>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson, day four of MWC '23. Show's winding down a little bit, but it's still pretty packed here. Lot of innovation, planes, trains, automobiles, and we're talking 5G all week, private networks, connected breweries. It's super exciting. Really happy to have Warren Jackson here as the Edge Gateway Product Technologist at Dell Technologies, and Scott Waller, the CTO of the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> Really interesting stories that we're going to talk about. Let's start, Scott, with you, what is the Open Innovation Lab? >> So it was hatched three years ago. Ideated about a bunch of guys from Microsoft who ran startup ventures program, started the developers program over at Microsoft, if you're familiar with MSDN. And they came three years ago and said, how does CSPs working with someone like T-Mobile who's in our backyard, I'm from Seattle. How do they monetize the edge? You need a developer ecosystem of applications and use cases. That's always been the thing. The carriers are building the networks, but where's the ecosystem of startups? So we built a startup ecosystem that is sponsored by partners, Dell being one sponsor, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, Aspirant, you name it. The enterprise folks who are also in the connectivity business. And with that, we're not like a Y Combinator or a Techstars where it's investment first and it's all about funding. It's all about getting introductions from a startup who might have a VR or AI type of application or observability for 5G slicing, and bring that in front of the Microsoft's of the world, or the Intel's and the Dell's of the world that they might not have the capabilities to do it because they're still a small little startup with an MVP. So we really incubate. We're the connectors and build a network. We've had 101 startups over the last three years. They've raised over a billion dollars. And it's really valuable to our partners like T-Mobile and Dell, et cetera, where we're bringing in folks like Expedo and GenXComm and Firecell. Start up private companies that are around here they were cohorts from our program in the past. >> That's awesome because I've often, I mean, I've seen Dell get into this business and I'm like, wow, they've done a really good job of finding these guys. I wonder what the pipeline is. >> We're trying to create the pipeline for the entire industry, whether it's 5G on the edge for the CSPs, or it's for private enterprise networks. >> Warren, what's this cool little thing you got here? >> Yeah, so this is very unique in the Dell portfolio. So when people think of Dell, they think of servers laptops, et cetera. But what this does is it's designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments and it allows customers to do analytics, data collection at the edge. And what's unique about it is it's got an extended temperature range. There's no fan in this and there's lots of ports on it for data ingestion. So this is a smaller box Edge Gateway 3200. This is the product that we're using in the brewery. And then we have a bigger brother of this, the Edge Gateway 5200. So the value of it, you can scale depending on what your edge compute requirements are at the edge. >> So tell us about the brewery story. And you covered it, I know you were in the Dell booth, but it's basically an analog brewery. They're taking measurements and temperatures and then writing it down and then entering it in and somebody from your company saw it and said, "We can help you with this problem." Explain the story. >> Yeah, so Scott and I did a walkthrough of the brewery back in November timeframe. >> It's in Framingham, Mass. >> Framingham, Mass, correct. And basically, we talked to him, and we said, what keeps you guys up at night? What's a problem that we can solve? Very simple, a kind of a lower budget, didn't have a lot money to spend on it, but what problem can we solve that will realize great benefit for you? So we looked at their fermentation process, which was completely analog. Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges. And what we did is we digitized that process. So what this did for them rather than being completely reactive, and by the time they realized there was something going wrong with the fermentation process, it's too late. A batch of scrap. This allowed them to be proactive. So anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped. >> Okay. Amazing. And Scott, you got a picture of this workflow here? >> Yeah, actually this is the final product. >> Explain that. >> As Warren mentioned, the data is actually residing in the industrial side of the network So we wanted to keep the IT/OT separation, which is critical on the factory floor. And so all the data is brought in from the sensors via digital connection once it's converted and into the edge gateway. Then there's a snapshot of it using Telit deviceWISE, their dashboarding application, that is decoding all the digital readings, putting them in a nice dashboard. And then when we gave them, we realized another problem was they're using cheap little Chromebooks that they spill beer on once a week and throw them out. That's why they bought the cheap ones 'cause they go through them so fast. So we got a Dell Latitude Rugged notebook. This is a brand new tablet, but they have the dashboarding software. So no matter if they're out there on the floor, but because the data resides there on the factory they have access to be able to change the parameters. This one's in the maturation cycle. This one's in the crashing cycle where they're bringing the temperature back down, stopping the fermentation process, getting it ready to go to the canning side of the house. >> And