>> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World sponsored by HPE and Intel. Today we're going to dive into advanced performance of VDI with the fourth gen Intel Zion scalable processors. Hello I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. My guests today are Alan Chu, Director of Data Center Performance and Competition for Intel as well as Denis Kondakov who's the VDI product manager at HPE, and also joining us is Cynthia Sustiva, CAD/CAM product manager at HPE. Thanks for coming on, really appreciate you guys taking the time. >> Thank you. >> So accelerating VDI to the Edge. That's the topic of this topic here today. Let's get into it, Dennis, tell us about the new HPE ProLiant DL321 Gen 11 server. >> Okay, absolutely. Hello everybody. So HP ProLiant DL320 Gen 11 server is the new age center CCO and density optimized compact server, compact form factor server. It enables to modernize and power at the next generation of workloads in the diverse rec environment at the Edge in an industry standard designed with flexible scale for advanced graphics and compute. So it is one unit, one processor rec optimized server that can be deployed in the enterprise data center as well as at the remote office at end age. >> Cynthia HPE has announced another server, the ProLiant ML350. What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, so the HPE ProLiant ML350 Gen 11 server is a powerful tower solution for a wide range of workloads. It is ideal for remote office compute with NextGen performance and expandability with two processors in tower form factor. This enables the server to be used not only in the data center environment, but also in the open office space as a powerful workstation use case. >> Dennis mentioned both servers are empowered by the fourth gen Intel Zion scale of process. Can you talk about the relationship between Intel HPE to get this done? How do you guys come together, what's behind the scenes? Share as much as you can. >> Yeah, thanks a lot John. So without a doubt it takes a lot to put all this together and I think the partnership that HPE and Intel bring together is a little bit of a critical point for us to be able to deliver to our customers. And I'm really thrilled to say that these leading Edge solutions that Dennis and Cynthia just talked about, they're built on the foundation of our fourth Gen Z on scalable platform that's trying to meet a wide variety of deployments for today and into the future. So I think the key point of it is we're together trying to drive leading performance with built-in acceleration and in order to deliver a lot of the business values to our customers, both HP and Intels, look to scale, drive down costs and deliver new services. >> You got the fourth Gen Z on, you got the Gen 11 and multiple ProLiants, a lot of action going on. Again, I love when these next gens come out. Can each of you guys comment and share what are the use cases for each of the systems? Because I think what we're looking at here is the next level innovation. What are some of the use cases on the systems? >> Yeah, so for the ML350, in the modern world where more and more data are generated at the Edge, we need to deploy computer infrastructure where the data is generated. So smaller form factor service will satisfy the requirements of S&B customers or remote and branch offices to deliver required performance redundancy where we're needed. This type of locations can be lacking dedicated facilities with strict humidity, temperature and noise isolation control. The server, the ML350 Gen 11 can be used as a powerful workstation sitting under a desk in the office or open space as well as the server for visualized workloads. It is a productivity workhorse with the ability to scale and adapt to any environment. One of the use cases can be for hosting digital workplace for manufacturing CAD/CAM engineering or oil and gas customers industry. So this server can be used as a high end bare metal workstation for local end users or it can be virtualized desktop solution environments for local and remote users. And talk about the DL320 Gen 11, I will pass it on to Dennis. >> Okay. >> Sure. So when we are talking about age of location we are talking about very specific requirements. So we need to provide solution building blocks that will empower and performance efficient, secure available for scaling up and down in a smaller increments than compared to the enterprise data center and of course redundant. So DL 320 Gen 11 server is the perfect server to satisfy all of those requirements. So for example, S&B customers can build a video solution, for example starting with just two HP ProLiant TL320 Gen 11 servers that will provide sufficient performance for high density video solution and at the same time be redundant and enable it for scaling up as required. So for VGI use cases it can be used for high density general VDI without GP acceleration or for a high performance VDI with virtual VGPU. So thanks to the modern modular architecture that is used on the server, it can be tailored for GPU or high density storage deployment with software defined compute and storage environment and to provide greater details on your Intel view I'm going to pass to Alan. >> Thanks a lot Dennis and I loved how you're both seeing the importance of how we scale and the applicability of the use cases of both the ML350 and DL320 solutions. So scalability is certainly a key tenant towards how we're delivering Intel's Zion scalable platform. It is called Zion scalable after all. And we know that deployments are happening in all different sorts of environments. And I think Cynthia you talked a little bit about kind of a environmental factors that go into how we're designing and I think a lot of people think of a traditional data center with all the bells and whistles and cooling technology where it sometimes might just be a dusty closet in the Edge. So we're defining fortunes you see on scalable to kind of tackle all those different environments and keep that in mind. Our SKUs range from low to high power, general purpose to segment optimize. We're supporting long life use cases so that all goes into account in delivering value to our customers. A lot of the latency sensitive nature of these Edge deployments also benefit greatly from monolithic architectures. And with our latest CPUs we do maintain quite a bit of that with many of our SKUs and delivering higher frequencies along with those SKUs optimized for those specific workloads in networking. So in the end we're looking to drive scalability. We're looking to drive value in a lot of our end users most important KPIs, whether it's latency throughput or efficiency and 4th Gen Z on scalable is looking to deliver that with 60 cores up to 60 cores, the most builtin accelerators of any CPUs in the market. And really the true technology transitions of the platform with DDR5, PCIE, Gen five and CXL. >> Love the scalability story, love the performance. We're going to take a break. Thanks Cynthia, Dennis. Now we're going to come back on our next segment after a quick break to discuss the performance and the benefits of the fourth Gen Intel Zion Scalable. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech coverage, be right back. Welcome back around. We're continuing theCUBE's coverage of compute engineer for your hybrid world. I'm John Furrier, I'm joined by Alan Chu from Intel and Denis Konikoff and Cynthia Sistia from HPE. Welcome back. Cynthia, let's start with you. Can you tell us the benefits of the fourth Gen Intel Zion scale process for the HP Gen 11 server? >> Yeah, so HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers support DDR five memory which delivers increased bandwidth and lower power consumption. There are 32 DDR five dim slots with up to eight terabyte total on ML350 and 16 DDR five dim slots with up to two terabytes total on DL320. So we deliver more memory at a greater bandwidth. Also PCIE 5.0 delivers an increased bandwidth and greater number of lanes. So when we say increased number of lanes we need to remember that each lane delivers more bandwidth than lanes of the previous generation plus. Also a flexible storage configuration on HPDO 320 Gen 11 makes it an ideal server for establishing software defined compute and storage solution at the Edge. When we consider a server for VDI workloads, we need to keep the right balance between the number of cords and CPU frequency in order to deliver the desire environment density and noncompromised user experience. So the new server generation supports a greater number of single wide and global wide GPU use to deliver more graphic accelerated virtual desktops per server unit than ever before. HPE ProLiant ML 350 Gen 11 server supports up to four double wide GPUs or up to eight single wide GPUs. When the signing GPU accelerated solutions the number of GPUs available in the system and consistently the number of BGPUs that can be provisioned for VMs in the binding factor rather than CPU course or memory. So HPE ProLiant Gen 11 servers with Intel fourth generation science scalable processors enable us to deliver more virtual desktops per server than ever before. And with that I will pass it on to Alan to provide more details on the new Gen CPU performance. >> Thanks Cynthia. So you brought up I think a really great point earlier about the importance of achieving the right balance. So between the both of us, Intel and HPE, I'm sure we've heard countless feedback about how we should be optimizing efficiency for our customers and with four Gen Z and scalable in HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers I think we achieved just that with our built-in accelerator. So built-in acceleration delivers not only the revolutionary performance, but enables significant offload from valuable core execution. That offload unlocks a lot of previously unrealized execution efficiency. So for example, with quick assist technology built in, running engine X, TLS encryption to drive 65,000 connections per second we can offload up to 47% of the course that do other work. Accelerating AI inferences with AMX, that's 10X higher performance and we're now unlocking realtime inferencing. It's becoming an element in every workload from the data center to the Edge. And lastly, so with faster and more efficient database performance with RocksDB, we're executing with Intel in-memory analytics accelerator we're able to deliver 2X the performance per watt than prior gen. So I'll say it's that kind of offload that is really going to enable more and more virtualized desktops or users for any given deployment. >> Thanks everyone. We still got a lot more to discuss with Cynthia, Dennis and Allen, but we're going to take a break. Quick break before wrapping things up. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage. We'll be right back. Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBEs coverage of Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World. I'm John Furrier. We'll be wrapping up our discussion on advanced performance of VDI with the fourth gen Intel Zion scalable processers. Welcome back everyone. Dennis, we'll start with you. Let's continue our conversation and turn our attention to security. Obviously security is baked in from day zero as they say. What are some of the new security features or the key security features for the HP ProLiant Gen 11 server? >> Sure, I would like to start with the balance, right? We were talking about performance, we were talking about density, but Alan mentioned about the balance. So what about the security? The security is really important aspect especially if we're talking about solutions deployed at the H. When the security is not active but other aspects of the environment become non-important. And HP is uniquely positioned to deliver the best in class security solution on the market starting with the trusted supply chain and factories and silicon route of trust implemented from the factory. So the new ISO6 supports added protection leveraging SPDM for component authorization and not only enabled for the embedded server management, but also it is integrated with HP GreenLake compute ops manager that enables environment for secure and optimized configuration deployment and even lifecycle management starting from the single server deployed on the Edge and all the way up to the full scale distributed data center. So it brings uncompromised and trusted solution to customers fully protected at all tiers, hardware, firmware, hypervisor, operational system application and data. And the new intel CPUs play an important role in the securing of the platform. So Alan- >> Yeah, thanks. So Intel, I think our zero trust strategy toward security is a really great and a really strong parallel to all the focus that HPE is also bringing to that segment and market. We have even invested in a lot of hardware enabled security technologies like SGX designed to enhance data protection at rest in motion and in use. SGX'S application isolation is the most deployed, researched and battle tested confidential computing technology for the data center market and with the smallest trust boundary of any solution in market. So as we've talked about a little bit about virtualized use cases a lot of virtualized applications rely also on encryption whether bulk or specific ciphers. And this is again an area where we've seen the opportunity for offload to Intel's quick assist technology to encrypt within a single data flow. I think Intel and HP together, we are really providing security at all facets of execution today. >> I love that Software Guard Extension, SGX, also silicon root of trust. We've heard a lot about great stuff. Congratulations, security's very critical as we see more and more. Got to be embedded, got to be completely zero trust. Final question for you guys. Can you share any messages you'd like to share with the audience each of you, what should they walk away from this? What's in it for them? What does all this mean? >> Yeah, so I'll start. Yes, so to wrap it up, HPR Proliant Gen 11 servers are built on four generation science scalable processors to enable high density and extreme performance with high performance CDR five memory and PCI 5.0 plus HP engine engineered and validated workload solutions provide better ROI in any consumption model and prefer by a customer from Edge to Cloud. >> Dennis? >> And yeah, so you are talking about all of the great features that the new generation servers are bringing to our customers, but at the same time, customer IT organization should be ready to enable, configure, support, and fine tune all of these great features for the new server generation. And this is not an obvious task. It requires investments, skills, knowledge and experience. And HP is ready to step up and help customers at any desired skill with the HP Greenlake H2 cloud platform that enables customers for cloud like experience and convenience and the flexibility with the security of the infrastructure deployed in the private data center or in the Edge. So while consuming all of the HP solutions, customer have flexibility to choose the right level of the service delivered from HP GreenLake, starting from hardwares as a service and scale up or down is required to consume the full stack of the hardwares and software as a service with an option to paper use. >> Awesome. Alan, final word. >> Yeah. What should we walk away with? >> Yeah, thanks. So I'd say that we've talked a lot about the systems here in question with HP ProLiant Gen 11 and they're delivering on a lot of the business outcomes that our customers require in order to optimize for operational efficiency or to optimize for just to, well maybe just to enable what they want to do in, with their customers enabling new features, enabling new capabilities. Underpinning all of that is our fourth Gen Zion scalable platform. Whether it's the technology transitions that we're driving with DDR5 PCIA Gen 5 or the raw performance efficiency and scalability of the platform in CPU, I think we're here for our customers in delivering to it. >> That's great stuff. Alan, Dennis, Cynthia, thank you so much for taking the time to do a deep dive in the advanced performance of VDI with the fourth Gen Intel Zion scalable process. And congratulations on Gen 11 ProLiant. You get some great servers there and again next Gen's here. Thanks for taking the time. >> Thank you so much for having us here. >> Okay, this is theCUBEs keeps coverage of Compute Engineered for your Hybrid World sponsored by HP and Intel. I'm John Furrier for theCUBE. Accelerate VDI at the Edge. Thanks for watching.

Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering People First Network. Brought to you by Mayfield. >> Hello, I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for an exclusive conversation, CUBE conversation, part of the People First Network with theCUBE and Mayfield fund. I'm here with John Chambers at his house in Palo Alto. John Chambers is the former CEO/Chairman of Cisco Systems, now running J2C, JC2 Ventures. Great to see you, thanks for spending time! >> It's a pleasure to be together again. >> I'm here for two reasons. One, I wanted a conversation about People First and technology waves, but also, I want to talk about your new book, which is exciting, called Connecting the Dots. And it's not your standard business book, where, you know, hey, rah-rah, you know, like a media post these days on the internet; it's some personal stories weaved in with the lessons you've learned through the interactions you've had with many people over the years, so exciting book and I'm looking forward to talking about that. >> Thank you! >> Again, John Chambers, legend, Cisco, 1991 when you joined the company from Wang before that. 400 employees, one product, 70 million in revenue. And when you retired in 2015, not so much retired, 'cos you've got some--. >> I'm working on my next chapter! >> You've got your next chapter (laughs)! 180 acquisitions, 447 billion in revenue, you made 10,000 people millionaires, you created a lot of value, probably one of the biggest inflection points in computer history, the evolution of inter-networking and tying systems together, it was probably one of the biggest waves somewhat before the wave we're on now. So an amazing journey, now you're running JC2 Ventures and investing in game-changing start-ups. So you're not retired? >> No. It was only my next chapter. I made my decision almost 10 years before I left Cisco first, to make for a very smooth transition because it's my family, and out of the 75,000 people, I hired all but 23 of them! And in terms of what I wanted to do next, I really wanted to both give back, create more jobs, get our start-up engine going again in this country, and it's currently broken, and I want to do that on a global basis, in places like France and India as well. So I'm on to my next chapter, but the fun part in this chapter is that I do the things that I love. >> And you've got a great team behind you, but also, you have a great personal network. And I want to get into that, of your personal stories as well as your social network in business and in the community; but one of the things I want to get up front, because I think this is important for this conversation is, you've been very strong. I've seen you present many times over the years, going way back into the 90's. You're eloquent, you're people-oriented, but you have a knack for finding the waves, seeing transitions, you've been through many waves. >> Yes I have, good and bad. >> Good and bad. But one of the big ones, how do you spot those transitions? And what wave are we in now? I mean, talk about the wave that's happening now, it's unprecedented on many levels, but, different, but it's still a wave. >> It is, and outgoing market transitions and often combined with either economic changes or business model changes with technology. And part of the reason that I've been fortunate to be able to identify many of them is I listen to customers very carefully, but also, you're often a product of your prior experiences. Having experienced West Virginia, one of the top states in the US in terms of the chemical industry, uh, during the 40's and 50's and 60's when I was growing up there, and literally more millionaires in West Virginia than there were in the entire Great Britain. We were on top of the world in the chemical industry, and the coal industry, and yet, because we missed transitions, and we should've seen them coming, the state fell a long way, so now we're trying to correct that with some of the start-up activity we'll talk about later. As you see this, and then I went to Boston, 128, we were talking earlier, Wang Laboratories, the mini-computer era, but I was in IBM first out of the central part of the nation, so I watched IBM and Mainframes, and then I watched them miss on going to the mini-computer, and then miss in terms of the internet. So I was able to see the transitions that occurred in Boston, Route 128, where we were the Silicon Valley of the world, and we knew it, and this unusual area out in California called Silicon Valley, we paid almost no attention to, and we didn't realize we failed to make a transition from the mini-computer era to the pc and the internet era. Then I joined Cisco, and saw the internet era. So part of it is, you're a product of your experiences, and know the tremendous pain that occurs, because Boston 128 is nowhere near what it used to be, so there's no entitlement in this new world out of the thousand high-tech companies that I was associated with, including four or five giants in mini-computers, none of them are really in existence today, so it shows you, if you don't identify the transitions, number one, you're going to have an opportunity to benefit by them, but number two, you sure have an opportunity to get hurt by them. >> And you know, these waves also create a lot of wealth and value; not just personal wealth, but community wealth, and Cisco in particular had a good thing going for them, you know, TCP-IP was a defact-- not even a standard, it was a defacto standard at that time, IBM and these kinds of digital equipment corporations dominated the network protocol. Even today, people are still trying to take out Cisco competitively, and