>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program one of SUSE's partners, we have Marc O'Regan, he is the CTO of EMEA for Dell Technologies. Marc, it is great to see you, we all wish, I know when I talked to Melissa Di Donato and the team, everybody was really looking forward to coming to Ireland, but at least we're talking to you in Ireland so thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. You know, really looking forward to getting you guys here, unfortunately it wasn't a beaver, once we're all safe and well, great to talk. >> Yeah, absolutely, that's the important thing. Everybody is safe, we've had theCUBE a couple of times in Dublin. I'd actually, you know, circled this one on my calendar 'cause I wanted to get back the Emerald Isle but, Marc, let's talk first, you know, the Dell and SUSE relationship you know, disclaimer, you know, I've got a little bit of background on this. You know, I was the product manager for Linux at a company known as EMC back before Dell bought them, many moons ago, so I know that, you know, Dell and the Dell EMC relationship with SUSE go back a couple of decades, but, you know, bring us into, you know, what your teams are working together and we'll go from there. >> Yeah, sure, Stu, so, quite correct, nearly a two decade long relationship with SUSE and one that we hold very dear to our heart. I think what both organizations have in common is their thirst and will to innovate and we've been doing that with SUSE for 16, 17 years, right back to, you know, SUSE Enterprise Linux sitting on, you know, PowerEdge architecture way, way back in the day into you know, some of the developments and collaborations that we, that we worked through with the SUSE teams. I remember back 2013, 2014 doing a pretty cool program with our then Fluid Cache technology. So, when you look at, you know, OLTP kind of environments, what you want to kind of get away from is the, you know, the read-write, commits and latency that are inherent in those types of environments. So, as you start to build and get more users hitting the, hitting the ecosystem, you need to be able to respond and SUSE has been absolutely, you know, instrumental to helping us build an architecture then with our Fluid Cache technology back in the day, and the SUSE technology sitting around and under that and then of course, in more recent times, really extending that innovation aspiration, I guess, has been absolutely a pleasure to, to watch and to be involved with, see it mature so some of the cool platforms that we're developing with SUSE together it's a, it's pretty neat so I'm, you know, one of those being-- >> So, Marc, yeah, well, you know, bring us up to speed, you know, right in the early days, it was, you know, Linux on the SUSE side, it was, you know, servers and storage from the Dell side, you know, today it's, you know, microservice architectures, cloud native solutions. So, you know, bring us up to speed as to some of the important technologies and obviously, you know, both companies have matured and grown and have a much broader portfolio other than they would have years ago. >> Yeah, for sure, absolutely. So, I mean, what's exciting is when you look at some of the architectures that we are building together, we're building reference architectures. So we're taking this work that we're doing together and we're building edge architectures that are suitable for small, medium, and you know, and large environments. And the common thread that pulls those three architectures together is that they are all enterprise grade architectures. And the architectures are used as frameworks. We don't always expect our customers to use them, you know, by the letter of the law, but they are a framework and, by which they can look to roll out scalable storage solutions. For example, like the Ceph, the SUSE Enterprise Storage solution that we collaborate with and have built such a reference architecture for. So this is, you know, it's built on Ceph architecture under the hood, but, you know, both ourselves and SUSE have brought a level of innovation, you know, into an arena, where you need cost, and you need low latency, and you need those types of things that we spoke about, I guess a moment ago, and into, you know, this new cloud native ecosystem that you just spoke to a few moments ago. So on the cloud native side, we're also heavily collaborating, and near co-engineering with SUSE on their CaaS technologies. So here it's really interesting to look at organizations like SAP and what we're doing with data hub and SAP, it's all part of the intelligent enterprise for SAP. This is where SUSE and Dell Tech together really get, you know, into looking at how we can extract information out of data, different data repositories. You know, you may have Oracle you may have, you know, you may have HDFS, you may have Excel and you're trying to extract data and information from that data, from those different siloed environments and the CaaS technology brings its, you know, its micro, capability to the forum in that regard, our hardware architecture is the perfect fit to, to bring that scalar platform, cloud native platform into the ecosystem. >> So, you know, Marc, you've got the CTO hat on for the European theater there. When we, we've been talking to SUSE, when they talk about their innovation, obviously, the community and open-source is a big piece of what they're doing. You were just walking through some of the cloud native pieces, give us what you're seeing when it comes to, you know, how is Dell helping drive innovation, you know, and how does that connects with what you're doing with partners like SUSE. >> Yeah, well, you know, innovation is massively, massively important. So there's a number of different factors that, you know, make up a very good innovation framework or a good innovation program. And at Dell Tech we happen to have what we believe to be an extraordinarily good innovation framework. And we have a lot of R&D budget assigned to helping innovate and we get the chance to go out and work with SUSE and other partners as well. What SUSE and Dell Tech do really, really well together is bring other partners and other technologies into the mix. And, you know, this allows us to innovate, co-innovate together as part of that framework that I just mentioned. So on the Dell Tech framework, we'll obviously, you know, take technologies, you know, we'll take them, perhaps into the office of the CTO, look at new, you know, emerging tech and look at, you know, more traditional tech, for example, and we will blend those together. And, you know, as part of the process and the innovation process, we generally take a view on some of the partners that we actually want to get involved in that process. And SUSE is very much one of those partners, as a matter of fact, right now, we're doing a couple of things with SUSE, one in the labs in Walldorf in Germany, where we're looking at high availability solution that we're trying to develop and optimize there right now at this point in time. And another good example that I can think of at the moment is looking at how customers are migrating off, you know, older, more traditional platforms, they need to look at the cloud native world, they need look at how they can, platform for success in this cloud native world. And we're looking at how we can get smarter, I guess about migrating them from that, you know, extraordinarily stealthy world that they had been in the past but that needs to get from that stealthy world into an even stealthier scalable world that is, that is cloud native world. >> Yeah, Marc, you talk about customers going through these transformations, I wonder if you can help connect the dots for us as to how these types of solutions fit into customers overall cloud strategies. So, you know, obviously, you know, Dell has broad portfolio, a lot of different pieces that are on the cloud, you know, I know there's a long partnership between Dell and SUSE and like SAP solutions, we've been looking at how those modernize so, you know, where does cloud fit in and we'd love any of kind of the European insights that you can give on that overall cloud discussion. >> Yeah, sure, so, again, ourselves and SUSE go back on, in history, you know, on the cloud platforming side, I mean, we've collaborated on developing a cloud platform in the past as well. So we had an OpenStack platform that we both collaborated on and you know, it was very successful for both of us. Where I'm seeing a lot of the requirement in this multicloud world that we're kind of living in right now, is the ability to be able to build a performant scalable platform that is going to be able to respond in the cloud native ecosystem. And that is going to be able to traverse workloads from on-prem to off-prem and from different cloud platforms with different underlying dependencies there. And that's really the whole aspiration, I guess, of this open cloud ecosystem. How do we get workloads to traverse across, across those types of domain. And the other is bringing the kind of, you know, performance that's expected out of these new workloads that are starting to emerge in the cloud native spaces. And as we start to look to data and extract information from data, we are also looking to do so in an extraordinary, accurate and in an extraordinary performant way and having the right kind of architecture underneath that is absolutely, absolutely essential. So I mentioned, you know, SAP's data hub a little earlier on, that's a really, really good example. As is, a matter of fact, SAP's Leonardo framework so, you know, my background is HPC, right? So, I will always look to how we can possibly architect to get the compute engineering as close to the data sources as possible as we can. And that means having to, in some way get out of these monolithic stacks that we've been used to over the last, you know, for a number of decades into a more horizontally scaled out kind of architecture. That means landing the right architecture into those environments, being able to respond, you know, in a meaningful way that's going to ultimately drive value to users and for the users and for the providers of the services, who are building these type of, these type of ecosystems. Again, you know, as I said, you know, data hub, and some of the work that Dell Tech are doing with the CaaS platform is absolutely, you know, perfectly positioned to address those types of, those types of problems and those types of challenges. On the other side, as I mentioned, the, you know, the story solutions that we're doing with SUSE are really taking off as well. So I was involved in a number of years ago in the Ceph program on the Irish government network and, so these would have been very big. And one of the earliest to be honest, Ceph firm I was involved with probably around five, six years ago, perhaps. And the overlying architecture, funnily enough, was, as you probably have guessed by now was SUSE Enterprise. And here we are today building, you know, entire, entire Ceph scale out storage solutions with SUSE. So yeah, what we're seeing is an open ecosystem, a scalable ecosystem and a performant ecosystem that needs to be able to respond and that's what the partnership with SUSE is actually bringing. >> So, Marc, I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you is, you know, we're all dealing with the, the ripple effects of what are happening with the COVID-19 global pandemic. >> Sure. >> You know, I know I've seen online lots that Dell is doing, I'm wondering what is the impact that, you know, you're seeing and anything specific regarding, you know, how this impact partnerships and how, you know, tech communities come together in these challenging times? >> Yeah, that's a great question to end on, Stu. And I think it's times like we're living through at the moment when we see, you know, the real potential of, I guess of human and machine collaboration when you think of the industry we're in, when you think of some of the problems that we're trying to solve. Here we are, a global pandemic, we have a problem that's distributed by its very nature, and I'm trying to find patterns, I guess, I'm trying to model, you know, for the treatment of, you know, COVID-19 is something that's very, very close to our heart. So we're doing a lot on the technology side where we're looking to, as I said, model for treatment but also use distributed analytical architectures to collaborate with partners in order to be able to, you know, contribute to the effort of finding treatments for COVID-19. On the commercial side of things then Dell Tech are doing a huge amount so, you know, we're, for instance, we're designing a, we're designing a financial model or framework, if you will, where our customers and our partners have, you know, can take our infrastructure and our partners infrastructure and those collaborations that we spoke about today. And they can land them into their ecosystem with pretty much zero percent finance. And so it's kind of a, it's an opportunity where, you know, we're taking the technology and we're taking the capability to land that technology into these ecosystems at a very, very low cost, but also give organizations the breadth and opportunity to consume those technologies without having to worry about, you know, ultimately paying up front they can start to look at the financial model that will suit them and that will, that will, that will, hopefully, accelerate their time, their time to market, trying to solve some of these problem that we've been speaking about. >> Well, Marc, thank you so much for the updates. Definitely good to hear about the technology pieces as well as some of these impacts that will have a more global impact. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, my pleasure. Thank you, take care and stay safe. >> Thanks, same to you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more covered from SUSECON Digital '20. Thank you, for always, for watching theCUBE. 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. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff, Rick here with the cube Worthen Nevada museum of art in Reno, Nevada for the Interbike show. Just happening down the street at the convention center. But we're actually at a side of it put on by Royal Dutch, a gazelle bikes, 125 year old, a bike company who is all in on electric bikes. We wanted to come in, see what's going on, really how the e-bike phenomenon is kind of intermingling with all these alternative scooters and, and all these alternative ways of getting around cities especially and, and get a feel for it. So we're excited to have a retailer who's been in the business for a long time. He's Davey oil. He is a founder a and, and cone or of GNO family. Cyclery David. Great. See you. Thanks. It's really happy to be here. Yeah. So first off, uh, just impressions of this event tonight. Um, cause I was rolling eyes. There's six or seven new bikes out here tonight. What do you think? >>It's very exciting because that was an extremely high quality brand of electric bicycle. And like you said, they have a uh, like a very long history in, in bicycle design. Right. And what they're doing now is they're, they're riding this wave of new technology that's coming through e-bikes and it's phenomenal. It's so funny cause >>some of these things I was talking about earlier, you know, so many Kickstarters, right, that have started and actually a lot of the companies have been pretty successful on the Kickstarter basis, but this is an old line company. They'd been making these things, I think I heard earlier, they're still making them at the same factory that they've been making them for 125 years. And surprisingly to me a third of this year's bike sales will be eBikes. So clearly there's something going on here. Yeah, there is that. What do you think in terms of the adoption Seattle, cause what I've heard as well is that the U S is about 10 years behind >>and Kennedy bike adoption. Yeah. I think that's probably the case in Seattle. We're very fortunate that there are a lot of factors at play that are, that are driving your bike adoption a happening a little faster than it is in some other parts of the country. But I think that all around the country and in cities and suburbs and also in rural areas, people are gonna find that adding an electric mobility to your bicycle, it takes away the barriers to cycling that so many people experienced that are totally rational. Like when I arrived at my destination, I don't want to be sweaty or I want to be able to use a bicycle, but I want to be able to carry more things or my children. Right. And when you add the mobility to your bicycle, those kind of barriers are just eliminated. You can see you're still getting exercise, but you can choose to make the bicycle ride more of what you'd expect from other forms of transportation, which is convenient and not sweaty and difficult. >>So how many of your customers aren't really bicyclists that that they're coming at this as a, as kind of a new opportunity? Maybe they just, they cycled before, but they're not kind of hardcore cyclists. You see this as the right foot. What's amazing to me is you have all these form factors, but this is a form factor that people are very familiar with and that's where I think there's a real opportunity bike that's not the same as scooters and some of these other things. Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, what we experience is that probably two thirds of our customers don't previously identified themselves as bicyclists. Um, they're probably somewhat friendly with the idea bicycles so they wouldn't have walked into a bicycle store. But what we see is that that transformation that happens to people when they adopt cycling as a, as a major part of their life and a major part of their transportation that still occurs, but it occurs all at once when they leapfrog over so many of these barriers and just have the opportunity to use a bicycle so much more than they would have otherwise. And the same thing happens to people who are already interested in cycling. People who only ride recreationally often find that with the addition of any bike into their life, they can use a bicycle for many, many, or most of their transportation needs, uh, over the course of their life. And that's profound, right. Transforms people. >>So there's a lot of special kind of characteristics of Seattle. Yeah. Obviously the weather is not great. Of course it's not great in, in Holland either. And they got a lot of bikes. They're got Hills and bridges and some nasty traffic. Not that everybody else does them, Massey traveling, but Seattle's got some crazy traffic. So you guys are seeing not only the adoption of the bikes for commuting and for fun and all those things, but you're selling a lot of cargo bikes for commercial purposes in this tight urban center. So I wonder if you can give us a little bit more color on how you're seeing the penetration in cargo bikes. Sure. >>Well, I think that cargo bikes when used for like freight purposes and delivery purposes and enterprise purposes in general, they benefit from the same things that bicyclists benefit from in urban environments in general, which is just greater mobility, freedom from the restrictions of traffic. I'm not trying to say that bicycles aren't on the road and that they don't sometimes find themselves behind a long line of stopped cars, but we have so much more flexibility in those situations and we can park safely and reasonably on a sidewalk. And so, so many things that happen, uh, that people suffer through due to congestion or alleviated when they're riding a bicycle in general. And business has experienced that when they use them for freight for sure. >>And it's not just a cargo bike, it's any cargo bikes. So now I've got the superhuman skills so I can, I can carry that load. I can replace a truck. I mean we have, we have bicycles in operation in Seattle for some, some of our customers use that. Our daily carrying 400 500 pounds of weight in there and they're traveling, you know, 60 70 miles in a day. Right. So how are you seeing the integration of the eBikes with the regular bikes, the hardcore bikers, the recreational bikers, and then of course you've got the slow move in pedestrians, right? And the, the dangerous stuff occurs when you've got all these disparity in, in, in velocity. And it's going to be interesting to see kind of how the regs kind of catch up and eventually probably, you know, discriminate. So these PO, these paths are for, you know, 20 miles or more of these paths are for, you know, 10 miles an hour or less. So how are you seeing that kind of work itself out in the streets of the city? Cause absolutely get a little rough sometimes out there. I think it has the potential to get a little rough. I think that honestly, um, yeah, >>the situation, the opportunities for conflict between pedestrians and electric bicyclists is not an issue or not any more significant than the opportunities for conflict between pedestrians and conventional bicyclists. I think that while an electric bicycle can travel up to 20 miles an hour or in some cases faster, they don't ordinarily travel that fast. That's a peak speed. Um, and so I don't really think that sidewalks are being menaced by electric bicyclists. I don't think that's really occurring, although I do think that the kind of regulations that you're talking about that classify type II bikes into types so that we can then, um, uh, empower people who have jurisdiction over different pieces of infrastructure to, um, to determine for themselves and for their users what bikes are allowed in which ones are, are, are forbidden, um, or restricted. I think that's really positive. Right? I think it's extremely important that we define what these vehicle types are because of course there are some vehicles which are more appropriate for some environments than others. >>Right. But I think the real thing is that bicyclists and III bicyclists are not the enemy of pedestrians. I think that together we're all making smart choices and we're in the safe spot. And I think that if it feels like there's too many bicycles on the sidewalk in your town, it's probably because you haven't made any room for bicyclists in the streets of your town. Right. And I think we all need to work together to make cycling a safe and viable option across all of our communities that will help congestion when we remove people from cars, we improve traffic for everybody. >>Right, right. And bikes should not be on sidewalks, period. Right. That's not really not the bike, not the bike place unless the, the street is just so, so tragic. >>I think. I think that if you're talking about it in a situational like daily life active, uh, situation, I think, um, there are a lot of conditions where bicycles are going to be on the sidewalk and there are many of them that I think are reasonable. I think it's totally reasonable to decide as a city we don't want bicycles, bicycles to primarily ride on sidewalks or when bicycles are on sidewalks. I don't think there's any city in the country that allows bicycles on sidewalks. It doesn't also stipulate as long as they're traveling safely. So if somebody has a problem with how somebody is behaving, that's still a problem either way. >>Right, right, right. So I'm just curious to get your take as, as you've seen this market evolved. Again, we've got big players involved. Bosch is doing all the, all the electronics on these bikes. Yeah. Capacity's got bigger on the battery speeds have gotten better. Dependability. Yeah. So how are you seeing kind of the evolution of the eBikes impacting the total market for bikes? Again, I can't believe that that gives out. Guys said they're going to sell a third of their bikes. Are e-bikes. Yeah. You see in the same thing in your business. >>Yeah. Well, I mean my business is focused on eBikes. Um, but what I will say is that I think that um, one of the challenges for bicycle advocacy and bicycle marketing and retail has always been a how to appeal to people who are somewhat friendly towards bicycling but aren't doing it that called interested but concerned. And it, I think it turns out that e-bikes are the key here, that we can help transform people from someone who is friendly towards bicycling to somebody who uses a bicycle as a big part of their life simply by making bicycles easier. And as you identified right now, finally, we're at a point in the development of this technology where the bikes really are reliable as a vehicle. And that's significant, right? It's not just a hobbyist activity at this point. These are, these are legitimate, uh, reliable vehicles >>in transportation. I mean, legitimate trans, it's not just your last mile vehicle anyway. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at our shop at least we're talking about people who are, who have given up a car. Um, almost almost every one of our customers who's getting an electric cargo bag is doing this as part of their family transportation budget. And that includes driving less or removing a car from their life, right? And that could only work if the e-bike was at least as reliable as driving lists. And so maybe a flat tire is still a pretty annoying problem, but that should be the worst problem. Right? And I think we're finally there in terms of the quality of technology that's out >>and now it's only upward. We're like at year zero now. Right. Amazing. Even with the weather and the Hills and everything else, it's profound, man. It's really, and then it's a, it's a cultural shift, so it's just, it's just spreads across our community. Right. One person who inspires somebody else and inspires somebody else. Well, David, thanks for taking a few minutes and sharing your story. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. All right. He's Dave young. Jeff. We are at Interbike Reno, but we're actually at the gazelle, uh, event looking at their e-bikes and they're really, really cool. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. Day 2, lots of stuff going on. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed colleague Dave Vellante. >> Hey hey. >> Hey hey! I'm excited to welcome an old friend, Eric Herzog, the CMO of IBM, as well as Sam Warner offering management IBM software-defined storage. Welcome, guys! >> Well thanks, we always love to be on The Cube, always. >> Dave: Love the shirt. >> Thank you, I'm glad I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt again. >> Dave: Thank you for making sure you wore that, yeah. >> I think it's like my 25th time on The Cube with a Hawaiian shirt. >> Lisa: Oh you're like the Alec Baldwin of The Cube. (laughs) >> Lisa: Alright guys, so here we are- >> Dave: If we have the record, that is the same shirt you wore last year, isn't it? >> Yes, but I did clean it, Dave. (laughs) >> He wears it once a year. >> I've never had to ask anyone about dry cleaning on The Cube but there's a first time for everything. Alright guys, so here we are at VMworld. What's new with IBM and VMware? Kind of talk to us, Eric, from a marketing perspective. What's going on there? >> Sure, well the big thing is IBM and VMware have a very strong alliance across our entire portfolio. The Cloud Division has a big agreement with VMware that was announced with Pat Gelsinger and the head of the division last year, the Storage Division has all kinds of heavy duty integration with our VersaStack product, as well as in all of our all-flash arrays, and then Sam's team brought out a new backup and recovery product, Spectrum Tech Plus, which is optimized for VMware and hypervisor and cloud environments. >> Excellent. And that's one of the things actually thematically that we heard yesterday is that, you know, backup is hot. So tell us a little bit more about that hotness and how you guys are working with VMware to dial that- >> Dial that heat. >> Yeah, dial that heat up. >> Sam: Well it's actually, it's more than backup, right, it's about data availability, and ensuring your data's safe, data's the bloodline of your company now, right? Everything's moving toward cognitive and AI, you can't do that without data. Most of your data's trapped as a backup. And what we're trying to do now is make it really easy for people to get at that data and use it for other purposes. So first of all, making sure you're safe from things like ransomware, but also making sure you can get some value out of that data. Make it very easy to recover that data. >> So, lots of topics that we could cover there, I wonder, did you have one more and I want to jump in. >> I did. Just, Eric from a, as the CMO, from a messaging perspective now we've heard backup is hot, you've just kind of articulated that a little bit more, same with storage. From a conversation perspective, and you talked about the importance of data, Michael Dell talked about that this morning, that the data conversation is a CEO agenda. How is the conversation changing, and the position of IBM changing when you guys are talking to customers that, is backup, is storage a conversation around data that you're having with the C-suite of your customers? >> So, a couple things, and I've done storage for 32 years. EMC, IBM twice, seven startups, and the C-suite hates storage, including the CIO, but they do love their data. So they all know they need storage but when you talk about data, data availability, the resiliency of the data, the data always needs to be there, you don't even use things like data resiliency 'cause the CEO doesn't know what that is, so you need to say, so how'd you like it if you were in Star Trek, and Bones wanded you with a new healthcare wand, and it came back with no answer? (laughs) That's 'cause your storage is not resilient and it's not fast enough. So the data has to be available and it has to be fast. So we're moving to this world where everything is AI and everything is immediate. If your storage goes down and you're in dark trading, you just lost ten million bucks per second. So, but it's all about the data. So basically what we're doing is getting out of the storage conversation and talking about the data conversation. How data is used to optimize their business, and then you weave the storage in underneath as, well as you know if you've got a bad foundation to your building and the earthquake hits, boom. You building falls down. So data is that building, and storage is the foundation on which your data rests. >> I love this conversation, and I think you're right on. The C-suite, they hate storage because it's to them, it's just an expense, but I want to pick up on something that was one of my favorite interviews thus far this year. Believe it or not, it was the interview that you and Burris and Ed Walsh did in our studio in Palo Alto. And I wonder if you could add some color, and then Sam I want you to chime in. What I loved about that interview is you guys talked about digital business and digital business being all about data and how you leverage data. And you said something there, and I want to unpack it a little bit. Storage should not be just a dumb target that is unintelligent. it should be an active element of your data and digital strategy. >> Eric: Right. >> So what did you mean by that and how does IBM make it, storage, an active element of a data strategy? >> So the first thing you want to do is you want to make it all automated. You want to make it transparent to the user. So, whether it's in the healthcare space, I don't care what your business, Herzog's bar and grill? My storage is transparent. Okay I'm running a bar and grill, I don't have time to fool around with the storage. I need it automated, I need it fast, I need to see who's drinking what, how many cigars I can sell, I don't have time to fart around. Right? Storage can make that happen. So you've got certain CPU that's done on the server level or in the virtual machines, and then you've got to have storage that's intelligent. So, we're working on some products we're not ready to announce yet, but we've got some products that have built-in AI into the storage themselves. So things like, you can search in the storage instead of search on the server. How do like, be able to look at metadata and have the storage actually fetch the data not the server fetch the data, so the server's crunching, crunching, crunching, and the storage is smart enough to go grab the data on its own and then bring it to the server. Versus the server having to do that work. So all that's about making data more available, more resilient, and again, having smart storage not dumb storage. >> So Sam, when we were talking about backup it's how you say, it's not just backup, it's more than that. >> Sam: Right. >> Pick up on what Eric just said. How is Spectrum Protect more than just backup and playing into what Eric just talked about? >> Well a lot of things Eric was just talking about you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily going to be able to do all this analysis reporting, analytics on your production data, you don't want to get in the way of your critical workloads, so how can we make copies off to the side where you can do things like analytics, where you can do dev test, quickly build new applications, so we give the ability to have access to that data in a way that's not going to jeopardize your core applications as well. And of course, that data, you can't lose it, right? I mean, you've got to make sure it's protected. So we also offer you a very simple way to protect it, and very rapidly restore it. >> So, let's go through an example or use case. You mentioned ransomware before. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of people think okay I'll create an air gap, but air gap, in and of itself, you know, you watch these Black Hat shows, and they go, "Air gap is a joke. It's easy for me to get through an air gap." >> Sam: Right. >> So how do you deal with that problem? Presumably, you have insights and analytics that can help you identify anomalies, but I wonder if you can address what's the conversation like with your customers and how are you solving a problem like that? >> Well I think there's a lot of stages that would solve it. First of all, there's simple things you can do like have copies that are immutable, so they can't be changed, encryption can't go and encrypt a read-only volume, there is air gapping, which like you said there are ways around that, but then there's also, Eric touched on some of the metadata analysis. If you can find anomalies and changes in the metadata that are unexpected, you can take action and alert an administrator and let them know that something doesn't seem right, so there's a lot more work we're doing to introduce cognitive capabilities that can also detect that. >> One of the things actually that Pat Gelsinger said this morning, and this may have put a smile on your face when you said there's something you can't quite talk to yet is, companies have to integrate AI into their products. And machine learning. >> Eric: So, that's the plan at IBM, and we've already done some of that, we have some products that we've hinted at, that's product code name Harmony, and we've already done a public blog on that, a statement of direction, and that is our first step in implementing AI technology directly into the storage, again it's part of what I talked about a couple weeks ago when I filmed at your Palo Alto office, storage is not dumb anymore. I may be dumb, but storage is not. Storage is smart, storage is intelligent, storage is active not passive, and in the old worlds, when I started doing storage a long time ago, storage was just passive. Just a big brick. It's no longer a brick. It's a brain, and it thinks and it acts, and it relieves the CPU, and the other areas of your IT infrastructure from having to do the work, which is part of the metadata action that Sam talked about that we're working on and also this project Harmony that we talked about, is adding AI intelligence, things like Watson for example, maybe, but I can't quote me on that yet, but maybe we might put Watson inside of our storage, since we happen to own Watson, the dominant AI platform on the planet, we could probably put that into our storage. Maybe we will. >> So there's still a... okay why not? There's still a lot of dumb storage out there though. >> Yes. >> Huge install base. You actually probably sold a lot of it back in the day, so fixing the problem that you created, that's smart marketing. (laughs) But when you talk about the technical debt that exists, how do you go from point A to point B, going from that dumb storage to that active element? What's that conversation like with customers? >> So, it's actually pretty easy. First of all, storage refreshes every three to five years anyway. So now you can say, "Well you know the storage you had only did this, how about if we could do this, this, this or this, and really raise the bar?" The other thing of course is that IBM is the number one storage software company in the world, so anything we do is going to be integrated into the software side of our business, not just embedded in the storage systems we sell. And that software works with everyone's arrays. So that, if you will, artificial intelligence that we can bring to bear in an IBM Storwize or flash systems would also work on an EMC VNX2, would also work on a Dell Compellent, would also work on an HP 3PAR, would also work on this guy, that guy, and the other guy, because we are the number one storage software company in the world, for the guys that track the numbers, and all of this is being implemented into the software layer, which means it'll work with the other guys' gear. So we can take the old stuff I used to do at the evil machine company and make that stuff smart. >> What do you mean when you say you're the number one software company, because when you worked for that company you guys would always tell me, us as analysts, "Look, we don't really have any hardware engineers any more, we spend all our time on software, so we're a software company." You're talking about something different today, you guys leaned in to software to find, you've put your chips in, you did your billion dollar Steve Mills bet, what does it mean today to be a software company in storage? >> So for us, let's take all of our storage systems for example, FlashSystem V9 comes with Spectrum virtualized software, which works with over 400 arrays that aren't IBM logo. That software comes on that system. FlashSystem A9000 comes with Spectrum Accelerate, which is a scale-out block infrastructure that works both on-premise and in the cloud. Again, not just with our own gear. So we basically decided that, do we want to sell the full system solution? Sure we do. But if we sell the software only, that's fine with us, and remember, most of the big shops in IBM is exceedingly strong, enterprise to the Global Fortune 1000, and the Global Fortune 1000 down to those sort of, you know, one billion dollar company and up, most of them are heterogeneous anyway, so you're, if you're smart, and we think we are at IBM, to this effect, we made sure our software works with everybody else's gear. Spectrum Protect and Spectrum Protect Plus will back up any storage from any vendor, old or new, will go to any tape drive, will go to any cloud, we can automatically back up to the cloud, will automatically go to an object store, not just to our own object store, but other object stores. Will automatically go to disk or flash, so we've made it completely heterogeneous and, if you will, media and technology independent. And we're doing that across the board with all the IBM storage software. >> So that compatibility matrix, if I can call it that, is very important, has always been important in the storage business, but I feel like it's insufficient in today's cloud world. And let me tell you, explain what I mean and get your reaction. I'll start with Sam. So we've been talking all week about the imperative to not try to reform your business and bring it to the cloud, but rather to shape the cloud and bring cloud services to your data. And that's the right model, and now part of that, a big part of that, a huge part of that is simplicity. So we're here at VMworld, we're talking about backup and data protection, simplicity is fundamental. What are you guys doing in that regard, generally and specifically with regard to Spectrum Protect? >> Yeah, I think what you want is a very simple way to do data protection, and a methodology to do data protection that's consistent between your applications that you're running in your own data center and what you're running in the cloud. So you don't want to find out that, yeah your traditional applications that you've been you know, running in your data center for years are all protected, but it turns out all the new applications being built out on the cloud don't have the same rigor, aren't following the same standards, you're breaking your governance models, and you're at risk. So what you want is a simple way to manage both sides, you want a simple dashboard that gives you visibility to the entire environment in one space, so you know I've got 2,000 VMs, 1,800 of them are backed up, two of them aren't backed up, oh those are in the cloud, somebody didn't set it up correctly. You want to be able to see it very easily on a simple dashboard, and that's what we're bringing with Spectrum Protect Plus. >> Speaking of simple, Eric, last question to you, as the CMO, how do you make this message simple for a C-suite to comprehend and understand and help take them to the next level for them? >> Well for us, we don't even talk storage anymore. We just talk data, applications, their workloads and their use cases. That's it, and then you bring storage up underneath it, again it's the foundation of your data infrastructure, your data is the primary building, but if you don't have a solid foundation and, being from Silicon Valley and being from the '89 earthquake, when the earthquake hits, if you have a solid foundation, the building stays up, if you don't the building falls down. So, we lead with data, data, data, ease of use, simplicity, but really focus on what's your application, what's the workload you're trying to accomplish, what's the use case you need. And when you do it that way, you take the discussion away from being, "You're a storage guy." It's, "You're the data guy. You're the business guy." And that's how you have to pitch it. >> I like that. Hashtag data data data you heard it here first. (laughs) Eric and Sam, thank you so much for joining us on The Cube, I wish you best of luck and we'll be keeping our eyes and ears open for what's coming with AI and machine learning. Thank you for watching The Cube, continuing coverage live from VMworld 2017 Day 2, I'm Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante. Stick around, we've got more great conversations coming right back up. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Chad: Thank you. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Burris. This is Day 2. Chad Sakac is here. He's the president of Dell EMC, long-time CUBE guest, CUBE alumn. Chad, we were talking about eight years >> Yeah, it's crazy, man, it's been great. >> Dave: And you were one of the first. >> It's been great. I was thinking about it. What I love is it's always a great events where there's great things happening. And you guys ask killer, right to the point questions, and I always try to give killer, right to the point answers. >> Dave: All right, well let's get into it. Your ascendancy, personally, kind of coincided with VMware's explosion. You are down and dirty with the customers. So, first of all, congratulations on-- >> Thanks, dude. >> Dave: that role and being the president at Dell EMC. Awesome. >> I have a passion for it, Dave. Passion is the key, right? >> Okay, so we're all talking about cloud, right? Cloud first is something that you hear from customers all the time. I want to be cloud first. What does that mean to you, to Dell EMC, VMware? >> I think the first thing is is that to all of us, cloud is much more about an operating model than a place. And people have started to internalize that it's about changing the way that they operate their business, both for some of their traditional apps, as well as how they build cloud-native apps. That's the first thing. Operating model, not place. The second thing is, I think I'm seeing the customers in the market get a little more, I don't how to say this without sounding pejorative, but a little more mature in their view that the answer is going to have to be a hybrid model based on data and data gravity, based on elasticity of workloads, based on governance factors, that lead to hybrid being the answer. And if you think about what we've seen just in the last two days, VMware on AWS, Google partnering with VMware and Pivotal around Pivotal Container Services. Those are all about hybridizing both traditional IT and how people build new cloud applications. So operating model, not place. Hybrid is the answer. And the third thing is that it's multi. I still occasionally encounter somebody that says, "It's all going to be one cloud." And I'm like, "Okay, just out of curiosity, "does your definition of cloud include SalesForce.com?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include Office 365?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include AWS?" "Well, yeah." "Does it include your own private cloud?" "Well, yeah." "So, what are you talking about?" >> Peter: Where's the one? (laughs) >> Where's the one, right? And I think that there's a... Things start to matter once they move out of hyperbole and into pragmatism. >> Well, and when you paid attention, let's say four or five years ago, when you listened to Andy Jassy speak, the notion of hybrid cloud, or hybrid IT, or private cloud was not in his lexicon. And then yesterday, we saw him up on stage with Pat Gelsinger. They were talking about hybrid and private cloud. >> Chad: Well, by the way, I don't want to throw the dart at Andy. I think if you talked to Vmware or Dell EMC four or five years ago, public cloud wasn't in our-- >> Dave: Absolutely. >> (laughs) in our vernacular either. >> Dave: Absolutely, so those worlds have come together with the customer reality that says, "Well there isn't just one cloud. "And I can't just bring my business, "reform my business for the cloud." So what do you make of the fact that we've evolved as an industry and as a vendor community? >> I think it's time to get on to the brass tacks of solving the problems for the customers, ma'am. And I see actually that happening in the industry more and more. People are solving problems that they can't solve in their private clouds using public clouds. They're figuring out that the best place to put a dollar is to rebuild their applications using cloud-native principles. But they're also realizing that sometimes that it's not even a legitimate choice or option. And they're trying to figure out also, at the same time, "How do I support some of those "more traditional application stacks "and make them more automated and cloud-like, "even if they're not going to be cloud-native maybe ever." >> Peter: Let me jump in here for a minute. >> Dave: So this gets to the promise that you've got to make. And please jump in. >> Yeah, because in many respects, what we're really saying, let me test this with you, Pat, is that, ultimately, it may be one cloud, but that one cloud is going to be defined by the business and not by a particular vendor. >> Chad: It's a higher-order function. >> Peter: That's right. So what we like to say is we like to say, "You're not going to take your business to the cloud. "You're going to bring the cloud to your business." And your business attributes and your business characteristics, where you operate, how you operate, how you use data, who your customers are, how are you going to reach them, all those different things, the physical realities, the legal realities, the IP realities, all that's going to shape the architectural choices that you make regarding cloud. And you have to have a strategy for that becoming consistent and coherent for your business. So a lot of piece parts, but it becomes your cloud. Does that make sense to you? >> It makes sense to me. It means that it's an answer that involves a little more sophistication and nuance for the customer, because they've got to think about what it means for them. And the answer is not the same for every single customer. However, there are common base elements in that formula. Number one, digital transformation always starts with applications that are written using cloud-native principles, often using data fabrics that are modern distributed data fabrics. That's one piece. There's a consistent piece that says, "I'm going to leverage public and private cloud models." And the definition of which workload goes to one or another, like you said, is very much driven by data gravity. Compute tends to co-locate with the data against which it's computing. Governance rules, which is not security. Public and private clouds are equivalent. In some cases, one or the other is more secure than the other. But those are common elements. There's one other common element that I've learned over the last four years of being on the journey myself with many of our customers, which is that the only way that the on-premises part of cloud stacks work is through radical simplification and deploying their on-premises infrastructure using design and automation principles that look a lot more like the public cloud than they look like their most traditional IT. >> No, you're absolutely right. And I think that's a crucial point, that ultimately the physics of all this. >> Chad: Mm-hmm. >> And I agree, cloud is not a We like to say the cloud is not a place, it's a time. >> Chad: Yeah. >> Because at the end of the day, all this is defined by the realities of your data. >> Chad: Yep. >> And if your data can't If you don't have time to move the data or it's too expensive to move the data, that's going to dictate where the process actually runs. And I like the way you've redefined, I'll say redefined data gravity. Most people think data gravity, "Oh, once you put data in place, "it's going to accrete more gravity." And you're saying, "No, that's not the way to think about it. "It's going to accrete more function." >> Chad: Right. >> 100% agreement. And I don't think a lot of people are talking about things that way. >> By the way, the linkage to physics, I don't know how many of the viewers basically were physics majors, but it's actually related to quantum physics and mechanics. Information inherently can't simultaneously be in two places at once. That's a law of physics, right? >> Data, okay, keep going, keep going. >> If any bit, any information, basically, is connected between two points at the speed of light, that's not a function of vendor technology until someone-- >> Well, let me we get into quantum entanglement, nano >> Yeah. >> But I think where you are, where you're absolutely correct is that ultimately, that there is a cost to moving data. >> Chad: Bingo. Bingo >> And we have to start When we think about digital transformation, our approach is the difference between a digital business and a business is a digital business treats data as an asset and builds strategic capabilities to treat data as an asset and apply data as an asset. And one of the beauties of what you were saying earlier with simplification, is for example, the idea that if I build around data, >> Chad: Yup. >> then I can use hyper-converged, I can use converged, I can use Flash, I can use VC, and I can use all these different things to treat my data differently. >> And do it as simple as possible. The thing that I think I'll give you an example from this morning. I was meeting with a customer that's in the finance and insurance vertical, right? And they're pretty advanced down there, use of both public and private clouds. They've got a software-defined data center. And they're trying to basically redefine how they're using mobile apps and customer intelligence. They provide a ton of services. They're a great, great customer and a partner. But again, to highlight that cloud is a place, or a time, to use your vernacular, as they build their mobile app, sets of assets are running in a public cloud, the data was born in the public cloud, the compute is running in the public cloud, it's built around a cloud-native app principle using PCF and Kubernetes. Great! When that person is using that application, there's a moment when they go in and do a transaction where literally it's hitting a mainframe running DB2 in their core data center. >> And there's nothing wrong with that. >> And there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that pattern is universal, right? And so it highlights basically that you've got to be a little practical about how you do this stuff. >> Okay, so in the limited time we have remaining, give us the the quick why Dell EMC, Dell EMC, VMware, why you guys Maybe talk a little bit about the portfolio. >> So if you look at this week, the one thing that jumps out, at least to me, I'm probably a little close to it, Dave, but I hope it jumps out to the viewers, right, is while we maintain an open ecosystem, Dell EMC has its open ecosystem, VMware has its ecosystem, Pivotal has its ecosystem, we're becoming much more opinionated, right? And that matters because customers want clarity. So I'll give you clarity. Clarity that jumped out on stage and it came out of the mouth of Pat, not me, was the easiest way to deploy VSAN is on VxRail. The easiest way to deploy VMware Cloud Foundation is on VxRack SDDC. Period, full stop. Now, why are we saying that so emphatically? It's because if you don't have a good foundation for an SDS and SDC, or SDC, SDS, and SDN, so software-defined network and compute and storage, in the case of VMware Cloud Foundation and VxRack SDDC, then your whole underpinning is just way too complex, right? So there's a very clear opinionated point of view that says hyper-converged infrastructure that's being built by the combined team is the way forward for customers who have standardized on vSphere. >> Well, and you nailed it earlier. If you're going to bring the cloud model to on-prem, to the data, it's got to be simple. >> Chad: Mm-hmm. >> Peter: That's the cloud model. >> That is the cloud model, right? And and without it, you can't fulfill that promise. With it, you can. >> I'll give you a second example. For the last four years, we've been supporting our customers with the Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. We've learned more about what does it take to lifecycle, manage, and deploy vRealize Suite on top of HCI, where we own the lifecycle, right? At the same time, VMware has been learning about, "What does it take to take vRealize and run it "in the VMware cloud on AWS, not as software, "but as a service?" And that's all about simplification and lifecycle management. What we're doing between VMware and Dell EMC is taking that knowledge and saying, "HCI is the foundation, and on top of that, "here's how you build your IaaS "for your traditional applications, "and the foundation for what's coming next." And then the last part that we saw today loud and clear is a strongly opinionated point of view that says PCF, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, is the best structured PaaS in the market, and a full embrace of Kubernetes, Pivotal Kubernetes Services, Pivotal Container Services using Kubernetes, is going to be the best way to build container as a service. How do you deploy it best? On vRealize. How do you deploy it best? On top of VxRack SDDC. It's pretty clear. >> Covered all the bases, we could go all day with you, but we're out of time. >> Yeah. >> Chad, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE yet again. Really appreciate it. >> It's my pleasure, guys, thank you. >> All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE. (electronic music)

>>from the bellagio Hotel >>in Las Vegas. >>It's the >>cube covering >>Ui Path forward. >>Four brought to >>you by Ui Path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. The cube is here. We've been here for two days covering Ui Path Forward for lisa martin here with David Monty. We've talked about automation and many industries. Now this segment is going to focus on automation and healthcare. We've got two guests joining us Jim Petrosea Cto of Blue Cross, Blue Shield and Gadget. Dhaliwal. The global C. I. O. Industry lead at you. I pass guys welcome to the program. Thank you. So let's start unpacking from the CTO level and the ceo level the agenda for automation. Jim let's start with you. What does that look like >>for us. It's actually pretty strategic and part of as we think about digital and what digital transformation means, it actually plays a pretty key role. Um There are a lot of processes that can be very manual within a big organization like Blue cross and Blue shield and to be able to streamline that and take away kind of what I would call the mundane work. Right? The the you know, going through a spreadsheet and then typing it into the screen, there are a lot of processes like that that are legacy. But what if you could take that away um and actually create a better work experience for the people that work there right? And and focus on higher value type uh type things and it's really key. And it really It goes down to our our business folks right? There are a lot of things we can drive with automation. We started a program um in 2019. Um that's been quite successful. We now have 250 box, we measure what we call annualized efficiency gains. So how much efficiency are we getting by these bots? So the bots are doing um this repetitive work that people would do. Um And what we're finding is, you know, we've got about $11 million in any wise efficiency gain through the process and we're just getting started. Um But we're all we're not stopping there too though, we're enabling citizen developers. So we're saying, hey business, if you want to automate, you know, parts of your job, we're gonna help you do that. So we've got about 60 people that were training. Um We run bad Ethan's where they come together and they actually create bots uh And it's really really creating some some impact and buzz in our business >>anywhere from your lens, where does automation fit within the C. I. O. S. Agenda? And how do you work together in unison with the C. T. O. To help roll this out across the enterprise? >>Yeah, no, definitely. And in fact as a part of introduction, I can actually share that. How I'm wearing a Ceo had within your path since I'm just joining join path and I'm actually now helping a client ceos in their automation strategy but I was a deputy ceo in my prior role at L. A. County where actually I ran the automation strategy. So if we look at from our organization perspective B complex as L. A County which is such a Federated organization. From a Ceo perspective, the way we look at the strategy is it's always driven by the business goals of the city or a county and we typically drive into three different areas. One is how we can transform our operational processes so that we can save the tax dollars. It's all about doing more with the less dollars. And then second is about how we can transform our residents experience because end of the day it is all about how we can improve the quality of life for our residents. So we've got 10 million people for L. A. County, the largest populous county in us. So it was an uphill task to serve that such a diverse population need and that the third area is about how to transform the new business models because as we are moving away from a government centric approach to the residents centric approach, you really need to come up with a new digital solutions. And Ceo is in the center of all these three elements when you look at it. So it's a very appear to us to keep keep improving your efficiency and then at a time keep adding the new digital solutions and that's where automation strategy is kind of a horizontal strategy which enables all these components. So what I hear from >>that is alignment with the business. Yeah. Right. Change management. Absolutely. That's like really fundamental and then see IOS this this agent of transformation uh you can see or she has a horizontal purview across the organization now now jim the cto role is the automation at blue cross blue shield lead by you or you there to make sure the technology plugs into your enterprise architecture. What's your shoulder? >>You know? Uh my my role is really to drive uh what I'll call technology enabled business change. Right. So I actually uh started our our automation journey uh at hc sc and I did that by partnering with our business. Um There was actually a lot of buzz around automation and there were actually some small pockets of it, none of it was enterprise scale. Um Right. And we really wanted to go big in this and and working with the business sponsors, they saw value in it. Um and we've you know, we've generated um a lot of uh efficiency, better quality of work because of it but but I very closely had a partner with our business, we have a committee that is lead of business folks that I facilitate. So I view my role as an enabler, um we have to communicate the change management pieces is huge. Uh the education just having a common vernacular on what is automation mean, Right, because everybody interpreted it differently um and then being able to do it at an enterprise scale is quite challenging. Um You know, I I really enjoyed um one of the key notes, I don't know if you had a chance to see shankar by Duncan from the hidden brain, right? But he talked a lot about the brain aspect and how do you get people to change? And and that's a large part of it. There's a lot about technology, but there's really a lot about being a change agent um and and really working very closely with your business, >>how does one measure? I'm hearing a lot time saved. Our saved. How does one measure that and quantify the dollar impact, which by the way, I'm on record as saying the soft dollars are way bigger. And but when you're talking to the, you know, the bottom line CFO and it's all about, you know, the cash flow, whatever is, how do you measure that? >>I can take it. So we, what we do is as we define these use cases right? We we go through an actual structure product process where we we gather them. Um we then rate them and we actually prioritize them based on those that are going to have the greatest impact. Um and we can tell based on, you know, what is the manual effort today. So we understand there are X number of people that do this X number of days and we think this body can take that some load off of them. Right? Um So we we go in with the business case. Um And then the Ui Path platform actually allows us to measure well, how much is that pot running? Right. So we can actually sit there and say, well we wanted that thing to run 10 hours a day and it did and it's generated this kind of efficiency because otherwise the human would have had to do that work. >>So the business case is kind of redeploying >>human. It really is is really maximizing human