>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies Everyone welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience I'm John for your host of the Cube Cube. Virtual. We're not in person this year were remote We're doing The interviews were not face to face. So thanks for watching two great guests to talk about the Dell Technology Storage and data protection for the VM Ware environments got Caitlin Gordon, vice President, product management, Dale Technologies and Leak as well. Vice president of Cloud Platform Business Unit, also known as CPB. You for VM where Lee and Cable in Great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me >>s So what? What a crazy year. We're not in person. Usually the the events Awesome. VM world recently went on and then you guys have the same situation role online now and it's >>really kind >>of highlighted the customer environments of cloud needed. But I've been saying this on all my reports and all the Cube interviews that the executives who are in charge and now saying, Look at our modern APS have to be cloud native because the obvious benefits are there and container ization has become mainstream. But yet I d c still forecast about 15% of enterprises are still fully containing rise, with a huge amount of growth coming around the corner. So you're seeing this mature market where containers are validated, they're being put into production. People are now moving hard core with containers. And you have the kubernetes. I gotta ask you, Li, I'm Caitlin. What does this mean for the customers? Are they getting harder pressure points to do things faster? What does it all mean for the customer? >>Yeah, I'll start. Only you can add to it. I mean, I think what we see is the trends that were already happening of now. Accelerated and modern APs were kind of the top of the priority list, but now it has is really expedited. But at the same time, traditional applications haven't gone anywhere. So there's this dichotomy that a lot of I t is dealing with of head Oh, accelerate those modern APs while also streamlining and simplifying my environment for my traditional laps. And not only do I need to the right infrastructure to have that for production workloads, modern, traditional, but also form a data protection standpoint. How to ensure that those are all secure and do all of that in a way that simplifies life for whether it's the data protection admin, the BM admin or even the developer right, all of the different folks involved and needing to make all of their lives simpler has just really exacerbated a challenge and really given us a lot of opportunity to try to solve that for customers together. >>Lee, What's your take on the landscape out there? >>Yeah, I'd emphasized that speed really matters today, right? That we're really looking at. How do you go and deploy new applications faster, right? New ways to get engaged with customers. I mean, it's not happening physically anymore. So how is it happening while it's happening largely through applications? And so as you now basically develop new applications more quickly, containers are a way to speed the pace of applications, and the theme that you know we continue to drive home is that that means infrastructure has to respond more quickly, and it means that for the teams that are managing infrastructure, it really helps if you have a consistent model where you can get mawr done with the same teams and leverage all the experience you have, as well as the security and infrastructure resiliency model that we're bringing together to our customers. >>This brings up the real question, and if this comes up, kind of you see more of the executive level like we need to have a modern application direction. They'll go. Everyone goes, Yeah, of course. Thumbs up. Then they go Try to make that a reality because even though Dev ops and Infrastructures Code is still the viable path, it's hard. It's like Caitlin, we're talking about EJ to core Data center hybrid the multi cloud. There's a lot going on under the hood there. So you guys are doing a lot of stuff together. VM Ware and Dell Technologies. What's the solution for customers? They gotta move faster. As lead pointed out, Caitlin, how are you guys working together to make that infrastructure more modern, faster, programmable and reliable, >>and make it simpler for the customers right? I think it really comes down to one of the most powerful things about the partnership is that from the dull technology standpoint, we have really a plethora of different solutions to support your VM or environment. Whether it's a three tier architecture with Power Edge power store or leveraging the X rail. Or very commonly, it's gonna be both of those. You have the right infrastructure to support the production workloads and have a consistent operating model between them leveraging devils and primary storage side and all the integrations we have with the ex rail. And then we have with power, protect data manager Great integrations in some recent enhancements that make that even better and are now able to protect Tan Xue, protect the VCF management domain and not only have the storage, but also the protection for that environment. But do it in a way that supports what the V A madman needs and also gives that consistent protection, consistent storage, consistent operating model for the rest of I T. And at the same time you're enabling the developers to move faster. >>Lee, You guys have been doing a lot of joint development, and we've been covering a lot of the news VM world. Ah, lot of joint engineering, a lot of joint integrations. You guys have been collaborating with Dell Technologies for a long time. Also, the relationship. Where is that Today? Can you expand on that a little bit and take a minute to explain the joint >>collaboration? I'll start with the fact that you know, good marketing is really easy when you have great engineering. And so the work that we're doing together, like between our companies. Now we have a lot to talk about, right? E mean the work scaling mentioned right around Devil's integration, for example, on power Max right on da npower store, right? I mean, you start looking at the integration work that we're doing together. It means that customers are getting the benefits of the joint integration work and testing right that comes and so you're guaranteed out of the box toe work. Also, you know, don't forget that contain owners and all of the things we're doing around containers. It's basically designed thio accommodate the fact that containers air spun up more quickly or destroyed more quickly, their shared across the hybrid cloud more frequently and without an inherent security model and built in data protection. It's really hard to go and see how you can deploy these with the enterprise resilience that's demanded at enterprise scale. And so that's what we're doing together, right? And, you know, we build great software, Uh, but without great hardware partnerships, it's one hand clapping, right. It's about getting our teams together, right? That really makes it sing at the customer level. >>You know, I think that's a really example of the business. Performance results have come in Vienna, where you guys were doing a great job. Go way back to the years ago when Pat and Raghu we're talking with from Amazon and all. Since then, it's been joint development, join integrations, and that's a great business model for you. And so, Caitlyn, I wanna get back to you. Because at VMRO we covered Project Monterey, the new initiative for the anywhere but a year before they had Project Pacific that came toe life with product results. Tan Xue specifically, you guys have the power protect data manager that we talked about in the summer, but now for Tan Xue supported and Tan Xue environments that super relevant, can you share any updates on your end on the power protect Data Manager and Tan Xue? >>Yeah, I li I couldn't agree more that great engineering mix our jobs a lot more fun and a whole lot easier. So we've been really lucky. And the partnership we've had has really never been stronger. So yeah, but the most recent release of power protect Data Manager introduces the support for that tan xue protection. It also introduces really important things like storage, storage based policy management. So in in biosphere, when you set up a storage policy, you have data protection as part of that and you have the integration with power protect data Manager. So you're able to automatically protect new VM that are created by that storage policy of being applied. >>But >>at the same time, it's also being tracked in power. Protect Data Manager. So you have that consistency across enabling your vitamins and enabling your data protection your i t. Team. To keep track of that, we also have ah tech preview that we did at VM World about how we're working as from Dell technology standpoint to innovate around. How do you protect some of these VMS that are so large and so mission critical that you need to be able to protect them in a new and innovative way that doesn't disrupt the business. And we did a tech preview of that, and it's something you'll hear more about from us, too. But it's PM traditionally would be in this category of unprotected ble because of the impact it could have on the environment and how we're really looking to do that in a more efficient and intelligent way. So we can actually protect those be EMS. And there's there's really a whole lot more. When you talk about objects, scale and everything else that we've done, it's really exciting. And you don't think Lee and I have ever talked as much as we do now. Ah, and it's been a lot of a lot of fun. >>It's been great following both of you guys on the keep interviews over the years. The success in the vision We had early conversations about what the plans where it's kind of all playing out. So I want to congratulate both of you of VM Ware Adele Technology. So good job going forward. The collaboration. I want to get to that in a second, you'll into it. But Caitlin Lee, I want to get your thoughts because one of the big themes this year besides covert and all the issues that that's highlighting. But in the cloud world, automation has been the number one conversation we've been hearing, and with that you got machine learning all the tech around that as you abstract away. The complexity of the infrastructure to make the modern APS automation has been great. The business cross connect is everything is a service we're seeing. This is the big wave coming. Could you guys share your vision on how all this stuff you mentioned V balls and all objects scale all these things? There's a >>lot of >>plumbing underneath and a lot of tooling, a lot of part piece parts. If that gets programmable, >>automation >>kicks in, which then enables everything is the service because you guys both share your vision of what that means in terms of what's going to change and what would it impact the customer? >>Yeah, and it's very relevant for this week, right? Dell Technologies world. That's a big part of what we've announced this week in our commitment to really bringing our portfolio as a service, and it's really interesting, especially for folks like Lee and I, who have been doing kind of mawr product marking and talking about speeds and feeds and thinking about how you make the product life simpler. And how do you automate that? Have the intelligence built in things like Biaro have been such an important part of that, especially with power store coming to market. But if you think about where that leads us, actually changes everything, which is when you have everything as a service and we're really delivering outcomes to our customers and no longer products. That automation is actually just a important and maybe even more important. But it's not the end user that cares about it directly is actually us, because as Dell Technologies, we become the ones managing that infrastructure, owning that infrastructure and the more automation we can bring in, the more intelligence we can build them for ourselves. The more insights we can give to our customers, the better that service can become. And it's really a flip from how we've always been thinking about and really rolling out automation. It's not actually about enabling our end users to do anything. It's actually about enabling them to not worry about any of it, but enable our own organization to support their outcomes better. So it really changes everything. >>Lee, what's your thoughts on this? Everything you've got, V Sphere V Center. You've got all the storage you got all the back up. All this stuff has to be automated. Makes sense. But as a service, how does that impact your world? >>You know, it really does. When you think about the VMRO Cloud Foundation, right, which is the integration of all of our V sphere with Visa. And with these, you know, our NSX products that will be realized. Management suite. Tom Zoo now, right, All of this pulled together. One of things that's interesting is when you go to the public cloud, we have some experience now where we always deliver that full stack together. And what that does is it frees up customers. Thio, go on, focus on the applications, I think and stop looking down the infrastructure. Start looking up at the APS. And so we're offering and bringing that same level of experience to the on premises data centers. And now bridging that across the hybrid cloud that all of a sudden gives you this sense that Hey, I'm future ready. No, matter where I am today. If I'm thinking about the hybrid cloud, I could go on move there, right. And with our partnership with Dell Technologies, there's such a great opportunity to bridge that uniquely, by the way across all of my on premises infrastructure, including common policy based management, back into storage through RV Valls efforts, right and then back in through objects scale right into objects based, uh, applications and through our DP efforts to data protection efforts, then back into, like, date full data protection. And so what you get now is we're helping customers realize that I got this. I could take new Cooper navies orchestrated applications and I could make them work and do it with the same operational model that I have today. Start spending more time on the applications, less time, basically configuring and managing underlying infrastructure. >>Caitlin you mentioned that earlier at the top of the segment, ease of use, making it easier, simpler, great stuff on the on on the future. Lee, I gotta ask you about Project Monterey. We did a lot of coverage on VM World on silicon angle in the Cube. I love how this comes out. It's always, You know, the brain trust that VM Ware lays out the future, they fill it in throughout the year, expect to see some meat on the bone there. But what is that gonna do from for new capabilities and how with Dell Technologies? Because, um, it's end to end, right this Michael Dell and I talked, I think, two years ago, a Dell Tech world. And then last year, he hit the point home hard and to end with Dell Technologies. It kind of feels like it's gonna be a good fit. Could you share how that Monterey project fits in with Dell Technologies? >>Yeah. We're so pleased to be showing this together with Dell Technologies at the VM World to showcase this new idea that you could basically go on, start offloading CPUs and using smart knicks as a way to basically now provide, um or let's call it a, You know, a architecture that allows you to, uh, be responsive to new application needs. So let me talk a little bit about that. So when we opened up Tansu, right, we got this complete inflow pouring of new container base kubernetes orchestrated APS. So what? We found was, Hey, they're driving a lot of CPU needs their driving a lot of scale out security needs for things like distributed firewalls. And so we started looking at this, and what's clear is we need to basically use the CPU very judiciously, So it's basically reserved for the APS. And so what we're doing now is we're basically saying there's an opportunity for us to go in, offload the CPU for things that look more like infrastructure, including S X, I and other things. And at the same time, then we could go and work together with Dell Technologies to be the deployment vehicle. And so, just like Project Pacific, which was going broad, if you will, this project moderate, which is going deep like the canyon, John not far from here, um is, you know, a source of all new discovery right where we'll be working together and over time, just like the Project Pacific name faded to black and became product Tan Xue vcf with Tom juvie sphere. With Hangzhou, we'll see that Project Monterey will evolve into new products coming together with Dell Technologies. >>Caitlin, can you elaborate on Take a min, explain the product how this renders into products because I can also imagine just the benefits just from a security standpoint. Efficiency. If the platform, um, there's a range of things, could you take a minute to >>explain the >>impact on products? >>Yeah, I think you'll hear a lot more about it, but we're obviously excited to be partners on this is Well, and I think it's It's just another example of the more intelligent the infrastructure can become than the rest of the entire I T organization can run more efficiently and that that can come in the form of the A. I built into power, Max, that can come in the form of the evils that we have both in Power Max and Power Store that can come in the form of even just the fact that we have now built a fully containerized S three compatible objects or platform called objects scale which we have no in early access. Um, that can run on the V sand data persistence platform, and it just gives you the ability to leverage this all of the right technology. And we can continue to really partner on that. I think Project Monterey really opens up even more opportunities to do that, and you'll certainly hear more from us on that in the future. >>I >>mean, you got compression, you got encryption. A lot of benefits across the board. Great to have you guys both on and your graduation. The great event. Final question for both of you, talk about this has been a crazy year. We're not face to face, so everything will be online. What should customers and partners and people watching know about the relationship between VM Ware and Dell Technologies this year? What's the big message to take away? What should people walk away with and and think about? >>I think it's It's never been stronger than ever, uh, than it's been than it is right now. We have never had >>more >>breath and more depth of integration. I think that the partnership on the engineering level, on the product management level on the marketing level, we have really never been in a better place. And you know what? What? My team is really enjoyed with VM world season and you're coming up on Deltek. World season is we've really enjoyed the fact that we've had so much richness >>of >>that integration to talk >>about, and >>we also know there's even more coming. So I, you know, from from my standpoint, if we really feel it and probably the best and most rewarding time we hear about that, is when we bring new things into market, we hear that back. And when Power Store came into the market and over the past few right kind of first months in market, one of the most resounding feedback that has come out as one of the most differentiated parts is that it? It's so incredibly integrated with VM ware. But we've even gotten questions from analysts asking, you know, did you purposely make it feel like you are really working similarly to a B M or environment? And you know what? That just shows how closely we have been working as organizations is that it comes a very seamless experience for our customers. >>Lee Final Word. >>What >>should people walk away with this year on the relationship between Be and we're in Dell Technologies? >>Well, I think the best partnerships right are ones that are customer driven. And what you're finding here is customers. They're actually encouraging us, right? We're doing a lot of three way meetings now, right where customers like, Hey, tell me how you're going to go involved this. How do I How do I basically modernized right and preserve my existing investment, perhaps Or, you know, update here, Or how do I grow like customers have really complex individual situations. And what you confined right is that we're helping jointly not, you know, just simply with the engineering side, which is awesome, but also with the idea that we're helping customers go on deploy responsibly in a time where it's very difficult to plan. And so if you come to us, we can help you jointly plan for the future in uncertain times and make sure that you're gonna be successful. And that's just a great feeling when you're a customer looking at, How do you deploy going forward in this? You know, with the amount of pace of change that we've got, >>I want to congratulate. Both of you have been following you guys. Success has been proven out on the business results and also the products and the enablement that you guys are providing customers been great. Thanks for coming on. Great to see both of you have a great event. Thanks for. Come on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>Okay, I'm John for your here with the Cube. Covering Del Technology Worlds Digital experience 2020 The Cube Virtual. >>Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm still minimum and this is the Cubes coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year doing the Cube. First year. We're doing it, of course, virtually globally. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni, Shannon Champion, and she is the director of product marketing with Dell Technologies. Shannon, Nice to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you as well. >>Alright, So big thing, of course, at VM World, talking about building off of what was Project Pacific at last year's show? Talking about how kubernetes all the wonderful cloud native pieces go in. So let's let's talk about application modernization. Shannon, you know, with a theme I've talked about for a number of years, is you know, we need to modernize the platform, and then we can modernize the applications on top of those. So tell us what you're hearing from your customers and how Delon vm, where then, are bringing the solutions to help customers really along that journey. >>Yeah, I'd love Thio. It's fun stuff. So, um, enterprises are telling us that especially now more than ever, they're really looking for how they must digitally transform. And they need to do that so they can drive innovation and get a competitive advantage on one way. That they're able to do that is by finding ways to flexibly and rapidly move work loads to where they make sense, whether that's on premises or in the public cloud. And the new standard for doing this is becoming cloud native applications. There was a recent I. D. C. Future Escape that predicted that by 2025 2 3rd of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code being deployed on a daily basis, and over 90% of applications at that time will be delivered with cognitive approaches. So it's just kind of crazy to think, and what's really impressive to is that the sheer volume of applications that are anticipated to be produced with these cloud native approaches Ah, it's expected to be over 500 million new APS created with cognitive approaches by 2024 just kind of putting that into perspective 500 million. APS is the same number that's been created over the last 40 years. So it's a fun, fun trend to be part of. >>Yeah, it's really amazing. When I talked to customers, there's some It's like, Oh, let me show you how Maney APs I've done and created in the last 18 months. It was like, Great. How does that compare before? And they're like, we weren't creating APS. We were buying APS. We were buying software. We had outsourced some of those pieces. So you know that that that trend we've been talking about for a number of years is kind of everyone's a software company, Um, does not mean that, you know, we're getting rid of the old business models. But Shannon, there are challenges there either expanding and moving faster or, you know, making sure that I have the talent in house. So bring us inside. What if some of the big things that your customers are telling you, uh, maybe that's holding them back from unlocking that central? >>Yeah, totally. You hit on a couple of them, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of interest in adoption of kubernetes and clearly VM Ware is leading the way with Changzhou. But we're also hearing that they're underestimating the challenges on how toe quote unquote get to kubernetes. Right? How do you stand up that full cloud native staff and particularly at scale Thio? How do you manage the ongoing operations and maintain that infrastructure? How do you support the various stakeholders? How do you bring I t operators and developers together? Eso There's really a wide range of challenges that, um businesses air facing. And the other thing is that you hit on, you know, they're going to be producing mawr and Mawr cloud native applications, but they still need to maintain legacy applications, many of which are driving business, critical applications and workloads. So they're going to need to look for solutions that help them manage both and allow them to re factor or retire those legacy ones at their own pace so they can maintain business continuity. >>Yeah, and of course, Shannon, we know as infrastructure people, our job was always toe, you know, give the environment to allow the applications to run in virtualization. For years, it was Well, I knew if I virtualized something, I could leave it there and it wasn't going to. It didn't have to worry about the underlying hardware changes. Help us understand How does kubernetes fit into this environment? Because, as I said that people don't want to even worry about it. And the infrastructure people now need to be able to change, expand and, you know, respond to the business so much faster than we might have in times past. >>Yeah, so from an infrastructure perspective, working with VM ware based on tons of really the essence of that is to bring I t operators and developers together. The infrastructure has a common set of management that, you know, each the developer and the I t operators can work in the language there most familiar with. And, you know, the communication of the translation all happens within Tan Xue so that they're more speaking the same, um, language when it comes Thio, you know, managing the infrastructure in particular with VM ware tansy on VX rail. We are delivering kind of a range of infrastructure options because we know people are still trying to figure out you know, where they are in their kubernetes readiness path. Some people have really developed mature capabilities in house for who were Netease for software defined networking. And for those customers, they still may want Thio. You know, use a reference architecture er and build on top of the ex rail for, you know, a custom cloud native specific application. What we're finding is more and more customers, though, don't have that level of kubernetes expertise, especially at scale. And so VM ware v sphere with Tan Xue on VX rail as well as via more cloud foundation on VX rail are ways Thio get a fast start on kubernetes with directly on these fair or kind of go with the full Monty of VM or Cloud Foundation on VX rail. >>Well, we're bringing up VX rail. Of course. The whole wave of h C I was How do we enable simplicity? We don't wanna have to think about these. We wanna, uh, just make it so that customers can just buy a solution. Of course. VX rail joint solution, you know, heavily partnership with VM ware. So, Shannon, there's a few options. VM has been moving very fast toe expand out that the into portfolio, uh, back at the beginning of the year when the sphere seven came out. You needed the BMR Cloud Foundation. Which, of course, what was an option for for for the VX rail. So help us understand you laid out a little bit some of those options there. But what should I know as Adele customer, Uh, you know what my options are? How the fault Kansas Wheat fits into it. >>Yeah, eso We like to call it kubernetes your way with the ex rail. So we have a range of options to fit your operational or kubernetes scale requirements or your level of expertise. So the three options, our first for customers that are looking for that tested, validated, multi