they can't because they connected the world. Now the world's connected with digital, it's connected with mobile, so we're kind of seeing this connected wave globally. How do you think about that, now that you've seen the movie at the plumbing levels at Cisco, you now have been traveling the world, we're all connected. >> We are. And it's important to understand that I'm completely arms-length with Cisco, it's their company to run now, and I'm excited about their future. But I'm focused on the next chapter in my life, and while I think about the people at Cisco everyday, I'm into the start-up world now, so how do I think about it now? I think most of the innovation over the next decade will come from start-ups. The majority of the top engineering students, for example, at a Stanford or an MIT or a Polytechnique in France, which is the top engineering school, I think, in Europe, or at the ITs in India, they are all thinking about going to start-ups, which means this is where innovations going to come from. And if you think about a digital world going from the time you and I, we almost recruited you to Cisco, and then we finally did; there's only a thousand devices connected then when Cisco was founded. Today there are about 20 billion devices connected to the internet; in the future, it's going to be 500 billion in a decade, and so this concept of digitalization combined with artificial intelligence, all of a sudden we'll get the right information at the right time to the right person or machine to make the right decision, sounds complex, and it is. And it's ability to do that, I think start-ups are well-positioned to play a key role in, especially in innovation. So while the first stage of the internet, and before that were all dominated by the very large companies, I think you're going to see, in this next phase of digitalization, you're going to see a number of start-ups really emerge, in terms of the innovation leaders, and that's what I'm trying to do with my 16 investments I've made, but also coaching probably another 50 uh, start-ups around the world on a regular basis. >> And the impact of outside Silicon Valley, globally, how do you see that ecosystem developing with the entrepreneurship models that are now globally connected in with these connection points like Silicon Valley? >> It will partially in parallel, partially, it's a new phenomenon. I sold the movie of Boston 128, as I said earlier, and on top of the world, and there is no entitlement. The same thing's true with Cisco, um, sorry, of Silicon Valley today; there's no entitlement for the future, and just because we've led up until this point in time, doesn't mean we will in 10 years, so you can't take anything for granted. What you are seeing, since almost all job creation will be from start-ups, and small companies getting bigger, the large companies in total will probably not add any head count over this next decade because of artificial intelligence and digitization, and so you're now going to see job growth coming from those smaller companies, if these small companies don't get a forum to all 50 states, if they don't get a chance to grow their head count there, and the economic benefits of that, then we're going to leave whole states behind. So I think it's very important that we look at the next wave of innovation, I think there's a very good probability that it will be more inclusive, both by geography, by gender, and all diversity measures, and I'm optimistic about the future, but there are no guarantees, and we'll see how it plays out. >> Let's talk about your next chapter. I was going to wait, but I want to jump while we're on the topic. JC2 is a global start-up, game-changing start-up focus that you have. What is the thesis? What are you looking for, and talk about your mission? >> Well, our mission is very simple. I had a chance to change the world one time with Cisco, and many people, when I said Cisco's going to change the way the world works, lives, learns, and plays by enabling the internet, everybody said nice marketing, but you're a router company. And yet, I think most people would agree, probably more than any other company, we had the leadership role in changing the internet and the direction going on, and now, a chance to do it again, because I think the next wave of innovation will come from the start-ups, and it doesn't come easy. They need coaches, they need strategic partners, they need mentors as much as they need the venture capitalists, so I would think of as this focusing on disruptive start-ups that get very excited in these new areas of technology, ranging from physical and virtual worlds coming together, to artificial intelligence and automation everywhere, to the major capabilities on cyber security across that to the internet of things, so we're trying to say, how do we help these companies grow in skill? But if I was just after financial returns, I'd stay right here in the Valley. I can channel anybody, VC's here that I trust and they trust me, and it would be a better financial return. But I'm after, how do you do this across a number of states, already in seven states, and how do you do it in France and India as role models? >> It's got a lot of purpose. It's not just a financial purpose. I mean, entrepreneurs want to make money, too, but you've made some good money over the years, but this is a mission for you, this is a purpose. >> It is, but you referred to it in your opening comments. When we were at Cisco, I've always believed that the most successful owe an obligation to give back, and we did. We won almost every corporate social responsibility award there was. We won it from the Democrats and the Republicans, from Condie Rice and George Bush and from Hillary Clinton and President Obama. We also, as you said, made 10,000 Cisco employees millionaires just in the first decade. And we tried to give back to society with training programs like Network Academies and trained seven million students. And I think it's very important for the next generation of leaders here in the Valley to be good at giving back. And it's something that I think they owe an obligation to do, and I think we're in danger now of not doing it as well as we should, and for my start-ups, I try to pick young CEOs that understand, they want to make a financial return, and they want to get a great product out of this, but they also want to be fair and giving back to society and make it a win-win, if you will. >> And I think that's key. Mission-driven companies are attracting the best talent, too, these days, because people are more cognizant of that. I want to get into some of your personal stories. You mentioned giving back. And reading your book, your parents have had a big role in your life--. >> Yes, they have. >> And being in West Virginia has had a big role in your life. You mentioned it having a prosperity environment, and then missing that transition. Talk about the story of West Virginia and the role your parents played, because, they were doctors, so they were in the medical field. The combination of those two things, the culture where you were brought up, and your family impacted your career. >> I'm very proud of being from West Virginia, and very proud of the people in West Virginia, and you see it as you travel around the world. All of us who, whether we're in West Virginia, or came out of it, care about the state a great deal. The people are just plain good people, and I think they care about treating people with respect. If I were ever run off a road at night in the middle of the night, I'd want to be in West Virginia, (both laugh) when I go up to knock on that door. And I think it carries through. And also, the image of our state is one that people tend to identify in terms of a area that you like the people. Now what I'm trying to do in West Virginia, and what we just announced since last week, was to take the same model we did on doing acquisitions, 180 of them, and say here's the playbook, the innovation playbook for doing acquisitions better than anyone else, and take the model that we did on country digitization, which we did in Israel and France and India with the very top leaders, with Netanyahu and Shimon Peres in Israel, with Macron in France and with Modi in India, and drove it through, and then do the same thing in terms of how we take the tremendous prosperity and growth that you see in Silicon Valley, and make it more uniform across the country, especially as traditional business won't be adding head count. And while I'd like to tell you the chemical industry will come back to West Virginia and mining industry will come back in terms of job creation, they probably won't, a lot of that will be automated in the future. And so it is the ability to get a generation of start-ups, and do it in a unique way! And the hub of this has to be the university. They have to set the pace. Gordon Gee, the President there, gets this. He's created a start-up mentality across the university. The Dean of the business school, Javier Reyes is going across all of the university, in terms of how you do start-ups together with business school, with engineering, with computer science, with med school, et cetera. And then how do you attract students who will want to really be a part of this, how do you bring in venture capital, how do you get the Governor and the President and the Senate and the Speaker of the House on board? How do you get our two national senators, Shelly Moore Capito and also Joe Manchin, a Democrat and a Republican working together on common goals? And then how do you say here's what's possible, write the press release, be the model for how a country, or a state, comes from behind and that at one time, then a slow faller, how do we leap frog? And before you say it can't be done, that was exactly what people said first about India, when I said India would be the strongest growing economy in the world, and it is today, probably going to grow another seven to 10%. That means you double the per capita of everyone in India, done right, every seven to 10 years. And France being the innovation engine in Europe to place your new business, you and I would have said John, no way, just five years ago, yet it has become the start-up engine for Europe. >> It's interesting, you mentioned playbook, and I always see people try to replicate Silicon Valley. I moved out here from the East Coast in 1999, and it's almost magical here, it's hard to replicate, but you can reproduce some things. One of the common threads, though, is education. The role of education in the ecosystem of these new environments seems to be a key ingredient. Your thoughts about how education's going to play a role in these ecosystems, because education and grit, and entrepreneurial zeal, are kind of the magic formula. >> Well they are in many ways. It's about leadership, it's about the education foundation, it's about getting the best and brightest into your companies, and then having the ability to dream, and role models you can learn from. We were talking about Hewlett-Packard earlier, a great role model of a company that did the original start-up and Lou Platt, who was the