell's doing, it's great. I was only scaleable using data for special. So it's a distributed computer. That's all that's going on in the world right now, and it's changing everything. Open source software is there. All that makes it completely different, and it's a huge opportunity. Whoever can crack the code on this, it's in the trillions and trillions of dollars. Total adjustable market >> well, in twenty ten we said that way, noted the gap. There's still a gap between what Amazon could do and what the on Prem guys Khun Dio, we'd argue, is a five years is seven years, maybe ten years, whatever it is. But at the time we said, if you recall, lookit, they got to close the gap. It's got to be good enough for I t to buy into it like we're starting to see that. But my view, it's still not cloud. It doesn't have to scale a cloud, doesn't have the economics cloud. When you peel the onion, it doesn't certainly doesn't have the SAS model and the consumption model of cloud nowhere close yet. Well, and you know, >> here's the drumbeat of innovation that we see from the public cloud. You know where we hit the shot to show this week, the public have allowed providers how many announcements that they probably had. Sure, there was a mega launch of announcements here, but the public lives just that regular cadence of their, you know, Public Cloud. See a CD. We're not quite there yet in this kind of environment, it's still what Amazon would say is. You put this in an environment and it's kind of frozen. Well, it's thought some, and it's now we can get data set. A service consumption model is something we can go. We're shifting in that model. It's easier to update things, but you know, how do I get access to the new features? But we're seeing that blurring of the line. I could start moving services that hybrid nature of the environment. We've talked a few times. We've been digging into that hybrid cloud taxonomy and some of the services to span because it's not public or private. It's now truly that hybrid and multi environment and customers are going to live in. And all of >> the questions Jonah's is good enough to hold serve >> well. I think the reality is is that you go back to twenty ten, the jury in the private cloud and it's enterprises almost ten years to figure out that it's real. And I think in that time frame Amazon is absolutely leveled. Everybody, we call that the tsunami. Microsoft quickly figures out that they got to get Cloud. They come in there, got a fast followers. Second, Google's trying to retool Oracle. I think Mr Bo completely get Ali Baba and IBM in there, so you got the whole cloud game happening. The problem of the enterprises is that there's no growth in terms of old school enterprise other than re consolidate in position for Cloud. My question to you guys is, Is there going to be true? True growth in the classic enterprise business or, well, all this SAS run on clouds. So, yes, if it's multi cloud or even hybrid for the reasons they talk about, that's not a lot of growth compared to what the cloud can offer. So again, I still haven't seen Dave the visibility in my mind that on premises growth is going to be massive compared to cloud. I mean, I think cloud is where Sassen lives. I think that's where the scale lives we have. How much scale can you do with consolidation? We >> are in a prolonged bull market that that started in twenty ten, and it's kind of hunger. In the tenth year of a of a decade of bull market, the enterprise market is cyclical, and it's, you know, at some point you're going to start to see a slowdown cloud. I mean, it's just a tiny little portion of the market is going to continue to gain share cloud can grow in a downturn. The no >> tell Motel pointed out on this, Michael Dell pointed out on the Cubans, as as those lieutenants, the is the consolidation of it is just that is a retooling to be cloud ready operationally. That's where hybrid comes in. So I think that realization has kicked in. But as enterprises aren't like, they're not like Google and Facebook. They're not really that fast, so So they've got to kind of get their act together on premises. That's why I think In the short term, this consolidation and new revitalisation is happening because they're retooling to be cloud ready. That is absolutely happen. But to say that's the massive growth studio >> now looked. It is. Dave pointed out that the way that there is more than the market growth is by gaining market share Share share are areas where Dell and Emcee didn't have large environment. You know, I spent ten years of DMC. I was a networking. I was mostly storage networking, some land connectivity for replication like srd Evan, like today at this show, I talked a lot of the telco people talk to the service of idle talk where the sd whan deny sirrah some of these pieces, they're really starting to do networking. That's the area where that software defined not s the end, but the only in partnership with cos like Big Switch. They're getting into that market, and they have such small market share their that there's huge up uplift to be able to dig into the giant. >> Okay, couple questions. What percent of Dell's ninety one billion today is multi cloud revenue. Great question. Okay, one percent. I mean, very small. Okay. Very small hero. Okay? And is that multi cloud revenue all incremental growth isat going to cannibalize the existing base? These? Well, these are the fundamentals weighs six local market that I'm talking to >> get into this. You led the defense of conversations. We had Tom Speed on the CFO and he nailed us. He said There's multiple levers to shareholder growth. Pay down the debt check. He's got to do that. You love that conversation. Margin expansion. Get the margins up. Use the client business to cover costs. As you said, increased go to market efficiency and leverage. The supply chain that's like their core >> fetrow of cash. And that all >> these. The one thing he said that was mind blowing to me is that no one gets the valuation of how valuable Del Technologies is. They're throwing off close to seven billion dollars in free cash flow free cash flow. Okay, so you can talk margin expansion all you want. That's great, but there got this huge cash flow coming in. You can't go out of business worth winning if you don't run out of cash >> in the market. When the market is good, these guys are it is good a position is anybody, and I would argue better position than anybody. The question on the table that I'm asking is, how long can it last? And if and when the market turns down and markets always cyclical we like again. We're in the tenth year of a bull market. I mean, it's someone >> unprecedented gel can use the war chest of the free cash flow check on these levers that they're talking about here, they're gonna have the leverage to go in during the downturn and then be the cost optimizer for great for customers. So right now, they're gonna be taking their medicine, creating this one common operating environment, which they have an advantage because they have all the puzzle pieces. You A Packer Enterprises doesn't have the gaping holes in the end to end. They can't address us, >> So that is a really good point that you're making now. So then the next question is okay. If and when the downturn turn comes, who's going to take advantage of it, who's going to come out stronger? >> I think Amazon is going to be continued to dominate, and as long as they don't fall into the enterprise trap of trying to be too enterprising, continue to operate their way for enterprises. I think jazz. He's got that covered. I think DEL Technologies is perfectly positioned toe leverage, the cash flow and the thing to do that. I think Cisco's got a great opportunity, and I think that's something that you know. You don't hear a lot of talk about the M where Cisco war happening. But Cisco has a network. They have a developer ecosystem just starting to get revitalized. That's an opportunity. So >> I got thoughts on Cisco, too. But one of things I want to say about Del being able to come out of that stronger. I keep saying I've said this a number of times and asked a lot of questions this week is the PC business is vital for Del. It's almost half the company's revenue. Maybe not quite, but it it's where the company started it. It sucks up a lot of corporate overhead. >> If Hewlett Packard did not spin out HP HP, they would be in the game. I think spinning that out was a huge mistake. I wrote about a publicly took a lot of heat for it, but you know I try to go along with the HPD focus. Del has proven bigger is better. HP has proven that smaller is not as leverage. And if it had the PC that bee have the mojo in gaming had the mojo in the edge, and Dale's got all the leverage to cross pollinate the front end and edge into the back and common cloud operate environment that is going to be an advantage. And that's going to something that will see Well, let me let me >> let me counter what you just said. I agree. You know this this minute. But the autonomy was the big mistake. Once hp autonomy, you know what Meg did was almost a fatal complete. They never should've bought autonomy >> makers. Levi Protector he was. So he was there. >> But she inherited that bag of rocks. And then what you gonna do with it? Okay, so that's why they had to spend out and did create shareholder value. If they had not purchased autonomy, then he would return much better shape, not to split it up. And they would be a much stronger competitor. >> And I share holder Pop. They had a pop on value. People made some cash with long game. I think that >> going toe peon base actually done pretty well for a first year holding a standalone PC company. So, but again, I think Del. With that leverage, assuming pieces, it's going to be really interesting. I don't know much about that market. You were loving that PC conversation, but the whole, you know, the new game or markets and and the new wayto work throwing an edge in there, I don't know is ej PC and edges that >> so the peanut butter. And so the big thing that Michael get the big thing, Michael Dell said on the Cube was We're not a conglomerate were an integrated company. And when you have an integrated company like this, with the tech the tech landscape shifting to their advantage, you have the ability to cross subsidize. So strategy game. Matt Baker was here we'd be talking about OK, I can cross subsidize margin. You've brought it up on the client side. Smaller margins, but it pays a lot of the corporate overhead. Absolutely. Then you got higher margin GMC business was, you know, those margins that's contributing. And so when you have this new configuration. You can cross, subsidize and move and shift, so I think that's a great advantage. I think that's undervalued in the market place. And I think, you know, I think Del stock price is, well, undervalue. Point out the numbers they got VM wear and their question is, What what point is? VM where blink and go All in on del technology stew. Orcas Remember that Gus was gonna partner. You don't think the phone was ringing off the hook in Palo Alto from their parties? What? What's this as your deal? So Vienna. There's gotta be the neutral party. Big problem. The opportunity. >> Well, look, if I'm a traditional historical partner of'Em are, it's not the Azure announcement that has me a little bit concerned because all of them partner with Microsoft to it is how tightly combined. Del and Veum, where are the emcee, always kept them in arms like now they're in the same. It's like Dave. They're blending it. It's like, you know Del, from a market cap standpoint, gets fifty cents on the dollar. VM wears a software company, and they get their multiples. Del is not a software company, but VM where well, people are. Well, if we can win that a little bit, maybe we could get that. >> Marty still Isn't it splendid? No, no, I think the strategy is absolutely right on. You have to go hard with VM wear and use it as a competitive weapon. But, Stuart, your point fifty cents and all, it's actually much worse than that. I mean the numbers. If you take out of'Em, wears the VM wear ownership, you take out the core debt and you look at the market value you're left with, like a billion dollars. Cordell is undervalued. Cordell is worth more than a billion or two billion dollars. Okay, so it's a really cheap way to buy Veum. Where Right that the Tom Sweet nailed this, he said. You know, basically, these company those the streets not used to tech companies having such big debt. But to your point, John, they're throwing off cash. So this company is undervalued, in my view. Now there's some risks associated with that, and that's why the investors of penalizing them for that debt there, penalizing him from Michael's ownership structure. You know, that's what this is, but >> a lack of understanding in my opinion. I think I think you're right. I just think they don't understand. Look at Dale and they think G You don't look a day Ellen Think distributed computing system with software, fill in those gaps and all that extra ten expansion. It's legit. I think they could go after new market opportunities as as a twos to us as the client business. I mean mere trade ins and just that's massive trillions of dollars. It's, I think I think that is huge. But I'm >> a bull. I'm a bull on the value of the company. I know >> guys most important developments. Del technology world. What's the big story that you think is coming out of the show here? >> Well, it's definitely, you know, the VM wear on del I mean, that is the big story, and it's to your point. It's Del basically saying we're going to integrate this. We're going to hard, we're going to go hard and you know Veum wear on Dell is a preferred solution. No doubt that is top for Dell and PacBell Singer said it. Veum wearing eight of us is the first and preferred solution. Those are the two primary vectors. They're going to drive hard and then Oh, yeah, we'Ll listen to customers Whatever else you want Google as you're fine, we're there. But those two vectors, they're going