configuration reference architectures er that will deliver platform as a service or containers is a service. We've got Tom to architecture for VX rail, which is a new name for what was known as pivot already architecture er and then for customers that may have minimum scaling requirements. They may have some of that expertise in house to manage at scale. The fastest path to get started with kubernetes is the new VM ware V sphere with Changzhou on VX rail. And then last I mentioned kind of that full highly automated turnkey on promises Cloud platform. That's the VM, or Cloud Foundation, on VX rail, which is also known as Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. And that option supports Tan Xue with software defined networking and security built in with that automated lifecycle management across the full stack. So there's really three paths to it from a reference architecture approach to a fast path on the actual clusters all the way to the full Deltek Cloud platform. And Dell Technologies is the first and only really offering this breath of tans. You infrastructure deployment options. Eso customers can really, uh, choose the best path for them. >>Yeah, So, Shannon, if if I If I think back to what we saw in the keynote, you know, VM Ware lays out there, they're hybrid and multi cloud solution. So of course they're they're public cloud the VM ware cloud on a W s. They have that solution. They have extended extended partnerships. Now, with azure uh, the the the offering with Oracle. Uh, that's coming, and I guess I could think to just think of the delta cloud on VX rail as just one of those other clouds in that hybrid and multi cloud solutions. Do I have that right? Same stack. Same management. If I'm if I'm living in that VM world world. >>Yeah. So the Deltek Cloud platform is an on premises hybrid cloud. So, you know, ah, lot of customers were looking to reduce complexity really quickly especially, you know, with some of the work from home initiatives that were sprung upon us and trying to pivot, um to respond to that. And, you know, the answer to solving some of that complexity is to jump into public cloud. What we found is a lot of customers actually are driving a hybrid cloud strategy and approach. And we know many customers sort of have that executive mandate. There's value in, um, driving that are on prem hybrid cloud approach. And that's what Dell Technologies Cloud platform is. So you get the consistent operations in the consistent infrastructure and more of the public cloud like consumption experience while having the infrastructure on Prem for security data locality. Other, um, you know, cost reasons like that. Eso That's really where VM or Cloud Foundation on VF Trail comes into play eso leveraging the VM ware technologies you have on Prem Hybrid cloud. It can connect all those public cloud providers that you talked about. So you have, you know, core to cloud on Dwan. Of the new capabilities that VM or Cloud Foundation, is announced support for is remote clusters. So that takes us kind of from cloud all the way toe edge because you now have the same VCF operational capabilities and operational efficiency with centralized management for remote locations. >>Wonderful. I'm glad you brought up the edge piece. Of course, you talk to the emerging space vm ware talking about ai talking about EJ, so help us understand. How much is it? The similar operational model? Is it even eyes that part of the VX rail family? What's the What's the state of the state in 2020 when it comes to how edge fits into that cloud core edge discussion that you just raised? >>Yeah, when you look at trends, especially for hyper converged edge and cloud native are kind of taking up a lot of the airwaves right now. Eso hyper converge is gonna play a big role in Theodore option of both cloud native Band Edge. And I think the intersection of those two comes into play with things like the remote cluster support for VM Ware Cloud Foundation on VX rail, where you can run cloud, you know, cloud native based modern applications with Tan Xue alongside traditional workloads at the edge, which traditionally have more stringent requirements. Less resource is maybe they need a more hardened environment, power and cooling, you know, um, constraints. So with VCF on VX rail, you have all the operational goodness that comes from the partnership in the levels of integration that we have with VM Ware. And customers can sort of realize that promise of full workload management mobility in a true hybrid cloud environment. >>Shannon I'm wondering what general feedback you're getting from your customers is as they look at a zoo, said these cloud native solutions. You know what's what's the big take away? Is this a continuation of the HD I wave that you've seen? Do they just pull this into their hybrid environments? Um, I'm wondering if you have any either any specific examples that you've been anonymized or just the general gestalt that you're getting from your customers. Is that how they're doing expanding, uh, into these, you know, new environments that kind of stretch them in different ways. >>Yeah, it's interesting because you know, there's there's customers that run the gamut when we look at those that are sort of the farther down their digital transformation journey. Those are the ones that were already planning for cloud native applications or had some in development. Uh, there's also some trends that we're seeing based on, you know, the the size of cluster deployments and the range of, you know, various configurations that are an indicator of those customers that are more modernized in terms of their approach to cloud native. And what we find from those customers, especially over the last six months, is that they're more prepared to respond to the unknown on bond. That was a big lesson for some of the other customers that you know, had new. The digital transformation was the way of the future, but hadn't yet sort of come up with a strategy on how to get there themselves were finding those customers are inhibiting their investments to areas that can help them be more ready for the unknown in the future. In Cloud native is top of that list. >>Absolutely. Shannon Day Volante showed a few times There's the people in the office, you know, with their white board doing everything. And there's the wrecking ball of covert 19. Kind of like Well, if you weren't ready and you weren't already down this path, you better move fast. Wonderful. All right, Shannon. So we know, uh, from past years, you know, VX rail. Usually it's all over the show. So in the digital world, what do you want to he takeaways. What are some of the key? You know, hands on demos, sessions that that people should check out. >>Thank you. Yeah. So hopefully your take away is that the X ray is a great infrastructure to support modern applications. First and foremost, we have, you know, a jointly engineered system built with VM ware, four VM ware environments to enhance fam. Where, and we do that with our the extra LHC I system software, which I didn't give a shout out to yet, which extends that native capabilities and really is the secret behind how we do seamless automated operational experience with the ex rail. And that's the case, whether it's traditional or modern applications. So that's my little commercial for VX rail at the show. Please tune into our VM World session on this topic. We also have hands on labs. We are launching a fun augmented reality game. Eso Please check that out on. We have a new Web page as well that you could get access to all the latest assets and guides that help you, you know, navigate your journey for cloud native. And that's at dell technologies dot com slash Hangzhou. >>Wonderful. Well, Shannon Champion, thanks so much. Great to see you again. And be short. Uh, we look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Thanks to >>stay with us. Lots more coverage from VM World 2020. I'm stew. Minimum is always thank you for watching the Cube.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman, and this is we've actually reached the end of the cubes coverage of VM World 2020. Hard to believe. 11 years we've done lots of interviews here has been great to be able to engage with the audience talk, talk to the executives, talk some customers, but saving one more for you. So happy to welcome to the program is the first time on the Cube. But we've been talking to him since they came out of stealth. So I have the co founder and CEO of Minhai. Oh, and that is a non Babu Harry Asami A B. So nice to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank >>you too. Thank you for having me on the show. >>Alright. So we love when we get to talk to the founders of companies were gonna dig into your company. But before we do just frame for us, you're not really high performance. I Oh, I oh, is in the name of your company. Um, men might make me think that there's some miniaturization, but give us the VM Ware connection. Obviously, VM Ware talked a lot about Cloud this week. They've talked about going deep into a I and computing. So we know this ecosystem has changed a lot in the 11 years that we've been covering it. Tell us how you and your company high end >>sounds good. Yeah. So men in many of those stands for minimalism right somehow in the enterprise like it has always been like shiny, heavy, complex things, find complex solutions to simple problems and charge them a lot. That has been the trend in the past, right? That's what Cloud has recent in the Enterprise and men on mini Iot is actually about solving that data storage problem. A very large scale. And the solution is like find simple solutions to complex problems. And we grew in the cloud in the both in the public and Private Cloud, and we are now the fastest growing object storage for the private cloud. And now we, um, we're coming into the government, the territory we actually CVM where is set to lead the kubernetes race. And in the Cooper Natives, if you look for an object storage pretty much, many ways standard. And this is where we bring our ecosystem toe. Be aware. And we, um where brings the enterprise market of cloud And this is the start off the private cloud. In the long run, I think public and private cloud will look alike. >>Yeah, absolutely. We've We've been writing about this for for for for many years a b We saw the enterprises taking on more of the characteristics of the hyper scholars, the hyper scholars. Of course, they're coming more to the enterprise. Ah, lot of discussion about hybrid and multi cloud these days. But what I want you to explain a little bit when? When When when your company was formed. You talk about, you know, doing these kubernetes environment. You do partner with AWS and azure, but ah, lot of what you do is on premises and that strikes people as a little bit unconventional in the thing. Or definitely 2017 and even for 2020. So help us understand. You know what it is exactly that you know the technology bring and why you think it's the fit for if you extend making private cloud on par with public. >>Yeah, it's not surprising to us at all, but it made no sense when we started with the rest of the world, right? Even the investors like not our other investors but the typical venture community toe the rest of the world. They thought that an object storage if it is not useful inside AWS, there is no use but an object storage at all. And we our question was very simple that the amount of data the world will produce in the next 10 years bulk off the data. Where is it going to be? Right? And it's not going to be in the public cloud. And it didn't sound obvious back then, right? And we saw that in the long run, public and private cloud will look alike but bulk of the data if it's going to be generated outside AWS while AWS s three sets the standard, the rest of the world what are they going to do? So many who was raised to be the S three for the rest of the world and the rest of the world is the biggest market. And back then there was no private cloud. There was public cloud and public cloud. What meant only AWS, right? And this was not so long ago. We're talking like 56 years, right? And then soon multi cloud came from multi cloud private cloud came what really accelerated. This is basically kubernetes and containers, right? In fact, containers started the trend and then Coburn It has accelerated it further nowadays. If you if you see why it's no longer a dream, are a faith based model, right, it's actually we're we're talking about, like a $540,000. Actually, 540,000 doctors pulled a day, right? And 400 like 400 well million or so Dr Pools in aggregate. That shows that the entire industry has changed, and it's already the Coburn. It is even public or private cloud. It is the one hybrid infrastructure layer, and now it has now it's no longer private Cloud is that question right? And customers are now able to move between public and private cloud. The trend is hybrid hybrid cloud. I think it's irreversible. >>Alright, you talked about Dr Poles and the code there, so let's make sure our audience understand exactly what you are. Sounds like your software sounds like open source is a piece of it. Help us understand. You know how you fit with Because if we're talking about object storage, there's gotta be some infrastructure underneath that. What does mean I owe provide and where do you turn to the partners? >>Yeah, so just like server less, it means that it's not like there is no server, right? It's about a software problem. Similarly, storage right When store when object storage is containerized, we still need drives, right? That is where VM ware V Sand comes. Descends Job is to virtualized the physical layer toe the basically container layer. But end of the day if you see the it is a software problem and what may I would just like a database would solve the metadata data store problem. I mean, I will solve the blob data problem. And in the public, cloud object storage is the foundational piece. It is the primary storage, but we saw this as a software problem, and when customers started building these applications, they actually containerized their application and use Cooper notice to roll out their application infrastructure. And when they do that, they cannot possibly by a hardware appliance on the public cloud. And even on the on the private cloud, they when they when they completely orchestrate two containers, they cannot roll out hardware appliances. This is where the the industry the cloud native community always saw this as a software problem. It was obvious to them for the enterprise I t it was not so clear. And the storage industry giants, if you see everyone off them is a hardware appliance play, and they are in for a total shock. And we were basically as a as reset with their seven or to update one, if there is a lot of interesting things to come. >>All right, So if if I understand Here you sit from a VM Ware environment, I've got V sand underneath. I've got Tangguh above, and you're you're providing that object service in between. So for our for our friends in the in the channel market on when thinking about gear, anything that V san can sit on, you just can come along for the ride. Do I have that right? >>Yeah. So underneath the sand is basically bunch of J boards, right? These are like Dell and HP servers with the drives in them on This is not a hardware appliance anymore, right? You look at the storage market, it is. Stand our NASA plans. That is how the enterprise I t operated not in the club world. And as we and we're moves into the cloud world, everything looks cloud native and in this case, the sand. NASA plans have no role to play. Even the object storage hardware appliance has no role to play because we and we're becomes the end where Visa becomes the new block storage layer. And then they have positioned object storage database. Everything as a data data store are a data persist since layer. So only this software only the software that is contained race gets to play on top of, um, where in the new World, including the storage itself. And it's No, there is no appliance here. >>All right, so and your your solution is is listed as kubernetes kubernetes native. So now you mentioned VCR seven, VCR seven, update one Now house full kubernetes support. I'm assuming Then you can plug into tansy you you can plug into, uh, Amazon Azure. Other kubernetes options out there. Is that the case? >>Yeah, So from a customer point of view, right? If you are on the enterprise, I d. Environment Now from I t administrator point off you. Nothing changes much other than from the V Center console itself. You now get to see me, and I will in in the first suspend data services. You click and deploy entirely as a software without even learning to spell Cooper notice. You can build a private cloud storage multi tenant exactly like how public cloud storage outrage. And that is from the private cloud point a few right, and it's purely software. You're not waiting for six months, but the hardware to arrive and long procurement cycles and provisioning all that is now provisioned as a software container. In just five minutes, you can actually set up a private cloud in Prospector. That's for the private cloud, right? But why? The reason why customers want this to be a software problem is they roll out their software on the on the private cloud on the public cloud for burst, wear clothes and sustained work clothes on private cloud burst workloads on public cloud. Noncritical jobs are anything that is fast moving on, convenience based. They push it to public cloud. Customers do want tohave one leg here and one like there. And nowadays even the edge on decentralized on the from the telco space toe video on other other areas even the edges now growing toe. They want a your software solution. The entire data center software is now containerized. They can roll out Public cloud Our private cloud are on the edge On with me No, we solve the data side the compute side Then we're already has done a wonderful job on the networking side. They have done it on on the beast on the storage site dated the physical toe container layer movies. And now the data storage part is what we solved. Now what does this do to the end user? Now they can build software and truly deploy on public private our age without any modification on entirely it is a software problem. This >>great. What do you find? Or some of the more prevalent use cases, you know, sitting on top, What applications or the key ones that people are deploying your solution for >>Yeah, So in the public cloud, if you see, that's that. That's actually a good place to start if you see in the public cloud, right, starting from even simple static website hosting toe aml, big data, workloads toe. Even the modern databases like Snowflake, for example is built on object storage in the public cloud. It has become a truly horizontal play. And that is how it started right there. W started with history and then came everything else. And now that trend is beginning to percolate into the enterprise. And surprisingly, we found that the enterprise was the explosion of data. Growth is actually not about like cat videos, right? What? What are these touring? Mostly We found that bulk of the data that is drowning that crisis messing generated data. And these are basically like some kind of log data event data data streams that are continuously produced on that actually can grow from 10 terabytes to 10 petabytes in a very short time. This is where clearly object storage has become the right choice, just like in the public cloud. But customers are now adopting object storage as the primary storage and now multiple applications. Whether it is the cloud native applications in like the Hangzhou Application Service like spring boot and like all the clothes on re stack from their toe. So all the m l big data workloads pretty much everybody has been verging to object storage as there foundation. >>Yeah, absolutely. You seen some of those use cases very prevalent here in the VM Ware community. I heard you talking about it. I was expecting to hear you talk about Splunk data protection, something that's been a big topic of conversation in the last few years. Obviously, VM Ware has a number of key partners. So I'm assuming many of those air who you are also working with. >>Look, it felt good broad Splunk Splunk itself is actually is an important move that what we did recently with VM where finally we can run Splunk natively on BM where at large scale and without any performance penalty and at a price point that it becomes really attractive Now comparing Splunk Cloud, where's the Splunk on Prem? We can actually show like at least like one third off what it would cost to run on Splunk load. So I don't know Splunk themselves would like it, But I think Splunk as a company would like what customers like, right? And this is where Splunk actually now can sit on many, many us, all the all their data stores. They call it smart store underneath underneath me. I will now, when the previous original Visa incarnation, we couldn't actually your huge amounts of data. But now, with the visa and direct, we actually have access to the local drives and you can attach as many drives as you want. Then if you want more capacity, more more number of servers so you can pack thousands and thousands off drives at a price point that even public cloud cannot be anywhere closer. And this is actually important. Yeah, environment for the Splunk customers. Because for them, not only the cost right, even the data is sensitive for them. They cannot really, really push it to the public cloud data generated outside of the public cloud. If data generated inside Public Cloud, probably Amazon has their own solution, and Splunk cloud makes sense. But when data is produced outside, these are sensitive data and it's huge volume, and they produce on an average, like the kind of users VCs center about. It's a day on on, then it's only growing at an accelerated pace. And this is where the Visa and Direct and Mini Oh, you can now bring that workload onto the number. Finally, the ICTY can control the control, the Splunk deployments. This is something important for I t right in the past, if you see big data workloads always ran on bare metal and silos, something I d hated right This time it is flexible that it's not just flexible, exactly gets better. >>Well, it sure sounds like the technology maturation has finally caught up on the VM ware standpoint with the vision that you and the team had. So give us a little bit. Look forward now that you've got kubernetes really being embraced by VM where on and starting to see maturation in this space. Where do we go from here? >>So we were actually, If you see what they brought to the table this time, they didn't actually catch up with others, right? Typically, the innovation in the recent times happened in the open source space and then the large vendors will come and innovate. Startups and open source started the innovation large, large. When the large winters come in later. But this time around, remember, actually did the innovation part and these and direct. It's actually a big step forward in the Covenant of CSE space. And the reason why it's a big step is C s A. Traditionally is designed for the sand gnats vendors and using the same C s. A model, remember, was able to bring in large work clothes and that allowed entirely to use the local drive possibility. Right now it moving forward. What What we will see. What were said to see is the cloud native workload. Actually a ran as a silo in the Enterprise, right? There was big data workloads. There was the applications team that ran Cooper knitters and containers on their own. There are on their on their own develop shop on enterprise. I'd ran the idea introspect These three were not connected on finally this time around. By bringing cover natives native into the I T infrastructure, there is going to be a convergence. You will not. The silos will get eliminated. Big data, big data workloads, ml wear clothes on bare metal will now come toe come toe. Then I will be aware that the Governor disk combination and you will see the the coordinative applications space. They will hand over the physical layer infrastructure onto the VM Ware e and everybody coming together. I think it's the best. Big step forward. >>Well, maybe. I sure hope you're right. We love to see the breaking down of silos. Things coming together. We've been a little bit concerned over the last few years that we're rebuilding the silos in the cloud. We've got different skill sets different there, but we always love some good tech optimism here, uh, to say that we're gonna move these sorts of Thank you so much. Great to catch up with you and definitely look forward to hearing more from you and your customers in the future. >>Thank you to this. Wonderful to be on your show. >>All right. We want to thank everybody for joining VM World 2020 for day. Volonte John, for your big thanks to the whole production team and of course, VM Ware and our sponsors for helping us to bring this content to you. As always, I'm stew Minuteman and thank you for joining us on the Cube