President of HP when I came out here, I called him up and said, you don't know me, Lou, I'm with a company you've probably never heard of, and we have 400 people, but I don't know the Valley, can you teach me? And he did, and he met with me every quarter for three years, and then when I said what can I do to repay you back, because at that time, Cisco was on a roll, he said John, do it for the next generation. And so, that's what I'm trying to do, in terms of, you've got to have role models that you can learn from and can help you through this. The education's a huge part. At the core of almost all great start-up engines is a really world-class university. Not just with really smart students, but also with an entrepreneur skill and the ability to really create start-ups. John Hennessey, Stanford did an amazing thing over the last 17 years on how to create that here at Stanford, the best in the world, probably 40% of the companies, when I was with Cisco, we bought were direct or indirect outgrowth of Stanford. Draw a parallel. Mercury just across the way, and this isn't a Stanford/CAL issue, (both laugh) equally great students, very good focus on interdisciplinary activities, but I didn't buy a single company out of there. You did not see the start-ups grow with anywhere near the speed, and that was four times the number of students. This goes back to the educational institution, it has to have a focus on start-ups, it has to say how they drive it through, this is what MIT did in Boston, and then lost it when 128 lost it's opportunity, and this is what we're trying to do at West Virginia. Make a start-up engine where you've got a President, Gordon Gee, who really wants to drive this through, bring the political leaders in the state, and bring the Mountaineers, the global Mountaineers to bare, and then bring financial resources, and then do it differently. So to your point, people try to mimic Silicon Valley, but they do it in silos. What made Silicon Valley go was an ecosystem, an education system, a environment for risk-taking, role models that you could steal people from--. >> And unwritten rules, too. They had these unwritten rules like pay it forward, your experience with Lou Platt, Steve Jobs talks about his relationship with David Packard, and this goes on and on and on. This is an important part. Because I want to just--. >> Debt for good is a big, big issue. Last comment on education, it's important for this country to know, our K through 12 system is broken. We're non-competitive. People talk about STEM, and that's important, but if I were only educating people in three things, entrepreneurship, how to use technology, and artificial intelligence; I would build that into the curriculum where we lose a lot of our diversity, especially among females in the third, fourth, fifth grade, so you haveta really, I think, get people excited about this at a much earlier age. If we can become an innovation engine again, in this country, we are not today. We're not number one in innovation, we're number 11! Imagine that for America? >> I totally agree with ya! And I don't want to rant and waste a lot of time, but my rants are all on Facebook and Twitter. (both laugh) Education's a problem. It's like linear, it's like a slow linear train wreck, in my opinion, but now you have that skills gaps, you mentioned AI. So AI and community are two hot trends right now. I'm going to stay with community for a minute. You mentioned paying it forward. Open source software, these new forms of operational scale, cloud computing, open source software, that all have this ethos of pay it forward; community. And now, community is more important than ever. Not just from the tech world, but you're talking about in West Virginia, now on a global scale. How does the tech industry, how can the tech industry, in your opinion, nurture community at local, regional, global scale? >> This is a tough one John, and I'd probably answer it more carefully if I was still involved directly with Cisco. But the fun thing is, now I represent myself. >> In your own opinion, not Cisco. There's a cultural thing. This is, Silicon Valley has magic here, and community is part of it. >> Yes, well it's more basic than that. I think, basically, we were known for two decades, not just Cisco, but all of the Valley as tech for good, and we gave back to the communities, and we paid it forward all the time, and I use the example of Cisco winning the awards, but so do many of our peers. We're going to Palestine and helping to rebuild Palestine in terms of creating jobs, et cetera. We went in with the Intels of the world, and the Oracles and the other players and HP together, even though at times we might compete. I think today, it's not a given. I think there is a tug of war going on here, in terms of what is the underlying purpose of the Valley. Is it primarily to have major economic benefits, and a little bit of arm's length from the average citizen from government, or is it do well financially, but also do very well in giving back and making it inclusive. That tug of war is not a given. When you travel throughout the US, today, or around the world, there are almost as many people that view tech for bad as they do tech for good, so I think it's going to be interesting to watch how this plays out. And I do think there are almost competing forces here in the Valley about which way should that go and why. The good news is, I think we'll eventually get it right. The bad news is, it's 50/50 right now. >> Let's talk about the skill gap. A lot of leaders in companies right now are looking at a work force that needs to be leveled up, and as new jobs are coming online that haven't been trained for, these openings they don't have skills for because they haven't been taught. AI is one example, IOT you mentioned a few of those. How do great leaders, proactively and reactively, too, get the skills gaps closed? What strategies can you do, what's the playbook there? >> Well two separate issues. How do they get it closed, in terms of their employees, and second issue, how do we train dramatically better than we've done before? Let's go to the first one. In terms of the companies, I think that your ability to track the millennials, the young people, is based upon your vision of doing more than quote just making a profit, and you want to be an exciting place to work with a great culture, and part of that culture should be giving back. Having said that, however, the majority of the young people today, and I'm talking about the tops out of the key engineering schools, et cetera, they want to go to start-ups. So what you're going to see is, how well established companies work with start-ups, in a unique partnership, is going to be one of the textbook opportunities for the future, because most companies, just like they didn't know how to acquire tech companies and most of all tech acquisitions failed, even through today. We wrote the textbook on how to do it differently. I think how these companies work with start-ups and how they create a strategic relationship with a company they know has at least a 50/50 probability of going out of business. And how do you create that working relationship so that you can tap into these young innovative ideas and partnerships, and so, what you see with the Spark Cognition, 200 people out of Texas, brilliant, brilliant CEO there in terms of what he is focused on, partnering with Boeing in that 50/50 joint venture, 50/50 joint venture to do the next FAA architecture for unmanned aircraft in this country. So you're going to see these companies relate to these start-ups in ways they haven't done before. >> Partnership and collaboration and acquisitions are still rampant on the horizon, certainly as a success for you. Recently in the tech industry we're seeing big acquisitions, Dell, EMC, IBM bought Red Hat, and there's some software ones out there. One was just going public and got bought, just recently, by SAP, how do you do the acqui-- you've done 180 of them? How do you do them successfully without losing the innovation and losing the people before they invest and leave; and this is a key dynamic, how do companies maintain innovation in an era of collaboration, partnerships, and enmity? >> I had that discussion this morning at Techonomy with David Kirkpatrick, and David said how do you do this. And then as I walked out of the room, I had a chance to talk with other people and one of them from one of the very largest technology companies said, John, we've watched you do this again and again; we assumed that when we acquired a company, we'd get them to adjust to our culture and it almost never worked, and we lost the people at a tremendously fast pace, especially after their lock-in of 18 to 24 months came up. We did the reverse. What we did was develop a replicatible innovation playbook, and I talk about it in that book, but we did this for almost everything we did at Cisco, and I would've originally called that, bureaucracy, John. (both laugh) I would've said that's what slow companies do. And actually, if done right, allows you to move with tremendous speed and agility, and so we'd outline what we'd look for in terms of strategy and vision; if our cultures weren't the same, we didn't acquire them. And if we couldn't keep the people, to generate the next generation of product, that was a bad financial decision for us, as well. So our attrition rate averaged probably about 5% or over while I was at Cisco for 20 years. Our voluntary attrition rate of our acquired companies, which normally runs 20% in these companies, we had about four. So we kept the people, we got the next generation product out, and we went in with that attitude in terms of you're acquiring to be able to keep the people and make them a part of your family and culture. And I realize that that might sound corny today, but I disagree. I think to attract people, to get them to stay at your company, it is like a family, it is like how you succeed and occasionally lose together, and how you build that family attitude under every employee, spouse, or their children that was life-threatening, and we were there for them in the ways that others were not. So you're there when your employees have a crisis, or your customer does, and that's how you form trust in relationships. >> And here's the question, what does People First mean to you? >> Well people first is our customer first. It means your action and everything you do puts your customers and your people first, that's what we did at Cisco. Any customer you would talk to, almost every customer I've ever met in my life would do business with us again, or with me again, because your currency in today's world is trust, track record, and relationships, and we built that very deep. Same thing with the employees. I still get many, many notes from people we helped 10 or 15 years ago; here's the picture of my child that you all helped make a difference in, Cisco and John, and you were there for us when we needed you most. And then in customers. It surprises you, when you help them through a crisis, they remember that more than when you helped them be successful, and