to Dr David >> build on that because we saw the, um we're building out of multi cloud strategy and what we have today is Del is now putting themselves in there as a first class citizen. Before it was like, Oh, we're doing VX rail and Anna sex and, you know, we'LL integrate all these pieces there, but infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure now it is. It is multi cloud. We want to see that the big table, >> right, Jeff, Jeff Clarke said, Why are you doing both? Let's just one strategy, one company. It's all one Cash registers that >> saying those heard that before. I think the biggest story to me is something that we've been seeing in the Cuban laud, you know, been Mom. This rant horizontally scaleable operating environment is the land grab and then vertically integrate with data into applications that allow each vertical industry leverage data for the kind of intimate, personalized experiences for user experiences in each industry. With oil and gas public sector, each one has got their own experiences that are unique. Data drives that, but the horizontal and tow an operating model when it's on premises hybrid or multi cloud is a huge land grab. And I think that is a major strategic win for Dell, and I think, as if no one challenges them on this. Dave, if HP doesn't go on, emanate change. If H h p e does not do it em in a complete changeover from strategy and pulling, filling their end to end, I think that going to be really hurting I think there's gonna be a tell sign and we'LL see, See who reacts and challenges Del on this in ten. And I think if they can pull it off without being contested, >> the only thing I would say that the only thing I would say that Jonah's you know, HP, you know very well I mean, they got a lot of loyal customers and is a huge market out there. So it's >> Steve. Look at economic. The economics are shifting in the new world. New use cases, new step function of user experiences. This is this is going to be new user experiences at new economic price points that's a business model. Innovation, loyal customers that's hard to sustain. They'Ll keep some clutching and grabbing, but everyone will move to the better mousetrap in the scenario. So the combination of that stability with software it's just this as a big market. >> So John twenty ten Little Table Back Corner, you know of'em See Dylan Blogger World double set. Beautiful says theatre of present lot of exchange and industry. But the partnership in support of this ecosystem. It's something that helped us along the way. >> You know, when we started doing this, Jeff came on board. The team has been amazing. We have been growing up and getting better every show. Small, incremental improvements here and there has been an amazing production, Amazing team all around us. But the support of the communities do this is has been a co creation project from day one. We love having this conversation's with smart people. Tech athletes make it unique. Make it organic, let the page stuff on on the other literature pieces go well. But here it's about conversations for four and with the community, and I think the community sponsorship has been part of funding mohr of it. You're seeing more cubes soon will be four sets of eight of US four sets of V M World four sets here. Global Partners sets I'm used to What have we missed? >> Yeah, it's phenomenal. You know, we're at a unique time in the industry and honored to be able to help documented with the two of you in the whole team. >> Dave, How it Elias sitting there giving him some kind of a victory lap because we've been doing this for ten years. He's been the one of the co captains of the integration. He says. There's a lot of credit. >> Yeah, Howard has had an amazing career. I I met him like literally decades ago, and he has always taken on the really hard jobs. I mean, that's I think, part of his secret success, because it's like he took on the integration he took on the services business at at AMC U members to when Joe did you say we're a product company? No services company. I was like, Give me services. Take it. >> It's been on the Cube ten years. Dave. He was. He was John away. He was on fire this week. I thought bad. Kelsey was phenomenal. >> Yeah, he's an amazing guest. Tom Tom Suite, You know, very strong moments. >> What's your favorite Cuban? I'LL never forget. Joe Tucci had my little camera out film and Joe Tucci, Anna. One of the sessions is some commentary in the hallway. >> Well, that was twenty ten, one of twenty eleven, I think one of my favorite twenty ten moments I go back to the first time we did. The cue was when you asked Joe Tucci, you know why a storage sexy. Remember that? >> A He never came on >> again. Ah, but that was a mean. If you're right, that was a cube mean all for the next couple of years. Remember, Tom Georges, we have because I'm not touching. That was >> so remember when we were critical of hybrid clouds like twenty, twelve, twenty, thirteen I go, Pat is a hybrid cloud, a halfway house to the final destination of public loud. He goes to a halfway house, three interviews. This was like the whole crowd was like, what just happened? Still favorite moment. >> Oh, gosh is a mean so money here, John. As you said, just such a community, love. You know, the people that we've had on for ten years and then, you know, took us, you know, three or four years to before we had Michael Dell on. Now he's a regular on our program with luminaries we've had on, you know, but yeah, I mean, twenty ten, you know, it's actually my last week working for him. See? So, Dave, thanks for popping me out. It's been a fun ride, and yeah, I mean, it's amazing to be able to talk to this whole community. >> Favorite moment was when we were at eighty bucks our first show. We're like, We still like hell on this. James Hamilton, Andy Jazzy Come on up, Very small show. Now it's a monster, David The Cube has had some good luck. Well, we've been on the right waves, and a lot of a lot of companies have sold their companies. Been part of Q comes when public Unicorns New Channel came on early on. No one understood that company. >> What I'm thrilled about to Jonah's were now a decade, and we're documenting a lot of the big waves. One of one of the most memorable moments for me was when you called me up. That said, Hey, we're doing a dupe world in New York. I got on a plane and went out. I landed in, like, two. Thirty in the morning. You met me. We did to dupe World. Nobody knew what to do was back then it became, like, the hottest thing going. Now nobody talks about her dupe. So we're seeing these waves and the Cube was able to document them. It's really >> a pleasure. The Cube can and we got the Cube studios sooner with cubes Stories with Cube Network too. Cue all the time, guys. Thanks. It's been a pleasure doing business with you here. Del Technologies shot out the letter. Chuck on the team. Sonia. Gabe. Everyone else, Guys. Great job. Excellent set. Good show. Closing down. Del Technologies rose two cubes coverage. Thanks for watching

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018, the inaugural Dell Technologies World event. Have two sets side by side, three days of broadcast. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my cohost for this segment by John Troyer. >> Happy to welcome back to the program John Byrne, who since the last time we caught up with has a new title now, the North American Commercial Sales at Dell EMC. John thank you for joining us. >> Pleasure. Good to see John, John and Stu thank you. >> All right John, what are you doing here? Isn't it almost like the end of like financials? On the road, everything like that. But, yeah, tell us a little bit about kind of the change in role and what that meant for you. >> Yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of amazing. I was only here a year ago and here I was talking about bringing together Dell EMC's brand new channel. And we're very proud that we're talking about then it was a $35 billion organization. Here we are 12 months later, $35 billion to $43 billion channel organization, which is spectacular. And it's all thanks to our wonderful partner community and what they did. They were the ones that helped us with our vision, our strategy. The wonderful program that the team has developed, and we're seeing it unfold. That's been an incredible journey. And now one of the good things is obviously when we were building this initiative there was a power of and. We want both motions to continue to go, direct and channel. And you saw the results, both are growing. So obviously my new role and I've been asked to run North America Commercial Sales under Marius Haas, by Michael and Marius. >> I'd like to dig into it a little bit. I spoke to Marius on Monday, actually in our kick off this morning, talking about kind of EMC channel and sales and Dell channel and sales, a little bit different. I mean, EMC had a great channel, has a great channel continuing, but very much considered belly to belly as how they do that. Dell has been a little bit more partner and channel focused for longer. So I'm wondering, give us a little bit of insight. So you had the channel piece, you've had the sales piece. We hear things like, oh there's turning a direct rep into now he's more of an overlay. Through a little bit of those dynamics, what's happening from the sales standpoint and the impact on the channel. >> I think we got to remember the channel is an important wheel to everything we're doing here. With Dell Technologies we have 40,000 sales makers. Within our channel ecosystem we have 140,000 people. That is a sales army. They've gone after the market with the portfolio that we have, with the capability that we have, frankly done properly is unstoppable. And actually educating how both rose to market, how we want to play with one another. We look at, it is the power of and, and especially as we go through these transformational journeys and we're talking about digital and IT and workforce security, but we need everyone to play here. The wonderful news is, you saw, and I'm sure you have from Michael, a year ago we're a $73 billion organization. Within a year we're $80 billion organization. Phenomenal growth. However, the exciting thing for me, that's in a $3 trillion market. So 2.66%, that is so much upside for us, for all of us, that look, done properly, we're going to win is the general feeling. >> It's a pretty remarkable transformation. I mean transformation has been a theme of the whole show here, right? Digital transformation, make it real. You've been involved with both channels and Dell EMC sales. The role of the technology trusted advisor has changed over the last few decades. How are you approaching both your field force and the channel and your partners there, about this new role of how do we make digital transformation real in the field? What kind of upscaling do you need to be doing? And competencies do we need to be working on for folks that are listening that might be out in the field working directly with customers? >> We've all been in the industry for a long time. You think, rewind 10 years ago, you talk about technology, you talk about IT it was a call center. You fast forward to now it's a business imperative. You know when we're talking to our customers they clearly they want to get ahead of this transformational journey. However, we know then that less than half of them have already begun the journey. Here's the good news, those that have begun the journey, here's what we know. They're moving faster, their customer satisfactions are up. They're driving incremental revenue. The costs are going down. They're driving their incremental operating income. And I think what you're seeing here, right here right now, it is no longer this discussion around the transformational journeys. Making it real is here. You're seeing like AeroFarms. You're seeing McLaren onstage talking about bringing Formula One all the way through to medical. You're seeing TGen and a wonderful, wonderful company with the capability using technology to identify cancer earlier in children. I mean, that is what our purpose is all about. Now with that of course you have to evolve your own sales organization as well as your partner ecosystem. And we're treating our partners and their sales teams as exactly one in the same. So the way they're training and all the competencies that we'd expect of our own sales team is exactly what I'm expecting from our partner community. Like, it's an evolution we're going through here. Our sales team, we're training them on these transformations. We're showing them a purpose, how we're going to do it, but the other thing was more exciting for myself. We're also targeting the next generation of sales leaders. You know, working with universities. We want these top graduates to come here, to enjoy this wonderful company and what we're doing here. So now we're investing in people. We actually set up sales universities here in the US. It can be a three month program, it can be a two year program, spending anywhere between, up to almost $400,000 on a graduate coming through so that they understand exactly that the transformations are just natural in their DNA. That's what we're looking for right now. >> I love that, and Stu I love, I mean we both have a history with the Dell Technologies organizations over the years, and I'm impressed by how many people that I have met that are either long-term employees or have left and come back, right? And that investment in the people has got to be critical for your growth, especially at this size. >> Yeah, I think, John, we've gone beyond the, hey, what do you do and how do you do it, right? And now it's like what is your purpose? Our purpose is to impact human lives each and every single day. And I gave you some examples. But look, our ability using technology to connect more people around the world. Our ability to actually use technology to live longer, for us to identify, again, cancer earlier in people. That purpose is inspiring. And then you learn we're spending