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm still minimum and this is the Cubes coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year doing the Cube. First year. We're doing it, of course, virtually globally. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni, Shannon Champion, and she is the director of product marketing with Dell Technologies. Cannon. Nice to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you as well. >>Alright, So big thing, of course, at VM World, talking about building off of what was Project Pacific at last year's show? Talking about how kubernetes all the wonderful cloud native pieces go in. So let's let's talk about application modernization. Shannon, you know, with a theme I've talked about for a number of years, is you know, we need to modernize the platform, and then we can modernize the applications on top of those. So tell us what you're hearing from your customers and how Delon Vm Ware then are bringing the solutions to help customers really along that journey. >>Yeah, I'd love Thio. It's fun stuff. So, um, enterprises are telling us that especially now more than ever, they're really looking for how they must digitally transform. And they need to do that so they can drive innovation and get a competitive advantage on one way. That they're able to do that is by finding ways to flexibly and rapidly move work loads to where they make sense, whether that's on premises or in the public cloud. And the new standard for doing this is becoming cloud native applications. There was a recent I. D. C. Future Escape that predicted that by 2025 2 3rd of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code being deployed on a daily basis, and over 90% of applications at that time will be delivered with cognitive approaches. So it's just kind of crazy to think, and what's really impressive to is that the sheer volume of applications that are anticipated to be produced with these cloud native approaches Ah, it's expected to be over 500 million new APS created with club approaches by 2024 just kind of putting that into perspective 500 million. APS is the same number that's been created over the last 40 years. So it's a fun, fun trend to be part of. >>Yeah, it's really amazing. When I talked to customers, there's some It's like, Oh, let me show you how Maney APs I've done and created in the last 18 months. It was like, Great. How does that compare before? And they're like, we weren't creating APS. We were buying APS. We were buying software. We have outsourced some of those pieces. So you know that that that trend we've been talking about for a number of years is kind of everyone's a software company, Um, does not mean that, you know, we're getting rid of the old business models. But Shannon, there are challenges there either expanding and moving faster or, you know, making sure that I have the talent in house. So bring us inside. What if some of the big things that your customers were telling you, maybe that's holding them back from unlocking that potential? >>Yeah, totally. You hit on a couple of them, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of interest in adoption of kubernetes and clearly vm Ware is leading the way with Changzhou. But we're also hearing that they're underestimating the challenges on how toe quote unquote get to kubernetes. Right? How do you stand up that full cloud native staff and particularly at scale Thio? How do you manage the ongoing operations and maintain that infrastructure? How do you support the various stakeholders? How do you bring I t operators and developers together? Eso There's really a wide range of challenges that, um businesses air facing. And the other thing is that you hit on, you know, they're gonna be producing Mawr and Mawr cloud native applications, but they still need to maintain legacy applications, many of which are driving business critical applications and workloads. So they're going to need to look for solutions that help them manage both and allow them to re factor or retire those legacy ones at their own pace so they can maintain business continuity. >>Yeah, and of course, Shannon, we know as infrastructure people, our job was always toe, you know, give the environment to allow the applications to run in virtualization. For years, it was Well, I knew if I virtualized something, I could leave it there, and it wasn't going to it didn't have to worry about the underlying hardware changes. Help us understand How does kubernetes fit into this environment? Because, as I said that people don't want to even worry about it. And the infrastructure people now need to be able to change, expand and, you know, respond to the business so much faster than we might have in times past. >>Yeah, So from an infrastructure perspective, working with VM ware based on tons of really the essence of that is to bring I t operators and developers together. The infrastructure has a common set of management that, you know, each the developer and the I t operators can work in the language there most familiar with. And, you know, the communication of the translation all happens within Tan Xue so that they're more speaking the same, um, language when it comes Thio, you know, managing the infrastructure in particular with VM ware tansy on VX rail. We are delivering kind of a range of infrastructure options because we know people are still trying to figure out you know, where they are in their kubernetes readiness. Have, um, some people have really developed mature capabilities in house for who were Netease for software defined networking. And for those customers, they still may want Thio. You know, use a reference architecture er and build on top of the ex rail for, you know, a custom cloud native specific application. What we're finding is more and more customers, though, don't have that level of kubernetes expertise, especially at scale. And so VM ware v sphere with Tan Xue on VX rail as well as via more cloud foundation on VX rail are ways Thio get a fast start on kubernetes with directly on these fair or kind of go with the full Monty of B M or Cloud Foundation on BX rail. >>Well, we're bringing up VX rail. Of course. The whole wave of h C I was How do we enable simplicity? We don't wanna have to think about these. We wanna, uh, just make it so that customers can just buy a solution. Of course. VX rail joint solution, you know, heavily partnership with VM ware. So, Shannon, there's a few options. VM has been moving very fast. Expand out that the into portfolio, uh, back at the beginning of the year when the Sphere seven came out. You needed the BMR Cloud Foundation. Which, of course, what was an option for for for the VX rail. So help us understand you laid out a little bit some of those options there. But what should I know as Adele customer, Uh, you know what my options are? How the fault hands a sweet fits into it. >>Yeah, eso we like to call it kubernetes your way with the ex rail. So we have a range of options to fit your operational or kubernetes scale requirements or your level of expertise. So the three options, our first for customers that are looking for that tested, validated multi configuration reference architectures er that will deliver platform as a service or containers is a service. We've got tons of architecture for VX rail, which is a new name for what was known as pivot already architecture er and then for customers that may have minimum scaling requirements, they may have some of that expertise in house to manage at scale. The fastest path to get started with kubernetes is the new VM ware V sphere with Changzhou on VX rail. And then last I mentioned kind of that full highly automated turnkey on promises. Cloud platform. That's the VM, or Cloud Foundation, on VX rail, which is also known as Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. And that option supports Tan Xue with software defined networking and security built in with that automated lifecycle management across the full stack. So there's really three paths to it, from a reference architecture approach to a fast path on the actual clusters all the way to the full Deltek Cloud platform. And Dell Technologies is the first and only really offering this breath of Tanya infrastructure deployment options. Eso customers can really choose the best path for them. >>Yeah, so, Shannon, if if I If I think back to what we saw in the keynote, you know, VM Ware lays out there, they're hybrid and multi cloud solution. So of course they're they're public cloud the VM ware cloud on a W s. They have that solution. They have extended extended partnerships. Now, with azure uh, the the the offering with Oracle that's coming. And I guess I could think to just think of the Delta cloud on VX rail as just one of those other clouds in that hybrid and multi cloud solutions do I have that right? Same stack. Same management. If I'm if I'm living in that VM world world. >>Yeah. So the Deltek Cloud platform is an on premises hybrid cloud. So, you know, ah, lot of customers were looking to reduce complexity really quickly especially, you know, with some of the work from home initiatives that were sprung upon us and trying to pivot to respond to that. And, um, you know the answer toe solving some of that complexity is to jump into public cloud. What we found is a lot of customers actually are driving a hybrid cloud strategy and approach. And we know many customers sort of have that executive mandate. There's value in, um, driving that, um on Prem hybrid cloud approach. And that's what Dell Technologies Cloud platform is. So you get the consistent operations in the consistent infrastructure and more of the public cloud like consumption experience while having the infrastructure on Prem for security data locality There, um, you know, cost reasons like that eso That's really where VM or Cloud Foundation on VF drill comes into play eso leveraging the VM ware technologies you have on Prem hybrid cloud. It can connect all those public cloud providers that you talked about. So you have, you know, core to cloud on day one of the new capabilities that VM or Cloud Foundation is announced support for is remote clusters. So that takes us kind of from cloud all the way toe edge because you now have the same VCF operational capabilities and operational efficiency with centralized management for remote locations. >>Wonderful. I'm glad you brought up the edge piece. Of course, you talk to the emerging space vm ware talking about ai talking about EJ. So help us understand. How much is it? The similar operational model is it even? Is that part of the VX rail family? What's the What's the state of the state in 2020 when it comes to how edge fits into that cloud core edge discussion that you just, uh, raised? >>Yeah. When you look at trends, especially for hyper converged edge and cloud native are kind of taking up a lot of the airwaves right now. Eso hyper converge is gonna play a big role in Theodore option of both cloud native Band Edge. And I think the intersection of those two comes into play with things like the remote cluster support for VM or Cloud Foundation on VX rail where you can run cloud, you know, cloud native based modern applications with thons Ooh, alongside traditional workloads at the edge, which traditionally have more stringent requirements. Less resource is maybe they need a more hardened environment, power and cooling, you know, um, constraints. So with VCF on Vieques, well, you have all the operational goodness that comes from the partnership in the levels of integration that we have with VM Ware. And customers can sort of realize that promise of full workload management mobility in a true hybrid cloud environment. >>Shannon, when I'm wondering what general feedback you're getting from your customers is as they look at a zoo, said these cloud native solutions and you know what's what's the big take away? Is this a continuation of the HD I wave that you've seen? Do they just pull this into their hybrid environments? Um, I'm wondering if you have any either any specific examples that you've been anonymized or just the general gestalt that you're getting from your customers. Is that how they're doing expanding, uh, into these, you know, new environments that kind of stretch them in different ways. >>Yeah, it's interesting because you know, there's there's customers that run the gamut when we look at those that are sort of the farther down their digital transformation journey. Those are the ones that were already planning for cloud native applications or had some in development. Uh, there's also some trends that we're seeing based on, you know, the the size of cluster deployments and the range of, you know, various configurations that are an indicator of those customers that are more modernized in terms of their approach to cloud native. And what we find from those customers, especially over the last six months, is that they're more prepared to respond to the unknown on bond. That was a big lesson for some of the other customers that you know, had new. The digital transformation was the way of the future, but hadn't yet sort of come up with a strategy on how to get there themselves were finding those customers are inhibiting their investments to areas that can help them be more ready for the unknown in the future. In Cloud Native is top of that list. >>Absolutely Shannon Day Volante shown a few times. There's the people in the office, you know, with their white board doing everything. And there's the wrecking ball of covert 19. Kind of like Well, if you weren't ready and you weren't already down this path, you better move fast. Wonderful. All right, Shannon. So we know, uh, from past years, you know, VX rail. Usually it's all over the show. So in the digital world, what do you want? He takeaways. What are some of the key? You know, hands on demos, sessions that that people should check out. >>Thank you. Yeah. So hopefully your take away is that the exhale is a great infrastructure to support modern applications. First and foremost, we have, you know, a jointly engineered system built with VM ware, four VM ware environments to enhance fam. Where, and we do that with our the extra LHC I system software, which I didn't give a shout out to yet, which extends that native capabilities and really is the secret behind how we do seamless automated operational experience with the ex rail. And that's the case, whether it's traditional or modern applications. So that's my little commercial for VX rail at the show please tune into our VM World session on this topic. We also have hands on labs. We are launching a fun augmented reality game. Eso Please check that out on. We have a new Web page as well that you get access to all the latest assets and guides that help you, you know, navigate your journey for cloud native. And that's at dell technologies dot com slash Hangzhou. >>Wonderful. Well, Shannon Champion, thanks so much. Great to see you again. And be short. Uh, we look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Thanks to >>stay with us. Lots more coverage from VM World 2020. I'm stew. Minimum is always thank you for watching the Cube.

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >>Welcome to this Special Cube conversation. We're gonna unpack and have a casual conversation around the big news that VM Ware just announced the sphere 7.7 point. Oh, or V. Sphere seven. Chris Prasad, senior vice president, General manager of the Sphere Cloud Platform Business unit. Paul Turner, VP of product. Guys, we just chatted about the big news. Congratulations. Um, the bottom line, if I'm a customer, I'm moving into the cloud. I see this as really an either an enabler or blocker. You guys actually think it's an enabler? Um, I'm not saying it's a blocker, but as a customer, I just need to know, Is it going to help me go faster? I'm going cloud, Which means I've been told I got to get on the cloud you got Amazon might have azure or multiple clouds with workloads sitting around. I gotta pull them all together and make them work. But right now, I just got to get my operations cloud native necessarily kind of pressure point. >>Oh, for sure. One of the biggest drivers that you see happen in the industry right now is kubernetes. Why? Why is kubernetes taking off communities taking off because it gives you cloud independence. It gives you the ability to run with same operating model, whether it's in Google Cloud, Amazon's Cloud, Microsoft Cloud or any other cloud service. What we're doing with version seven instruction bring that same kubernetes cloud independent operating model directly in divisor. So now all of your infrastructure platforms that are out there, 90% of I T environments are all kubernetes ready platforms on. That's really powerful. So what we've done is just taken a totally different kind of, um ah, scope on how cloud should be Cloud should be any cloud. It should be independent of one particular flavor of it and on developers should be able to work then in a much more agile way. >>You just see, I've been following VM where you know my career since it was founded. And, you know, with the Cube coverage over the years is they see the innovation. You guys do a lot of great stuff. Of course, we keep on our teams to minimum. And David Lantz he made some good calls with these v san. We saw the early stuff with V Cloud Air Kind of saw that kind of going in this direction, But it's been really innovation going on around you guys. I'll see with NSX has exploded and V Sphere has been the core thing. As you guys look at the cloud model, you guys made some good moves with Amazon. I've always felt that you guys could be that Switzerland that that layer of connection points between as enterprise really moved from old way of provisioning, too much more seamless operating model where they have a deal with cyber security. They gotta deal with all the stuff that's going to come from APS that's going to come from the APP store. When you bought Hep D Oh, I was like, That's actually really smart move. You started bringing that cloud native vibe into V sphere, and that's what's essentially happening here. Isn't it? >>Exactly. This is like the the coming out party for that, like it's V Sphere having all the hefty oh goodness embedded in it. And what they would see is that because we have such a huge presence in the on Prem space, this provides the fastest bad for customers to get to the cloud. So today I mean this? I don't want this point to be lost on the today. You know, we are running the same VM Ware Cloud Foundation, our on Prem on Amazon in Google and many of the same code base. Same code base, right? It's the exact same thing. So now what does that give you as a customer? It gives you the same operational model across all these clouds. Because customers today, we thought that they're setting up set of processes and tools or Amazon. Then you go to Azure. You're doing a different set than their training people to do that. And, you know, you could get into compliance and other issues where things fall through the cracks. Right? When you do that here, the same platform you said your policies wants it applies to all the clouds. You can move your workloads between clouds, right? That's a V motion. Essentially, we don't know the >>last kept on that one, but that's ideal would be crippled >>today. It is happening today and we have thousands of other partners which are the tier two service providers who are all also offering that. So we have a huge grab off these providers are in which we live in the same platform. >>Yeah, I want to add something else, actually, to that as well. Which is? This is an open platform, which is really powerful, right? This is based on kubernetes for developers, which means you can run on the V sphere platform, and that is a hybrid infrastructure that is the most ubiquitous infrastructure out there. But if you actually want to take your application actually deployed onto a native application Native Cloud, you can do that as well. Um, and so it's very important for us to keep the platform open while making broadest available on >>Dev ops. I mean, first, I totally agree. I think open wins, But the end of the day, I think this operating consistency is a big story because it's kind of like nuance. But it is really the most important customers care about, because if you're operating successfully seamlessly across cloud, it's better. So the question I have on the Dev Op side because the dream has always been infrastructure as code. So are you guys there with this? Do you consider this V Sphere seven kind of infrastructures code from a developer? Is it all being taken care of. How close are we in your mind's eye to infrastructure as code. >>Now it's 100% there. I mean, we made the announcement around Hangzhou, which is a set off other products and capabilities that we add to what the sphere has and that whole stack. And the solution is for this targeted at the modern developer. So we have all the capabilities that the developers need to do infrastructure as scored, to deploy their applications and deployed across all these clouds. >>And I want I want to add to that the infrastructure as code really has two parts to it. We look at how do I provide the developers infrastructure's code, which is what we're doing with kubernetes enablement and we have our V San product is available. In fact, all storage services from V sphere available through that andare NSX services are available through kubernetes. So you've got full infrastructures code for developers. But infrastructures code also means how do you deploy large scale infrastructures and manage them as code? How do people actually manage the operations and the deployment of services? And so you're right in your admin team actually have a full layer of enhanced lifecycle management provisioning off configurations and settings across infrastructure. All of that is now managed, as >>that's almost under the hood kind of stuff. But that's important because networking is going to play a big role in all of this from a security standpoint and also compute storage. Pretty much looking, looking good, but networking becomes a huge part of what's under the hood. >>Yeah, I mean, look at networking is what enables us to connect all these clouds together, right? And NSX being the underlying platform for us enables us to have one single layer across all these clouds with the same operating model. So NSX is very critical. >>I want to get your guys thoughts on some little history lesson here or scar tissue, as we say in the industry. You know, I remember back during the Hadoop days, 2010 the big data movement hit, and it was just going to save us all. It's gonna be great, but what ended up happening was this very hard to stand up these clusters and what happened was the commitment the vision was there, but it was just really hard to manage and stand up clusters and hire people to do this. So it has some use cases, but it just really kind of fell down. We saw Open Stack have a similar trajectory where good on paper, things had used cases. But it's just so hard to manage the trends. We're moving very, very fast. Cloud was here. Cloud Computing kind of took everyone by storm and just got rid of all those things. And so they kind of dying. >>No. But if you think about why open Stack didn't go anywhere in the end, it's because of the operational complexity right? It took a lot to set it up, and he had essentially invest a lot more than keeping it running right. And then what we're doing is saying you don't have to worry about that aspect because it's built into the platform that you already know, right? So we have taken that complexity out completely, and so you just have this fear. The administrators know how to set up and run and do life cycle, and this year, and you get kubernetes, go >>back to my original question. If that's the case, which, by the way, I think that's the way to think about it. Then I found the customer acceleration. I can draft up with the movement of cloud as fast as I can Go is having any kind of blockers. >>Fastest lamb like cloud >>ran to the cloud >>and fastest fastest ramp to a cloud operating model, which means that all of your developers can now actually run as quickly as they can, building their applications independent of I t. In a much more dynamic way. So you want to move to that cloud operating model. That's why Kubernetes is so important on the infrastructure side. We've actually, of course, made it a much easier platform to manage. But but it's the agility that matters. >>You guys have done some great innovation. I think you've got a good ear to the market, made some good moves. Looking good. This is a great vision. I got to get your guys take on the edge. Big discussion. Five g. Certain years love that kind of vision. But the end of the day and edge. Now, if you talk about cloud operations, everything's an edge, right? So what does edge mean for V sphere? How do you guys look at the edge of the network. And as these applications with the sensors or whatever happening at the edges, How does this V Sphere look at that? How do you guys look? >>So, uh, for let me just I would say that, you know, we we have, ah, data center edge, right? We just think of it as, um, retail stores, Starbucks, right. They have a kind of a mini data center application running there. That's one kind of edge that people talk about. Then you have the kind of the telco edge, but a lot of the crossing of the five year data is happening, right? Where the cell tower, Selden. We're done. And then you have the devices. You just the cars, the You know what you have at home and we're not right. And then and we can play across all of these because we have the platform. I don't know if you know, but ah, v sphere, as the platform is, is embedded in many devices today. It's in the army. It's embarking leaders it. So it has a form factor that can live in all these devices. We certainly play in the data center, so we're well suited to play the >>piece for anywhere. >>Yeah, that is exactly right. >>I think we're already We're already at the data center edge, as we've talked about that is, it's a very common deployment use case for earlier versions of the sphere, and it will continue to be the value that you guys it's not not new at all. I think the telco edge is actually a very interesting one, particularly the five G switch over. So you know what's happening. There is. There's a whole radio access networks and you're looking at the V Ron as a big initiative there. Which is how do we bring virtualization as a service they're into into those networks? Container deployments becomes very important as well. So we actually have a platform with version seven that actually can give the telco edge and five G network deployments a much more secure, predictable runtime environment. So that's really powerful as well. And it's containers and VMS because many of those applications that are deployed a telco edge our container based applications. >>It's interesting, you know, we talk about stacks in our last segment and you guys talking about the news and now having all these stacks later on. But think about the evolution of the industry with cloud. A whole new sets of services are emerging mentioned Telco Edge. So it just looks different. What's the same kind of open model that open systems brought us, but just a little bit different? It's a distributed cloud security computer, same concepts, new new capabilities. >>Not just to add to that, I mean the biggest innovation John is happening in the hardware layer by the computer, sort of getting disaggregated. There is a lot of acceleration that is going on that are specialized chips, a six effigies that are being built into the servers and and memory's getting pulled outside because the interconnect is getting fast enough for those things to happen. And so a lot of the innovation that we do as a platform that we didn't talk about much today is really a data layer, because we had to virtual eyes all of that and provide it to the level. Of course, >>yeah, it's great. It's a great architecture. I think I just add more complexity that's coming and you guys can help. Abstract away is you just look at cybersecurity and the role of data. You got to get in front of all these these trends to get that automation dev ops going because without any automation and software is just people can't handle the inbounds. It's a big problem. >>Yeah, you really need, um, your platforms to provide intrinsic security. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be an option. It shouldn't be something the developers need to worry about. It should be something that's just part of the platform. And that's one of the things that we see is critical and actually built into Visa or seven. And you've seen that we've made a number of acquisitions recently. Actually, in the security piece, it's it's so that we can purposely build into your runtime environment, which is your VM environment container environment that we're running. We actually build in intrinsic security would build in a dynamic checking off the scope of an application in real time. Um, while those applications running, which is very key. >>Paul, >>Thanks for sharing all that great stuff. I want to get one final thought for both of you before we wrap up is we've been seeing and we've been reporting kind of the three ways of the cloud wave one was public. We all kind of know how that turned out. Awesome Cloud Native Born in the Cloud Wave two is well right now with a lot of intensity hybrid that's got a range of definitions. And then the third wave that's coming fast is multi cloud. So I want to get your thoughts on hybrid. A lot of energy, a lot of spend a lot of dollars investment in hard causing people in hybrid. I know we have different definitions. Is also different versions of hybrid. How do you define hybrid? And how does that become a path to the next wave? Or is it a path of next wave? What's your take? >>So it's absolutely the bad the next, I would say the hybrid, in our view, is the same platform running on which cloud do you want to use in our platform, as we talked about spans all the major clouds today giving the same operating model, and that's what we view as the hybrid cloud story. But the next one is the ability to mix native cloud workloads and services with that, and we already have a set of products and services that target that it's the times. A portfolio that I talked about is all focused on the multi cloud journey. So we kind of support both, and we're looking forward and aggressively going after the multi cloud. >>I think it's important to think of them as is completely complimentary of each other, right? A hybrid infrastructure platforms. So you know, a single I T organization can actually have one operating experience for their entire infrastructure, independent of Cloud Private Cloud Public Cloud Services. But Multi Cloud is about developers. It's about developers able to deploy their applications on any cloud environment that they need to, and they don't need to worry about infrastructure. So hybrid cloud is really about, ah, hybrid infrastructure that we can deploy everywhere, multi cloud and the services that we're providing to developers is all about how you could be independent of any cloud deployment that you want. It could be a hybrid infrastructure you deploy on. It could be on a standard public cloud service, >>and what's interesting is not. Not not all clouds are created equal. I mean, Amazon has much more capability in Azure and Google, but they're finding their swim lanes. But again it's all about the workload. The workload decides which cloud to work on. And that's right. You guys just agnostic? Yes, For the operator. Well, well, Thanks for the insight, guys. Appreciate you did a little post wrap of the news. Thanks for hiring. Thank you. Big news. These fear seven Q breakdown here. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching, >>right? Yeah.