capital and make and and you know really using because the bots do repetitive stuff really well. They don't do higher level thinking and and we don't view it as replacing people, we view it as augmenting and actually making them more efficient and more effective at what, how do you get the dollars out of that? Well, a couple of ways. Right. And so one of the things we've we've done is we we create and measure the efficiency our business users and financed by the way is one of our bigger ones. And the CFO is one of the sponsors of the program, um can decide how to reinvest it in a lot of cases it is actually cost avoidance as we grow, literally being able to grow without adding staff. I mean that's very measurable. Um in some cases it is actually taking, you know cost out um in in certain cases, but a lot of times that's just through attrition, right? You don't back fill positions, you let it happen naturally. Um and and then there's just things that happen to your business that you have to respond to give you a great example, state of texas, um passes what's the equivalent of the no surprise attack. But they did it there before the federal government did it. Um but it requires a lot of processes to be put in place, because now you have providers and payers having to deal with disputes, right? It actually generates a boatload of work. And we thought there might be, you know, 5000 of these in the first year, where there were 21,000 in the first year. And so far this year we're doubling that amount, right. We were able to use automation to respond to that without having to add a bunch of stuff. If we had to add staff for that, it would have literally been, you know, maybe hundreds of people, right? And but now, you know, there's, you can clearly put a value on it and it's millions of dollars a year, that we would have otherwise had to expect. >>The reason I'm harping on this lease is because I've been through a lot of cycles, as you know, and after the dot com boom, the the cost avoidance meant not writing the check to the software company, right? And that's what nick Carr wrote this, i. T matter. And then, and then, you know, post the financial crisis, we've entered uh a decade plus of awareness on the impact of technology. And I wonder if it's, I think this, I think this the cycle is changing I think. And I wonder if you have an opinion here where people, I think organizations are going to look at Technology completely different than they did like in the early 2000s when it was just easy to cut. >>No, I think the other point I will add to it. I agree with the gym. So we typically look at our away but it doesn't always have to be the cost. Right? If you look from the outcomes of the value, there are other measures also right? If you look at the how automation was able to help in the Covid generate. It was never about costs at that time. It was about a human lives. So you always may not be able to quantify it what you look at. Okay. What how are we maximizing the value or what kind of situations where we are and where we may not even have a human power to do that work. And we are running against the time. It could be the compliance needs. I'll give example of our covid use case which was pretty big success uh within L. A. County we deployed bots for the covid contact tracing program. So we were actually interviewing all the people who were testing positive so that we actually can keep track of them and then bring back that data within our HR so that our criminologists actually can look at the trends and see how we are doing as a county as compared to other counties and nationally. And we were in the peak, we were interviewing about 5000 people a day And we had to process that data manually into our nature and we deployed 15 members to do that. And they were doing like about 600 interviews a day. So every day we had a backlog of 2500 interviews. So it is not about a cost saving or a dollar value here because nobody planned for these unplanned events and now we don't have a time and money to find more data entry operators and parts were able to actually clear up all the backlog. So the value which we were able to bring it is way beyond the cost element. >>I I believe that 100% and I've been fighting this battle for a long time and it's easier to fight now because we're in this economic cycle even despite the pandemic, but I think it can be quantified. I honestly believe it can be tied to the income statement or in the case of a public sector, it could be tied to the budget and the mission how that budget supports the mission of the company. But I really believe it. And and I've always said that those soft factors are dwarf the cost savings, but sometimes, you know, sometimes the CFO doesn't listen, you know, because he or she has to cut. I think automation could change that >>for public sector. We look at how we can do more about it. So it's because we don't look at bottom line, it's about the tax dollars, we have limited dollars, but how we can maximize the value which we are giving to residents, it is not about a profit for us. We look at the different lens when it comes to the commercial >>Side, it's similar for us. So as a as a health care pair, because we're a mutual right? Our members and we have 17 million of them are really the folks that own the company and we're very purpose driven. Our our purpose is to do everything in our power to stand by members in sickness and in health. So how do you get the highest quality, cost effective health care for them? So if automation allows you to be more effective and actually keep that cost down, that means you can cover more people and provide higher quality care to our members. So that's really the driver for mission driven, >>I was gonna ask you as a member as one of your 17 million members, what are some of the ways in which automation is benefiting me? >>Um you know, a number of different ways. First off, you know, um it lowers our administrative costs, right? So that means we can actually lower our rights as as we go out and and and work with folks? That's probably the the the the bottom line impact, but we're also automating processes uh to to make it easier for the member. Right? Uh the example I used earlier was the equivalent of no surprises. Right. How do we take the member out of the middle of this dispute between, you know, out of network providers and the payer and just make it go away. Right, and we take care of it. Um but that that creates potentially administrative burden on our side, but we want to keep their costs down and we do it efficiently using it. So there's a number of use cases that we've we've done across, you know, different parts of our business. We automate a lot of our customer service, right? When you call um there's bots in the background that are helping that that agent do their job. And what that means is you're on the show, you're on the phone a lot shorter of a period of time. And that agent can be more concise and more accurate in answering your question. >>So your employee experience is dramatically improved, as is the member experience? >>Yes, they go hand in hand. They do go hand, unhappy members means unhappy employees, 100% >>mentioned scale before, you said you can't scale in this particular, the departmental pockets. Talk about scale a little bit. I'm curious as to how important cloud is to scale. Is it not matter. Can you scale without cloud? What are the other dimensions of scale? >>Well, you know, especially with my CTO had, we're we're pushing very heavily to cloud. We view ourselves as a cloud first. We want to do things in a cloud versus our own data centers, partially because of the scale that it gives us. But because we're healthcare, we have to do it very securely. So. We are very meticulous about guarding our data, how we encrypt information um, not only in our data center but in the cloud and controlling the keys and having all the controls in place. You know, the C. So and I are probably the best friends right now in the company because we have to do it together and you have to take that that security mind set up front. Right cloud first. Put security first with it. Um, so we're moving what we can to the cloud because we think it's just going to give us better scale as we grow and better economics overall, >>Any thoughts on that? I think a similar thoughts but if we look from L. A. county because of the sheer volume itself because the data which we are talking about. We had 40 departments within the county. Each department is serving a different business purpose for the resident beit voting or B justice or being social services and all and the amount of data which we are generating for 10 million residents and the amount of duplicate asi which it comes out because it's a very government centering model. You have a different systems and they may not be talking to each other. The amount of diplomacy and identity delicacy which we are creating and as we are enabling the interoperability between these functions to give us seamless experience keeping security in mind so fully agree on that because the end of the day we have to ensure that customer guarantee but it's a sheer volume that as and when we are adding these data sets and the patient's data as well as the residents data and now we have started adding a machine data because we have deployed so many IOT solutions so the data which is coming from those machines, the logs and all its exponential so that's where the scale comes into picture and how we can ensure that we are future ready for the upscale which we need and that's where cloud ability definitely helps a lot. >>What do you mean by future ready? >>So if you look at from a future smart city or a smart community perspective, imagine when machines are everywhere machines and IOT solutions are deployed, beat even healthcare, your bad information, you're even patient information, everything is interconnected and amount of data which is getting generated in that your automobile they're going to start talking to entertainment or we have to potentially track a single resident might be going same person going to the justice or maybe same person might be having a mental health issues, A same person might be looking for a social services, how we're going to connect those dots and what all systems they are touching. So all that interconnections needs to happen. So that exponential increase of data is a future readiness, which I'm talking about. Are we future ready from a technology perspective? Are we future ready from the other ecosystem perspective and how and how we're gonna manage those situations? Uh, so those are the things which we >>look at it and it's a it's a multiplier to, right? We all have this influx of information and you need to figure out what to do with it. Right. This is where artificial intelligence, machine learning is so important. But you also have interoperability standards that are coming. So now we're we have this massive data that each of our organizations have. But now you have interoperability which is a good thing for the member saying now I need to be able to share that data. Yeah, I wanted to ask you about >>that because a lot of changes in health care, um, are meaningful use. You have to show that to get paid but the standards weren't mature. Right? And so now that's changing what role does automation play in facilitating those standards. >>So, you know, we're big, big supporters of the fire standard that's out there um to in order to be able to support the standards and and create a P. I. S. And and pull together the information. What what will happen sometimes in the background is there's actually um artificial intelligence, machine learning models that create algorithms right? The output of that though often has to be active. Now a person can do something with that information or a vodka. Right? So when you start taking the ideal of artificial intelligence and now you have a robotic process that can use that to pull together the information and assimilated in a way to make it higher quality. But now it's available. It's kind of in the background. You don't see it but it's there helping. >>What are some of the things that you see? I know we're out of time but I just have a couple more questions. Some of the things that you see here we are you I path forward for we're in person. This is a bold company that's growing very quickly. Some of the announcements that were made, what are what are some of your reaction to that? And how do you see it helping move blue crush blue shield forward even >>faster. Well you know a lot of the announcements in terms of some of the features that that they've added around their robotics processing are great right? The fact that they're in the cloud and and some of the capabilities and and and better ability to to support that the process mining is key. Right. In order for abouts to be effective, you have to understand your process and you just don't want to necessarily automate the bad practices. Right? So you want to take a look at those processes to figure out how you can automate things smartly. Um and some of their capabilities around that are very interesting. We're going to explore that quite a bit but but I think they're the ambition here is beyond robotics. Right. It's actually creating um you know, applications that actually are using bots in the background which is very intriguing and has a lot of potential potentially to drive even more digital transformation. This can really affect all of our workers and allow us to take digital solutions out to the market a lot faster >>and to see what was going to ask you, you are here for four weeks at UI Path, you got to meet a lot of your colleagues, which is great. But what about this company attracted you to leave your former role and come over here to the technology vendor side. >>Well, I think I was able to achieve the similar role within L. A. County, able to establish the automation practice and achieve the maturity, able to stand up things and I feel that this is the same practitioner activity which I can actually take it back to the other clients ceos because of one thing which I really like about your hypothesis. RP is just a small component of it. I really want to change that mindset that we have to start looking ui path as an end to end full automation enterprise solution and it is not only the business automation, it's the idea automation and it's a plus combination and whether we are developing a new industry solutions with our partners to help the different industry segments and we actually helping Ceo in the center of it because Ceo is the one who is driving the automation, enabling the business automation and actually managing the automation ceo and the governess. So CEO is in left and center of it and my role is to ensure that I actually help those Ceos to make successful and get that maturity and you will path as a platform is giving that ability of length and breath and that's what is really fascinating me and I'm really looking forward that how that spectrum is changing that we are getting matured in a process mining area and how we are expanding our horizons to look at the whole automation suit, not just the R. P. Product and that's something which I'm really looking forward and seeing that how we're going to continue expanding other magic quadrants and we're actually going to give the seamless experience so the client doesn't have to worry about okay for this, I have to pick this and further, I have to pick something else >>that's seamless experience is absolutely table stakes these days. Guys, we're out of time. But thank you so much for joining. David me, talking about automation and health care. Your recommendations for best practices, how to go about doing that and and the change management piece. That's a critical piece. We appreciate your time. >>Thanks for having. Thank >>you. Our pleasure for day Volonte. I'm lisa martin live in las Vegas. The cubes coverage of you a path forward for continues next. Mhm. Mhm mm.

>>from the bellagio hotel >>in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering Ui Path forward. Four brought to you >>by Ui Path. Welcome back from the bellagio in Las Vegas. The Cubans live at Ui Path forward for I'm lisa martin here with Dave Volonte. We're gonna be talking about roadblocks to automation and how to navigate around them, joining us next as Pernando Panini expert associate partner at bain and company per night. Welcome to the program. >>Thanks lisa. Happy to be here. >>Talk to us about some of the use cases that bain is working on with you I Path and then we'll dig into some of those roadblocks that you guys have uncovered. >>Yes. Uh I started a few months ago where we're working with Brandon who's the product lead on the Ui part side. We wanted to understand what's the state of citizen development and what are the blockers and how we should Both from the product side. But also on the automation journey side we need to dig deeper and understand where each of the clients and the employees are going through the journey together >>and if you look at it from the citizen developer perspective, what are some of those roadblocks? >>There are a few. So when like if you before we go to the roadblocks there are three main concerns or I would say critical groups that are involved in being successful with automation. The organization or bu leaders, the I. T. And employees. So each of the groups have different perceptions on like misconceptions or perceptions on benefits of automation and how to go up go about it. The blockers that we have seen where like a three sets of blockers. The first is cognitive where employees are unaware of automation on the benefits of automation and the second one is more organizational where organization leaders and how they feel about automation or how the how they think about employees when we introduce automation to them. One part of that is there is a misconception without nation leaders that employees are fearful of job loss when you introduce automation. What we have seen in our research is it's completely the opposite of employees are eager to adopt automation have given an opportunity, they are willing to upscale themselves and they are willing to save the time so that they can spend that on critical value added activities for um for their customers in the process. And a third blocker that we have seen is more on the product side where the some of the employees that we talked to as much as progress has been made by RPF vendors and local local vendors. It's still these tools are not intuitive user friendly for business users. They still feel they need to go through some training programs and have a better user friendly interface is >>what's the entry point she would organization first time I ever heard of Arpaio Years and years and years ago was at a CFO conference. Okay so that's cool. It seems like it forward for there's a lot more C. I. O presence here and that. Is that relatively new or did I just miss it before? >>It is relatively new. So like when we looked at like in the past few years the empty point has been someone in finance or I. T. Has heard about R. P. A. The benefits of head. They went and bought a handful of licenses and then they went and implemented it but it's just a handful of processes. It's not organizational wide. It has been mostly on a smaller sub scale of processes. And projects now that like organizations are realizing employees are asking and we are like slowly growing up with automation ceo es it's now it's intersecting with the C XL level of if it has to intersect with your or if you want to reinvent your business through automation, it has to come from the sea X level and that's where we're seeing more and more. See IOS are being involved in decisions on automation journeys, the technologies they have to buy and adopt for the business processes. >>So I. T. Can be an enabler of course. Also sometimes it can be a blocker. Um and you know, certainly from security standpoint governance etcetera. And so one of the things that we heard today in the keynotes was you don't want to automate the C I. O. He or she owns this application portfolio and everybody wants to do new projects because that's the fun stuff we heard from one CFO. Yeah. You add up all the NPV from the new projects. It's bigger than the valuation of the company. Right. But the C i O is stuck having to manage the infrastructure and all the processes around the existing application portfolio. One of things I heard today was don't automate an application or a process that you're trying to retire because we never get rid of stuff in it. So I wonder should automation like an enterprise wide automation? Should there be kind of an application rationalization exercise or a business process rationalization coincident with that >>initiative? Absolutely. I think that was one of the blockers that we have seen. Like some of the misconceptions and some of the blockers when I looked at it for them, they consider like you're bringing all these tools you're asking business users to like who haven't had haven't been trained in technology or programming, You're asking them to build these automation ins So one they have to manage with the all the applications and the tools for all that happens. And to manage these automation is after business users have either left the company or moved on. So it is essential for them to think through and provide a streamline tools it on on two aspects. one it needs to be as as you started off, it needs to be an enabler to provide them the specific tools that they can, they have already blessed. They've curated it which are ready for business consumption. A second part I can also do is providing collaboration platforms so that business users can learn from each other and from it so that they can one are developing the right processes with the right methodology that is governed by I. T. And no security or data governance issues. Come through. >>One of the things that you mentioned in terms of the three roadblocks ceo uncovered was that you were surprised that the results of the research showed that in fact employees are really wanting to adopt automation. In fact I think the stat is um 86% of employees want automation but only 30% of leaders are giving them the opportunity to use that. That's a big gap. Why do you think that is >>so a few things. Right. I mean as we talked about the three constituents that you have right one is automation leaders. If you consider from them. Their view is their employees are not capable of adopting or building on the automation is using these tools and they need technical skills. But the all the automation vendors have made progress and if you look at the tools today are much more user friendly and business users are willing to adopt. The second part as we talked about is like the fear of job loss from the employee standpoint. Whereas employees are looking at it as an opportunity for them to up skill but also eliminate the pain points that they have today in the day to day activities using the automation tools. And for them it is like this is helping them spend the time with the customers where it matters on critical value added activities versus going through reparative process of the journey. And the third part we talked about earlier with I. T. I. T. Has this notion that they need to build and develop anything technical. Business users will not be able to build or manage and they're also worried about the governance, the security and the third part which you brought up earlier is that tool sprawl, It's like we need to manage like this volume of tools that are coming in which is only adding to their plate of already busy busy workforce. >>I have one of those. It depends questions and it's a good consultant I'm sure you say well it depends but are there patterns best practice or even more than best pressures? Are there sort of play books if you will? And patterns? I'm sure it's situational. But are you seeing patterns emerge, you can say okay this sort of category should approach it this way. Here's another one in a different, maybe it's a department bottoms up top down, can you help us sort of squint through that? >>Yeah. So in terms of approaches like at least up till now the prevalent thing that is happening is like C. O. Es went and buy some licenses they talk about like opportunities that they have. So it's more of a top down driven uh like ceo driven agenda. What we're seeing now especially with citizen automation or democratisation of automation is there's a new approach of including employees into the journey and bringing the bottoms up approach. So there's a happy path where you marry up the top down approach with bottoms up and one you will find opportunities which are organizational wide with the bu leaders and they are ones which are on the long tail of opportunities which employees feel the pain but I. T. Or C. O. He doesn't have the time to come and implement or automate these activities. Um considering like one part we have seen which is increasingly helpful for people who have done this properly is including employees. And one thing we talked yesterday is invest in employees. They consider automation as investment in employees rather than something they're doing to employees. So it's kind of collaborating with employees to make progress which seems to be helping evangelize and also benefit with automation. How >>Have the events of the last 18 months impacted this as well, we've seen so much acceleration and the mandate for automation. What are some of the things that you've seen? >>Sure. So for us like even before the pandemic we've seen in our research so like more than close to 50% of the organizations that they started the automation journey were unable to achieve the savings or targets that they set themselves for whatever the success factors are. Which which hard. A few reasons one they didn't have the organizational support, not they were taking the end to end journey or a customer journey to figure out like what are these big opportunities that they can go through and they haven't included employees and to figure out what are the major pain points to go through the journey. One thing it was clear was with covid, no one expected this kind of disruption in a pan and a pandemic. There are a lot of offshore centres or like pretty much different geography is got disconnected from the work that's being done. You still need to support your customers, there is still a higher demand, what do you do? It's not like you can scale up your employees in a pandemic, that's where like we have seen increasing push towards automation and technology to see that can help and support and scale in a pandemic environment uh and also help your customers in the journey. >>So has in your opinion has automation become a mandate? Uh As a result of the pandemic >>I would say. Yeah I I would consider it's more of like now it's become a I would say uh business won a competitive differentiator to say like one I needed to keep my lights on and resiliency but also the companies have done really well they saw the advantage and they whether the pandemic better with the customers now they use that as a platform to create a competitive differentiation against their peers and push things forward. >>one of the things we heard of today and the keynotes is you got to think about my words, the life cycle, you don't just put in the bot and then just leave it alone. You really have to think through that. And that seems to me to be where you would help customers think through how to get the most return out of their investment. You I passed product company I think it's great. And so you talk about the value layer that you guys bring. >>So for us it's it's like when we talked to mostly be bringing from the business side of the house to understand what are the key drivers that you need to work on. I mean even before we talk about technology, we talk about, let's understand from the customer standpoint what is your customer journey into end and look through that journey lens and let's take the process and to end, let's look at redesigning process and making it more optimal and streamlined and where technology fits in. That's when we talk about like if it is an RPG or if it's a UI Path platform that can support, let's go through that journey versus taking the tool itself as the solution and trying to find every nail that you can hurt, which usually is not sustainable to your point. Like we need to think through the whole life cycle, make sure this is going to last. Or if you are retiring. Like in the ceo panel that was a discussion where that we need to think through when we are going to retire and make sure like we are in that journey versus building all these automation zor bringing all these tools and leaving them alone for I. T. To manage long term. >>No. Again the last 18 months. Again, question about the the um reactions catalyzed facilitated thinking about those three roadblocks. The cognitive roadblocks the organizational roadblocks since particularly what I'm interested in this question and product, what are some of the conversations that you've seen or trends that you seem to help those organizations better understand how to collaborate with each other so that what they're not doing is putting in our P. A point tools but really starting to build the right part of the nomination and and journey into their digital transformation plans. Yeah. >>I mean in a way to again, I'll go back to the three concerns that we talked earlier, right? It's it can only go so far and automate so much because they haven't seen the business lens of like how the processes are what they have to do and to end, which is where you need to involve the business leaders who can give you that view from the business side and employees who are seeing the work day to day and where they can eliminate the pain points. So the organisms that are successful, they are creating a collaborative environment between the three groups to push things forward. You >>have to have that collaboration that's critical. Otherwise, that's probably one of the road blockers as well. >>Yeah, absolutely. >>Where does automation fit? I mean you're obviously heavily into automation, but let's think about the bane portfolio, the boardroom discussions. Where does automation fit? I mean there's security, there's how do we embed ai into our business? How do we sas if I our business um how do we do transform digitally? Where's automation fit in that hole discourse? >>So I think the automation is like at the heart of digital transformation, the part which we have seen where the gap is is not taking the business angle and actually thinking through the process and to end versus picking up a tool and trying to go solve a problem or find a problem to solve. And that's where we think in our discussions with boardrooms, it's more of let's think through how you want to reimagine your company or how you want to be more competitive looking into the future and like walk back from that standpoint and then started part from, I mean, the way we call it the future back like where you are today and now, like let's go forward and to what your end status and where technology broadly a digital tools and where automation fits in the process. >>How do you see what you i path is talking about at this conference? The announcements from yesterday? There's a lot of people here which is fantastic. How do you see what they're announcing? The vision that they set out a couple years ago that they're now delivering on. How is that a facilitator of organizations removing those roadblocks? Because as you said automation is a huge competitive differentiator these days and If we've learned nothing in the last 19 months you gotta you gotta be careful because there's always a competitor in the rear view mirror who might be smaller faster more agile ready to take your place. >>Yeah so like a few things that we've seen in the product roadmap that you talked about is they are providing the collaboration platform or tools where the I. T. Business owners can work through. Like for automation hub is what they talked at length yesterday is that's the platform where business users can provide their ideas. Like you provide process mining tools which can capture the process and the business users understand the process and they are the ones who are putting in an opportunity on the road map. So you have now a platform where all the ideas are being catalogued and once you implement they're being tracked on the automation hub so that that is providing a platform for everyone to collaborate together. The second one which Brandon talked yesterday is the tool itself for Studio X. When we're talking about citizen developers, employees trying to use and make it more user friendly. Is that where the Studio X which is providing that you are interface? Which is easy intuitive for business users to build basic automation is and try to take that long tail of opportunities that we talked about. So all these tools are coming together as one platform play, which you ipod has been talking about all through the conference and that is critical for everyone to collaborate to make a progress versus only thinking it's an easy job to implement the automation opportunities. That >>collaboration is business critical these days. Right. Thank you for joining David me and the program talking about some of the roadblocks that you've uncovered, but also some of the ways that organizations in any industry can navigate around them and really empower those employees who want automation in their jobs. We appreciate your insights. >>Happy to be here. Thanks for having us. You're welcome >>for day Volonte. I'm lisa martin live in las Vegas at UI Path forward for we'll be right back with our next guest. Yeah. >>Yeah. Mm. Mhm