four and a half billion dollars in R and D to bring world class products and capabilities to the market. Done properly and with that true transformational mindset, as well as not forgetting that there's a massive market on IT infrastructure and the consolidation and winning in that space. Like I think we're, we as a collective community along with our customers we're praying to do wonderful things. >> All right, so, I want you to bring us inside your customers. So you've got North American Commercial Sales. Big market. Probably one of the most dynamic changing markets in the globe these days. what are some of the biggest challenges you're hearing from your customers who talk about digital transformation, make it real. What is your organization hearing while they're out there. >> Well also, actually you talk about North American Commercial Sales. I didn't frame it, where I work $19, $20 billion of the organization. >> Stu: Just a small piece. >> Just a small piece, but of course within we have state and local, we have education, we have federal government, we have the media and business space. Each of them all realize this digital transformation is here. And the conversation they're having with us is how do we get ahead of this, right? What experiences have you enjoyed yourself as an organization or with your partner ecosystem to make it real to them. So we're spending a lot of time with them in our executive briefing centers with our solution architects, showing well how to we enable the AeroFarms that we just talked about? It's really making a real (mumbles) conversation that we're having with them. Now there's the other edge spectrum of our customers, which is look, we want to continue to sell an unbelievable amount of PCs, and unbelievable amount of servers and storage and hyper-converge, and backup. So we have the wide spectrum. The good news is the conversation normally goes to let me tell you about Dell Technologies Advantage. Why did Michael spend $24 billion taking us private? $67 billion giving us all this wonderful array of assets. And as you walk them through these transformational journeys the normal response is oh my goodness, I did not know you did all of that. And then, okay, I'm not ready yet to go all the way there. But the comfort that you have it, okay let's begin a discussion. And that's what we're finding with a lot of our customers right now. >> All right one of the things, look you mentioned so many of the verticals there, and the commonality amongst most of them is change. Talk a little bit about the training, competencies, you know, your organization, how do you keep up? How do you help your customers keep up? >> Yeah, like, what is, change your dye it's kind of the mantra right now. We are spending an unbelievable amount of time on training. But with training also you acquire a lot of consistency. It's interesting we were here only two months ago for our field ready seminar, our sales kickoff. The feedback from our sales team was wow this seems very similar to last year. (mumbles) good. You got to learn these transformational journeys. Gone are the days of just going in and selling a single unit of product. You have to become the trusted advisor. So with that all of our training, all of our competencies are around understanding each of the transformations, how do you layer in Pivotal and Virtustream, and VMWare, and RSA, and SecureWare, and of obviously Dell EMC. How do you bring all of this together? And then also making it very clear to our sales team, This is my expectation of your role. This is what I expect you both to do. And here's the specialty teams that are around here, around you, to make you successful. So we have the training. It goes on every, actually it's consistent training, but two big ones per year. And with (mumbles) partners they've got to do exactly the same thing, that's what we're saying. >> John, as you and your sales leaders go out and talk to IT and you know, you're not, again in the field, you're way beyond oh check the box to order a new round of laptops or a new round of servers, right? Or server refresh. As you talk to the CIOs out there and the senior IT leaders, where are we in this transition? Are they getting it? I guess it's quite a range of responses. >> It really is, look some are already there. But are we there? Absolutely not. I think we're in single, we're more or less single digit. But again, when those CIOs, when they see, are you telling me look I can not only modern infrastructure, I can actually save money by getting to the modern infrastructure and I can layer in insights into my business using your technology, be it big data, be it AI, and I can yield more profitability at the end of it? You find them all in. But they're all in different levels obviously of expectation. >> Are there any characteristics of an organization that is either, is going or is ready to go that you see? >> I wouldn't say, here's what I will say. If you look across all of our transformations, VMWare is always consistent. I will tell you security remains a big theme. The other thing we've found is, again, as we get through these transformational discussions, the starting point still tends to be client. The client still seems to be the gateway to the data center for us. And I think you're also seeing, a lot of times we're also seeing, now everyone recognizing the workforce, the workforce has changed forever. Gone are the days when we remember sitting at a desk from nine til five. Look people are working remotely, people want to be reductive. They want to always be on. And I think that's why you're seeing this resurgence in the PC market. If you look now we've got 21 quarters of consecutive share gain, number one in the world on units, on revenue. Number one on profitability. Number one on server, number one on storage. Obviously number one with VMWare. That's consistent is they want to be dealing with Dell Technologies. >> John I want to give you the final word on key takeaways from the show. But I have to take away a couple things. Yes it does rain in Vegas, and you know, people, you know, playing at events, so other than those two things, what do you hope that people come away from from Dell Technologies World 2018? >> I hope people, well a few things. One, I hope they understand our purpose. We are and we have a desire to impact human life each and every day, by being the essential infrastructure. There is no longer buzz words around these transformational journeys. It's here. You can feel it, you can see it, there's real proof points. I think it's also clear these two motions that are happening. Mass consolidation of IT infrastructure, we want our customers and our partners to leave with Dell Technologies. And as you go through this transformational journey there is only one company who has all of the portfolio to satisfy all the needs, and it's Dell Technologies with the support of our customers and partners, and I'd be remiss if I don't always end by just saying, thank you. None of this is possible without wonderful customers supporting us on this journey. So that's (mumbles). >> All right, John Byrne really appreciate catching up with you. Look forward to catching up with you in the future. Hope you keep this job a little more than a year this time. >> I need to. John, thank you as well, thank you. >> I'm Stu Miniman with John Troyer. We'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here on the Cube as we continue our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live and we are in Las Vegas. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, we're now joined by Vince Affatati, whose the the global VP of sale and pre-sales at Dell EMC. It's good to see you sir. >> Thanks for having me. >> John: And Dan Serpico who's the CEO of FusionStorm. Dan, good to see you as well. >> Nice to see you. >> Thanks for joining us here we appreciate it, especially late in the day. >> Dan: Yeah absolutely, glad to be here >> First off Dan, tell us a little about FusionStorm and we'll get into the channel partnership a little bit later, but first off a little bit more about what you do. >> Great, well FusionStorm is a global solution provider, we're rapidly approaching a billion dollars in sales, probably hit a billion dollars in sales this year, and Dell Technologies is our principal partner. >> Alright and then the partnership program, if you would get, a little bit of great success, you know, it's just an absolute home run, but, again, how does working with Dan's company kind of personify what you do in the broader scheme? >> Yeah I mean, FusionStorm's a great partner, you know, part of what we want to talk about today is Ready Stack and how, kind of, this partnership and this program evolved based on, kind of cross-engineering and marketing that we do together and how, you know, Dan's team is so much closer, they're very close to the business of our customers and they have a great understanding of what's needed in the marketplace, so they're able to design and engineer and support the service solutions that are really unique, they hit an industry vertical and they really leverage, kind of, the best of our technologies, so, it's a great partnership. >> Dan: Yes it is. >> Yeah, Dan maybe you could expand a little, you said that, you know, Dell's your primary partner, why is that, you know, what kind of things do they do to enable you from a channel partner to meet what your customers need and, you know, make the money you need to run your business? >> Boy-oh-boy, we probably don't have enough time in this interview to talk about why Dell's our best partner. Look, all kidding aside, they are our largest partner, they have the broadest portfolio of technology solutions bar-none compared to any of our other partners, they're number one in most of the technology stacks, which is really important, our customers want leading edge technology. Our customers are Google, Facebook, Apple, Square, Pandora, they want leading edge technology as part of their play and Dell has really a incredible portfolio, then frankly, from the business side, the tremendous partnership with the great channel program, which gives us a terrific opportunity to partner from a marketing perspective, back-end rebates and incentives are a critical part of our value add and profitability model, so they touch all of the important points that make us a viable business. >> Vince, we talked to Marius Haas a little bit this morning about how the Dell and the EMC pieces came together and of course, you know, long history of channel with both sides, but bring us inside some of those, you know, incentives and rebates and things that Dan was talking to, you know, how does Dell set up those programs and, you know, bring us inside a little bit. >> Yeah, so, there's front-end rebates and there's back-end rebates, we're actually in our second year of rebate design, so we've done some things to kind of change it, but ultimately, there's rebates paid on dollar one across our full, a full stack, so, and then as the metal, as you go in the metal tiers, the rebates kind of increase, right, so our top tier partners get a higher rebate amount and then today, we announced a richer rebate for taking our competitive gear, so that's on the back-end and those are the traditional design. Now on the front-end we have storage rebates, we announced about five months ago or so, which incent you to basically sell our modern infrastructure or the storage side, include DPS into those designs and then take out competitive gear. We also have some incentives for proposal writing and demand generation as well, so a pretty rich program. >> Alright, so Dan here's the question I have for ya. Dell, they've got a lot of offerings out there and change is something that, you know, at the keynote this morning they said, you know, today compared to the past, you know, is the busiest we've ever been, but tomorrow there's even going to be more change. So, do they make it simple, I mean, you know, that's something, you know, we're all looking for, you got to run your business, you got to listen to your customers, you know, how is it easier when, you know, working with Dell? >> Well, I think it's easier because they are leading the pack, really, if you think about the world of technology and how it evolves constantly, everybody is leap-frogging everybody else every six months, so what you want is, you want a partner who's going to be leading the technology play for the future, honestly. Our business 15 years ago sold, 99% of what we sold 15 years ago, we do not sell a nickel today, not a nickel because that partner couldn't keep up with the evolution that takes place in technology today. So really, while I appreciate the question, it's really not about what's easy, it's what is most advanced so that you can stay competitive. >> You know, Vince was talking about incentives, he was talking about rebates, right. And so, from your side of that fence, if you will, how critical is it that you have those kinds of opportunities or you have that kind of incentive, I would think in a competitive environment, it's fairly crucial, right, I mean, you've got to be able to offer to each other and then down the line, that kind of value, right? >> It's tremendously important, we pride ourselves on our ability to help influence customers in their buy-decisions around technology, okay. And so, look we're not going to sell, regardless of what the incentives are, we aren't going to sell bad products and bad technologies 'cause that's a good way to lose customers, but certainly the financial rewards for our sellers, for our SEs, and for us as a company so we can continue to stay viable is critically important and we absolutely take advantage of the programs that are in place with Dell and others too, by the way, but certainly with Dell and direct our customers to those things that make the most sense for them. >> Yeah, right, I mean really, simple, predictable and profitable, we talk about it a lot, but that's ultimately where we're trying to go. We're not