they're there for you. >> Talk about failure and successes. You talk about this in the book. This is part of entrepreneurship, you can't succeed without failures. Handling failures is just as important as handling successes, your thoughts on people should think about that from a mindset standpoint? >> Well, you know, what's fun is those of you who are parents, or who will be parents in the future, when your child scores a goal in soccer or makes a good grade on a test, you're proud for them, but that isn't what worries you. What worries you is when they have their inevitable setbacks, everybody has that in life. How do you learn to deal with them? How do you understand how much were self-inflicted and how much of it was done by other causes, and how they navigate through that determines who they are. Point back to the West Virginia roots, I'm dyslexic, which means that I read backwards. Some people in early grade school thought I might not even graduate from high school much less go to college. My parents were doctors, they got it, but how I handled that was key. And while I write in the book about our successes, I spend as much time on when disaster strikes, how you handle that determines who you are in the future. Jack Welch told me in the 90's, he said John, you have a very good company, and I said Jack, you're good at teaching me something there, we're about to become the most valuable company in the world, we've won all of the leadership awards and everything else, what does it take to have a great company? He said a near-death experience. At the time I didn't understand it. At the end of 2001 after the dot com bubble, he called me up, he said, you now have a great company, I said Jack, it doesn't feel like it. Our stock price is down dramatically, people are questioning can I even run the company now, many of the people who were so positive turned very tough and--. >> How did you handle that? How did you personally handle that, 'cos--. >> It's a part of leadership. It's easy to be a leader when everything goes well, it's how you handle when things are tough, and leadership is lonely, you're by yourself. No matter how many friends you have around you, it's about leadership, and so you'd lead it through it. So 2001, took a real hard look, we made the mistake of focusing, me, on the numbers, and my numbers in the first week of December were growing at 70% year over year. We'd never had anything negative to speak of, much less below even 30% growth, and by the middle of January, we were -30%. And so you have to be realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much the market, I felt the majority of it was market-inflicted, I said at the time it's a hundred year flood. I said to the employees, here's how we're going to go forward, we need to bring our head count back in line to a new reality, and we did it in 51 days. And then you paint the picture from the very beginning of what you look like as you recover and in the future and why your employees want to stay here, your customers stay with you and your shareholders. It wiped out most of our competitors. Jack Welch said, John, this is probably your best leadership year ever, and I said Jack, you're the only one that's going to say that. He said probably, and he has been. >> And you've got the scar tissue to prove it. And I love this story. >> But you're a product of your scars. And do you learn how to deal with them? >> Yeah, and how you-- and be proud of them, it's what, who you are. >> I don't know if proud's the right word. >> Well, badge of honor. (both laugh) >> Red badge of honor, they're painful! >> Just don't do it again twice, right? >> We still make the same mistake twice, but at the same time when I teach all these start-ups, I expect you to make mistakes. If you don't make mistakes, you're not taking enough risk. And while people might've, might say John, one of your criticisms is that you spread yourself a little bit too thin in the company at times, and you were too aggressive. After thinking about it, I respectfully disagree. If I had to do it over, I'd be even bolder, and more aggressive, and take more risks, and I would dream bigger dreams. With these start-ups, that's what I'm teaching them, that's what I'm doing myself. >> And you know, this is such a big point, because the risk is key. Managing risk is actually, you want to be as risky as possible, just don't cut an artery, you know, do the right things. But in your book, you mention this about how you identify transitions, but also you made the reference to your parents again. This is, I think, important to bring up, because we have an expression in our company: let's put the patient on the table and let's look at the problem. Solving the problems and not going out of business at that time, but your competitors did, you had to look at this holistically, and in the book, you mentioned that experience your parents taught you, being from West Virginia, that it changed how you do problem solving. Can you share what that, with that in conscience? >> Well, both parents were doctors, and the good news is, you got a lot of help, the bad news is, you didn't get a lot of self 'cos they'd fix you. But they always taught me to focus on the real, underlying issue, to your point. What is the real issue, not what the symptom is, the temperature, or something else. And then you want to determine how much of that was self-inflicted, and how much of it was market, and if your strategy's working before, continue, if your strategy was starting to get long in the tooth, how do you change it, and then you got to have the courage to reinvent yourself again and again. And so they taught me how to deal with that. I start off the book by talking about how I almost drowned at six years of age, and as I got pulled down through the rapids, I could still see my dad in my mind today running down the side of the river yelling hold on to the fishing pole. It was an ugly fishing pole. Might've cost $5. But he was concerned about the fishing pole, so therefore I obviously couldn't be drowning so I focused both hands on the fishing pole and as I poked my head above water, I could still see him running down. He got way down river, swam out, pulled me in, set me on the side, and taught me about how you deal when you find yourself with major setbacks. How do you not panic, how do you not try to swim against the tide or the current, how you be realistic of the situation that you're in, work your way to the side, and then you know what he did? He put me right back in the rapids and let me do it myself. And taught me how to deal with it. Dad taught me the business picture and how you deal with challenges, Mom, uh, who was internal medicine, psychiatry, taught me the emotional IQ side of the house, in terms of how you connect with people, and I believe, this whole chapter, I build relationships for life. And I really mean it. I think your currency is trust, relationships, and track record. >> And having that holistic picture to pull back and understand what to focus on, and this is a challenge for entrepreneurs. You're now dealing with a lot of entrepreneurs and coaching them; a lot of times they get caught in the forest and miss the trees, right? Or have board meetings or have, worry about the wrong metrics, or hey, I got to get financing. How should an entrepreneur, or even a business leader, let's talk about entrepreneur first and then business leader, handle their advisors, their investors, how do they manage that, how do they tap into that? A lot of people say, ah, they don't add much value, I just need money. This is important, because this could save them, this could be the pole for them. >> It could, or it could also be the pole that causes the tent to collapse (both laugh). So I think the first thing when you advise young entrepreneurs, is realize you're an advisor, not a part of management. And I only take young entrepreneurs who want to be coached. And as I advise them, I say all I'm asking is that you listen to my thoughts and then you make the decision, and I'll support you either way you go, once you've listened to the trade-offs. And I think you want to very quickly realize where they are in vision and strategy, and where they are on building the right team and evolving the team and changing the team, where they are in culture, and where they are on their communication skills because communication skills were important to me, they might not have been to Jack Welch, the generation in front of me, but they were extremely important to ours. And today, your communication mismatch on social media could cost your company a billion dollars. If you're not good at listening, if you're not good at communicating with people and painting the picture, you've got a problem. So how do you teach that to the young players? Then most importantly, regardless of whether you're in a big company or a small company, public or private sector, you know what you know and know what you don't. Many people who, especially if they're really good in one area, assume that carries over to others, and assume they'll be equally as good in the others, that's huge mistake; it's like an engineer hiring a good sales lead, very rarely does it happen. They recruit business development people who appeals to an engineer, not the customer. (both laugh) So, know what you know, know what you don't. For those things you don't know, surround yourself with those people in your leadership team and with your advisors to help you navigate through that. And I had, during my career, through three companies, I always had a number of advisors, formal and informal, that I went to and still go to today. Some of them were very notable players, like our President Clinton or President Bush, Shimon Peres, Henry Kissinger, or names that were just really technical leads within companies, or people that really understood PR like Thomas Freedman out of the New York Times, or things of that. >> You always love being in the trenches. I noticed that in Cisco as an observer. But now that you're in start-ups, it's even more trenches deeper (laughs) and you've got to be seeing the playing field, so I got to ask ya a personal question. How do you look back at the tech trends that's happening right now, globally, both political, regulatory technology, what advice would you give your 23-year-old self if you were breaking into the business, you were at Wang and you were going to make your move; in this world today, what's going on, what would you be doing? >> Well the first thing on the tech trend is, don't get too short-term focused. Picture the ones that are longer term, what we refer to as digitization, artificial intelligence, et cetera. If I were 23 years old, or better yet, 19 years old, and were two years through college and thinking what did I want to do in college and then on to MBA school and perhaps beyond that, legal degree if I'd followed the prior path. I would focus on entrepreneurship and really understand it in a lot more detail. I learned it over 40 years in the business. And I learned it from my dad and my mom, but also from the companies I went into before. I would focus on