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by, Cohesity. >> Good morning everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here in the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is Microsoft's Big Show. 26,000 people from around the globe, all descending on Orlando. This is the big infrastructure show. Thoughts, impressions, now that we're on day two of a three day show. >> Yeah, Rebecca. Last year I had this feeling that it was a little bit too much talking about the Windows 10 transition and the latest updates to Office 365. I could certainly want to make sure that we really dug in more to what's going on with Azure, what's happening in 6the developer space. Even though they do have a separate show for developers, it's Microsoft build. They actually have a huge partner show. And so, Microsoft has a lot of shows. So it's, what is this show that is decades old? And really it is the combination of Microsoft as a platform today. Satya Nadella yesterday talked about empowering the world. This morning, Scott Hanselman was in a smaller theater, talking about app devs. And he came out and he's like, "Hey, developers, isn't it a little bit early for you this morning?" Everybody's laughing. He said, "Even though we're kicking off at 9:00 a.m., Eastern." He said, "That's really early, especially for anybody coming from the West Coast." He was wearing his Will Code For Tacos shirt. And we're going to have Scott on later today, so we'll talk about that. But, where does Microsoft sit in this landscape? Is something we've had. I spent a lot of time looking at the cloud marketplace. Microsoft has put themselves as the clear number two behind AWS. But trying to figure out because SaaS is a big piece of what Microsoft does. And they have their software estate in their customer relationship. So how many of those that are what we used to call window shops. And you had Windows people are going to start, Will it be .NET? Will it be other operating systems? Will it come into Azure? Where do they play? And the answer is, Microsoft's going to play a lot of places. And what was really kind of put on with the point yesterday is, it's not just about the Microsoft solutions, it is about the ecosystem, they really haven't embraced their role, very supportive of open source. And trust is something that I know both you and I have been pointing in on because, in the big tech market, Microsoft wants to stand up and say, "We are the most trusted out there. And therefore, turn to us and we will help you through all of these journeys." >> So you're bringing up so many great points and I want to now go through each and every one of them. So, absolutely, we are hearing that this is the kinder, gentler Microsoft, we had Dave Totten on yesterday. And he was, as you just described, just talking about how much Microsoft is embracing and supporting customers who are using a little bit of Microsoft here, a little bit of other companies. I'm not going to name names, but they're seemingly demanding. I just want best to breed, and this is what I'm going to do. And Microsoft is supporting that, championing that. And, of course we're seeing this as a trend in the broader technology industry. However, it feels different, because it's Microsoft doing this. And they've been so proprietary in the past. >> Yeah, well, and Rebecca, it's our job on theCUBE actually, I'm going to name names. (laughs) And actually Microsoft is-- >> Okay. >> Embracing of this. So, the thing I'm most interested in at the show was Azure Arc. And I was trying to figure out, is this a management platform? And at the end of the day really, it is, there's Kubernetes in there, and it's specifically tied to applications. So they're going to start with databases specifically. My understanding, SQL is the first piece and saying, it sounds almost like the next incarnation of platform as a service to our past. And say, I can take this, I can put it on premises in Azure or on AWS. Any of those environments, manage all of them the same. Reminds me of what I hear from VMware with Hangzhou. Vmworld, Europe is going on right now in Barcelona. Big announcement is to the relationship with VMware on Azure. If I got it right, it's actually in beta now. So, Arc being announced and the next step of where Microsoft and VMware are going together, it is not a coincidence. They are not severing the ties with VMware. VMware, of course partners with all the cloud providers, most notably AWS. Dave Totten yesterday, talked about Red Hat. You want Kubernetes? If you want OpenShift, if you are a Red Hat customer and you've decided that, the way I'm going to leverage and use and have my applications run, are through OpenShift, Microsoft's is great. And the best, most secure place to run that environment is on Azure. So, that's great. So Microsoft, when you talk about choice, when you talk about flexibility, and you talk about agility cause, it is kinder and gentler, but Satya said they have that tech intensity. So all the latest and greatest, the new things that you want, you can get it from Microsoft, but they are also going to meet you where you are. That was Jeremiah Dooley, the Azure advocate, said that, "There's, lots of bridges we need to make, Microsoft has lots of teams. It's not just the DevOps, it's not just letting the old people do their own thing, from your virtualization through your containerization and everything in between microservices server list, and the like. Microsoft has teams, they have partners. Sure that you could buy everything in Microsoft, but they know that there are lots of partners and pieces. And between their partners, their ecosystem, their channel, and their go-to-market, they're going to pull this together to help you leverage what you need to move your business forward. >> So, next I want to talk about Scott Hanselman who was up on the main stage, we're going to have him on the show and he was as you said, adorned in coder dude, attire with a cool t-shirt and snappy kicks. But his talk was app development for everyone. And this is really Microsoft's big push, democratizing computing, hey, anyone can do this. And Satya Nadella, as we've talked about on the show. 61% of technologist's jobs are not in the technology industry. So this is something that Microsoft sees as a trend that's happening in the employment market. So they're saying, "Hey, we're going to help you out here." But Microsoft is not a hardware company. So how does this really change things for Microsoft in terms of the products and services-- >> Well right, >> It offers. >> So really what we're talking about here, we're talking about developers right? 61% of jobs openings for developers are outside the tech sector. And the high level message that Scott had is your tools, your language, your apps. And what we have is, just as we were talking about choice of clouds, it's choice of languages. Sure they'd love to say .NET is wonderful, but you want your Java, your PHP, all of these options. And chances are, not only are you going to use many of them, but even if you're working on a total solution, different groups inside your company might be using them and therefore you need tools that can spam them. The interesting example they use was Chipotle. And if there's a difference between when you're ordering and going through the delivery service, and some of the back-end pieces, and data needs to flow between them, and it can't be, "Oh wait, I've got silos of my data, I've got silos of all these other environments." So, developer tools are all about, having the company just work faster and work across environments. I was at AnsibleFest show earlier this year. And, Ansible is one of those tools that actually, different roles where you have to have the product owner, the developer, or the the operations person. They all have their way into that tool. And so, Microsoft's showing some very similar things as to, when I build something, it's not, "Oh, wait, we all chose this language." And so many of the tools was, " Okay, well, I had to standardize on something." But that didn't fit into what the organization needed. So I need to be able to get to what they all had. Just like eventually, when I'm picking my own taco, I can roll it, bowl it, soft or hard shell-- >> It was a cool analogy. >> And choose all my toppings in there. So it is Taco Tuesday here-- >> Yes. >> At Microsoft Ignite and the developers like their choices of tools, just like they like their tacos. >> And they like their extra guac. So going back to one of the other points you made at the very opening. And this is the competitive dynamic that we have here. We had David Davis and Scott Lowe on yesterday from a ActualTech Media. Scott was incredibly bullish about Microsoft. And saying it could really overtake AWS, not tomorrow, but within the next decade. Of course, the choice for JEDI certainly could accelerate that. What do you make of it? I mean, do you think that's still pie in the sky here? AWS is so far ahead. >> So look, first of all, when you look at the growth rates, first of all, just to take the actual number, we know what AWS's, revenue is. Last quarter, AWS did $9 billion. And they're still growing at about a 35% clip. When I look at Microsoft, they have their intelligent cloud bucket, which is Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server and GitHub. And that was 10.8 billion. And you say, "Oh, okay, that's really big." But last year, Azure did about $12 billion dollars. So, AWS is still two to three times larger when you look at infrastructure as a service. But SaaS hugely important piece of what's going on in the cloud opportunity. AWS really is more of the platform and infrastructure service, they absolutely have some of the PaaS pieces. Azure started out as PaaS and has this. So you're trying to count these buckets, and Azure is still growing at, last quarter was 64%. So if you look at the projection, is it possible for Azure to catch up in the next three years? Well, Azure's growth rate is also slowing down, so I don't think it matters that much. There is a number one and a number two, and they're both clear, valid choices for a customer. And, this morning at breakfast, I was talking to a customer and they are very heavily on Microsoft shop. But absolutely, they've got some AWS on the side. They're doing Azure, they've got a lot of Azure, being here at our Microsoft show. And when I go to AWS, even when I talked to the companies that are all in on AWS, " Oh, you got O 365?" "Of course we do." "Oh, if you're starting to do O 365, are there any other services that you might be using out of Azure?" "Yeah, that's possible." I know Google is in the mix. Ali Baba's in the mix. Oracle, well, we're not going to talk about Oracle Cloud, but we talked about Oracle, because they will allow their services to run on Azure specifically. We talked about that a lot yesterday, especially how that ties into JEDI. So, look, I think it is great when we have a healthy competitive marketplace. Today really, it is a two horse race. It is, AWS and Azure are the main choices for customers. Everyone else is really a niche player. Even a company like IBM, there's good solutions that they have, but they play in a multi cloud world. Google has some great data services, and absolutely a important player when you talk about multi cloud for all they've done with Kubernetes and Istio. I'm going to be at Kube Con in a couple of weeks and Google is front and center there. But if you talk about the general marketplace, Microsoft has a lot of customers, they had a lot of applications and therefore, can they continue to mature that market and grow their environment? Absolutely. AWS has so many customers, they have the marketplace is stronger. It's an area that I want to dig in a little bit more at this show is the Azure Marketplace, how much we talked about the ecosystem. But, can I just procure through the cloud and make it simpler? Big theme we've talked about is, cloud in the early days was supposed to be cheap and simple. And it is neither of those things. So, how do we make it easier, so that we can go from the 20% of applications in the public cloud, up to 50% or more? Because it is not about all everything goes to the public cloud, but making customers put the applications and their data in the right place at the right time with the right services. And then we haven't even talked about edge computing which Microsoft has a big push on, especially with their partners. We talked to HP, a little bit about that yesterday. But really the surface area that this show and Microsoft covers is immense and global. >> It is indeed, and we are going, this is our second day of three days of coverage and we're going to be getting into all of those things. We've got a lot of great guests. We have Cute Host, Keith Townsend, Dave Cahill, a former Wikibon guy, a lot of other fantastic people. So I'm excited to get it on with you today, Stu. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Great stuff. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music`)

>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017, brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage live here in Austin, Texas for the CNCF's two conferences, CloudNativeCon, which was yesterday, and two days, today and tomorrow, KubeCon for Kubernetes' conference. This is theCUBE, of course, from SiliconANGLE Media. I'm John Furrier with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Our next guest, Dan Kohn, is the executive director of the CNCF, the man who put it all together. Congratulations. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Oh, absolutely. Thrilled to have you guys back here again. >> So you kind of doing a victory lap here now, high fiving each other? >> Dan: Great hugs. >> John: Great event. >> Laughing: I'm glad it's a good event, and I am hearing fantastic feedback that folks are thrilled to be here. But we sort of describe this moment for the organization and the community as being the end of the beginning. >> John: Yeah. >> Where we now have all the major cloud vendors, all of the biggest enterprise software companies. We have a core group of 14 projects anchored by Kubernetes, but tons and tons of work in front of us. >> And tons of success, so I'm just going to read a couple of highlights from yesterday. There's a lot today. Baidu joins the CNCF, a lot of scaling production application examples, 31 new silver end-user members joined, Alibaba Cloud update to platinum, CoreDNS 1.0, Containerd, Fluentd, Jaeger, tons of news. Obviously, we've been pumping out the coverage. Today, again, more and more great goodness. But really interesting is that you guys have put a frame around this community to allow it to grow, to fertilize the open source vibe, which is all cloud but yet scaled. And you put up a slide I want to get your reaction to that I thought was compelling yesterday during your keynote. It was the flywheel, circle, and it said projects, products, profit. >> Dan: Right. >> And not that you're promoting profit, but you're not hiding the ball, either, saying, hey, you know what? There's a lot of commercial interest in cloud, obviously. We saw AWS' success last week. And that is if you create good products in this community framework, there's profit to be had. >> Right. So first of all, I should admit to plagiarizing that slide from Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. >> And similarly, I think you can look at a lot of aspects... >> It's an open source feature. >> Dan: Yes. >> Free for you to use. >> John: Right. >> Similarly, I think there's a lot of ways in which Kubernetes is trying to build on the success of Linux. And Jim even describes Kubernetes as the Linux of the cloud. >> John: Yeah. >> Stu: Yeah. >> John: That's a good point. >> Dan, one of the things we've been talking around Kubernetes is you talk about scale. >> Dan: Right. >> Talk about scale of the CNCF. You have 4 to 14 projects. People are a little worried when you get all the vendors around here and there's all these projects. It's a foundation thing, it's going to go off the rails. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Customers aren't going to have a voice. How do we make sure we kind of learn from some of the things that other projects have had challenges with in the past? >> And I think that's our advantage, which is the great thing about coming later than some of the other foundations, is we can look at where they had successes and where they had issues. And our aspiration for CNCF is to get to go make entirely new mistakes rather than replicating some of the issues that have come before. And so really from the beginning of CNCF, we had a somewhat unusual and frankly a little bit cumbersome charter where I describe it at times as a three-ring circus. We have a governing board made up of the vendors that are putting a lot of money into the community, but they don't get to run the projects and they don't even get to pick the projects. Instead, they appoint six of the nine members of an independent technical oversight committee, kind of like the Supreme Court. And then we have a third group in the end-user community that I'm thrilled to say is now up to 28 members in it. They appoint one of those folks. We finally got that working. We have Sam Lambert, the director of infrastructure at GitHub, who has just made a huge commitment to Kubernetes and is moving all their infrastructure over into it. Those seven appoint the last two. And so that body, and they just had their public meeting a couple hours ago. They feel very strongly about their independence, about their reputation, that they're trying to make very good judgments based on what they're seeing in the marketplace. >> That's interesting, the three-ring circle. I like how you put it. But let's talk about the end-user piece because I think that's critical. One of the things we were commenting earlier from the Lyft folks was you have a lot of end users who have built some large-scale systems out of their own sheer necessity. >> Dan: Definitely. >> And that is now being donated in. We saw Kubernetes come in with, you shepherded beautifully, went from Google, but you've got Lyft donating an amazing product convoy. >> This first convoy has a huge amount of excitement. And what was fun was, actually, on the same stage that they contributed back in LA in September, Uber contributed a separate project. Now, unlike Uber and Lyft, the two projects are in no way competitive- >> John: Yeah. >> Like Jaeger is really fantastic tracing one. But what they have in common is that they're companies that have had to grow from nothing to extremely high scale and then had problems that they solved. And they wanted to share that expertise with us. >> I want to get your thoughts on this. Because we've been speculating, on theCUBE, we've been kind of thinking, an editorial, but just that this is all good business. Now, that's pretty obvious, right? You're starting to see this kind of contribution, the gifts that keep on giving. These are significant code. >> Dan: Yeah. >> Not like, okay, let's start a little group and huddle and build something organically. You have real goodness coming in from Google, Uber, Lyft, and there's a million others. >> Dan: Right. >> How is that changing the game? Certainly accelerating it. That's really bringing goods to the table. >> Right. I think the whole... >> You have to manage it. >> Well, and for what it's worth, I don't actually manage the projects. And so we do provide a set of services- >> John: The community? >> -to them and we help them, we market them. But one of the unusual aspects of CNCF is that the projects do actually manage themselves. A little bit of guidance from the TOC, but we really are unusual in that sense. And that's one of the reasons the projects have been... >> And what's interesting is, to connect the dots, though, one step further, you're talking about a commercial entity donating massive intellectual property in the open for all the goodness of everyone else. But yet that flywheel is continuing. They're still using it. So it is inherently commercial dynamic. >> Right. And back to that circle, I think really the underlying concept is that companies agree that sharing key parts of their infrastructure has a huge amount of value to the whole ecosystem, to each other. And then they're absolutely eager to compete above that. And so you can look at it with the public clouds where we have now Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, IBM, Oracle all at the table. They are absolutely fierce competitors. But they're saying that this specific software infrastructure layer isn't the area that they want to compete. They want to compete on all the value-added services, customer service, et cetera. >> Dan, I wonder if you can speak to how CNCF connects to some of the broader communities out there. Things like Kata containers got announced coming out of the OpenStack group. You've got a serverless track happening here, kind of extends some of where Kubernetes is going. How does CNCF fit into the broader... >> Sure. And it's definitely the case that all the innovation out there cannot happen in CNCF. Most obviously, everything that we do, almost everything depends on Linux. And so that's our parent organization, the Linux Foundation. But we've had a good collaboration with Jonathan Bryce from OverStack. They have two booths on the floor here at the show. And we've spoken to Clear Containers and RunV, the two predecessors in the past. But the part that I'm particularly pleased with for Kata containers is that it is an OCI-compliant runtime, that's another sister organization, and is really designed to work well for Kubernetes. And then they can pitch that and let the market go decide which container runtimes they find the most valuable. >> Obviously a lot of traction here in terms of the sentiment around service meshes and pluggable lock-in textures. That's been very cool. But security came up. So I want to get your thoughts around security, obviously storage and these older models around how to deal with storage and networking. Obviously, always in the action. >> Yeah. >> But security is top of mind for everyone. How is that being addressed? You know, talk is out there... >> Sure. I mean our philosophy on this is that moving to cloud-native and particularly the continuous integration and continuous development that goes along with that is the most important step that you can do to help secure your infrastructure. And Equifax is the example everyone always brings up. But there was a case where they were using known insecure software and they didn't have the processes up to place where instead of doing quarterly updates or monthly updates, you want to be doing dozens of updates per day. And a cloud-native infrastructure allows you to do that. >> What's next for you? Because you've got great traction with both community response, and the community has been absolutely amazing, the quality of people, level has been great, but also at the funding sponsors. You've got a lot of people that are involved. What's next? What happens next? What do you envision happening? What's the plan, and then how do you view that evolving? >> Well, I hate to fall into the buzzword implosion here, but if you go back to the crossing the chasm metaphor, I think we're still very much just in the early adopter phase. 2018 could very well be the moment that we jump over to the early majority. And I do feel like this whole community now has the velocity to do that and that we're on track for it. But as that happens, there's just far, far more people who need to be educated so they understand the projects and the options and how to work with them. And then hopefully they go from just being consumers of these technologies to contributors and that we can welcome them into our community and hopefully get the advantage of their expertise as well. >> I want to get your thoughts on a comment that Stu and I were talking about. Stu, you and I were talking about the notion of value creation above the stack, and then how Kubernetes, although some could say being commoditized, but it's also creating value because with that consistency of Kubernetes, you can now create value. So we believe, and I want to get your reaction to this, because we think a whole new ecosystem dynamic will emerge of a new kind of ecosystem. And if this new app developer combined with software engineering, which is really going on, you're talking about the cloud, the app developers will just build in value, that value creation will be rewarded. That's where monetization will be happening. >> And if I could build off that... >> John: Yeah. >> Dan, I loved one of your opening comments. You quoted, "exciting times for boring infrastructure, "maybe too exciting." So this week we've been teasing out there's a lot of work to make that infrastructure boring. You've got everybody on this floor, the CNCF board, lots of new projects making that. Where the action is and what this is going to create is that application monetization and the speed and agility of being able to create these cool new cloud-native applications out there. So it's interesting dynamic, spans broad pieces of this, layers of the stack there. >> Yeah. Well, I will point out that there was an odd level of unanimity of just a ton of different leaders in the community, in keynotes from Craig McLuckie and Chen Goldberg and others where they all agree that Kubernetes is not by any means the ultimate answer or the final answer. I think everybody now expects to see Kubernetes as a core aspect of the infrastructure for software for the next decade or more. But there's a belief that there's a whole ton of value that needs to be added above it, particularly to try and show for a regular application developer who just has a PHP app or no-GS microservices or anything else what's the easiest way to go from having a piece of software and deploying it effectively. >> Dan, so it's interesting. You watch the people on the outside. They're like, oh, look at Kubernetes. They're all holding hands and saying Kumbaya. We know there's some spirited debates that happen- >> Dan: Definitely. >> In the code, some projects that are sometimes competing up there. Why has the community come together, and where are some of the areas that we still need to work on and improve to help customers going forward? >> And again, I think they have the big advantage of having watched other communities that didn't value community and consensus and the ability to work through their issues. And so thankfully, we just have a ton of really capable engineers who also have some of those social or personal qualities that they care about working these things out. And to date, at least, I think most of those disagreements have been settled pretty amicably and in a positive direction. I think there's still huge swathes of this space that are still up in the air. Storage is an obvious one where there's a ton of work going on in a storage working group of CNCF. Serverless is another where I think everyone agrees that the application deployment model of AWS Lambda is really exciting and has things that people should replicate and should be brought over to Kubernetes. But how that should happen, what the software is, et cetera, there's still, in fact, we have our first serverless track today here at KubeCon where several different competing approaches are all talking about what they'd like to do. >> Awesome stuff. And you also announced some dates for next year, December 11 and 13 in Seattle. >> Dan: Yes. >> Okay. >> Dan: That's a year from now. >> November 14 and 15 in Shanghai. >> Now, you and I met in Hangzhou in the lobby, which was just amazing. But I certainly am hoping to convince you to go back to China with us. This will be our first event... >> I got a three-year visa. >> Good, yeah, that's the exactly right one. But this will be our first event in China, which I think is just a huge opportunity. We now have Baidu, Tencent, Huawai, ZTE, a number of startups. There's just so much excitement for this space over there that we're really excited to satisfy. >> Stu: And Copenhagen in May. >> And that's the last one. Thank you. May 2 to 4 in Copenhagen, and we're really excited for the event, to bring it to Europe and the rest of the world. >> Okay. So you've been working like a dog, you've been working hard. I've seen you in China. It's serendipitous. But it's not without being mentioned that this has been great effort by your team and the Linux Foundation and Jim and the whole team. But congratulations. Are you having a pinch me moment? I know it's too early to do a victory lap. >> But you've got to be pretty excited. >> Yeah. It really has been a great thing for the foundation that we sort of accomplished many of our 2018 and 2019 goals this year. But I'm sure we're going to find plenty of stuff to do next year. >> And your goal for the next 6 to 12 months, what's on your top three to-do's, continue the momentum? Share your API for... >> Yeah. What's great is that we really have plenty of members. We'd always like to add new ones and serve the ones we have better. But right now, the focus is really about providing better services to our projects. All of them feel overworked. They would love help on documentation, on marketing, on messaging about it, and some of them need help with testing development and other things. So that's really what we're buckling down on. >> Great community are going to test them, being here on the ground, personally present at creation. And I was standing there with J.J. and Lew Tucker, OpenStack three years ago, talking about Kubernetes. We were kind of ripping. We couldn't have imagined, then, obviously, they bolted it on last year with your event. Now second year here, huge community... >> But you have 4,100 folks here, is more than the previous four events combined. >> Yeah, awesome. >> So it really is exciting. >> TheCUBE, always on the ground. And sometimes the squirrel finds a nut. We found a cloud-native foundation, part of the Linux Foundation. CNCF, Cloud-Native Compute Foundation, really a new, growing, and relevant community for cloud and a new way to do software and reimagine the future from software engineering to full application development, a new way. This is theCUBE's coverage, and we are here live in Austin. More live coverage after this short break. We'll be right back. [Techno Music]