>>mm Welcome to VM World 2021 2 days of virtual discussions on innovation. Multi cloud application modernization, securing your data new ways to work transforming the network expanding to the edge and loads of content to help build your digital business. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube and with me today is Carol Carpenter who's the chief marketing officer of VM. Where carol Great to see you again. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you Dave. It's great to be here. >>Okay, well, so when we last talked last year at VM World, I honestly thought we'd be back face to face this year. Seems like we learn more every day every week. Every month. How did this year's event come together? What were your priorities in shaping the program? >>You know, I'm with you. I really hoped we would be together in person this year and here we are, another year of virtual. We are primarily all virtual again, which has some really big benefits in that we're able to reach new audiences who in the past couldn't afford to fly, could afford to take the days And it's taught us a lot. So we really approached this year as how do we create a VM world experience that is filled with digestible bites. You know, the notion that any of us are going to sit still for 3-2 days, three days and pay attention full time. This is a pretty antiquated notion. You know, we all like to to take little bites and tastes of content here and there and so we really designed the whole program to do just that. And with this go ahead. >>No, please carry on. >>No, I was going to say one of the things we really wanted to do this year with the M world. The reason the theme is imagined that is we wanted to show the world that VM World is not about your parents, BM world that this is a company while we're very proud of our virtualization past, what we offer today really spans the gamut as you pointed out everything from networking to security to application development platforms. So it's a it's just a different different company with different products and solutions for customers. >>And I love the whole concept of digestible called stackable bites and love that. And you've put together a pretty impressive lineup. You got superstar names, you got, you got stars inside of our industry and then you you know the tech people might know but you've got well known celebrities. What are you looking forward to this year and you know especially around customer and partner engagements. >>Yeah and thank you for highlighting all of that. Like I am super excited about all the different luminaries who are speaking. I am most excited about the customers and partners. Every session will have a customer's part of it. Either a customer speaking or a customer story or customer quotes really speaking to the value and with that we have hundreds of customers presenting customers. Like some you might expect like Fedex to new sas based customers like toast who provides restaurant software and they just went public to companies like space ape games who provide online games. So a real boy, I think a real diversity of customers um, in terms of their transformations and how they're leveraging the VM ware solutions. And then our partner ecosystem really excited. This year we added a new level of sponsorship to bring in some of the um, I would say younger customers and younger partners, partners like, you know, Reddit and um, you know, couch face and others who are bringing new solutions to market. >>We have some great names, they're toast. I think the local boston company, we've, we've been following them so excited to to hear what they have to say. Now let's talk a little bit about the virtual world, This is your second virtual VM world. I'm interested in what you're doing differently. I want to talk about learning, but, but what are you looking forward to in in, in in that sense? And how has the event grown? >>Well, the event has definitely grown in terms of the platform. I think the expectations in terms of numbers of attendees were expecting, you know, over 100,000. Um, and even in this zoom fatigued world, we still expect high level of engagement. The biggest changes. We have made one the more stackable content that we've been talking about two. We focused this year on a high level of interactivity, so we have slack channels set up for almost every session. We expect both speakers, customers prospects to really engage. And and then third area that's different is we amped up all of the different activities. We know that people want to interact and network in other ways. So, you know, some of the usual things like the bourbon tasting, the wine tasting, but also yoga classes and opportunities to learn from a magician, Even golf tips for those of us who love golfing, um really trying to mix it up and create a higher level of interactivity. In addition to all of the platforms you expect for hands on, learning, hands on labs, practitioner classes, All that's still there. We just wanted to increase the level of engagement. >>That's super fun, really innovating in that regard. You're right. I mean it's so easy to just to multitask and get lost. But if I know like if I'm really into yoga or I want some golf tip, I'm gonna come back at that time and it'll, you'll re engage me. So I love that, you know, the cube, we have a unique privilege of participating in a very wide spectrum of events as you can imagine. And we were deeply integrated carol into one of the industry's first big hybrid events this year at mobile world Congress this >>summer. We thought >>that was like the light of the end of the tunnel, but of course we've seen a pullback of sorts but we're still doing some physical, we do a lot of virtual, we were doing these hybrid events. We've been involved in events where they, you know, the host and the guests are there with no audience. So I'm curious as to how you see the evolution of conferences in this post isolation era. What's the learnings? What's changed and what does the future look like for events? >>Yeah, I mean I've talked with a lot of my industry peers about this, including the folks over at Mobile World Congress. Um, I don't think the large, the monolithic event with hundreds of thousands of people um, is in the cards for our near future. And so we've been rethinking like what does a physical event look like or a set of physical events look like next year. That would have an online component. We're we've always had an online component. So we certainly are not. We won't be shedding that anytime soon. The ability to reach new audiences. New targets, new user groups, we absolutely will keep that. I think in terms of the physical presence is exactly what you said. It will be hybrid. Um, we are looking at a series, don't quote me on this because we haven't finalized, but we are considering a series of in person, more local, more regional events with smaller groups. People still want that engagement, customers still want a network and talk with each other. Our users want to talk to each other are vima groups are our new groups like our DEvoPS loop group. The deVOPS folks, they all still want a network, so we want to provide that. But in a smaller, safer, more localized setting. And I think that's the future for a lot of companies. It puts a bigger toll and, and makes more work for us as the company who's hosting, meaning you and you too Dave, you'll be hopefully traveling with us two more of these locations, but it creates a little more strain on the team who is posting. >>You know, it's funny as you well know when we first started doing virtual events, like I said, we've always been been virtual, but largely it was okay. Here are the keynotes, you know, come watch. Uh, and now you're like, say you gave great examples of how you're increasing the engagement, getting much more creative and, and, and it was a lot unknown last year, especially like class March. It was like, okay and virtual events are harder in many respects than physical events and so much of the process has changed different roles. And I think we're seeing the same thing now with with hybrid, there's a lot that's unknown and a lot of trial and error, a lot of experimentation and, but I think at the end of the day, you can actually have the best of both worlds. You can get your what you described, I would, I would call it a VIP locally. V. I. P. Event maybe even role based they have the technical folks, it used to have conferences within conferences, you have your C. I. O. Event, you'd have your event and so I see a kind of return to that maybe I could say smaller and and safer and then a a much much larger audience and in the case it's different in terms of you know converting those into loyal customers and so forth. But but I think overall it's a much much bigger pond ocean that we're playing in. >>Absolutely I think of it as we're going to bring the um world too our customers and prospects and partners and you know it's pretty amazing. The other part of this you asked earlier about like speakers and some of the luminaries the fact is getting everyone to travel to one place at one point in time always had its share of logistical challenges and being able to, you know, some of it can be recorded in advance some of it will be in person. Like one thing we did this year is we recorded our ceo Ragu with six other ceos of hyper scholars talking about the future of multi cloud and what it means and the role that VM ware plays in this. That's pretty hard to do. Like to get all six of them together in one place at the same time. You know how everyone's schedules so compacted so that's what virtual gives us an opportunity to do reach, have more interesting speakers, lots of different speakers who potentially couldn't all travel. >>You don't want to miss that, that event or replay. Um, let's talk about your role as chief marketing officer. You're obviously putting your fingerprints on this new ever you new era. You had no choice you could have entered in. Yeah. We always talked about digital now is like if you're not a digital business, you're out of business and you're, you're living it now. But but I'm interested in in your strategy for global marketing, the organization, The brand in the coming decade. Like you say, the next 10 years are going to be like the last 10 years. >>That's right. Well let's talk about the brand. So VM ware, The name itself is so tightly associated to virtualization and VMS, right, Which is an amazing history and the story of success. That was really what we like to talk about is chapter One, We pioneered server virtualization laying the foundation for what today is the cloud. And then chapter two, we went bigger and broader and we virtualize the entire data center and now here we are, we're in chapter three and this is the next phase of our brand and our promise to customers, which is really focused on customer based innovation and helping our customers innovate and multi cloud. We really believe it's the center of gravity for everything we do. It's in our DNA. It's what how we take constraints which is a very multi cloud can be complex. There are challenges of you know are for customers operating in a multi cloud world. How do we take that help them turn it into an asset, How do we help them take that and give them freedom and control? And that's what our brand is about. It's about the ant is that you can help your developers move faster and retain enterprise control. It's that you can have enterprise apps on any cloud and you can have control and cost savings and enterprise management. So that's what the brand is about. That power of aunt and um and um in terms of how our marketing team is evolving a big piece is exactly what you said. You know just digital everything digital first customers want to learn try buy online and as a company you know VM ware we're shifting our business model from on premise license software to more assassin subscription services And you can see that in our earnings and how we've been shifting and it's quite exciting because with assassin subscription based model you know it's all about customers getting full value in helping customers achieve their value and consumption. So for our marketing team we have shifted from okay we want to get you to the sale and one and done to how do we really drive a full life cycle with a customer, how do we help them land and expand and use the products and get value from them and have a meaningful relationship. It's much more um of a full life cycle. So we're really excited. We, we love what we're doing um particularly on the acquisition side, getting helping customers to learn try by more easily in a digital world and then being able to follow them through with some physical, physical engagement, uh events like the um world and really helping them get the most value out of the products. >>VM ware is really quite an amazing company I'm super excited for as one individual has been following this company for a long time to see the next chapter and the thing a couple of things you mentioned innovation and I see so many companies today, they may have a big customer base, they just, it's easy for them. Easy quotes to milk that customer base and put out new products that sort of lifecycle products. Multi cloud is challenging and one of the hallmarks of VM ware is it's always had a leader that deeply understands technology. You've done that again with with Ragu and so engineering and really drives that innovation. So when I think about cloud generally and you know, there was some start stops with VMware's cloud strategy but then you said, you know what the cloud is an opportunity, it's a gift, we're gonna lean in and then you develop some really interesting partnerships like you said, you got all the big cloud companies up up on stage here this year. And so multi cloud is going to require deep engineering in a vision to really bring that uh, together. And I think, you know, VM ware is, he's one of a handful, you know, small handful of companies that can actually pull that off. >>Well, thank you. Dave, we think so for sure. I mean, we have the history and the foundation and the relationships to be able to do that. I think that um what's what's hard sometimes is that, you know, people may or may not know all the different things we do this multi cloud chapter is really a, It's the reality, 75% of our customers are operating living in a multi cloud world. And if you look at some of the data, it looks like 80, are going that way. And so how do we help them simplify? How do we help customers simplify and innovate for the future? It's definitely in our DNA it's how we take constraints and turn them into an asset for our customers. We, we really believe that it shouldn't be so complex and that we want our customers to have flexibility and choice used to be able to pick which application for which cloud and at any point in time change your mind as well when there are new capabilities on those clouds. And for us, you know, you've hit it on the head, we did realize and we did learn that we don't really want to compete with the hyper scale ear's, what they're doing is pretty unique. What we want to do is help customers consume and accelerate their innovation faster. >>Well, I love the messages and and really appreciate carol your time explaining to our cube audience, going to your vision is the CMO. And you know, we look forward to an interesting chapter ahead with hybrid events, hybrid cloud, multi cloud and all the rest. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Dave >>You're very welcome and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content to cubes coverage of VM World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back. >>Mhm

>>Mhm. >>The company Nutanix was founded as the world was coming out of the financial crisis in 2009 Cop Computing was still in its infancy but had shown the way for what was possible with automation and simplification of infrastructure provisioning and management at scale. Now what Nutanix did is it brought cloud concepts to data centers and created the market for hyper converged infrastructure, a software defined architecture that eliminated stovepipes in the heavy lifting Associated with traditional compute networking in storage management. Now in the first part of the next decade, Nutanix essentially set the standard for this new world, building a loyal customer base, reaching escape velocity and successfully going public in 2016. Fast forward to 2021 and much has changed. Cloud is no longer knew rather it's become a staple of the digital economy as we exit the isolation economy. The cloud is much different today. It's expanding to on prem and out to the edge. New connections are being made in hybrid and across cloud models and as such, connecting and managing infrastructure across these new clouds to create a facile experience for users irrespective of where the data lives. Has become a major priority for organizations. They don't want to waste time and money on making the plumbing work. But that's easier said than done as the market is evolving. So is Nutanix to meet these new customer challenges and opportunities and with me ahead of dot next the major event of the year for Nutanix customers is Monica Monica Kumar who is the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go to market for the company Monica always great to see you welcome back to the cube. >>Thank you so much. Dave I'm so happy to be here again. >>Okay, so you heard my little narrative upfront, what's your perspective on the cloud market and where your customers are in their journey? >>Well, as you said, Dave Cloud is a critical enabler for rapid growth for organizations now, it's no longer just uh you know, nice to have, it's become a must have for organizations to survive and thrive in this digital economy. Uh In fact I follow a lot of um surveys that are happening around cloud adoption and one of the key trends that's coming out is it's no longer just about I. T. Practitioners adopting cloud. In fact, 78% of C. X. O. S are looking to cloud to speed up transformation of the entire businesses. You know, 80% of business executives are looking to cloud to mitigate their risks of their companies and 87% of the executives view cloud as critical to achieving their corporate growth goals. So what we are now realizing is that hybrid multi cloud is becoming the preferred model Which means there is no one cloud that customers are using, they're using the right cloud for the right workload. In fact, according to Gartner Group, 81% of public cloud users are using more than two providers. So what's happening is increasingly businesses are relying on multiple public clouds and on premises to meet their needs and are looking for that flexibility and that's delivered by different cloud providers. Um We've done our own survey called Nutanix Enterprise cloud and that we do it every year and 86% of respondents in the last service said hybrid cloud is the ideal operating model. So the Net Net that we're hearing from our customers is cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model. Customers want the right cloud for the right workload and the right applications. >>Okay, awesome. So the world, great setup. Thank you. So the world is moving to multi cloud. I think there's not no debate on that and that is really the mainstream. That's the norm. Talk about where Nutanix fits into this new world. >>Absolutely. So we're at an inflection point as organizations are grappling with this complexity. Now, obviously you can imagine the more computing environments to use this complexity in running and managing those hybrid solutions across multiple clouds. When Nutanix is focused singularly on is making that cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on their business outcomes. We are solving the complexity of running and managing multiple clouds, just like we did for infrastructure and data centers a decade ago when we first started as a company. Now with the Nutanix start platform enabling our customers to seamlessly connect their private and public clouds simply move applications, data licenses across any cloud, optimize the work replacement and costs all while leveraging a consistent set of services, tools and processes. So for us it's really, really crucial that we give customers the choice to pick the hardware. Of the choice, the cloud of their choice, the virtual machines, they want to deploy the containers and data and help them realize their entire hybrid multi cloud strategy. It's all about giving our customers that peace of mind to deploy and operate the apps and data across multiple clouds with ease and flexibility. >>All right, let's talk about dot next my I think I'm pretty sure my first dot next was the first one ever, which I think was 2015. It was pre I P O. The focus is obviously evolving what's the focus this year? >>Well, dot next has evolved to become the industry's leading hybrid multi cloud conference. It's almost here. It's taking place next week, september 28th, 23rd and this year's event will bring together it and cloud professionals from around the globe to explore the latest trends, solutions, best practices and hybrid, multi cloud technology. Now we're obviously gonna, you know, future a lot of thought leaders from within the industry as well as in general, you know, people that impact our lives in a positive manner. And we're going to really focus on topics around hybrid multi cloud hyper converged infrastructure, private cloud ABM organization, you know, kubernetes containers, how do you figure out which after deploy where? So you're gonna see a lot of focus on hybrid multi colored solutions this year we're going to have lots of real world stories, hands on labs, best practices for practitioners. And again as I said all the tools that attendees need to go back and then put to practice some of the hybrid multi cloud strategies that they would learn and dark next >>talk a little bit more Monica about the what's in it for me for for attendees, what can they expect? What are they going to be able to take away from from this conference? >>Well, so as I said, a conferences both for business leaders and I. T. Leaders and practitioners. So for the business leaders, as I said, they'll get to hear from the latest industry visionaries around where the world of cloud is moving to, what are the latest and greatest innovations and hybrid multi cloud technologies uh and how can they make the businesses more competitive? How can they, you know, create more business value for the organization by using these technologies. For the IOT practitioners, they will go away as I said, learning from their peers in how they are adopting cloud, what are some of the myths around cloud computing. Get some information on deployment details and the benefits some of the piers are realizing since they moved to new tenants for example, in general, since they've adopted, you know, hybrid multi cloud solutions, they will also be able to connect with their industry peers, access democrat pounds. Uh in fact one of the major uh spotlights and not next will be the test drive live uh practitioners can get hands on our technology and really test drive it during the event itself and learn how to create a hybrid cloud within an hour, learn how to deploy databases with a click of a button for example, so lots of great goodies there and oh by the way we have some amazing external speakers as well besides our own, you know engineers, executives and so on. We have a whole roster of third party speakers too. >>That's awesome. Now, you know, one of the other things too is one of the ways you were able to reach escape velocity as a company is you had a strong partner ecosystem I presume is going to be a partner network participating as well. >>Yes, absolutely, thank you for reminding me about that partnerships is very, very, very, very important in Nutanix. You know, it does take a village, we have a full day dedicated to our partners and partner technology and solutions. It's called the part exchange. It's on Monday September 20, so again we hope that you all will participate but also you'll see partners are embedded uh in our september 21st and 22nd agenda and programme as well which is the main two days of dot next. So partners are in our life and blood, they're part of our ecosystem. >>That's great. What's next for Nutanix as you head into 20, >>Well before I go there, I do want to focus on a couple more featured speakers. So for those of you who are interested in cybersecurity, we will have Theresa Patton, who is the first female white house C I O and a leading cybersecurity expert. She'll be speaking. I'm actually interviewing her as well. We have Rachel, so johnny who is the founder of Girls who code and marshall plan for moms. We have Gary Vaynerchuk who's the ceo of Winner Media who is an author and entrepreneur. So I do hope that folks will plan to join if not for the core hybrid, multi colored content but also for these amazing speakers and last but not least. Hey, if none of this excites you then we do have some amazing entertainment. We have john taylor of Duran, Duran and the electric fondue coke, Romeo also headlining our day to keynote. >>So fantastic. I love it. Okay, go ahead please. >>Well I was gonna say so now let me talk about So what's next? Well for us, what's next is really helping customers realize their full hybrid, multi cloud strategy and empower them to make the right cloud decisions. So in fact one of the things you're gonna see us launch next week is also a new brand campaign. It's called cloud on your terms and you'll see that all over plastered all over dot next and so on. We are fully invested in our customer success to help them build, run and operate anywhere to help them easily migrate to public cloud or stay on premises if they choose to. And ultimately to make cloud complexity invisible for our customers, >>you know uh cloud your way kind of thing. I love that. And I and I failed to mention one of the first conferences I went to next, I met some developers and I was like whoa, cool. Because you guys one of the first that really truly do infrastructure as a code and bring that on prem and now it's going across clouds. So September 20 you kick off the partner day, is that right? And then the big keynote start the 21st right >>And go through the 20 >>third. Yes, >>yes. And we have a lot of on demand content as well around the keynote. So it's gonna be a packed packed set of agenda and days and you can choose whatever content you want to attend and participate in. >>Excellent. You guys always put under great program so go there register, we'll see you there, Monica. Always a pleasure. Thanks so much. >>Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. >>All right. And we'll see you at dot next. This is Dave Volonte for the cube. >>Mhm mm