entrepreneurship, I'd focus on technology that enables entrepreneurship, I would probably focus on what artificial intelligence can do for that and that's what we're doing at West Virginia, to your point earlier. And then I would think about security across that. If you want really uh, job security and creativity for the future, if you're a really good entrepreneur, with artificial intelligence capability, and security capability, you're going to be a very desired resource. >> So, we saw you, obviously networking is a big part of it. You got to be networking with other people and in the industry, would you be hosting meet ups? Young John Chambers right now, tech meet ups, would you be at conferences, would you be writing code, would you be doing a start-up? >> Well, if we were talking about me advising them? >> No, you're 23-years-old right now. >> No, I'd just be fooling around. No, I'd be in MBA school and I'd be forming my own company. (both laugh) And I would be listening to customers. I think it's important to meet with your peers, but while I developed strong relationships in the high-tech industry, I spent the majority of time with my customers and with our employees. And so, I think at that age, my advice to people is there was only one Steve Jobs. He just somehow knew what to build and how to build it. And when you think about where they were, it still took him seven years (laughs). I would say, really get close to your customers, don't get too far away; if there's one golden rule that a start-up ought to think about, it's learning and staying close to your customers. There too, understand your differentiation and your strategy. Well John, thanks so much. And the book, Connecting the Dots, great read, it's again, not a business book in the sense of boring, a lot of personal stories, a lot of great lessons and thanks so much for giving the time for our conversation. >> John, it was my pleasure. Great to see you again. >> I'm John Furrier here with the People First interview on theCUBE, co-created content with Mayfield. Thanks for watching! (upbeat electronic music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are in Orlando in the NetApp booth at SAP Sapphire 2018. We are joined by a new person to theCube, Amit Sinha, the Founder and Chief Customer Officer at WorkSpan. Amit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me, excited to be here. >> So I'm really excited to understand more about WorkSpan, what you guys do. Tell us a little about that, what opportunity you saw in the market with respect to alliances that you went, "Ah why is it no one's doing that." You have this great idea. >> Yeah, absolutely, we had this ah-ha moment, in this day and age of connectedness around the world, there is not a single company that goes to market alone. Right, when the reality's that we all serve the same demanding end-customers. We got to align our marketing. We got to align our messages, We need to align our innovation. I mean just altogether in order to be more. Easier said then done, right. So that's we saw the opportunity, that what if there was a network of alliances that are connected with one another, and if they can truly define a joint innovation, a joint solution, take it to market, co-market it. When they co-market they can get twice the audience at half the cost, and then co-sell. That way they can improve their vendors, and we are truly seeing that, so that's the opportunity that we saw, to really make the life of the alliance manager, the alliance leader, simpler, and easier to do in this connected day and age. >> Well, essential because also on your website, 60 to 75 percent of announced alliances fail. That's enormous, so talk to us about some of the successes that you have had, talking with companies, as you say, that, you know, nobody goes to market alone these days, did they have those ah-ha moments as well when you came knocking on there and say, hey look what we're developing. >> Absolutely, so look at this large event here. Sapphire is one of the biggest enterprise events out here. Over 100 strategic alliances are here from SAP, and they will all make key announcements here about joint products, big golden markets, but can you imagine, three months down the line, 70 percent of them will be actually catching dust on the road. They won't even watch the people, the business cases will be the winner. And that's such a wasted opportunity. The amount of due diligence that goes into kind of creating an alliance, thinking about the business case, people putting together solutions. But then once they announce the keynote, that's where the decline really happens. There's no operational support behind, how do you take this to market. That's where WorkSpan comes in. People wanting to join sales plan, the joint marketing plan, the joint solution plan, to really operationalize that people coming together across the platform. In India we say that a marriage is between families, and that's very true. So really, an alliance is between companies, deep in the companies, not just the alliance manager working with another alliance manager. It's really marketeers, sales folks, alliance people. So, it's a family of two companies coming together. And that's where WorkSpan, why it's the foundation, the consistent process logic, and a data driven argument around it. So you can dig decisions on the base of data, to say, okay where is my alliance working, and where does it need help? You don't do post mortems after that, you can fix as you're going along. >> So let's talk about that process and data driven nature of alliances. Alliances are complex setups, just starting at the very beginning of saying, you know what, I'm, we're two companies, we overlap in areas of competition, but there's these outliers where we really can partner together to make that happy. You look on a show floor, you see brands that are obvious, you know, we're in the NetApp booth and we've talked SAP Hanna a lot, and right across the way is the Oracle booth, and they're talking heavily SAP on Oracle, so there's this opportunity to cooperate, and there's this area of competition. A lot of that is data driven, how do you capture that data and help create the process logic to help companies identify alliances and then execute upon, and manage those alliances going forward. >> Well I think that's an excellent question, so when you are living in a network in this interdependent work, you will partner in some areas and you will compete in some places. So for this network world, we need a new security model, so that only people who are allowed to see something are able to see that thing. We call this Attribute Base Access Control. Compare that to traditional applications which do role based access control, just because you're higher up in the organization, you get to see everything. But this new module of security, Attribute Based Access Control model, allows the right people to get into the right plans, so that they, and they alone, can see it. So you might be working for SAP on, let's say the Google relationship, or the Apple relationships, or the Oracle relationship, or the NetApp relationship, only those right people have those accesses. And the owners of those programs can control and secure that data. So what it allows a company to then do is, it's even more secure in this day and age. We can argue that in this day and age with GDPR and all those compliance efforts, that WorkSpan is far more secure, than sending spreadsheets out, which is the current mode of collaboration. So you can enforce a corporate policy around, what is your shared data, what's your private data. So in the same opportunity you can have private data for your own company, employees to see that as them as sort of partners. So that translucency, not transparency, but translucency is really really important when you do alliances, and that we understand is model of WorkSpan. >> So how do you help, like, for alliances marketing for example, and say there's a joint campaign, NetApp with one of their partners for example, and they wanted to do some lead generation activities, events, webinars, lunch and learns, digital campaigns, and they're gonna get leads that come in from that, and they might say, ah, okay, well I don't want to give you all of that. How do you help with some of that, I mean it kind of goes to the "coopertition" theme a little bit, but from a marketing standpoint, I'm just curious, how do you help either reduce or mitigate concerns that companies, alliance partners would have in that space, or do you come in and sort of help them from a strategic area to normalize some of these concerns? >> Yeah, so what we do is we partner with the company's marketing automation systems, so let's say NetApp is working with AP Cloud for customer. So at this event we announce the integration between WorkSpan and this AP Cloud for customer. Similarly other customers may have other marketing optimations, and you should see in a low quarter market, or a salesfirst.com, so we integrate with those systems. So what happens is marketeers can continue their contact database and their lead machine in those systems, and we get aggregate results in WorkSpan to really see which alliances are doing well. So we don't get into what marketing automation systems do, we partner and we integrate with them. So that, what happens in that, we are extending an investment the company already has made in their marketing automations tech, and we come across as a partner or alliance automations tech, so that really the alliances knew one another. And why is this important. This is important because if you're like an Intel or a NetApp, you may be working with a whole ecosystem of providers, and they themselves have their own marketing automation systems. So you imagine if you are at an intel or you're a NetApp or you're an SAP, you can get all this data back, because there's WorkSpan in the middle. So as a network, you may have just one percent of the data, but your overall network is far more intelligent than all the data you've been collecting. >> So again, whenever we get a topic like this, we have to invoke John Forrier's name and get some block chain conversation going on, from an ideal of, you know, basically there's just, you guys have become an authority of authentication, there's reputation, there's all these fundamental infrastructure things that you have to determine. And you think through, you scale this out beyond just, you know, alliances, and honestly technology is one area. There's all the attributes in manufacturing, in other companies, how does this align with, or a more aggressive question, how does this sort plant like, the ideas of smart contracts with the lies of block chain? >> Yeah, absolutely. So BlockShare is a really good implementation of what we really have done in WorkSpan. So, in WorkSpan, if you think about it, it's a network. There are transactions, they're like, flowing across different parties. And these transactions are trusted, right, across different parties. Let's say an Intel or a NetApp stays approved on our platform, the process extends to the partner and they get a