>>Hey guys, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of IFS Unleashed in Miami. I'm Lisa Martin. Been here half a day so far, having great conversations. It is so great to be back on the show floor and I'm getting that sentiment from the IFS execs, their customers, their partners, and the ecosystem. I'm pleased to welcome Kathy Hall as my next guest, the SVP of experience at ifs. Kathy, welcome to the program. >>Thank you. >>Love talking about the customer experience. Talk to me, but the employee experience is equally important because they're like this, but talk to me about your role as the SVP of experience and what that entails. >>Yeah, so I'm really, really fortunate at IFS to be SVP across experience. So I do a lot of work with the r and d team, but I also have a role that spans sales consulting support so I can really get involved in any part of the organization to enable us to deliver moments of service. So I'm really, really fortunate. I've got such a broad remit and really work on everything from the user experience and what the product looks like, feels like, how it interacts, how it moves, how we put our partner, the technologies in there, everything to their customer experience. So how people find it if they have to engage with support or what it's like in presales. And we are really trying to wrap that up into a total experience so that we bring all of those parts together and really productize our experience so that every customer gets a fantastic experience and the best moments of service. So yeah, it's like a short job title and it's a really kind of big role. It's fantastic. >>It is. It's very, it's very encompassing. You have so much visibility across the entire organization that impacts the customer in many different ways. I can't only imagine that having that visibility in that role really helps to create not only a great customer experience but a, a great experience for the employees. And those two things I always think of them as like this, like inextricably linked. >>Yeah, exactly. And we've done a lot over the last couple of years of really trying to make sure we've got the data so we understand both from a product point of view and a service point of view, what our users and our customers think about that moment of service. Where the friction points are, you know, what's really good and, and we can use that to coach our employees to celebrate success, to give people kudos for the fantastic work they do. And that really enables us to create a hype around the customer within, within ifs. And just last week we were celebrating CX day and we did a whole week and had our own sort of internal hashtag of CX days every day. And that was fantastic to really galvanize that spirit of those ifss, you know, Team Purple, really being at the forefront of how we deliver that, that customer experience. And it's fantastic for our customers, but it's also brilliant for our people because it's motivating and, and it empowers people to, to be able to do a great job, which is what we all want to do. >>Absolutely. Employees need to be empowered because if that's not there, then the customer experience inextricably linked will suffer. Talk to me a little bit about the evolution of the role. Has it been something that's been the, a focus of ifs? Cuz there's, you guys have so many unique differentiators for, for a company that isn't widely known, but talk to me about how that came about going, you know, what we need to be able to take to really look at the customer experience through many different lenses, take their feedback and really deliver a product experience that is seamless so that they can deliver those moments of service. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, when, when Darren took over a ceo, we've been on this really kind of passionate journey to bring service to our customers, bring value to our customers, you know, we really value is at the heart of, of everything for our customers. And, and so it's our ethos too. And so we've, we've sort of woven this value into everything that we do with that focus on the customer. So my role started off sort of more in the come in and then try and understand it from a very product point of view, but in today's kind of world products and service lines emerging things need to be unified. You know, if you go back 20 years a product was built and it got shipped out and somebody picks it up and they implemented it and then there was a support and there were sort of these walls in between, but now of course it is a cloud company and those walls don't exist anymore. >>Product features are coming out regularly. The code sort of flows through the system out to customers. The way that we service has to be different. And so we're thinking all the time, how do we get that to be a seamless process and how do we enable, for example, data within a customer system to identify opportunities to create more value for that customer using technology like AI for example, and then being able to highlight that value back. But then maybe you say to the presales person, okay, this is the precise demonstration and capability that the customer needs to see because this is what the, the system's telling us is the business case. And that then flows through to the scope and it enables us to, to deliver that value. So it's really changing the way that we think about these things and unifying together that product and that service into this kind of bigger total experience and this end to end experience. >>So we're really looking at what are all the friction points along our journeys with the customers, How does it stop them getting value? How do we prioritize that value and, and therefore how do we reimagine an end to end experience? So as that thinking's evolved, my role's also evolved from being quite product centric to being very much across the organization. And I'm lucky I come from a commercial and operational background, so I've got a vast amount of experience in delivering these types of solutions. So that's really helped as well because I'm able to see that that full end to end and, and I've got a, you know, brilliant team of people and, and it comes back to the point where we said before, the people ifs are so engaged to want to deliver value, to want to deliver the moments of service that, that it's kind of easy, you know, just got to kind of focus people in the right way and, and the s comes together. >>That's nice to hear. And that's actually the vibe and the sentiment that we're getting from this. You know, talking about the end to end experience. It's so critical because people used to tolerate fragmented experiences. We don't anymore. One of the things that went away, I think or is in massively short supply during Covid and may not come back as patience and tolerance, right? So being able to deliver that end to end experience to your customers through what you're doing internally is critical for differentiation, for competitive advantage, and of course for your customers to be successful with their customers. >>Yeah, and there's so many parts of that that you could un pick. We, we could spend hours talking about it and as consumers our expectations are huge and we carry those expectations into the workplace. And in the same way, you know, at IFS we want our team to be motivated and, you know, proud and excited about the moments of service they're delivering. Our customers want the same thing from their teams and that also means they want a system where it's easy to train, easy to use, you can pick up, it looks great, you know, it gives users love ifs and it kind of gives them a tool that helps 'em get the job done, doesn't stand in their way. So, you know, all the kind of things we think about internally and how we're measuring customer experience also translates and resonates with our customers. Everything we think about how, you know, our people need to be empowered to deliver a customer experience. That's the same messages that, you know, we hear back time and time again from our customers. So there's so many parallels and we're really able to work with our customers to kind of do both at the same time, which is fantastic. >>Talk about measurement. What are some of the key indicators of success cus success in in from an experienced lens internally and with your customers? >>Yeah, so I mean there's all the obvious ones about, you know, MPS and CSAT and customer effort score. We also put a lot of value into the qualitative feedback. So we use customer A avail, which is an IFS product to collect data on our own moments of service. And you know, the numbers are great and they tell a story, but I also get really sucked into reading the comments back from the customers and there's kind of text analytics and sentiment analytics and for me that's becoming the more powerful kind of piece of data to look at because a story conveys much more than a simple number and it's also something that goes global as well. You know, different countries score in different ways. There's different kind of, you know, there's a lot of gaming that can go on with a score. It can be quite difficult to really interpret, but a but a story and understanding the sentiment behind that customer, that's gold. And if you can put those together and have a way of on scale being able to interpret that analysis, which we can do, you know, that becomes something quite special. So for me it's about a shift to understanding more of those stories as well as keeping, you know, the kind of traditional, traditional measures across the, the learning across the journey points, >>Right? The, the value, I always think the value of the voice of the customer is probably invaluable to organizations because it's honest. >>It absolutely it's honest. And I think once you've got those stories and you've got those metrics and then you're looking at your operational metrics, so what does that mean then in terms of, you know, recur revenue and what does that mean in terms of margins and the costs? And being able to put those three things together so that you couldn't understand the levers that you've got and the, and the results of those levers, that becomes really powerful. And that's really what's driving our, our customers for, for them to deliver in their moments of service as well, which ties back into when we're working within customers and engaging with customers and looking at that value story, doing the value assessments more able to use the, the evidence from industry and previous customers and, and the data sources available to help them also project, you know, an operational efficiency here will have this c CX benefit but actually also has this value benefit >>Oh, a value back to the business. I mean a a good experience is transformative. Yeah, >>Really powerful. >>Any industry. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's so powerful and you know, that really resonates with our customers and that's what they're trying to, to achieve all the time. And so when they're looking at IFS cloud in particular, they're looking at how, you know, the, the software can help them achieve those moments of service and perfect those moments of service and all the technology that comes into play that can enable people to improve those moments of service at the same time as getting those operational benefits. And that enables organizations to then invest more in the customer experience, more advocacy and, and really, you know, feels growth. There's, there's no denying that now you have to have that experience and, and at your point before the expectation from as others consumers, we won't tolerate a bad experience anymore, which is a good thing. >>It is. We, we've all had met plenty of those throughout the last two and a half years. Last question for you, you, what are some of the things that are next for experience at ifs? I know you mentioned before we went live that you started during the pandemic, so you go, go get to meet your team finally, but what are some of the things that excite you about the momentum that you guys are carrying through the rest of the second half? >>Yeah, so our focus now is really bringing the component parts together. So we have several tools across our whole experience that leverage from our IFFs cloud platform in order to deliver those moments of service to our customers. But those tools have grown up in different areas of the business because there's been a specific need in that area of the business. So tools at the pre-sale stage, tools that enable us to deliver scope, more frictionlessly tools that enable us to, to identify and capture value. The next stage is bringing those all together. So this week I announced our vision for experience and the experience hub and that really being a place where you get that thread of value throughout the whole experience where everything is tied into one place and it makes it really frictionless for our customers to get the value from ifs. >>And that's critical. You guys have north of 10,000 customers, it's only growing. Kathy, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about the end to end experience that IFS delivers internally and externally to its customers. We appreciate your insights. >>Thank you for having >>Me. My pleasure. For Kathy Hall, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube live on the show floor of IFS Unleashed from Miami. Stick around. My next guest joins me in just a minute. I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now, so I've had the.

>>The Cube Presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to the Cube's Coverage of Forward five UI Path Customer event. This is the fourth forward that we've been at. We started in Miami, had some great events. It's all about the customer stories. Dave Valante with Dave Nicholson, Flow Yees here. She's the director of engineering and development at dsu and Kate Hall is to her right. And Kate is the director of Automation Solutions at dsu. Ladies, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much. Thanks >>You to >>Be here. Tell us about dsu. You guys are huge company, but but give us the focus. >>Yeah, absolutely. Dentsu, it's one of the largest advertising networks out there. One of the largest in the world with over 66,000 employees and we're operating in a hundred plus countries. We're really proud to serve 95% of the Fortune 100 companies. Household names like Microsoft Factor and Gamble. If you seen the Super Bowls ads last year, Larry, Larry Davids ads for the crypto brand. That's a hilarious one for anyone who haven't seen it. So we're just really proud to be here and we really respect the creatives of our company. >>That was the best commercial, the Super Bowl by far. For sure. I, I said at the top of saying that Dave and I were talking UI pass, a cool company. You guys kinda look like cool people. You got cool jobs. Tell, tell us about your respective roles. What do you guys do? Yeah, >>Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I'm the director of engineering and automation, so what I really do is to implement the automation operating model and connecting developers across five continents together, making sure that we're delivering and deploying automation projects up to our best standards setting by the operating model. So it's a really, really great job. And when we get to see all these brilliant minds across the world >>And, And Kate, what's your role? Yeah, >>And the Automation Solutions vertical that I head up, the focus is really on converting business requirements into technical designs for flows, developers to deliver. So making sure that we are managing our pipeline, sourcing the right ideas, prioritizing them according to the business businesses objectives and making sure that we route them to the right place. So is it, does it need to be an automation first? Do we need to optimize the process? Does this make sense for citizen developers or do we need to bring in the professional resources on flow's >>Team? So you're bilingual, you speak, you're like the translator, you speak geek and wall, right? Is that fair? Okay. So take me back to the, let's, let's do a little mini case study here. How did you guys get started? I'm always interested, was this a top down? Is, is is top down required to be successful? Cuz it does feel like you can have bottom up bottoms up with rpa, but, but how did you guys get started? What was the journey like? >>Yeah, we started back in 2017, very traditional top down approach. So we delivered a couple POCs working directly with UiPath. You know, going back those five years, delivered those really highly scalable top down solutions that drove hundreds of thousands of hours of ROI for the business. However, as people kind of began to embrace automation and they learned that this is something that they could, that could help them, it's not something that they should be afraid of to take away their jobs. You know, DSU is a young company with a lot of young, young creatives. They wanna make their lives better. So we were absolutely inundated with all of these use cases of, hey I, I need a bot to do this. I need a bot to do that i's gonna save me, you know, 10 hours a week. It's gonna save my team a hundred hours a month, et cetera, et cetera. All of these smaller use cases that were gonna be hugely impactful for the individuals, their teams, even in entire department, but didn't have that scalable ROI for us to put professional development resources against it. So starting in 2020 we really introduced the citizen development program to put the power into those people's hands so that they could create their own solutions. And that was really just a snowball effect to tackle it from the bottom up as well as the top down. >>So a lot of young people, Dave, they not not threatened by robots that racing it. So >>They've grown up with the technology, they know that they can order an Uber from their phone, right? Why am I, you know, sitting here at MITs typing data from Excel into a program that might be older than some of our youngest employees. >>Yeah. Now, now the way you described it, correct me if I'm wrong, the way you described it, it sounds like there's sort of a gating function though. You're not just putting these tools in the hands of people sitting, especially creatives who are there to create. You're not saying, Oh you want things automated, here are the tools. Go ahead. Automated. We'll we, for those of you who want to learn how to use the tools, we'll have you automate that there. Did I hear that right? You're, you're sort of making decisions about what things will be developed even by citizen developers. >>Let me, Do you wanna talk to them about governance? Yeah, absolutely. >>Yeah, so I think we started out with assistant development program, obviously the huge success, right? Last year we're also here at the Cubes. We're very happy to be back again. But I think a lot, a lot had changed and we've grown a lot since last year. One, I have the joy being a part of this team. And then the other thing is that we really expanded and implemented an automation operating model that I mentioned briefly just earlier. So what that enabled us to do is to unite developers from five continents together organically and we're now able to tap into their talent at a global scale. So we are really using this operating model to grow our automation practice in a scalable and also controlled manner. Okay. What I mean by that is that these developer originally were sitting in 18 plus markets, right? There's not much communication collaboration between them. >>And then we went in and bridged them together. What happened is that originally they were only delivering projects and use cases within their region and sometimes these use cases could be very, very much, you know, small scale and not really maximizing their talent. What we are now able to do is tap into a global automation pipeline. So we connecting these highly skilled people to the pipeline elsewhere, the use cases elsewhere that might not be within their regions because one of our focus, a lot of change I mentioned, right? One thing that will never change with our team, it's used automation to elevate people's potential. Now it's really a win-win situation cuz we are connecting the use cases from different pipelines. So the business is happy cuz we are delivering these high scalable solutions. We also utilizing these developers and they're happy because their skills are being maximized and then at the same time growing our automation program. So then that way the citizen development program so that the lower complexities projects are being delivered at a local level and we are able to innovate at a local level. >>I, I have so many questions flow based on what you just said. It's blowing my mind >>Here. It's a whole cycle. >>So let me start with how do you, you know, one of the, one of the concerns I had initially with RPA, cuz just you're talking about some very narrow use cases and your goal is to expand that to realize the potential of each individual, right? But early days I saw a lot of what I call paving the cow path, taking a process that was not a great process and then automating it, right? And that was limiting the potential. So how do you guys prioritize which processes to focus on and maybe which processes should be rethought, >>Right? Exactly. A lot of time when we do automation, right, we talk about innovations and all that stuff, but innovation doesn't happen with the same people sitting in the same room doing the same thing. So what we are doing now, able to connect all these people, different developers from different groups, we really bring the diversity together. That's diversity D diverse diversity in the mindset, diversity in the skill. So what are we really able to do and we see how we tackle this problem is to, and that's a problem for a lot of business out there is the short-termism. So there's something, what we do is that we take two approaches. One, before we, you know, for example, when we used to receive a use case, right? Maybe it's for the China market involving a specific tool and we just go right into development and start coding and all that good stuff, which is great. >>But what we do with this automation framework, which we think it's a really great service for any company out there that want to grow and mature their automation practice, it's to take a step back, think about, okay, so the China market would be beneficial from this automation. Can we also look at the Philippine market? Can we also look at the Thailand market? Because we also know that they have similar processes and similar auto tools that they use. So we are really able to make our automation in a more meaningful way by scaling a project just beyond one market. Now it's impacting the entire region and benefiting people in the entire region. That is what we say, you know, putting automation for good and then that's what we talked about at dsu, Teaming without limits. And that's a, so >>By taking, we wanna make sure that we're really like taking a step back, connecting all of the dots, building the one thing the right way, the first time. Exactly. And what's really integral into being able to have that transparency, that visibility is that now we're all working on the same platform. So you know, Brian spoke to you last year about our migration into automation cloud, having everything that single pipeline in the cloud. Anybody at DSU can often join the automation community and get access to automation hub, see what's out there, submit their own ideas, use the launchpad to go and take training. Yeah. And get started on their own automation journey as a citizen developer and you know, see the different paths that are available to them from that one central space. >>So by taking us a breath, stepping back, pausing just a bit, the business impact at the tail end is much, much higher. Now you start in 2017 really before you UI path made it's big enterprise play, it acquired process gold, you know, cloud elements now most recently referenced some others. How much of what you guys are, are, are doing is platform versus kind of the initial sort of robot installation? Yeah, >>I mean platforms power people and that's what we're here to do as the global automation team. Whether it's powering the citizen developers, the professional developers, anybody who's interacting with our automations at dsu, we wanna make sure that we're connecting the docs for them on a platform basis so that developers can develop and they don't need to develop those simple use cases that could be done by a citizen developer. You know, they're super smart technical people, they wanna do the cool shit with the new stuff. They wanna branch into, you know, using AI center and doing document understanding. That's, you know, the nature of human curiosity. Citizen developers, they're thrilled that we're making an investment to upscale them, to give them a new capability so that they can automate their own work. And they don't, they, they're the process experts. They don't need to spend a month talking to us when they could spend that time taking the training, learning how to create something themselves. >>How, how much sort of use case runway when you guys step back and look at your business, do you see a limit to the use cases? I mean where are you, if you had on a spectrum of, you know, maturity, how much more opportunity is there for DSU to automate? >>There's so much I think the, you feel >>Like it's limitless? >>No, I absolutely feel like it's limitless because there one thing, it's, there's the use cases and I think it's all about connecting the talent and making sure that something we do really, you know, making sure that we deliver these use cases, invest the time in our people so we make sure our professional developers part of our team spending 10 to 20% of the time to do learning and development because only limitless if our people are getting the latest and the greatest technology and we want to invest the time and we see this as an investment in the people making sure that we deliver the promise of putting people first. And the second thing, it's also investment in our company's growth. And that's a long term goal. And overcoming just focusing on things our short term. So that is something we really focus to do. And not only the use cases we are doing what we are doing as an operating model for automation. That is also something that we really value because then this is a kind of a playbook and a success model for many companies out there to grow their automation practice. So that's another angle that we are also focusing >>On. Well that, that's a relief because you guys are both seem really cool and, and I'm sitting here thinking they don't realize they're working themselves out of a job once they get everything automated, what are they gonna do? Right? But, but so, so it sounds like it's a never ending process, but because you guys are, are such a large global organization, it seems like you might have a luxury of being able to benchmark automations from one region and then benchmark them against other regions that aren't using that automation to be able to see very, very quickly not only realize ROI really quickly from the region where it's been implemented, but to be able to compare it to almost a control. Is that, is that part of your process? Yeah, >>Absolutely. Because we are such a global brand and with the automation, automation operating model, what we are able to do, not only focusing on the talent and the people, but also focusing on the infrastructure. So for example, right, maybe there's a first use case developing in Argentina and they have never done these automation before. And when they go to their security team and asking for an Okta bypass service account and the security team Argentina, like we never heard of automation, we don't know what UiPath is, why would I give you a service account for good reason, right? They're doing their job right. But what we able to do with automation model, it's to establish trust between the developers and the security team. So now we have a set up standing infrastructure that we are ready to go whenever an automation's ready to deploy and we're able to get the set up standing infrastructure because we have the governance to make sure the quality would delivered and making sure anything that we deployed, automation that we deploy are developed and governed by the best practice. So that's how we able to kind of get this automation expand globally in a very control and scalable manner because the people that we have build a relationship with. What are >>The governors to how fast you can adopt? Is it just expertise or bandwidth of that expertise or what's the bottleneck? >>Yeah, >>If >>You wanna talk more about, >>So in terms of the pipeline, we really wanna make sure that we are taking that step back and instead of just going, let's develop, develop, develop, here are the requirements like get started and go, we've prove the value of automation at Densu. We wanna make sure we are taking that step back and observing the pipeline. And it's, it's up to us to work with the business to really establish their priorities and the priorities. It's a, it's a big global organization. There might be different priorities in APAC than there are in EM for a good reason. APAC may not be adopted on the same, you know, e r P system for example. So they might have those smaller scale ROI use cases, but that's where we wanna work with them to identify, you know, maybe this is a legitimate need, the ROI is not there, let's upscale some citizen developers so that they can start, you know, working for themselves and get those results faster for those simpler use cases. >>Does, does the funding come from the line of business or IT or a combination? I mean there are obviously budget constraints are very concerned about the macro and the recession. You guys have some global brands, you know, as, as things ebb and flow in the economy, you're competing with other budgets. But where are the budgets coming from inside of dsu? Is it the business, is it the tech >>Group? Yeah, we really consider our automation group is the cause of doing business because we are here connecting people with bridging people together and really elevating. And the reason why we structure it that way, it's people, we do automation at dsu not to reduce head count, not to, you know, not, not just those matrix number that we measure, but really it's to giving time back to the people, giving time back to our business. So then that way they can focus on their wellbeing and that way they can focus on the work-life balance, right? So that's what we say. We are forced for good and by using automation for good as one really great example. So I think because of this agenda and because DSU do prioritize people, you know, so that's why we're getting the funding, we're getting the budget and we are seeing as a cause of doing business. So then we can get these time back using innovation to make people more fulfilling and applying automation in meaningful ways. >>Kate and Flo, congratulations. Your energy is palpable and really great success, wonderful story. Really appreciate you sharing. Thank you so >>Much for having us today. >>You're very welcome. All keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Ante. We're live from UI path forward at five from Las Vegas. We're in the Venetian Consent Convention Center. Will be right back, right for the short break.