they're doing all that from this dashboard. >> They're doing all from the dashboard. They also have a giant screen that we put up there that in the floor instead of walking a hundred yards back behind a whole bunch of machinery equipment from a safety perspective, now they just look up on the screen and go, "Oh, that's red. That's out of range." They're actually doing a bunch of cleaning and a bunch of other things right now, too. So this is real time from Boston. >> Dave: Oh okay. >> Scott: This is actually real time from Boston. >> I'm no hop master, but I'm looking at these things flashing at me and I'm thinking something's wrong with my beer. >> We literally just lit this up last week. So we're still tweaking a few things, but they're also learning around. This is a new capability they never had. Oh, we have the ability to alert and monitor at different processes with different batches, different brews, different yeast types. Then now they're also training and learning. And we're going to turn that into eventually a product that other breweries might be able to use. >> So back to the kind of nuts and bolts of the system. The device that you have here has essentially wifi antennas on the back. >> Warren: Correct. >> Pull that up again if you would, please. >> Now I've seen this, just so people are clear, there are also paddle 5G antennas that go on the other side. >> Correct. >> That's sort of the connection from the 5G network that then gets transmogrified, technical term guys, into wifi so the devices that are physically connected to the brew vats, don't know what they're called. >> Fermentation tanks. >> Fermentation tanks, thank you. Those are wifi. That's a wifi signal that's going into this. Is that correct? >> Scott: No. >> No, it's not. >> It's a hard wire. >> Okay, okay. >> But, you're right. This particular gateway. >> It could be wifi if it's hard wire. >> It could be, yes. Could be any technology really. >> This particular gateway is not outfitted with 5G, but something that was very important in this application was to isolate the IT network, which is on wifi and physically connected from the OT network, which is the 5G connection. So we're sending the data directly from the gateway up to the cloud. The two partners that we worked with on this project were ifm, big sensor manufacturer that actually did the wired sensors into an industrial network called IO-Link. So they're physically wired into the gateway and then in the gateway we have a solution from our partner Telit that has deviceWISE software that actually takes the data in, runs the analytics on it, the logic, and then visualizes that data locally on those panels and also up to their cloud, which is what we're looking at. So they can look at it locally, they're in the plant and then up in the cloud on a phone or a tablet, whatever, when they're at home. >> We're talking about a small business here. I don't know how many employees they have, but it's not thousands. And I love that you're talking about an IT network and an OT network. And so they wanted, it is very common when we talk about industrial internet of things use cases, but we're talking about a tiny business here. >> Warren: Correct. >> They wanted to separate those networks because of cost, because of contention. Explain why. >> Yeah, just because, I mean, they're running their ERP system, their payroll, all of their kind of the way they run their business on their IT network and you don't want to have the same traffic out on the factory floor on that network, so it was pretty important. And the other thing is we really, one of the things that we didn't want to do in this project is interrupt their production process at all. So we installed this entire system in two days. They didn't have to shut down, they didn't have to stop. We didn't have to interrupt their process at all. It was like we were invisible there and we spun the thing up and within two days, very simple, easy, but tremendous value for their business. >> Talk about new markets here. I mean, it's like any company that's analog that needs to go digital. It's like 99% of the companies on the planet. What are you guys seeing out there in terms of the types of examples beyond breweries? >> Yeah, I could talk to that. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple years running my own little IoT company and a lot of it being in agriculture. So like in Washington state, 70% of the world's hops is actually grown in Washington state. It's my hometown. But in the Ag producing regions, there's lack of connectivity. So there's interest in private networks because the carriers aren't necessarily deploying it. But because we have the vast amount of hops there's a lot of IPAs, a lot of hoppy IPAs that come out of Seattle. And with that, there's a ton of craft breweries that are about the same size, some are a little larger. Anheuser-Busch and InBev and Heineken they've got great IoT platforms. They've done it. They're mass scale, they have to digitize. But the smaller shops, they don't, when we talk about IT/OT separation, they're not aware of that. They think it's just, I get local broadband and I get wifi and one hotspot inside my facility and it works. So a little bit of it was the education. I have got years in IT/OT security in my background so that education and we come forward with a solution that actually does that for them. And now they're aware of it. So now when they're asking questions of other vendors that are trying to sell them some type of solution, they're inherently aware of what should be done so they're not vulnerable to ransomware attacks, et cetera. So it's known as the Purdue Model. >> Well, what should they do? >> We came in and keep it completely separated and educated