>>Welcome >>back to HP discover 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes virtual coverage of discover 21 we're excited to welcome back our wa Kadoura, She's the vice president and worldwide go to market leader for HP. Es smoking hot. Green Lake Cloud services are welcome back to the cube. Good to see you again. >>Thank you for having me to be with you. >>So talk about how your products and services are supporting customer transformations. I'm interested in the experience that everybody has been dreaming about describe how you're giving your customer that competitive advantage. If you've got any examples, that would be awesome. >>Yeah, you got it. Um, I think as we heard Antonio say the cloud is an experience, not a destination, right? And what we're doing with Green Lake is bringing those cloud capabilities and the cloud experience to our customers. You know, we like to say co locations, data center and edge of course. So this is the cloud on prem. And so rather than forcing customers to only have to go up to cloud to get modern cloud capabilities or the benefits of things like, you know, pay as you go for consumption, et cetera. You know, cloud native capabilities like containers, leveraging, kubernetes. We now bring all of that to Green Lake and to our customers. Edge locations and co locations and data centers. We've been able to dramatically transform many of our customers businesses. Right? And you'll probably see it discover some of those examples come to life. For example, Care Stream, who is, you know, in the electronic medical imaging world, Right? They have all of the X ray equipment that capture x rays and different sort of diagnostics for patients. Um and we worked with them to not only craft a ml solution to better read and diagnose these images, um but also all of the underlying infrastructure with the HP Green Lake Ml ops platform that allows them to instantly leverage the capabilities of machine learning and the infrastructure to go with it. >>And so tell me, so, how is it resonating with customers? What you're out there, talking to customers all the time? What are they >>telling you? You know, I think what our customers appreciate about HP Green Lake is it's not sort of look, it's either all on prem in my data center and I have to fully manage it, build it, implement it, take care of it or it's fully public cloud. I have little control and basically I get whatever the public cloud gives me right. Hp Green leg gives our customers the flexibility and control that they require. Right. And so you can think of many use cases where customers have a need to have the compute storage sort of processing need to happen closer to where their data and apps live. Um and so for that exact reason our customers love the flexibility, right? Cloud one, Dato was public cloud. Cloud to Dato I think is the cloud that comes to our customers at their convenience. And to me, you know what I tell C I O S and C T O S and sort of other lines of business leaders when I meet with them is you shouldn't be forced to have to take your data and apps elsewhere to get the transformation that you need. We want to be able to bring that directly to our customers. >>Of course, a lot of the transformation is around data. We love talking about data on the cube and it's funny, I mean we talked about big data last decade. We don't use that term much anymore. Uh It was kind of overhyped but as as often times as the case may be in the early days it's overhyped but then it's under hyped when it actually starts to kick in. And I feel like we're entering a new age of data. And insights with the ascendancy of machine learning and ai what does this mean from H. P. S. Perspective and what our customers telling you that it means for them. >>Yeah no data. I think we often hear data is the new currency writes the new gold. Um You know we've heard uh Antonio even say things like look data could even become something that maybe over time companies start to put some kind of value on their balance sheet. Behind right the same way that maybe brands represented this value on a balance sheet. Um effectively what's happened with data is a lot of people have a lot of data but there's not been a lot of ability to extract insights from data. Right? And I think this is the new revolution that we're all undergoing is we finally have the modern analytics tools to actually turn the data into insights and what we bring to the table from an HPD perspective is the fact that we have the best infrastructure. We obviously now have the cloud capabilities mixed in with our data fabric or container platform, our machine learning operations platform to then be able to process that data again, integrated with many of the great I SV partners that we have on the data side allow our customers to turn that into real insights for their business. And effectively data is becoming a huge competitive advantage. Right? I think many of us are you know, leveraging some, you know, pretty interesting tools or gadgets these days, right? Like I wear one of those, you know, sleep brings, you can imagine a company like that in the future that's able to collect so much data from the folks that purchase their products. Then being able to give us insights about, you know, where is the best zip code that, you know, people get the most amount of sleep in or you know, which zip codes are the healthiest and you know, the United States or countries, et cetera. Um but data really is becoming um you know, a competitive advantage. And one of the things that we care most about at HP is also using it as a force for good and making sure that there is a sort of ethical ai capability. >>That's a great message and very important one. And and it's interesting you're saying about data and the value how well it's clearly it's clearly being valued in terms of companies market caps. I mean it's it's it's you know, maybe it's not the balance yet, but it's on the income statement in terms of data products and data services that that's happening. So we'll see if Antonio's right in the next, you know, several years. But so let's talk more about the specific data challenges that you're solving for your customers. They talk about silos, they talk about they haven't got as much value out of their data initiatives as they wanted to. What are they telling you? Are there challenges and how are you approaching it? >>Yeah, I think, you know, um data's everywhere right. The ability for customers to store the right amount of data is a huge challenge because obviously there's, you know, a huge cost associated with collecting, keeping cleansing processing, you know, all the way to sort of analyzing your data. There tends to be a ton of data silos, right? So customers are looking for a common data fabric that they can then process their data sources across and then be able to sort of tap into that data from an analytics perspective. So much of the technology again that we're focused on is be able to store the data right, Our data fabric layer with his moral right being able to process that data capture that data and then allow the analytics tools to then harness the power of that data and turn that into real business insights for our customers. Um Every customer that I have spoken to, you know whether their financial services, you know, you can imagine the big financial services. I mean they've got you know, just bazillions of pockets of data everywhere and you know, the real sort of a challenge for them is how do I build a common data platform that allows me to tap into that data in effective ways for my business users? >>You talk a little bit about how you're changing the way you're providing solutions? Maybe maybe you could contrast it with the way HP has done in the past, because I think that's important when you, when you think about, you talk a lot about green lake and as a service, but if the products are still, you know, kind of boxes and Luns and, and gigahertz and ports, then, you know, that's that's a dis continuity. So what's changed from the past and how are you feeding into the way customers are transforming their business and supporting their outcomes? >>That's exactly right. You know, at some point in time, right. If you think maybe 10 or 20 years back, it used to be very much about the infrastructure for hp. What's exciting about what we're doing differently for our customers is look, we have the best infrastructure in the business, right. Hp has been doing this you no longer than anyone has probably almost 60 years now. Um but being able to vertically integrate right, move up in that value change so that our customers can get more complete solutions is the more interesting part for our customers. Our customers love our technology, Yes, the gigahertz and the speeds and feeds all of that do matter because they, you know, make for some very powerful infrastructure. However, what makes it easier is the fact that we are building platform stacks on top of that hardware, um that help abstract away the complexity of that infrastructure and the ability to use it far more seamlessly. Um and then if you think about it, we of course have also one of the most advanced services organizations. So being able to leverage our services capabilities, our platform capabilities on top of that hardware, again, deliver it back to our customers In a consumption model, which they've become two X, which they've come to expect from a cloud model. Um and then surrounded by a very rich ecosystem of partners. And we're talking about system Integrators that now have capabilities on helping our customers run their Green Lake environments. We're talking about I. S. V. S. Right? So software stacks and platforms that fully integrate with the Green Lake platform for completely seamless solutions. Um as well as channel Partners and global distributors. So I think that's where we can truly deliver the ultimate end to end solution. It's not just the hardware, right? But it's being complemented with the right services being complemented with the right platform capabilities, the software integrations to deliver that workload that the customer expects. >>And partners, they gotta they gotta place bets, they gonna put resources time money in a line, their resources with with their their partners and their suppliers like HP. So when they ask you, hey, okay. Hp. Tell me or well, what's your overall strategy? Why is it compelling and why do you give me competitive advantage relative to some of your peers in the industry? >>Yeah, I think what, you know, partners are going to be most excited about is the openness of the platform, right? Being able to allow our partners to leverage Green Lake Central with open API so that they can integrate some of their own technologies into our platform. Uh the ability to allow them to also layer in their own um managed services on top of the platform is key. Um And of course being able to build sort of these win win solutions with the system Integrators, right. The system Integrators have some fantastic capabilities all the way from an application development, all the way down to the infrastructure management and data center delivery centers that they have. And so leveraging HP Green Lake um really helps them have access to core technologies that they need to deliver these solutions. >>I wonder if I could take a little sort of side road here and ask you because so many changes going on HP itself is transforming your customers are transforming the pandemic has accelerated all these transformations. Can you talk a little bit about how you've transformed go to market specifically in the context of of as a service? I mean that had to be quite a change for you guys. >>Yeah, no, go to market transformations in support of sort of moving from traditional go to markets right to call, go to markets or significant. Um They required us to really think through what does delivering as a service solutions mean for our direct sales force? What does it mean for our partners and their transformations and being able to support as a service solutions? Um for HP specifically, it also means um thinking about our customer outcomes, not just our ability to ship them, you know, the requisite hardware and say, look, once it's left our dog, our job is done right. It really takes our obligation all the way to the customer using the technology on a day by day basis, as well as supporting them in making sure that everything from implementation to set up to the ongoing monitoring operations of the technology is working for them in the way that they expect in an as a service way, right? We don't expect them to operate it. We don't expect them to, you know, do anything more than pick up the phone and call us if something doesn't go as planned. >>And how about your sellers and your partners? How did they respond? I mean you just wake up one day is okay guys, here we go, new compensation scheme, new way to sell new way to market that that took some thought in some time. And where are you in that journey? >>That's right. And I always say, you know, if you expect people to wake up one day and be transformed, right? You're kidding yourself. Um So everything from sort of the way that we think about our customers use cases, right? And empowering our sellers to understand the outcomes that our customers expect and demand from us to things like compensation too. You know, the partner rebate program that we leverage through the channel partners in order to give them the right incentives to also allow them to make the right investments to support Green Lake. Um, you know, we've all, you know, HP has a fairly significant field sales and solution team and so not thinking about this only as a single person that represents Green Lake, but looking at our capabilities across the board, right. We have fantastic advisory consultants on the ground with phds and data science. We have folks that understand, you know, high performance computing, so making sure that we're embedding the expertise in all of the right personas that support our customers, not just from a calm perspective, but also from an understanding of the end to end solutions that we're bringing to those markets. >>So what gets you stoked in the morning, you get out of bed and you're like, okay, I'm gonna go attack the world. What are you most excited about for H P E and his future? >>You know, it's, there's so much happening right now in this sort of cloud world. Right? Um to me the most exciting portion is the fact that given that we've now introduced on prem cloud to the world, our ability to ship new services and new capabilities, um, but also do that via a very rich partner ecosystem honestly is what probably has me most excited. This is no longer the age of go at it alone, Right. So not only are engineering and product teams hard at work in the engine room producing, you know, capabilities at sort of lightening fast speeds, but it's also our ability to partner, uh you know, whether it's with platform providers, you know, software providers or, you know, system Integrators and services providers, that ecosystem is starting to come together to deliver highly meaningful solutions to our customers and all in a very open way. Um, the number one thing that I personally care about is that our customers never feel like they are being locked in or that they are sort of being forced to have to give up certain levels of capabilities. We want to give them the best of what's out there and allow them to then have that flexibility in their solution. >>And one of the challenges, of course with virtual events is you don't have the hallway track. You know, somebody can't say, hey, have you seen that IOT zone? It's amazing. They got all these robots going around. But so what, what would you say that people should be focused on the discovery maybe things that you want to call out specific highlights or segments that you think are relevant? >>Yeah, there's gonna be a ton of fantastic stuff I think, um you know, really looking for that edge to cloud strategy, um that we're gonna be spending a lot of time talking about um looking at some of our vertical workload solutions, right. We're gonna be talking about quite a few from electronic health care records to payment solutions. Um and many more I think depending on what folks are interested in, there's gonna be something for everyone. Um Project Aurora, which now starts to announce our new security capabilities. Um, you know, the zero trust capabilities that we're delivering um is probably interesting to a lot of our customers, so lots of exciting things coming and I'm excited for our customers to check this out. >>No doubt that's a hot topic. Especially given what's been happening the news these past several months. All right, well, thanks so much for coming back in. The cube is great to see you hopefully face to face next time. >>I sure hope so. Thanks so much for having me. >>It's our pleasure. And thank you for watching and thank you for being with us and our ongoing coverage of HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte. You're watching the cube, The leader and digital tech coverage. >>Yeah.

>>Welcome >>back to HP discover 2021. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes virtual coverage of discover 21 we're excited to welcome back our wa Kadoura, She's the vice president and worldwide go to market leader for HP. Es smoking hot. Green Lake Cloud services are welcome back to the cube. Good to see you again. >>Thank you for having me to be with you. >>So talk about how your products and services are supporting customer transformations. I'm interested in the experience that everybody has been dreaming about describe how you're giving your customer that competitive advantage. If you've got any examples, that would be awesome. >>Yeah, you got it. Um, I think as we heard Antonio say the cloud is an experience, not a destination, right? And what we're doing with Green Lake is bringing those cloud capabilities and the cloud experience to our customers. You know, we like to say co locations, data center and edge of course. So this is the cloud on prem. And so rather than forcing customers to only have to go up to cloud to get modern cloud capabilities or the benefits of things like, you know, pay as you go for consumption, et cetera. You know, cloud native capabilities like containers, leveraging, kubernetes. We now bring all of that to Green Lake and to our customers. Edge locations and co locations and data centers. We've been able to dramatically transform many of our customers businesses. Right? And you'll probably see it discover some of those examples come to life. For example, Care Stream, who is, you know, in the electronic medical imaging world, Right? They have all of the X ray equipment that capture x rays and different sort of diagnostics for patients. Um and we worked with them to not only craft a ml solution to better read and diagnose these images, um but also all of the underlying infrastructure with the HP Green Lake Ml ops platform that allows them to instantly leverage the capabilities of machine learning and the infrastructure to go with it. >>And so tell me, so, how is it resonating with customers? What you're out there, talking to customers all the time? What are they >>telling you? You know, I think what our customers appreciate about HP Green Lake is it's not sort of look, it's either all on prem in my data center and I have to fully manage it, build it, implement it, take care of it or it's fully public cloud. I have little control and basically I get whatever the public cloud gives me right. Hp Green leg gives our customers the flexibility and control that they require. Right. And so you can think of many use cases where customers have a need to have the compute storage sort of processing need to happen closer to where their data and apps live. Um and so for that exact reason our customers love the flexibility, right? Cloud one, Dato was public cloud. Cloud to Dato I think is the cloud that comes to our customers at their convenience. And to me, you know what I tell C I O S and C T O S and sort of other lines of business leaders when I meet with them is you shouldn't be forced to have to take your data and apps elsewhere to get the transformation that you need. We want to be able to bring that directly to our customers. >>Of course, a lot of the transformation is around data. We love talking about data on the cube and it's funny, I mean we talked about big data last decade. We don't use that term much anymore. Uh It was kind of overhyped but as as often times as the case may be in the early days it's overhyped but then it's under hyped when it actually starts to kick in. And I feel like we're entering a new age of data. And insights with the ascendancy of machine learning and ai what does this mean from H. P. S. Perspective and what our customers telling you that it means for them. >>Yeah no data. I think we often hear data is the new currency writes the new gold. Um You know we've heard uh Antonio even say things like look data could even become something that maybe over time companies start to put some kind of value on their balance sheet. Behind right the same way that maybe brands represented this value on a balance sheet. Um effectively what's happened with data is a lot of people have a lot of data but there's not been a lot of ability to extract insights from data. Right? And I think this is the new revolution that we're all undergoing is we finally have the modern analytics tools to actually turn the data into insights and what we bring to the table from an HPD perspective is the fact that we have the best infrastructure. We obviously now have the cloud capabilities mixed in with our data fabric or container platform, our machine learning operations platform to then be able to process that data again, integrated with many of the great I SV partners that we have on the data side allow our customers to turn that into real insights for their business. And effectively data is becoming a huge competitive advantage. Right? I think many of us are you know, leveraging some, you know, pretty interesting tools or gadgets these days, right? Like I wear one of those, you know, sleep brings, you can imagine a company like that in the future that's able to collect so much data from the folks that purchase their products. Then being able to give us insights about, you know, where is the best zip code that, you know, people get the most amount of sleep in or you know, which zip codes are the healthiest and you know, the United States or countries, et cetera. Um but data really is becoming um you know, a competitive advantage. And one of the things that we care most about at HP is also using it as a force for good and making sure that there is a sort of ethical ai capability. >>That's a great message and very important one. And and it's interesting you're saying about data and the value how well it's clearly it's clearly being valued in terms of companies market caps. I mean it's it's it's you know, maybe it's not the balance yet, but it's on the income statement in terms of data products and data services that that's happening. So we'll see if Antonio's right in the next, you know, several years. But so let's talk more about the specific data challenges that you're solving for your customers. They talk about silos, they talk about they haven't got as much value out of their data initiatives as they wanted to. What are they telling you? Are there challenges and how are you approaching it? >>Yeah, I think, you know, um data's everywhere right. The ability for customers to store the right amount of data is a huge challenge because obviously there's, you know, a huge cost associated with collecting, keeping cleansing processing, you know, all the way to sort of analyzing your data. There tends to be a ton of data silos, right? So customers are looking for a common data fabric that they can then process their data sources across and then be able to sort of tap into that data from an analytics perspective. So much of the technology again that we're focused on is be able to store the data right, Our data fabric layer with his moral right being able to process that data capture that data and then allow the analytics tools to then harness the power of that data and turn that into real business insights for our customers. Um Every customer that I have spoken to, you know whether their financial services, you know, you can imagine the big financial services. I mean they've got you know, just bazillions of pockets of data everywhere and you know, the real sort of a challenge for them is how do I build a common data platform that allows me to tap into that data in effective ways for my business users? >>You talk a little bit about how you're changing the way you're providing solutions? Maybe maybe you could contrast it with the way HP has done in the past, because I think that's important when you, when you think about, you talk a lot about green lake and as a service, but if the products are still, you know, kind of boxes and Luns and, and gigahertz and ports, then, you know, that's that's a dis continuity. So what's changed from the past and how are you feeding into the way customers are transforming their business and supporting their outcomes? >>That's exactly right. You know, at some point in time, right. If you think maybe 10 or 20 years back, it used to be very much about the infrastructure for hp. What's exciting about what we're doing differently for our customers is look, we have the best infrastructure in the business, right. Hp has been doing this you no longer than anyone has probably almost 60 years now. Um but being able to vertically integrate right, move up in that value change so that our customers can get more complete solutions is the more interesting part for our customers. Our customers love our technology, Yes, the gigahertz and the speeds and feeds all of that do matter because they, you know, make for some very powerful infrastructure. However, what makes it easier is the fact that we are building platform stacks on top of that hardware, um that help abstract away the complexity of that infrastructure and the ability to use it far more seamlessly. Um and then if you think about it, we of course have also one of the most advanced services organizations. So being able to leverage our services capabilities, our platform capabilities on top of that hardware, again, deliver it back to our customers In a consumption model, which they've become two X, which they've come to expect from a cloud model. Um and then surrounded by a very rich ecosystem of partners. And we're talking about system Integrators that now have capabilities on helping our customers run their Green Lake environments. We're talking about I. S. V. S. Right? So software stacks and platforms that fully integrate with the Green Lake platform for completely seamless solutions. Um as well as channel Partners and global distributors. So I think that's where we can truly deliver the ultimate end to end solution. It's not just the hardware, right? But it's being complemented with the right services being complemented with the right platform capabilities, the software integrations to deliver that workload that the customer expects. >>And partners, they gotta they gotta place bets, they gonna put resources time money in a line, their resources with with their their partners and their suppliers like HP. So when they ask you, hey, okay. Hp. Tell me or well, what's your overall strategy? Why is it compelling and why do you give me competitive advantage relative to some of your peers in the industry? >>Yeah, I think what, you know, partners are going to be most excited about is the openness of the platform, right? Being able to allow our partners to leverage Green Lake Central with open API so that they can integrate some of their own technologies into our platform. Uh the ability to allow them to also layer in their own um managed services on top of the platform is key. Um And of course being able to build sort of these win win solutions with the system Integrators, right. The system Integrators have some fantastic capabilities all the way from an application development, all the way down to the infrastructure management and data center delivery centers that they have. And so leveraging HP Green Lake um really helps them have access to core technologies that they need to deliver these solutions. >>I wonder if I could take a little sort of side road here and ask you because so many changes going on HP itself is transforming your customers are transforming the pandemic has accelerated all these transformations. Can you talk a little bit about how you've transformed go to market specifically in the context of of as a service? I mean that had to be quite a change for you guys. >>Yeah, no, go to market transformations in support of sort of moving from traditional go to markets right to call, go to markets or significant. Um They required us to really think through what does delivering as a service solutions mean for our direct sales force? What does it mean for our partners and their transformations and being able to support as a service solutions? Um for HP specifically, it also means um thinking about our customer outcomes, not just our ability to ship them, you know, the requisite hardware and say, look, once it's left our dog, our job is done right. It really takes our obligation all the way to the customer using the technology on a day by day basis, as well as supporting them in making sure that everything from implementation to set up to the ongoing monitoring operations of the technology is working for them in the way that they expect in an as a service way, right? We don't expect them to operate it. We don't expect them to, you know, do anything more than pick up the phone and call us if something doesn't go as planned. >>And how about your sellers and your partners? How did they respond? I mean you just wake up one day is okay guys, here we go, new compensation scheme, new way to sell new way to market that that took some thought in some time. And where are you in that journey? >>That's right. And I always say, you know, if you expect people to wake up one day and be transformed, right? You're kidding yourself. Um So everything from sort of the way that we think about our customers use cases, right? And empowering our sellers to understand the outcomes that our customers expect and demand from us to things like compensation too. You know, the partner rebate program that we leverage through the channel partners in order to give them the right incentives to also allow them to make the right investments to support Green Lake. Um, you know, we've all, you know, HP has a fairly significant field sales and solution team and so not thinking about this only as a single person that represents Green Lake, but looking at our capabilities across the board, right. We have fantastic advisory consultants on the ground with phds and data science. We have folks that understand, you know, high performance computing, so making sure that we're embedding the expertise in all of the right personas that support our customers, not just from a calm perspective, but also from an understanding of the end to end solutions that we're bringing to those markets. >>So what gets you stoked in the morning, you get out of bed and you're like, okay, I'm gonna go attack the world. What are you most excited about for H P E and his future? >>You know, it's, there's so much happening right now in this sort of cloud world. Right? Um to me the most exciting portion is the fact that given that we've now introduced on prem cloud to the world, our ability to ship new services and new capabilities, um, but also do that via a very rich partner ecosystem honestly is what probably has me most excited. This is no longer the age of go at it alone, Right. So not only are engineering and product teams hard at work in the engine room producing, you know, capabilities at sort of lightening fast speeds, but it's also our ability to partner, uh you know, whether it's with platform providers, you know, software providers or, you know, system Integrators and services providers, that ecosystem is starting to come together to deliver highly meaningful solutions to our customers and all in a very open way. Um, the number one thing that I personally care about is that our customers never feel like they are being locked in or that they are sort of being forced to have to give up certain levels of capabilities. We want to give them the best of what's out there and allow them to then have that flexibility in their solution. >>And one of the challenges, of course with virtual events is you don't have the hallway track. You know, somebody can't say, hey, have you seen that IOT zone? It's amazing. They got all these robots going around. But so what, what would you say that people should be focused on the discovery maybe things that you want to call out specific highlights or segments that you think are relevant? >>Yeah, there's gonna be a ton of fantastic stuff I think, um you know, really looking for that edge to cloud strategy, um that we're gonna be spending a lot of time talking about um looking at some of our vertical workload solutions, right. We're gonna be talking about quite a few from electronic health care records to payment solutions. Um and many more I think depending on what folks are interested in, there's gonna be something for everyone. Um Project Aurora, which now starts to announce our new security capabilities. Um, you know, the zero trust capabilities that we're delivering um is probably interesting to a lot of our customers, so lots of exciting things coming and I'm excited for our customers to check this out. >>No doubt that's a hot topic. Especially given what's been happening the news these past several months. All right, well, thanks so much for coming back in. The cube is great to see you hopefully face to face next time. >>I sure hope so. Thanks so much for having me. >>It's our pleasure. And thank you for watching and thank you for being with us and our ongoing coverage of HPD discovered 2021. This is Dave Volonte. You're watching the cube, The leader and digital tech coverage. >>Yeah.

