>> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain. It's the Cube. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is day two of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Peter Burris, Alain Andreoli is here. He's the Senior Vice President and general manager of the hybrid IT group at HPE. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you David, great to see you Peter. >> So, a lot of good energy here, the story Alain is coming together. >> Alain: Yes. >> We've seen it over the last five years but really fine-tuned the organization and seems like things are going well. >> We have more clarity on our strategy than I've ever seen in a company, and this was not easy to do because the market is changing so fast. We addressing $120 billion market in hybrid IT, we lead the market in compute, we lead the market in storage, we lead the market with private cloud, we have invented composable, we are ramping up our Harper converge offering, and now on top of the infrastructure, we building these layers of one sphere, which is managing a multi-cloud environment for the data, and we are adjusting our services to become advisory and consumption models. This is having such an impact on our customers, 74 percent of our customers are going for hybrid IT journey. So we have organized ourselves to make this journey to be basically the partner of choice for our customers as they go through that. >> I mean so cloud of the last five, seven years, cloud and open-source software have really disrupted our industry. You've had to respond to that, and basically bringing cloud-like operating models to your customers. >> Alain: Yes. >> How have you done that, how do you rate your progress and where are you to date in that regard? >> So the first decision we had to make is are we a neutral party to our customers? (laughing) >> Dave: Yeah. >> We need to redo it. (laughing) >> They're getting you back, right? So, I don't know if you can see that, alright? Alain came by on his scooter, here we go, let's catch this. Here we go, this is called payback. (laughing) During Dr. Tom's interview, Alain came by with his scooter. (laughing) >> I will get you, I will get you for this. (laughing) >> It's great fun on the Cube. >> We can kid, that's alright. >> That's good. >> So the decision we had to make is are we the partner for our customers to go to the cloud or are we saying on PRIM is better? >> Dave: Yeah. >> And we 'vedecided to be this partner. Because we believe there is value for everyone and we believe it is not a one-way street. And we see actually that 32 percent of the customers who have moved work loads to the cloud are bringing these work loads back on PRIM. So we had to advise them. We helped them go through this journey, we really mean it, we helped them to go on Amazon, we helped them to go on Azure, we helped them to go on Google, and we helped them make it work, and this is why it's a service-led journey. The problem if you go on the public cloud is that we don't really know how much it is going to cost you, and you don't really have a single pane of glass to have all your data being managed across, what is now an ecosystem. We enabled them to do that. And the market we are directly addressing on PRIM is not shrinking. We still see huge pockets of growth, in flash storage, in HPC, you've seen the results we have in HPC. In Mission-Critical X86, in Hyperconvert, so we are basically moving from the one-size fits all type of organization of freeing X86 and start off storage, to become a company that offers value to customers, in specialized pools of compute, of storage, of networking, and offering them the end to end journey across the different stack. What I think is going to make a huge difference, if you look at the five-year horizon, is the growth of The Edge and the fact that 70 percent of the data are going to come from The Edge, and then you will really see the power of our strategy of private IT which goes from The Edge, to the core, to the cloud, because we will be able to enable our customers to have their data moving seamlessly across this journey. And we have exactly organized the company that way. >> One of the obvious use cases from what I like to call machine intelligence or artificial intelligence is really infusing artificial intelligence into infrastructure for predictive analytics and predictive maintenance, IT operations management, Infocyte, you got through an acquisition of Nimble and have been impressed with the pace at which you pushed that throughout the portfolio, I wondered if you could address that. >> We've been almost surprised. We looked at, we wanted to become the flash company because we saw that the market over three years, would completely move to flash. And when there is such a pendulum shift, you want to be at the forefront. >> Dave: Right. >> So we looked at all these companies who were having very strong positions on flash and Nimble intrigued us because they had, by far, when we talked to their customers, the highest customer satisfaction, I think it was something like 87 percent. >> The NPS is off the charts. >> The NPS is off the charts, right? And then we peeled the onion and we saw Infocyte, which was almost enough to start south because it was not part of our list, right? Initially of our list of this is how we are gonna select a company we want to acquire, and when we got into Infocyte, how it works, how we can actually port easily these to three power and then to SimpliVity and then to the rest of the portfolio we felt this is the crown jewel that is going to be the foundation of us making >> Dave: And not just the storage portfolio. >> No, end to end so we're gonna do these for everything, now we cannot do it in one day. The priority was to give a seamless experience to customers going three power or Nimble, so we've done that very quickly. We acquired the company six months ago and it's already there for three power. Next one will be Simplivity, very soon in a few weeks, then we go to the whole computes platform as well, then finally to networking. I hope, it's not a commitment, but I hope that by the end of next year, and under a year, we will be done for the whole infrastructure portfolio. >> And explain the benefit to customers. >> And then the benefit is that you basically have, you eliminate the need for level one and level two support because it's proactively, now you have to be wanting to have your device calling home, right? Because otherwise, if you want your device to be in the data center and insulated from communicating with the network effect, that is not going to work, so but assuming you want your device to be connected centrally, so that it can be monitored centrally the artificial intelligence that is embedded in Infocyte is basically going to monitor the behavior of your device compared with hundreds of thousands of other ones and therefore anything that is deviant will be flagged as a potential problem and resolved before you even know about it. That's one. So when you end up having a problem eventually, which is becoming very, very rare, then you directly call the level three engineer who is an expert and who has, on the screen, the behavior of your device for the last month compared