them because in the end too we'll build a design guide and a starter kit out of this that other brewers can use. Because I've toured dozens of breweries in Washington, the exact same scenario, analog gauges, analog process, very manual. And in the end, when you ask the brewer, what do they want out of this? It keeps them up at night because if the temperature goes out of range, because the chiller fails, >> They ruined. >> That's $30,000 lost in beer. That's a lot to a small business. However, it's also once they start digitizing the data and to Warren's point, it's read-only. We're not changing any of the process. We augmented on top of their existing systems. We didn't change their process. But now they have the ability to look at the data and see batch to batch consistency. Quality doesn't always mean best, it means consistency from batch to batch. Every beer from exhibit A from yesterday to two months from now of the same style of beer should be the same taste, flavor, boldness, et cetera. This is giving them the insights on it. >> It's like St. Louis Buds, when we were kids. We would buy the St. Louis Buds 'cause they tasted better than the Merrimack Buds. And then Budweiser made them all the same. >> Must be an East coast thing. >> It's an old guy thing, Dave. You weren't born yet. >> I was in high school. Yeah, I was in high school. >> We like the hops. >> We weren't 21. Do me a favor, clarify OT versus IT. It's something we talk about all the time, but not everyone's familiar with that separation. Define OT for me. >> It's really the factory floor. You got IT systems that are ERP systems, billing, you're getting your emails, stuff like that. Where the ransomware usually gets infected in. The OT side is the industrial control network. >> David: What's the 'O' stand for? >> Operation. >> David: Operation? >> Yeah, the operations side. >> 'Cause some people will think objects 'cause we think internet of things. >> The industrial operations, think of it that way. >> But in a sense those are things that are connected. >> And you think of that as they are the safety systems as well. So a machine, if someone doesn't push the stop button, you'd think if there's a lot of traffic on that network, it isn't guaranteed that that stop button actually stops that blade from coming down, someone's going to lose their arm. So it's very tied to safety, reliability, low latency. It is crafted in design that it never touches the internet inherently without having to go through a security gateway which is what we did. >> You mentioned the large companies like InBev, et cetera. You're saying they're already there. Are they not part of your target market? Or are there ways that you can help them? Is this really more of a small to mid-size company? >> For this particular solution, I think so, yeah. Because the cost to entry is low. I mean, you talk about InBev, they have millions of dollars of budgets to spend on OT. So they're completely automated from top to bottom. But these little craft brewers, which they're everywhere in the US. Vermont, Washington state, they're completely manual. A lot of these guys just started in their garage. And they just scaled up and they got a cult kind of following around their beers. One thing that we found here this week, when you talk around edge and 5G and beer, those things get people excited. In our booth we're serving beer, and all these kind of topics, it brings people together. >> And it lets the little guy compete more effectively with the big giants. >> Correct. >> And how do you do more with less as the little guy is kind of the big thing and to Warren's point, we have folks come up and say, "Great, this is for beer, but what about wine? What about the fermentation process of wine?" Same materials in the end. A vessel of some sort, maybe it's stainless steel. The clamps are the same, the sensors are the same. The parameters like temperature are key in any type of fermentation. We had someone talking about olive oil and using that. It's the same sanitary beverage style equipment. We grabbed sensors that were off the shelf and then we integrated them in and used the set of platforms that we could. How do we rapidly enable these guys at the lowest possible cost with stuff that's at the shelf. And there's four different companies in the solution. >> We were having a conversation with T-Mobile a little earlier and she mentioned the idea of this sounding scary. And this is a great example of showing that in fact, at a relatively small scale, this technology makes a lot of sense. So from that perspective, of course you can implement private 5G networks at an industrial scale with tens of millions of dollars of investment. But what about all of the other things below? And that seems to be a perfect example. >> Yeah, correct. And it's one of the things with the gateway and having flexibility the way Dell did a great job of putting really good modems in it. It had a wide spectrum range of what bands they support. So being able to say, at a larger facility, I mean, if Heineken wants to deploy something like this, oh, heck yeah, they probably could do it. And they might have a private 5G network, but let's say T-Mobile offers a private offering on their public via a slice. It's easy to connect that radio to it. You just change the sims. >> Is that how the CSPs fit here? How are they monetized? >> Yeah, correct. So one of our partners is T-Mobile and so we're working with them. We've got other telco partners that are coming on board in our lab. And so we'll do the same thing. We're going to take this back and put it in the lab and offer it up as others because the baseline building blocks or Lego blocks per se can be used in a bunch of different industries. It's really that starter