>>Welcome back to HP discover 2021 My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cubes, virtual coverage of H. P. S. Big customer event. Of course, the virtual edition, we're gonna dig into transformations the role of technology in the role of senior technology leadership. Look, let's face it, H P. E. Has gone through a pretty dramatic transformation itself in the past few years. So it makes a great example in case study and with me is rashmi kumari who is the senior vice president and C. I. O. At HP rashmi welcome come on inside the cube. >>Dave Nice to be here. >>Well, it's been almost a year since Covid changed the world as we know it. How would you say the role of the CEO specifically and generally it has changed. I mean you got digital Zero Trust has gone from buzzword to >>mandate >>digital. Everybody was complacent about digital in many ways and now it's really accelerated remote work hybrid. How do you see it? >>Absolutely. As I said in the last discover that Covid has been the biggest reason to accelerate digital transformation in the company's I. C. C. I O. S role has changed tremendously in the last 15 months. It's no more just keep the operations running that's become a table stick. Our roles have become not only to create digital customer experience engaged with our customers in different ways, but also to transform the company operations from inside out to be able to give that digital experience from beginning to end off the customer engagement going forward. We have also become responsible for switching our strategies around the companies as the Covid. Covid hit in different parts of the world at different times and how companies structured their operations to go from one region to another. A global company like H. B had to look into its supply chain differently. Had to look into strategies to mitigate the risk that was created because of the supply chain disruptions as well as you go to taking care of our employees. How do you create this digital collaboration experience where teams can still come together and make the work happen for our end customers? How do we think about future employee engagement when people are not coming into these big buildings and offices and working together, But how to create the same level of collaboration coordination as well as delivery or faster uh goods and services which is enabled by technology going forward. So see I. O. And I. T. S. Role has gone from giving a different level of customer experience to a different level of employee experience as well as enabling day to day operations of the company's. Ceos have realized that digital is the way to go forward. It does not matter what industry you are in and now see a as have their seat at the table to define what the future of every company now, which is a technology company respective you are in oil and gas or mining or a technical product or a card or a mobility company. End of the day you have to act and behave like a technology company. >>So I want to ask you about that because you've you've been a Ceo and uh you know, leading technology provider now for the last three years and you've had previous roles and where you know non technical technology, you know, selling to I. T. Companies and as you point out those worlds are coming together, everybody is a technology company today. How do you think that changes the role of the C. I. O. Because it would always seem to me that there was a difference between A C. I. O. And a tech company. You know what I mean by that? And the C. I. O. It's sort of every other company is those two worlds converging. >>Absolutely. And it's interesting you pointed out that I have worked in many different industries from healthcare and pharma to entertainment to utilities. Um And now at a technology company end of the day um The issues that I. T. Deals with are pretty similar across the organization. What is different here is now my customers are people like me in other industries and I have a little bit of an advantage because just having the experience across various ecosystem. Even at H. B. Look I was fortunate um at H. B. Because of Antonio's leadership, we have topped out mandate to transform how we did business. And I talked about my next gen IT program in last year's cube interview. But at the same time while we were changing our customer partners experience from ordering to order processing to supply chain to finance. Uh We decided this pivot of becoming as a service company. And if you think about that pivot it's pretty common if it was a technology company or non technology company at HP. We were very used to selling a product and coming back three years later at the time of refresh of infrastructure or hardware. That's no more true for us now we are becoming as a service or a subscription company and I. T. Played a major role to enable that quote to cash experience. Which is very different than the traditional experience around how we stay connected with our customer, how we proactively understand their behavior. I always talk about this term. Um Digital exhaust which results into data which can result into better insight and you can not only Upsell cross l because now you have more data about your product usage, but first and the foremost give what your customer wants in a much better way because you can proactively understand their needs and wants because you are providing a digital product versus a physical product. So this is the change that most of the companies are now going through. If you look at Domino's transition, there are pills a sellers but they did better because they had better digital experience. If you look at Chipotle, these are food service companies I. K which is a furniture manufacturer across the board. We have helped our customers and industries to understand how to become a more digital provider. And and remember when uh hp says edge to cloud platform as a service edges the product, the customers who we deal with and how do we get that? Help them get their data to understand how the product is behaving and then get the information to cloud for further analysis. Um and understanding from the data that comes out of the products that gets up, >>I think you've been HP now think around three years and I've been watching of course for decades. Hp. Hp then HP is I feel like it's entering now the sort of third phase of its transformation, your phase one was okay, we gotta figure out how to deal or or operate as a separate companies. Okay. That took some time and then it was okay. Now how do we align our resources and you know, what are the waves that we're gonna ride? And how do we how do we take our human capital, our investments and what bets do we place and and all in on as a service. And now it's like okay how do we deliver on all those promises? So pretty massive transformations. You talked about edge to cloud as a service so you've got this huge pivot in your in your business. What's the technology strategy to support that transformation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question. So as I mentioned first your second phase which was becoming a stand alone company was the next N. I. T. Program very broad and um S. Four and 60 related ecosystem application. We're even in the traditional business there was a realization that we were 100 20 billion company. We are 30 billion company. We need different types of technologies as well as more integrated across our product line across the globe. And um we I'm very happy to report that we are the last leg of next in I. T. Transformation where we have brought in new customer experience through low touch or not touch order pressing. A very strong as four capabilities. Where we are now able to run all global orders across all our hardware and services business together. And I'm happy to report that we have been able to successfully run through the transformation which a typical company of our size would take five or six years to do in around close to three years. But at the same time while we were building this foundation and the capabilities to be able to do other management, supply chain and data and analytics platforms. We also made the pivot to go to as a service now for as a service and subscription selling. It needs a very different quote to Kazakh cash experience for our customers and that's where we had to bring in um platforms like brim to do um subscription building, convergent charging and a whole different way to address. But we were lucky to have this transformation completed on which we could bolt on this new capability and we had the data and another X platform built which now these as a service products can also use to drive better insight into our customer behavior um as well as how they're using our product a real time for our operations teams. >>Well they say follow the money in the cube. We love to say follow the day to day is obviously a crucial component of competitive advantage business value. So you talk a little bit more about the role of data. I'm interested I'm interested in where I. T. Fits uh you know a lot of companies that have a Chief data officer or Ceo sometimes they're separate. Sometimes they they work you know for each other or Cdo works for C. I. O. How do you guys approach the whole data conversation? >>Yeah that's a that's a great question and has been top of the mind of a lot of C E O C I O S. Chief digital officers in many different companies. The way we have set it up here is do we do have a chief data officer and we do have a head of uh technology and platform and data within I. T. Look. The way I see is that I call the term data torture if we have multiple data lakes, if we have multiple data locations and the data is not coming together at one place at the first time that it comes out of the source system, we end up with data swamps and it's very difficult to drive insights. It's very difficult to have a single version of truth. So HP had two pronged approach. First one was as part of this next gen i. T. Transformation we embarked upon the journey first of all to define our customers and products in a very uniform way across the globe. It's called entity Master Data and Product Master Data Program. These were very very difficult program. We are now happy to report that we can understand the customer from code stage to servicing stage beginning to end across all our system. It's been a tough journey but it was a effort well spent at the same time while we were building this message capability, we also invest the time in our analytics platform because we are generating so much data now globally as one footprint. How do we link our data link to R. S. A. P. And Salesforce and all these systems where our customer data flows through and create analytics and insight from it from our customers or our operations team. At the same time, we also created a chief data officer role where the responsibility is really to drive business from understanding what decision making an analytics they need around product, around customer, around their usage, around their experience to be able to drive better alignment with our customers and products going forward. So this creates efficiencies in the organization. If you have a leader who is taking care of your platforms and data building single source of truth and you have a leader who is propagating this mature notion of handling data as enterprise data and driving that focus on understanding the metrics and the insight that the businesses need to drive better customer alignment. That's when we gain those efficiencies and behind the scenes, the chief data officer and the data leader within my organization worked very, very closely to understand each other needs sometimes out of the possible where do we need the data processing? Is it at the edge? Is it in the cloud? What's the best way to drive the technology and the platform forward? And they kind of rely on each other's knowledge and intelligence to give us give us superior results. And I have done data analytics in many different companies. This model works where you have focused on insight and analytics without because data without insight is of no value, but at the same time you need clean data. You need efficient, fast platforms to process that insight at the functional nonfunctional requirements that are business partners have and that's how we have established in here and we have seen many successes recently. As of now, >>I want to ask you a kind of a harder maybe it's not harder question. It's a weird question around single version of the truth because it's clearly a challenge for organizations and there's many applications workloads that require that single version of the truth. The operational systems, the transaction systems, the HR the salesforce. Clearly you have to have a single version of the truth. I feel like however we're on the cusp of a new era where business lines see an opportunity for whatever their own truth to work with a partner to create some kind of new data product. And it's early days in that. But I want to and maybe not the right question for HP. But I wonder if you see it with in your ecosystems where where it's it's yes, single version of truth is sort of one class of data and analytics gotta have that nail down data quality, everything else. But then there's this sort of artistic version of the data where business people need more freedom. They need more latitude to create. Are you seeing that? And maybe you can help me put that into context. >>Uh, that's a great question. David. I'm glad you asked it. So I think tom Davenport who is known in the data space talks about the offensive and the defensive use cases of leveraging data. I think the piece that you talked about where it's clean, it's pristine, it's quality. It's all that most of those offer the offensive use cases where you are improving company's operations incrementally because you have very clean that I have very good understanding of how my territories are doing, how my customers are doing how my products are doing. How am I meeting my sls or how my financials are looking? There's no room for failure in that area. The other area is though, which works on the same set of data. It's not a different set of data, but the need is more around finding needles in the haystack to come up with new needs, new ones and customers or new business models that we go with. The way we have done it is we do take this data take out what's not allowed for everybody to be seen and then what we call is a private space. But that's this entire data available to our business leader, not real time because the need is not as real time because they're doing more what we call this predictive analytics to be able to leverage the same data set and run their analytics. And we work very closely with business in its we educate them. We tell them how to leverage this data set and use it and gather their feedback to understand what they need in that space to continue to run with their with their analytics. I think as we talk about hindsight insight and foresight hindsight and insight happens more from this clean data lakes where you have authenticity, you have quality and then most of the foresight happens in a different space where the users have more leverage to use data in many different ways to drive analytics and insights which is not readily available. >>Thank you for that. That's interesting discussion. You know digital transformation. It's a journey and it's going to take many years. A lot of ways, not a lot of ways 2020 was a forced March to digital. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and you really didn't have much time to plan. So now organizations are stepping back saying, okay let's really lean into our strategy the journey and along the way there's gonna be blind spots, there's bumps in the road when you look out what are the potential disruptions that you see maybe in terms of how companies are currently approaching their digital transformations? That's a great question. >>Dave and I'm going to take a little bit more longer term view on this topic. Right in what's top of my mind um recently is the whole topic of E. S. G. Environmental, social and governance. Most of the companies have governance in place, right? Because they are either public companies or they're under some kind of uh scrutiny from different regulatory bodies or what not. Even if you're a startup, you need to do things with our customers and what not. It has been there for companies. It continues to be there. We the public companies are very good at making sure that we have the right compliance, right privacy, right governance in in in place. Now we'll talk about cyber security. I think that creates a whole new challenge in that governance space. However, we have the set up within our companies to be able to handle that challenge. Now, when we go to social, what happened last year was really important. And now as each and every company, we need to think about what are we doing from our perspective to play our part in that. And not only the bigger companies leaders at our level, I would say that Between last March and this year, I have hired more than 400 people during pandemic, which was all virtual, but me and my team have made sure that we are doing the right thing to drive inclusion and diversity, which is also very big objective for h P E. And Antonio himself has been very active in various round tables in us at the world Economic forum level and I think it's really important for companies to create that opportunity, remove that disparity that's there for the underserved communities. If we want to continue to be successful in this world too, create innovative products and services, we need to sell it to the broader cross section of populations and to be able to do that, we need to bring them in our fold and enable them to create that um, equal consumption capabilities across different sets of people. Hp has taken many initiatives and so are many companies. I feel like uh, The momentum that companies have now created around the topic of equality is very important. I'm also very excited to see that a lot of startups are now coming up to serve that 99% versus just the shiny ones, as you know, in the bay area to create better delivery methods of food or products. Right. The third piece, which is environmental, is extremely important as well as we have seen recently in many companies and where even the dollar or the economic value is flowing are around the companies which are serious about environmental HP recently published its living Progress report. We have been in the forefront of innovation to reduce carbon emissions, we help our customers, um, through those processes. Again, if we do, if our planet is on fire, none of us will exist, right. So we all have to do that every little part to be able to do better. And I'm happy to report, I myself as a person, solar panels, battery electric cars, whatever I can do, but I think something more needs to happen right where as an individual I need to pitch in, but maybe utilities will be so green in the future that I don't need to put panels on my roof, which again creates a different kind of uh waste going forward. So when you ask me about disruptions, I personally feel that successful company like ours have to have E. S. G. Top of their mind and think of products and services from that perspective, which creates equal opportunity for people, which creates better environment sustainability going forward. And, you know, our customers are investors are very interested in seeing what we are doing to be able to serve that cause uh for for bigger cross section of companies, and I'm most of the time very happy to share with my C I. O cohort around how are H. P E F s capabilities creates or feeds into the circular economy, how much e waste we have recycled or kept it off of landfills are green capabilities, How it reduces the evils going forward as well as our sustainability initiatives, which can help other, see IOS to be more um carbon neutral going forward as well. >>You know, that's a great answer, rashmi, thank you for that because I gotta tell you hear a lot of mumbo jumbo about E S G. But that was a very substantive, thoughtful response that I think, I think tech companies in particular are have to lead in our leading in this area. So I really appreciate that sentiment. I want to end with a very important topic which is cyber. It's obviously, you know, escalated in, in the news the last several months. It's always in the news, but You know, 10 or 15 years ago there was this mentality of failure equals fire. Now we realize, hey, they're gonna get in, it's how you handle it. Cyber has become a board level topic, you know? Years ago there was a lot of discussion, oh, you can't have the sec ops team working for the C. I. O. Because that's like the Fox watching the Henhouse, that's changed. Uh it's been a real awakening, a kind of a rude awakening. So the world is now more virtual, you've gotta secure physical uh assets. I mean, any knucklehead can now become a ransomware attack, er they can, they can, they can buy ransomware as a services in the dark, dark web. So that's something we've never seen before. You're seeing supply chains get hacked and self forming malware. I mean, it's a really scary time. So you've got these intellectual assets, it's a top priority for organizations. Are you seeing a convergence of the sea? So roll the C. I. O. Roll the line of business roles relative to sort of prior years in terms of driving security throughout organizations. >>This is a great question. And this was a big discussion at my public board meeting a couple of days ago. It's as as I talk about many topics, if you think digital, if you think data, if you think is you, it's no more one organizations, business, it's now everybody's responsibility. I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of days ago where Somebody has compared cyber to 9-11-type scenario that if it happens for a company, that's the level of impact you feel on your on your operations. So, you know, all models are going to change where C so reports to see IO at H P E. We are also into products or security and that's why I see. So is a peer of mine who I worked with very closely who also worked with product teams where we are saving our customers from a lot of pain in this space going forward. And H. B. E. Itself is investing enormous amount of efforts in time in coming out of products which are which are secured and are not vulnerable to these types of attacks. The way I see it is see So role has become extremely critical in every company and the big part of that role is to make people understand that cybersecurity is also everybody's responsibility. That's why in I. T. V. Propagate def sec ups. Um As we talk about it, we are very very careful about picking the right products and services. This is one area where companies cannot shy away from investing. You have to continuously looking at cyber security architecture, you have to continuously look at and understand where the gaps are and how do we switch our product or service that we use from the providers to make sure our companies stay secure The training, not only for individual employees around anti phishing or what does cybersecurity mean, but also to the executive committee and to the board around what cybersecurity means, what zero trust means, but at the same time doing drive ins, we did it for business continuity and disaster recovery. Before now at this time we do it for a ransomware attack and stay prepared as you mentioned. And we all say in tech community, it's always if not when no company can them their chest and say, oh, we are fully secured because something can happen going forward. But what is the readiness for something that can happen? It has to be handled at the same risk level as a pandemic or earthquake or a natural disaster. And assume that it's going to happen and how as a company we will behave when when something like this happen. So I'm here's believer in the framework of uh protect, detect, govern and respond um as these things happen. So we need to have exercises within the company to ensure that everybody is aware of the part that they play day today but at the same time when some event happen and making sure we do very periodic reviews of I. T. And cyber practices across the company. There is no more differentiation between I. T. And O. T. That was 10 years ago. I remember working with different industries where OT was totally out of reach of I. T. And guess what happened? Wanna cry and Petra and XP machines were still running your supply chains and they were not protected. So if it's a technology it needs to be protected. That's the mindset. People need to go with invest in education, training, um awareness of your employees, your management committee, your board and do frequent exercises to understand how to respond when something like this happen. See it's a big responsibility to protect our customer data, our customers operations and we all need to be responsible and accountable to be able to provide all our products and services to our customers when something unforeseen like this happens, >>Russian, very generous with your time. Thank you so much for coming back in the CUBA is great to have you again. >>Thank you. Dave was really nice chatting with you. Thanks >>for being with us for our ongoing coverage of HP discover 21 This is Dave Volonte, you're watching the virtual cube, the leader in digital tech coverage. Be right back. >>Mm hmm, mm.