perfect, we've learned a lot, but, you know, strong partnerships like this make it clear that that's the right way to go about it and it is more than just incentives, it's staffing, it's dedicating people to help, help make the business easier, doing boot camps and joint seminars and, you know, selling together. And that works. >> Vince, the other thing, can you put into context for us, you know, Ready Stack, we've got everything from, you know, Full Stack, everything bake to, you know, some of the software platforms, you know. What's in here and, you know, how does this fit in the overall? >> So, Ready Stack is a way to address a market that we haven't gone after directly, which is the build systems, when you look at converge infrastructure, it's about a six billion dollar market. We own about 49% of that and with the VxBlock 1000, is a good example of those, kind of, integrated systems, right? But what we haven't really done a lot of and we're really going into feet-first, head-first is the idea that we want to help with customers who aren't ready to buy the Full Stack, but they want to do something that's engineered special right? So, providing, Ready Stack is a way to, it's so we're close with our, it's a partner exclusive program we work with the partners to make it easier for them to sell our tech, right, into converged environments to help solve problems. I mean, it's something that you guys do everyday, already, but it's a program to help with the engineering and provide incentives, to make that easier to do. >> Well, I think that's right, the converged infrastructure which is, you know, what we call this, is probably, outside of maybe cloud computing and that world, the single fastest growing part of the tech space today, right? It's what our customers need, it's what our customers want. I think that what's unique about the Ready Stack play here, the architecture, is that it's flexible, okay? It's flexible and leads with Dell and leads with certified architecture, as opposed to others who are just taking piece parts from different vendors, cobbling it together and calling it a certified converged play, this is a truly converged play that has flexibility. Flexibility could mean that someone's, a customer's storage needs grow faster than compute needs or vice versa, alright? So you're not locked in a solution, but you still, you're locked in on a framework that allows you to expand based on your unique needs, then when you take their architecture and their engineering capabilities in combination with ours, the blueprints, you get, you have a really robust solution that we can align ourselves with and be consistent in terms of our delivery to the customers. >> So, you tell us about flexibility, I mean that, that's kind of a buzzword, right? I mean, you want to give people the ability to customize, right? Do people, I mean, are your customers now, you know, Dan, do they really, I mean, do people know what they want or because they have new capabilities, they have new, there are new avenues they can go down, new choices. I mean, how do you get 'em there? >> Well, our customers are very smart, again, if you heard the partial list of customers that we have, they are very smart and they're looking at this. >> Stu: You mentioned a couple of big names there. >> We've recognized a few of those. >> But they are very smart and access to Dell, lot of them are here at Dell Technologies World, they read information on the internet, these are very smart people, of course, but let's not undermine our role, or underestimate our role in helping them, whether it's through our labs, to do bake-offs, we can take, we can run some of their workloads on our architecture or the Dell architecture versus others and they can see how this technology works or how their workloads work, what performs better for them for their unique specs. There is constantly discussion around white boarding, okay? The technology is moving all the time and I don't think that can be underestimated either, right? If you look at a data center, if you picked up a thousand customers and looked at their data center, probably no three of them would be exactly alike because of the nature of technology, so what you need, is you need an OEM, like Dell Technologies get a robust portfolio of products and a good partner, like FusionStorm who can offer that robust portfolio and help it be fully integrable with all these other technologies, right? Look, the truth of the matter is that we would love to rip out somebody else, but that has a depreciation life and CIOs have to live with something they bought last year, for three years. So, how is that compatibility going to exist? That's very important; so all those things are part of the education of our customers. >> Vince, I know there's a huge push at this show, working with the channel partners, bringing them all together; but give us a little view past Dell Technologies World, you know, for this program, some of the roadmaps; what should we, that are watching the industry, look for throughout the rest of the year and in the channel partners? >> So, you mean what's coming forward or what? >> Stu: Just walking away from here. >> John: The road ahead! >> Stu: Your program, the road ahead, yeah. >> The road ahead, absolutely, so I'll tell you, particularly, let me focus for a minute on, on Ready Stack and where we're going there. So, as I said, we're, the idea here is maximum flexibility, but we also want to provide guidance and compatibility and sizing. So, what you'll see from us over the next year, is a lot, a lot of engineering around this program and working on building different scenarios, common scenarios and scenarios that we're learning about, you know, working with FusionStorm and our other partners, around the world. So, you'll see a lot of engineering going on around creating these design guides to deployment guides and help with sizing and we think that's really important. You'll also notice that, this is going to be hypervisor agnostic and so they'll be support for other hypervisors in this, we realize that other people do use other hypervisors besides VMware, which is kind of odd, but we know it exists, right, so a KVM we're work, they'll be, you'll see solutions that support KVM, we'll have solutions for Docker, we'll see, you'll see Hyper-V in here as well. Again, it's a realization that there's more to this do-it-yourself kind of options and we want to be there to support that, but we do think great integration, great support, sizing, is what you'll see more of as we kind of go through the year. >> Which brings us right back to flexibility, right? Give the people what they want, when they need it, right? >> Now we also say, our engineer systems, right? VxRail, our hyper conversion converge systems, we're not saying we're de emphasizing that, we're not at all, but we're realizing that, you know, more and more working with our partners there's, we're addressing a very large and growing part of the market space. >> Dan, Vince, thanks for being with us. >> Yeah. >> Thank you very much. >> We appreciate the time, enjoy the rest of the show, but I'm sure it's going well for ya. >> It's wonderful. >> And we hope to see you down the road. >> Terrific. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for joining us. Back with more here on the Cube; we're live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley it's the Cube, covering food I.T., fork to farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with The Cube. We're at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, at the Food I.T. show. About 350 people from academe, from food producers, somebody came all the way from New Zealand for this show. A lot of tech, big companies and start-ups talking about applying IT to food, everything from ag to consumption to your home kitchen to what do you do with the scraps that we all throw away. We're excited now to get to the "Big Brain" segment. We've got our Ph.D.s on here. We're excited to have Doctor Glenda Humiston. She's the V.P. of agriculture and natural resources for the University of California. Welcome. And also, Doctor Helene Dillard. She's the dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So first off, we were talking a little bit before we turned the cameras on. Neither of you have been to this event before. Just kind of your impressions of the event in general? >> Glenda: I love seeing the mix of the folks here as you were saying in your intro. There's quite a diverse array of people, and I personally believe that's what's really going to help us find solutions moving forward, that cross-pollination. >> Helene: And I've enjoyed it, just seeing all the different people that are here, but then the interaction with the audience was very uniquely done, and I just think that's a real big positive for the show. >> So you guys were on a panel earlier today, and I thought one of the really interesting topics that came up on that panel was, what is good tech? You know, everybody wants it all, but unfortunately there's no free lunch, right? Something we all learned as kids. There's always a trade-off, and so people want perfect, organic, this-free, that-free, cage-free, at the same time they want it to look beautiful, be economical and delivered to their door on Amazon Prime within two hours. So it's interesting when we think of the trade-offs that we have to make in the food industry to kind of hit all these pieces, or can we hit all these pieces or how does stuff get prioritized? >> Well I think that for us, it's going to be a balance, and trying to figure out how do you provide the needs for all these different audiences and all the different things that they want and I don't think one farmer can do it for all these different groups that have different demands on what they're looking for. And some of the tradeoffs could be, as we go away from pesticides and from other things, we might have more blemishes. And those are still edible pieces of fruit and vegetables, it's just that maybe it's curly, maybe the carrot's not straight, you know, maybe it's forked, but it's still very edible. And so I think that we have to do a lot more to help educate consumers, help people understand that it doesn't have to look perfect to give you perfect nutrition. >> Right, right. >> Glenda: Yeah, yeah, Helene is absolutely right. Some of it's just education, but some of it's also us finding the new technology that is acceptable to the public. Part of the problem is we sometimes have researchers working on their own, trying to find the best solution to a problem and we're not socializing that with the public as we're moving forward. So then all of a sudden, here's this new type of technology and they're like, where did this come from? What does it mean to me? Do I need to worry about it? And that's one reason--we talked earlier on the panel too, about the need to really engage more of our citizens in the scientific process itself, and really start dealing with that scientific illiteracy that's out there. >> Because there was a lot of talk about transparency in the conversation-- >> Yes. >> Earlier today about what is transparency. Cause you always think about people complaining about genetically modified foods. Well what is genetically modified? Well, all you have to do is look at the picture of the first apple ever, and it was a tiny little nasty-looking thing that nobody would want to eat compared to what we see at the grocery store today. A different type of genetic modification, but still, you don't plant the ugly one, and you plant the ones that are bigger and have more fruit. Guess what, the next round has more fruit. So it does seem like a big education problem. >> It is, and yet, for the average human being out there, all you have to do is look at a chihuahua next to a Saint Bernard. None of that was done with a genetically modified technology and yet people just--they forget that we've been doing this for thousands of years. >> Jeffrey: Right, right. You talked about, Glenda, the VINE earlier on in the panel. What is the VINE? What's the VINE all about? >> Well, it's brand new. It's still getting rolled out. In fact, we announced it today. It's the Verde Innovation Network for Entrepreneurship. You know, you've got to think of a clever way to get that acronym in there >> Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? >> Basically it's our intent from University of California to catalyze regional innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems. Part of what's driving that is we've got a fairly good amount of resources scattered around the state, even in some of our rural areas, on small business development centers, our community colleges, our county cooperative extension offices, and a host of other resources including lately, the last several years, incubators, accelerators, maker's labs. But they don't talk to each other, they don't work together. So we're trying to go in, region by region, and catalyze a coalition so that we can make sure that our innovators, our inventors out there, are able to go from idea to commercialization with all the support they need. Via just basic legal advice, on should they be patenting something. Access to people to discuss finances, access to people that can help them with business plans. Opportunities to partner with the University in joint research projects. Whatever it takes, make sure that for anybody in California they can access that kind of support. >> That's interesting. Obviously at Haas, and at Stanford, not far from here, you know, a lot of the technologies of such companies come out of, you know, kind of an entrepreneurial spin with a business-focused grad and often a tech grad in a tech world. You know, ton of stuff at Berkeley on that, but >> Yeah, but those folks this is really for ag >> are in urban areas >> If you're in a large urban area or you're near a major campus you've probably got access to most of that. If you're in agriculture, natural resources, and in particular, our more remote, rural communities, you