contract, that simple. So in some ways, in living in a connected world, we need to have these kinds of smart contracts and trust in data source that is not just your own. We're living in a shared data world, right? So one of the key partners at Bolt, well NetApp works with this Bolt Intel as well as SAP, right. So, because SAP program funds the SAP marketing campaigns here, and they're both Intels, and they both come from trusted parties, NetApp is able to trust that data, trust that transaction that makes it too. So we provide that trans-foundation based on the qualities that.. >> Sorry, Amit, but that's kind of the trust foundation, as sort of aligns to what Bill Madridment said in his keynote this morning, about, you know, trust being this new currency. You guys have been attaining a lot of momentum in the Fortune 500 space. Tell us a little bit about how you're doing that, and then if there's a customer example that you, that's one of your favorites that you think really articulates your brand values, share that too. >> Absolutely, so we've been very fortunate that we've been trusted by a lot of Fortune 500 companies to come on the platform. Really want to orchestrate their platform and their ecosystem. And we are seeing this need that the head of alliances seen, they're going to be very strategic at the board, where they want to be data driven and numbers driven. They're no longer saying, I'm okay by saying that my alliance with such and such partner is going well. They want to be quantified, they wanna say it's going well by this much. So this is where the main value prop is, we have had companies on our platform that have generated 58 percent more leads, that have reduced their marketing cost by 50 percent. Intel and SAP specifically, this is their third year on our platform, and year on year they have collaborated more number of campaigns, deeper in the regions, where their marketeers are working with intel marketeers, for example. So they got a 24X internal marketing investment, [Lisa] Wow. where as they were expecting an eight to 10x marketing investment, so dramatically increased. For SAP, that meant 100 million dollars more than double at lower marketing cost, just because the two companies can unleash their shared potential with the shared customers across the world. Now this happened, this was not an overnight success, this is a three year success in the making, where there's deep partnership and collaboration at the regional level, at the marketeer level, and all rolling it up at the head of alliances. So Intel is one company, we have SAP of course as a marketing account. We not only work with hardware alliances like NetApp and Intel, but also their SI alliances are on WorkSpan, so large, as many as size you see here, those programs are coming at WorkSpan as well. People at Novel were invited on WorkSpan, HPE is on WorkSpan, so that's a great example as well of a Fortune 500 company. >> Wow, lot of momentum. You know, it's for companies like SAP, like WorkSpan, where you've got software and you've got something under the hood that a lot of people won't know what's happening, or further jobs don't have to know or care, it's always challenging for a brand to go, how do we show the value of our product and service is when it's not something we can touch, or see, or feel. And it's really through the validation, the best you can get, is through the voice of your customer. And the stats that you shared, you must be sort of salivating, with we can actually help you increase Legion by 58 percent, or increase revenue opportunities by 40 percent. I mean, you've got some really substantial data driven facts to show how you're transforming a business. That's got to be, that's gotta make doing business a little bit easier, that you know you've got such salitity. >> Actually when you think of the world, it's really diverse, right, but you can see patterns from this all. So when you work with a lot of partners and you're orchestrating them on your ecosystem, you're running different kinds of marketing campaigns or different sales opportunities. They have different traction depending on how you actually executed them, right. But when you step back and you say, hey, webinars don't really work well in Japan, late evening events work better in Japan. But in the US, one of the best course, it seems like webinars work better. Or such and such partner does a really good job of hiring clients in events, but this other partner I spent a lot of money with, it all seems to go in search or non advertising that I don't see a lot of benefit of, right. So you can make these data driven arguments by partner, by channel, by investment, by, you know by any metric that you want now. So now the head of alliance, this is exactly where the value profit for spenders. Now you can be totally data driven and say, this works, that doesn't work, so I should do more of this and spend less there. >> Fantastic, well Amit I wish we had more time to keep chatting, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing not only who WorkSpan is and what you do, but some of the significant impact that you can deliver to your customers. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity, loved talking to you both. >> Likewise. We want to thank you for watching theCube, I am Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, from SAP Sapphire 2018, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live (digital music) from New York City, it's The Cube covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Lenovo Transform. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are here with Kim Stevenson. She is the senior vice president and general manager of data center infrastructure here at Lenovo. Thank you so much for joining us, Kim. >> Thanks! I always enjoy my time on The Cube, so thanks for having me. >> So you've had a long and esteemed career in technology. Former CIO of Intel. Why did you come to Lenovo? What was it about Lenovo that drew you? >> Yeah, so I was very specifically looking for, to be in the data center space, because I believe our whole data center industry is changing. Right, and the incumbents actually don't possess very much value in this rapid pace of change. And I wanted to be a part of that. I've always loved big change agendas, so I was looking for that. Lenovo was clearly the underdog at the time I was making my decision. I like the underdog, I want, you know, I sort of-- it's about making impact and making progress, and being able to see that impact, and so that fit. And then I had, you know, good experiences with the management team, and I wanted to be able to leverage that, and in fact, you know, it's been a seamless transition in because I knew the management team and I understood some of the dynamics that we'd be facing together, and the challenges that we wanted to take on together. So it's been great, and I do think today's product launch is a culmination of, you know, we're not going to be the underdog for very much longer. >> Kim, I want to help you out and kind of help us unpack that changing dynamic of the data center. You had a very interesting viewpoint, coming from Intel. You know, Intel chips, we know they're going everywhere. What do you see as the role of the data center? Some people are like, oh, public cloud, and the hyperscales, and Lenovo has a, you know, a strong position playing across the board, so what do you see as data center? What does that mean to you and what does that mean to your customers? >> Yeah, so look, I think all businesses today are using technology to deliver their competitive advantage. It's the fundamental thing that's driving transformation in companies. So but if you look what's happened in enterprise tech for the last couple years, we've been consumed as IT practitioners, moving our workload to the cloud. Because there's rich functionality there, there's good economics, it's made complete sense. But that's only half the journey. And when you look at the other half, the second half of this movie, is really about why that enterprise data center becomes so much more important tomorrow than it is today. And it's because of the workloads, the differentiating workloads of your company. So when I was the CIO at Intel, our differentiating workloads were engineering and manufacturing. We got paid to engineer great products. We got paid to make them. And every industry has those kind of workloads. And then with the emergence of artificial intelligence and IOT, those workloads are going to explode, and they are going to reside in your enterprise data center. And so, but you think about what that needs in terms of network, in terms of memory, IO capability, those are much different platforms than what you think of as a legacy data center. And I simply want to be a part of making that come to life. >> Okay, and so you would include, some people would call that the edge requirement, edge computing, which, you know, sometimes the little bit of difference is, it's not my centralized data center, even if it does live out in the customer's environment. >> Some of it is edge, right? Clearly, the growth in the edge will be phenomenal. And some of that will be real-time processing that happens at the edge, and others of it will be coming back to the data center for other types of processing, right? It could be for pattern analysis over a longer time horizon. It could be for developing of new services to deploy it at a later date. But I think both of those things are going to, what do they call it, Jevons paradox, right? The more you have, the more you use, right? And that's what I think's going to happen with the value of data, being able to capture it and store it and analyze it in a very, very cost-effective manner. >> You were talking about how companies get paid to make great products, and how with the introduction or the evolution of AI and machine learning, how those workloads are going to explode, and it's not going to be enough any more to just make great products. Are companies ready for these changes? >> You know, there's a spectrum. I would say some yes, some no. I think in some cases, the rapid pace of technology scares the crap out of boards of directors and CEOs that don't come from our space. But, in the end, I do think that's going to be the winners and losers will be decided by who can deploy the most advanced technology in the fastest amount of time. And I think there's a whole generation of people that that scares. They didn't grow up like us, in the middle of it. There's a whole generation of people like me, that you know, it excites us, and it makes us want to do more. So but yeah, I think companies, especially those outside of tech, they have a longer journey than tech companies do. >> Rebecca: A learning curve. Yeah, learning curve is steeper. >> I want to talk a little about your experience at Lenovo so far. Before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about just the greater numbers of women in senior leadership positions at Lenovo, and how that changes the dynamic and the approach to teamwork. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about what you've experienced? >> Yeah, so it's really been a pleasant surprise, because Lenovo's a very diverse company, and that diversity plays out. So in our president's staff, right, which I'm a member of, you know, half of the staff are women. And that may not sound unusual, except for it's very unusual in tech, >> Rebecca: In technology! and it's very unusual for me, as a woman, to have the opportunity to work with other women. And so, but, it's an interesting thing, because we're focused on driving more customer-centricity as a company, and particularly in data center group, and so what you see with this natural collaboration is that we're all focused on the same problem, and we're willing to leverage the strengths of one another, so there's no siloed thinking, there's no I have to be the smartest person in the room thinking, that often exists in tech companies. And I largely attribute that to the diversity of the staff. And the other thing is, it's sort of a sidetrack, but, the number of African Americans in our organization are greater than I've ever seen in any tech company. And so I've been asking some of the African American women, like, why is that, help me understand that, let's-- and they're brilliant, they're really brilliant. And so I just never subscribe to you can't find any women for these jobs, or you can't find any, you know, diverse candidates for these jobs. You just have to look in the right places, and so it's been really, really fabulous at Lenovo to work with really talented women, and learn from them, and hopefully I'm helping them learn something too, right? >> And eye-opening that it can happen, even in technology. At a time when we're hearing about the dearth of woman leaders, and the sort of bro culture in Silicon Valley, in particular. >> Yep, yep, so it's, you know, I mean I do think it takes a management team that has an open mindset to solve problems in different ways, and you know, if our core different is better, we're willing to do it differently, and look, we have a different management team and style that, you know, is much more focused on our customers. So it's been good. >> Kim, as a former CIO, I'm curious what your viewpoint is of the role of the CIO today. We talked about, you know, just the rapid pace of change that's happening in data center, a cloud needs to fit into the equation, you know, what do you see as the primary role of the CIO, and you know, how that's different today than it was, say, five years ago. >> Yeah, so, look, I think today's, the very, very best CIOs, people the top of our profession, are outstanding change agents. They're transformational leaders, they speak for the company, they don't speak for IT. They are integral in the strategic direction setting of the company, and they bring sort of a new thinking to that. Now, that said, they also have to run the operations extremely well. You do not get to sit at the table at the board meetings, or the CEO's staff, if you can't run the place really well. Because it's so pivotal that operational execution is really, really outstanding when your whole business is built on this. But the differentiators are really the ones around leadership, and speaking for the business, and strategic direction setting, and really trying to understand the capacity of change that the company can go through, and how do you keep expanding that capacity for change. >> Lenovo is number one in customer satisfaction on a slew of different rankings, and as you said, this is where you are focused, on pleasing the customer, satisfying the customer, anticipating the customer's needs before the customer even knows he has those needs. When you're number one, you can't move up. So how do you keep driving toward remaining in that top position? >> Yeah, so you know, one of the things that we're trying to do is change the expectation of the customers have of their hardware vendors, right? So obviously, customers always expect great products. It needs to be reliable, it needs to have good performance, it needs to cost the right price point. Those are always the standard. But we're trying to take it a little bit further and say, look, your expectation should be, we need to be easy to do business with, right, from the time I think about writing an RFQ, to maybe evaluate some hardware, to the time that I sunset that piece of equipment. Everything in-between, right, it needs to be easy to acquire, it needs to be easy to run, easy to manage, it needs to be easy to sunset. I want to future-proof that investment by making things upgradeable, and having, you know, instead of, I was talking to one customer today who said, hey, look, if I could have a 10 year life cycle, I can use bond money to fund my growth. If I don't, I can't. I have to use expense money, and therefore, I can do far less. And I said, well, we future-proofed this system, set of products, and here's how you can do that, right? You upgrade the memory at this cycle. You upgrade the processors at this cycle. Use the same rack, same chassis, for the next 10 years, and you get three generations of technology out of a single rack. And he's like, that's a brilliant! I mean, that's the kind of thing we're trying to help customers think through. It's more than, I always say, it's the tech and the team that get leadership, and that's what we want, to be a part of the team that drives leadership. >> Kim, your team has an interesting blend of people with long history in especially the x86 server market, and new people. Kirk and yourself, both, you know, relatively new to the position, how are you tracking, what KPIs are you measuring, to say that Lenovo's succeeding, becoming a larger, more strategic partner for customers in the data center. >> Yeah, so we're coming off, and it's no surprise, we're coming off a bad year, right? And so, we have really three dimensions that we are driving improvements in. One is sales execution. So all the classic KPIs and you know, sales productivity types of measures, and we've made the changes to get a dedicated sales force, hired very specific specialists, so that's one dimension. The second is product performance and portfolio gaps. So how well, you know, do we make, you know, our benchmarks? So we've got these 30 world record benchmarks, right? In the next generation, how well are we going to do against those? HPC benchmarks, right? So we're really external benchmarking, and it really is, like we measure ourselves externally, so we can get good view of the competition. And then we look at where our portfolio gaps are, and what do we have to do to close those portfolio gaps through focused engineering? And the third is then customer engagement and support, which is really where the satisfaction measure comes from, but we're not-- satisfaction is a rear-view mirror look at the world. We're using advanced analytics and AI to predict customer engagement drop, right? Why would that customer no longer be engaging with us? Customer field failures, and we're tracking every incident that happens out there, whether it's something we need to act on, or the customer needs to act on, so those become our important KPIs, to build this lifelong customer within a trusted relationship. >> The theme of this event is transform, and Lenovo has undergone an enormous transformation in the past few years, and now you're just starting, and sort of on the brink of this new transformation. I asked Cameron about this earlier, but just, if you could talk a little bit about where you want to be five years from now, in Lenovo, and sort of what you've accomplished in the next five years. What do you want to see? >> So I guarantee you, five years from now, I'll still be saying, we need to change, we need to grow! Because I think it's a big journey. But I believe what you'll see in the next five years is you're going to see this enormous growth in these new workloads. And you're going to have to have data center capability that effectively is seamless. So we call that hybrid cloud today, or we call it converged infrastructure, or we call it, you know, hyper converged. But the reality is, you know, IT organizations will have morphed their skill sets to be, instead of being siloed servers, network, and storage, you'll have people that span those technology skill sets, and therefore our products need to be fully integrated, right, and almost so self-healing in their process that you don't need consoles. The idea of a console, the monitor things that I know, we have one, right? You have to have it today. I don't think you need it in the future, because the machine is so self-healing, why do I need someone looking at a console? >> Rebecca: I love that concept of a self-healing machine, one that can fix itself. >> Yeah, and we've got some Lenovo research being done today on how you do that. And I know it can be done, because if you look at the equipment, individual pieces of equipment, all have now call home capability, or some intelligent care capability, but they're siloed by vendors, or type of product. So you could integrate that into a machine learning application, and use that to act, where I don't need any human interference with that. Because I've got a knowledge management database, I have all those events that have happened in the past, so you can really, truly bring self-healing, self-diagnosing, self-healing, to life, and I think that's where we'll be in five years. It doesn't take very long to get that type of capability, given that we have the foundation already. >> So Kim, now that you're on the other side of the table from your relationship with Intel, speak a little bit about Lenovo as a partner. I think about Intel, Microsoft, you know, companies that are very strategic to Lenovo, but also with your key competitors. What differentiates Lenovo as a partner? >> Yeah, so you know, one, we don't compete with our partners, right? And so it sort of depends on what kind of partners, but some of our competitors end up, you know, through acquisition, through growth, through intention, they end up competing with their partners. We're very, very clear. We don't compete with our partners. We're here to make our partners successful. And so we have deep industry partnerships with like the Intels of the world, and the Microsofts of the world, because we're so complementary. And we're after the same types of things, and so, that's really worked to our advantage. But I would even go down to, you know, our channel partners, the value added resellers and distributors, they're critically important to us, and we've made changes this year to insure that they have rich incentives to work with Lenovo. And so it really spans, you know, sort of the supply side to the delivery side, that we have a holistic view of how strategic and important our partners are to us, and that shared sense of win-win. We really want a win-win relationship with all of our partners. >> A great note to end on. Thanks so much for joining us, >> Thanks for having me. it's always a pleasure having you on the show. >> Yep, thanks for having me again, I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Lenovo Transform just after this. (digital music)