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube presenting >>active de que intelligent automation for data quality brought to you by Iota Ho >>Welcome to the sixth episode of the I. O. Tahoe data automation series. On the cube. We're gonna start off with a segment on how to accelerate the adoption of snowflake with Glenn Grossman, who is the enterprise account executive from Snowflake and yusef khan, the head of data services from Iota. Gentlemen welcome. >>Good afternoon. Good morning, Good evening. Dave. >>Good to see you. Dave. Good to see you. >>Okay glenn uh let's start with you. I mean the Cube hosted the snowflake data cloud summit in November and we heard from customers and going from love the tagline zero to snowflake, you know, 90 minutes very quickly. And of course you want to make it simple and attractive for enterprises to move data and analytics into the snowflake platform but help us understand once the data is there, how is snowflake helping to achieve savings compared to the data lake? >>Absolutely. dave. It's a great question, you know, it starts off first with the notion and uh kind of, we coined it in the industry or t shirt size pricing. You know, you don't necessarily always need the performance of a high end sports car when you're just trying to go get some groceries and drive down the street 20 mph. The t shirt pricing really aligns to, depending on what your operational workload is to support the business and the value that you need from that business? Not every day. Do you need data? Every second of the moment? Might be once a day, once a week through that t shirt size price and we can align for the performance according to the environmental needs of the business. What those drivers are the key performance indicators to drive that insight to make better decisions, It allows us to control that cost. So to my point, not always do you need the performance of a Ferrari? Maybe you need the performance and gas mileage of the Honda Civic if you would just get and deliver the value of the business but knowing that you have that entire performance landscape at a moments notice and that's really what what allows us to hold and get away from. How much is it going to cost me in a data lake type of environment? >>Got it. Thank you for that yussef. Where does Io Tahoe fit into this equation? I mean what's, what's, what's unique about the approach that you're taking towards this notion of mobilizing data on snowflake? >>Well, Dave in the first instance we profile the data itself at the data level, so not just at the level of metadata and we do that wherever that data lives. So it could be structured data could be semi structured data could be unstructured data and that data could be on premise. It could be in the cloud or it could be on some kind of SAAS platform. And so we profile this data at the source system that is feeding snowflake within snowflake itself within the end applications and the reports that the snowflake environment is serving. So what we've done here is take our machine learning discovery technology and make snowflake itself the repository for knowledge and insights on data. And this is pretty unique. Uh automation in the form of our P. A. Is being applied to the data both before after and within snowflake. And so the ultimate outcome is that business users can have a much greater degree of confidence that the data they're using can be trusted. Um The other thing we do uh which is unique is employee data R. P. A. To proactively detect and recommend fixes the data quality so that removes the manual time and effort and cost it takes to fix those data quality issues. Uh If they're left unchecked and untouched >>so that's key to things their trust, nobody's gonna use the data. It's not trusted. But also context. If you think about it, we've contextualized are operational systems but not our analytic system. So there's a big step forward glen. I wonder if you can tell us how customers are managing data quality when they migrate to snowflake because there's a lot of baggage in in traditional data warehouses and data lakes and and data hubs. Maybe you can talk about why this is a challenge for customers. And like for instance can you proactively address some of those challenges that customers face >>that we certainly can. They have. You know, data quality. Legacy data sources are always inherent with D. Q. Issues whether it's been master data management and data stewardship programs over the last really almost two decades right now, you do have systemic data issues. You have siloed data, you have information operational, data stores data marks. It became a hodgepodge when organizations are starting their journey to migrate to the cloud. One of the things that were first doing is that inspection of data um you know first and foremost even looking to retire legacy data sources that aren't even used across the enterprise but because they were part of the systemic long running operational on premise technology, it stayed there when we start to look at data pipelines as we onboard a customer. You know we want to do that era. We want to do QA and quality assurance so that we can, And our ultimate goal eliminate the garbage in garbage out scenarios that we've been plagued with really over the last 40, 50 years of just data in general. So we have to take an inspection where traditionally it was E. T. L. Now in the world of snowflake, it's really lt we're extracting were loading or inspecting them. We're transforming out to the business so that these routines could be done once and again give great business value back to making decisions around the data instead of spending all this long time. Always re architect ng the data pipeline to serve the business. >>Got it. Thank you. Glenda yourself of course. Snowflakes renowned for customers. Tell me all the time. It's so easy. It's so easy to spin up a data warehouse. It helps with my security. Again it simplifies everything but so you know, getting started is one thing but then adoption is also a key. So I'm interested in the role that that I owe. Tahoe plays in accelerating adoption for new customers. >>Absolutely. David. I mean as Ben said, you know every every migration to Snowflake is going to have a business case. Um uh and that is going to be uh partly about reducing spending legacy I. T. Servers, storage licenses, support all those good things um that see I want to be able to turn off entirely ultimately. And what Ayatollah does is help discover all the legacy undocumented silos that have been built up, as Glenn says on the data estate across a period of time, build intelligence around those silos and help reduce those legacy costs sooner by accelerating that that whole process. Because obviously the quicker that I. T. Um and Cdos can turn off legacy data sources the more funding and resources going to be available to them to manage the new uh Snowflake based data estate on the cloud. And so turning off the old building, the new go hand in hand to make sure those those numbers stack up the program is delivered uh and the benefits are delivered. And so what we're doing here with a Tahoe is improving the customers are y by accelerating their ability to adopt Snowflake. >>Great. And I mean we're talking a lot about data quality here but in a lot of ways that's table stakes like I said, if you don't trust the data, nobody's going to use it. And glenn, I mean I look at Snowflake and I see obviously the ease of use the simplicity you guys are nailing that the data sharing capabilities I think are really exciting because you know everybody talks about sharing data but then we talked about data as an asset, Everyone so high I to hold it. And so sharing is is something that I see as a paradigm shift and you guys are enabling that. So one of the things beyond data quality that are notable that customers are excited about that, maybe you're excited about >>David, I think you just cleared it out. It's it's this massive data sharing play part of the data cloud platform. Uh you know, just as of last year we had a little over about 100 people, 100 vendors in our data marketplace. That number today is well over 450 it is all about democratizing and sharing data in a world that is no longer held back by FTp s and C. S. V. S and then the organization having to take that data and ingested into their systems. You're a snowflake customer. want to subscribe to an S and P data sources an example, go subscribe it to it. It's in your account there was no data engineering, there was no physical lift of data and that becomes the most important thing when we talk about getting broader insights, data quality. Well, the data has already been inspected from your vendor is just available in your account. It's obviously a very simplistic thing to describe behind the scenes is what our founders have created to make it very, very easy for us to democratize not only internal with private sharing of data, but this notion of marketplace ensuring across your customers um marketplace is certainly on the type of all of my customers minds and probably some other areas that might have heard out of a recent cloud summit is the introduction of snow park and being able to do where all this data is going towards us. Am I in an ale, you know, along with our partners at Io Tahoe and R. P. A. Automation is what do we do with all this data? How do we put the algorithms and targets now? We'll be able to run in the future R and python scripts and java libraries directly inside Snowflake, which allows you to even accelerate even faster, Which people found traditionally when we started off eight years ago just as a data warehousing platform. >>Yeah, I think we're on the cusp of just a new way of thinking about data. I mean obviously simplicity is a starting point but but data by its very nature is decentralized. You talk about democratizing data. I like this idea of the global mesh. I mean it's very powerful concept and again it's early days but you know, keep part of this is is automation and trust, yussef you've worked with Snowflake and you're bringing active D. Q. To the market what our customers telling you so far? >>Well David the feedback so far has been great. Which is brilliant. So I mean firstly there's a point about speed and acceleration. Um So that's the speed to incite really. So where you have inherent data quality issues uh whether that's with data that was on premise and being brought into snowflake or on snowflake itself, we're able to show the customer results and help them understand their data quality better Within Day one which is which is a fantastic acceleration. I'm related to that. There's the cost and effort to get that insight is it's a massive productivity gain versus where you're seeing customers who've been struggling sometimes too remediate legacy data and legacy decisions that they've made over the past couple of decades, so that that cost and effort is much lower than it would otherwise have been. Um 3rdly, there's confidence and trust, so you can see Cdos and see IOS got demonstrable results that they've been able to improve data quality across a whole bunch of use cases for business users in marketing and customer services, for commercial teams, for financial teams. So there's that very quick kind of growth in confidence and credibility as the projects get moving. And then finally, I mean really all the use cases for the snowflake depend on data quality, really whether it's data science, uh and and the kind of snow park applications that Glenn has talked about, all those use cases work better when we're able to accelerate the ri for our joint customers by very quickly pushing out these data quality um insights. Um And I think one of the one of the things that the snowflake have recognized is that in order for C. I. O. Is to really adopt enterprise wide, um It's also as well as the great technology with Snowflake offers, it's about cleaning up that legacy data state, freeing up the budget for CIA to spend it on the new modern day to a state that lets them mobilise their data with snowflake. >>So you're seeing the Senate progression. We're simplifying the the the analytics from a tech perspective. You bring in Federated governance which which brings more trust. Then then you bring in the automation of the data quality piece which is fundamental. And now you can really start to, as you guys are saying, democratized and scale uh and share data. Very powerful guys. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. I appreciate as well. Yeah.

>>mhm Yes. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of red hat summit 2021 virtual john for your host of the cube paul. Comey who's here is the president and Ceo of red hat cube alumni paul always great to have you on the leader of red hat now President and Ceo for a year I think about a year now we're looking at under your belt now part of IBM Great to see you. >>You too nice to see you again john. >>So we've talked many times on the Cuban now. It's kind of playing out in real time. The software world with open source has gone mainstream. The conversation was moved to the cloud. Okay. People move to the cloud. Cloud native emerges devil has been around for a while. But now the conversation is cloud for the enterprise that uh, the enterprises, it's a tough world. You gotta, it's complicated is a lot of legacies, a lot of value and you want the new stuff. This is what the conversation is now. It's shifted to I got cloud, it's hybrid. What's your reaction to that? >>Well, you know, it really is, as you say, it's complicated but it's evolving and really, really fast. I mean, you know, I think you remember we've been here a lot. You first remember first software is eating the world and open source software is eating the world and in every every company is becoming a software company. All true. But that evolution continues today with the proliferation of hybrid cloud environments that it encompasses everything from data centers to public cloud services to And even now we'll talk about two for far flung edge deployments. That's all now part of the cloud. I mean, this is all what makes up hybrid. I like to always say that Hybrid really is the new data centers but now see IOS and I thi leaders, they need to reconsider what their roles, what their role here is and the way we look at it as every C I O now needs to be a cloud operator because because Hybrid is what their environment is now today, that used to be all in their data center. So, so but one of the things that really makes a choice even more important and its leaders, they need to address address specific needs, um not only to the organization, but even as they change and evolve in this because it really is a dynamic environment, I mean think about it and just mentioned edge and how how important that is to see IOS, we weren't even talking about that two years ago, so, so it's not a single answer here, right? Um and and you know, and there as there wasn't a single answer when it was all in one building or in one data center, but now it's even it's even more complex. So, so we need to enable really a new wave of cloud operators here with technologies that can be deployed as cloud services as well as on premises. We'll talk more about this too, but and we'll talk about this at the summit. We talked about the summit. Cloud services become really important, especially managed services, for example, because, um because we're so complex, Hybrid brings so much power, but it is complex. You know, see I need help with this, they need help managing this now. And so that's really where a lot of our focus is today. >>It's interesting you say there's no single answer. I would agree with you because it's now you can actually do a lot more customization with cloud and Hybrid. I think there's a general sentiment and directionally correct answer uh in the industry is that hybrid is operating model right? And I think you guys are have a whole division of SRS google talks about this all the time and their cloud site reliability engineers. And I think you're seeing that in educational institutions which we'll talk about. But I think this idea of cloud scale as the new I. T. And you mentioned hybrids, the new data center. You know, I don't I don't want to offend my I. T. Friends out there but they're kind of all realizing it to that if they don't understand how to operate cloud scale they'll be irrelevant and they're and they understand that their jobs are not just provisioning storage, networking and servers. Those are now involved in a hybrid architecture. And by the way, there is no one recipe, it's dependent. Each enterprise can have its own set of architecture based on their workloads again. So I buy that no single answer, but there is hybrid and I think it's pretty well understood. I mean, do you agree with that? >>I absolutely agree with that. But let's take a look at this, unpack it a little bit and take a look at the building blocks a bit. Right. Um, you know, we talked about open sources, what's driving all of this now and and everything we're talking about here is built in and around Lennox and it was only possible because Lennox was so open, so available and became so powerful, that's now been the platform that all this new innovation is built around. I mean, I oftentimes saying it's true the cloud just wouldn't be here had Lennox not only made its way in the open source development environment, but made its way into the enterprise to enable it to companies like us that make it enterprise ready, secure etcetera. So I think that's really an important thing to understand here. So when you talk about skills that the Ceos need certainly SRE skills, operation skills etcetera, but they also need Lennox skills and even open source skills. So so I think I think that's important, everything that's coming down the road and in in this space in um in his open source based and built in and around Lennox things like ai quantum computing, autonomous vehicles um IOT in and out to the edge all built on a foundation of Lennox and open source. So we see it in the enterprise everywhere now. I mean a survey where you know we did a survey out there and looking at the survey of C I O s out there, open is predominant out there, Lennox is predominant out there in hybrid is predominant and growing in a pretty big clip every year. >>You know, paul, I want to get your reaction to something because this may be kind of a dot connecting moment for me because I want to get your thoughts on this because it's a it's a pattern I'm seeing emerging now multiple times and usually I thought this was kind of a one off, but I'm starting to see it. So I'm going to get your thoughts on this. You guys have been super successful with open source in the enterprise, Super successful over decades, building a community and an ecosystem now with open source with with cloud Native, specifically we're seeing end users participating more in the, in the contribution starts out with the hyper scale ear's but now you're seeing kind of, I would call general purpose mainstream enterprises contributing projects, not necessarily their expertise, but they've been participating in taking the goodness of open source and bringing that into the into the enterprise. And I'll see you relying on you guys as well. But now I'm starting to see the pattern where people are relying on you to bring your community to them and they merge their communities with you guys and being kind of a steward there, is that a pattern? Do you see that evolving? Because we've heard that on multiple interviews on the cube where we've heard end users say we love the red hat ecosystem and and that seems to be more and more about they want to be building their ecosystem. So you did it for yourselves, you did it for the industry. Now, enterprises want this service is this is this is a pattern. And what's your reaction to that? >>It actually is a pattern because it's actually one of the reasons why innovation is moving so quickly right now. As I just said, you know, you know, this whole area here in infrastructure and cloud and development environments, Hybrid included. It's all built in and around, it's all built in and around Lennox. And in the past, what's happening and driven by open source development in the past? What happened? Look at the old fashioned way, right, where a company like us would be in a company, software company, not like us, but any old software company would be, you know, in their stovepipe, talking to their customers, getting their requirements and then bringing those requirements back from the customer base and then trying to work that into their products over time, get that back out to the customer to test it and try it, see it as it works. That's probably a five year, there's probably a five year journey, uh, for big, big requirements for big change requirements you look at now with, with actually end users now participating in upstream development, they're building their requirements into that upstream, which is our development environment. And actually that's what feeds our products. And so we've cut out the middleman, if you will completely in there now when we're building those requirements into our future future, R and D work in the upstream and then we bring that down into a product back into their enterprise for them to use in production. So it cuts out years of time for that innovation to get from concept to building to product, rising to production. And, and I think, you know, john, that's one of the big reasons why that customer base participating is one of the big reason why we're seeing innovation move like we've never seen it before in the enterprise, which in the old days that was a stodgy place where they didn't want to move very quickly. >>Yeah. And the values there, I mean I think it's clear what the pandemic we get to this towards the the last last talking track here. But with the pandemic I think it's pretty clear what the value is and the speed to capture opportunities and growth. I think enterprises are realizing that I think the power of the ecosystem is a modern error kind of phenomenon that is now kind of showing its its value and clearly in the market. And I think people who harness communities and ecosystems not try to fork them but connect them and and intersect them and kind of played well together. So again this is an open source concept kind of re imagined so we'll keep an eye on that. So, um, I want to get to your comment in the kino you mentioned at the top here every C I. O. It has to be a cloud operator. You know, that reminds me of all the start ups and all the positioning statements. Every company needs to be a software company. Every company needs to be a media company. Every company needs to be a cloud operator. So I love that. What does it mean? Because I could say, hey paul, I have a cloud, I'm working on amazon Or is that it? Or wait a minute as yours got, I got 365 over here and I'm using big query over here. I might use oracle over here. I mean all these multi cloud conversations. So it's confusing. >>Yeah. Tell me what, you know, if you look at, if you look at it, we were really one of the first ones to really build around this hybrid, this hybrid concept. And the reason why we were one of the first ones is because what amazon hit the world 12 or 13 years ago or something like that, They were the first major cloud and at the time that the narrative was that, you know, every application was going to move to the cloud tomorrow. Right well, because as I said earlier, everything is built in and in and around open source. And legs were very involved with our customers as they tried to move those first applications to the cloud. So certainly is a lot of value and moving to the cloud. But our customers quickly realized with us helping them, quickly realized that you know what, this is great. But not every application suited for the cloud, um for any cloud, but also I may want to run multiple clouds because another cloud provider over here might have a better service than this particular service over here, vice versa. And so we were in the middle of that. So one of the decisions we made seven or eight years ago, everything we did in that last seven or eight years around the portfolio, whether it was building products, m and A, requiring new companies etcetera, was built around that hybrid portfolio. What that means is a common platform that sits both on premise and bare metal machines. Virtual machines, private clouds on premise multiple clouds across out in the enterprise, that common platform so that developers, operators and the security people have that common platform to build with because just like in Lenox, even though they are all derived from open source upstream, they're all different, they all make different choices and how they're going to configure themselves. So, so that's important. So now we're out there with these multiple clouds. One of our surveys we see our Ceo is telling us now that You're using on the average I think six Clouds today and they expect that to go 8-10 over the next 3-5 years. So how are they going to manage that? How are they going to secure that? How are their operations people going to operate with that? That's all the things that we've been working on over the last number of years. So from that common platform, which is sort of the basis which is open shift to underneath it, which is the Linux operating system, which is well that spans all those footprints that I talked about. And then also you look at one of the latest trends is as well as manage services because what customers are now telling us is okay I got this environment that this hybrid is now my data center. It means I have to worry about these apps all in different footprints. Um I want to the platform to act like a cloud in some cases I don't want to I don't want to even manage it. I want you to manage it for me because for many reasons I want great up time. I might not have the right skill sets in my organization and so I want you to manage it. And so that's where we develop managed services and that's where we have set a large group today large SRE group that's providing those managed services no matter where our platform runs for our customers. Also, what I talked about in my keynote today is that to support that thought process is that we're doing a lot of research in this and so, you know, in a typical computer science research world, you know, of the past, you might really be into the into the real computer science of Research. We with the consortium around mass Open cloud with Boston University, MIT, Harvard Northeastern with this consortium. We're running mass Open cloud on all Red Hat with the collaboration of these universities and we're really focusing on the sorry aspect of it. What do we need to manage it? What do we need around automation to manage it? What do we need around ai to manage it? What do we need for tools to manage it? And and that's really goes down to what I fully briefly said in the beginning, is that every C I O N I T uh executive now has to be their own cloud operator because they are effectively stitching all these disparate clouds together. So that's where a big part of our focus takes us all the way from, You know, upstream development to product to the research we're doing for the next 3-5 plus years. >>You know, I gotta say the hybrid cloud is a new data center which is implying I T in the cloud operators with C X O S and C IOS is interesting because it's validated by Mckinsey's recent report that came out that said there's a trillion dollars of untapped value in one retrofitting existing infrastructure and operations and to net new operate use cases that the cloud enables. So there's clearly not two categories of value proposition that businesses are facing. One is, you know, kind of take care of the existing and then also bring in the new that cloud enables. So, you know, I think that's really key and that will drive the business leaders to foresight, if you will to be agile and adaptive to that. So so totally agree on that. I love this open cloud initiative, you mentioned the mass open cloud which I know is kind of like this beanpot for techies, um people who know what that means, uh it's in the boston area these institutions um this is gonna be a training and an opportunity to train the next generation and if you take it to the next level cybersecurity is also in this kind of net new novelty, interdisciplinary components. So you got engineering which is like devops engineering and then Systems Engineering and Computer Science intersecting together with kind of this data discipline. So it hits cybersecurity which is a board level conversation, it hits the new business model opportunities which is a driver, this is new, this is there's no pre existing curriculum. What how do you explain that to heads of the departments and the deans of these institutions saying, you know, it's an engineering thing. No, it's computer science thing. No, it's a it's a business school thing with data science. What's your what's your conversation with folks in the industry when you say this is a different thing? >>Uh you know, the university, you know, the university is getting, it was actually one of the one of the first things this is you know what you'll see. You know, I talked to uh dr bob Brown from President bu earlier in an interview and and this is what we imagined with them early on and even they brought those disciplines together now in in in what they call a harry institute, where to bring data, computer science engineering as you say. And now even operations, it's almost like, you know, systems engineering on steroids, it's a really big spanning system. And so so the universities are starting understand that's why these universities in the consortium, that's why we're working here. But also, you know, the industry's kind of learning it the hard way because now that they get some of their developers starting to move some of their application developments out into one, maybe two clouds and having the now they have to figure out how they're going to do all those things that we talked about, develop, secure operated. So they're they're learning the hard way that this is the new discipline because that's reality. I also think that, you know, as I said, like anything in tech, we always say this is going to happen tomorrow. I also think, like I said, when when cloud first came came out, everybody saying, I'm moving every app to the cloud tomorrow. We even had customers that bought into that said we're moving going full board but they realized once they get into it it wasn't practical. Don't take me wrong. Cloud brings a ton of value here but from a practical perspective it's going to be some apps and across many clouds and and so now they're having to deal with the I. T. Execs and the C. I. Was having to deal with it. So they're learning really fast because of the reality that they have to deal with. Now having said all that to it also brings up why managed services you're seeing so popular right now because as that's moving so fast they just don't have the skills necessary in many cases to really operate and run in this in this type of environment. It brings so much power but the skills aren't necessarily there in the industry. So that now you see the connection between the industry where we sit and even the university now looking at this whole big problem as as you put said, john, actually a new discipline, >>I think, I think, and I think one final leg of a three legged stool is at the business schools because when you think about systems programming, you mentioned that and you know, I love to go back in history and look at the history of operating systems. And you know, paul, we've talked us in the past and you guys know a lot about operating systems from a technology standpoint, it's not just about a productivity suite for a user or a department with the system, it's a company that needs to be programmed. So when people want to globally operate their business, that software defined this isn't now and this is now happening, right? So this the new leaders in these companies that want to run these global companies that scale operate them, just like operating the business not necessary. Operating a tech or shiny new toy, have to build the operating system for the business. To me, I think that's where I see IBM looking at cloud differently and saying, hey, this is an operating system under the covers for the business. The applications are multi fold from, you know, an application for productivity to an edge device, industrial or consumer user work at home. I mean it's a plethora of applications. What's your reaction to that? And you you see the same thing? >>I mean frankly, I think this is an area that a lot of the infrastructure players missed in the past. And I think I think this is what IBM saw with with bringing us in as well. It's all about the application. You know, I said earlier that, you know, we said every every company was a software company is true. And so that means the companies are running their businesses on these applications. So it's all about the app and I think a lot of infrastructure companies miss that. And and so with Hybrid now you have that ability to run the app wherever makes the most sense for for a whole host of reasons. And so now, but now comes the complexity of all of that. I think, I think IBM with bringing us in saw that that Hybrid was maybe as big, if not a bigger opportunity than cloud itself because of of the complexity it's going to bring, the power is going to bring. But also the complexity is gonna bring. I see that's why, you see Arvind, I sort of doubling down the entire IBM company on on hybrid services that are that are going to be really important here, that they provide these applications on top that are going to be really important, but that have to be architected in such a way that they can run in a hybrid environment. And finally there's all the infrastructure and tools and development pieces that we bring to the table. So, So yeah, I think I think are really, really understood that as they made the decision to bring redheaded, >>I talked to a center all the time and they also have this kind of concept of re factoring and reprogramming your business. Uh, it's not, it's a holistic view. This is kind of what's happening. So my final question for you is as as that becomes software enabled and programmed if you will with applications the business with many different subsystems in there. Um a lot of companies now looking at the light at the end of the tunnel with the pandemic and they're seeing vaccines coming out. Some say vaccines will be pretty much everywhere, everyone over 12 by the fall. So we're back to real life. There's gonna be a pullback of some projects on doubling down on others. As you as you mentioned, what are we doing? We're starting to see hybrid as companies come out of the pandemic, they're all jockeying to make sure that they have either done their work to re factor or reposition, reprogrammed their business and be set up for net new opportunities. >>What >>do you see as a growth model or growth opportunities for companies? You want to come out with a growth strategy out of the gate of the pandemic. What's your thoughts? >>Well, I mean, I think you have to plan for companies have to plan for your workforce to be anywhere, but in order to be anywhere in and to be productive, you need you need services like we're on right now for example, but you need the infrastructure to be able to do that. You need you need a way for your customers if you buy the fact that every company is a software company, you're running a business through their applications either way for your customers to be able to interact with you anywhere from where they are anywhere in a real time way. And so I think that's why from our perspective, things like that we're pushing a lot on the edge. Now, that's why you're seeing the hybrid cloud moved all the way out into the edge and you can see it in every vertical, you know, in the telco space. The edge means you gotta do, you have data and compute that needs to be done on the set on the cell tower in the manufacturing world. You have the state and compute that needs to be done on the factory floor, in the retail vertical. We see the edge really being significant in all these verticals, but but that edge is now extends that hybrid data center that we've been talking so much about. So even though you have all these edge devices way out there on the edge, it's a critical part of the business. So you have to have, your developers need need to be able to develop for it, you need to secure it, you need to and you need to operate it and manage it. So now, you know, in a very short period of time, hybrids taken on another dimension, bringing you out to all these points on the edge which is the same but slightly different in every vertical. Now comes complexity and that's why automation is so important because with that power comes complexity but it's going to take automation to keep it all running, >>paul. Great insight. Thanks for coming on the cube. Open innovation out in the open with with you guys again continue. And the focus of the evolution of software and the cloud with enterprise I. T. Clearly a lot of innovation and your contribution to academia and the mass open cloud and all the open cloud initiatives, phenomenal. The world's going. Open source and continues and continues. Doesn't stop. The operating system of businesses is coming and you guys are well positioned. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks again john. Always a pleasure. >>Okay paul, Cormier, President Ceo of Red Hat here on the Cuban, john for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Yeah. Mhm mm.