>> Announcer: SiliconANGLE Media presents theCUBE! covering Alibaba Cloud's annual conference, brought to you by Intel. Now here's John Furrier.... >> Hi I'm John Furrier, with SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE. I'm the co-founder based in Silicon Valley, California, Palo Alto, California, and I am here in Hangzhou, China for the Alibaba Cloud conference in Cloud City, it's the biggest cloud computing conference here in China. I'm excited to be here with Dr. Min Wanli, who's the Chief Data Scientist and General Manager of Big Data division at Alibaba Cloud. Dr. Wanli, thank you for spending time. >> Thank you for having me. >> We have seen a lot of data in the conversation here at the show, data technology's a big part of this new revolution, it's an industrial revolution that we've never seen before, a whole 'nother generation of technology. What does data technology mean to Alibaba? >> Okay, it means everything. So first off, our internal technical speaking, it's technology handling massive real-time data and streaming data, and that's of different variety. For instance the app for the mobile app, for system knock, the customer behavior, they click, and they click browsing of the digital image of each merchant and asking for the price and compare against another similar product. All these behaviors are translated as data, and this data will be further merged with the archived data and try to update the profile of this customer's interests, and then try to detect whether there's a good match of they current merchant with the customer intent. If the match is good, then will flash this to the top priority, the top spot. So that try to increase the conversion rate. So if the conversion rate is high, then our sales is high. So DT, data technology means everything to Alibaba. >> It's interesting, I find my observation here, it's so fascinating because in the old days, applications produced data, that was stored on drives. They'd go to data warehouses, and they'd analyze them. You guys, in Alibaba Cloud are doing something fundamentally different, that's exciting in the sense that you have data, people call it data exhaust or data in general, but you're reusing the data in the development in real-time. So it's not just data exhaust, or data from an application. You're using the data to make a better user experience and make the systems smarter and more intelligent. Did I get that right? >> Exactly, exactly. This is a positive feedback loop, in a way, so in the old-fashioned way, you archived the data for offline analysis and for post-event analysis, and trying to identify whether there's any room for improvement. But that's fine. But now people cannot wait, and we cannot wait. Offline is not enough. So we have to do this in real time, online, in a feedback version, in search of a way that we could capture exactly at the right moment, understand the intent of the customer, and then try to deliver the right content to the customer on the fly. >> Jackie Ma, or Jack Ma, your boss, and also Dr. Wong who I spoke with yesterday, talk about two things. Jack Ma talks about a new revolution, a new kind of industrial revolution, a smarter world, a better society. Dr. Wong talks about data flowing like a river, and you hear Hangzhou as an example, but it highlights something that's happening across the world. We're moving from a batch, slow world with data to one that's in motion and always real time. They're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they're different. A data lake or a data river, whatever word you want, I don't really like the word data lake personally, I think it means, it's batch to me. But batch has been around for a while. Real time mixed streaming. This is something that's happening, and it's impacting the architecture and the value proposition of applications, and it's highlighted in Internet of Things, it's highlighted in examples that we're seeing that's exciting like the ET Brains. Can you share your view in your project around ET Brains, because that is not just one one vertical. It's healthcare, it's industrial, it's transportation, it's consumer, it's everything. >> Yeah, good question, so first of all I concur with you that data lake already exists, will continue to exist, because it's got its own value because our ET Brain for example, actually emerged from data lake, because it has to learn all the benchmark, the baseline model, the basic knowledge from the existing archive data, which is a data lake. However, that's not enough. Once you have the knowledge, you have the capability but you need to put that in action. So we are talking about data in motion, data in action. How do we do that? So once you have the training example, all the training data from data lake, and you train the brain, the brain is mature enough and in the next step you want to push the brain coupled with real-time streaming data, and then to generate real-time action in real-time manner in preemptive way, rather than posting in a reactive way. So for example, in transportation and travel, T and T, travel and transportation, and traffic management. So currently, all the authorities, they have access to real-time information, and then they do a post-event analysis if there's a traffic jam, and then they want to do some mitigation. However, the best scenario is, if you can prevent the traffic jam from happening in the first place, right, how can you foresee there will be, there would be, there could be traffic jam happen in 10 minutes from now, and then you take a preemptive strike, and then try to prevent that from happening. That's the goal ET Brain, in traffic management want to achieve. Like for example, you see the ambulance case, and once the ET Brain receives the message say the ambulance is going to go to Point A, pick up a patient, and carry that patient, rush them to Hospital B, and then it immediately calculates the right routing, the driving direction, and the calculate the ETA to every intermediate intersection and then try to coordinate with the traffic lights, traffic signal. All this systematic integration will create on demand a green wave for ambulance, but in the past ambulance is just by the siren, right. >> Yeah, this is fascinating, and also I'd like to get your thoughts, because you bring us something that's important, and that is, and I'd like to connect the dots for the audience, and that is, real time matters. If you're crossing the street, you can't be near real time, because you could get hit by a car. But also latency's important, also the quality of the data is good. I was talking to an executive who's laying out an architecture for a smart city, and he said, "I want the data in real time," and the IT department said, "Here it is, "it's in real time", and he says, "No, that's last year's data." And so the data has to be real time and the latency has to be low. >> Exactly. I completely agree. The latency has to be low. Unfortunately, in the current IT infrastructure, very often the latency exist. You cannot eliminate that, right? And then you have to live with that, so the ET Brain acknowledge the fact, in fact we have our own algorithm designed in a way that it can make a shortened prediction. So based on five minutes ago data, the data collected five minutes ago, and then it can project the next five minutes, next 10 minutes, what would be the data, and then use that to mitigate, or to conquer, to offset the latency. So we find that to be a good strategy, because it's relatively easy to implement, and it is fast and efficient. >> Dr. Wanli, fascinating conversation. I'd like to get your thoughts on connecting that big data conversation or data conversation to this event. This is a cloud computing event. We at theCUBE and SiliconANGLE and our Wikibon research team we go to all the events. But sometimes the big data events are about big data, Hadoop, whatever, and then you have cloud, talking about DevOPs, and virtual machines. This conference is not just a siloed topic. You have cloud computing, which is the compute, it's the energy, it's the unlimited compute potential, but it's also got a lot of data. You guys are blending it in. >> Exactly. >> Is that by design, and why is that important? >> It's by design. Actually, you cannot separate cloud from data, big data. Or you cannot talk big data without referring to cloud, because once the data is big, you need a huge computation power. Where does that come from? Cloud computing. So that means that data intelligence, all the value has to require a good technological tool to unleash the value. What's the tool? Cloud computing. For example, the first time IBM come up with a smart plan, a smart city, that's 2005 or 2006, around that time, there's no cloud computing yet, at the earliest emerging stage. And then we see what happens. And the smarter city and then gradually become IT infrastructure construction. But it's not DT, data technology. So they invested billions of dollars in the infrastructure level, and they collect so much data, but all the data become a burden to the government, to save, to archive the data or protect the data from hacking, right. Now, these days, if you have the cloud computing available, you can do real-time analytics to unleash the value in the first place, at the first moment you receive the data and then later on you know which data is more valuable, which data is of less value, and then you know how much you want to archive. >> Our Wikibon research team put out research this past year that said IT is no longer a department, it's everywhere, >> It's everywhere >> it supports your DT, data technology, it's a fabric. But one thing that's interesting going back to 2005 to now is not only the possibility for unlimited compute, is that now you're seeing wireless technologies significantly exploding in a good way, it's really happening. That's also going to be a catalyst for change. >> Definitely. >> What's your thoughts on how wireless connectivity, 'cause you have all these networks, you have to move data around, it has to be addressable, you have to manage security. That's a heavy load.\ what do you do, how are you guys doing that? >> Okay, very good question. We faced this challenge a couple of years ago, we realized that, because in Chinese domestic market, the users they are migrating from PC to mobile, and this create the mobile phone has wi-fi, right, so interacts with another AP, Access Point, right. So then how do we recognize our tracking, and recognizes ID identification, all this stuff, create huge headache to us, and this time, in this conference, we announce our solution for mobile, for mobile cloud. So what does that mean? So essentially, we have a cloud infrastructure product designed in order to do a real-time integration and do a data cleansing of the mobile data. I mean by mobile, and wireless as well. Wireless means even bluetooth, or even IoT, IoT solution also supported there. So this is a evolving process in the way. The first solution probably is less than perfect, but gradually, as we are expanding into more and more application scenario, and then we will amalgamate the solution and try to make it more robust. >> You guys have a good opportunity, and Alibaba Cloud certainly met with Karen Liu about the opportunity in North America and United States where I'm from. But Alibaba Cloud, and Alibaba Group, in the Alibaba Cloud has had a great opportunity, almost a green field, almost a clean sheet of paper, but you have a very demanding consumer base here in China. They're heavily on mobile as you pointed out, but they love applications. So the question I want to ask you is, and I'd love your thoughts on this. How do you bring that consumerization, its velocity, the acceleration of the changing landscape of the consumer expectation and their experience to small businesses and to enterprises? >> Ok, very good question. So user not just customer base, and the demanding customers in China trying to help us to harden our product, harden our solution, and to reduce the cost, the overall cost, and the economy of mass scale, economy of scale, and then once we reach that critical point, and then our service is inexpensive enough, and then the small and medium, SMB, small and medium business they could afford that. And in old days, SMB, they want to have access to high performance computing, but they do not have enough budget to afford the supercomputer. But these days now, because our product, our computation product, cloud product, big data product is efficient enough, so the total cost is affordable. And then you see that 80% of our customers of Alibaba, at least 80%, are actually SMB. So we believe the same practice can be applied to overseas market as well. >> You bring the best practices of the consumer and the scale of Alibaba Cloud to the small and medium-sized enterprises, and they buy as they grow. >> Exactly. >> They don't buy a lot upfront. >> Yeah, yeah, they buy on demand, as they need. >> That's the cloud, the benefit of the cloud. >> Exactly. >> Okay, the compute is great, you've got greatness with the compute power, it's going to create a renaissance of big data applications where you see that. What is your relationship with Intel and the ecosystem, because we see, you guys have the same playbook as a lot of successful companies in this open source era, you need horsepower and you need open source, what is Alibaba's strategy around the ecosystem, relationship with Intel, and how are you guys going to deal with partners? >> Yeah, first of all, so we really happy that we have Intel as our partner. In our most recent big data hackathon for the medical AI competition, and we just closed that competition, that data hackathon. Okay, very fascinating event, okay. Intel provided a lot of support. All the participants of this data hackathon, they do their computing leveraging on the Intel's products, because they do their image process. And then we provided the overall computing platform. Okay, this is a perfect example of how we collaborated with our technology partners. Beyond Intel, in terms of the ecosystem, first of all, we are open. We are building our ecosystem. We need partners. We need partners from pure technology perspective, and we also need partners from the traditional vertical sectors as well, because they provide us domain knowhow. Once we couple our cloud computing and big data technology with the domain knowhow, the subject matter expertise, well together the marriage will generate a huge value. >> That's fantastic, and believe me, open source is going to grow exponentially, and by 2025 we predict that it's going to look like a hockey stick. From the Linux foundation that's doing amazing work, you're seeing the Cloud Native Foundation. I want to get your thoughts on the future generation. >> Yeah, you mean open source? >> The future generation that's using open source, they're younger, you guys have tracked, you know the demographics in your employee base, you have a cloud native developer now emerging. They want to program the infrastructure as they go. They don't want to provision servers, they want the street lights to just work, whatever the project, the brains have to be in the infrastructure, but they want to be creative. You're bringing two cultures together. And you've got AI, it's a wonderful trend, machine learning is doing very well. How do you guys train the younger generation, what's your advice to people looking at Alibaba Cloud, that want to play with all the good toys? You got machine learning, you got AI, they don't want to necessarily baby, they don't want to program either. They don't want to configure switches. >> Yeah, very good question. Actually this is related to our product strategy. So in a way, like today we announce our ET Brain, so we are going to release this and share this as a platform to nurture all the creative mind, creative brains, okay, people, trying to leverage on this brain and then do the creative job, rather than worry about the underlying infrastructure, the basic stuff. So this is that part which we want to share with the young generation, tell them that unleash your creativity, unleash your imagination, don't worry about the hard coding part, and we already build the infrastructure, the backbone for you. And then image anything you think possible and then try to use ET Brain, try to explore that. And we provide the necessary tool and building blocks. >> And the APIs. >> And the APIs as well, yes. >> Okay, so I want to get your thoughts on something important to our audience, and that is machine learning, the gateway to AI. AI, what is AI? AI software, using cloud. Some will argue that AI hasn't really yet come on the scene but it's coming. We love AI, but machine learning is really where the action is right now, and they want to learn about how to get involved in machine learning. So what's your view on the role of machine learning, because now you have the opportunity for a new kind of software development, a lot of math involved, that's something that you know a lot about. So is there going to be more libraries? What's your vision on how machine learning moves from a bounded use case to more unbounded opportunities, because, I'm a developer, I want the horizontally scalable resource of the cloud, but I'm going to have domain expertise in a vertical application. So I need to have a little bit of specialism, and I want the scalability. So data's got to move this way and it's got to be up this way. >> Yes, yeah, okay, let me put it this way. So first off, for people who are really interested in AI, or they want to work on AI, my recommendation first of all, you got to learn some mathematics. Why, because all the AIs and machine learnings is talking about algorithms, and those algorithms are actually all about math, mathematics, the formula, and also the optimization, how to speed up the convergence of the algorithms, right. So all this maths is important, okay. And then if you have that math background, and then you have the capability to judge or to see next, which algorithm, or which machine software is suitable to solve the vertical problems. Very often the most popular algorithm may not be the right one to solve the specific vertical problems. So you're going to the way, capability to differentiate and to see that and make the right choice. That's the first recommendation. The second recommendation, try to do as many type of examples as possible, try to get your hands on, don't stop at looking at the function specification and oh, this is a function and input, output, da da da, but you need to get your hands dirty, get your hands on the real problem, the real data. So that you can have a feeling about how powerful it is or how bad or how good it is. Once you have this kind of experience, and then you do have capability, you gradually build up a cumulative capability to make a right choice. >> This is fascinating, Dr. Wanli, this is fantastic. I want to follow up on that because you're bringing up, in my mind I can almost see all these tools. There's an artisan culture coming on. You're seeing that. Dr. Wong discussed that with me yesterday. Artisans meeting technologists, scientists and creatives. UI, we're seeing evolutions in user experience that's more art. And so culture's important. But the machine learners of the algorithms, sometimes you have to have a lot of tools. If you have one tool, you shouldn't try to use tools for other jobs. So bring this up. How should a company who's architecting their business or their application look at tooling, because on one hand, there's the right tool for the right job, but you don't want to use a tool for a job that it's not designed for. To your point. Tools, what's your advice and philosophy on the kinds of toolings and when to engage platforms, relationship between platforms and tools. >> Okay, then put it this way. So, this is a decision based on a mixture of different criteria together. So first of all, from technology perspective, and secondly from the business perspective. From technology perspective I would say if your company's critical competence is technical stuff, and then you've got to have your own tool, your own version. If you only rely on some existing tool from other companies, your whole business actually is dependent on that, and this is the weakest link, the most dangerous link. But however, very often to develop your own version of the tool takes forever, and market wouldn't give you so much time. And then you need too strike a balance, how much I want to get involved for self development and how much for in-house development, and it's how much I want to buy in. >> And time. >> And time as well, yes. And another one is that you've got to look at the competitive landscape. If this tool actually has already existed for many years and many similar product in the market, and the problem is not a good idea to reproduce or reinvent, and then you're going to why not buy it, you take that for granted. And it think that's a fact, and then you build a new fact, right. So this is another in terms of the maturity of the tool, and then you need to strike a balance. And in the end, in the extreme case, if your business, your company is doing a extremely new, innovative, first of a kind study or service, you probably need some differentiate, and that differentiator probably is a new tool. >> Final question for you. For the audience in America, in Silicon Valley, what would you like to share from your personal perspective about Alibaba Cloud that they should know about? Or they might not know about and should know about. >> Okay, 'cause I worked in the US for 16 years. To be frank, I knew nothing about Alibaba until I came back. So as a Chinese overseas, I'm so ignorance about Alibaba until I came back. So I can predict, I can guess, more or less, in the overseas market, in US customers, they probably know not that much about Alibaba or Alibaba Cloud. So my advice and from my personal experience, I say, first of all, Alibaba is a global company, and Alibaba Cloud is a global company. We are going to go global. It's not only a Chinese company, for example. We are going to serve customers overseas market in Europe and North America and Southeast Asia. So we want to go global first. And second, we are not only doing the cloud. We are doing blending of cloud and big data and vertical solutions. I call this VIP. V for vertical, I for innovation. P for product. So VIP is our strategy. And the innovation is based upon our cloud product and big data product. >> And data's at the center of it. >> Data is the center of this, and we already got our data technique, our data practice from our own business, which is e-commerce. >> And you're solving some hard problems, the ET Brain's a great playground of AI opportunity. You must be super-excited. >> Yeah, yeah, right, right, okay. >> Are you having fun? >> Yes, a lot of fun. Very rewarding experience. A lot of dreams really come true. >> Well, certainly when you come to Silicon Valley, I know you have a San Mateo office, we're in Palo Alto, and this is theCUBE coverage of Alibaba Cloud. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon research and theCUBE, here in China covering the Alibaba Cloud, with Dr. Wanli, thanks for watching.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents ... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE. We are here for an exclusive Cube conversations at the Alibaba Cloud conference here in Hangzhou, China. We're here with Dr. Wang, who's the chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee as well as the founder of Alibaba Cloud, here in the new Museum of Inspiration at the event. Thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thank you for coming. >> So before we talk about Alibaba Cloud and all the goodness going on here at the conference, talk about this Museum of Inspiration. It is new, and it has kind of a display theme. You kind of walk through time. What was the motivation and the inspiration for the museum? >> Yeah, I think the keyword for the museum, inspiration, is really the inspiration that started the museum. I would say that there's two, really the artists thinking about that. The first thing is really about when people, people take a lot of things for granted. One of the goals for this museum, it just shows the people they probably see every day. But just let them, just, wow, okay, that's different from what I thought. I think a lot of people take for granted, but it's really a great invention, a great human contribution to the whole society. I think that one thing is really about that people understand why we got here today. So that's the first thing. The other thing is really about science and technology. When people are talking about science and technology, people often will say, whether we can combine science and technology. But I don't think that's the right way to describe the relationship between science and technology. I would say science and technology, really the two sides of the coin. I really want to see, let people to see two sides instead of mixing together and got one thing. So that's two things that's parallel, just like zero and one. They are two things. When they're put together in a computer, amazing things happen. If you mix the zero and the one, like half something, then it's just not that fun. So I really want to make sure it's the museum of science and art instead of the mixture of science and arts. So that's the one thing. The other thing is really about the inspiration of future. Most of the museum is really about the past, to show how we have in the past, and with less on the inspiration to help people to think about the future. This museum is really, when we think about everything over here, we did talk about the past, but we want to make sure people think about the future. That's the whole idea about the museum. >> And the computer industry is fairly young, if you go back to modern computing. But you kind of have a take here about how technology really is embedded in life. Talk more about that impact 'cause that seems to translate to the conference here at Alibaba, that technology isn't just about the speeds and the feeds, it's about the integration into life. >> Yeah, and I think that from this museum we can see actually I trace back the origin of all the technology. When people are talking about the computer technology, I really want to talk about the computing technology. And then we can trace back, see actually the human is the first signal computing device. Our Mother Nature created for us. If you look at the same things differently, you really can see the origin of that. I think in this museum we talk about two really original things. The first is about the nature origin of the Internet. When talking about Internet, people talk about our current technological infrastructure of Internet. When you look at the human history, how is when people walk, you create an Internet for Earth? You can see a lot of things can trace back. Then, with this kind of trace back, you can help us to think about what's going to happen next. The trace of the original idea is actually very important if you're thinking about technology. >> Talk about the story of Alibaba Cloud. That is not, It's new, Amazon has had it for around, early 2000's. But you guys came right after Amazon, 2009. Still young and growing. How does the Alibaba Cloud take the culture of this inspiration? What are some of the design principles of the Alibaba Cloud? >> Actually I would say the Alibaba Cloud is different from the Amazon Cloud. In the sense we have different vision about the future. Unfortunately though, we are put under the same umbrella called cloud computing by media, I will say that. So we are different, in the sense when the Amazon, actually I show great respect to Amazon. When Amazon started cloud computing, they are really talking about the utility. They're talking about how to cut the cost down. So basically, they start with the low cost of IT infrastructure. That's what I understand. When I started Alibaba Cloud, we know that actually cost is important for sure. But we know that actually the computing part is more important than the cost if you're thinking about the big data era. We started with thinking it's the acentric cloud computing. When you look at our first brochure and we put those words over there. That's almost nine years ago. We called it acentric cloud computing. Instead of the IT-centric cloud computing. This actually, it's not just an idea difference. It's actually, eventually, influenced of the underlying technology infrastructure. Our whole underlying technological infrastructure is designed for the data, instead of just for the IT deployment. >> Jack Ma was talking about this industrial revolution, this digital transformation. What strikes me is you guys have that same art and scientist dynamic, art and science coming together, reminds me of the Steve Jobs technology liberal arts thinking that spawns new creativity. Certainly the iPhone is a great example of that as one of the many things. But now the new generation is coming together. You have a big artist focus here at the event. Music festival, not just technology. How is that part of the focus at the event here? What does that mean for new developers? >> I think it's really the crossing behind that. If you're thinking about technology and now e-commerce, what's really the one thing behind that that's really changed the way of peoples' lives? Computing in that sense, computing is not just technology. It's really something that changes the way of life of every people. I think the e-commerce change the way of life of every people. In that sense, they are the same. If you look at the peoples' lives, they won't just live on technology. They won't just live on the arts. They need a life, love means everything. By nature, we have to make sure as consumers, they need something more than just one thing. I think we are very lucky we understand that. If you're thinking about the young people, I will give you a few numbers about this conference about young people. In China, we have a very specific word talking about the young people a couple of years ago. We call the 'badiho'. It basically means the generation born of the '80s. When people talk about 'jodiho', that basically means people born after '90s. And then people talking about the 'leniho' it's basically people born after 2000. I think that most of the visitors for this conference are 'leniho', 'jodiho', and 'badiho'. These are all young, all young people. >> The digital culture. >> It's a digital culture. I would rather use my own word in the book I would say instead of digital. For me, digital generation is already an old generation I would say. I would like to call this the online generation. They do everything online. Even the last generation do a lot of things digital because digital is everywhere. But I want to emphasize it's an online generation. They do everything online. >> Dr. Wang, talk about data. You mentioned that's the key ingredient, the fuel for innovation. That's impacting the city brain project you guys are doing. Talk about the city brain and the role of data and how that's impacting the societal users out there certainly here in China, the traffic is crowded. This is just an example of what else is out there. >> Okay. City brain actually it's, again it means different things based on the perspective. One thing that's probably important is the data. This is first time actually I think instead of using the big data, it's better to using what I call the data results. It's a better word than big data. I think the one fundamental thinking for the city brain is we find a human army. Humans finally realize actually that data results is the most precious resource for the city, instead of land and water supply. Because we already know that the land is limited. The water supply is limited. This is very important. It doesn't view data as a non-essential thing. It's just a part of your IT system. We finally realize that data is part of the city instead of part of your city IT system. I think it's a leap frog thinking, at least for me. When it got to that, and you realize that today all the existing IT systems cannot actually really embrace the data. IT system is just to support the people doing the work they used to do. And then you realize we need an infrastructure to really make the value from the data. Just like we have water supply for the city, then you can use the reservoir. Otherwise, the reservoir is useless for the city. I think city brain is just like a water supply system for the data. The city eventually can consume that. We start thinking it's a new infrastructure for the city just like water supply system, just like power grid, just like any way system. That's how we're thinking about it. This is the first thing. The reason we got to the traffic system is this is the problem every city has around the world. From my yesterday's presentation, I just joked about we build two roads for the city, which is too many. I was thinking a lot of people realize it. That's why Boston had the project. They want to get all the roads under the surface. Under surface. But it's still a road. It's still expensive. You know how much money they spend just to move all the roads. >> The big dig, I remember, that was the-- >> Yes, that's a big dig. I don't think that's, that's good for the transportation system, but I don't think that's the number one way for the growth of the city. I think probably most of the city don't have the money to do that. What the data city brain wants to do whether we can take the resource of data and we can optimize every aspect of the city so we can use less resource to support city growth. When we start with the traffic, it's just to make sure, you know that when we use the data to optimize the traffic lights, the idea behind that actually we use the data to optimize the time. How to just read the time. It's not just lights. And then if you're thinking, when we show the eventually, if you have enough data, then we can have less roads in the city but still got the same. >> So the Internet of Things is the hottest trend. 