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're here talking about how you can better understand and manage the risks associated with the digital supply chain. How in this day and age where software comes from so many different places and sources throughout the ecosystem, how can organizations manage the risks associated with our dependence on software? And with me now are two great guests, Andrea Hall, who is a specialist solution architect and project manager for security and compliance at Red Hat. She's going to focus on public sector. And Andrew Block who's a distinguished architect at Red Hat Consulting, folks welcome. >> Welcome >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Andrea, let's start with you. Let's talk about regulations. What exists today that we should be aware of that organizations should be paying attention to? >> Oh sure, so the thing that comes to mind first being in the US is the presidential executive order on cybersecurity that came out a few months ago. Organizations are really paying attention to that. And in the US, it's having a ripple effect with policy, but we're also seeing policy considerations pop up in other countries, Australia and England. The supply chain is a big focus right now, of course, but we see these changes coming down the road as more and more government organizations are trying to secure their critical infrastructure. >> Is there kind of a leadership, or probably in other words, is somebody saying seeing what the UK does and say, okay, we're going to follow that template? Or is it just a variety and a mish mash with no sort of consolidation? How is that sort of playing out? >> I see a lot of organizations kind of basing their requirements on (indistinct) However, each organization has its own nuances. Each agency has its own nuances to how it wants them implemented. >> Andrew, maybe you could chime in here. What are you seeing when you talk to customers that are tuned into this issue? >> You know, as Andrea had just mentioned having that north star in terms of regulations is so fundamentally great for them because many of them especially in regulate industries, look to these regulations on how they apply their own policies. So at least it has some guidance on how to move forward because as we all know the secure software supply chain is getting news every day and how they react to it is something that I know all their leaders are asking themselves, especially those IT leaders. >> Andrea, when I talk to practitioners, sometimes they're frustrated. They understand they have to comply. They know new regulations are coming out, but sometimes it's hard for them to keep up. It would be helpful if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's frustrated and they ask you, what are your expectations? What are the trends in regulations? How do you see the current regulations evolving to specifically accommodate the digital supply chain and the security exposures and corollary requirements there? >> We see a lot of organizations struggling in the sense of trying to understand what the policy actually wants. Definitions are still a little bit vague, but implementation is also difficult because sometimes organizations will add more tools to their toolkit, adding a layer of complexity there. Really automation has to be pulled in. That's key to implementing this instead of adding more workload and more burden to your folks. It's really important for these organizations to pull stakeholders in the organization together. So the IT leaders bring together the developers, the security operations sit at the same table, talk about whether or not what needs to be implemented or what's proposed to be implemented, will affect the mission or in any way or disrupt operations. It's important for everybody to be on the same page so it doesn't slow anything down as you're trying to roll it out. >> And one of the things here is that we're seeing a lot of change with these new regulations and with a lot of organizations, any type of change is scary. And that is one area that they're looking for guidance not only in the tooling, but also how they apply it in the organization. >> I'll add on. >> Please. >> I'll add onto that and say, organizations really need to take into account the people side of things too. People need to understand what the impact is to the organization, so that they don't try to find the loopholes, they're buying into what needs to be done. They understand the why behind it. You for example, if you walk into your house, you normally close the door behind you. Security needs to be seen as that, as well, that's the culture and it's the habit. And it's ingrained in the fabric of the organization to live this way, not just implement the tools to do it. >> Right, and the number of doors you have in your infrastructure are a lot more than just a couple. Andrew mentioned sort of guidance and governments are obviously taking a more active role. I mean, sometimes I'm a cynic. I mean, the president Biden signs an executive order, but swipe of a pen doesn't really give us enough to go on. Do you think Andrea, that we're going to see new guidance from governments in the very near future? What are you expecting? >> I expect to see more conversations happening. I know that agencies who developed the policies are pulling together stakeholders and getting input. But I do see in the not too distant future, that mandates will be rolling out, yes. >> Well, so Andrew of course, Andrea, if you have a thought on this as well, but how do you see organizations dealing with adopting these new policies. >> Slowly, don't boil the ocean is one thing I tell a lot to every one of them, because a lot of these tooling, a lot of these concepts are foreign to them, brand new. How they adopt those and how they implement them, needs to be done in a very agile fashion, very slow and prescriptive. Go ahead and try to find one area of improvement and go ahead and work upon it and build upon it. Because not only does that normally make your organization more successful and secure, but also helps your organization just from a more out standpoint. One thing that you need to emphasize is that don't blame anyone. 'Cause a lot of times when you're going through this, you're reassessing your own supply chain. You might find where you could see improvements that need to be done. Don't blame things that may have occurred in the past. See how you can benefit from these lessons learned in the future. >> It's interesting you say that the blame game, I mean it used to be that failure meant you get fired and that's obviously has changed. As many have said, you know you're going to have incidents. It's how you respond to those incidents. What you learn from them. Do you have Andrew, any insights from specifically working with customers on securing their software supply chain? What can you tell us about what leading practitioners are doing today? >> They're going in and not only assessing what their software components consist of. Using tools like an SBOM, a software bill of materials, understand where all the components of their ecosystem and their lineage comes from. We're hearing almost every single day, new vulnerabilities that are being introduced in various software packages. By having that understanding of what is in your ecosystem, you can then better understand how to mitigate those concerns moving forward. >> Andrea, Andrew was just saying, one of the things is you don't just dive in. You've got to be careful. There's going to be ripple effects is what I'm inferring, but at the same time, there's a mandate to move quickly. Are there things that could accelerate the adoption of regulation or even the creation of regulations and that guidance in your view? What could accelerate this? >> As far as accelerating it goes, I think it's having those conversations proactively with the stakeholders in your organization and understanding the environment like Andrew said. Go ahead and get that baseline. And just know that whatever changes you make are maybe going to be audited down the road, because as we were moving towards this kind of third-party verification, that you're actually implementing things in order to do business with another organization. The importance of that, if organizations see that gravity to this, I think they will try to speed things up. I think that if organizations and the people in those organizations understand that why, that I talked about earlier and they understand how things like solar winds or things like the oil disruption that happened earlier this year. The personal effect to cyber events will help your organization move forward. Again, everybody's bought into the concept, everybody's working towards the same goals and they understand that why behind it. >> In addition to that, having tooling available, that makes it easy for them. You have a lot of individuals who this is all foreign, providing that base level tooling that aligns to a lot of the regulations that might be applicable within their real realm and their domain, makes it easier for them to start to complying and taking less burden off of them to be able to be successful. >> So it's a hard problem because Andrew, how do you deal with sort of the comment more tools, okay. But I look at that the Optiv map, if you've seen that. It makes your eyes cross. You've got so many tools, so much fragmentation, you're introducing new tools. Can automation help that? Is there hope for consolidation of that tools portfolio? >> Right now, this space is very emerging. It's very emerging, it's very fluid to be honest, 'cause there is actually mandates only a year or two old. But as they come over the course of time, however, I do see these types of tooling starting to consolidate where right now it seems like every vendor has a tool that tries to address this. It's being able to have the people work together, have more regulations that will come out that will allow us to start to redefine and solidify on certain tools like ISO standards. There are certain ones that I mentioned on as balance previously, there's now a ISO standard on SBOM there wasn't previously. So as more and more of these regulations come out, it makes it easier to provide that recommended set of tooling that organizations can start leveraging instead of vendor A, vendor B. >> Andrea, I said this before I was a cynic, but will give you the last word, give us some hope. I mean, obviously public policy is very important. A partnership between governments and industry, both the practitioners, the organizations that are buying these tools, as well as the technology industry got to work together in an ecosystem. Give us some hope. >> The hope I think will come from realizing that as you're doing this, as you are implementing these changes, you're in a sense trying to prevent those future incidents from happening. There's some assurance that you're doing everything that you can do here. It's a situation, it can be daunting, I'll put it that way. It can be really daunting for organizations, but just know that organizations like Red Hat are doing what we can to help you down the road. >> And really it's just continuing this whole shifting left mentality. The top of supply chain is just one component, but the introducing dev sec ops security at the beginning, that really will make the organizations become successful because this is not just a technology problem, It's a people issue as well. And being able to kind of package them all up together will help organizations as a whole. >> Yeah, so that's a really important point. You hear that term shift left. For years, people say, hey, you can't just bolt security on, as an afterthought, that's problematic. And that's the answer to that problem, right? Is shifting left meaning designing it in at the point of code, infrastructure as code, dev sec ops. That's where it starts, right? >> Exactly, being able to have security at the forefront and then have everything afterwards. Propagate from your security mindset. >> Excellent, okay, Andrea, Andrew, thanks so much for coming to the program today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Very welcome, thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. Your a global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're here talking about how you can better understand and manage the risks associated with the digital supply chain. How in this day and age where software comes from so many different places and sources throughout the ecosystem, how can organizations manage the risks associated with our dependence on software? And with me now are two great guests, Andrea Hall, who is a specialist solution architect and project manager for security and compliance at Red Hat. She's going to focus on public sector. And Andrew Block who's a distinguished architect at Red Hat Consulting, folks welcome. >> Welcome >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Andrea, let's start with you. Let's talk about regulations. What exists today that we should be aware of that organizations should be paying attention to? >> Oh sure, so the thing that comes to mind first being in the US is the presidential executive order on cybersecurity that came out a few months ago. Organizations are really paying attention to that. And in the US, it's having a ripple effect with policy, but we're also seeing policy considerations pop up in other countries, Australia and England. The supply chain is a big focus right now, of course, but we see these changes coming down the road as more and more government organizations are trying to secure their critical infrastructure. >> Is there kind of a leadership, or probably in other words, is somebody saying seeing what the UK does and say, okay, we're going to follow that template? Or is it just a variety and a mish mash with no sort of consolidation? How is that sort of playing out? >> I see a lot of organizations kind of basing their requirements on (indistinct) However, each organization has its own nuances. Each agency has its own nuances to how it wants them implemented. >> Andrew, maybe you could chime in here. What are you seeing when you talk to customers that are tuned into this issue? >> No as Andrea had just mentioned having that north star in terms of regulations is so fundamentally great for them because many of them especially in regulate industries, look to these regulations on how they apply their own policies. So at least it has some guidance on how to move forward because as we all know the secure software supply chain is getting news every day and how they react to it is something that I know all their leaders are asking themselves, especially those IT leaders. >> Andrea, when I talk to practitioners, sometimes they're frustrated. They understand they have to comply. They know new regulations are coming out, but sometimes it's hard for them to keep up. It would be helpful if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's frustrated and they ask you, what are your expectations? What are the trends in regulations? How do you see the current regulations evolving to specifically accommodate the digital supply chain and the security exposures and corollary requirements there? >> We see a lot of organizations struggling in the sense of trying to understand what the policy actually wants. Definitions are still a little bit vague, but implementation is also difficult because sometimes organizations will add more tools to their toolkit, adding a layer of complexity there. Really automation has to be pulled in. That's key to implementing this instead of adding more workload and more burden to your folks. It's really important for these organizations to pull stakeholders in the organization together. So the IT leaders bring together the developers, the security operations sit at the same table, talk about whether or not what needs to be implemented or what's proposed to be implemented, will affect the mission or in any way or disrupt operations. It's important for everybody to be on the same page so it doesn't slow anything down as you're trying to roll it out. >> And one of the things here is that we're seeing a lot of change with these new regulations and with a lot of organizations, any type of change is scary. And that is one area that they're looking for guidance not only in the tooling, but also how they apply it in the organization. >> I'll add on. >> Please. >> I'll add onto that and say, organizations really need to take into account the people side of things too. People need to understand what the impact is to the organization, so that they don't try to find the loopholes, they're buying into what needs to be done. They understand the why behind it. You for example, if you walk into your house, you normally close the door behind you. Security needs to be seen as that, as well, that's the culture and it's the habit. And it's ingrained in the fabric of the organization to live this way, not just implement the tools to do it. >> Right, and the number of doors you have in your infrastructure are a lot more than just a couple. Andrew mentioned sort of guidance and governments are obviously taking a more active role. I mean, sometimes I'm a cynic. I mean, the president Biden signs an executive order, but swipe of a pen doesn't really give us enough to go on. Do you think Andrea, that we're going to see new guidance from governments in the very near future? What are you expecting? >> I expect to see more conversations happening. I know that agencies who developed the policies are pulling together stakeholders and getting input. But I do see in the not too distant future, that mandates will be rolling out, yes. >> Well, so Andrew of course, Andrea, if you have a thought on this as well, but how do you see organizations dealing with adopting these new policies. >> Slowly, don't boil the ocean is one thing I tell a lot to every one of them, because a lot of these tooling, a lot of these concepts are foreign to them, brand new. How they adopt those and how they implement them, needs to be done in a very agile fashion, very slow and prescriptive. Go ahead and try to find one area of improvement and go ahead and work upon it and build upon it. Because not only does that normally make your organization more successful and secure, but also helps your organization just from a more out standpoint. One thing that you need to emphasize is that don't blame anyone. 'Cause a lot of times when you're going through this, you're reassessing your own supply chain. You might find where you could see improvements that need to be done. Don't blame things that may have occurred in the past. See how you can benefit from these lessons learned in the future. >> It's interesting you say that the blame game, I mean it used to be that failure meant you get fired and that's obviously has changed. As many have said, you know you're going to have incidents. It's how you respond to those incidents. What you learn from them. Do you have Andrew, any insights from specifically working with customers on securing their software supply chain? What can you tell us about what leading practitioners are doing today? >> They're going in and not only assessing what their software components consist of. Using tools like an SBOM, a software bill of materials, understand where all the components of their ecosystem and their lineage comes from. We're hearing almost every single day, new vulnerabilities that are being introduced in various software packages. By having that understanding of what is in your ecosystem, you can then better understand how to mitigate those concerns moving forward. >> Andrea, Andrew was just saying, one of the things is you don't just dive in. You've got to be careful. There's going to be ripple effects is what I'm inferring, but at the same time, there's a mandate to move quickly. Are there things that could accelerate the adoption of regulation or even the creation of regulations and that guidance in your view? What could accelerate this? >> As far as accelerating it goes, I think it's having those conversations proactively with the stakeholders in your organization and understanding the environment like Andrew said. Go ahead and get that baseline. And just know that whatever changes you make are maybe going to be audited down the road, because as we were moving towards this kind of third-party verification, that you're actually implementing things in order to do business with another organization. The importance of that, if organizations see that gravity to this, I think they will try to speed things up. I think that if organizations and the people in those organizations understand that why, that I talked about earlier and they understand how things like solar winds or things like the oil disruption that happened earlier this year. The personal effect to cyber events will help your organization move forward. Again, everybody's bought into the concept, everybody's working towards the same goals and they understand that why behind it. >> In addition to that, having tooling available, that makes it easy for them. You have a lot of individuals who this is all foreign, providing that base level tooling that aligns to a lot of the regulations that might be applicable within their real realm and their domain, makes it easier for them to start to complying and taking less burden off of them to be able to be successful. >> So it's a hard problem because Andrew, how do you deal with sort of the comment more tools, okay. But I look at that the Optiv map, if you've seen that. It makes your eyes cross. You've got so many tools, so much fragmentation, you're introducing new tools. Can automation help that? Is there hope for consolidation of that tools portfolio? >> Right now, this space is very emerging. It's very emergent, it's very fluid to be honest, 'cause there is actually mandates only a year or two old. But as they come over the course of time, however, I do see these types of tooling starting to consolidate where right now it seems like every vendor has a tool that tries to address this. It's being able to have the people work together, have more regulations that will come out that will allow us to start to redefine and solidify on certain tools like ISO standards. There are certain ones that I mentioned on as balance previously, there's now a ISO standard on SBOM there wasn't previously. So as more and more of these regulations come out, it makes it easier to provide that recommended set of tooling that organization is leveraging instead of vendor A, vendor B. >> Andrea, I said this before I was a cynic, but will give you the last word, give us some hope. I mean, obviously public policy is very important. A partnership between governments and industry, both the practitioners, the organizations that are buying these tools, as well as the technology industry got to work together in an ecosystem. Give us some hope. >> The hope I think will come from realizing that as you're doing this, as you are implementing these changes, you're in a sense trying to prevent those future incidents from happening. There's some assurance that you're doing everything that you can do here. It's a situation, it can be daunting, I'll put it that way. It can be really daunting for organizations, but just know that organizations like Red Hat are doing what we can to help you down the road. >> And really it's just continuing this whole shifting left mentality. The top of supply chain is just one component, but the introducing dev sec ops security at the beginning, that really will make the organizations become successful because this is not just a technology problem, It's a people issue as well. And being able to kind of package them all up together will help organizations as a whole. >> Yeah, so that's a really important point. You hear that term shift left. For years, people say, hey, you can't just bolt security on, as an afterthought, that's problematic. And that's the answer to that problem, right? Is shifting left meaning designing it in at the point of code, infrastructure as code, dev sec ops. That's where it starts, right? >> Exactly, being able to have security at the forefront and then have everything afterwards. Propagate from your security mindset. >> Excellent, okay, Andrea, Andrew, thanks so much for coming to the program today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Very welcome, thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. Your a global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're here talking about how you can better understand and manage the risks associated with the digital supply chain. How in this day and age where software comes from so many different places and sources throughout the ecosystem, how can organizations manage the risks associated with our dependence on software? And with me now are two great guests, Andrea Hall, who is a specialist solution architect and project manager for security and compliance at Red Hat. She's going to focus on public sector. And Andrew Block who's a distinguished architect at Red Hat Consulting, folks welcome. >> Welcome >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Andrea, let's start with you. Let's talk about regulations. What exists today that we should be aware of that organizations should be paying attention to? >> Oh sure, so the thing that comes to mind first being in the US is the presidential executive order on cybersecurity that came out a few months ago. Organizations are really paying attention to that. And in the US, it's having a ripple effect with policy, but we're also seeing policy considerations pop up in other countries, Australia and England. The supply chain is a big focus right now, of course, but we see these changes coming down the road as more and more government organizations are trying to secure their critical infrastructure. >> Is there kind of a leadership, or probably in other words, is somebody saying seeing what the UK does and say, okay, we're going to follow that template? Or is it just a variety and a mish mash with no sort of consolidation? How is that sort of playing out? >> I see a lot of organizations kind of basing their requirements on (indistinct) However, each organization has its own nuances. Each agency has its own nuances to how it wants them implemented. >> Andrew, maybe you could chime in here. What are you seeing when you talk to customers that are tuned into this issue? >> No as Andrea had just mentioned having that north star in terms of regulations is so fundamentally great for them because many of them especially in regulate industries, look to these regulations on how they apply their own policies. So at least it has some guidance on how to move forward because as we all know the secure software supply chain is getting news every day and how they react to it is something that I know all their leaders are asking themselves, especially those IT leaders. >> Andrea, when I talk to practitioners, sometimes they're frustrated. They understand they have to comply. They know new regulations are coming out, but sometimes it's hard for them to keep up. It would be helpful if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's frustrated and they ask you, what are your expectations? What are the trends in regulations? How do you see the current regulations evolving to specifically accommodate the digital supply chain and the security exposures and corollary requirements there? >> We see a lot of organizations struggling in the sense of trying to understand what the policy actually wants. Definitions are still a little bit vague, but implementation is also difficult because sometimes organizations will add more tools to their toolkit, adding a layer of complexity there. Really automation has to be pulled in. That's key to implementing this instead of adding more workload and more burden to your folks. It's really important for these organizations to pull stakeholders in the organization together. So the IT leaders bring together the developers, the security operations sit at the same table, talk about whether or not what needs to be implemented or what's proposed to be implemented, will affect the mission or in any way or disrupt operations. It's important for everybody to be on the same page so it doesn't slow anything down as you're trying to roll it out. >> And one of the things here is that we're seeing a lot of change with these new regulations and with a lot of organizations, any type of change is scary. And that is one area that they're looking for guidance not only in the tooling, but also how they apply it in the organization. >> I'll add on. >> Please. >> I'll add onto that and say, organizations really need to take into account the people side of things too. People need to understand what the impact is to the organization, so that they don't try to find the loopholes, they're buying into what needs to be done. They understand the why behind it. You for example, if you walk into your house, you normally close the door behind you. Security needs to be seen as that, as well, that's the culture and it's the habit. And it's ingrained in the fabric of the organization to live this way, not just implement the tools to do it. >> Right, and the number of doors you have in your infrastructure are a lot more than just a couple. Andrew mentioned sort of guidance and governments are obviously taking a more active role. I mean, sometimes I'm a cynic. I mean, the president Biden signs an executive order, but swipe of a pen doesn't really give us enough to go on. Do you think Andrea, that we're going to see new guidance from governments in the very near future? What are you expecting? >> I expect to see more conversations happening. I know that agencies who developed the policies are pulling together stakeholders and getting input. But I do see in the not too distant future, that mandates will be rolling out, yes. >> Well, so Andrew of course, Andrea, if you have a thought on this as well, but how do you see organizations dealing with adopting these new policies. >> Slowly, don't boil the ocean is one thing I tell a lot to every one of them, because a lot of these tooling, a lot of these concepts are foreign to them, brand new. How they adopt those and how they implement them, needs to be done in a very agile fashion, very slow and prescriptive. Go ahead and try to find one area of improvement and go ahead and work upon it and build upon it. Because not only does that normally make your organization more successful and secure, but also helps your organization just from a more out standpoint. One thing that you need to emphasize is that don't blame anyone. 'Cause a lot of times when you're going through this, you're reassessing your own supply chain. You might find where you could see improvements that need to be done. Don't blame things that may have occurred in the past. See how you can benefit from these lessons learned in the future. >> It's interesting you say that the blame game, I mean it used to be that failure meant you get fired and that's obviously has changed. As many have said, you know you're going to have incidents. It's how you respond to those incidents. What you learn from them. Do you have Andrew, any insights from specifically working with customers on securing their software supply chain? What can you tell us about what leading practitioners are doing today? >> They're going in and not only assessing what their software components consist of. Using tools like an SBOM, a software bill of materials, understand where all the components of their ecosystem and their lineage comes from. We're hearing almost every single day, new vulnerabilities that are being introduced in various software packages. By having that understanding of what is in your ecosystem, you can then better understand how to mitigate those concerns moving forward. >> Andrea, Andrew was just saying, one of the things is you don't just dive in. You've got to be careful. There's going to be ripple effects is what I'm inferring, but at the same time, there's a mandate to move quickly. Are there things that could accelerate the adoption of regulation or even the creation of regulations and that guidance in your view? What could accelerate this? >> As far as accelerating it goes, I think it's having those conversations proactively with the stakeholders in your organization and understanding the environment like Andrew said. Go ahead and get that baseline. And just know that whatever changes you make are maybe going to be audited down the road, because as we were moving towards this kind of third-party verification, that you're actually implementing things in order to do business with another organization. The importance of that, if organizations see that gravity to this, I think they will try to speed things up. I think that if organizations and the people in those organizations understand that why, that I talked about earlier and they understand how things like solar winds or things like the oil disruption that happened earlier this year. The personal effect to cyber events will help your organization move forward. Again, everybody's bought into the concept, everybody's working towards the same goals and they understand that why behind it. >> In addition to that, having tooling available, that makes it easy for them. You have a lot of individuals who this is all foreign, providing that base level tooling that aligns to a lot of the regulations that might be applicable within their real realm and their domain, makes it easier for them to start to complying and taking less burden off of them to be able to be successful. >> So it's a hard problem because Andrew, how do you deal with sort of the comment more tools, okay. But I look at that the Optiv map, if you've seen that. It makes your eyes cross. You've got so many tools, so much fragmentation, you're introducing new tools. Can automation help that? Is there hope for consolidation of that tools portfolio? >> Right now, this space is very emerging. It's very emergent, it's very fluid to be honest, 'cause there is actually mandates only a year or two old. But as they come over the course of time, however, I do see these types of tooling starting to consolidate where right now it seems like every vendor has a tool that tries to address this. It's being able to have the people work together, have more regulations that will come out that will allow us to start to redefine and solidify on certain tools like ISO standards. There are certain ones that I mentioned on as balance previously, there's now a ISO standard on SBOM there wasn't previously. So as more and more of these regulations come out, it makes it easier to provide that recommended set of tooling that organization is leveraging instead of vendor A, vendor B. >> Andrea, I said this before I was a cynic, but will give you the last word, give us some hope. I mean, obviously public policy is very important. A partnership between governments and industry, both the practitioners, the organizations that are buying these tools, as well as the technology industry got to work together in an ecosystem. Give us some hope. >> The hope I think will come from realizing that as you're doing this, as you are implementing these changes, you're in a sense trying to prevent those future incidents from happening. There's some assurance that you're doing everything that you can do here. It's a situation, it can be daunting, I'll put it that way. It can be really daunting for organizations, but just know that organizations like Red Hat are doing what we can to help you down the road. >> And really it's just continuing this whole shifting left mentality. The top of supply chain is just one component, but the introducing dev sec ops security at the beginning, that really will make the organizations become successful because this is not just a technology problem, It's a people issue as well. And being able to kind of package them all up together will help organizations as a whole. >> Yeah, so that's a really important point. You hear that term shift left. For years, people say, hey, you can't just bolt security on, as an afterthought, that's problematic. And that's the answer to that problem, right? Is shifting left meaning designing it in at the point of code, infrastructure as code, dev sec ops. That's where it starts, right? >> Exactly, being able to have security at the forefront and then have everything afterwards. Propagate from your security mindset. >> Excellent, okay, Andrea, Andrew, thanks so much for coming to the program today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Very welcome, thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. Your a global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (soft music)