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back to the cubes ongoing coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual cube, you know, the pandemic has caused us to really rethink this this whole concept of operational resilience and we're gonna dig into that and talk about the importance of constructing a holistic resilience plan and get the perspective of some really great domain experts. Alan Downs is the vice president, global Cloud security and resiliency services at IBM and he's joined by MS Michelle what? Weston who is the director of cloud security and resiliency offerings at IBM folks. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. >>Now before we get into it, I said IBM but I want to ask you, alan about an announcement you made last month about Kendrell new spin out from IBM. What can you tell us? >>Very excited about the name? I think there's a lot of meaning in the name centered around new growth and censored around partnership and relationship. So if you look at the name that was announced I think it really does typify what we set out to be as a trusted partner in the industry. All born around new growth centered around strong partnership and relationship. So very pleased and excited and look forward to the opportunity we have going forward. >>Yeah congratulations on that. Had some clarity martin schroder. New ceo Cubillan. Great executive love it. So good luck. Um Alan let me stay with you for a second. I mean operational resilience it means different things to different people and we know from speaking with C. IOS in our community during the pandemic. It doesn't just mean disaster recovery. In fact a lot of C. I. O. Said that their business continuing strategy were too focused on on D. R. Ellen. What does operational resilience mean from your perspective? >>So I'll answer it this way. Operational resiliency risk is defined as the quantifiable steps that any client needs to take in order to respond, recover from an unplanned outage. It sits squarely within operational risk. And if you think about it, operational risk is the kind of non financial element of risk. And defined within that category, operational resiliency risk is trying to identify those steps both pre active and reactive that a client needs to consider that they would have to take in the event of an unplanned disruption or an unplanned outage that would impact their ability to serve their clients or to serve their organization. That's how I define operational resiliency risk. >>Great and I wonder Michelle if you can add to that but I think you know I sometimes say that the pandemic was like a forced march to digital and part of that was business resilience. But You know, where do we go from here? You know, we had 14 months shoved into our face and now we have some time to think about. So how should clients think about evolving their strategies in this regard? >>Yeah, Well, certainly with respect to what was called Newco now, Kendrell, um our approach has been advisory led. Uh we will help clients along this journey. Uh, one thing that I'd like to point out in one of the journeys that we've been taking over the last couple of years is it really is about security and resiliency together. If you think of that planning and how to mitigate your operational risk, the security and resiliency go hand in hand through the same people within the organization that are planning for that and worried about it. And so we had already started about three years ago to pull the two together and to have a unified value proposition for clients around security and resiliency, both being advisory lead, doing everything for a client from project based to the digital consumption world which we know clients live in today to a fully managed service all around security and resiliency together. >>Yeah, so I mean it's really important topic. I mean you heard Chair Powell last month. He was he was on 60 minutes saying well yeah worried about inflation, were way more worried about security. So so alan you know, were let's say you're in the virtual, you know, conference room with the board of directors. What's that conversation like? Uh where does it start? >>I think there is a huge concern right now with regard to security and obviously resiliency as well. But if you just think about what we've all been through and what's transpired in the last 12 months, the what we call the threat landscape has broadened significantly and therefore clients have had to go through a rapid transformation not just by moving employees to home base, but also their clients having a much higher expectation in terms of access to systems, access to transactions which are all digital. So you referred to it earlier. But the transformation, our clients have had to go on driving a higher dependence on those systems that enable them to serve their clients digitally and enable them to allow the employees to work remotely in this period has increased the dependencies that they have across the environment that are running many of the critical business processes. So the discussion in the boardroom is very much are we secure? Are we safe? How do we know how safe and secure and resilient should we be? And based on that fact about how safe and secure should we be? Where are we today as an organization? And I think these are the questions that are at the boardroom is basically from a resiliency security perspective, where should we be that supports our strategy vision and our client expectation? And then the second question is very much where are we today? How do we know that we are secure? How do we know that we can recover from any unplanned or unforeseen disruption to our environments? >>So Michelle, I mean I just mentioned the threat surface is expanding and we're just getting started, everybody's like crazy about five G leaning in the edge Iot and that's just uh this could be orders of magnitude by the end of the decade compared to where it is today. So how do you think about the key steps that organizations should should take to ensure operational resilience, you know, not only today, but also putting in a road map. >>Yeah, yeah. And and one thing that we do know from our clients is those that have actually planned for resiliency and security at the forefront. They tend to do that more effectively and more efficiently. Um It's much better to do that than to try to do that after an outage. You certainly learn a lot. Um but that's not the experience that you want to go through. You want to have that planning and strategy in the forefront. As Alan said in terms of the threat vector, the pandemic brought that on as well. We saw surgeons Of cyberattacks, opportunistic attacks. Um you know, we saw the best of people in the pandemic as well as the worst in people. Some of those attacks were on agencies that we're trying to recover. We're trying to treat the public with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. So none of us can let our guard down here. I think we can anticipate that that's only going to increase. And with the emergence of these new technologies like cloud, we know that there's been such a massive benefit to clients. In fact those that were cloud enabled to sustain their businesses during the pandemic full stop. But with that comes a lot more complexity. Those threat vectors increase five G. I expect to be the same. So again, resilience and security have never been more relevant. More important, we see a lot of our clients putting budget there and those that plan for it with a strategic mindset and understand that whatever they have today may be good enough, but in the future they're going to have to invest and continue to evolve that strategy. Are those that have done the best. >>Yeah, the bolt on strategy doesn't doesn't really work that well, but and I wonder if you think about when we talk to CSOS for example, and you ask them what's your biggest challenge? They'll say things like lack of talent. We got too many tools. It's just as we're on the hamsters on wheels. So I would think that's, you know, unfortunately for some, but it's good for your, your business. That's that's a dynamic that you can help with. I mean you're a services organization, you got deep expertise in this. So I wonder if you could, could talk a little bit about that, that lack of talent, that skills gap and how you guys address that. >>I think this is really the fit for managed services providers like Kendrell, um, certainly with some of our largest clients, if we look at Peta as an example, that notion of phone a friend is really important when it starts to go down and you're not sure what you're gonna do next. You want the expertise, you want to be able to phone someone and you want to be able to rely on them to help you recover your most critical data. One of the things clients have also been asking us for is a vaulted capability, almost like the safe deposit box for your data and your critical applications. Being able to put them somewhere and then in the event of needing to recover, um, you certainly could call someone to help you do exactly that >>Ellen. I wonder if you can address this. I mean, I like IBM I was I'm a customer. I trust IBM. What's your relationship? Are you still gonna, you know, be able to allow me to tap the pieces that that I like and maybe you guys can be more agile in some respects, maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >>She has Sure, Dave and many of our clients, we have a long history with a very positive experience of delivering, you know, market leading and high high quality of services and product the relationship continue. So we will remain very close to IBM and we will continue to work with many of IBM's customers as will IBM work with our customers going forward. So the relationship, I believe whilst a different dynamic will continue and I believe engenders an opportunity for growth and you know, we mentioned earlier the very name signifies the fact that it's new growth and I do think that that partnership will continue and we'll continue together to deliver the type of service, the quality of products and services that our clients have, you know, enjoyed from IBM over the last number of years, >>Michelle my, one of my takeaway from your earlier comments as you guys are hands on consultative in nature. Um, and I think about the comment I made about a lot of Ceo said we were way too d our focus. But when I think about d are a lot of times it was a checkbox to the board. Hey, we got it. But it was last time you tested it. Well, we don't test it because it's too risky to test. You know, we, we do fail over, but we don't fail back because it's just too risky. Can I stress test, you know, my environment, we, at the point now where technology and expertise will allow us to do that is that part of what you bring to the table? >>It is exactly exactly what we bring to the table. So from a first of all, from a compliance and regulatory perspective, you no longer have that option. A lot of the auditors are asking you to demonstrate your d our plan. We have technology and I think we've talked about this before about the automation that we have in our portfolio with resiliency orchestration that allows you to see the risk in your environment on a day to day basis. Proactively manage it. I tried to recover this, there's a there's a failure and then you're able to proactively address it. I also give the example from a resiliency orchestration perspective in this very powerful software automation that we have for D. R. We've had clients that have come in scheduled A. D. R. Test, it was to be all day they've ordered in lunch And the D. R. test fail over failed back took 22 minutes and lunch was canceled. >>I love >>it. Very powerful and very powerful with an auditor. >>That's awesome. Okay guys, we've got to leave it there. Really great to get the update. Best of luck to you and congratulations. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much >>and thank you for watching. This is Dave Volonte for the cubes continuous coverage of IBM think 2021 right back. >>Mhm.

>>from >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm your host lisa martin today. Have a new guest new to the cube moderate Tabla, the director of strategic partnerships for enterprise application services is joining me moderate. It's nice to have you on the program. >>Thank you lisa. Very excited to be here and hello everyone. >>So different this year. Again Virtual like last year we're going to talk about digital transformation and we saw this huge acceleration in 2020. The massive adoption of SAS applications. We want to talk though about IBM managed services for S AP applications. So before we get into that I'd love for you to be able to describe what your role is to our audience. >>Absolutely lisa. So good day everyone. I've been with IBM for over 23 years and my current role, I run the strategic alliances for IBM basically in the E. R. P. Space S. A. P. Being our primary strategic partner, I have a global team of architects and we basically look at market requirements. Talk to a lot of customers, talk to our business partner S. A. P. Obviously um you know, try to help them would come up with a solution. Well the transformation journey to the cloud and hopefully today, you know, we'll elaborate a little bit more on the exact work that we do in this space. So very happy to be here. Thank you. >>Sure. So we're going to dissect the IBM s. A. P. Relationship. I think you even worked at S. A. P. Before your 23 year tenure at IBM. So we'll get to some of that as well. But help us understand customers have so much choice each day. There is more and more interest why should a customer choose IBM as their strategic partner for this digital transformation journey. >>Well really, IBM has been in this essay p business for many, many decades. As you know Um we have many many certified people in S. A. P. close to 40,000 people actually globally. Um And we can help the clients in various aspects of their journey. So you know the typical cloud journey has four different aspects to it. Um You need the advice so you need basically systems integration services to help customers actually define the scope on, you know what they actually want to either upgrade, bring it to current as well as you know what workloads they want to move to the cloud. We can help customers with our Systems integration services called the Global Business Business Services in IBM we can help them with their entire planning, we can help them with the actual move to the cloud. So IBM offers a whole different variety of services for migration or not only to see ASAP workloads. I mean ASAP typically ends up being the heart of the workloads that any of the major customers run but surrounding SCP, there's a lot of other applications so we can help plan that entire journey for advice and then move it as well as in the interim. You know, there's also another step which can be some customers. They need to build net new and you know upgrade their applications to the latest technologies so we can help them with that. And then once the building move is over, obviously customers need help with the actual steady state run state environment and that's where this key service that we have managed services for SCP applications helps them. So our certifications with S. A. P. And the fact that we have consultants that are certified and all these different aspects of the journey can really help your clients. The other part, I would say that IBM is really a hybrid cloud provider. So obviously we have our cloud service, the IBM cloud, but we can offer this service meeting the customer where they need to be. So we are a client centric service, so if the customer has a choice of AWS or Azure, uh we can meet them left. So this is how, you know, we can really help our customers with our expertise. I know the data point to note that, you know, 70 80 of the enterprise customers still have not moved their workloads to the cloud. So this is a space, especially with Covid, as you've seen what's happened, you know, customers now are really, really looking to accelerate the journey because it's become a necessity, It's no longer something that our Ceo and C I O can push to the right, right, this is something they have to act now. So I began with all these various services, you know, specifically good in the S A. P area. Um, and given that we've been managing these production workloads for a lot of these enterprise customers on our cloud services for many, many years, we have the experience, we can truly help them with their journey >>And as you said, that's so critical of these days. One of the things that I think we learned in 2020 is is there was no time like the present, it really became such a massive shift that for business survival, those that weren't digitized definitely were in some hot water. Talk to me. So you talked about the IBM s, a P relationship being longstanding, Can you talk to me about the different aspects of the alliance and how that helps you guys to meet customers where they are? >>Sure. Um so s. a. p. and idea, we've been strategic partners for over 46 years. That's a long time. The partnership obviously has evolved over the years and I'll talk about you know a few of the different aspects where we've been partners um you know, the alliance initially obviously started, you know, IBM is in multiple businesses as you know, we have our one of the largest systems integrators in the world from a global business services point of view as well as one of the largest application planet services providers. So that's uh you know part of the alliance then we have our server groups, the power systems that IBM has. So that's another dimension of the alliance where um you know 5 6000 plus ASAP clients even today are still running um there? S a the applications on the power systems, whether it's on premise or also in some of the cloud deployment models. Historically we also had obviously the Database DB two alliance, but now with the S. A. P. S moved to Hannah um that's kind of a little bit of a mute point. Obviously it still exists, but most of the clients are now obviously being encouraged really to adopt S. A. P. S latest S four hana from the services standpoint. The other facet, you know, is really around the cloud services. So that's really our topic today right. Um in the cloud services area we have alliances with S. A. P very very strong alliances that have existed for you know, almost a decade now. Um as I said we've been managing the production workloads for very very large customers in many different industries, their entire supply chains. HR financial systems are running on IBM either in the old traditional hosting models um or also in our cloud models for the past 10 plus years. Right as IBM has evolved, so we have made sure that we do a whole different types of certifications with S. A. P. To stay current. Um many of these certifications are done either you know every two years, some are done every year. And if anyone checks, you know, the S. A. P. Service marketplace website which is owned by S. A. P. You can see IBM listed in all these different angles as a certified provider. There isn't another provider that can claim this breath in terms of certifications that IBM has done and that's why customers can benefit either from one or two of these services that IBMS provides or obviously a combination is a single vendor if the customer needs. So, you know, we have the sex, we have the credibility, we have decades of, you know, Delivery excellence in these areas, servicing these clients. Lots of the Fortune, 100 customers actually are running. Um there? S a p workloads on the IBM systems, whether in traditional hosting or in a hybrid cloud deployment. Some cases were actually providing services for customers that run their SCP workloads on premise. So we cater to that, you know, sets of clients as well and then of course others that are purely on our cloud. Um IBM cloud as well as hyper scholars. Yeah, so long >>list of certifications, that seems to be one of the biggest differentiators that you talked about me a little bit about how things have evolved over the last 12 to 18 months. in terms of how is IBMS focus changed for hybrid cloud with S. A. P. >>Yeah, so the focus changed if you know, you know, until last year we will call the cloud and cognitive company. Um This year of course the whole company has changed and we're going through a major transformation at the moment. We are the hybrid cloud company now. And that that name change means a lot. It means a lot in the sense that it gives choices to the customer, that's what the whole mission is all about. We want to make sure that customers are consuming IBM services and the IBM wants to meet them where they want to be. So there's you know, flexibility of choices in terms of hybrid, another cloud deployment model. So most customers in the S. A. P. Area, you know, they're looking for either just a pure private cloud deployment or they're looking for public cloud deployment or a combination and some are because, you know, there? S A. P. S. Footprint sizes are so large. Think about the multinational global companies, you know, and then they operate in so many different regions of the world and their data sizes of their databases are so large. Perhaps, you know, the public cloud really isn't a good fit yet. These customers are looking to move some sort of their workloads to the cloud. So that's where this hybrid cloud helps them. Because customers, you know, 90 plus percent of the clients today are really not choosing one hyper Scaler as their deployment option. They're really looking at multiple. So because they're running their workloads not just ASAP, but everything else, you know, SCP always brings along a whole bunch of other applications like tax applications and other interfaces, homegrown applications analytics that the customers are using. So if you want to take advantage of the true hybrid cloud and the benefits of all the various um, deployments and hyper scale is available in that region. Really, the hybrid cloud strategy from IBM is a perfect fit because we give them choices of deployment. We're not saying that you have to deploy an IBM cloud. Um, we're saying you can deploy either on premise VWs as your idea of cloud. Really what makes sense? You know, best sense for the types of war clothes that the customer is looking at. So that's how the strategy for IBM has completely changed to meet the clients, you know, for what they're actually looking for. Talk to me a >>little bit about the go to market so I B M and S A P longstanding decades old relationship, A lot of certifications that you talked about. We're talking about business critical Applications, you mentioned supply chain a minute ago and I can't help but think it how supply chain has been affected in the last year. What is the good market approach with respect to providing consultation services to help customers determine? Should we migrate to what Hyper Scaler and how and when? >>Yeah, so we can help them with that? Um, so hyper hyper scale is obviously, you know, IBM has been listed for example, as the leader in Gartner 2020 and you know, there's lots of other stats that show them that IBM is a leader in application services, in consulting services, application management services as well as managed services. So these are all different, Right? And you can see us being listed as a leader either it's in Gartner or I. D. C. Or Horse or Wave. And for many reasons and you know, IBM actually has one series of pinnacle awards from S. A. P. Over the U. S. How this helps the clients really determined is that, you know, IBM obviously does a lot of studies externally. We have internal as well as external facing views of comparatives of the various hyper scholars, um you know, including Aws, Azure, G. C. P. And so on. So when a customer comes to us for asking for advice, um, and so on, we basically look at our own intellectual properties, all the analysis that has been done. And more importantly, we look at the full scope of services that the customer wants is doing. What sort of a business are there in. We have industry experts, there's E. R. P. Strategy, um, folks within IBM. So, you know, they go after a certain industry and when they, let's say, you know, they've gone after the oil and gas industry, for example, they will look at multiple customers in that particular space. So based on their experiences, we can actually define the right road map for the client to be able to help them to move their work clothes to this hybrid cloud strategy that I just mentioned. Right? So that's how we can help them because we have the expertise in that industry as well. >>And I'm curious moderate in the last year with so much flux and rapidly changing market conditions, Did you >>see any >>one or two industries in particular really leading the charge here and coming to IBM. S. A. P. For help on this transformation journey which has been accelerated by a couple of years. >>Suddenly the retail industry for sure, right. I mean in spite of the crisis, I think the retail industry did pretty well, right? Because people still have to buy stuff. Of course, the whole buying behavior change. No question. Um You and I don't know about two days of, but for me, you know, I was never a major online shopper. Oh yeah. You know, I just about everything. Um previously it used to be select things here and there, but now it's totally changed, right? So that industry certainly has accelerated. No question. We've had a lot of those coming. The other industries that I've seen. The change in the last 12, 18 months is really, for example, you know, the banking industry and so on. Um IBM basically, you know, launched a lot of services in the financial services sector for this reason. Um So those are of course transforming very fast to keep up with the market. Um and I'm sure there's others, right? But these are the two that come to mind. Yeah, >>two that have been most affected and needed to pivot so quickly. In addition to health care. Let me ask you one final question here. Before we wrap. Talk to me about the advantages of using the PMC partner managed cloud s a P license resale model. The advantages of using that and the benefits. >>Sure. Um so we, you know, so far our discussion was really focused around, you know, the various service capabilities that IBM has in terms of our capabilities for helping clients with hyper scholars and hybrid cloud. We also need to spend a little bit of time talking about the operations model. Right? So when they're running their production workloads on IBM PMC is yet another dimension. So what PMC partner managed cloud is really some very limited partnerships that s A P does And the IBM is the lead on that one in this base. What ASAP allows is the partner, which in this case is IBM to resell the ASAP software license to a customer. So IBM has the rights globally to resell the license and why is that beneficial to the client? Because now, um, IBM can actually turn around the S. A. P license and have the customer pay us in a SAS model. So it basically is now an apex model where the customer is basically paying, you know, a monthly fee as an example, so there's no upfront cost to the client and they basically pay IBM and IBM PS ASAP. So IBM is kind of holding the risk if you will on behalf of the customer, it gives customers more choices, more flexibilities, better pricing approach. So if the customer wants as an example to buy everything the full package, including systems implementation services, deployment models with choices on a cloud, whether it's IBM cloud or others as well as the license itself. IBM has this end to end capability today. We've been selling it to several clients for a few years in several geography is right. So that's the advantage behind it. >>Excellent. Thanks for breaking that down moderate and joining me today talking about what's new with I B M and S A P, the opportunities for customers to accelerate their digital transformation. We appreciate you stopping by. >>Thank you very much, lisa truly enjoyed it. Thank you. >>Good. Me too. For moderate Tabla. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM think 2021. >>Mm.