0bviously machine learning and artificial intelligence are part of that, and the cloud powers this new edge of the network, and the data has to flow. So the question that a lot of technologists who are architecting these solutions ask is how do you make the data go at a very low latency? That takes compute power. That takes a lot of technology. How does Alibaba Cloud think about the architecture? Obviously you have a strategic partner like Intel, Obviously with a lot of compute power. You got to think differently around making the data move. If it's like water, it needs to flow. So real time is really important, but self-driving cars, real time is down to the millisecond, nanosecond. How do you think about that as a technologist? >> I think the, if you go back to the Internet of things, I think it's still the Internet. I would say eventually, if you're thinking about the word cloud computing and people use edge computing and people talking about Internet of things. For me, it's just the computing of the Internet. Cloud computing is the computing of the Internet and edge computing is computing on the Internet. Even the IoT is the computing of the Internet. If you're talking about the data, I think eventually it's really about the data on the Internet. It's not data on the sensor. It's not data on the cloud. Basically it's data on the Internet. I would expect eventually the Internet infrastructure will be improved significantly. It's not an improved cloud. It's not improved edge computing. Or it's improvement of the IoT. But it's really, >> Together. >> it's together. >> So Intel, I was covering them, Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. And obviously five G. You need the mobile overlay, that's super important. You also have the end-to-end inside the cloud. Obviously Intel is a strategic partner. Can you talk about the relationship you have with Intel? And also your philosophy, technically speaking, with the ecosystem? Because it's not just Intel, it's everybody. There's a lot of people here at this event. American companies as well as international companies who are now going to be part of your ecosystem. >> Actually the, we certainly have a very good relationship with Intel. I think we share in some sense the same vision. I think that the number one thing is really about people learning about how important the computing is. For me, the Intel is not that, a chip selling company. Intel is really the provider of computing power. That's what I understand. And we can expect eventually the whole ecosystem is really about who is going to provide the computing power. Who is going to provide the infrastructure to make the data? Instead of just equipment supply, eventually the need for computing, and the need for data, will be the challenge for every company, including Alibaba Cloud. We are not, we are not immune from these challenges. We will feel the same challenge. What we want to do is really make sure that with all these partners, provide enough computing for the next 10 or 20 years. We want to make sure that there's enough data flow for the next 10 years. In that sense, it's not the traditional ecosystem as like you do this and you do that. It's basically how we can work together to really make sure we have the challenge for the data and computing in the next 10 years. >> Yesterday we covered the news that you guys announced 15, building and R&D over the next three years, which is a lot of money. Also it has a very international and global view. Academics with younger folks. Alibaba Cloud is going to be a part of that, I'm assuming. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that intersecting. But the question for you is the cloud world today is moving at very, very fast speed. We're seeing Amazon, for instance, has been the best in terms of new announcements every year. Not one or two, like a ton of announcements, a lot. How are you guys going to continue to keep the pace? To move faster because the city brain is a great project, but it's going to have more evolution. It's going to move fast. How are you guys keeping up with the pace? >> I think the only way, that's not just for the next 10 years. Actually when I started Alibaba Cloud, we take the same philosophy. Actually the user moves very fast than us. If you look at the users in China they move very fast probably than anywhere else around the world. If you use the city brain project, I would say city brain project is basically tell the people, we need the computing power more than any other task. You really can see that. People want you. If you can't satisfy their demand, then somebody else is going to do that. It's not something we want to move fast but >> You have to move fast. >> You have to move fast. That's why the China is special. I want to say China is not just a place for the market. China is the place that pushes you to move faster. That's more important than market size. >> You mentioned data technology and information technology kind of transferring to a new world. Software is also a big part of it. Software you have to compute, obviously with Intel and the relationships you have. But software is growing exponentially. Certainly in open source, we see Cloud Native Foundation here. They'll probably have Linux foundation. Open source is going to grow exponentially. Most of the code will be shipping. But you have more data growing exponentially. Software is eating the world, but data is eating software. That means data is greater than software. If you look at it that way, that's super important. As the new architects, you and I were just talking about how we've in the industry for a while. You certainly have an amazing career from Microsoft now at Alibaba. A new generation of architects and developers are going to create new innovations around this dynamic of data. What's your advice and how do you view that if you are 21 years old again right now and you were going to jump into studies and academic and or field. It's a whole new world. >> I think there's probably two suggestions. Not necessarily for the young generation, but I would say it's just a suggestion for the young generation to push that habit. The first thing you mentioned about the data eats software. Well, I would put it in a different perspective. I would say for the last generation, the last two or three generations, I would say the computer era, we are really talking about the computer software. That's pretty much in everything. For this generation, I would say we are talking about computing plus the data. That box is not important, but the computing power is more important. For the computing era, the box is important. >> There's no box. It's the world, it's the cloud. >> That's one thing. The implication for this, I want the young generation to push is, then we need the new infrastructure. Thinking about the build as a great vision, got to have the computer in every home. That's infrastructure. Today when you are in the computing process data era, the infrastructure is not there. I think the vision for the Alibaba Cloud is make sure that we have this infrastructure for the next 10 or 20 years so the young generation can take advantage of that and to do that innovation and inventions, just like computing in every home. >> That's very important. I think that also speaks to businesses, how enterprises, I remember my first start up, I had to buy all this equipment and put it into the telephone closet. Now, start ups and small businesses don't need IT departments. This has been a big growth area certainly for Alibaba Cloud. But now all businesses might have a small closet, not a big data center. This is going to change the nature of business. So work and play are coming together. This speaks to the Museum of Inspiration theme here where you can have work and play kind of integrate but yet still be separate in that analog digital world. What's your vision on this new dimension of everything doesn't have to be just digital? You can have an analog life and mix it with digital. >> Actually I was always sad. It's not, the world never has just one side. It always has two sides. The difference is which side is important at a particular time. Just like when people talk about digital and analog, the analog will exist forever. It's hard for you to kill. The question is whether you can find the most beauty from the digital at the same time you can most beautiful part of the analog. I would say that the people, just like when talking about software, people still loved the hardware. And people still loved the touch. The digital has to make sure it looks good. Will it work versus it looks good? I would say we want to make sure people live in a world with two sides, instead of just giving them one side of the world. >> You mentioned people still love hardware. I always say, a car drives but there's still an engine, and people like to understand the engine. There's a maker culture in the United States that's been growing over the past two decades. And now even more accelerated is the maker culture because of the edge and how technology has become part of the fabric of life. How do you see that maker culture being enabled by more cloud services? Because anyone can make a skateboard or motorcycle or a computer or a device now. Powering that with the cloud is an opportunity. How do you view that? >> I would say that eventually, if we have the broad definition of a cloud, I would say eventually, everything the maker makes will be part of the cloud. When talking about clouds, we're really talking about Internet, so every hardware, every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. I would say, if you look at the evolution of the Internet, Internet, it's just a backbone at the very beginning. Actually the first revolution the Internet made is really to make sure that every piece of software is a part of Internet. That's how we got the world wide web. I would say when talking about the maker culture, I would say eventually that every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. So Internet won't be complete without the hardware. In that sense, the cloud is a really essential part of that. >> There's some really interesting things happening here in China that I'm excited about. One of them is the nature of the user base and how close you guys are to that. In the US a similar scale but it's kind of spread over a bunch of other cloud providers. But the interesting phenomenon as data grows exponentially, as software grows exponentially in open source, things are becoming more decentralized. Without talking about the whole initial coin offerings, I know China has banned it and Russia's going to ban it. Other countries are putting a clamp down on crypto currency. Putting that aside, there's still blockchain as a potential disruptive enabler. You're seeing decentralization becoming a new architecture dynamic because you have to support the growth of these devices at the edge. Distributive computing has been around for a while, but now a decentralized architecture dynamic exists. How do you steer that technology direction? >> You have to separate from the the distributive architecture versus its physical location. I would say I like the blockchain idea very much. I think eventually it would be part of the Internet. It's not just something that sits on top of the Internet. It would be very fundamental, just like TCP and IP. This is low level, so this would be part of the Internet instead of standing on top of the Internet. Eventually, in that sense, Internet would be very distributed. By thinking that it's nothing, there's no decentralization exists. You still need, even though physically, it's in one place. >> It's almost decentralized, not 100 percent. >> Yeah, yeah. Obviously this would be different. Without Internet, without new software, that basically, just like PC. PC is really in a single box, and we use all software in a box. We distribute architecture. We could have decentralized, but everything actually is distributed. You still cannot trace that. You put like a meeting. A service in a data center. It's actually distributed over this one meeting service. In that sense, it's completely distributed. >> That server list too is a big trend where if you talk about the edge of the network, you got to move compute to the data sometimes. Or have compute on the edge. So this is going to be continued growth, you see that as well right? >> Yes, but I still think, if you use Silicon as a measure for this computing power, I would say if you can see there's more silicon on the edge, but I would say when we put one silicon on the edge, you probably have to put 100 silicons on the cloud. It's still kind of-- >> It's a relationship. >> It's a relationship, just like our body is very important but the brain consumes the most oxygen. >> It's important what's in the cloud then. You got to have the computing, have those ratios. It depends on the architecture. >> Yes, yes. >> Final question for you is as the folks in Silicon Valley, where we're based, and Palo Alto want to know is Alibaba, what it means to them? If you have a chance to say a few things about what Alibaba Cloud is to America, what would you like to say? >> I would say that actually they would just put the cloud computing aside. Just look at what it really means behind that. I think the cloud, we do have an understanding of what the cloud computing really means. At the very beginning actually, I wouldn't call the company a cloud computing company. I would call it a general computing company. It's really a fraction of what's thinking in China. Again, my comment is not just to view China as the market to sell your product. To view China as the place to inspire having a new product. >> And it's a global world now, the world is flat. >> Yes, just like United States, it's not, it's a place inspired. All the people around the world together to have a new idea. I think the people in China just love new things. They love to try new things. It really can shoot your size of your innovation. >> And it's a global collaboration, it's interesting. That phenomenon is going to continue. You've done amazing work here. Congratulations on the Museum of Inspiration and the projects you're working on. Personal question for you. What are you excited about now? We kind of joke about how old we are now, but the young people certainly have a great future ahead of them. But you have a lot of experience and you're steering Alibaba's technology committee across the group as well as being the founder of the cloud. What are you excited about right now, technically speaking? What's the big, or just impact? What's the big wave that you like? >> I think it's very exciting in a couple of things, three things I would say. The first is really about just look at technology itself. Just like when I described my book, it's really, really exciting in your life if you can see the Internet plus the computing and plus data, cause they're together. Just like you have this engine, you have the airplane, a couple of things, they're together wherever. This is a very, very exciting era. This is not just about a technology era. It's an era that all things happen at the same time, so that's very exciting. That's one thing. The second thing as you read about the city around over here, I think the the Alibaba the Hanzo, it's just a very special for Alibaba, but I think it's special for the other company as well. So this place is very special. Just to give you an idea where you are, this area has the most networked river in the past. If you look at the map, it's like Internet. I would say, all the people over here, just their mindset. It's just on an Internet mindset. Even goes back 100, 200 years ago because the river is the only way for them to travel, for the communications-- >> That's the data back then. >> That's exactly my point, see. If you look at the map, so this is very exciting. The other thing about that the Alibaba, for me, the Alibaba you know Alibaba, we have a very broad opinions. You can feel that. From a technology point of view, that basically means it's the place you can touch every aspect of technology. You have a very slight, very-- >> You have a great surface area aperture to look at impact of life. >> So you think about these three things together. It's hard to say the, you better get excited. >> It's a great time to be in technology, isn't it? Entertainment, e-commerce, web services. >> For me, when I work on the city brain project, it's just the beginning of machine learning. A lot of people, they are fighting for like, when people talk about speech recognition, they are fighting for the last one meter for the speech recognition. But if you're talking about city brain, it's the world. The most big AI project. And it's just the beginning. We just start with the one percent. >> It must be a lot of fun. You got a lot of data to work with. You have real life integration. It's super exciting. When are we going to see you in Silicon Valley? >> I appear regularly to Silicon Valley two or three times every year. We'll probably see sometime early next year. >> Thank you very much for the time, appreciate it. >> Thank you for coming to the conference and coming to the museum. >> Thank you very much for your inspiration. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE, for our exclusive coverage in Hangzhou, China for Alibaba Cloud Conference here, it's a Cloud Computing Conference. The entire city is a cloud. We're here at the Intel booth with Peter Chen, who's the general manager of Products and Technology, for Data Center Group Sales of Intel Corporation. Peter, AI is the hottest topic, IoT, Alibaba Cloud, I mean, a huge event here mixing, kind of a cultural shift, generational shift, young developers. >> Definitely lots of crowd, you can see people surrounding us, right? So, artificial intelligence is definitely a hot word here in China for the past 12 months. Everybody's trying to figure it out, what's going on, how they can really use them, so we're very excited as well to really partner with Alibaba to really explore some of the potentials. >> I had a chance to speak with some of the Alibaba executives, and obviously, a strategic partnership with Intel, pretty strategic, and it matters what's inside the Cloud. But it's not an Intel inside like a PC. The AI is showing that there's a little bit of Intel on everything, from IoT, industrial IoT to data center. It's a range of technology that's powering a new kind of software. This is where AI is shining. We're seeing that with machine learning and as data driven technology. So, I got to ask you. What is the view from Intel on AI? Obviously, we see the commercials, we see the technology from Intel. How does that translate to your view on AI? What's that view? >> So, essentially today's AI, artificial intelligence, is powered by three factors, the amount of data, the new algorithms, and lastly the compute power. And Intel has historically been the leader of create and compute. So, for the past many years, we has always been generating new compute powers into the cloud and data centers as well as PCs. But going forward as we look at applying AI to different usages like autonomous driving, for example, you cannot expect everything to be done just in the cloud because we need the real data to be inputted from a car, for instance, all the cameras, all the sensors. So, we do definitely see a need of actually faster processors at the edge as well to constantly bring in the data back into the cloud, so they have an autonomous feedback loop, make sure there will be right decision making. >> Yeah, so Cloud drives this, right? So, it's not just Cloud though, it's software. There's exponential growth in open source software that's causing a Renaissance in the developer community. You're seeing it here in China, a lot of young demographics here. Software and data's tsunami going on. You need compute power. >> Yes, yes. I think, everybody knows Intel is a hardware company, but we do have a very large effort on engaging a software ecosystem. From the old days on engaging Linux, the cloud different software stack, and working with CSPs like Alibaba in China to really make sure they can create and write the new latest software AI framework and taking the most advantage of our hardware platform as well. So, that's something that we've been very focusing on. >> And one of the themes here is the IoT for traffic in China. Obviously, if you've been here, you know it's kind of congested. But Alibaba is giving a lot of talks on how they're using data in this cloud city for traffic, which is an example of IoT, Internet of Things, but applied to the real world. That's where the AI kind of connects with the data. Is that kind of where it's going? >> Yeah, so I think this is a great application, as you just mentioned. And Alibaba calls it City Brain. So, essentially, imagine a normal city like in China, can easily go five million, 10 million people. The amount of people and the amount of traffic that goes on the road every day. So, if the city is able to utilize all these videos' stream of data, feedback from different traffic intersections, and be able to direct traffics and control the traffic lights dynamically, using artificial intelligence, you'd actually solve a lot of the city's congestion problem. So, I think this is where we are seeing a lot of application being explored in China, they're using very innovative, different ways by Alibaba. >> Peter, I've got to ask you because one of the things we're seeing in theCUBE and Wikibon Research is the growth of new kinds of ecosystems. Karen Liu, who runs the America's, general manages for America's Alibaba, said to me that ecosystem is super important for Alibaba as an example. But a new kind of ecosystem is developing. Cloud service providers are becoming a new hot growth area because the specialty of building applications in the cloud is not like it was kind of in the old days. You got to have a little bit of a cloud native mindset, but yet, domain expertise, whether it's traffic or a certain vertical solution. So, it's a little bit of both. Always often scalable, yet specialism. This is going to create a lot of opportunities for cloud service providers. What's your view on that from Intel's perspective? How are you guys seeing that market? Do you agree? And what are you guys looking at, at that market? >> So, obviously cloud service provider, the likes of Alibaba or Amazon, are one of our fastest growing customer base over the past five years. And in the near future, we expect this trend to continue to grow. We definitely see CSPs as a leading edge of driving innovation because they are not just the leading edge of driving consumer usages but they also, like the City Brain project, they've been really close on solving the enterprise problem as well with public cloud. So, I think we're very excited to have the opportunity to be a close partner with a CSP like Alibaba to really help them, providing our latest hardware technology to allow them to drive innovation on top of this offer and with the programs and the algorithms. >> How are they, how are those big cloud service providers, or CSPs like Alibaba, they're a big one, they're the fourth cloud in the world, enabling their CSPs? Because I was just talking to someone on the floor here, an ISV in the old world, who was telling me that he's now a cloud service provider, so you have now this nice balance in the ecosystem developing. You guys see the same thing? How do you guys, looking at that? >> So, this is what we call a hybrid situation. So, while the big CSPs like Alibaba, they have a lot of competency and they have a lot of internal engineering, it may not make sense for them to create every single application in the world. So, there may be some legacy enterprise application, for instance, a CRM software in China, maybe it was really popular, for them to forge a collaboration with the leading company Alibaba to translate their on-prem software stack into a cloud solution. So, I think we definitely see a lot of that collaboration happening, to take the best of the best from the legacy as well as the new public cloud environment to really make the better service for the companies and the customers. >> Create ecosystem opportunity. Okay, so I got to ask. What is the Intel relationship that you guys are doing on your end with Alibaba Cloud? Obviously, they're taking names, they're kicking butt. They're doing well. They're going global. They're not just in China. They're the first cloud provider here in China to go outside the mainland. Obviously, they're in the US, they're in Silicon Valley, our backyard. What's the collaboration? Share the relationship. >> We work very closely with Alibaba. Like you said, they're now the leading cloud service provider in China. They're starting going abroad. And we as an ingredient, knowledge provider perspective, we have a very close collaboration with them, sharing with them our technologies on hardware roadmap as well as software enabling to make sure they can take full advantage of it. So, we're very excited to see the growth of Alibaba over the past few years, and we look forward to seeing them continue to expand their business together with us. >> Yeah, great company. So, I got to ask you, one of the collaborations that got my attention was the, I don't want to say hack-a-thon, it was a competition, it was the AI competition called Tianchi that you guys were a part of with Alibaba. What was Intel's role in that? I saw some of the winners earlier. I didn't get a chance to get the specifics, but take me through this AI competition that Alibaba did with these entrepreneurs. >> So, I'm very, actually very excited. I just talked to one of the winning team just now. So, what happened is, when we talk about artificial intelligence, today it's a lot about image recognition, voice recognition but that's just pure technology. So, what Alibaba decide to do, which in terms of partner, is we created a medical image contest. So, we pick a particular subject, for instance, lung cancer and we invited 16 local hospitals to provide some of the image data of the patients anonymously, and then we opened it up for the software ecosystem, the academia, professors, the schools, and say, hey, why don't you come in and try to compete on the image recognition accuracy based on those X-ray images, using these images? So, it takes about six, we have overwhelming turnout. We have about 3,000 teams from 20 different countries applying to join in the contest, and then we just select the winner yesterday. So, basically, the three winning teams, two of them are from the best universities here in China, one of them is from overseas. And again, Intel's role in this is we provide a lot of consultation help. First of all, we provide the hardware system based on our Xeon Phi clusters, and on top of that, we provide a lot of the software tools, Caffe, image recognition libraries, Intel material libraries to really help the contestant to be able to use the Intel hardware for the maximum to drive the best performance. >> And so, you guys provided the technology, Alibaba the Cloud, and let these guys just take. What was the results? Was there any success? Was there a winner? >> There was a winner. I think the big winner was Beijing University. But I think overall, we are not just excited just because of this specific winners but really the larger intent. If you can imagine in a country like China, there's a lot of people, meaning there's a lot of patients at different part of the country, and not every tier two, tier three city have the same resource or access of the best doctors. If we're able to simplify the lung cancer image recognition to be able to provide this as a tool for all the tier two, tier three cities of China, imagine how much this will change. >> It's a societal impact. >> Definitely. >> And you've got a collective intelligence. It's almost like an open source kind of thing, where the more people doing it. >> It gets better, it gets better. >> The fly wheel. >> And then, we have definitely a lot of hospitals who want to really take advantage of this as well. So, we're really glad on the results of this first round, and I think Alibaba will do a next round with a different subject as well, and we're looking forward to partnering with them again. >> That's inspirational. Okay, great to have you on. Thanks for the commentary. Exclusive coverage. Final thought, what's your thoughts on the event? Where's AI going? Where do you see this trajectory of Alibaba and Intel going? >> So, definitely the event's wonderful and great. This is my third year here. It gets just bigger and bigger every time. So, I'm looking forward to come back for the next couple of years again. Our collaboration with Alibaba has been very close. We work with each other deeply, with our engineers' collaboration, and I look forward to continuing to bring out more successful projects. >> And they're really bringing together, not just science and developers, but artists. You've got a music festival here, feels like South by Southwest meets a developer conference. Societal impact, traffic, solving problems, lung cancer, big data, and data is changing the world. Now, you need the compute power, you need the analytics. Of course, you need SiliconANGLE and theCUBE and Wikibon, exclusive coverage here in China of the Alibaba Cloud Conference. Thanks for watching.