>>law from Las Vegas. It's the two covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in along with its ecosystem partners, >>everyone welcome to the Cubes Live coverage in Las Vegas For AWS Reinvent 2019 starts Seventh year of the Cube coverage. Watching the big wave of Amazon continue to pound the pound the beach with more announcements. I'm John Ferrier instructing the seal for the new ways with my partner, David Dante, our next guest. Brian Hall, vice president. Product market for all of AWS >>Brian. Thanks for coming on. The Cube is >>really a pleasure to be here. We've had ready, eh? We've >>had many conversations off camera around opportunities, innovation and watching Andy Jackson Kino, which is a marathon. Three hours, 30 announcements. He's hit his mark. Live music, well done. But he got a ton of stuff in there. Let's unpack the key points. Tell us what you think people should pay attention to. Of all the announcements, one of the three major or one of the major areas that are that stand out that are most notable that you wanna highlight. >>Okay, I'll give you I'll give you four areas that I think are most notable from the keynote. First is we continue to be very focused on how do we give the deepest and broadest platform for all the different things people want to be able to do with computing. And we had a big announcements around new instance instances of easy to that air based on custom design silicon that that we built one of them is called IMF one. These are instances that are focused on machine learning inference. Where it turns out, up to 90% of the cost for machine learning often is. And so we have. We have a brand new set of instances reduce costs by up to 90% for people doing inference in the cloud. We also last year announced a armed chip that we developed called Graviton, and we announced today grab it on two and that their new instances that are running on gravity on thio, including our general purpose computer instances, are compute intensive instances and high memory instances, and people will get up to 40% price performance improvement by using the instances that are based on the >>method of the messages faster more inexpensive. But also there's an architectural shift going on with Compute Way. Heard that with the I. O. T. And the Outpost stuff where computer is moving to the data because moving around is well recognized and now affirmed its expensive. Yeah, this is a big part of it. You got local zone. What's that local zone? Was it a local >>s? So they're kind of two ways that we're addressing that the first is but making it so that our infrastructure is closer to customers. We have outposts for customers that want to run a WS in their own environments. We announced today local zones which are essentially taking the computer storage database capabilities and putting it closer to metro areas where people want to have a single digit Leighton see for applications when going to the clouds over video rendering for gaming and like, that's gonna be very helpful. Is >>that gonna be like a regional point of presence was gonna be installed, Eleni, on any premise anyone wants, I could put my >>outpost can be put in any environment where you have the right power network infrastructure. Local zones are managed by Amazon, so I don't have to have it. I don't have to manage any data center. Anything. I could just choose to deploy to an environment that is geographically very >>smaller than a region. >>Small isn't an ability. Oh, yeah, >>Right. Okay. That's like a mini zone. Yeah, and and so what about the the availability component? It's sort of up to the customer to figure that out There >>it is connected to a region. So, for instance, we're releasing in Los Angeles with availability now, and that's connected to the US West region. So all of the data backup redundancy application duplication of people want to be able to do could do be done, do the region. >>All right, So graviton processor got onto those early press reports that leaked out prior to reinvent. I noticed that didn't match kind of what was announced. Just clarify what the grab it on ship is doing. What was the key? Grab it on a piece of the news here >>s O gravitas to is a arm based process lor designed and built by a W s. It is powering three different instance. Types are for those who know the types the see instances am instances and are instances on dhe available starting today with M six, which is one of our general purpose computing platforms. And so it gives up to 40% better price performance. And there's a whole ecosystem of platforms and APS Little run unarmed today. >>Are you pushing the envelope on computer? Which is great you continue to do That's the core of jewels of AWS, which we love and storage and everything else. Warm story. I get that a second, but I want your thoughts on the stage maker. A lot of time was spent on stage maker kind of levels of the stack infrastructure, machine, learning stage maker and tools. And a I service is. But the big announcement was this new I d frame environments, not a framework. You're taking an environment like an i d for all the different frameworks. Where did this come from? How I mean so obvious. Now, looking back that no one has this this was a big party announcement. You explain this. >>Yeah. So what you're referring to is sage Makers studio. One of the things that people have really liked about sage maker is it takes the whole process of building a model training a model ended up deploying a model and gives you the steps to do it, but there it hasn't been brought together into one environment before. And so sage maker Studio is a integrated development environment for machine learning that lets you spin up. No books. Run experiments test how your models performing. Deploy your model of detective. Your model is drifting all from one place, which gives me essentially a single dashboard for my whole machine learning work. Look, what do >>you think the impact's gonna be on this? Because if I'm just looking at that obvious awesomeness, it's like, OK, that means anyone can get start using machine learning, you know, be a guru or a total math. >>That's that's fundamentally a lot of what we're doing is trying to reduce the barrier for developers or anyone who has who has a desire to start using machine learning to be able to do that and say, you maker studios just another way that we're doing it. Another one we announced on Monday or on Sunday night, of course, a machine learning powered musical keyboard. Everyone knew that was coming right? That's that's just a example like Deep Racer, where we're taking machine learning. We're making it immediately practical and even fun. And then giving people a way to start experimenting does that they'll eventually become developers who are using machine learning for much >>things. Have a question. As you simplify machine learning, people are concerned about explain ability. You guys, I think, have some ways of helping people understand what's going on inside the algorithm. So that's not a pure black box. Is that correct interpretation? >>It is. It is way announced. Today s age maker experiments, which is one of the one of the things about machine learning, is your kind of constantly tuning the different variables that you're using in your model tow. Understand what works? What doesn't. That's all black box. It's really hard to tell with sage major studio and experiments in particular. Now I can see how models perform differently based on tweaking variables, which starts making it much easier to explain what's happening. >>I think you guys got it right, and he laid out the databases. Multiple databases pick your database. It's okay that multiple databases just create some abstracted layers on top. I totally agree with that philosophy and I think that's gonna be a nice haven for opportunity. We agree. >>Used to be that because so much of running a database was all of the operational expertise it took that you wouldn't wanna have too many databases because that's that many database administrators and people doing the undifferentiated heavy lifting now with the cloud. If you have a data set that's better suited for something like a uh uh, workload in Cassandra, we announced the Manage Cassandra service today. You can just been up that service, load your data and start going. And so it creates a lot more opportunity >>talk about quantum because I know you guys yesterday, which is always a signal from Amazon and didn't make the keynote cut, but a ray relevant quantum announcement, the joke was, is gonna be a quantum supremacy messaging. But no, is more of a humble approach from you guys is more. Hey, we're gonna put some quantum out there setting expectations on the horizon, not over playing your hand on that. But you also have an institute with Caltech humble academic thing going on. What's the quantum inside Inside conversation like an Amazon? What's the what's going on with you. What can we expect? >>We're really excited about what quantum computing's going to be able to do for customers, and we say a lot of Amazon on many things. It's date one, which means it's really early. When we look at Quantum somewhere between zero and one, we're not quite sure where. So just live saying it's really early days. And so what we're doing is providing a platform, a partnership with Caltech, to advance the state of the art and then also a Quantum Solutions lab to help customers start to experiment. To figure out how might. This enabled me to solve problems that I couldn't do before >>you? No one can ask. So Andy talked in a keynote about most of the spend is still on. So the early days of cloud were about, you know, infrastructures of service, storage, computer networking, and it seems like we're entering This era of this data is really sort of the driver where you're applying analytics and machine learning. Data's everywhere, and it seems to be driving sort of new forms of compute. It's not just in this sort of stovepipe anymore. You see that you see that sort of new emergence of new compute were close. >>Yeah. Yeah, we definitely do. And in particular, the way that people are starting to use data lakes, which is essentially a way of saying, Hey, I have my data and one place in a bunch of different formats. And I want different analytical tools, different machine learning tools, different applications toe all be able to build on that same data. And once you do that, you start unlocking opportunities for different application developers, different lines of business to take advantage of it. Brian, >>Thanks for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate your VP of all product. Mark. You get the keys to the kingdom, you kind of see what's going on. Take us home and finish the exit interview out by by talking about the best. Now that Jesse Safer last. The best for last was the outpost G A and the five G wavelength with CEO of Arise on. Yeah, I mean, that's gonna bring five G to stadiums for drones, immersive experiences. I mean, that's a big vision. Yeah, I think it's home >>people. People are rightfully excited about five G for having faster connections, but the thing that we're also very excited about is the fact that all these devices will have much lower laden see and the ability to run interactive applications that having a W s with AWS wavelength hosted with the five G providers is gonna give developers chances to melt. >>Brian Hall with With AWS I'm John David Lot. They were here on the Cube studios, sponsored by Intel's Our Signature sponsors of the Intel's Cube Studios. When it's to a shoutout for Intel to them for supporting our mission, bringing the best content from events and extracting the signal from the noise will be back with more after this short break.

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante we are on day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019. Welcoming a couple of guests to theCube. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure, Nathan welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks, thanks very much. >> Lisa: And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Sutliff, director of systems engineering and the America's data center, welcome to the Cube Tom. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: It's howdy you all. >> Howdy you all, okay. Thank you, it took the wicked smart guy from Boston to figure that out. >> A local. >> All right, so you all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure, you guys have been partners now since, Nathan we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco, Pure partnership evolution, better together? What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? >> Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment and think about Charlie Giancarlo from Cisco we've got a lot of just common, cross pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level, Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well, we had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco intersight, so we are first and only to have storage integration of the Cisco intersight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console, so a lot of simplicity, just single SaaS interface for managing everything. >> Tom why Pure, why first with them? >> Well you know Nathan he articulated it well, we can look at the executive level, we talked about Charlie, but even, you know all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churn them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done, our customers see that and it's really helped drive our goal to market together it's really a very strong strategy. >> So there's a CVD around this is that right? >> Yeah there's many there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially we might do one or two things well, we do a lot of things well I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVD's but more than that. >> So this really started in the field if I understand correctly is that right? [Nathan] - Yes. >> So I always look for these deals and say is it a Barney deal, you know Barney deal I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on then you say okay it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what, hey we should you know a customer wants us to work together and then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources and what does that look like? >> I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective we fill in a lot of each others gaps so that's really where it started was having the success in the field and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVD's, the intersight integration, et cetera. >> So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI for audience members who it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? >> I say it's another better together story, for example we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape we have Cisco hyper flex the HX managing the database portion, we have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the Hanna portion, and really it all comes down to single console which is intersight. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. >> So from a customer conversation perspective let's go back to you know we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment. Going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, FEEdi, and there's FlashStack like 31 flavors of FlashStack right. What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI when you guys come into play? Obviously FlashStack being I mentioned a number of flavors of that have been around for awhile, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? >> You know there's a clear delineation between a hyper convergence, our HX platform, a hyper flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStacks. If you look at a FlashStack it's an all in one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's you know scalable, something that's a highly dense tier one application. Latency obviously plays into this you know, I'd say it's a little less with the hyper flex platform and hyper convergence, much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play it does many of the similar same things but you know we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space so. But it's really about scalability, ease of use, some of them are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise. But we can sell them across anywhere whether it be public sector, commercial, mid market, smaller customers. But they each have use cases that they fit in very well. >> This morning in the key notes we heard a lot about API's, I want to get into Multi Cloud in a second but before I do we talk a lot about infrastructures code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet I've often said on theCUBE that they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructures code, how does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on the roadmap? >> Nathan: So from DevNet can you take that one? >> Well I can say yes it is a play, if you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually working with our API's, API's that we work with separate with other vendors too that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago and it was really built off of that development effort so that's critical for us going forward here there's a lot that we're doing I know we're going to talk about intersight and some other things where that was a key element of it. >> Yeah so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. >> And Cisco DevNet. >> And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember, you had many many booths, very specialized, then you have CCIE's learning python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, edge comes in. Anything you'd add Nathan to sort of programmability? >> So I think just from day one from Pure Storage just having our restful API interface, having code.purestorage.com we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy for to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly, and honestly evidence of that is in intersight itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that restful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI Ops of Pure One and bring it into intersight, be able to get intersight to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. >> What do we need to know about intersight? Add some color there, what is it, how's it work, what's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? >> So if I look at, going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper converge, it's often really a story of simplicity right? Customers want something simple for the data center, they know they can get it out in the Cloud but they can't always run their workloads out in the external Cloud. So simplicity is for intersight, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it, to get really specific imagine a VMware administrator is able to in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console so doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles, gets that Cloud like experience and that's what intersight delivers. So you get that simplicity whether its converged or hyper converged with intersight. >> Whether it's in the Cloud, it's the Edge, it's the Branch, Hybrid Cloud, instead of having to manage it I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage, compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console world wide no matter where they sit. >> So I want to talk about Multi Cloud if we can. So if I look at the players in Multi Cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, you partner with all of those pretty much I think. AWS is not on the list but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the Multi Cloud scene but they're not going after Multi Cloud, Cisco was a relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a Cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate, you've got companies that don't have a Cloud like Cisco that want to participate, where does Pure fit in to that Multi Cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? >> Well I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and Multi Cloud is the same approach to Multi Cloud and that is I'd call it open Multi Cloud. As opposed to having, forcing a single type of hyper visor on one side or a single Cloud, external Cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app, anywhere? How do we appear and provide the data fabric having the most efficient amenity of fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads, and we do that now with Pure Flash right on premises, Cloud block store out in the Cloud, our ability to Cloud snap to Azure, to AWS, and that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI anywhere really that compeletes the any workload anywhere story, and keeping it open so it's not just one hyper visor or one Cloud provider on the other side. >> So you be the data plane in that equation, with the management of that data plane, and Cisco is the overall management framework the control plane I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well, and we're part of essentially the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really upleveling for example EBS to an enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before, now we have something that whether you're on hardware on premises or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. >> So let's look at this in the real world in a customer environment, talk to me about whatever kind of whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you, what are the business benefits that, we'll use delta Airlines as an example, what would they get out of this if they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers? What's that you know TCO, ROI, what are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? >> So I'd say they get essentially a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic gap, the sync would take days, the SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice. You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application and I know it could run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere, and it's the same story essentially now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep essentially the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it consistent no matter where it is, freeze that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. >> So internal operations can be dialed way up which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects, and the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of this stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. >> Exactly, yeah you can manage if you look at ACI you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric again wherever it may be, and there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application you look at the robustness of that on the network and the network here us absolutely critical, none of this is going to run I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the Cloud, it could be in the Branch, you still want the same level of performance the SLA, the five nines and that's where the network comes in that's what's critical. >> Well and the security piece as well. >> Absolutely. >> You guys are largely coming at the Multi Cloud from of course the network strength that you have but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Talk about security and it's importance and so on. >> Well I think the security I mean one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make realtime decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally obviously you have firewall and you try to keep everything out but a lot of what will happen a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. So this is able to look at all of the flows, at every single packet the flow of the application and the information to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power a lot of storage and a lot of capacity but you know that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play, our security team is actually out selling that in addition to the data center teams. >> So is Wallingford Yankee's country or Red Sox country? >> Oh it's right on the border so I've got my in laws Yankee's, my parents Redsox, so it's very difficult at home. >> You're a Pat's fan of course, did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? >> Tom: No not at all. >> Oh you felt good? >> Maybe 19 and O this year we'll see. >> And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? >> I try to be it's hard. >> Well you know this company is Warrior's so we can talk NBA too. >> You bet! >> There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now. Not so much for our team but. (laughter) >> Lisa: You never know! >> You never know. >> I had to try to be Switzerland too cause I was the West Coaster with the East Coaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom last question for you, whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today as we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has we talked about that, that Cisco has as well, what are some of the things that as a partner as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there, what is Ciscos reaction to that news? >> Well the thing with Pure and it preceded this conference but you know I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas, it's just the innovation which is pretty incredible. You know you kind of have the big four products here but primarily with the Flash arrays the CI platforms, the Flash blades, what's going on with Pure one, that's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi Cloud. We talked about the validated designs, this is really going to lead us to almost like it's kind of funny when you have an innovative partner you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing work at them or what have you. It's like now we really innovated again, 12, 15 months later we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. >> Alright well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE today we appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of this Cisco Pure partnership, thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE ya'll from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas. (upbeat music)

>> From Tavern on the Green in Central Park, New York it's theCUBE. Covering Veritas Vision Solution Day, brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to New York City everybody. We're here in the heart of Central Park at Tavern On the Green, a beautiful facility. I'm surrounded by Yankee fans so I'm like a fish out of water. But that's okay, it's a great time of the year. We love it, we're still in it up in Boston so we're happy. Dave Vellante here, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Nathan Hall is here, he's the field CTO at Pure Storage. Nathan, good to see you. >> Good to see you too. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. >> So you guys made some announcements today with Veritas, what's that all about? >> It's pretty exciting and Veritas, being the market leader in data protection software. Now our customers are able to take Veritas's net backup software and use it to drive the policy engine of Snapshots for our FlashArrays. They're also able to take Veritas and back up our data hub, which is our new strategy with FlashBlade to really unify all of data analytics onto a single platform. So Veritas really is the solution net back up that's able to back up all the workloads and Pure is the solution that's able to run all the workloads. >> So what if I could follow-up on that, maybe push you a little bit? A lot of these announcements that you see, we call them Barney deals, I love you, you love me, we go to market together and everything's wonderful. Are we talking about deeper integration than that or is just kind of press release? >> Absolutely deeper integration. So you'll see not just how-to guides, white papers, et cetera, but there's actual engineering-level integration that's happening here. We're available as an advanced disk target within that back up, we've integrated into CloudPoint as well. We certify all of our hardware platforms with Veritas. So this is deep, deep engineering-level integration. >> Yeah, we're excited about Pure, we followed you guys since the early days. You know we saw Scott Dietzen, what he built, very impressive modern architecture, you won't be a legacy for 20, 25 years so you've got a lot going for you. Presumably it's easier to integrate with such a modern architecture, but now at the same time you got to integrate with Veritas, it's been around for about 25 years. We heard a lot about how they're investing in API-based architectures, and microservices, and containers and the like, so what is that like in terms of integrating with a 25-year-old company? >> Well I think, from Pure's perspective we are API first, we're RESTfull APIs first. We've done a ton of integrations across multiple platforms whether it's Kubernetes, Docker, VMware, et cetera, so we have a lot of experience in terms of how to integrate with various flavors of other infrastructure. I think Veritas has done a lot of work as well in terms of maturing their API to really be this kind of cloud-first type of API, this RESTful API, that made our cross-integration much easier. >> You guys like being first, there were a number of firsts, you guys were kind of the first, or one of the first with flash for block. You were kind of the first for file. You guys have hit AI pretty hard, everybody's now doing that. You guys announced the first partnership with NVIDIA, everybody's now doing that. (laughs) You guys announced giving away NVME as part of the Stack for no upcharge, everybody's now doing that. So, you like to be first. Culturally, you've worked at some other companies, what's behind that? >> Well culturally, this is best company I've worked at in terms of culture, period, and really it all starts with the culture of the company. I think that's why we're first in so many places and it's not just first in terms of first to market. It's really about first in terms of customer feedback. If you look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant we're up, we've been at leaders quadrant for five years in a row. But this year, we're indisputably the leader. Furthest to the right on the X-axis, furthest north on the Y-axis and that's all driven by just a customer-obsessed culture. We've got a Net Promoter Score of 86.6 which is stratospheric. It's something that puts us in the top 1% of all business-to-business companies, not just tech companies. So, it's really that culture about customer obsession that drives us to be first. Both to market, in a lot of cases, but also just first in terms of customer perception of our technology. >> You guys were a first at really escape velocity, the billion dollar unicorn status, and now you're kind of having that fly-wheel effect where you're able to throw off different innovations in different areas. Can you talk more about the data hub and the relevance to what you're doing with Veritas and data protection? Let's unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, sure, the data hub, we had a great keynote this morning with Jyothi the VP of Marketing for Veritas and he had an interesting customer tidbit. He had some sort of unnamed government agency customer that actually gets penalized when they're unable to retrieve data fast enough. That's not something that many of our customers have, but they do get penalized in terms of opportunity costs. The reason why is 'cause customers just have their data siloed into all these different split-up locations and that prevents them from being able to get insight out of that data. If you look at AI luminaries like Andrew Ng or even people like Dominique Brezinski at Apple, they all agree that you have to, in order to be successful with your data strategy, you have to unify these data silos. And that's what the data hub does. For the first time we're able to unify everything from data warehousing, to data lakes, to streaming analytics, to AI and now even backup all onto a single platform with multidimensional performance. That's FlashBlade and that is our data hub, we think it's revolutionary and we're challenging the rest of the storage industry to follow suit. Let's make less silos, let's unify the data into a data hub so that our customers can get real actionable information out of their data. >> I was on a crowd chat the other day, you guys put out an open letter to the storage community, an open challenge, so that was kind of both a little controversial but also some fun. That's a very important point you're making about sort of putting data at the core. I make an observation, it's not so much true about Facebook anymore 'cause after the whole fake news thing their market value dropped. But if you look at the top five companies in terms of market value, include Facebook in there, they and Berkshire keep doing this, but let's assume for a second that Facebook's up there. Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon, top five in terms of US market value. Of course markets ebb and they flow, but it's no coincidence that those are data companies. They all have a lot of hard assets at those companies. They've got data at their core so it's interesting to hear you talk about data hub because one of the challenges that we see for traditional companies, call them incumbents, is they have data in stovepipes. For them to compete they've got to put it in the digital world, they've got to put data at their core. It's not just for start-ups and people doing Greenfield, it's for folks that are established and don't want to get disrupted. Long-winded question, how do they get, let's think of traditional company, an incumbent company, how do they get from point A to point B with the data hub? >> I think Andrew Ng has a great talked-point on this. He basically talks about your data strategy and you need to think about, as a company, how do you acquire data and then how do you unify into a single data hub? It's not just around putting it on a single platform, such as FlashBlade. A valuable byproduct of that is if you have all the stove-piped data, though you probably in terms of your data scientist trying to get access to it, now have to, they have 10 different stovepipes you've got 10 different VPs that you have to go talk to in order to get access to that data. So it really starts with stopping the bleeding and starting to have a data strategy around how do we acquire and how do we make certain or storing data in the same place and have a single unified data hub in order to maximize the value we are able to get out of that data. >> You know when I talked to, I'll throw my two cents in, I talk to a lot of chief data officers. To me, the ones that are most insightful talk about their five imperatives. First of all, is they got to understand how data contributes to monetization. Whether it's saving money or making money, it's not necessarily selling your data. I think a lot of people make that mistake, oh I'm going to monetize my data, I mean I'm going to sell my data, no, it's all about how it contributes to value. The second is, what about data sources? And then how do I get access to data sources? There's a lot implied there in terms of governance and security and who has access to that. And in the same time, how do I scale up my business so that I get the right people who can act on that data? Then how do I form relationships with a line of business so that I can maximize that monetization? Those are, I think, sensible steps that aren't trivial. They require a lot of thought and a lot of cultural change and I would imagine that's what a lot of your customers are going through right now. >> I think they are and I think as IT practitioners out there, I think that we have a duty to get closer to our business and be able to kind of educate them around these data strategies. To give them the same level of insight that you're talking about, you see in some chief data officers. But if I looked out at the, there's a recent study on the Fortune 50, the CXOs, and these aren't even CIOs, they're actually, we think as IT practitioners that the cloud is the most disruptive thing that we see, but the CEOs and the CFOs are actually five times more likely to talk about AI and data as being more disruptive to their business. But most of them have no data strategy, most of them don't know how AI works. It's up to us as IT practitioners to educate the business. To say here's what's possible, here's what we have to do in order to maximize the value out of data, so that you can get a business advantage out of this. It's incumbent on us as IT leaders. >> So Nathan, I think again, that's really insightful because let's face it, if you're moving at the speed of the CIO, which is what many companies want to do, because that's the so called, fat middle and that's where the money is. But you're behind, I mean we're moving into a new era, the cloud era, no pun intended, is here, it's solid but we're entering that data of machine intelligence and we built the foundation with the dupe even, there's a lot of data now what do we do with it? We see, and I wonder if you could comment on this, is the innovation engine of the future changing it? It use to be Moore's Law, we marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for years. Now it's data applying machine intelligence and then, of course, using the cloud for scale and attracting start-ups and innovation. That's fine because we want to program infrastructure, we don't want to deploy infrastructure. If you think about Pure, you got data for sure. You're going hard after machine intelligence. And cloud, if I understand your cloud play, you sell to cloud providers whether they're on-prem or in the public cloud but what do you think about those? That innovation sandwich that I just described and how do you guys play? >> Well, cloud is where we get over 30% of our revenue so we're actually selling to the cloud, cloud service providers, et cetera. For example, one of the biggest cloud service providers out there that I think today's announcement helps them out a lot from a policy perspective actually used FlashBlade to reduce their SLAs, to reduce their restore time from, I think, it was 30 hours down to 38 minutes. They were paying money before to their customers. What we see in our cloud strategy is one of empowering cloud providers, but also we think that cloud is increasingly, at the infrastructure layer, going to be commoditized and it's going to be about how do we enable multicloud? So how do we enable customers to get around data gravity problems? I've got this big, weighty database that I want to see if I can move it up to the cloud but that takes me forever. So how do we help customers be able to move to one cloud or even exit a cloud to another or back to on-prem? We think there's a lot of value in applying our, for example deduplication technology, et cetera, to helping customers with those data gravity problems, to making a more open world in terms of sharing data to and from the cloud. >> Great, well we looked at Pure and Veritas getting together, do some hard core engineering, going to market, solving some real problems. Thanks Nathan for hanging out, this iconic beautiful Tavern on the Green in the heart of New York City. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right, keep it right there everybody, Dave Vallante. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Veritas Solutions Day, #VeritasVision, be right back. (digital music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Moscone Center it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit San Francisco 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to our exclusive Cube Coverage here in San Francisco, California for Amazon Web Services AWS Summit 2018. We are all day covering the regional event for Amazon Web Services. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, our next guest is Steve Hall, vice president of partnerships at a company called, CloudCheckr. Cloud check with an r dot com. Companies we see in the ecosystem doing great stuff really capturing the growth of the cloud. Steve, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So I got to ask you, so you guys are like Switzerland, you guys are involved in a lot of the stuff. Before I go into some of the pointed questions, we'll have to get your thoughts on the cloud, but take a minute first to explain what CloudCheckr does, your core business, and why are you calling yourself "Switzerland". Is it like you play nice with all the clouds? Is that where all the cryptocurrency is going to go? I mean give us a straight scoop. >> Sure you bet, so CloudCheckr is a cloud management platform, right, that helps organizations get visibility in control across their public cloud estate. So, you know the challenges that we're seeing really typically fall into two categories. It's "I thought it was going to save me money when going to the cloud" and "I thought that my data was going to be less secure going into the cloud". CloudCheckr helps solve both those problems by helping you reduce costs, eliminate waste, all that good stuff, as well as, identify your attack surface and make sure that its protected. >> John: Is it SaaS offering or is it more... >> SaaS offering, born in the cloud for the cloud. We focus as you said, Switzerland, we really focus on sort of a management layer that sits across a multi-cloud environment where you're not just looking at Amazon and AWSs, but also the Azures and GCPs of the world to make sure that you have kind of that unified single pane of glass that everyone kind of wishes for but they don't necessarily know how to get. >> Yeah and I get the joke on Switzerland with the cryptocurrency. There's legit people are going to Switzerland but metaphorically you guys are, you're independent you want to play with all clouds cause you got to look at the holistic picture. What's the critical thing that you're seeing right now? We had a guest on earlier talking about you leave the lights on so to speak. You know the EC2 is running a lot of inefficiencies. You got security. Are you guys kind of like a dashboard, single pane of management glass in there? Is it other services? What specifically are you guys focused on right now? Obviously the growth of the cloud is what it is. You guys, that's a tailwind for you guys. >> Yeah I mean. >> The key thing that you do? >> So I mean I think the biggest thing that we see driving our business right is the economics around the cloud. Everyone's moving, the workloads are you know obviously whether they're in the early days or kind of more mature, everyone thinks that by moving to the cloud they're going to save money. And there's data out there to suggest that there's upwards of 30 to 40 percent wastage happening inside of the cloud environments today just because people, using that analogy, leave light switches on, and they didn't even realize that they, they didn't know how to find them, right. So where we see a lot of pain, right, is what do I do, right? Where do I start? And so partnering with not only the native tools that Amazon brings to bear, you know trusted advisor and specter, all the other cool tools... >> So is a new term being developed called cloud sprawl? Stu we talked about server sprawl. I mean you've got Lambda now. I mean is it cloud sprawl? Is that an issue? >> Oh there's so surely. And cloud spend sprawl, right. You know it's this shadow IT thing that goes on. Somebody told me a story of the CMO at Bank of America got a phone call a couple of years ago from the CEO after a Superbowl ad that ran and said what is this thing that you're doing? And she said oh we just turned it on in the cloud. And he's like did you talk to IT? Did you have anybody do it? And she's like why would I do that? Why would I even bother? I can just go do it myself. So how do I get my arms around that. Right obviously is somewhat of an opportunity but also challenge. >> Steve you talk about getting your arms around something. When we talk to customers, you know IT is heterogeneous. >> Steve: Right. >> So you know yes public cloud and people are growing and using more Amazon, but there's other clouds, there's by service providers, and oh yeah I've still probably got some data centers because you know there's 35 years after you stopped building those a few years back for you to do that. How do you help them get around there? And I'd love to hear how are you seeing Amazon maturing and working in some of those environments. It used to be Amazon is all in public cloud only. Then it was oh there's the VMWare stuff, there's the RedHat stuff. Oh hey they're starting to work with service providers even. What are you seeing and how are you involved in that? >> Yeah you bet. I mean again I think you touch on again probably the biggest problem which is visibility, right? And transparency. And how do I create accountability around all of that because there's new roles that are emerging inside of these organizations to try to do things with this cloud stuff as well as a lot of questions are being asked. They don't even know how to answer them. And so you know where Amazon I think is really maturing, we'll start there, right is not only providing a lot of just the native tooling, it's somewhat kind of yes Amazon focused but focused really on kind of providing that, that visibility that they need. Where I think CloudCheckr really kind of steps in is sort of a little bit deeper level view of what they have as well as how do you cross-pollinate that with the other environments. Whether it's a hybrid environment or another cloud provider that you want to again kind of bring into one singular view. That's really how we try to help. And then I think that the other piece that you touched on, which is there's this whole managed service provider and reseller community that's really quite mature in fact within the AWS ecosystem. Which I think is one of the things that AWS really kind of differentiates itself with by empowering partners to be able to build a practice around AWS. Because again another challenge that we see is cloud is great, but I don't have the people to do it. Or I don't know what the people that I do have don't know what to do and so having a trusted like a managed service provider to turn to to go do that stuff is like a blessing. >> What sort of areas, where can that local managed service provider, where can they help? You know is it just cause they have localized people? But what services od they have, is it just enabling people to get up into the cloud? Or are there things that they're doing between you know the service provider and Amazon with direct connect and the like? >> Well I think that so the first thing honestly ends up becomes billing truthfully. And that sounds so boring in many respects, but okay I get a bill, but the billing is really... >> Stu: Yeah the CFO doesn't think it's boring. >> But they don't. As well as you get the bill, how do I make sense of it right? And so you know clients are looking for managed service providers to sort of make sense of all of this cost data and usage data and give them sort of the view of who's using what and how much should we spend right? Because money talks. And so that is driving a different conversation for managed service providers. So building, we're seeing a lot of our partners working up new practices around cost optimization and how to build an entire, not only just billing portal, but a practice on top of that to help optimize the environment for... >> Well there's such a huge opportunity there. I've talked to customers that were like I dedicated engineer to do financial engineering rather than architecting. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So there's an opportunity when you see that it's like oh wait, do you want a head count of a highly trained engineer? >> Right. >> Or you know is there, that's what the partner can help with right? >> Yeah and there's a couple of different ways that they can do it too. We see partners, some that are hiring the smart guy in the room, putting him in a back room and doing the analytics and analysis around that data. Others are literally just creating white labeled portals and putting it in front of their customers. So there's lots of different ways that AWS makes it easy for a partner to build new products and actually turn their seven percent margins into 20 percent margins by building more services and solutions around the AWS infrastructure. >> Steve I want to get your industry expertise on something. You're the vice president of partnerships and you know we always talk on theCUBE, Stu, myself, Dave Vellante, Jeff, Rick, and the team around what it's like to compete in a modern era. And we commented on Amazon's competitive strategy. For the first time they've got to actually deal with heavy dose of competition. >> Steve: Yeah. >> And no one's going to give up the market share. They've got to fight tooth and nail. You deal with all the cloud providers. But people are learning there's a new kind of partnership. If everything's API based you've got SAASified, platform as a service kind of going away to infrastructure as a service. You have this cloud fabric, global reach with regions, all kinds of new moving parts. How is it changing partnerships? How do, how should people who are in trying to partner with the big clouds. >> Steve: Yep. >> Is there a posture, is there an approach, is there a playbook that you see that's different than the old way? The old was you know, press the pavement, press the palms together, you get dinner, you get coffee, whenever you do a deal, longer time horizon. Now it's you've got to have services, you got the data, whole different landscape. What's your thoughts on the partner equation. How should people partner, what's the playbook? >> And I'll speak on for CloudCheckr's perspective. So we've been going to REInvent and these summits for the last five, six years, right. So I remember when this was 500 people in a room, right. You know and there's 10 vendors exhibiting. And here you have 7,000 plus people now that are, you know where you have lots of vendors that you're very familiar with, right. That are large scale kind of like global vendors. So definitely the competitive landscape has changed and it's partly just like you said, the opportunity, right. This is a... I heard somebody say it's probably market cap of a a trillion dollars in public cloud right at the end of the day. So everyone sees the opportunity but how do you actually make good use of it as a partner to the cloud providers? First of all you solve a real problem. Right? There's a lot of... I tend to see a lot people that are just cloud dipping their solutions and kind of coming to market around things because they want a piece of the pie. But if you really focus yourself on how do I solve some of the most pressing needs. And that's where again we see, you know, our product helping customers around cost and security but even our partners. >> So the ecosystem is the key. You've got to be part of a ecosystem. Is that the criteria? >> You got to play, well yeah, it's not just go to coffee and have drinks. Right you know what I mean. It's connect with the people inside of your community. Whether it's at these events or whether it's in your local AWS offices or in the smaller sort of settings to say what are your customers asking for right? And how can we help you with that? I mean it's pretty obvious stuff. >> So Steve, you mentioned security a few times. You know if you go back a few years it was like oh I'm going to be less secure if I go to cloud. Now most people realize it's an opportunity for me to readdress security. >> Yeah. >> And chances are security's better because when's the last time I really updated all my security. >> Yeah. >> What are the hot buttons? What are you seeing? What's Amazon doing well? What does the industry as a whole need to do better? >> Absolutely well I mean you touched on it. Security used to be the reason not to go and now it is the reason to go. And I think companies realize oh my God they've got hundreds of security engineers. We have two. So I think that their infrastructure's probably more secure. What we're seeing as the hot press buttons. I mean I think the last 18 months, 12 months have been all about S3 buckets, right. You know and all of this data that's been exposed sitting out there on the internet. And I think AWS did a fabulous job of changing some of the configurations to allow customers not to stab themselves in the foot. But I think that a lot of it ends up being human error, right. You know really it's the human element inside of security that continues to plague the industry. And the cloud only makes it harder because now you don't have IT people doing IT. You've got business people doing IT, right. Back to the Bank of America example. So, sorry Bank of America. So my point is yeah I think that you know it's really back to how do we create solutions that non-IT people can use and make sense of it so that we can put common sense good controls in place. >> Business models are critical nailing the business model's critical. >> Steve: Yeah. >> Alright Steve final question for you. I want to kind of just put you on the spot a little bit here. You guys are trying to solve a real big need in the market place. Becoming a trusted source for cloud optimization, cloud costs, I mean it's going to impact obviously financial workflows and rolling the data up so a lot of moving parts at AWS and other clouds. >> Yeah. >> So are you guys using machine learning and AI because if Werner Vogels says hey look at all the magic that can happen in the cloud, how are you guys using all these data points? How are you rolling them up? Can you share >> Yeah. >> the philosophy, the tech. >> Yeah. >> Are you guys cutting edge? Are you on the front bleeding edge? What... >> Absolutely. >> Are you guys eating your own job food? I mean I'm obviously putting you on the spot there. >> Yeah, no no that's fine. I mean so we are absolutely using machine learning and artificial intelligence on the back end. Using AWS technology in fact to empower a lot of that inside of the project or platform. And it is all about taking all of these disparate data sources, I called them machine exhaust, of the cloud right that's kind of coming out. How do I put good sense to that? And CloudCheckr really is that layer above all of that whether it's your cloud trail logs or your cloud watch metrics or your cloud usage report, putting it all into one place and then doing machine learning and predictive analytics around that. That's exactly what CloudCheckr's all about. >> So it's an interpretation challenge, right. >> Right, right I mean, go ahead. >> Yeah so Steve it's just we talked about kind of the heterogeneous nature and you brought up a term a service area. >> Steve: Yeah. >> When we start adding in things like IOT, service area's going to grow exponentially and the heterogeneous nature >> Yes. is just going to go up you know. >> Steve: Yeah. >> The same. Is CloudCheckr going to help there? Is that something your customers are ready for? >> I think they're already there right. So I mean I think a lot of our customers, like the use cases that we see are either big data analytics or IOT or you know some other use case around why they're using public cloud to begin with. And so really it's about as that expansion increased usage occurs, how do I protect that attack surface? How do I look for known good state information and then lock my doors and windows if you will? As well as how do I make sure that I'm using the right resources in the right way? So that again I have that visibility and transparency and then you can have the right controls and automation around it to do something about it. >> Steve thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Check out CloudCheckr. >> Thanks. >> Again this is one of those things as you use the cloud there's going to be more bells and whistles, more services to watch and instrument. Obviously cost containment and managing the growth is certainly going to be something to watch using the data and managing that's what CloudCheckr does. Of course theCUBE is bringing all the data here at the trusted source for all the action at AWS Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also here. This is day two of our coverage of MWC 23 on theCUBE. We're super excited. We're in between hall four and five. Stop by if you're here. Dennis Hoffman is here. He's the senior vice president and general manager of the Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Yousef Khalidi, who's the corporate vice president of Azure for Operators from Microsoft. Gents, Welcome. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you. >> So we saw Satya in the keynote. He wired in. We saw T.K. came in. No AWS. I don't know. They're maybe not part of the show, but maybe next year they'll figure it out. >> Indeed, indeed. >> Lots of stuff happened in the Telecom, but the Azure operator distributed service is the big news, you guys got here. What's that all about? >> Oh, first of all, we changed the name. >> Oh, you did? >> You did? >> Oh, yeah. We have a real name now. It's called the Azure Operator Nexus. >> Oh, I like Nexus better than that. >> David: That's much better, much better. >> Dave: The engineers named it first time around. >> I wish, long story, but thank you for our marketing team. But seriously, not only did we rename the platform, we expanded the platform. >> Dave: Yeah. >> So it now covers the whole spectrum from the far-edge to the public cloud as well, including the near-edge as well. So essentially, it's a hybrid platform that can also run network functions. So all these operators around you, they now have a platform which combines cloud technologies with the choice where they want to run, optimized for the network. >> Okay and so, you know, we've talked about the disaggregation of the network and how you're bringing kind of engineered systems to the table. We've seen this movie before, but Dennis, there are differences, right? I mean, you didn't really have engineered systems in the 90s. You didn't have those integration points. You really didn't have the public cloud, you didn't have AI. >> Right. >> So you have all those new powers that you can tap, so give us the update from your perspective, having now spent a day and a half here. What's the vibe, what's the buzz, and what's your take on everything? >> Yeah, I think to build on what Yousef said, there's a lot going on with people still trying to figure out exactly how to architect the Telecom network of the future. They know it's got to have a lot to do with cloud. It does have some pretty significant differences, one of those being, there's definitely got to be a hybrid component because there are pieces of the Telecom network that even when modernized will not end up centralized, right? They're going to be highly distributed. I would say though, you know, we took away two things, yesterday, from all the meetings. One, people are done, I think the network operators are done, questioning technology readiness. They're now beginning to wrestle with operationalization of it all, right? So it's like, okay, it's here. I can in fact build a modern network in a very cloud native way, but I've got to figure out how to do that all. And another big part of it is the ecosystem and certainly the partnership long standing between Dell and Microsoft which we're extending into this space is part of that, making it easier on people to actually acquire, deploy, and importantly, support these new technologies. >> So a lot of the traditional carriers, like you said, they're sort of beyond the technology readiness. Jose Maria Alvarez in the keynote said there are three pillars to the future Telecom network. He said low latency, programmable networks, and then cloud and edge, kind of threw that in. You agree with that, Yousef? (Dave and Yousef speaking altogether) >> I mean, we've been for years talking about the cloud and edge. >> Yeah. >> Satya for years had the same graphic. We still have it. Today, we have expanded the graphic a bit to include the network as one, because you can have a cloud without connectivity as well but this is very, very, very, very much true. >> And so the question then, Dennis, is okay, you've got disruptors, we had Dish on yesterday. >> Oh, did you? Good. >> Yeah, yeah, and they're talking about what they're doing with, you know, ORAN and all the applications, really taking account of it. What I see is a developer friendly, you know, environment. You got the carriers talking about how they're going to charge developers for APIs. I think they've published eight APIs which is nowhere near enough. So you've got that sort of, you know, inertia and yet, you have the disruptors that are going to potentially be a catalyst to, you know, cross the chasm, if you will. So, you know, put on your strategy hat. >> Yeah. >> Dave: How do you see that playing out? >> Well, they're trying to tap into three things, the disruptors. You know, I think the thesis is, "If I get to a truly cloud native, communications network first, I ought to have greater agility so that I can launch more services and create more revenue streams. I ought to be lower cost in terms of both acquisition cost and operating cost, right, and I ought to be able to create scale between my IT organization, everything I know how to do there and my Telecom network." You know, classic, right? Better, faster, cheaper if I embrace cloud early on. And people like Dish, you know, they have a clean sheet of paper with which to do that. So innovation and rate of innovation is huge for them. >> So what would you do? We put your Clay Christensen hat on, now. What if you were at a traditional Telco who's like, complaining about- >> You're going to get me in trouble. >> Dave: Come on, come on. >> Don't do it. >> Dave: Help him out. Help him out, help him out. So if, you know, they're complaining about CapEx, they're highly regulated, right, they want net neutrality but they want to be able to sort of dial up the cost of those using the network. So what would you do? Would you try to disrupt yourself? Would you create a skunkworks? Would you kind of spin off a disruptor? That's a real dilemma for those guys. >> Well for mobile network operators, the beauty of 5G is it's the first cloud native cellular standard. So I don't know if anybody's throwing these terms around, but 5G SA is standalone, right? >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> So a lot of 'em, it's not a skunkworks. They're just literally saying, "I've got to have a 5G network." And some of 'em are deciding, "I'm going to stand it up all by itself." Now, that's duplicative expense in a lot of ways, but it creates isolation from the two networks. Others are saying, "No, it's got to be NSA. I've got to be able to combine 4G and 5G." And then you're into the brownfield thing. >> That's the hybrid. >> Not hybrid as in cloud, but hybrid as in, you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a converge network. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah. >> So, you know, I would say for a lot of them, they're adopting, probably rightly so, a wait and see attitude. One thing we haven't talked about and you got to get on the table, their high order bit is resilience. >> Dave: Yeah, totally. >> David: Yeah. >> Right? Can't go down. It's national, secure infrastructure, first responder. >> Indeed. >> Anytime you ask them to embrace any new technology, the first thing that they have to work through in their minds is, you know, "Is the juice worth the squeeze? Like, can I handle the risk?" >> But you're saying they're not questioning the technology. Aren't they questioning ORAN in terms of the quality of service, or are they beyond that? >> Dennis: They're questioning the timing, not the inevitability. >> Okay, so they agree that ORAN is going to be open over time. >> At some point, RAN will be cloud native, whether it's ORAN the spec, open RAN the concept, (Yousef speaking indistinctly) >> Yeah. >> Virtual RAN. But yeah, I mean I think it seems pretty evident at this point that the mainframe will give way to open systems once again. >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> ERAN, ecosystem RAN. >> Any RAN. (Dave laughing) >> You don't have to start with the ORAN where they're inside the house. So as you probably know, our partner AT&T started with the core. >> Dennis: They almost all have. >> And they've been on the virtualization path since 2014 and 15. And what we are working with them on is the hybrid cloud model to expand all the way, if you will, as I mentioned to the far-edge or the public cloud. So there's a way to be in the brownfield environment, yet jump on the new bandwagon of technology without necessarily taking too much risk, because you're quite right. I mean, resiliency, security, service assurance, I mean, for example, AT&T runs the first responder network for the US on their network, on our platform, and I'm personally very familiar of how high the bar is. So it's doable, but you need to go in stages, of course. >> And they've got to do that integration. >> Yes. >> They do. >> And Yousef made a great point. Like, out of the top 30 largest Telcos by CapEx outside of China, three quarters of them have virtualized their core. So the cloudification, if you will, software definition run on industry standard hardware, embraced cloud native principles, containerized apps, that's happened in the core. It's well accepted. Now it's just a ripple-down through the network which will happen as and when things are faster, better, cheaper. >> Right. >> So as implemented, what does this look like? Is it essentially what we used to loosely refer to as Azure stacked software, running with Dell optimized Telecom infrastructure together, sometimes within a BBU, out in a hybrid cloud model communicating back to Azure locations in some cases? Is that what we're looking at? >> Approximately. So you start with the near-edge, okay? So the near-edge lives in the operator's data centers, edges, whatever the case may be, built out of off the shelf hardware. Dell is our great partner there but in principle, it could be different mix and match. So once you have that true near-edge, then you can think of, "Okay, how can I make sure this environment is as uniform, same APIs, same everything, regardless what the physical location is?" And this is key, key for the network function providers and the NEPs because they need to be able to port once, run everywhere, and it's key for the operator to reduce their costs. You want to teach your workforce, your operations folks, if you will, how to manage this system one time, to automation and so forth. So, and that is actually an expansion of the Azure capabilities that people are familiar with in a public cloud, projected into different locations. And we have technology called Arc which basically models everything. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So if you have trained your IT side, you are halfway there, how to manage your new network. Even though of course the network is carrier graded, there's different gear. So yes, what you said, a lot of it is true but the actual components, whatever they might be running, are carrier grade, highly optimized, the next images and our solution is not a DIY solution, okay? I know you cater to a wide spectrum here but for us, we don't believe in the TCO. The proper TCO can be achieved by just putting stuff by yourself. We just published a report with Analysys Mason that shows that our approach will save 36 percent of the cost compared to a DIY approach. >> Dave: What percent? >> 36 percent. >> Dave: Of the cost? >> Of, compared to DIY, which is already cheaper than classical models. >> And there's a long history of fairly failed DIY, right, >> Yeah. >> That preceded this. As in the early days of public cloud, the network operators wrestled with, "Do I have to become one to survive?" >> Dave: Yeah. Right. >> So they all ended up having cloud projects and by and large, they've all dematerialized in favor of this. >> Yeah, and it's hard for them to really invest at scale. Let me give you an example. So, your biggest tier one operator, without naming anybody, okay, how many developers do they have that can build and maintain an OS image, or can keep track of container technology, or build monitoring at scale? In our company, we have literally thousands of developers doing it already for the cloud and all we're doing for the operator segment is customizing it and focusing it at the carrier grade aspects of it. But so, I don't have half a dozen exterior experts. I literally have a building of developers who can do that and I'm being literal, here. So it's a scale thing. Once you have a product that you can give to multiple people, everybody benefits. >> Dave: Yeah, and the carriers are largely, they're equipment engineers in a large setting. >> Oh, they have a tough job. I always have total respect what they do. >> Oh totally, and a lot of the work happens, you know, kind of underground and here they are. >> They are network operators. >> They don't touch. >> It's their business. >> Right, absolutely, and they're good at it. They're really good at it. That's right. You know, you think about it, we love to, you know, poke fun at the big carriers, but think about what happened during the pandemic. When they had us shift everything to remote work, >> Dennis: Yes. >> Landline traffic went through the roof. You didn't even notice. >> Yep. That's very true. >> I mean, that's the example. >> That's very true. >> However, in the future where there's innovation and it's going to be driven by developers, right, that's where the open ecosystem comes in. >> Yousef: Indeed. >> And that's the hard transition for a lot of these folks because the developers are going to win that with new workloads, new applications that we can't even think of. >> Dennis: Right. And a lot of it is because if you look at it, there's the fundamental back strategy hat back on, fundamental dynamics of the industry, forced investment, flat revenues. >> Dave: Yeah. Right. >> Very true. >> Right? Every few years, a new G comes out. "Man, I got to retool this massive thing and where I can't do towers, I'm dropping fiber or vice a versa." And meanwhile, most diversification efforts into media have failed. They've had to unwind them and resell them. There's a lot of debt in the industry. >> Yousef: Yeah. >> Dennis: And so, they're looking for that next big, adjacent revenue stream and increasingly deciding, "If I don't modernize my network, I can't get it." >> Can't do it. >> Right, and again, what I heard from some of the carriers in the keynote was, "We're going to charge for API access 'cause we have data in the network." Okay, but I feel like there's a lot more innovation beyond that that's going to come from the disruptors. >> Dennis: Oh yeah. >> Yousef: Yes. >> You know, that's going to blow that away, right? And then that may not be the right model. We'll see, you know? I mean, what would Microsoft do? They would say, "Here, here's a platform. Go develop." >> No, I'll tell you. We are actually working with CAMARA and GSMA on the whole API layer. We actually announced a service as well as (indistinct). >> Dave: Yeah, yeah, right. >> And the key there, frankly, in my opinion, are not the disruptors as in operators. It's the ISV community. You want to get developers that can write to a global set of APIs, not per Telco APIs, such that they can do the innovation. I mean, this is what we've seen in other industries, >> Absolutely. >> That I critically can think of. >> This is the way they get a slice of that pie, right? The recent history of this industry is one where 4G LTE begot the smartphone and app store era, a bevy of consumer services, and almost every single profit stream went somewhere other than the operator, right? >> Yousef: Someone else. So they're looking at this saying, "Okay, 5G is the enterprise G and there's going to be a bevy of applications that are business service related, based on 5G capability and I can't let the OTT, over the top, thing happen again." >> Right. >> They'll say that. "We cannot let this happen." >> "We can't let this happen again." >> Okay, but how do they, >> Yeah, how do they make that not happen? >> Not let it happen again? >> Eight APIs, Dave. The answer is eight APIs. No, I mean, it's this approach. They need to make it easy to work with people like Yousef and more importantly, the developer community that people like Yousef and his company have found a way to harness. And by the way, they need to be part of that developer community themselves. >> And they're not, today. They're not speaking that developer language. >> Right. >> It's hard. You know, hey. >> Dennis: Hey, what's the fastest way to sell an enterprise, a business service? Resell Azure, Teams, something, right? But that's a resale. >> Yeah, that's a resale thing. >> See, >> That's not their service. >> They also need to free their resources from all the plumbing they do and leave it to us. We are plumbers, okay? >> Dennis: We are proud plumbers. >> We are proud plumbers. I'm a plumber. I keep telling people this thing. We had the same discussion with banks and enterprises 10 years ago, by the way. Don't do the plumbing. Go add value on the top. Retool your workforce to do applications and work with ISVs to the verticals, as opposed to either reselling, which many do, or do the plumbing. You'd be surprised. Traditionally, many operators do around, "I want to plumb this thing to get this small interrupt per second." Like, who cares? >> Well, 'cause they made money on connectivity. >> Yes. >> And we've seen this before. >> And in a world without telephone poles and your cables- >> Hey, if what you have is a hammer, everything's a nail, right? And we sell connectivity services and that's what we know how to do, and that both build and sell. And if that's no longer driving a revenue stream sufficient to cover this forced investment march, not to mention Huawei rip and government initiatives to pull infrastructure out and accelerate investment, they got to find new ways. >> I mean, the regulations have been tough, right? They don't go forward and ask for permission. They really can't, right? They have to be much more careful. >> Dennis: It is tough. >> So, we don't mean to sound like it's easy for these guys. >> Dennis: No, it's not. >> But it does require a new mindset, new skillsets, and I think some of 'em are going to figure it out and then pff, the wave, and you guys are going to be riding that wave. >> We're going to try. >> Definitely. Definitely. >> As a veteran of working with both Dell and Microsoft, specifically Azure on things, I am struck by how you're very well positioned in this with Microsoft in particular. Because of Azure's history, coming out of the on-premises world that Microsoft knows so well, there's a natural affinity to the hybrid nature of Telecom. We talk about edge, we talk about hybrid, this is it, absolutely the center of it. So it seems like a- >> Yousef: Indeed. Actually, if you look at the history of Azure, from day one, and I was there from day one, we always spoke of the hybrid model. >> Yeah. >> The third point, we came from the on-premises world. >> David: Right. >> And don't get me wrong, I want people to use the public cloud, but I also know due to physics, regulation, geopolitical boundaries, there's something called on-prem, something called an edge here. I want to add something else. Remember our deal on how we are partner-centric? We're applying the same playbook, here. So, you know, for every dollar we make, so many of it's been done by the ecosystem. Same applies here. So we have announced partnerships with Ericson, Nokia, (indistinct), all the names, and of course with Dell and many others. The ecosystem has to come together and customers must retain their optionality to drum up whatever they are on. So it's the same playbook, with this. >> And enterprise technology companies are, actually, really good at, you know, decoding the customer, figuring out specific requirements, making some mistakes the first time through and then eventually getting it right. And as these trends unfold, you know, you're in a good position, I think, as are others and it's an exciting time for enterprise tech in this industry, you know? >> It really is. >> Indeed. >> Dave: Guys, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Dave: It's great to see you. Have a great rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Dave. Thank you, Dave. >> All right, keep it right there. John Furrier is live in our studio. He's breaking down all the news. Go to siliconangle.com to go to theCUBE.net. Dave Vellante, David Nicholson and Lisa Martin, we'll be right back from the theater in Barcelona, MWC 23 right after this short break. (relaxing music)

(electronic music) (graphics whooshing) (graphics tinkling) >> Telecommunications is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally, that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, they're frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up, they're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane, and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined. And leading telcos are adopting cloud native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models, and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense. And these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast. Meaning, not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels. And they want them to be highly cost-effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante, and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me to unpack the trends in telco, and look ahead to MWC23 are Dennis Hoffman, he's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Dell's telecom business, and Aaron Chaisson, who is the Vice President of Telecom and Edge Solutions Marketing at Dell Technologies, gentlemen, welcome, thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, and a large part because their purpose-built infrastructure could been somewhat of a barrier to responding to all these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really this market so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action Dave is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors, and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together, and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress, it's the largest event for telecoms, what should people know about Dell? And what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack, to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, or along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves. And so, one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today. Be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry. And then finally, we want to help both partners, as well as our CSP providers activate those changes, so that they can bring new solutions to market, to be able to serve their customers. And so, the key areas that we're really focusing on with our customers is, technologies to help modernize the network, to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures, and bring price performance to what they're expecting, and availability that they're expecting today. And then also, partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions, and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So Dennis, you and I, known you for a number of years. I've watched you, you're are a trend spotter. You're a strategic thinker. I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got to make it happen. So, how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things. And I appreciate the comment, I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years, to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward, and produce the outcomes that our network operator customers can actually buy and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is, there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year in telecom. Because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have being developed for years. With the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market, we've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks. Some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure. And so, I would say the second main thrust is, we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together. But those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you obviously not going to go alone in this market, it's way too broad, there's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously very, very important. So, can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress, or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. As Aaron touched on, I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal. And all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So, let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market. And producing very specific products to enable open, high performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors, as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software, and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year. And then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNF's and CNF's that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks, that are now opening up and being delivered, as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it. The systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which of course, has been running for a long time, and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way. And so, all of that, together kind of forms the ecosystem, all of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is, it's sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure, I wonder if I could touch on another major trend, which we're seeing is the cloud, and I'm talkin' about not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. Telcom providers are lookin' to the public cloud for specific use cases, you think about like bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever. But at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services, so telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent. And I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell specifically is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, and I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before. And I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so, one of the hot topics in the industry now is, what is telco cloud? And what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage. But at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers, and then provide value added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best of breed servers that are built in design for the telecom environments. Recently, we announced our Infer block program, in partnering with virtualization providers, to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage, and lifecycle manage throughout day two operations, an entire cloud environment. And whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River, or VMware, or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive. And Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware, as well as on management software perspective. So, this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community, to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second, I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got Edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G, where's security fit, what are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about the sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network Edge, the RAN capabilities to deliver traditional telecommunication services, and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is, telecoms are really looking from a line of business perspective to figure out how do they monetize that network, and be able to deliver value added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So, you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. In the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage Edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility, and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities, to be able to access these devices that are around all of these Edge environments of the enterprises. And telecoms are seeing as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So, these are areas that Dell is historically very strong at. Being able to provide compute, be able to provide connectivity, and being able to provide data protection and client services, we are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us, to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So, those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key, I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing, cost per bit goes down, data consumption going through the roof, all the over at the top guys have had the field day with the data, and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge (chuckles) of the telcos. Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you break out the binoculars a little bit. >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined open hardware cloud native. And the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center, they all run very large data centers. And they're trying to get some of the scale economies. Some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. It's clear as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing, and the difficulty to monetize that investment. And I think now, everybody's looking at this 5G, and frankly, 5G plus 6G, and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and Enterprise Edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me, Aaron into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got Industry 4.0, you've got our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So, give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress 23, what's on deck at the show from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year. And it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So, we're going to be using this obviously to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do, and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be doin', we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today, and show them the use cases, and put into action, so they get to actually look and feel, and touch, and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important, everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kickoff for the year. So, we're going to have, we're lookin' at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be lookin' to have across the industry with our customers and partners in the broader community. And of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So, you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies, kind of spread all over the floor. And of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry, and how we're looking to leverage the broader, open ecosystem to be able to transform the network, and what we're lookin' to do. So, in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation. And then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity? So, these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on, and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome in Barcelona at the FITA, as you say, Dell's big presence in hall three, Orange is in there, Deutsche Telecom, Intel's in hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone, you got some great things to see there. Check that out, and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you, we got a great setup. We're in the walkway right between halls four and five, right across from the government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event, so there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there, really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> Alright, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th right after the keynotes. So, first thing in the morning, east coast time, we'll be broadcasting is, Aaron said all week, Monday through Thursday in the show floor, check that out at thecube.net. siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happenin' there, have all the action from the event. Don't miss us, this is Dave Vellante, we'll see you there. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Telecommunic^ations is well north of a trillion-dollar business globally that provides critical services on which virtually everyone on the planet relies. Dramatic changes are occurring in the sector, and one of the most important dimensions of this change is the underlying infrastructure that powers global telecommunications networks. Telcos have been thawing out, if you will, their frozen infrastructure, modernizing. They're opening up. They're disaggregating their infrastructure, separating, for example, the control plane from the data plane and adopting open standards. Telco infrastructure is becoming software-defined, and leading telcos are adopting cloud-native microservices to help make developers more productive, so they can respond more quickly to market changes. They're embracing technology consumption models and selectively leveraging the cloud where it makes sense, and these changes are being driven by market forces, the root of which stem from customer demand. So from a customer's perspective, they want services, and they want them fast, meaning not only at high speeds, but also they want them now. Customers want the latest, the greatest, and they want these services to be reliable and stable with high quality of service levels, and they want them to be highly cost effective. Hello and welcome to this preview of Mobile World Congress 2023. My name is Dave Vellante and at this year's event, theCUBE has a major presence at the show, made possible by Dell Technologies, and with me, to unpack the trends in Telco and look ahead to MWC 23, Dennis Hoffman. He's the senior vice-president and general manager of Dell's telecom business and Aaron Chaisson, who is the vice-president of telecom and edge solutions marketing at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, welcome. Thanks so much for spending some time with me. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, glad to be here. So, Dennis, let's start with you. Telcos in recent history have been slow to deliver and to monetize new services, in a large part, because their purpose-built infrastructure can been somewhat of a barrier to respondent to these market forces. In many ways, this is what makes telecoms, really, this market, so exciting. So from your perspective, where is the action in this space? >> Yeah, the action, Dave, is kind of all over the place, partly because it's an ecosystem play. You know, I think it's been, as you point out, the disaggregation trend has been going on for a while. The opportunity's been clear, but it has taken a few years to get all of the vendors and all of the components that make up a solution, as well as the operators themselves, to a point where we can start putting this stuff together and actually achieving some of the promise. >> So, Aaron, for those who might not be as familiar with Dell's a activities in this area, you know, here we are just ahead of Mobile World Congress. It's the largest event for telecoms. What should people know about Dell, and what's the key message to this industry? >> Sure, yeah, I think everybody knows that there's a lot of innovation that's been happening in the industry of late. One of the major trends that we're seeing is that shift from more of a vertically-integrated technology stack to more of a disaggregated set of solutions, and that trend has actually created a ton of innovation that's happening across the industry, well, along technology vendors and providers, the telecoms themselves, and so one of the things that Dell's really looking to do is, as Dennis talked about, is build out a really strong ecosystem of partners and vendors that we're working closely together to be able to collaborate on new technologies, new capabilities, that are solving challenges that the networks are seeing today, be able to create new solutions built on those in order to be able to bring new value to the industry and then finally, we want to help both partners as well as our CSP providers activate those changes so that they can bring new solutions to market to be able to serve their customers, and so the key areas that we're really focusing on, with our customers, is technologies to help modernize the network to be able to capitalize on the value of open architectures and bring price performance to what they're expecting and availability that they're expecting today and then also partner with the lines of business to be able to take these new capabilities, produce new solutions and then deliver new value to their customers. >> Great, thank you, Aaron. So, Dennis, I have known you for a number of years. I've watched you. You are a trend spotter, and you're a strategic thinker, and I love now the fact that you're running a business that you had to go out and analyze, and now you got got to make it happen. So how would you describe Dell's strategy in this market? >> Well, it's really two things, and I appreciate the comment. I'm not sure how much of a trend spotter I am, but I certainly enjoy, and I think I'm fascinated by what's going on in this industry right now. Our two main thrusts, Dave, are, first round, trying to catalyze that ecosystem, you know, be a force for pulling together a group of folks, vendors, that have been flying in fairly loose formation for a couple of years to deliver the kinds of solutions that move the needle forward and produce the outcomes that our network-operator customers can actually buy, and consume, and deploy, and have them be supported. The other thing is there's a couple of very key technology areas that need to be advanced here. This ends up being a much anticipated year, in telecom, because of the delivery of some open infrastructure solutions that have been being developed for years, with the Intel Sapphire Rapids program coming to market. We've of course got some purpose-built solutions on top of that for telecommunications networks, some expanded partnerships in the area of multi-cloud infrastructure, and so I would say the second main thrust is we've got to bring some intellectual property to the party. It's not just about pulling the ecosystem together, but those two things together really form the twin thrusts of our strategy. >> Okay, so as you point out, you're obviously not going to go alone in this market. It's way too broad. There's so many routes to market, partnerships, obviously, very, very important. So can you share a little bit more about the ecosystem and partners, maybe give some examples of some of the key partners that you'd be highlighting or working with, maybe at Mobile World Congress or other activities this year? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, as Aaron touched on. I'm a visual thinker. The way I think about this thing is a very, very vertical architecture is tipping sideways. It's becoming horizontal, and all of the layers of that horizontal architecture are really where the partnerships are at. So let's start at the bottom, silicon. The silicon ecosystem is very much focused on this market and producing very specific products to enable open, high-performance telecom networks. That's both in the form of host processors as well as accelerators. One layer up, of course, is the stuff that we're known for, subsystems, compute, storage, the hardware infrastructure that forms the foundation for telco clouds. A layer above that, all of the cloud software layer, the virtualization and containerization software and all of the usual suspects there, all of whom are very good partners of ours, and we're looking to expand that pretty broadly this year, and then at the top of the layer cake, all of the network functions, all of the VNFs and CNFs that were once kind of the top of proprietary stacks that are now opening up and being delivered as well-formed containers that can run on these clouds. So, you know, we're focusing on all of those, if you will, product partnerships, and there is a services wrapper around all of it, the systems integration necessary to make these systems part of a carrier's network, which, of course, has been running for a long time and needs to be integrated with in a very specific way, and so all of that together kind of forms the ecosystem. All of those are partners, and we're really excited about being at the heart of it. >> Interesting, it's not like we've never seen this movie before, which is sort of repeating itself in telco. Aaron, you heard my little intro up front about the need to modernize infrastructure. I wonder if I could touch on, you know, another major trend which we're seeing, is the cloud, and I'm talking about, not only public, but private and hybrid cloud. The public cloud is an opportunity, but it's also a threat for telcos. You know, telecom providers are looking to the public cloud for specific use cases. You think about, like, bursting for an iPhone launch or whatever but at the same time, these cloud vendors, they're sort of competing with telcos. They're providing, you know, local zones, for example, sometimes trying to do an end run on the telco connectivity services. So telecom companies, they have to find the right balance between what they own and what they rent, and I wonder if you could add some color as to what you see in the market and what Dell, specifically, is doing to support these trends. >> Yeah, I think the most important thing is what we're seeing, as you said, is these aren't things that we haven't seen before, and I think that telecom is really going through their own set of cloud transformations, and so one of the hot topics in the industry now is what is telco cloud and what does that look like going forward? And it's going to be a, as you said, a combination of services that they offer, services that they leverage, but at the end of the day, it's going to help them modernize how they deliver telecommunication services to their customers and then provide value-added services on top of that. From a Dell perspective, you know, we're really providing the technologies to provide the underpinnings to lay a foundation on which that network can be built, whether that's best-of-breed servers that are built and designed for the telecom environments. Recently we announced our, our Infra Block program in partnering with virtualization providers to be able to provide engineered systems that dramatically simplify how our customers can deploy, manage and lifecycle-manage throughout day-two operations, an entire cloud environment, and whether they're using Red Hat, whether they're using Wind River or VMware or other virtualization layers, they can deploy the right virtualization layer at the right part of their network to support the applications they're looking to drive, and Dell is looking to solve how they simplify and manage all of that, both from a hardware as well as a management software perspective. So this is really what Dell's doing to, again, partner with the broader technology community to help make that telco cloud a reality. >> Aaron, let's stay here for a second. I'm interested in some of the use cases that you're going after with customers. You've got edge infrastructure, remote work, 5G. Where's security fit? What are the focus areas for Dell, and can we double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's two main areas of telecommunication industry that we're talking to. One, we've really been talking about sort of the network buyer, how do they modernize the core, the network edge, the RAN capabilities, to deliver traditional telecommunication services and modernize that as they move into 5G and beyond. I think the other side of the business is telecoms are really looking, from a line of business perspective, to figure out how do they monetize that network and be able to deliver value-added services to their enterprise customers on top of these new networks. So you were just touching on a couple of things that are really critical. You know, in the enterprise space, AI and IoT is driving a tremendous amount of innovation out there, and there's a need for being able to support and manage edge compute at scale, be able to provide connectivity, like private mobility and 4G and 5G, being able to support things like mobile workforces and client capabilities to be able to access these devices that are around all of these edge environments of the enterprises, and telecoms are seen as that, as an opportunity for them to not only provide connectivity, but how do they extend their cloud out into these enterprise environments with compute, with connectivity, with client and connectivity resources, and even also provide protection for those environments as well. So these are areas that Dell's historically very strong at, being able to provide compute, being able to provide connectivity and being able to provide data protection and client services. We are looking to work closely with lines of businesses to be able to develop solutions that they can bring to market in combination with us to be able to serve their end user customers and their enterprises. So those are really the two key areas, not only network buyer, but being able to enable the lines of business to go and capitalize on the services they're developing for their customers. >> I think that line of business aspect is key. I mean, the telcos have had to sit back and provide the plumbing. Cost per bit goes down. Data consumption going through the roof. All the way over to the top guys, you know, had the field day with the data and the customer relationships, and now it's almost like the revenge of the telcos. (chuckles) Dennis, I wonder if we could talk about the future. What can we expect in the years ahead from Dell, if you, you know, break out the binoculars a little bit? >> Yeah, I think you hit it earlier. We've seen the movie before. This has happened in the IT data center. We went from proprietary vertical solutions to horizontal open systems. We went from client server to software-defined, open-hardware, cloud-native and you know, the trend is likely to be exactly that, in the telecom industry, because that's what the operators want. They're not naive to what's happened in the IT data center. They all run very large data centers, and they're trying to get some of the scale economies, some of the agility, the cost of ownership benefits for the reasons Aaron just discussed. You know, it's clear, as you point out, this industry's been really defined by the inability to stop investing and the difficulty to monetize that investment, and I think now everybody's looking at this 5G, and, frankly, 5G plus, 6G and beyond, as the opportunity to really go get a chunk of that revenue, and enterprise edge is the target. >> And 5G is touching so many industries, and that kind of brings me here into Mobile World Congress. I mean, you look at the floor layout, it's amazing. You got industry 4.0. You've got, you know, our traditional industry and telco colliding. There's public policy. So give us a teaser to Mobile World Congress '23. What's on deck at the show for from Dell? >> Yeah, we're really excited about Mobile World Congress. This, as you know, is a massive event for the industry every year, and it's really the event that the whole industry uses to kick off this coming year. So we're going to be using this, obviously, to talk to our customers and our partners about what Dell's looking to do and what we're innovating on right now, and what we're looking to partner with them around. In the front of the house, we're going to be highlighting 13 different solutions and demonstrations to be able to show our customers what we're doing today and show them the use cases and put it into action, so they get to actually look and feel and touch and experience what it is that we're working around. Obviously, meetings are important. Everybody knows Mobile World Congress is the place to get those meetings and kick off for the year. You know, we're looking at several hundred meetings, hundreds of meetings that we're going to be looking to have across the industry with our customers and partners and the broader community, and, of course, we've also got technology that's going to be in a variety of different partner spaces as well. So you can come and see us in hall three, but we're also going to have technologies kind of spread all over the floor, and, of course, there's always theCUBE. You're going to be able to see us live all four days, all day, every day. You're going to be hearing our executives, our partners, our customers, talk about, you know, what Dell is doing to innovate in the industry and how we're looking to leverage the broader open ecosystem to be able to transform, you know, the network and what we're looking to do. So in that space, we're going to be focusing on what we're doing from an ecosystem perspective, our infrastructure focus. We'll be talking about what we're doing to support telco cloud transformation and then finally, as we talked about earlier, how are we helping the lines of business within our telecoms monetize the opportunity. So these are all different things we're really excited to be focusing on and look forward to the event next month. >> Yeah, it's going to be awesome In Barcelona at the Fira. As you say, Dell's big presence in Hall three. Orange is in there, Deutsche Telekom. Intel's in Hall three. VMware's there, Nokia, Vodafone. You got great things to see there. Check that out and of course, theCUBE, we are super excited to be collaborating with you. We got a great setup. We're in the walkway, right between halls four and five, right across from the Government of Catalonia, who are the host partners for the event. So there's going to be a ton of action there. Guys, can't wait to see you there. Really appreciate your time today. >> Great, thanks. >> All right, Mobile World Congress, theCUBE's coverage starts on February 27th, right after the keynotes. So first thing in the morning, East coast time, we'll be broadcasting, as Aaron said, all week, Monday through Thursday, on the show floor. Check that out at thecube.net. Siliconangle.com has all the written coverage, and go to dell.com, see what's happening there. Have all the action from the event. Don't miss us. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you there. (upbeat music)

(corporate electronic xylophone jingle intro) >> Good afternoon everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS re:Invent 22 from Vegas. We're at the Venetian Expo Hall with we're hearing, north of 50,000 people. I know we've been giving you different numbers but, that's kind of what we've settled on here. Hundreds of thousands are watching online. This is a huge event. People, John Furrier, Lisa Martin are ready to be back. >> Yes, it's really great show. A lot of change going on at Amazon. They're continuing the innovation, continuing to grow. The theme this year's data security and their partner ecosystem, which is continuing to grow. Their partners are filling the gaps on solutions and, it's just a whole another, I think, partner friendly cloud. This next gen wave that's coming, it's really next segment I think speaks to, I'm looking forward to this. >> It does. We're going to be digging into that partner network. We've got two guests. One of them's an alumni, Reza Honarmand SVP Global Cloud at TD SYNNEX. Great to have you back. >> Hello. >> Sergio Farache joins us as well, the Chief Strategy Officer at TD SYNNEX. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you. Thank you for having us. >> Great to be back in person, isn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's a great experience. >> Amazing. The energy here has been hot at the highest levels since we came here Monday, Monday night, which is great. Sergio, I want to start with you. Last year when you guys were on the show, Tech Data. Tech Data has been around a long time. Now your TD SYNNEX. Talk a little bit about that. What's new, that transformation? >> Yeah, that is correct. It's great to be able now to present TD Synnex as a new merger between Tech Data and Synnex Corporation. Now, we are the largest distributor basically, across the world, with more than 62 billion dollar in a business. And, Amazon is obviously a strategic partner with a hyper growth and, we has been very focused to working with them to expand that partner ecosystem across solution ISVs and service providers. There has been very nice experience combine these two company and now have the reach and a scale that enable more than 140,000 partners across the world. >> Wow. >> And, the partner's message here is changing too. The new leader, Aruba is up on stage talking about this new partner paths. A lot of changes in a good way. They're bringing people together. What's your guys take and reaction to AWS's new posture towards partners? Obviously, the ecosystem we see going to be doubling and tripling we see in size and, also the value proposition is going to be stronger too and, more money making of course. But, the new Amazon's posture with partners. What's your reaction? >> We were at Aruba just an hour ago. Fantastic. If I look at the change from when we first got here a few years ago to now, it is beyond comparison. The realization is that technology and, especially what we work with Amazon is deflationary force and, we need scale to actually drive that across all of our partners to the customers. And, I can only see that accelerating now in terms of what Amazon is doing and actually with the channel and what Aruba is doing. I think this is exactly the right direction. >> John: What's your message? >> My message is, this is now channel. This is channel and this is serious. So, partners with Amazon equals growth. >> As we've seen so much transformation in the last couple of years, Sergio, with every business having to become digital to survive, right. And then, to eventually thrive and succeed and grow and the challenging economic times that we've had. What are some of the pivots that TD Synnex has made through your partner program to meet customer needs to accelerate their transformation? >> Yeah, as you said, has been a significant transformation. I think that in the past was clear what was a technology company and what an industrial company etcetera and, those frontiers are blending right now. Then, as a consequence we has been investing in several elements. One is to really increase the capability of the partner network in a way that they can on one side provide more solution-oriented activities to those customers to drive either growth or cost optimization. The other element has been verticalization meaning, know the industry where you are playing. We have been investing in the healthcare market, of course, as a consequence of all the demand that has been generating. But, at the same time and, we recently announced the competency in the government sector where we expand drastically our capabilities around specifically the federal and non federal business. But, not only in US but, across the world with those elements. Then, I would say that it's a combination of enhancing the skill, enhancing the knowledge on the industry, and finally provide the tools through our platform to enable the partner to operate in a digital way and enable the access of ISVs to the Iotly and serving the customers end to end. >> Is that the ISV experience project that I heard about, ISV experience with SaaS companies? Is that what you're referring to? >> Yeah, ISVs is one, ISV experience is one of the components that we use but, basically what we are trying to achieve with the ISV is helping in the journey of certification. Is how you transform either a partner that is born in the cloud or a partner that is still in the on-premise side. How you transition to the cloud and enabling how you reach to the end user in a more effective way and, how we expose 140,000 partner across the multiple geographies to help those ISVs to reach more customers. >> It's great distribute, it's great distribution. It's a business model innovation. >> Sorry? >> It's a business model innovation for these ISVs. >> Absolutely. Some of the ISVs, as you can imagine, they're incumbent with us. We work with them. So, actually it's finding new ways of consuming technology but, there's thousands of them that actually do not understand how to operate with a channel. And, this is a part where we help them with the channel, build a program, coach them through the process, help them access their partners and the customers that Sergio was referring to. >> Let me ask you guys a question. Where's the growth going to come from? You mentioned ecosystem, more growth, Aruba mentioned that's where the growth is. They are serious. So, you going to deliver that keynote now. Where do you guys see your growth coming from? >> Well, to be honest, the growth is unlimited in our opinion, right? It's so many areas. >> John: The wave is still coming. Yeah, the wave is still there. When you see still the amount of platform that need to be migrated to the cloud then, we have been investing in a significant way in enable capabilities of migration programs from the on-premise to the off-premise. At the same time, we have been expanding geographically because, it's still several segments and markets we operate globally. As an example, we recently launched our public sector capability in Latin America and Europe, expanding those segments. And, in addition to that, again, how we bring more ISVs more solution oriented driven. There's many spots of growth. And, I think that Amazon message recently recognized more and more the value of, nobody have all the solutions. You need this ecosystem playing together to bring those solutions to market. >> So if I build on that. If we look at the growth in the public cloud last year, was around 40 billion dollars. We expect a similar growth level this year as well. I mentioned about deflationary force, the technology being a deflationary force. Now, everybody knows a lot of businesses out there are going under a lot of challenges. So, they have to compete, they have to have the insights, they have to be efficient, and actually, they're going to get a lot of that through the technologies that we're talking about here. The key to that is partners with the right skill sets. What we are seeing is the partners with the skill sets who can participate in that 40 billion dollar growth, take a big, big share of it. >> And you guys are providing a great service. I think, when I wrote the story on Friday that I published. One of my premise was is that, this next-gen cloud is going to lift up more ISVs which is kind of a legacy classic, independent software vendor, create new kinds of partners that have platforms or unique solutions for verticals. So, the ISV classic definition will still exist and, new customers are emerging. It's got a new dynamic developing. We're seeing people build clouds on top of the cloud, tap the ecosystem, partner distribution services. It's a whole new way to build and take something to market. What do you guys think about that? >> Yeah, I think that the beauty of our position in the market is that we are in the center of that ecosystem. Again, we have access to thousands of ISVs, thousands of hardware vendors, the hyperscalers. Then somebody need to put all those pieces together. That is our role in the market. >> John: It's a good position to be in. >> It's a good place to be. And, enabling those partners now to collaborate with all those entities to bring the solution because, the customer is not acquiring technology anymore. They're acquiring a solution to a problem now. And, that solution require multiple components. >> Last year, no, this year, I'm sorry, you guys were announced as EMEA Distributor of the Year. Congratulations on that. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Talk about that in terms of just the evolution of the partnership. >> The partnership in EMEA is now across our entire geo. The growth that we've driven across the EMEA market space is I think, the reason why we have won it, as well as the competencies that we have built. Now, you were just talking about ISVs to give you an example. There are many ISVs that sit in EMEA that want to access the US market and vice versa. So, where we sit in the middle and enable that access, the frameworks that they need to move. So, those are the kind of things that contribute to the strength in the relationship what those awards are coming from. >> Yeah, the other critical factor here is again, how we bring more capability in terms of the serve to the market to Amazon. And, that has been another component of data where that we are very thankful. Again, we has been enabling and bringing numerous new partners and numerous new end customers that now have access, support, and services including, again, the competencies that we already described but, including service oriented businesses like migration, like cost optimization of the use, et cetera, that now we through partner serve to the market. >> Reza, Sergio. I want to ask you guys a question around trust. Trust. You're a trust broker because you have a lot of services and people and companies to put together. We were just talking about the good position you're in. Trust is a big part of your relationship with your customers. You've got two sides of your business. You got one side is the supply side and you got the distribution side, and then both sides are working together. Requires a lot of trust. What's that look like inside your company? Could you just take a minute to explain, take a bit to explain what's that like, the culture of the company and that trust. >> Yeah, absolutely. And, that is why the term of Trust Advisor came to the table, right? And, and again, for more than 40 years we has been building this ecosystem. We has been driving that motion and, we have been proving to the market a consistent approach with a strong support to the two tier model. We never get in opposition to our customers and, we enable those customers in a consistent way. Then, I think that trust is something that you earn not something that you ask for. And, that is what we are doing day basis. >> Well, congratulations. It's been great chatting with you. Challenge time for the challenge >> Lisa: Challenge Time, all right guys. >> A new challenge on theCUBE, new format. We usually say... >> Yes at the end of the interview. What's the take on the show? What's the bumper sticker? So, think of it like an Instagram Reel. Thought leadership, hot take. Each of you, spend a minute, 30 seconds to share a hot take, thought leadership, what you think was going on at Amazon, why you're here, what's important. What would you say if you were going to do an Instagram Reel right now? >> Yeah, the Amazon enable a new way to do business and a new transformation of the Iotly economy. We are here in TD Synnex to expand that capability across the segments enhancing partners to reach to their goals and, in users to get those transformations. In general, we will provide what is needed and, we continue investing to continue growing the capacity across all geographies and all the type of solutions that we deliver. >> All right, Sergio, you nailed it. Reza, you're up, your hot take, your sizzle reel. >> Well, frankly, I think, Sergio nailed it. It's about covering the geos and taking the competencies and, make sure we execute consistently across all of our geos. >> All right, nailed it. Thanks so much. >> Consistent execution. Reza, Sergio, thank you so much... >> Thank you so much. for joining John and me on the program, talking about what TD SYNNEX has done since we've last seen you. What you're doing with AWS and the partner ecosystem. We really appreciate you stopping by the set >> Thank you. >> Thank you for the time. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader at live tech coverage. (corporate electronic xylophone jingle outro)

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon everyone. Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of AWS Reinvent 22 from Vegas. We're at the Venetian Expo Hall, we're hearing north of 50 000 people. I know we've been giving you different numbers but that's kind of what we've settled on here. Hundreds of thousands are watching online. This is a huge event people. John Ferrior and Lisa Martin are ready to be back. >> Yes, it's really great show. A lot of change going on at Amazon. They're continuing the innovation, continuing to grow. The theme this year's Data Security. And their partner ecosystem, which is continuing to grow. Their partners are filling the gaps on solutions. And it's just a whole nother, I think partner friendly cloud. This NextGen wave that's coming is really, the next thing segment I think speaks to that, I'm looking forward to this. >> It does. We're going to be digging into that partner network. We've got two guests, one of them is an alumni, Reza Honarmand SVP Global Cloud at TD Synnex. Great to have you back. >> Yeah. >> Sergio Farache joins us as well the Chief Strategy Officer at TD Synnex. Welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Great to be back in person, isn't it? >> Yeah absolutely. That's great experience. >> Amazing, the energy here at the highest level since we came here Monday night, which is great. Sergio, I want to start with you. Last year when you guys were on the show Tech Data. Tech Data has been around a long time now you're TD Synnex. Talk a little bit about that, what's new, that transformation? >> Yeah, that is correct. It's great to be able now to present it in Synnex as a new merger between Tech Data and Synnex Corporation. And now we are the largest distributor basically across the world with more than $62 billion in a business. And Amazon is obviously an strategic partner with a hyper growth and we have been very focused to working with them to expand that partner ecosystem across solution ISVs and service providers. That has been very nice experience combine these two company and now have the reach and skill that enable more than 140,000 partners across the world. >> Wow. >> And the partner's message here is changing too. The new leader, Ruba is up on stage talking about this new partner paths, a lot of changes in a good way. They're bringing people together. What's your guys take and reaction to AWS's new posture towards partners? Obviously the ecosystem we see going to be doubling and tripling we see in size. And also the value proposition being stronger too and more money making of course. But the new Amazon's posture with partners. What's your reaction? >> Well, (indistinct) just an hour ago. Fantastic. I mean, if I look at the change from when we first got here a few years ago to now, it is beyond comparison. The realization is that technology and especially what we work with Amazon is deflationary force and we need scale to actually drive that across all of our partners to the customers. And yeah, I can only see that accelerating now in terms of what Amazon is doing and actually with the channel and what Ruba is doing. I think this is exactly in the right direction. >> What's your message? >> My message is, this is now channel. This is channel and this is serious. So partners with Amazon equals growth. >> As we've seen so much transformation in the last couple of years, Sergio, with every business having to become digital to survive. Right and then to eventually thrive and succeed and grow in the challenging economic times that we've had. What are some of the, the pivots that TD Synnex has made through your partner program to meet customer needs to accelerate their transformation? >> Yeah, as you said, has been a significant transformation. I think that in the past was clear what was a technology company and what industrial company, et cetera and those frontiers are blending right now. Then as a consequence we have been investing in several elements. Once is to really increase the capability of the partner network in a way that they can on one side provide more solution-oriented activities to those customers to drive either growth or cost optimization. The other element has been verticalization meaning know the industry where you are playing. We have been investing in the healthcare market, of course as a consequence of all the demand that has been generating. But at the same time and we recently announced the competence in the government sector where we expand drastically our capabilities around specifically the federal, and non feral business, but not only in US but across the world with those elements. Then I would say it's a combination of enhancing the skill, enhancing the knowledge on the industry, and finally provide the tools through our platform to enable the partner to operate in a digital way and enable the access of ISVs to digitally and serving the customers end to end. >> Is that the ISV experience project that I heard about? ISV experience with SaaS companies, Is that what you're referring to? >> Yeah, ISVs is one. ISP experience is one of the components that we use, but basically what we are trying to achieve with the ISV is helping in the journey of specification. It's how you transform either a partner that is born in the cloud or a partner that is still in the, in the OnPrem side how you transition to the cloud and enabling how you reach to the end user in a more effective way. And how we expose 140,000 partner across the multiple geographies to help those ISVs to reach more customers. >> It's great distribution. I mean this is, a business model innovation. >> Sorry? >> It's a business model innovation for these ISVs. >> Absolutely. Some of the ISVs, as you can imagine they're incumbent with us. We work with them. So actually it's finding new ways of consuming technology. But there's thousands of them that actually do not understand how to operate with a channel. And this is a part where we help them with the channel, build a program. Coach them through the process, help them access the partners and the customers that Sergio was referring to. >> Let me ask you guys a question. Where's the growth going to come from? I mean you mentioned ecosystem, more growth, Ruba was mentioned that's where the growth is. They are serious. She's going to deliver that keynote now. Where do you guys see your growth coming from? >> Well, to be honest the growth is unlimited in our opinion, right. It's so many areas. >> The wave is still coming. Yeah >> The wave is still there, you know. When you see still the amount of platform that need to be immigrated to the cloud then we have been investing in a significant way in enable capabilities of migration programs from the on-premise to off premise. At the same time, we have been expanding geographically because it's still several segments and markets we operate globally. As an example we recently launched our public sector capability in Latin America and Europe, expanding those segments. And in addition to that again, how we bring more ISVs more solution oriented driven than many spots of growth. And I think that Amazon message recently recognized more and more the value of nobody have all the solutions. You need this ecosystem plan together to bring those solutions to market. >> So if I build on that. If we look at the growth in public cloud last year, was around $40 billion. We expect a similar growth level this year as well. I mentioned about deflationary force, the technology being a deflationary force. Now everybody knows a lot of businesses out there are going under a lot of challenges. So they have to compete, they have to have the insights they have to be efficient and actually they're going to get a lot of that through the technologies that we're talking about here. The key to that is partners with the right skillsets. What we are seeing is the partners with the skillsets who can participate in that $40 billion growth, take a big, big share of it. >> And you guys are providing a great service. I think when I wrote the story on Friday that I published one of my premise was, is that this Next-Gen cloud is going to lift up more ISVs which is kind of a legacy classic, independent software vendor. Create new kinds of partners that have platforms or unique solutions for verticals. So, the ISV classic definition will still exist and new customers are emerging. It's got a new dynamic developing. We're seeing people build clouds on top of the cloud tap the ecosystem, partner distribution, services. It's a whole new way to build and take something to market. What do you guys think about that? >> Yeah, I think that the beauty of our position in the market is that we are in the center of that ecosystem. Again, we have access to thousands of ISVs thousands of hardware vendors, the hyper-scalers then somebody need to put all those pieces together. That is our role in the market. >> It's a good position to be in. >> It's a good place to be. And enabling those partners now to collaborate with all those entities to bring the solution because the customer is not acquiring technology anymore. They're acquiring a solution to a problem now. And that solution require multiple components. >> Last year. No, this year, I'm sorry. You guys were announced as EMEA distributor of the, of the year. Congratulations on that. >> Yeah, thank you. Talk about that in terms of just the evolution of the partnership. >> The partnership in EMEA is now across our entire geo. The growth that we have driven across the EMEA market space, is I think the reason why we have won it. As well as the competencies that we have built. Now you were just talking about ISVs to give you an example, there are many ISVs that sit in EMEA that want to access the US market and vice versa. So where we sit in the middle and enable that access. The frameworks that they need to move. So those are the kind of things that contribute to the strengthened in the relationship and what those awards are coming from. >> Yeah. The other critical factor here is, again how we bring more capillarity in terms of the serve to the market to Amazon. And that has been another component of data that we are very thankful. Again, we has been enabling and bringing numerous new partners and numerous new end customers that now have access, support and services. Including again, the competencies that we already described but including service oriented businesses like migration, like cost optimization of the use, et cetera. That now we through partners serve to the market. >> Reza and Sergio, I want ask you guys a question around trust. Trust. You're a trust broker because you have a lot of services and people and companies to put together. We were just talking about the good position you're in. >> Trust is a big part of your relationship with your customers. You've got two sides of your business, you got one side's the supply side and you got the distribution side and then both sides are working together, requires a lot of trust. What's that look like inside your company? Can you just chip in and explain, take a bit to explain what's that like? The culture of the company and that trust. >> Yeah, absolutely. And that is why the term of trust advisor came to the table right? And again, for more than 40 years we have been building this ecosystem. We have been driving that motion and we have been proving to the market a consistent approach with a strong support to the two tier model. We never, you know get in opposition to our customers and we enable those customers in a consistent way. And I think that trust is something that you earn, not something that you ask for. And that is what we are doing day to day basis. >> Congratulations, it's been great. Great chatting with you. Challenge time? For the challenge time? >> Challenge time. >> Alright guys. >> New challenge on the Cuba new format. We usually say yes at the end of the interview. What's take on the show, what's the bumper sticker? So think of it like an Instagram reel, thought leadership, hot take. Each of you, spend a minute 30 seconds to share a hot take, thought leadership, what you think was going on at Amazon? Why you're here? What's important? What would you say if you were going to do an Instagram reel right now? >> Yeah, the Amazon enable a new way to do business and a new transformation of the digital economy. We are here TD Synnex to expand that capability across the segments. Enhancing partners to reach to their goals and in users to get those transformations. In general we will provide what is needed and we continue investing to continue growing the capacity across all geographies and all the type of solutions that we deliver. >> All right, Sergio you nailed it. Reza you're up. Your hot take your sizzle reel. >> Well, frankly I think Sergio nailed it. It's about covering the geos and taking the competencies and make sure we execute consistently across all of our geos. >> All right, nailed it. Thanks so much. >> Consistent execution. Reza, Sergio. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the program, talking about what TD Synnex has done since we've last seen you. What you're doing with AWS and the partner ecosystem. We really appreciate you stopping by this side. >> Thank you very much. Thank you for the time. >> Alright, our pleasure. For our guests and for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader at Live Tech coverage.