point of giving folks the idea of what's possible. >> So small manufacturing, agriculture you mentioned, any other sort of use cases we should tune into? >> I think it's environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, I see it in IoT deployments all over the world. Just the simple starter kits 'cause a farmer doesn't want to get sold a solution, a platform, where he's got to hire a bunch of coders and partner with the big carriers. He just wants something that works. >> Another use case that we see a lot, a high cost in a lot of these places is the cost of energy. And a lot of companies don't know what they're spending on electricity. So a very simple energy monitoring system like that, it's a really good ROI. I'm going to spend five or $10,000 on a system like this, but I'm going to save $20,000 over a year 'cause I'm able to see, have visibility into that data. That's a lot of what this story's about, just giving visibility into the process. >> It's very cool, and like you said, it gets people excited. Is it a big market? How do you size it? Is it a big TAM? >> Yeah, so one thing that Dell brings to the table in this space is people are buying their laptops, their servers and whatnot from Dell and companies are comfortable in doing business with Dell because of our model direct to customer and whatnot. So our ability to bring a device like this to the OT space and have them have that same user experience they have with laptops and our client products in a ruggedized solution like this and bring a lot of partners to the table makes it easy for our customers to implement this across all kinds of industries. >> So we're talking to billions, tens of billions. Do we know how big this market is? What's the TAM? I mean, come on, you work for Dell. You have to do a TAM analysis. >> Yes, no, yeah. I mean, it really is in the billions. The market is huge for this one. I think we just tapped into it. We're kind of focused in on the brewery piece of it and the liquor piece of it, but the possibilities are endless. >> Yeah, that's tip of the spear. Guys, great story. >> It's scalable. I think the biggest thing, just my final feedback is working and partnering with Dell is we got something as small as this edge gateway that I can run a Packet Core on and run a 5G standalone node and then have one of the small little 5G radios out there. And I've got these deployed in a farm. Give the farmer an idea of what's possible, give him a unit on his tractor, and now he can do something that, we're providing connectivity he had never had before. But as we scale up, we've got the big brother to this. When we scale up from that, we got the telco size units that we can put. So it's very scalable. It's just a great suite of offerings. >> Yeah, outstanding. Guys, thanks for sharing the story. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Good to be with you today. >> Stop by for beer later. >> You know it. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team, we're here live at the Fira in Barcelona MWC '23 day four. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, brilliant humans and welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are live from the AWS Reinvent Show floor here with the cube. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined with Dave Valante, and we have a very exciting conversation with you. Two, two companies you may have heard of. We've got AWS and Red Hat in the house. Manu and Joel, thank you so much for being here. Love this little fist bump. Started off, that's right. Before we even got rolling, Manu, you said that you wanted this to be the best segment of, of the cubes airing. We we're doing over a hundred segments, so you're gonna have to bring the heat. >>We're ready. We're did go. Are we ready? Yeah, go. We're ready. Let's bring it on. >>We're ready. All right. I'm, I'm ready. Dave's ready. Let's do it. How's the show going for you guys real quick before we dig in? >>Yeah, I think after Covid, it's really nice to see that we're back into the 2019 level and, you know, people just want to get out, meet people, have that human touch with each other, and I think a lot of trust gets built as a functional that, so it's super amazing to see our partners and customers here at Reedman. Yeah, >>And you've got a few in the house. That's true. Just a few maybe, maybe a couple >>Very few shows can say that, by the way. Yeah, it's maybe a handful. >>I think one of the things we were saying, it's almost like the entire Silicon Valley descended in the expo hall area, so >>Yeah, it's >>For a few different reasons. There's a few different silicon defined. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't have strong on for you. So far >>It's, it's, it is amazing. It's the 10th year, right? It's decade, I think I've been to five and it's, it grows every single year. It's the, you have to be here. It's as simple as that. And customers from every single industry are here too. You don't get, a lot of shows have every single industry and almost every single location around the globe. So it's, it's a must, must be >>Here. Well, and the personas evolved, right? I was at reinvent number two. That was my first, and it was all developers, not all, but a lot of developers. And today it's a business mix, really is >>Totally, is a business mix. And I just, I've talked about it a little bit down the show, but the diversity on the show floor, it's the first time I've had to wait in line for the ladies' room at a tech conference. Almost a two decade career. It is, yeah. And it was really refreshing. I'm so impressed. So clearly there's a commitment to community, but also a commitment to diversity. Yeah. And, and it's brilliant to see on the show floor. This is a partnership that is robust and has been around for a little while. Money. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the partnership here? >>Yes. So Red Hand and AWS are best friends, you know, forever together. >>Aw, no wonder we got the fist bumps and all the good vibes coming out. I know, it's great. I love that >>We have a decade of working together. I think the relationship in the first phase was around running rail bundled with E two. Sure. We have about 70,000 customers that are running rail, which are running mission critical workloads such as sap, Oracle databases, bespoke applications across the state of verticals. Now, as more and more enterprise customers are finally, you know, endorsing and adopting public cloud, I think that business is just gonna continue to grow. So a, a lot of progress there. The second titration has been around, you know, developers tearing Red Hat and aws, Hey, listen, we wanna, it's getting competitive. We wanna deliver new features faster, quicker, we want scale and we want resilience. So just entire push towards devs containers. So that's the second chapter with, you know, red Hat OpenShift on aws, which launched as a, a joint manage service in 2021 last year. And I think the third phase, which you're super excited about, is just bringing the ease of consumption, one click deployment, and then having our customers, you know, benefit from the joint committed spend programs together. So, you know, making sure that re and Ansible and JBoss, the entire portfolio of Red Hat products are available on AWS marketplace. So that's the 1, 2, 3, it of our relationship. It's a decade of working together and, you know, best friends are super committed to making sure our customers and partners continue successful. >>Yeah, that he said it, he said it perfectly. 2008, I know you don't like that, but we started with Rel on demand just in 2008 before E two even had a console. So the partnership has been there, like Manu says, for a long time, we got the partnership, we got the products up there now, and we just gotta finalize that, go to market and get that gas on the fire. >>Yeah. So Graviton Outpost, local zones, you lead it into all the new stuff. So that portends, I mean, 2008, we're talking two years after the launch of s3. >>That's right. >>Right. So, and now look, so is this a harbinger of things to come with these new innovations? >>Yeah, I, I would say, you know, the innovation is a key tenant of our partnership, our relationship. So if you look at from a product standpoint, red Hat or Rel was one of the first platforms that made a support for graviton, which is basically 40% better price performance than any other distribution. Then that translated into making sure that Rel is available on all of our regions globally. So this year we launched Switzerland, Spain, India, and Red Hat was available on launch there, support for Nitro support for Outpost Rosa support on Outpost as well. So I think that relationship, that innovation on the product side, that's pretty visible. I think that innovation again then translates into what we are doing on marketplace with one click deployments we spoke about. I think the third aspect of the know innovation is around making sure that we are making our partners and our customers successful. So one of the things that we've done so far is Joe leads a, you know, a black belt team that really goes into each customer opportunity, making sure how can we help you be successful. We launched and you know, we should be able to share that on a link. After this, we launched like a big playlist, which talks about every single use case on how do you get successful and running OpenShift on aws. So that innovation on behalf of our customers partners to make them successful, that's been a key tenant for us together as >>Well. That's right. And that team that Manu is talking about, we're gonna, gonna 10 x that team this year going into January. Our fiscal yield starts in January. Love that. So yeah, we're gonna have a lot of no hiring freeze over here. Nope. No ma'am. No. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And you know what I love about working with aws and, and, and Manu just said it very, all of that's customer driven. Every single event that we, that he just talked about in that timeline, it's customer driven, right? Customers wanted rail on demand, customers want JBoss up in the cloud, Ansible this week, you know, everything's up there now. So it's just getting that go to market tight and we're gonna, we're gonna get that done. >>So what's the algorithm for customer driven in terms of taking the input? Because if every customers saying, Hey, I this a >>Really similar >>Question right up, right? I, that's what I want. And if you know, 95% of the customers say it, Jay, maybe that's a good idea. >>Yeah, that's right. Trends. But >>Yeah. You know, 30% you might be like, mm, you know, 20%, you know, how do you guys decide when to put gas on the fire? >>No, that, I think, as I mentioned, there are about 70,000 large customers that are running rail on Easy Two, many of these customers are informing our product strategy. So we have, you know, close to about couple of thousand power users. We have customer advisory booths, and these are the, you know, customers are informing us, Hey, let's get all of the Red Hat portfolio and marketplace support for graviton, support for Outpost. Why don't we, why are we not able to dip into the consumption committed spend programs for both Red Hat and aws? That's right. So it's these power users both at the developer level as well as the guys who are actually doing large commercial consumption. They are the ones who are informing the roadmap for both Red Hat and aws. >>But do, do you codify the the