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angle's theCUBE here on the ground, in Hangzhou, China. We're here at the Intel Booth as part of our coverage, exclusive coverage of Alibaba Cloud Conference here in the cloud city. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE. And I'm here with CJ Bruno, who is the Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Global Accounts of the sales and marketing group at Intel. That's a mouthful but basically you run a lot of the major accounts, you bring a lot of value to Intel Supplier to these big clouds. >> I do, John. We look after our top 20 or so largest partners and customers around the world. Amazing like Alibaba, edge to cloud enterprises, deep rich engagements, just an exciting, exciting time to be in the business with these big customers. >> And there's no borders to the cloud so its not as easy as saying PC, like people might think of Intel in the old days. You guys have these major cloud providers, there's a lot of intel inside so to speak but that value is enabling a new kind of functionality. We're hearing it here at the show. >> You are. We work together with partners like Ali, in the area of such big artificial intelligence development, big data analytics and of course, the cloud. We've been working with them for over 12 years now and you can see the advancements and the services that they're providing to their customers, not only domestically, here in China but on a global stage as well. >> Its interesting, Intel, you've been working with these guys for 12 years, what a journey, from an entrepreneurial 12 guys in a dorm room, or an apartment for Jackie Ma, that he talks about all the time, to now the powerhouse. What's it like, because these guys have an interesting formula going on here. They're bringing culture and art, with science, kind of sounds like Steve Jobs, technology meets liberal arts, bringing a cultural aspect. How far have they come? Give us some insight into where they've come from and where you think they're going. >> Its amazing, Jack Ma, yesterday in his keynote, talked about this event eight years ago. 120 people, John, we're standing amongst 60,000 or so, in this event today, just eight short years later. Its amazing what they've been able to do. They're driving innovation, this is not a copy economy, it's an innovation economy. They invest, very high-degree of technical acumen. Willingness to break barriers, try things people have not. Fail fast and correct. Take risks. They're entrepreneurs at heart, they're technologists in their bloodstream and they really invest to win. >> You guys are supplying. We talked to people who talk about Photonics, Deeraj Malik, who's really going deep on these pathways around. Some of the Intel innovations, some of it's like wow, mind-blowing. The other end is just practical stuff, making it easier, faster, simpler to run things. IoT, their big use case, I mean you can't get any more sexier than looking at a city cloud that's actually running the city with traffic and all those IoT devices, so what is the big thing that you guys do for Alibaba? Talk about that journey because its not one thing, what is it? What is the magical formula? >> Sure, of course, first off we deliver, we think, world-class ingredients to their world-class cloud. And enable them to deliver amazing services to their customer, at the base level. But we really work together to solve societal problems. Look at the precision medical cloud that we announced last April together, John. Genome sequencing, solving people's cancer problems, in a matter of days, instead of months. Just one example of the real use case that we bring these technologies to bear on and have an amazing influence. We work on them with the Tenatchi Medical Imaging Competition. 3,000 entrants competing to see who can identify lung cancer quickest, and we have some winners selected, just this week. So these things are real, taking this technology, solving real life problems, and business problems, around the globe. >> And its not just the big, heaving lifting technology that moves the needle, like you were mentioning but its also the micro technologies, like FPGA, you guys have got lot of things. This is like the new Intel, so I'd love to get your thoughts, if you can just take a moment to share the journey that Intel is on right now because you gave a talk yesterday, a kind of a keynote, onstage. What is the Intel journey right now look like? >> We're transforming ourselves from a PC centric company to a company that runs the cloud and powers countless numbers, billions and billions of smart-connected devices. That's a big journey we're on. We've diversified our business significantly in a five year period, John. Driving our data-center business, our IoT business, our programmable logic business as you said, our friends from former Alterra are now two years inside Intel. Our memory business, our NSG technologies, 3D NAND Optane, driving breakthroughs in SSDs and of course new technologies that we're exploring, like drones and neuromorphic computing, making sure we never miss the next big thing. >> I've been following Intel for 30 years of my career and life, as an initial user-developer and now in the media. It's interesting, Intel has never done it alone, it's always been part of the ecosystem. You have brought a lot of goods to the party, so to speak, in technology, Moore's law and the list is endless. Now is an end to end game but you look at 5G for instance, you kind of connect the dots, put a radio frequency cloud over a city and you got to run the IoT devices like a city brain, they're showing here. You got to tie it together with programmable arrays, it's a hardware thing but now the software guys are doing it. You've got cloud native with the Linux Foundation, that's DevOps. You've got data centers that are 10 to one silicon to the edge, this is a wide opportunity, how do you guys make sense of it to customers? Because its a complex story. >> It is John, look, we're the ultimate ingredient supplier. We're bringing forward technologies in artificial intelligence, in 5G, in VR and AR, areas that are just autonomous everything. Autonomous driving in particular. These are big investment areas we're driving into that require an enormous amount to compute, storage, networking, connectivity and we're making the investments to make sure we're critical partners with our customers, in all those huge growth areas. Making us a big growth company now. >> I had a great conversation with Dr. Wong, who's the founder of Alibaba Cloud, he's on the Technology Steering Committee for Alibaba Group and yesterday they just announced a 15 billion dollar investment over three years for FinTech, across the board IoT, AI, collaborate with scientists as well as artisans. This is a big deal. >> It is John, this is exactly an example of what I mentioned earlier. These guys invest to win and they have a will to win. And they want to pioneer and they want to innovate and they put their money where their mouth is, in that announcement, its pretty exciting. >> So the cloud serves quite a market, doing really well. Your global accounts are doing well, certainly in Asia and People's Republic of China, PRC, as you guys call it, extremely well but now there's a Renaissance in cloud in general, so we're expecting to see a lot more cloud service providers, maybe not as big as Alibaba but Alibaba is going to start getting customers that become SaaS companies, that's technically a cloud service provider if you think about it, if they have an application, how do you look at that mark? >> We see what is known as the super seven in the industry, the large folks, both US based and China based but then we've identified the next 60-70 next wave CSPs that are growing vibrantly around the globe and there's a long tail of another 120 that we're interacting with. You're absolutely on point, an exploding area. Significant double-digit growth for years to come and just solving, big, big life and business problems. >> So at SiliconANGLE also silicon is in the name and Wikibon Research is really big in China, here, interesting dynamic that's happening here with the data and the software and was brought up with Dr. Wong about the IoTs, kind of a nuanced point but I want to get it out for the folks watching that you're going to start to see new compute at the edge because data is now the currency of the future. It needs to flow, it's like water but at the edge it can be expensive, low latency that table stakes that everyone wants to get to. You're going to see a lot more compute or silicon at the edge of network. Internet of things coming, your view on that? >> There's no question John, that's exactly the way we see it. The time to get the data back to the long-haul data center, is very expensive and very challenging and requires an absolute redo of the network. We're moving to compute closer and closer to the data, of course, the cloud remains a vital, vital part of that but we move that compute capability closer to where the data is sensed, you can analyze it quicker, you can make faster decisions and you can implement those decisions at the edge. >> CJ, final question for you, obviously Alibaba, big part of their growth strategy is going outside mainland China, obviously doing very well here, not to knock them there but great opportunity to go into the global marketplace, specifically North America. That's going to put more competition, competition was good but it's also going to require more growth. How are you helping Alibaba and how does your relationship at Intel expand with Alibaba? >> We work with Alibaba, not only on the technical front of course but on their go-to-market plans, on ecosystem development plans and even some business models. We do that across our entire customer and partner base, John. We're seeing this explosive growth in cloud and being able to work with our partners on all four of those fronts; technology development, ecosystem development, business model development, are obviously a benefit to both of us. >> Alibaba is going to need some help because you know its competitive, Amazon had a nice run for a while, Microsoft nibbling at the heels, Google and now Alibaba coming in. Competition is good. >> We're proud to call all those innovators our customers and we work hard everyday to earn their business. >> Final, final question, this one just popped in my head. What should folks in America know about this PRC market or China market that they may not know about? Obviously they read what they read in the paper. They see the security hacks, they see the crypto-currency temporarily on hold but blockchain certainly has a lot of promise, but it's a dynamic market here. A lot of of opportunities. What should that audience know about the China market? >> I think the first thing they should know is that if they haven't come to experience it themselves they should. The scale of the opportunity, the scale of the country is like nothing people have ever seen before. As I said, the investments they're making-to innovate, to drive an innovation economy is breakthrough. You take that scale and that investment and this is a market to be reckoned with. >> Congratulations on the 12 year run with Alibaba, and now Alibaba Cloud. Looking really, really, strong, love the culture, got to unique twist; artistry and scientific cultures coming together, looking good. >> Absolutely John, thanks for letting us tell our story. >> CJ Bruno, Group Vice President, General Manager Global Accounts for Intel. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, thanks for watching.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents theCUBE! Covering the Alibaba Cloud annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, welcome to exclusive coverage with SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE here in Hangzhou, China for Alibaba Cloud's annual event here in Cloud City, the whole town is a Cloud. This is their event with developers, music festivals, and again, theCUBE coverage. Our next guest is Dhiraj Mallick, who is the Vice President of the Data Center Group, and the General Manager of Innovation, Pathfinding, and Architecture Group. That's a mouthful. Basically the CTO of the Data Center Group, trying to figure out the next big thing. >> That's right, John. >> Thanks for spending the time. >> It's my pleasure. >> We're here in China, it's-- You know in the U.S., we're looking at China, and we say okay, the fourth largest Cloud, Alibaba Cloud? >> Yes. >> Going outside of Mainland China, going global. You guys are strategic partners with them. >> Yes. >> They need a lot of compute, they need a lot of technology. Is this the path that you're finding for Intel? >> Yeah, so we've been collaborators with Alibaba for over 10 years, and we view them as a very strategic partner. They're one of the Super Seven, which is our top seven Cloud providers, and certainly in China, they're a very relevant customer for many years. We engage with them on a variety of fronts. On the technology side, we engage with them on what their key pinpoints are, what is the problems they want to be solving three to five years out, and then we co-develop, or co-architect solutions with them. >> So, I want to get your take on the event here in China, and how it relates to the global landscape, because I, it's my first time here, and I was taken back by the booth. I walked through Alibaba's booth, and obviously Jack Ma is inspirational. Steve Jobs like the culture, and artistry and science coming together, but I walked through the booth, it's almost too good to be true. They've got Quantum Computing, a Patent Wall, they've got Hybrid Cloud, they got security, they have IoT examples with The City Brain, a lot of great tech here at Alibaba Cloud. >> So I think the technologies that they're investing in are very, very impressive. Most cloud companies are probably not as far along as them, and looking at such a broad range of technologies, the Brain Project is really exciting, because it's going to be the Nexus of smart cities, both in China, as well as globally. The second thing that's very interesting is their research and investments in Quantum. While Quantum is not here today, it's certainly on the frontier, and Intel also has significant investments in sort of unpacking where Quantum will go, and what promises it offers to address. >> What I find interesting is that also hearing the positioning of, I kind of squint through the positioning, they're almost talking Cloud-native, DevOps, but they have all this goodness under the hood, and they're kind of talking IT-transitioning to Data Technology. Everything's about data to these guys, not just collecting data, using data with software. Now, that's really critical, because isn't that software-defined, data-driven is a hot trend? >> Yes, software-defined and data-driven is a very hot trend, in fact at Intel our CEO and us all believe that we've entered the data economy, and that the explosion in data is, and the thirst for analyzing that data to be able to drive smart business analytics is really the key to this digital revolution. I was reading an industry report by one of the analysts that said by 2019 there would have been over 100 billion dollars spent on business intelligence. And so, the real key is this data economy. >> The intersection of things, and even industrial internet, IIot, Industrial Iot, with artificial intelligence AI, intelligence Intel inside that word, interesting play on words-- >> Yes. >> Is coming together, and we've covered what you guys were doing on Mobile World Congress this year, where 5G was clearly an end-to-end architecture. You got FPGAs, all this goodness here going on. So that's 5G, and that's going to fuel a lot of IoT if you think of it like that way, but now AI. >> Yes. >> It's Software. How does that connect? Because that's the path we see forward on the Wikibon analyst side, we see software eating the world, but data eating software. And now you got 5G creating more data. >> Yeah, so the way we look at it at Intel is, we have data-center technologies that are fueled by the growth at the Edge by IoT devices, because they're creating demand for more processing capability to be able to unpack and analyze that information, and it's a self-fulfilling circle. We call it the virtual cycle of growth, because the data center feeds IoT demand and then IoT feeds the data center. And so it's the combination of those. What 5G does, is 5G forms the connectivity fabric between the data center and the Edge. It allows data to be pre-positioned at the correct places in the network, so that you minimize latencies through the network, and can process or do the analytics on it as quickly as you possibly can. >> So we were talking before we came on camera about Jack Ma, they call him Jackie Ma here, keynote being very inspirational, and talking moving to a new industrial era, a digital economy, all that good stuff, very, very inspirational. Let's translate that into the data center transformation, because we're seeing the data center and the Cloud with Hybrid Cloud become really critical to support what you were just talking about which is, how do you put it all together? It sounds so easy, but it really is difficult. >> It is, and so our vision is that in order to be able to fulfill this data economy, we will need to have five key innovations in the data center. The first innovation, in no particular order, is that the data center will be frictionless. And what I mean by frictionless, is that there will be zero to low latencies in order to provide that real-time experience at the Edge. So latency is extremely critical, and the way we believe that that can be achieved is by moving from copper to light. And Intel has significant investments in leadership products and silicon photonics that will enable switches to be based on photonics. It'll enable CPUs, and server hosts to be based on light. So we believe that light is a critical aspect to this success. The second aspect of frictionless is the need for liquid cooling and that was in the keynotes from Simon Hu this morning, that the liquid cooling is going to be essential to be able to enable a lot more horsepower in these data centers to be able to handle the volume of data that's coming. >> So you guys obviously with the photonics and the liquid cooling, you guys have been working on this in your labs for a long time, it's great R&D, but you need the connective tissue because with 5G you're now talking about a ubiquitous RF cloud, powering autonomous vehicles. We're seeing the Brain Project here, ET Brain, the City Brain-- >> Yes. >> Which is essentially IoT and big data being a big application that they're showcasing. What's the connective tissue? How does that work, from the data center, to the Edge? What's Intel's position? How do you see it? And what's going to unfold in front of our eyes? >> Yeah, so two things, so number one, I believe that the data center is boundary-less. It's not based on four physical walls. It's a connected link between the data center, and all the Edge devices that you called IoT. In order to fulfill this, you have to have 5G technology. We're invested in Silicon, in radio technologies, as well as in driving the 5G industry in consortia, to be able to bring 5G solutions to market. We think that 5G, as well as a tiered architecture between the Edge to the center, where you do some processing at the Edge, the radio stations, some in intermediate data centers, and then some in the back end Cloud data center, is what's going to be essential, and Intel has significant investments, both in developing this distributed hierarchical architecture, as well as in 5G. >> That's a great point. I want to just unpack that, and double-click on it a little bit, because you mentioned data at the Edge, and you also said earlier, low latency. Okay, a lot of people have been talking about, it costs you speed and time to move data around. So there's no real one general architecturing, where you have to kind of decide the architecture for the use case. >> Yes. >> So, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, whoever has the workloads or the equipment. >> Yes. >> How do you look at that, because now you're thinking about, if I don't want to move data around, maybe you shouldn't, maybe you want to move data around. How does that fit with the Cloud of model, because we're seeing Cloud being a great use case for IoT in one instance, and maybe not in another. How do you think about that? How should practitioners think about the data architecture? >> Yeah, so our vision is that the Cloud changes from a centralized Cloud, to a distributed Cloud, and is amorphoused between the Edge where the IoT devices are, and the backend, and the way to think about it perhaps, is to say that storage as people have envisioned it, as being centralized, that paradigm has to change, and storage has to become distributed, such that data is available at different points in the network, and my vision is that you don't want to move data around, you want to minimize data movement for most use cases, and you want to have it pre-positioned on the 5G network, and you want to move the compute to the data, that's more energy-efficient. >> So I got to ask you, as someone who's doing the path-finding, which is the future path for Intel, and innovation and architecture. I was talking with some practitioners recently at another event, and trying to find someone, because I don't speak Chinese very well. But they asked me the same question. It matters what's in my Cloud. And what they mean by their Cloud, either on-premise private Cloud that they're putting together, operating model of their business, now going Cloud-like. But also as they pick their Cloud provider, they want to have multi-Cloud, and so what's in their Cloud, and their Cloud provider's matters. You guys are the inside of the Cloud across many spectrums, Intel. >> Yes. >> How should a customer think about that question? What's in my Cloud? Why should it matter, and it should matter. What's your take on that, and what should they look for? >> Yeah, so my take is that for years we've had the debate of whether it's public Cloud, or private Cloud, or on-prem Cloud. Our view is that the world is Hybrid, which is why we are big supporters of Alibaba, and the Hybrid Cloud movement, and as such, if it's Hybrid, it sort of suggests that the end state is that there'll be about an equal amount of applications that run on public versus private, and so I think the number of applications have an affinity to move into the public Cloud, like mail, and then there's other applications that you might care more about the compliance and security that you would say have an affinity to being on-prem. >> Also you mentioned that there's no walls, it's boundary-less in the data center. Okay, there's no door, there's no mote, you can't put a firewall on that door, unlimited access surface area for security. Obviously security hacks are big. We found out today that Israel had hacked, and notified the NSA. Hacking is a huge problem. Equifax is going to be another one. How should customers protect themselves? >> It's a very fair question John. This is one of the side-effects of saying that the data center will be boundary-less. We now have to have security technologies that can, we've effectively expanded the attacks of security in a significant way, but I don't think the answer is to say we need to move backwards and not adopt this boundary-less Cloud. I think we want to adopt it, and we want to develop technologies. So at Intel, we are developing multiple isolation technologies that allow different VM and container tenants to be isolated from other tenants. >> And this was your point earlier, making the device more intelligent, whether that's more on-board memory, and more chips. >> Yes. >> That's what you were kind of referring to, is that right? >> That's correct. >> Okay great, so I want to get one kind of off-the-wall question, since I have you on here. It's just a brain trust here from Intel, which it's great to have him here. Distributed computing has been around for awhile, we know all about that. Network effects, distributed computing, the computer industry. But now we're seeing a trend with decentralization. Blockchain is one shining example. Russia just banned cryptocurrency. This poses a architectural challenge. What's your thoughts on the decentralization, and distributed architectures that are emerging? Opportunity is scary. How should customers think about decentralization? >> Well certainly there's a security challenge, as we just spoke, related to this. But I think the computer industry has oscillated, depending on the era and the needs between centralized and decentralized a number of times now. And we're going through an era where decentralization makes sense, because we expect 30 to 50 billion devices at the Edge, and so you can't handle that with a centralized model, primarily due to three reasons, number one, just moving that volume of data would be very expensive to do over the network. Second there'll be a number of applications that are latency-sensitive. And third, you might care about data federation, and crossing country boundaries in a number of cases. So I think for the use case that we have with IoT, we have to adopt decentralized and distributed. >> So, if The Brain is processing and data, and you've got plenty of it at Intel with more compute power, what's the central nervous system, the metadata? >> Well, actually look at the central nervous system as the 5G distributed network that enables the end-points, or the nerve endings if you will, to be connected to the spinal cord. >> Okay so a final question for you, I really appreciate you spending the time. >> Sure, it's been a pleasure. >> Intel's been a wave company in its generation, and obviously Moore's law, it's not well documented. It seems that Moore's law is every year some journalist claims Moore's law is dead, and that it never goes away, so we expect more and more innovation coming from Intel. You guys have surfed many waves. In your opinion, what waves are coming? Because it feels like the waves are big now, but a lot of people think that there's bigger waves coming. That the big wave set is coming in. What's the technology wave that you're looking at from a path-finding, innovation standpoint, that customers should look for, maybe prepare for. It could be further out coming in. What's the big wave coming in, obviously AI was seeing these things. What's your focus on that? >> So, a number of them. I think, you know distributed computing is not a solved problem yet. But certainly it needs to be solved to be able to address these end-point challenges. Another great example I think, is around visual computing. So in the past, most of the type of data that people handled, was textual. But that's moving to visual very rapidly, and there's so many examples. You brought up the City Brain Project as an example. But video and analyzing images, requires a different kind of art. Different compression techniques. If a human doesn't need to see it, you perhaps don't have to have as high a resolution, and so there's a number of ships in the assumption space. And so I think for me, visual computing is a great opportunity, as well as a wave, that's coming at us. >> And the software too. So the final question, final, final question. Alibaba here, are connecting the dots. You can see where it's going. How do you see the Cloud service provider opportunity, because obviously they're a Cloud service provider on paper, but they're big, they're a Native Cloud now, like with the big guys like Amazon, Google, Microsoft. But we're seeing an emergence of new class of Cloud service provider. Certainly our research is showing that what was a very thin neck in the power laws, now expanding into a much bigger range, where VARs and value-edited software developers are going to start doing their own Cloud-like solutions with the Native Clouds, because they need horizontally scalable data infrastructure, connective tissue, and Edge devices from Intel, but they're going to provide software expertise that's vertically specialized, whether it's traffic, IoT, or oil and gas, or financial, Fintech. The specialism of application developers combined with horizontally scalable Cloud, it seems like a renaissance in the Cloud service provider market. Do you see that as well, and how should the industry think about this potential renaissance? >> So I think there's two possibilities. One is for the vast majority of functions that people run in the public Cloud, I think one possibility is that there's a consolidation amongst a few players. But I think your point's a very good one. That they are specialized services that companies are able to provide, where they're able to carve out a niche, and become a Cloud provider for that particular set of functions, as well as there's a second reason that motivates regional Cloud providers to succeed, again, because of data federation requirements, as well as local proximal, proximity to the end-points. I think these two phenomena are likely to drive the emergence of regional Clouds, as well as specialized Clouds, like you described to perform certain functions. >> And potentially a new kind of ecosystem development. >> Yes. >> And this is, then you guys are all about ecosystems, so is Alibaba. >> That's right. >> Dhiraj, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, this is exclusive CUBE coverage with SiliconANGLE, and Wikibon here in China with Intel's booth here. Talking about AI, and the future of the data center and Cloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents ... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE. We are here for an exclusive Cube conversations at the Alibaba Cloud conference here in Hangzhou, China. We're here with Dr. Wang, who's the chairman of the Alibaba Group Technology Committee as well as the founder of Alibaba Cloud, here in the new Museum of Inspiration at the event. Thanks for spending the time with me. >> Thank you for coming. >> So before we talk about Alibaba Cloud and all the goodness going on here at the conference, talk about this Museum of Inspiration. It is new, and it has kind of a display theme. You kind of walk through time. What was the motivation and the inspiration for the museum? >> Yeah, I think the keyword for the museum, inspiration, is really the inspiration that started the museum. I would say that there's two, really the artists thinking about that. The first thing is really about when people, people take a lot of things for granted. One of the goals for this museum, it just shows the people they probably see every day. But just let them, just, wow, okay, that's different from what I thought. I think a lot of people take for granted, but it's really a great invention, a great human contribution to the whole society. I think that one thing is really about that people understand why we got here today. So that's the first thing. The other thing is really about science and technology. When people are talking about science and technology, people often will say, whether we can combine science and technology. But I don't think that's the right way to describe the relationship between science and technology. I would say science and technology, really the two sides of the coin. I really want to see, let people to see two sides instead of mixing together and got one thing. So that's two things that's parallel, just like zero and one. They are two things. When they're put together in a computer, amazing things happen. If you mix the zero and the one, like half something, then it's just not that fun. So I really want to make sure it's the museum of science and art instead of the mixture of science and arts. So that's the one thing. The other thing is really about the inspiration of future. Most of the museum is really about the past, to show how we have in the past, and with less on the inspiration to help people to think about the future. This museum is really, when we think about everything over here, we did talk about the past, but we want to make sure people think about the future. That's the whole idea about the museum. >> And the computer industry is fairly young, if you go back to modern computing. But you kind of have a take here about how technology really is embedded in life. Talk more about that impact 'cause that seems to translate to the conference here at Alibaba, that technology isn't just about the speeds and the feeds, it's about the integration into life. >> Yeah, and I think that from this museum we can see actually I trace back the origin of all the technology. When people are talking about the computer technology, I really want to talk about the computing technology. And then we can trace back, see actually the human is the first signal computing device. Our Mother Nature created for us. If you look at the same things differently, you really can see the origin of that. I think in this museum we talk about two really original things. The first is about the nature origin of the Internet. When talking about Internet, people talk about our current technological infrastructure of Internet. When you look at the human history, how is when people walk, you create an Internet for Earth? You can see a lot of things can trace back. Then, with this kind of trace back, you can help us to think about what's going to happen next. The trace of the original idea is actually very important if you're thinking about technology. >> Talk about the story of Alibaba Cloud. That is not, It's new, Amazon has had it for around, early 2000's. But you guys came right after Amazon, 2009. Still young and growing. How does the Alibaba Cloud take the culture of this inspiration? What are some of the design principles of the Alibaba Cloud? >> Actually I would say the Alibaba Cloud is different from the Amazon Cloud. In the sense we have different vision about the future. Unfortunately though, we are put under the same umbrella called cloud computing by media, I will say that. So we are different, in the sense when the Amazon, actually I show great respect to Amazon. When Amazon started cloud computing, they are really talking about the utility. They're talking about how to cut the cost down. So basically, they start with the low cost of IT infrastructure. That's what I understand. When I started Alibaba Cloud, we know that actually cost is important for sure. But we know that actually the computing part is more important than the cost if you're thinking about the big data era. We started with thinking it's the acentric cloud computing. When you look at our first brochure and we put those words over there. That's almost nine years ago. We called it acentric cloud computing. Instead of the IT-centric cloud computing. This actually, it's not just an idea difference. It's actually, eventually, influenced of the underlying technology infrastructure. Our whole underlying technological infrastructure is designed for the data, instead of just for the IT deployment. >> Jack Ma was talking about this industrial revolution, this digital transformation. What strikes me is you guys have that same art and scientist dynamic, art and science coming together, reminds me of the Steve Jobs technology liberal arts thinking that spawns new creativity. Certainly the iPhone is a great example of that as one of the many things. But now the new generation is coming together. You have a big artist focus here at the event. Music festival, not just technology. How is that part of the focus at the event here? What does that mean for new developers? >> I think it's really the crossing behind that. If you're thinking about technology and now e-commerce, what's really the one thing behind that that's really changed the way of peoples' lives? Computing in that sense, computing is not just technology. It's really something that changes the way of life of every people. I think the e-commerce change the way of life of every people. In that sense, they are the same. If you look at the peoples' lives, they won't just live on technology. They won't just live on the arts. They need a life, love means everything. By nature, we have to make sure as consumers, they need something more than just one thing. I think we are very lucky we understand that. If you're thinking about the young people, I will give you a few numbers about this conference about young people. In China, we have a very specific word talking about the young people a couple of years ago. We call the 'badiho'. It basically means the generation born of the '80s. When people talk about 'jodiho', that basically means people born after '90s. And then people talking about the 'leniho' it's basically people born after 2000. I think that most of the visitors for this conference are 'leniho', 'jodiho', and 'badiho'. These are all young, all young people. >> The digital culture. >> It's a digital culture. I would rather use my own word in the book I would say instead of digital. For me, digital generation is already an old generation I would say. I would like to call this the online generation. They do everything online. Even the last generation do a lot of things digital because digital is everywhere. But I want to emphasize it's an online generation. They do everything online. >> Dr. Wang, talk about data. You mentioned that's the key ingredient, the fuel for innovation. That's impacting the city brain project you guys are doing. Talk about the city brain and the role of data and how that's impacting the societal users out there certainly here in China, the traffic is crowded. This is just an example of what else is out there. >> Okay. City brain actually it's, again it means different things based on the perspective. One thing that's probably important is the data. This is first time actually I think instead of using the big data, it's better to using what I call the data results. It's a better word than big data. I think the one fundamental thinking for the city brain is we find a human army. Humans finally realize actually that data results is the most precious resource for the city, instead of land and water supply. Because we already know that the land is limited. The water supply is limited. This is very important. It doesn't view data as a non-essential thing. It's just a part of your IT system. We finally realize that data is part of the city instead of part of your city IT system. I think it's a leap frog thinking, at least for me. When it got to that, and you realize that today all the existing IT systems cannot actually really embrace the data. IT system is just to support the people doing the work they used to do. And then you realize we need an infrastructure to really make the value from the data. Just like we have water supply for the city, then you can use the reservoir. Otherwise, the reservoir is useless for the city. I think city brain is just like a water supply system for the data. The city eventually can consume that. We start thinking it's a new infrastructure for the city just like water supply system, just like power grid, just like any way system. That's how we're thinking about it. This is the first thing. The reason we got to the traffic system is this is the problem every city has around the world. From my yesterday's presentation, I just joked about we build two roads for the city, which is too many. I was thinking a lot of people realize it. That's why Boston had the project. They want to get all the roads under the surface. Under surface. But it's still a road. It's still expensive. You know how much money they spend just to move all the roads. >> The big dig, I remember, that was the-- >> Yes, that's a big dig. I don't think that's, that's good for the transportation system, but I don't think that's the number one way for the growth of the city. I think probably most of the city don't have the money to do that. What the data city brain wants to do whether we can take the resource of data and we can optimize every aspect of the city so we can use less resource to support city growth. When we start with the traffic, it's just to make sure, you know that when we use the data to optimize the traffic lights, the idea behind that actually we use the data to optimize the time. How to just read the time. It's not just lights. And then if you're thinking, when we show the eventually, if you have enough data, then we can have less roads in the city but still got the same. >> So the Internet of Things is the hottest trend. 0bviously machine learning and artificial intelligence are part of that, and the cloud powers this new edge of the network, and the data has to flow. So the question that a lot of technologists who are architecting these solutions ask is how do you make the data go at a very low latency? That takes compute power. That takes a lot of technology. How does Alibaba Cloud think about the architecture? Obviously you have a strategic partner like Intel, Obviously with a lot of compute power. You got to think differently around making the data move. If it's like water, it needs to flow. So real time is really important, but self-driving cars, real time is down to the millisecond, nanosecond. How do you think about that as a technologist? >> I think the, if you go back to the Internet of things, I think it's still the Internet. I would say eventually, if you're thinking about the word cloud computing and people use edge computing and people talking about Internet of things. For me, it's just the computing of the Internet. Cloud computing is the computing of the Internet and edge computing is computing on the Internet. Even the IoT is the computing of the Internet. If you're talking about the data, I think eventually it's really about the data on the Internet. It's not data on the sensor. It's not data on the cloud. Basically it's data on the Internet. I would expect eventually the Internet infrastructure will be improved significantly. It's not an improved cloud. It's not improved edge computing. Or it's improvement of the IoT. But it's really, >> Together. >> it's together. >> So Intel, I was covering them, Mobile World Congress earlier in the year. And obviously five G. You need the mobile overlay, that's super important. You also have the end-to-end inside the cloud. Obviously Intel is a strategic partner. Can you talk about the relationship you have with Intel? And also your philosophy, technically speaking, with the ecosystem? Because it's not just Intel, it's everybody. There's a lot of people here at this event. American companies as well as international companies who are now going to be part of your ecosystem. >> Actually the, we certainly have a very good relationship with Intel. I think we share in some sense the same vision. I think that the number one thing is really about people learning about how important the computing is. For me, the Intel is not that, a chip selling company. Intel is really the provider of computing power. That's what I understand. And we can expect eventually the whole ecosystem is really about who is going to provide the computing power. Who is going to provide the infrastructure to make the data? Instead of just equipment supply, eventually the need for computing, and the need for data, will be the challenge for every company, including Alibaba Cloud. We are not, we are not immune from these challenges. We will feel the same challenge. What we want to do is really make sure that with all these partners, provide enough computing for the next 10 or 20 years. We want to make sure that there's enough data flow for the next 10 years. In that sense, it's not the traditional ecosystem as like you do this and you do that. It's basically how we can work together to really make sure we have the challenge for the data and computing in the next 10 years. >> Yesterday we covered the news that you guys announced 15, building and R&D over the next three years, which is a lot of money. Also it has a very international and global view. Academics with younger folks. Alibaba Cloud is going to be a part of that, I'm assuming. I'd love to get your thoughts on how you see that intersecting. But the question for you is the cloud world today is moving at very, very fast speed. We're seeing Amazon, for instance, has been the best in terms of new announcements every year. Not one or two, like a ton of announcements, a lot. How are you guys going to continue to keep the pace? To move faster because the city brain is a great project, but it's going to have more evolution. It's going to move fast. How are you guys keeping up with the pace? >> I think the only way, that's not just for the next 10 years. Actually when I started Alibaba Cloud, we take the same philosophy. Actually the user moves very fast than us. If you look at the users in China they move very fast probably than anywhere else around the world. If you use the city brain project, I would say city brain project is basically tell the people, we need the computing power more than any other task. You really can see that. People want you. If you can't satisfy their demand, then somebody else is going to do that. It's not something we want to move fast but >> You have to move fast. >> You have to move fast. That's why the China is special. I want to say China is not just a place for the market. China is the place that pushes you to move faster. That's more important than market size. >> You mentioned data technology and information technology kind of transferring to a new world. Software is also a big part of it. Software you have to compute, obviously with Intel and the relationships you have. But software is growing exponentially. Certainly in open source, we see Cloud Native Foundation here. They'll probably have Linux foundation. Open source is going to grow exponentially. Most of the code will be shipping. But you have more data growing exponentially. Software is eating the world, but data is eating software. That means data is greater than software. If you look at it that way, that's super important. As the new architects, you and I were just talking about how we've in the industry for a while. You certainly have an amazing career from Microsoft now at Alibaba. A new generation of architects and developers are going to create new innovations around this dynamic of data. What's your advice and how do you view that if you are 21 years old again right now and you were going to jump into studies and academic and or field. It's a whole new world. >> I think there's probably two suggestions. Not necessarily for the young generation, but I would say it's just a suggestion for the young generation to push that habit. The first thing you mentioned about the data eats software. Well, I would put it in a different perspective. I would say for the last generation, the last two or three generations, I would say the computer era, we are really talking about the computer software. That's pretty much in everything. For this generation, I would say we are talking about computing plus the data. That box is not important, but the computing power is more important. For the computing era, the box is important. >> There's no box. It's the world, it's the cloud. >> That's one thing. The implication for this, I want the young generation to push is, then we need the new infrastructure. Thinking about the build as a great vision, got to have the computer in every home. That's infrastructure. Today when you are in the computing process data era, the infrastructure is not there. I think the vision for the Alibaba Cloud is make sure that we have this infrastructure for the next 10 or 20 years so the young generation can take advantage of that and to do that innovation and inventions, just like computing in every home. >> That's very important. I think that also speaks to businesses, how enterprises, I remember my first start up, I had to buy all this equipment and put it into the telephone closet. Now, start ups and small businesses don't need IT departments. This has been a big growth area certainly for Alibaba Cloud. But now all businesses might have a small closet, not a big data center. This is going to change the nature of business. So work and play are coming together. This speaks to the Museum of Inspiration theme here where you can have work and play kind of integrate but yet still be separate in that analog digital world. What's your vision on this new dimension of everything doesn't have to be just digital? You can have an analog life and mix it with digital. >> Actually I was always sad. It's not, the world never has just one side. It always has two sides. The difference is which side is important at a particular time. Just like when people talk about digital and analog, the analog will exist forever. It's hard for you to kill. The question is whether you can find the most beauty from the digital at the same time you can most beautiful part of the analog. I would say that the people, just like when talking about software, people still loved the hardware. And people still loved the touch. The digital has to make sure it looks good. Will it work versus it looks good? I would say we want to make sure people live in a world with two sides, instead of just giving them one side of the world. >> You mentioned people still love hardware. I always say, a car drives but there's still an engine, and people like to understand the engine. There's a maker culture in the United States that's been growing over the past two decades. And now even more accelerated is the maker culture because of the edge and how technology has become part of the fabric of life. How do you see that maker culture being enabled by more cloud services? Because anyone can make a skateboard or motorcycle or a computer or a device now. Powering that with the cloud is an opportunity. How do you view that? >> I would say that eventually, if we have the broad definition of a cloud, I would say eventually, everything the maker makes will be part of the cloud. When talking about clouds, we're really talking about Internet, so every hardware, every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. I would say, if you look at the evolution of the Internet, Internet, it's just a backbone at the very beginning. Actually the first revolution the Internet made is really to make sure that every piece of software is a part of Internet. That's how we got the world wide web. I would say when talking about the maker culture, I would say eventually that every piece of hardware will be part of Internet. So Internet won't be complete without the hardware. In that sense, the cloud is a really essential part of that. >> There's some really interesting things happening here in China that I'm excited about. One of them is the nature of the user base and how close you guys are to that. In the US a similar scale but it's kind of spread over a bunch of other cloud providers. But the interesting phenomenon as data grows exponentially, as software grows exponentially in open source, things are becoming more decentralized. Without talking about the whole initial coin offerings, I know China has banned it and Russia's going to ban it. Other countries are putting a clamp down on crypto currency. Putting that aside, there's still blockchain as a potential disruptive enabler. You're seeing decentralization becoming a new architecture dynamic because you have to support the growth of these devices at the edge. Distributive computing has been around for a while, but now a decentralized architecture dynamic exists. How do you steer that technology direction? >> You have to separate from the the distributive architecture versus its physical location. I would say I like the blockchain idea very much. I think eventually it would be part of the Internet. It's not just something that sits on top of the Internet. It would be very fundamental, just like TCP and IP. This is low level, so this would be part of the Internet instead of standing on top of the Internet. Eventually, in that sense, Internet would be very distributed. By thinking that it's nothing, there's no decentralization exists. You still need, even though physically, it's in one place. >> It's almost decentralized, not 100 percent. >> Yeah, yeah. Obviously this would be different. Without Internet, without new software, that basically, just like PC. PC is really in a single box, and we use all software in a box. We distribute architecture. We could have decentralized, but everything actually is distributed. You still cannot trace that. You put like a meeting. A service in a data center. It's actually distributed over this one meeting service. In that sense, it's completely distributed. >> That server list too is a big trend where if you talk about the edge of the network, you got to move compute to the data sometimes. Or have compute on the edge. So this is going to be continued growth, you see that as well right? >> Yes, but I still think, if you use Silicon as a measure for this computing power, I would say if you can see there's more silicon on the edge, but I would say when we put one silicon on the edge, you probably have to put 100 silicons on the cloud. It's still kind of-- >> It's a relationship. >> It's a relationship, just like our body is very important but the brain consumes the most oxygen. >> It's important what's in the cloud then. You got to have the computing, have those ratios. It depends on the architecture. >> Yes, yes. >> Final question for you is as the folks in Silicon Valley, where we're based, and Palo Alto want to know is Alibaba, what it means to them? If you have a chance to say a few things about what Alibaba Cloud is to America, what would you like to say? >> I would say that actually they would just put the cloud computing aside. Just look at what it really means behind that. I think the cloud, we do have an understanding of what the cloud computing really means. At the very beginning actually, I wouldn't call the company a cloud computing company. I would call it a general computing company. It's really a fraction of what's thinking in China. Again, my comment is not just to view China as the market to sell your product. To view China as the place to inspire having a new product. >> And it's a global world now, the world is flat. >> Yes, just like United States, it's not, it's a place inspired. All the people around the world together to have a new idea. I think the people in China just love new things. They love to try new things. It really can shoot your size of your innovation. >> And it's a global collaboration, it's interesting. That phenomenon is going to continue. You've done amazing work here. Congratulations on the Museum of Inspiration and the projects you're working on. Personal question for you. What are you excited about now? We kind of joke about how old we are now, but the young people certainly have a great future ahead of them. But you have a lot of experience and you're steering Alibaba's technology committee across the group as well as being the founder of the cloud. What are you excited about right now, technically speaking? What's the big, or just impact? What's the big wave that you like? >> I think it's very exciting in a couple of things, three things I would say. The first is really about just look at technology itself. Just like when I described my book, it's really, really exciting in your life if you can see the Internet plus the computing and plus data, cause they're together. Just like you have this engine, you have the airplane, a couple of things, they're together wherever. This is a very, very exciting era. This is not just about a technology era. It's an era that all things happen at the same time, so that's very exciting. That's one thing. The second thing as you read about the city around over here, I think the the Alibaba the Hanzo, it's just a very special for Alibaba, but I think it's special for the other company as well. So this place is very special. Just to give you an idea where you are, this area has the most networked river in the past. If you look at the map, it's like Internet. I would say, all the people over here, just their mindset. It's just on an Internet mindset. Even goes back 100, 200 years ago because the river is the only way for them to travel, for the communications-- >> That's the data back then. >> That's exactly my point, see. If you look at the map, so this is very exciting. The other thing about that the Alibaba, for me, the Alibaba you know Alibaba, we have a very broad opinions. You can feel that. From a technology point of view, that basically means it's the place you can touch every aspect of technology. You have a very slight, very-- >> You have a great surface area aperture to look at impact of life. >> So you think about these three things together. It's hard to say the, you better get excited. >> It's a great time to be in technology, isn't it? Entertainment, e-commerce, web services. >> For me, when I work on the city brain project, it's just the beginning of machine learning. A lot of people, they are fighting for like, when people talk about speech recognition, they are fighting for the last one meter for the speech recognition. But if you're talking about city brain, it's the world. The most big AI project. And it's just the beginning. We just start with the one percent. >> It must be a lot of fun. You got a lot of data to work with. You have real life integration. It's super exciting. When are we going to see you in Silicon Valley? >> I appear regularly to Silicon Valley two or three times every year. We'll probably see sometime early next year. >> Thank you very much for the time, appreciate it. >> Thank you for coming to the conference and coming to the museum. >> Thank you very much for your inspiration. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.