to others, and the resolution is in less than a minute. So it's a revolution in the way to do service. >> So, one of the things that we've observed as we've talked to customers is that the characteristics of the problems that they're now trying to solve have real world elements, and that's really what The Edge is about in many respects. For the first 50 years of IT, we were doing accounting, and HR, and supply chain, and we were able to define what the data models looked like, we could therefore say, the data's going to be here, the processing is going to be here, we could build data centers. Now as you said, 70 percent of the data is going to be coming from The Edge. It's not clear, necessarily where the best place to process that data is. Where's the compute going to be? How's it going to integrate with people? In many respects, hybrid IT is about diminishing the degree to which infrastructure dictates the way the problem gets solved. Would you agree with that? It's kind of like where does, let the data reside where it needs to reside, and make sure that the business is a natural infrastructure that reflects and corresponds to the work that needs to get done. >> I totally agree with your problem statement, and the way you position the question. In terms of semantics, I would just say we need to make infrastructure invisible. It's still there because it's all running on infrastructure. The iPhone is infrastructure, your PC is infrastructure, your camera is infrastructure, it's all there. >> A C.I.O said to me not too long ago... >> But you know what? We are having this interview, we are not thinking about what makes it happen. >> Peter: Right, right, right. >> Our business is to talk and communicate right now, this all has got to be seamless and that's how we need to make IT, seamless. >> I had a conversation with a C.I.O. >> Invisible. >> Yeah, who said that the value of my infrastructure is inversely proportional to the degree to which anybody knows anything about it. So, is that kind of what the HP promise is, is we're gonna let the data and the work loads define where the infrastructure goes and ensure we have those options? >> It's exactly right and the vehicle to do that, we call it autonomous data centers. Your phone is a data center. Your data center is a data center. Your off-frame cloud is a data center that you are subcontracting, right? So we want all of these to be autonomous, in terms of self-healing and everything else, and then the intelligence of where these data are being moved and how you use what and when is the single pane of glass that we are developing around one sphere. And how to get the customers to move their work loads and their business around that is what we do with point next with services. This is our strategy. >> So let me break that down a little bit. So, we've got devices that are powerful enough that we could put new types of control, new types of work loads there if we wanted to, we've got now the ability to package infrastructure, and have a single pane of glass, and have a common management framework. >> Right. >> But when you say the autonomous data center, it's we have a common business approach thinking about policy, thinking about value, thinking about how we're gonna do things, and we can put that into this entire vision, and let it actually execute how that manifests itself from a business standpoint. >> Exactly right. >> Have I got that right? >> It's exactly right. I love the way you put it. That's exactly what we are trying to do. it's not going to be done in one day, but that is our strategy, and we have organized, once again, the whole company around it, to execute this strategy and to make it happen for our customers. >> So if we think about what an HPE customer is gonna look like in, you know a really good HPE customer in 2023, what.. >> Alain: That's a long time. >> That's, five years, but I'm giving you that much run way, because you're right, it's not there yet and if it's too ambitious then so be it, but how is a business person going to think differently about working, about the role that IT is going to play in the business, and what it means to have a great partnership with a company like HP? >> Yeah, so we are basically, our motto is One size doesn't fit all, so we are first trying to understand the business of the customer, and then we will apply solutions to enhance this business, or to empower this business, right? So, we have the biggest brace of infrastructure that you can think of, think about this infrastructure becoming self-healing, but this infrastructure is more and more specialized, there is HPC, there is Mission-Critical, we just found Superdome flex, or SAP, we have all these specializations that, for those customers to optimize their business outcome. Then we have the single pane of glass that allows everything to seamlessly operate the data around, and then our point-neck services are going to work with the customers to architect their IT model in a way that their work loads are optimized. And one of the key is the right mix. The right mix of what you do yourself, what you got from multi-cloud, how much do you pay for it, how much do you anticipate that you're gonna pay for it, do you want this to be CAPEX, do you want this to be OPEX? And then how do you manage The Edge, and with Aruba and with Edgeline, and then with all your IT platforms that can manage the data across The Edge. We have the capability to also let the customer decide, do I want a lot of analytics and decisions to be made at The Edge, in my devices, and this is highly valuable depending on what customer business model we are talking about, or, do I want all the data from the analog world through the censors to come straight back to the ranch. All of these decisions, we are gonna have platforms to allow customers to make these decisions, to decide, kind of templates if you want, this is how I want it to run, and to be executed, and then to be automatically, autonomously operated. That's our vision of how we can help our customers moving forward. >> Last question, so the attendees of Discover, your customers, when they go back and he or she talks to their boss, what do you want them to say about Discover 2018? >> I invested two or three days of my time to come to HPE Discover. It was really exciting because I felt that it's like a new company, it's the company I know. I know they are customer first and customer last, and they are the ones who help me when I have a problem, whether they created it or not, they are here to help me. This is not going away, but they are taking us to the new world. They are gonna help us to build our hybrid IT model, and I think we need to trust them to have a seat at the table when we make these decisions, boss. >> Intimacy, innovation... >> Alain: Yeah, innovation. >> Trust. >> HPE's no longer wandering in the desert. (laughing) >> Alain Andreoli thanks so much for coming on the Cube, it is always a pleasure. >> It was a pleasure. Take care, thanks Peter. >> Keep it right there, everybody, Peter and I will be back with our next guest, right after this short break, we're live from Madrid. You're watching the Cube. (techno music)

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