typically have no access, or very little. >> Right. So biggest question is, Helene, so you're at Davis, right, obviously known as one of the top agricultural-focused schools certainly in the UC system, if not in the world. I mean, how is the role of academic institutions evolving in this space, as we move forward? >> I would say it's evolving in that we're getting more entrepreneurship on campus. So professors are being encouraged to look at what they're working on and see if there's patent potential for this. And also, we have a group on UC Davis campus called Innovation Access, but looking at how can they access this population of people with money and, you know, the startups to help them bring their thing to market? So that's becoming-- that's a very different campus than years ago. I think the other thing is, we're also encouraging our students to look at innovation. And so we have a competition called the Big Bang, and students participate in that. They do Hag-a-thon, they do all these kinds of things that we tend to think that only the adults are doing those but now the students are doing them as well. And so we're trying to push that entrepreneurship spirit out onto all of our campus, onto everyone on the campus. >> And I do want to emphasize that this isn't just for our students or our faculty. One of the key focuses of the VINE is all of our external partners, too. Just the farmers, the landowners, the average citizens we're working with out there. If they've got a great idea, we'd like to help them. >> Jeffrey: And what's nice about tech is, you know, tech is a vehicle you can change the world without having a big company. And I would imagine that ag is kind of-- big ag rolled up a lot of the smaller, midsize things, and there probably didn't feel like there was an opportunity that you could have this huge impact. But as we know, sitting across the street from Google, that via software and technology, you can have a huge impact far beyond the size and scope of your company. And I would imagine that this is a theme that you guys are playing off of pretty aggressively. >> Absolutely. I think that there are people on campus that are looking for small farm answers and mechanization as well as large farm answers. We have people that are working overseas in developing countries with really, really small farm answers. We have people that are working with the Driscolls and partnering up with some of these other big companies. >> We talked a little bit before we went on air about kind of the challenges of an academic institution, with some of the resources and scale. These are big, complicated problems. I mean, obviously water is kind of the elephant in the room at this conference, and it's not being talked about specifically I think they've got other water shows. Just drive up and down the valley by Turlock and Merced and you can see the signs. We want the water for the farms, not for the salmon in the streams, so where do the--the environmental impacts. So these are big, hairy problems. These are not simple solutions. So it does take a lot of the systems approach to think through, what are the tradeoffs of a free lunch? >> It really does take a systems approach, and that's one thing here in California, we're doing some very innovative work on. A great example that both UC Davis, my division, and other parts of the UC system are working on is Central Valley AgPlus Food and Beverage Manufacturing Consortium, which is 28 counties, the central valley and up into the Sierra. And what's exciting about it is, it is taking that holistic approach. It's looking at bringing around the table the folks from research and development, workforce, trained workforce, adequate infrastructure, financing, access to capital, supply chain infrastructure, and having them actually work together to decide what's needed, and leverage each other's resources. And I think that offers a lot of possibility moving forward. >> And I would say that at least in our college, and I would call the whole UC Davis, there's a lot of integration of that whole agriculture environmental space. So we've been working with the rice farmers on when can you flood the rice fields so that there's landing places for the migrating birds? Cause this is the Pacific flyway. And can we grow baby salmonids in that ricewater and then put them back in the bay? And they figured out a way to do that, and have it actually be like a fish hatchery, only even better, because we're not feeding them little tiny pellets, they're actually eating real food, (laughs) whole foods. >> And how has an evolution changed from, again, this is no different than anyplace else, an old school intuition, the way we've always done it versus really a more data driven, scientific approach where people are starting to realize there's a lot of data out there, we've got all this cool technology with the sensors and the cloud and edge computing and drones and a whole lot of ways to collect data in ways that we couldn't do before and analyze it in ways that we couldn't do before to start to change behavior, and be more data-driven as opposed to more intuition driven. >> I would say that what we're seeing is as this data starts to come in precision gets better. And so now that we understand that this corner of the field needs more water than the other side, we don't have to flood the whole thing all at once. You can start on the dry side and work over to the other side. So I think the precision is getting much, much better. And so with that precision comes water efficiency, chemical efficiency, so to me it's just getting better every time. >> And frankly, we're just at the beginning of that. We're just starting to really use drones extensively to gather that type of data. New ways of using satellite imagery, new way of using soil sensors. But one of the problems, one of the big challenges we have, back to infrastructure, is in many parts of your agricultural areas, access to the internet. That pipeline, broadband. If you've got thousand of sensors zapping information back you can fill up that pipeline pretty fast. It becomes a problem. >> Jeffrey: That pesky soft underbelly of the cloud, right? You've got to be connected. Well, we're out of time, unfortunately. I want to give you the last word for people that aren't as familiar with this, basically, myself included, what would you like to share with people that could kind of raise their awareness of what's happening with technology and agriculture? >> Well, I guess that I would start out saying not to be afraid of it, and to look at the technology that has come. Remember when we had the rotary dial phone? My son doesn't even know what that is! (laughs) >> Jeffrey: Mom, why do you say dial them up? >> Yeah, why do you say dial people up? So I think, looking at your rotary phone, now, looking at your smart phone, which has more computing power than your first Macintosh. It's very--the world is changing, and so why do we expect agriculture to stay in the 1800s mindset? It's moving too, and it's growing too, and it's getting better just like that iPhone that you have in your hand. >> I think I would add that to that, back to the citizen science, I would love people out there, anybody, average citizens young or old to know that there's opportunities for them to engage. If they're concerned about the science or the technology come work with us! We have over twenty thousand volunteers in our programs right now. We will happily take more. And they will have a chance to see, up close and personal, what this technology is and what it can do for them. >> Alright. Well that's great advice. We're going to leave it there, and Dr. Humiston, Dr. Dillard, thank you for taking a few moments out of your day. I'm Jeffrey. You're watching the Cube. We're at the Computer History Museum. Food IT. Learning all about the IT transformation in the agriculture industry. Also to the kitchen, your kitchen, the kitchen of the local restaurant and all the stuff that can happen with those scraps that we throw away at the end of the day. Thanks for watching, and we'll be right back after this short break. (electronic music)

(theCUBE theme music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its partner ecosystem. >> Welcome back here to the show floor at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. Along with John Furrier, I'm John Walls. Glad to have you here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage here live from the nation's capital. Joining us now from Enlighten IT Consulting is John Eubank IV, Director of Program Management Office. John, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, a CUBE rookie, I believe, is that correct? >> Yes, sir, yeah, thanks for the invite. >> Nice to break the maiden, good to have you aboard here. First off, tell us a little bit about your consulting firm for our viewers at home, to give an idea about your frame and why you're here at AWS. >> Absolutely, so we're a big data consulting company focused on cyber security solutions for the DOD IC community. What we jumped into about three years ago was a partnership with AWS. And seeing, just the volume, the velocity of data coming out of the DOD, that those on-premise server farms could not keep up, could not support it with the power, space and cooling needs. So we partnered with AWS and over the last three years we've been migrating our customers up to GovCloud, specifically. >> So what are you doing then for DOD specifically, then? When you said you solve problems, right? They've got reams and reams of data, trying to help them manage that process a little bit better, but, you know, drill down a little bit more specifically what you're doing for DOD. >> Absolutely, so we developed a proprietary technology called the Rapid Analytic Deployment and Management Framework, RADMF, it's available on RADMF.com, R A D M F dot com. >> John Walls: True marketer. >> Yeah, true marketer at heart. So that's our, sort of governance framework for DOD applications that want to move to the cloud. It automates the deployment process to get 'em out of their existing systems up to the cloud. One of the real problems inside the DOD that we've encountered is the disparate data sets to enable effective analytics when it comes to cyber security solutions. So, I like to think back to the day one conversation about, sort of the data swamp, not the data lake. That's exactly what we have inside the DOD. There's so many home-built sensors, paired with COT sensors, that it's created this absolute mess, or nightmare of data. That swamp needs to be drained. It needs to be, sort of refined in a way that we can call it a data lake, something understandable that people can-- >> I hate the term data lake, I, you've been listening, I, John knows I hate the term data lake. Love the term data swamp, because it illustrates exactly that, there is, if you don't watch the data, and don't share it, it's just stagnant, and it turns into a swamp. And I think, this is a huge issue. >> John Eubank IV: Absolutely correct. >> So I want you to just double down on that, just give some color. Is it the volume of the data, is it the lack of sharing, both? (laughs) >> It's really every, it's everything under the sun, there's, you know, sharing issues all across the federal government right now and who can see what data, Navy doesn't want to share with Army, inside the IC-- >> John Furrier: Well that'll never happen. >> Agencies don't want to share with each other. (laughs) I think we're, we're breaking down those walls. We're seeing that, when it comes to cyber security, no one person can defend an entire nation. No one agency can defend an entire nation on their own. It has to be a collaborative solution. It has to be a team effort. Navy, Army, Air Force, IC, etc., have to work together, in tendem, in partnership, if we're ever going to just, defend our nation from cyber hackers. >> I want to ask you a philosophical question, because, you know, as someone who's been online all my life, computer science, you've seen, there's always the notion of trolling, the notion of online message boards, back in the day when I was running, is now main stream now, >> John Eubank IV: Right. >> I mean people trolling each other on Twitter, for crying out loud, main stream. So, the culture of digital has an ethos, and open source is a big driver on that cyber security, there's a huge ethos of sharing, and it's kind of an honor among practitioners. >> John Eubank IV: Mm-hmm. 