>> Good afternoon, fellow cloud nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent 2022. We are live here from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by Lisa Martin. So excited to be here Lisa, it's my first reinvent. >> Is it really? >> Yeah. >> I think it's only like my fourth or fifth. >> Only your fourth or fifth. >> Only. >> You're such a pro here. >> There's some serious veterans here in attendance that have been to all 11. >> I love that. >> Yeah. Wow, go them. I know, maybe we'll be at that level sooner. >> One day we will. >> Are you enjoying the show so far? >> Absolutely, it is. I cannot believe how many people are here. We've had 70,000 and we're only seeing what's at the foundation Expo Hall, not at the other hotel. So, I can only imagine. >> I mean, there's a world outside of this. >> Yes, and there's sunlight. There's actual sunlight outside of this room. >> Nobel idea. Well, Lisa, I'm very excited to be sitting here next to you and to welcome our fabulous guests, from TEKsystems, we have Brandon and Srini. Thank you so much for being here. How is the show going for you gentlemen so far? >> It's great. Lot of new insights and the customers are going to love what AWS is releasing in this reinvent. >> There is such a community here, and I love that vibe. It's similar to what we had at Cloud Native con in Detroit. So much collaboration going on. I assume most folks know a lot about TEKsystems who are watching, but just in case they don't, Brandon, give us the pitch. >> You bet. So full stack IT solutions firm, been in business for over 40 years, 80,000 global employees, really specializing in digital transformation, enterprise modernization services. We have partners in One Strategy, which is an an acquisition we made, but a well known premier partner in the Amazon partner ecosystem, as well as One North Interactive, who is our boutique brand, creative and digital strategy firm. So together, we really feel like we can bring full end-to-end solutions for digital and modernization initiatives. >> So, I saw some notes where TEKsystems are saying organizations need experienced AWS partners that are not afraid doing the dirty work of digital transformation, who really can advise and execute. Brandon, talk to us about how TEKsystems and AWS are working together to help customers on that journey which is nebulous of digital transformation. >> So, our real hallmark is the ability to scale. We partner with AWS in a lot of different ways. In fact, we just signed our strategic collaboration agreement. So, we're in the one percenter group in the whole partner network. >> Savanna: That's a pretty casual flex there. >> Not bad. >> I love that, top 1%, that no wonder you're wearing that partner pin so proud today. (speaking indistinctly) >> But we're working all the way on the advisory and working with their pro serve organization and then transforming that into large scale mass migration services, a lot of data modernization that Srini is an absolute expert in. I'm sure he can add some context too, but it's been a great partnership for many years now. >> In the keynote, Adam spent almost 52 minutes on data, right? So, it emphasizes how organizations are ready to take data to cloud and actually make meaningful insights and help their own customers come out of it by making meaningful decisions. So, we are glad to be part of this entire ecosystem. >> I love that you quantified how many minutes. >> I know. >> Talked about it, that was impressive. There's a little bit of data driven thinking going on here. >> I think so. >> Yeah. >> Well, we can't be at an event like this without talking about data for copious amounts of time, 52 minutes, has just used this morning. >> Right, absolutely. >> But every company these days has to be a data company. There's no choice to be successful, to thrive, to survive. I mean, even to thrive and grow, if it's a grocery store or your local gas station or what? You name it, that company has to be a data company. But the challenge of the data volume, the explosion in data is huge for organizations to really try to figure out and sift through what they have, where is all of it? How do we make sense of it? How do we act on it and get insights? That's a big challenge. How is TEKsystems helping customers tackle that challenge? >> Yeah, that's a great question because that's the whole fun of handling data. You need to ensure its meaning is first understood. So, we are not just dumping data into a storage place, but rather assign a meaningful context. In today's announcement, again, the data zone was unveiled to give meaning to data. And I think those are key concrete steps that we take to our customers as well with some good blueprints, methodical ways of approaching data and ultimately gaining business insights. >> And maybe I'll add just something real quick to that. The theme we're seeing and hearing a lot about is data monetization. So, technology companies have figured it out and used techniques to personalize things and get you ads, probably that you don't want half the time. But now all industries are really looking to do that. Looking at ways to open new revenue channels, looking at ways to drive a better customer experience, a better employee experience. We've got a ton of examples of that, Big Oil and Gas leveraging like well and machine data, coming in to be more efficient when they're pumping and moving commodities around. We work a lot in the medium entertainment space and so obviously, getting targeted ads to consumers during the right periods of TV or movies or et cetera. Especially with the advert on Netflix and all your streaming videos. So, it's been really interesting but we really see the future in leveraging data as one of your biggest corporate assets. >> Brilliant. >> So, I'm just curious on the ad thing, just real quick and I'll let you go, Lisa. So, do you still fall victim to falling for the advertising even though you know it's been strategically put there for you to consume in that moment? >> Most of the time. >> I mean, I think we all do. We're all, (indistinct), you're behind the curtain so to speak. >> The Amazon Truck shows up every day at my house, which is great, right? >> Hello again >> Same. >> But I think the power of it is you are giving the customer what they're looking for. >> That's it. >> And you know... >> Exactly. We have that expectation, we want it. >> 100%. >> We know that. >> Agree. >> We don't need to buy it. But technology has made it so easy to transact. That's like when developers started going to the cloud years ago, it was just, it was a swipe. It was so simple. Brandon, talk about the changes in cloud and cloud migration that TEKsystems has seen, particularly in the last couple of years as every company was rushing to go digital because they had to. >> So several years ago, we kind of pushed away that cloud first mentality to the side and we use more of a cloud smart kind of fashion, right? Does everything need to go to the cloud? No. Do applications, data, need to go to the cloud in a way that's modern and takes advantages of what the cloud can provide and all the new services that are being released this week and ongoing. So, the other thing we're seeing is initiatives that have traditionally been in the CTO, CIO organization aren't necessarily all that successful because we're seeing a complete misalignment between business goals and IT achievements, outcomes, et cetera. You can automate things, you can move it to the cloud, but if you didn't solve a core business problem or challenge, what'd you really do? >> Yeah, just to add on that, it's all about putting data and people together. And then how we can actually ensure the workforce is equally brought up to speed on these new technologies. That has been something that we have seen tremendous improvement in the last 24 months where customers are ready to take up new challenges and the end users are ready to learn something new and not just stick onto that status quo mindset. >> Where do you guys factor in to bringing in AWS in the customer's cloud journeys? What is that partnership like? >> We always first look for where the customer is in their cloud journey path and make sure we advise them with the right next steps. And AWS having its services across the spectrum makes it even easier for us to look at what business problem they're solving and then align it according to the process and technology so that at the end of the day, we want end user adoption. We don't want to build a fancy new gadget that no one uses. >> Just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. And I think that's the classic engineering marketing dilemma as well as balance to healthy tension. I would say between both. You mentioned Srini, you mentioned workforce just a second ago. What sort of trends are you seeing in workforce development? >> Generally speaking, there are a lot of services now that can quantify your code for errors and then make sure that the code that you're pushing into production is well tested. So what we are trying to make sure is a healthy mix of trying to solve a business problem and asking the right questions. Like today, even in the keynote, it was all about how QuickSight, for example, has additional features now that tells why something happened. And that's the kind of mindset we want our end users to adopt. Not just restricting themselves to a reactive analytics, but rather ask the question why, why did it happen? Why did my sales go down? And I think those technologies and mindset shift is happening across the workforce. >> From a workforce development standpoint, we're seeing there's not enough workforce and the core skills of data, DevOps, standard cloud type work. So, we're actually an ATP advanced training partner, one of the few within the AWS network. So, we've developed programs like our Rising Talent Program that are allowing us to bring the workforce up to the skills that are necessary in this new world. So, it's a more build versus buy strategy because we're on talents real, though it may start to wane a little bit as we change the macroeconomic outlook in 2023, but it's still there. And we still believe that building those workforce and investing in your people is the right thing to do. >> It is, and I think there's a strong alignment there with AWS and their focus on that as well. I wanted to ask you, Brandon. >> Brandon: Absolutely. >> One of the things, so our boss, John Furrier, the co CEO of theCUBE, talked with Adam Selipsky just a week or maybe 10 days ago. He always gets an exclusive interview with the CEO of AWS before reinvent, and one of the things that Adam shared with him is that customers, CEOs and CIOs are not coming to Adam, to this head of AWS to talk about technology, they want to talk about transformation. He's talking about... >> The topic this year. >> Moving away from amorphous topic of digital transformation to business transformation. Are you seeing the same thing in your customer? >> 100%, and if you're not starting at the business level, these initiatives are going to fail. We see it all the time. Again, it's about that misalignment and there's no good answer to that. But digital, I think is amorphous to some degree. We play a lot with the One North partnership that I mentioned earlier, really focusing on that strategy element because consumer dollars are shrinking via inflation, via what we're heading into, and we have to create the best experience possible. We have to create an omnichannel experience to get our products or services to market. And if we're not looking at those as our core goals and we're looking at them as IT or technology challenges, we're not looking in the right place. >> Well, and businesses aren't going to be successful if they're looking at it in those siloed organizations. Data has to be democratizing and we've spent same data democratization for so long, but really, we're seeing that it has to be moving out into the lines of business because another thing Adam shared with John Furrier is that he sees and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, the title of data analysts going away because everybody in different functions and different lines of business within an organization are going to have to be data analysts to some degree, to use data whether it's marketing, ops, sales, finance, are you seeing the same? >> That is true. I mean, at this point, we are all in the connected world, right? Every data point is connected in some form or shape to another data point. >> Savanna: There are many data points, just sitting here, yeah. >> Absolutely, so I think if you are strategizing, data needs to be right in the center of it. And then your business problems need to be addressed with reliable data. >> No, I mean, advertising, supply chain, marketing, they're all interconnected now, and we're looking at ways to bring a lot of that siloed data into one place so we can make use to it. It goes back to that monetization element of our data. >> That's a lot about context and situational awareness. We want what we want, when we want it, even before we knew we needed it then. I think I said that right. But you know, it's always more faster, quicker and then scaling things up. You see a lot of different customers across verticals, you have an absolutely massive team. Give us a sneak peek into 2023. What does the future hold? >> 2023 is again, to today's keynote, I'm bringing it back because it was a keynote filled with vision and limitless possibilities. And that's what we see. Right now, our customers, they are no longer scared to go and take the plunge into the cloud. And as Brandon said, it's all about being smart about those decisions. So, we are very excited that together with the partnership that we recently acquired and the services and the depth, along with the horizontal domain expertise, we can actually help customers make meaningful message out of their data points. And that keeps us really excited for next year. >> Love that, Brandon, what about you? >> I think the obvious one is DevOps and a focus on optimization, financially, security, et cetera, just for the changing times. The other one is, I still think that digital is going to continue to be a big push in 2023, namely making sure that experience is at its best, whether that's employee and combating the war on talent, keeping your people or opening new revenue streams, enhancing existing revenue streams. You got to keep working on that. >> We got to keep the people happy with the machines and the systems that we are building as we all know. But it's very nice, it's been a lot of human-centric focus and a lot of customer obsession here at the show. We know it's a big thing for you all, for Amazon, for pretty much everyone who sat here. Hopefully it is in general. Hopefully there's nobody who doesn't care about their community, we're not talking to them, if that's the case, we have a new challenge on theCUBE for the show, this year as we kind of prepped you for and can call it a bumper sticker, you can call it a 30 second sizzle reel. But this is sort of your Instagram moment, your TikTok, your thought of leadership highlight. What's the most important story coming out of the show? Srini, you've been quoting the keynotes very well, so, I'm going to you first on this one. >> I think overall, it's all about owning the change. In our TEKsystems culture, it's all about striving for excellence through serving others and owning the change. And so it makes me very excited that when we get that kind of keynote resonating the same message that we invite culturally, that's a big win-win for all the companies. >> It's all about the shared vision. A lot of people with similar vision in this room right now, in this room, like it's a room, it's a massive expo center, just to be clear, I'm sure everyone can see in the background. Brandon >> I would say partnership, continuing to enhance our strategic partnership with AWS, continuing to be our customers' partners in transformation. And bringing those two things together here has been a predominance of my time this week. And we'll continue throughout the week, but we're in it together with our customers and with AWS and looking forward to the future. >> Yeah, that's a beautiful note to end on there. Brandon, Srini, thank you both so much for being here with us. Fantastic to learn from your insights and to continue to emphasize on this theme of collaboration. We look forward to the next conversation with you. Thank all of you for tuning in wherever you happen to be hanging out and watching this fabulous live stream or the replay. We are here at AWS Reinvent 2022 in wonderful sunny Las Vegas, Nevada with Lisa Martin. My name is Savannah Peterson, we are theCUBE, the leading source for high tech coverage.

>> 10, nine, eight, (clears throat) four, three. >> Good afternoon, fellow cloud nerds and welcome back to AWS Reinvent 2022. We are live here from fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by Lisa Martin. So excited to be here Lisa, it's my first reinvent. >> Is it really? >> Yeah. >> I think it's only like my fourth or fifth. >> Only your fourth or fifth. >> Only. >> You're such a pro here. >> There's some serious veterans here in attendance that have been to all 11. >> I love that. >> Yeah. Wow, go them. I know, maybe we'll be at that level sooner. >> One day we will. >> Are you enjoying the show so far? >> Absolutely, it is. I cannot believe how many people are here. We've had 70,000 and we're only seeing what's at the foundation Expo Hall, not at the other hotel. So, I can only imagine. >> I mean, there's a world outside of this. >> Yes, and there's sunlight. There's actual sunlight outside of this room. >> Nobel idea. Well, Lisa, I'm very excited to be sitting here next to you and to welcome our fabulous guests, from TEKsystems, we have Brandon and Srini. Thank you so much for being here. How is the show going for you gentlemen so far? >> It's great. Lot of new insights and the customers are going to love what AWS is releasing in this reinvent. >> There is such a community here, and I love that vibe. It's similar to what we had at Cloud Native con in Detroit. So much collaboration going on. I assume most folks know a lot about TEKsystems who are watching, but just in case they don't, Brandon, give us the pitch. >> You bet. So full stack IT solutions firm, been in business for over 40 years, 80,000 global employees, really specializing in digital transformation, enterprise modernization services. We have partners in One Strategy, which is an an acquisition we made, but a well known premier partner in the Amazon partner ecosystem, as well as One North Interactive, who is our boutique brand, creative and digital strategy firm. So together, we really feel like we can bring full end-to-end solutions for digital and modernization initiatives. >> So, I saw some notes where TEKsystems are saying organizations need experienced AWS partners that are not afraid doing the dirty work of digital transformation, who really can advise and execute. Brandon, talk to us about how TEKsystems and AWS are working together to help customers on that journey which is nebulous of digital transformation. >> So, our real hallmark is the ability to scale. We partner with AWS in a lot of different ways. In fact, we just signed our strategic collaboration agreement. So, we're in the one percenter group in the whole partner network. >> Savanna: That's a pretty casual flex there. >> Not bad. >> I love that, top 1%, that no wonder you're wearing that partner pin so proud today. (speaking indistinctly) >> But we're working all the way on the advisory and working with their pro serve organization and then transforming that into large scale mass migration services, a lot of data modernization that Srini is an absolute expert in. I'm sure he can add some context too, but it's been a great partnership for many years now. >> In the keynote, Adam spent almost 52 minutes on data, right? So, it emphasizes how organizations are ready to take data to cloud and actually make meaningful insights and help their own customers come out of it by making meaningful decisions. So, we are glad to be part of this entire ecosystem. >> I love that you quantified how many minutes. >> I know. >> Talked about it, that was impressive. There's a little bit of data driven thinking going on here. >> I think so. >> Yeah. >> Well, we can't be at an event like this without talking about data for copious amounts of time, 52 minutes, has just used this morning. >> Right, absolutely. >> But every company these days has to be a data company. There's no choice to be successful, to thrive, to survive. I mean, even to thrive and grow, if it's a grocery store or your local gas station or what? You name it, that company has to be a data company. But the challenge of the data volume, the explosion in data is huge for organizations to really try to figure out and sift through what they have, where is all of it? How do we make sense of it? How do we act on it and get insights? That's a big challenge. How is TEKsystems helping customers tackle that challenge? >> Yeah, that's a great question because that's the whole fun of handling data. You need to ensure its meaning is first understood. So, we are not just dumping data into a storage place, but rather assign a meaningful context. In today's announcement, again, the data zone was unveiled to give meaning to data. And I think those are key concrete steps that we take to our customers as well with some good blueprints, methodical ways of approaching data and ultimately gaining business insights. >> And maybe I'll add just something real quick to that. The theme we're seeing and hearing a lot about is data monetization. So, technology companies have figured it out and used techniques to personalize things and get you ads, probably that you don't want half the time. But now all industries are really looking to do that. Looking at ways to open new revenue channels, looking at ways to drive a better customer experience, a better employee experience. We've got a ton of examples of that, Big Oil and Gas leveraging like well and machine data, coming in to be more efficient when they're pumping and moving commodities around. We work a lot in the medium entertainment space and so obviously, getting targeted ads to consumers during the right periods of TV or movies or et cetera. Especially with the advert on Netflix and all your streaming videos. So, it's been really interesting but we really see the future in leveraging data as one of your biggest corporate assets. >> Brilliant. >> So, I'm just curious on the ad thing, just real quick and I'll let you go, Lisa. So, do you still fall victim to falling for the advertising even though you know it's been strategically put there for you to consume in that moment? >> Most of the time. >> I mean, I think we all do. We're all, (indistinct), you're behind the curtain so to speak. >> The Amazon Truck shows up every day at my house, which is great, right? >> Hello again >> Same. >> But I think the power of it is you are giving the customer what they're looking for. >> That's it. >> And you know... >> Exactly. We have that expectation, we want it. >> 100%. >> We know that. >> Agree. >> We don't need to buy it. But technology has made it so easy to transact. That's like when developers started going to the cloud years ago, it was just, it was a swipe. It was so simple. Brandon, talk about the changes in cloud and cloud migration that TEKsystems has seen, particularly in the last couple of years as every company was rushing to go digital because they had to. >> So several years ago, we kind of pushed away that cloud first mentality to the side and we use more of a cloud smart kind of fashion, right? Does everything need to go to the cloud? No. Do applications, data, need to go to the cloud in a way that's modern and takes advantages of what the cloud can provide and all the new services that are being released this week and ongoing. So, the other thing we're seeing is initiatives that have traditionally been in the CTO, CIO organization aren't necessarily all that successful because we're seeing a complete misalignment between business goals and IT achievements, outcomes, et cetera. You can automate things, you can move it to the cloud, but if you didn't solve a core business problem or challenge, what'd you really do? >> Yeah, just to add on that, it's all about putting data and people together. And then how we can actually ensure the workforce is equally brought up to speed on these new technologies. That has been something that we have seen tremendous improvement in the last 24 months where customers are ready to take up new challenges and the end users are ready to learn something new and not just stick onto that status quo mindset. >> Where do you guys factor in to bringing in AWS in the customer's cloud journeys? What is that partnership like? >> We always first look for where the customer is in their cloud journey path and make sure we advise them with the right next steps. And AWS having its services across the spectrum makes it even easier for us to look at what business problem they're solving and then align it according to the process and technology so that at the end of the day, we want end user adoption. We don't want to build a fancy new gadget that no one uses. >> Just because you built it doesn't mean they'll come. And I think that's the classic engineering marketing dilemma as well as balance to healthy tension. I would say between both. You mentioned Srini, you mentioned workforce just a second ago. What sort of trends are you seeing in workforce development? >> Generally speaking, there are a lot of services now that can quantify your code for errors and then make sure that the code that you're pushing into production is well tested. So what we are trying to make sure is a healthy mix of trying to solve a business problem and asking the right questions. Like today, even in the keynote, it was all about how QuickSight, for example, has additional features now that tells why something happened. And that's the kind of mindset we want our end users to adopt. Not just restricting themselves to a reactive analytics, but rather ask the question why, why did it happen? Why did my sales go down? And I think those technologies and mindset shift is happening across the workforce. >> From a workforce development standpoint, we're seeing there's not enough workforce and the core skills of data, DevOps, standard cloud type work. So, we're actually an ATP advanced training partner, one of the few within the AWS network. So, we've developed programs like our Rising Talent Program that are allowing us to bring the workforce up to the skills that are necessary in this new world. So, it's a more build versus buy strategy because we're on talents real, though it may start to wane a little bit as we change the macroeconomic outlook in 2023, but it's still there. And we still believe that building those workforce and investing in your people is the right thing to do. >> It is, and I think there's a strong alignment there with AWS and their focus on that as well. I wanted to ask you, Brandon. >> Brandon: Absolutely. >> One of the things, so our boss, John Furrier, the co CEO of theCUBE, talked with Adam Selipsky just a week or maybe 10 days ago. He always gets an exclusive interview with the CEO of AWS before reinvent, and one of the things that Adam shared with him is that customers, CEOs and CIOs are not coming to Adam, to this head of AWS to talk about technology, they want to talk about transformation. He's talking about... >> The topic this year. >> Moving away from amorphous topic of digital transformation to business transformation. Are you seeing the same thing in your customer? >> 100%, and if you're not starting at the business level, these initiatives are going to fail. We see it all the time. Again, it's about that misalignment and there's no good answer to that. But digital, I think is amorphous to some degree. We play a lot with the One North partnership that I mentioned earlier, really focusing on that strategy element because consumer dollars are shrinking via inflation, via what we're heading into, and we have to create the best experience possible. We have to create an omnichannel experience to get our products or services to market. And if we're not looking at those as our core goals and we're looking at them as IT or technology challenges, we're not looking in the right place. >> Well, and businesses aren't going to be successful if they're looking at it in those siloed organizations. Data has to be democratizing and we've spent same data democratization for so long, but really, we're seeing that it has to be moving out into the lines of business because another thing Adam shared with John Furrier is that he sees and I'm curious what your thoughts are on this, the title of data analysts going away because everybody in different functions and different lines of business within an organization are going to have to be data analysts to some degree, to use data whether it's marketing, ops, sales, finance, are you seeing the same? >> That is true. I mean, at this point, we are all in the connected world, right? Every data point is connected in some form or shape to another data point. >> Savanna: There are many data points, just sitting here, yeah. >> Absolutely, so I think if you are strategizing, data needs to be right in the center of it. And then your business problems need to be addressed with reliable data. >> No, I mean, advertising, supply chain, marketing, they're all interconnected now, and we're looking at ways to bring a lot of that siloed data into one place so we can make use to it. It goes back to that monetization element of our data. >> That's a lot about context and situational awareness. We want what we want, when we want it, even before we knew we needed it then. I think I said that right. But you know, it's always more faster, quicker and then scaling things up. You see a lot of different customers across verticals, you have an absolutely massive team. Give us a sneak peek into 2023. What does the future hold? >> 2023 is again, to today's keynote, I'm bringing it back because it was a keynote filled with vision and limitless possibilities. And that's what we see. Right now, our customers, they are no longer scared to go and take the plunge into the cloud. And as Brandon said, it's all about being smart about those decisions. So, we are very excited that together with the partnership that we recently acquired and the services and the depth, along with the horizontal domain expertise, we can actually help customers make meaningful message out of their data points. And that keeps us really excited for next year. >> Love that, Brandon, what about you? >> I think the obvious one is DevOps and a focus on optimization, financially, security, et cetera, just for the changing times. The other one is, I still think that digital is going to continue to be a big push in 2023, namely making sure that experience is at its best, whether that's employee and combating the war on talent, keeping your people or opening new revenue streams, enhancing existing revenue streams. You got to keep working on that. >> We got to keep the people happy with the machines and the systems that we are building as we all know. But it's very nice, it's been a lot of human-centric focus and a lot of customer obsession here at the show. We know it's a big thing for you all, for Amazon, for pretty much everyone who sat here. Hopefully it is in general. Hopefully there's nobody who doesn't care about their community, we're not talking to them, if that's the case, we have a new challenge on theCUBE for the show, this year as we kind of prepped you for and can call it a bumper sticker, you can call it a 30 second sizzle reel. But this is sort of your Instagram moment, your TikTok, your thought of leadership highlight. What's the most important story coming out of the show? Srini, you've been quoting the keynotes very well, so, I'm going to you first on this one. >> I think overall, it's all about owning the change. In our TEKsystems culture, it's all about striving for excellence through serving others and owning the change. And so it makes me very excited that when we get that kind of keynote resonating the same message that we invite culturally, that's a big win-win for all the companies. >> It's all about the shared vision. A lot of people with similar vision in this room right now, in this room, like it's a room, it's a massive expo center, just to be clear, I'm sure everyone can see in the background. Brandon >> I would say partnership, continuing to enhance our strategic partnership with AWS, continuing to be our customers' partners in transformation. And bringing those two things together here has been a predominance of my time this week. And we'll continue throughout the week, but we're in it together with our customers and with AWS and looking forward to the future. >> Yeah, that's a beautiful note to end on there. Brandon, Srini, thank you both so much for being here with us. Fantastic to learn from your insights and to continue to emphasize on this theme of collaboration. We look forward to the next conversation with you. Thank all of you for tuning in wherever you happen to be hanging out and watching this fabulous live stream or the replay. We are here at AWS Reinvent 2022 in wonderful sunny Las Vegas, Nevada with Lisa Martin. My name is Savannah Peterson, we are theCUBE, the leading source for high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here with theCUBE live on the Venetian Expo Hall Floor, talking all things AWS re:Invent 2022. This is the first full day of coverage. It is jam-packed here. People are back. They are ready to hear all the new innovations from AWS. Dave, how does it feel to be back yet again in Vegas? >> Yeah, Vegas. I think it's my 10th time in Vegas this year. So, whatever. >> This year alone. You must have a favorite steak restaurant then. >> There are several. The restaurants in Vegas are actually really good. >> You know? >> They are good. >> They used to be terrible. But I'll tell you. My favorite? The place that closed. >> Oh! >> Yeah, closed. In between where we are in the Wynn and the Venetian. Anyway. >> Was it CUT? >> No, I forget what the name was. >> Something else, okay. >> It was like a Greek sort of steak place. Anyway. >> Now, I'm hungry. >> We were at Pure Accelerate a couple years ago. >> Yes, we were. >> When they announced Cloud Block Store. >> That's right. >> Pure was the first- >> In Austin. >> To do that. >> Yup. >> And then they made the acquisition of Portworx which was pretty prescient given that containers have been going through the roof. >> Yeah. >> So I'm sort of excited to have these guys on and talk about that. >> We're going to unpack all of this. We've got one of our alumni back with us, Venkat Ramakrishna, VP of Product, Portworx by Pure Storage. And Dan Kogan joins us for the first time, VP of Product Management and Product Marketing, FlashArray at Pure Storage. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Hey, guys. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. >> Do you have a favorite steak restaurant in Vegas? Dave said there's a lot of good choices. >> There's a lot of good steak restaurants here. >> I like SDK. >> Yeah, that's a good one. >> That's the good one. >> That's a good one. >> Which one? >> SDK. >> SDK. >> Where's that? >> It's, I think, in Cosmopolitan. >> Ooh. >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> It's pretty good, yeah. >> There's one of the Western too that's pretty. >> I'm an Herbs and Rye guy. Have you ever been there? >> No. >> No. >> Herbs and Rye is off strip, but it's fantastic. It's kind of like a locals joint. >> I have to dig through all of this great stuff today and then check that out. Talk to me. This is our first day, obviously. First main day. I want to get both of your perspectives. Dan, we'll start with you since you're closest to me. How are you finding this year's event so far? Obviously, tons of people. >> Busy. >> Busy, yeah. >> Yeah, it is. It is old times. Bigger, right? Last re:Invent I was at was 2019 right before everything shut down and it's probably half the size of this which is a different trend than I feel like most other tech conferences have gone where they've come back, but a little bit smaller. re:Invent seems to be the IT show. >> It really does. Venkat, are you finding the same? In terms of what you're experiencing so far on day one of the events? >> Yeah, I mean... There's tremendous excitement. Overall, I think it's good to be back. Very good crowd, great turnout, lot of excitement around some of the new offerings we've announced. The booth traffic has been pretty good. And just the quality of the conversations, the customer meetings, have been really good. There's very interesting use cases shaping up and customers really looking to solve real large scale problems. Yeah, it's been a phenomenal first day. >> Venkat, talk a little bit about, and then we'll get to you Dan as well, the relationship that Portworx by Pure Storage has with AWS. Maybe some joint customers. >> Yeah, so we... Definitely, we have been a partner of AWS for quite some time, right? Earlier this year, we signed what is called a strategic investment letter with AWS where we kind of put some joint effort together like to better integrate our products. Plus, kind of get in front of our customers more together and educate them on how going to how they can deploy and build vision critical apps on EKS and EKS anywhere and Outpost. So that partnership has grown a lot over the last year. We have a lot of significant mutual customer wins together both on the public cloud on EKS as well as on EKS anywhere, right? And there are some exciting use cases around Edge and Edge deployments and different levels of Edge as well with EKS anywhere. And there are pretty good wins on the Outpost as well. So that partnership I think is kind of like growing across not just... We started off with the one product line. Now our Portworx backup as a service is also available on EKS and along with the Portworx Data Services. So, it is also expanded across the product lanes as well. >> And then Dan, you want to elaborate a bit on AWS Plus Pure? >> Yeah, it's for kind of what we'll call the core Pure business or the traditional Pure business. As Dave mentioned, Cloud Block Store is kind of where things started and we're seeing that move and evolve from predominantly being a DR site and kind of story into now more and more production applications being lifted and shifted and running now natively in AWS honor storage software. And then we have a new product called Pure Fusion which is our storage as code automation product essentially. It takes you from moving and managing of individual arrays, now obfuscates a fleet level allows you to build a very cloud-like backend and consume storage as code. Very, very similar to how you do with AWS, with an EBS. That product is built in AWS. So it's a SaaS product built in AWS, really allowing you to turn your traditional Pure storage into an AWS-like experience. >> Lisa: Got it. >> What changed with Cloud Block Store? 'Cause if I recall, am I right that you basically did it on S3 originally? >> S3 is a big... It's a number of components. >> And you had a high performance EC2 instances. >> Dan: Yup, that's right. >> On top of lower cost object store. Is that still the case? >> That's still the architecture. Yeah, at least for AWS. It's a different architecture in Azure where we leverage their disc storage more. But in AWS were just based on essentially that backend. >> And then what's the experience when you go from, say, on-prem to AWS to sort of a cross cloud? >> Yeah, very, very simple. It's our replication technology built in. So our sync rep, our async rep, our active cluster technology is essentially allowing you to move the data really, really seamlessly there and then again back to Fusion, now being that kind of master control plan. You can have availability zones, running Cloud Block Store instances in AWS. You can be running your own availability zones in your data centers wherever those may happen to be, and that's kind of a unification layer across it all. >> It looks the same to the customer. >> To the customer, at the end of the day, it's... What the customer sees is the purity operating system. We have FlashArray proprietary hardware on premises. We have AWS's hardware that we run it on here. But to the customer, it's just the FlashArray. >> That's a data super cloud actually. Yeah, it's a data super cloud. >> I'd agree. >> It spans multiple clouds- >> Multiple clouds on premises. >> It extracts all the complexity of the underlying muck and the primitives and presents a common experience. >> Yeah, and it's the same APIs, same management console. >> Dave: Yeah, awesome. >> Everything's the same. >> See? It's real. It's a thing, On containers, I have a question. So we're in this environment, everybody wants to be more efficient, what's happening with containers? Is there... The intersection of containers and serverless, right? You think about all the things you have to do to run containers in VMs, configure everything, configure the memory, et cetera, and then serverless simplifies all that. I guess Knative in between or I guess Fargate. What are you seeing with customers between stateless apps, stateful apps, and how it all relates to containers? >> That's a great question, right? I think that one of the things that what we are seeing is that as people run more and more workloads in the cloud, right? There's this huge movement towards being the ability to bring these applications to run anywhere, right? Not just in one public cloud, but in the data centers and sometimes the Edge clouds. So there's a lot of portability requirements for the applications, right? I mean, yesterday morning I was having breakfast with a customer who is a big AWS customer but has to go into an on-prem air gap deployment for one of their large customers and is kind of re-platforming some other apps into containers in Kubernetes because it makes it so much easier for them to deploy. So there is no longer the debate of, is it stateless versus it stateful, it's pretty much all applications are moving to containers, right? And in that, you see people are building on Kubernetes and containers is because they wanted multicloud portability for their applications. Now the other big aspect is cost, right? You can significantly run... You know, like lower cost by running with Kubernetes and Portworx and by on the public cloud or on a private cloud, right? Because it lets you get more out of your infrastructure. You're not all provisioning your infrastructure. You are like just deploying the just-enough infrastructure for your application to run with Kubernetes and scale it dynamically as your application load scales. So, customers are better able to manage costs. >> Does serverless play in here though? Right? Because if I'm running serverless, I'm not paying for the compute the whole time. >> Yeah. >> Right? But then stateless and stateful come into play. >> Serverless has a place, but it is more for like quick event-driven decision. >> Dave: The stateless apps. >> You know, stuff that needs to happen. The serverless has a place, but majority of the applications have need compute and more compute to run because there's like a ton of processing you have to do, you're serving a whole bunch of users, you're serving up media, right? Those are not typically good serverless apps, right? The several less apps do definitely have a place. There's a whole bunch of minor code snippets or events you need to process every now and then to make some decisions. In that, yeah, you see serverless. But majority of the apps are still requiring a lot of compute and scaling the compute and scaling storage requirements at a time. >> So what Venkat was talking about is cost. That is probably our biggest tailwind from a cloud adoption standpoint. I think initially for on-premises vendors like Pure Storage or historically on-premises vendors, the move to the cloud was a concern, right? In that we're getting out the data center business, we're going all in on the cloud, what are you going to do? That's kind of why we got ahead of that with Cloud Block Store. But as customers have matured in their adoption of cloud and actually moved more applications, they're becoming much more aware of the costs. And so anywhere you can help them save money seems to drive adoption. So they see that on the Kubernetes side, on our side, just by adding in things that we do really well: Data reduction, thin provisioning, low cost snaps. Those kind of things, massive cost savings. And so it's actually brought a lot of customers who thought they weren't going to be using our storage moving forward back into the fold. >> Dave: Got it. >> So cost saving is great, huge business outcomes potentially for customers. But what are some of the barriers that you're helping customers to overcome on the storage side and also in terms of moving applications to Kubernetes? What are some of those barriers that you could help us? >> Yeah, I mean, I can answer it simply from a core FlashArray side, it's enabling migration of applications without having to refactor them entirely, right? That's Kubernetes side is when they think about changing their applications and building them, we'll call quote unquote more cloud native, but there are a lot of customers that can't or won't or just aren't doing that, but they want to run those applications in the cloud. So the movement is easier back to your data super cloud kind of comment, and then also eliminating this high cost associated with it. >> I'm kind of not a huge fan of the whole repatriation narrative. You know, you look at the numbers and it's like, "Yeah, there's something going on." But the one use case that looks like it's actually valid is, "I'm going to test in the cloud and I'm going to deploy on-prem." Now, I dunno if that's even called repatriation, but I'm looking to help the repatriation narrative because- >> Venkat: I think it's- >> But that's a real thing, right? >> Yeah, it's more than repatriation, right? It's more about the ability to run your app, right? It's not just even test, right? I mean, you're going to have different kinds of governance and compliance and regulatory requirements have to run your apps in different kinds of cloud environments, right? There are certain... Certain regions may not have all of the compliance and regulatory requirements implemented in that cloud provider, right? So when you run with Kubernetes and containers, I mean, you kind of do the transformation. So now you can take that app and run an infrastructure that allows you to deliver under those requirements as well, right? So that portability is the major driver than repatriation. >> And you would do that for latency reasons? >> For latency, yeah. >> Or data sovereign? >> Data sovereignty. >> Data sovereignty. >> Control. >> I mean, yeah. Availability of your application and data just in that region, right? >> Okay, so if the capability is not there in the cloud region, you come in and say, "Hey, we can do that on-prem or in a colo and get you what you need to comply to your EDX." >> Yeah, or potentially moves to a different cloud provider. It's just a lot more control that you're providing on customer at the end of the day. >> What's that move like? I mean, now you're moving data and everybody's going to complain about egress fees. >> Well, you shouldn't be... I think it's more of a one-time move. You're probably not going to be moving data between cloud providers regularly. But if for whatever reasons you decide that I'm going to stop running in X Cloud and I'm going to move to this cloud, what's the most seamless way to do? >> So a customer might say, "Okay, that's certification's not going to be available in this region or gov cloud or whatever for a year, I need this now." >> Yeah, or various commercial. Whatever it might be. >> "And I'm going to make the call now, one-way door, and I'm going to keep it on-prem." And then worry about it down the road. Okay, makes sense. >> Dan, I got to talk to you about the sustainability element there because it's increasingly becoming a priority for organizations in every industry where they need to work with companies that really have established sustainability programs. What are some of the factors that you talk with customers about as they have choice in all FlashArray between Pure and competitors where sustainability- >> Yeah, I mean we've leaned very heavily into that from a marketing standpoint recently because it has become so top of mind for so many customers. But at the end of the day, sustainability was built into the core of the Purity operating system in FlashArray back before it was FlashArray, right? In our early generation of products. The things that drive that sustainability of high density, high data reduction, small footprint, we needed to build that for Pure to exist as a company. And we are maybe kind of the last all-flash vendor standing that came ground up all-flash, not just the disc vendor that's refactored, right? And so that's sort of engineering from the ground up that's deeply, deeply into our software as a huge sustainability payout now. And we see that and that message is really, really resonating with customers. >> I haven't thought about that in a while. You actually are. I don't think there's any other... Nobody else made it through the knothole. And you guys hit escape velocity and then some. >> So we hit escape velocity and it hasn't slowed down, right? Earnings will be tomorrow, but the last many quarters have been pretty good. >> Yeah, we follow you pretty closely. I mean, there was one little thing in the pandemic and then boom! It's just kept cranking since, so. >> So at the end of the day though, right? We needed that level to be economically viable as a flash bender going against disc. And now that's really paying off in a sustainability equation as well because we consume so much less footprint, power cooling, all those factors. >> And there's been some headwinds with none pricing up until recently too that you've kind of blown right through. You know, you dealt with the supply issues and- >> Yeah, 'cause the overall... One, we've been, again, one of the few vendors that's been able to navigate supply really well. We've had no major delays in disruptions, but the TCO argument's real. Like at the end of the day, when you look at the cost of running on Pure, it's very, very compelling. >> Adam Selipsky made the statement, "If you're looking to tighten your belt, the cloud is the place to do it." Yeah, okay. It might be that, but... Maybe. >> Maybe, but you can... So again, we are seeing cloud customers that are traditional Pure data center customers that a few years ago said, "We're moving these applications into the cloud. You know, it's been great working with you. We love Pure. We'll have some on-prem footprint, but most of everything we're going to do is in the cloud." Those customers are coming back to us to keep running in the cloud. Because again, when you start to factor in things like thin provisioning, data reduction, those don't exist in the cloud. >> So, it's not repatriation. >> It's not repatriation. >> It's we want Pure in the cloud. >> Correct. We want your software. So that's why we built CBS, and we're seeing that come all the way through. >> There's another cost savings is on the... You know, with what we are doing with Kubernetes and containers and Portworx Data Services, right? So when we run Portworx Data Services, typically customers spend a lot of money in running the cloud managed services, right? Where there is obviously a sprawl of those, right? And then they end up spending a lot of item costs. So when we move that, like when they run their data, like when they move their databases to Portworx Data Services on Kubernetes, because of all of the other cost savings we deliver plus the licensing costs are a lot lower, we deliver 5X to 10X savings to our customers. >> Lisa: Significant. >> You know, significant savings on cloud as well. >> The operational things he's talking about, too. My Fusion engineering team is one of his largest customers from Portworx Data Services. Because we don't have DBAs on that team, it's just developers. But they need databases. They need to run those databases. We turn to PDS. >> This is why he pays my bills. >> And that's why you guys have to come back 'cause we're out of time, but I do have one final question for each of you. Same question. We'll start with you Dan, the Venkat we'll go to you. Billboard. Billboard or a bumper sticker. We'll say they're going to put a billboard on Castor Street in Mountain View near the headquarters about Pure, what does it say? >> The best container for containers. (Dave and Lisa laugh) >> Venkat, Portworx, what's your bumper sticker? >> Well, I would just have one big billboard that goes and says, "Got PX?" With the question mark, right? And let people start thinking about, "What is PX?" >> I love that. >> Dave: Got Portworx, beautiful. >> You've got a side career in marketing, I can tell. >> I think they moved him out of the engineering. >> Ah, I see. We really appreciate you joining us on the program this afternoon talking about Pure, Portworx, AWS. Really compelling stories about how you're helping customers just really make big decisions and save considerable costs. We appreciate your insights. >> Awesome. Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thanks, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)