'cause they know how big the threat is. How is that evolving? Because this seems to highlight, your point about sharing, that it's, the digital world's different than the analog world, and some of the practices that are getting traction can be doubled-down on. So everyone's trying to figure out what's, what should be double-down on, and what are the good practices from the bad? Can you just share some cultural... >> Well, I think you hit the nail on the head with the open source model there. That is the key right here. It's not even within the government we need to share. It's industry and government, in partnership, need to approach these problem sets together and work on 'em as one cohesive body. So, for example, our company, our platform, it's entirely an open source platform. It's government-owned solution. We don't sell, it's the big data platform, it's provided by DISA right now. We don't sell that product. It's available to any government agency that wants it for free. We have 1500 different software developers and engineers from across the government community that collaborate together to evolve that platform. And that's really the only way we're going to make a significan difference right now. >> That creativity that could come out of this new process that you're referring to, I'm just kind of thinking out loud here on theCUBE, is interesting because you think about all those people on Twitch. >> John Eubank IV: Uh-huh. >> 34 million, I think, a day or whatever the big number, it's a huge number. Those idle gamers could be actually collaborating on a core problem that could be fun. So if you look at a crowd sourcing model of attacking data, this is kind of a whole new mindset of culture. To me, this is the kind of doors that open up when you start thinking like this model. Because the bad guys are already ahead of the game. I mean, so, how do you, how do you guys talk about that, 'cause you guys have to kind of keep some data masked, and you have to kind of, maybe not expose everything. How do you balance that secretive nature of it, and yet opening it up? >> That's a question that the DHS is struggling with, sort of day in and day out right now. They're going through a couple different iterations of different efforts. There was the ESSA program, there's the Automated Indicator Sharing program going on right now with DHS and some of the IC partners of what do we share with industry, because we're recognizing as a government we can't defend this nation on our own. We need an industry partnership. How do we open that up to the general public of the United States to do that crowd sourced mentality. Threat hunting is a lot of fun if you know what you're doing, and if somebody will guide you down the path, it's an endless world and a need for threat analysts to study the data sets that are out there. Indicators of compromise point you in a general direction, but they're a wide-open direction, and... >> They're already playing, it's like lagging in a video game, they're, gamers are already ahead of, the hackers are already ahead of you. Interesting point, Berkeley, University of California at Berkeley has a new program, they call it the quote Navy Seals of cyber. It's an integrated computer science and engineering and Haas business school program. And it's a four-year degree specifically for a special forces kind of thinking. Interdisciplinary, highly data driven, computer science, engineering and business so they can understand, again, hackers run a business model. These are organized units. This is kind of what we're up against. >> Absolutely agree. >> John Furrier: What are your thoughts on that? You think that's the, the right direction, we need more of it? >> We need more of it, absolutely. DOD is moving in the same direction with the cyber protection teams or CPTs. They're beginning to do sort of the same formal training models for the soldiers. Unfortunately, right now a lot of the cyber protection teams are just scavenged resources from other branches of the military. So you have guys in EOD that are now transitioning into cyber, and they're going from diffusing bombs to diffusing cyber threats. It's a totally different scenario and use case, and it's a tough struggle to transition into that when your background was diffusing a bomb. >> And you brought up the industry collaboration, talking about private, you know, private sector and public sector. I know, you know, personal experience in the wireless space, there was a lot of desire to share information, but yet there was a congressional reluctance. >> John Eubank IV: Mm-hmm. >> To allow that. For different concerns. Some we thought were very unwarranted at the time. So how do you deal with that, because that's another influence in this, is that you might have willing parties, but you've got another body over here that might not be on board. >> I think we're going to start seeing more of a shift as private industry acknowledges their need for government support and that government collaboration, so data breaches like the Target breach and massive credit card breaches that, you know, these private industries cannot keep up with defending their own network. They need government supoort for defending very large corporations. Walmart, Target, Home Depot, the list goes on of breaches. >> Final question as we wrap up here, but what's the coolest tech that you're seeing that's enabling you to be successful, whether it's cool tech that you're looking at, you're kicking the tires on. From software to Amazon, hardware, what are you seeing that's out there that's really moving the needle and getting people motivated? >> So a surprising thing there, I'm going to say the Snowball Edge. And people go, it's just a data hard drive. Well, not really. It's way more than a data hard drive. So when you come to Amazon you think enterprise solutions, enterprise capabilities. What the Snowball Edge provides is a deployable unit that has processing, compute, storage, etc., onboard that you can take into your local networks. They're putting it so you can run any VM you want on the Snowball Edge. What we're doing is we're taking that inside DOD tactical spaces that don't have connections to the internet. We're able to do computation analytics on threats facing that local regional onclave using a hard drive. It's really cool technology that hasn't been fully explored, but that's uh, that's where we're-- >> You can tell you're excited about it. Your eyes light up, you got a big smile on your face. >> Drove the new Ferrari that came out. >> Yeah, right. >> When I saw it, I just jumped all in. >> John Walls: You loved it, right. >> So, three months ago... >> You knew right away, too. >> Right. >> John Furrier: The big wheel. >> John, thank you for being with us. I think they're going to kick us out of the place, John. >> Hey, they got to unplug us. We're going to go until they unplug us. >> Alright, John, again thanks for being with us. >> Well, thank you guys for your time, much appreciated. >> Thank you for joining us here from Washington, for all of us here at theCUBE, we appreciate you being along for the ride at AWS Public Sector Summit 2017. (theCUBE theme music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas for a wrap up on day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE coverage at Dell EMC World, our eighth year covering EMC World Now, first year covering Dell EMC World. It's part of the big story of Dell and EMC combining entities, forming Dell Technologies, all those brands. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-hosts this week, Paul Gillin and Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Guys, great week, I thought I'd be wrecked at this point. But, I mean, a lot of energy here but we heard every story. We heard all the commentary, we heard the EMC people trotting in, about their customer references. We hear the executives on message. Bottom line, let's translate it for everybody. (laughing) All the messaging, pretty tight. >> Yes. >> All singing the same songs. My take away real quickly on messaging, they want to portray that this is all good. Everything's fine. No icebergs ahead. We are going to help customers try to move from speeds to feeds, a bigger message. Not getting there yet. Still speeds and feeds. 14 (mumbles), 14G, that's kind of the high level, thoughts? >> This company wants to dominate. I mean, what we heard again and again these last few days is number one, number one. They want to own the top market share in every market in which they play, and they have a broad array of products to do that. They have a huge mix of products, maybe too many products, but with some overlap, but that's okay, but they clearly are trying to blanket or carpet bomb those markets where they think they can win. Interestingly, there are some markets like big data, like software or cloud infrastructure where they are choosing not to be a big player, and that's okay too. It means they are focused. >> John: Keith, your thoughts. >> So, again, I agree with you, tight marketing. They wanted to get out this message. I think if the present analysts get together at the beginning, they emphasized 310 analysts, from analysts and press, from all over the world. They get out the message. They get these guys and gals in here to cover that message that Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, is the leader in this space. You know what? When big mergers like this happen, I can't think of one that happened well. They are usually rocky to begin with. We haven't seen those rocks at the beginning. We haven't see that at the show. It seems like the messaging has been consistent, the customers more or less get it, and that we can't detect the chinks in the armor, so I think they did a great job of getting that out there, and portraying the stress of the brand, and throughout the show. It was a great show for them. >> They have a good story. Their story better together, obviously that's the whole theme. My impression is, in weaving through all the messaging, is generally, authentically the people are pretty happy with it. I think EMC people have been trying to break out of this, we're a storage company, you know, and I won't say they had a little bit of VMware envy, but VM World events were always different than the EMC World, so those culture clashes weren't necessarily too divergent, but different. You had storage guys, and you had VMware developers, right, so I think EMC was always trying to break out and be bigger, and just couldn't get there. Dell wanted to be more enterprise, right, so I think the two together actually is better, in my opinion. Now will it work? I still think your post is still open. They merged for the right reasons, but look it, they're not done. They got a boat-load of work to do. >> I think they're aware, to Keith's point, they are aware that history is against them, that mega mergers don't work, never have worked in this industry, and so that creates a lot of pressure to make this one work, and the good thing about that for both companies is that they're aware of what went wrong in the past. I mean, we had Howard Elias on this show the first day. Howard Elias went through two of the worst tech mega mergers in history with Compaq Digital and HP Compaq, knows where a lot of those landmines are, so they seemed hyper aware of getting everyone on message, getting everyone talking positively about synergy, and as you said John, the language was consistent from the start. >> Alright, I want to ask you guys a pointed question on that point cause it kind of brings out the next question. Management team, do they have the chops, because, to your point, history's against them, okay? We sat down with Michael Dell, founder, lead entrepreneur, still at the helm. He's a billionaire. They're private, so no shot clock on the public markets. Marius Haas, he's a pro. Howard Elias, a pro. Goulden, he does his thing. On and on and on. I think they got a pretty deep bench. I mean, your thoughts guys? >> So, let's think about that. How many bad mergers has EMC gone through? Data domain >> Paul: Home run. >> Incredible. >> Paul: Home run. >> Home run. >> Paul: DSSD. >> DSSD, well, not so much, but that wasn't really that big of a merger. >> They kind of cleaned that up pretty quickly. >> Yeah, they did, what doesn't work they get it out quick, so great management team understands the complexities of mergers. VMware merger, or acquisition, probably one of the best in the history of tech, so the management team has the chops to understand where the value is added, extract that value, and expand it. >> That's a great point. And they know when to leave stuff alone too. >> John: Yeah, engineering lead but they're also, because we heard Jeff Boudreau on talking about the storage challenges. He's like, we know what to do, we took the lumps trying to, late to the game on Flash, we're not going to be late to the game in these other areas, and he is very hyper focused. But the other thing that we didn't talk about is that EMC has just been an impeccably, credible sales organization. They know how to sell, they know how to motivate sales people. They know how to tell the tell the enterprise sales motion, which is the biggest challenge in today's industry. Every company I talked to, startup to growing IPO is we need better enterprise sales. Look at Google. Look what they're doing in the cloud. They are struggling because they have great tech and horrid sales people. They are hiring young people doing phone work. Enterprise sales is a tricky game. >> Arguably the best enterprise sales force on the planet was EMC. I mean, these are the guys who would get on a plane at midnight, would charter a plane at midnight, to get to the customer's site to fix a problem, and no other company does it like that, and Dell has a lot to learn from that. If Dell can really take that knowledge and that culture and absorb it into their own enterprise sales force, they are going to have huge opportunity with their server division. >> I want to take a minute just to thank our sponsors for their awesome CUBE coverage. You guys did great. Dell EMC, Toshiba, Virtustream, Cisco, Dato, Nutanix, Druva, and VMware. Thanks to your support, we had two CUBEs covering VM World, 20 plus videos a day, for 3 straight days. All that's on youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, siliconangle.com for all the journalism and reporting. Wikibon.com for all the great research, and also a shoutout to Keith at @CTOAdvisor. Check him out on Twitter, always part of the conversation, super influential. Guys, great job this week. Just high level marks. My take away? Hyper converge, big time focus on these guys. VMware is the glue, Hybrid Cloud, and they're defensively using Pivotal to hold the line on Amazon, so thoughts on that point? I see you rolling your eyes. >> I just got out with James Watters, the SVP within that business unit. Pivotal is a key part of this. You know Michael has stressed on theCUBE, on Twitter, how important Pivotal is to their long term success. One of Dell's challenges, Dell EMC's, and this is not just Dell EMC, it's infrastructure companies throughout the landscape, is getting out of that conversation with their VP of infrastructure, getting into the offices of the CIOs, COs, CMO, and having these business conversations, and it's going to take a Pivotal type of solution to get that done. I thought Michael made a very great point that that white glove services, that's basically their service organization, is basically the older EMC services organization that's used to getting on a flight, solving the problem. Whatever the original statement at work was, they are willing to tear that up, and get down, get dirty, and get that done. They need to translate that >> The question for you then is this, without Pivotal, they have no play for the app developers? >> Keith: None. >> Amazon would mop that up and they'd have no positions, so I would say it is certainly a placeholder, a good one, I'm not going to deny that. The question is how big is that market for them. Can they get there, can they hold the line on Pivotal and bring in some resources and cavalry to keep that going, thoughts? >> This is where VMware comes into play. VMware has the relationship with the software layer at least, and they have a great story to tell. They need to get in front of the right people and tell that story, that CrossCloud story of being able to develop using CF and then move that to any cloud using NSX. Great story, but John, to your point, they have to get into the right rooms and have the right conversations, >> Yeah. >> Keith: That's a tough thing to do. >> I also got to give them some time. I mean, this merger happened eight months ago. I think it's pretty remarkable what they have pulled off here in such a short time, and to think about the developers are probably not their first priority right now. >> Alright, so we are going to do the metadata segment of our wrap up, which I just made up since it's such a good name, metadata, in the spirit of surveillance. What metadata can you pull out of your interviews, guys, that's a tea leaf that we could read and just nuance points, I'll start. Pat Gelsinger talked about Pivotal sharing, in between the conversations kind of weaved in, yeah, we had to spin out Pivotal, but I could almost see it in his eyes, he didn't say it specifically, but he's like, we shouldn't have sold it, right? And they had to because he said he had to work on the foundational stuff, get NSX done, get that right, but you can almost see that now as, I'd like to bring that back in, although a separate company. To me, I find that a very interesting data point, that that actually makes a lot of sense to your point about VMware. That might be an interesting combination. Why take Pivotal public, roll it into VMware. >> Yeah, I think that is going to be a interesting space to watch over the next few months. VMware and Pivotal have started to once again come back together with solutions. This NSX, CrossCloud talk makes it very compelling. It's hard to predict Dell EMC being relevant long term. They understand the value short term. They have a short rope to take advantage of this cross selling between the Dell and EMC customer. They can grow this business, get revenue short term, but there will be a cliff where they need to make that transition. Cisco is trying to make that transition into a services company, a software company, and it's hard to turn down one knob and turn the other one up. We'll see if Pat, Michael Dell, and the team have the chops to get it done. >> Cisco has to endure the public markets while they are doing that, which is one advantage Dell has. >> Data point that you can extract that you take away from this? >> Synergy, synergy. I mean when two companies this big come together, you're looking at a lot of product line overlap. I came out of this, though, thinking that there really isn't that much product line overlap. You've got a company that's strong in the mid market, with the small companies, a company that's strong in the enterprise, storage, servers, not a lot of overlap there. The big question for me, so I think the synergy question is this merger makes sense from that perspective, and the big question is software, what are they going to do with those software assets, and to your point, the future is going to be, software defined everything, and that's not a story they're telling yet. >> Keith, extracted insight that you observed that was notable that you kind of picked out of the pile of the interviews. Anything notable to you? Something obscure that made you go, wow I didn't know that, oh that's a good piece of the puzzle to put together. >> You know what, just the scale of, you look at the merger, 57 billion dollars, and on paper you are like, okay that's interesting, but a lot of the numbers coming out, you know, we talked to the senior VP of marketing and he says, you know, my guys are making bank, actually that's to paraphrase him. You said that John, that they are making bank, and one of the things that I worried about was the culture, the sales culture between Dell and EMC. Dell sales culture, very web based, very, you know I had a Dell rep and there was not an awful lot of value add, EMC >> Paul: Value add. >> The value add, and those guys earned their money, and bringing those two together and making sure that customers don't miss a beat and still get that EMC value, but Dell is able to maintain that same cost structure, I thought that was a really complicated thing to do. It seems like they are executing really well on that, and I thought from a customer's perspective, you want your supplier to make money and you want it to not be too disruptive, but you know, you want to see some value. >> Great point, that was one of highlights of my take aways, Marius Haas' interview around sales and comp and structure. They are used to a lot of bank, those sales guys, and now it's like, hey we're going to give you a haircut, what? I was about to make a million dollars on commissions this year. >> This merger will not work unless the sales organization is in sync. >> Other notables for me, just that jumped out at me, that kind of made me go, that amplifies a point, that's memorable is Michael Dell's interview hits home the point of entrepreneur founder, lead guy, and there's only three left in the industry, Ellison, Dell, and Bezos, in my mind that are billionaires that are actively, not mailing it in, they are actively driving their business, have a great ethos and culture that is creating durability. I find that the key point for me, that was a moment. I think he does sell Pivotal a little too much, which gives me a little red flag, like hmm, why is he pushing Pivotal so much, what is he hiding, but that's a different story. Michael Dell, founder. Gelsinger shared some personal commentary around his personal life. 2016 was the hardest year of his life. >> Keith: That was a mean story. >> Personal and business. Almost got fired. Remember last year? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelsinger, you're fired. So, he had a tough year, now he's kicking ass, taking names, evaluation's on the rise. That jumped out at me. And finally, the little nuance in this merger is the alliance opportunity. Dell had the Intel, wintel, Microsoft relationships from day one, that history, Intel was on stage. EMC's had it, but not at the deep level that Dell did. So I see the alliance teams really grooving here, so that's going to impact channel marketing, SIs. I think you are going to see a massive power base, to your scale point, around alliances in the industry, the ecosystem. It's either going to blow up big or blow up bad. Either way its high octane power, Intel. >> Keith: It is a big bet. >> It's a big bet. Those are my points. Anything that jumped out at you, final thoughts, interviews? >> Jeff Townsend threw off an interesting statistic, 70% of the traffic on the internet will be video by 2020. I never heard that one before, but that has some pretty interesting implications for how infrastructure has to manage it. >> Yeah, great for our business. We're doing video right now. Keith, anything that jumped out at you, anything else? >> The scale of this show compared to, I've been at Dell World, I've been to EMC World. The energy is different here. I can say that for sure, from the EMC Worlds and the Dell Worlds that I've been at. Customers, I think, are wide eyed. I've been to plenty of VM World's. It doesn't quite have the flavor of a VM World, but I think customers are starting to understand the scale of Dell EMC, the entire portfolio. You walk the show floor, you're like, wow I didn't know >> John: The relevance has increased. >> Just little bits of this larger Dell technologies that customers are picking up on, that they're keying on that there's value there. >> The 800 pound gorilla, the very relevant impact, people are taking notice. >> If you are a one product Dell customer or a one product EMC customer and you are coming to the show for the first time, I think you're a little bit wowed. >> Alright, guys, great job. Keith, great to have you host theCUBE. Great job, as always. Really appreciate you bringing the commentary to theCUBE. Great stuff. >> Always great being here. >> Paul, great editorial, great insight, great questions. Great to work with you guys. Great to the team. Thanks to our sponsors. Go to siliconangle.com, wikibon.com, and go to youtube.com/siliconeangle and check out all the videos and the playlists, more coverage, great. Thanks for watching our special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. See you next time.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell, EMC. >> John: Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is theCUBE live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017, our 8th year covering EMC World. Now, the first year covering Dell EMC World, I'm John Furrier, my co-host this week, Paul Gillin, on the blue set, two CUBES, two shot guns, double barrel shot gun of content. Our next guest, who's been on theCUBE every single year we've been in existence, since 2010, the Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies and Dell EMC, Jeremy Burton, formerly the CMO of EMC and again, 2010 was your first year with EMC, now. >> That's right. >> Look, I mean, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, yeah the makeup takes a bit longer, I got to cover up more wrinkles, but you know. >> You're running the show, you're on stage, your son is doing some gigs up there. Where are you now mentally, I mean, 2010, when we started our journey with theCUBE was the first at EMC World in Boston, you just joined the company. Now, here, look where you're at. I mean, do you have the pinch me moments? How the hell did this happen? Look how big we are. What's, how do you feel? >> Yeah, it's great. I mean, I almost have this belief in tech, you can never plan more than a couple years. I mean, so I kind of laugh a little bit at the five year strategy or whatever. And I'm think even personally, if you're looking out maybe more than a couple years in your career as to what you want to do, its... it can all change. It's like the start of a race. You can have all the best plans in the world, but you don't know what's going to happen when you get around the first corner, right? So, yeah, I knew last year, when Michael asked me to take on the CMO role, that the marketing team could make a difference. I'm a big believer about story and making sure that people understand what we're trying to do. It was, for me at least, it was a challenge, and a real interesting role to take on. >> Certainly a big challenge, you got the merger going on, obviously bigger role, bigger company, more portfolio product. You also have a product background you usually were doing a lot of the product stuff. What's been the impact from a customer standpoint as you've been rolling out the brand of Dell Technologies which I know is a holistic brand. But you now have a lot of brands to deal with in your portfolio. >> Yeah, well the good news is we're bigger, we have more budget, we can do a bigger brand campaign and the real goal here is; most people, when they think of Dell, they think of a PC. When they think of EMC they think of a storage array. Dell Technologies, if you look at the breadth of the company now, it really is incredible what we can do in an organization. So the brand campaign is really about redefining the company. What is Dell Technologies stand for? Well, it's about transforming your business, Transforming IT, your workforce and security. If we can get across over the next couple of years, the impact that we can have on an organization that's really where the win is. Underneath that obviously, we want to say, hey look, if you're on a digital project, Pivotal's going to be lead. It if's a software-defined data center, it's VMWear. So first and foremost, it's getting the big story of Dell Technologies, and redefining how people perceive the company. >> Well, Jeremy, so what's the message? We've been trying to read the tea leaves here, about what's the theme coming out of the show. What is the single most important message you want customers to take away? >> Number one, first and foremost, it's about, look, if every company is going to become a digital company, if you want to become a digital company, trust Dell Technologies for your journey. >> Everybody's saying that, though. I mean, that's HP's pitch now, too. So why did you adopt digital transformation as a theme, when it has become such a buzzword in the industry? Are you trying to find a nuance there? >> No, because the thing is, is that's where the world is going. And we could make up something that's ours, but the problem with that, I've never been one for saying, oh, we're just going to make up a new category. The category, people are going to become digital companies without a doubt, and I think our differentiation, and this is in the ad campaign, and you see it around the show, here, it's about making it real. At some point, you got to realize that transformation. if you're going to go build a cloud native app with HP, good luck, they don't have any software. >> I think you said on theCUBE last year, or the year before, I forget which year it was. These eight years are blurring in, and... theCUBE's on it's eight year. I think you quote said, "never fight fashion," was a phrase you always say, so I do believe that digital transformation's a little bit boring, but it's a reality. >> Well and for us, I feel like our differentiation, whether it be EMC or Dell, is we're a very practical company. And if we can't make it real, nobody can. Which is why the ad campaign only focused on customers. It was, hey if you want to look at GE, if you're going to look at Colombia Sports Wear, Chitale Dairy, we got about ten different customers, cause I think, to your point, right, it is noisy. How do you make it believable? You have a real customer saying, "I bet on Dell Technologies and they transformed my business." >> So we were talking on the intro about the transformation I know there's a lot of herding cats with the new merged companies, and you got to get every thing they want on stage, limited time on stage, not a lot of customers on stage, so I got to ask you, look it, the business transformation is Isilon Onefs, so digital transformation really means the businesses. How do you evolve from speeds and feeds culture, to real business transformation? Cause that's kind of what I hear you saying. >> That is, if you look internally at how the company's got to transform, it's exactly that. We created around the time we brought the companies together a small group sales team called Dell Technologies Select and these are folks that actually don't... carry any one brand. They carry Dell Technologies, and they're working with fifty of our biggest most transformative customers. So obviously the goal here is over time, you want that fifty to be two hundred, to be a thousand. Really, you're going to grow the DNA within that group, because the difficulty is that, some companies are doing digital transformation, some people are not even doing IT transformation, some companies are still trying to figure out the last big issue that they had. The market doesn't, it's not an on-off switch, you've got early adopters, you've got 'luggards, and everything in between, so Dell Technologies Select, was really geared towards engaging with transformative customers in a different way, across the entire portfolio, instead of; a storage, a service, a virtualization. >> Can you dig a little deeper on the sales model? Because you had the merge of two great sales organizations, one enterprise focused, is account focused, another is channel focused, >> SMB >> And direct SMB. How are you getting them to work together, or trying to merge those cultures, or are you trying to use each for what it does best? >> It's a great question, cause I think this is where many companies fall down when they merge or acquire even, right? So think of the Dell Technologies Select at the very top of the pyramid, they're the biggest, most transformative projects we're engaged on, and have a set of folks who work across the portfolio. Beneath that, we have an enterprise sales team. That, is predominantly made up from the EMC sales team, prior to the merger; relationship selling, big accounts, you know there's three thousand accounts there. Bill Scannell runs that sales team. Beneath that, you've got the commercial sales team, and Marius Haas, who was from Dell. Marius runs that. And so we're trying to preserve the higher end relationship selling that Bill Scannell and his team did. And the transactional sales team that Dell had, and then even beneath that in Jeff Clarke's organization, you've got consumer and small business. So what we've tried to do is, not complicated things. Leave each area to do what they were good at. And then to the key point we made earlier, build this very broad digital capability. Kind of new DNA; start small and grow big. >> You know, EMC has always had good partner relations, they were storage and you had some swim lanes, some stuff to partner program, and all the different stuff you were involved in. The branding was phenomenal when you took over on that. But now my observation on this show, just from watching it over the years, is a whole lift in alliance and marketing partners. Intel Dan Bryan on stage, obviously Dell and Intel make a lot of sense together. That history is there. But the alliances in Microsoft, Cisco, now a whole new set of industry alliances now, at the disposal. Has that changed your thinking a bit? And how do you look at that? Because now that's not just like a merging, that's like pre-existing and exploding. >> No, you always need partners, right? I think both Dell and EMC never believed they do it all themselves, right? And I think here we are, together, we're a much bigger company, but we still need partners. I mean Intel, we're Intel's biggest customer, right? So that makes up more relevant to them, but whereas in the past, maybe we were always thought as on the EMC side as enemy of Microsoft because of the VMWare. Now, Microsoft's an alliance partner. And it's nice that folks like Satya, he's taken over the company, and he's made it very clear that he wants to build an ecosystem, or rebuild and ecosystem. The big companies like Intel and Microsoft, I mean Cisco, we still do two billion dollars of Vblock, right? And as much as I think... we do kind of jousting between vendors at times, ultimately the customer decides who partners, and who competes. We often partner because the customer wants us to partner. >> One of the things I always like about interviewing you, Jeremy, you have your toe in the water of the future. I heard you mention VR, virtual reality, and all kinds of reality on stage; AR, VR. AI is certainly the hottest thing in the world. Deep learning and machine learning... is getting integrated into some of the products. But as a brand marketer, how are you looking at these new trends? Cause they are great opportunities, you have a great show on stage, you had great entertainment, informative, colorful, but now, soon, as a marketer, you have to start integrating some of these awesome tools, into the marketing mix. >> It's incredible right now, because... one of the things I love about the coming together of Dell EMC, and maybe this is not intuitively obvious, but a lot of the client products, a lot of the VR and gaming business that Dell has built over the years, I mean all the guys who come here, are either gamers or have got kids who are gamers. And so getting access to the Alienware team, they've got relationships with the Minecraft team, working with the folks that work on the AR and VR headsets. To me it should make events like this much more engaging. I'm a big believer that over time, these events have got to become- >> And by the way, all those new startups, are going to be running Dell servers, potentially, so a lot of this stuff is going on, your hands in it. >> Yeah, we got to make this experiential for folks. And a lot of the client technology has got that, it grabs you, right? I'm looking forward to exploring- I mean particularly augmented reality. To me, that's a technology, which is going to be massive in future. I think the way we want to present the company, is not as consumer and business, or client and data center, I think we've got to show folks the end to end. If you're doing a service request as a field service worker, and you've got your augmented reality headset on, you're going to get data for the service request from a back office system, you're going to get your knowledge from an Isilon system but it's going to be rendered in real time in front of you, as you do your work. I think the customer wants to see the solution. >> We were talking with Peter Burris in the previous segment about... are we going back to the future? The old IBM, one throat to choke, IBM was in every market, they dominated almost every market. But they had the full range of products you could get from them, from one sales rep. Are we going back to that type of model now? >> Yes and no. If you want a good indication of the future, look at the past, right? And so, infrastructure clearly is consolidating, right? What we believe, as infrastructure consolidates, it can support fewer players. So, you got to be the big player. So, in infrastructure market, we have a consolidation play, and we're very open about that. We're going to be more efficient, more economic Even if that market's flat, we're going to take more- >> But it's still huge numbers, by the way. >> It's a huge number, and then look, there's the new cloud native world. We've got to play with Pivotal there. Look at the myriad of devices you're going to see in IRT. The IRT ecosystem is not a single, vertical integrated stack. You've got sprinklers, you've got things that attach to cows, you've got... sensors on cars. I think when on part of the tech industry starts to consolidate, and you get this, maybe fewer vendors, another area opens up, and you get this incredible ecosystem. I'd say, IoT, machine intelligence, cloud native apps, that's like the next frontier, and those ecosystems are thriving, as the prior ecosystem consolidates. >> Great, awesome comment there, I think you just encapsulated- well done, the consolidation, that's a huge number, by the way. That's massive. >> It's hundreds of billions of dollars. In fact, IDC would track it and say it's about three. >> A hyper conversion that's going on right now. I mean two years ago, that was a thriving ecosystem, now it's all consolidated- >> It's consolidating, because the macro category- >> It seems to happen faster. >> Yeah, you've got to, I think in infrastructure... It's interesting, we don't necessarily in our business need to be the first mover, like we weren't the first mover to hyperconverge. But we can't be asleep at the wheel, number one, and we have to bring our distribution scale to bear. Once something goes to mainstream, as we proved in our flash, and now we're proving in hyperconverge, we has zero revenue for VxRail a year ago, today it's the market leader. That's... we weren't first to market with the product, but we've got distribution scale. The reason why a lot of these small companies are struggling is because they spend all of their VC money, or their profits, it's all spent on building a distribution channel. And so that's where Wall Street doesn't value them anymore. >> Scales and new competitive advantage, we've said on theCUBE, we continue to say that, certainly Amazon web service has proven that. Scale is the new differentiator, it's the barred to entry, great point there. I got to ask you about a point we were discussing, with Peter Burris, and we were kind of riffing on this, kind of, meaning to joke at at some of the vendors out there. Everyone's claiming to be number one, at everything. It's like, we're number one at this! We're number one. Markel's number one, Dell's number one, HP's number one. So the question is, what is the scoreboard? So the answer in our little opening was; customers. That is the ultimate scoreboard. >> Yeah. >> How are you guys going to continue to push, because there's been some wins with the combination. That's ultimately going to be the scoreboard. Forget the market share from whatever research firm. How are you getting new customers, are you retaining them, are they valuing your products and services? Your thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things there. And I think the history of Dell is pretty interesting, because the data shows that the best way for us to get into a new customer, believe it or not, is with a PC. And, it's our, probably lowest priced product, it's our, maybe the most frictionless sale. And the nice thing now is once we get in there with the PC, and maybe a low end server, there's a whole lot more value we can bring in behind it. Which is why a lot of our focus, is not just on product; it's distribution channel as well, because if that's working effectively, we can get that cross-sale going. We've already seen in the early days of the merger, customers who've got our storage, sometimes a great tactic is to go, ask the customer; "hey, can we have your server business?" And it's been amazing how many folks have come back and said, "okay," because we've got relationships. And so, adding for the next couple of years, that cross sale becomes absolutely critical for us. Because we get a new customer, but then we want to keep that customer. How do we keep them? We got to solve more of the problem. And that's called cross-sale. >> Jeremy, great to have you on theCUBE. I know you're super busy, I know you got Gwen Stefani's the entertainment tonight. Great attendance here at the show. Congratulations on the CMO role, of the huge organization that's Dell Technologies. Big brand challenge, a great opportunity for you personally. So my final question, as always on theCUBE, What are your priories for next year? When we come back, and look back... what are you trying to do this year? You've got a lot going on, give us the plan. >> I mean, I'll leave the Dell Technologies thing to Michael, he's probably talked about that already. But marketing specifically, look, 70% of the content on the internet is going to be video by 2020. So, as a marketer, we've got to get really great at producing really high quality video content. It's the way that marketing's going to be done. So the nice thing, the exciting thing for the marketing team is, hey, if you're great at doing PowerPoint or writing a white paper, you're going to be a media star in the future. But I'm a huge believer in the fact that we've got to get great at doing unique content, at scale, and that's how you cut through the noise and get people's attention, because the world is going to become more noisy, not less. So that's one of the big priorities, obviously there's a little bit of bedding in of this new marketing model, we only closed the deal back in September. We got to get the team- >> You got to big budget, that's for sure. >> Yeah but video, and storytelling, is huge. Up there, that's the biggest trend. >> And don't forget the gaming. You brought up the gaming. CGI is coming around the corner, we're going to have VR, AR... >> You're going to see a lot of that. >> Jeremy Burton, Chief Marketing Officer of Dell Technologies. Dell EMC, here on theCUBE. Here at the first Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier, Peter Burris will be back with more live coverage, stay with us. (techno 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.