feedback? >>Yeah, I'm like, I wanna see the database, >>The, I think it was, I don't know, it was maybe Chasy, maybe it was Besos, that that data beats intuition. So do you take that information and somehow, I mean, it's global, 70,000 customers, right? And they have different weights, different spending patterns, different levels of maturity. Yeah. Do you, how do you codify that and then ultimately make the decision? Yeah, I >>If, I mean, well you, you've got the strategic advisory boards, which are made up of customers and partners and you know, you get, you get a good, you gotta get a good slice of your customer base to get, and you gotta take their feedback and you gotta do something with it, right? That's the, that's the way we do it and codify it at the product level, I'm sure open source. That's, that's basically how we work at the product level, right? The most elegant solution in open source wins. And that's, that's pretty much how we do that at the, >>I would just add, I think it's also just the implicit trust that the two companies had built with each other, working in the trenches, making our customers and partners successful over the last decade. And Alex, give an example. So that manifests itself in context of like, you know, Amazon and Red Hat just published the entire roadmap for OpenShift. What are the new features that are becoming over the next six to nine to 12 months? It's open source available on GitHub. Customers can see, and then they can basically come back and give feedback like, Hey, you know, we want hip compliance. We just launched. That was a big request that was coming from our >>Customers. That is not any process >>Also for Graviton or Nvidia instances. So I I I think it's a, >>Here's the thing, the reason I'm pounding on this is because you guys have a pretty high hit rate, and I think as a >>Customer, mildly successful company >>As, as a customer advocate, the better, you know, if, if you guys make bets that pay off, it's gonna pay off for customers. Right. And because there's a lot of failures in it. Yeah. I mean, let's face it. That's >>Right. And I think, I think you said the key word bets. You place a lot of small bets. Do you have the, the innovation engine to do that? AWS is the perfect place to place those small bets. And then you, you know, pour gas on the fire when, when they take off. >>Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, it's not expensive to experiment. Yeah. >>Especially in the managed service world. Right? >>And I know you love taking things to market and you're a go to market guy. Let's talk gtm, what's got your snow pumped about GTM for 2023? >>We, we are gonna, you know, 10 x the teams that's gonna be focused on these products, right? So we're gonna also come out with a hybrid committed spend program for our customers that meet them where they want to go. So they're coming outta the data center going into a cloud. We're gonna have a nice financial model for them to do that. And that's gonna take a lot of the friction out. >>Yeah. I mean, you've nailed it. I, I think the, the fact that now entire Red Hat portfolio is available on marketplace, you can do it on one click deployment. It's deeply integrated with Amazon services and the most important part that Joel was making now customers can double dip. They can drive benefit from the consumption committed spend programs, both from Red Hat and from aws, which is amazing. Which is a game changer That's right. For many of our large >>Customers. That's right. And that, so we're gonna, we're gonna really go to town on that next year. That's, and all the, all the resources that I have, which are the technology sellers and the sas, you know, the engineers we're growing this team the most out that team. So it's, >>When you say 10 x, how many are you at now? I'm >>Curious to see where you're headed. Tell you, okay. There's not right? Oh no, there's not one. It's triple digit. Yeah, yeah. >>Today. Oh, sweet. Awesome. >>So, and it's a very sizable team. They're actually making sure that each of our customers are successful and then really making sure that, you know, no customer left behind policy. >>And it's a great point that customers love when Amazonians and Red Hats show up, they love it and it's, they want to get more of it, and we're gonna, we're gonna give it to 'em. >>Must feel great to be loved like that. >>Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I would say yes. >>Seems like it's safe to say that there's another decade of partnership between your two companies. >>Hope so. That's right. That's the plan. >>Yeah. And I would say also, you know, just the IBM coming into the mix here. Yeah. I, you know, red Hat has informed the way we have turned around our partnership with ibm, essentially we, we signed the strategic collaboration agreement with the company. All of IBM software now runs on Rosa. So that is now also providing a lot of tailwinds both to our rail customers and as well as Rosa customers. And I think it's a very net creative, very positive for our partnership. >>That's right. It's been very positive. Yep. Yeah. >>You see the >>Billboards positive. Yeah, right. Also that, that's great. Great point, Dave. Yep. We have a, we have a new challenge, a new tradition on the cube here at Reinvent where we're, well, it's actually kind of a glamor moment for you, depending on how you leverage it. We're looking for your 32nd hot take your Instagram reel, your sizzle thought leadership, biggest takeaway, most important theme from this year's show. I know you want, right, Joel? I mean, you TM boy, I feel like you can spit the time. >>Yeah. It is all about Rosa for us. It is all in on that, that's the native OpenShift offering on aws and that's, that's the soundbite we're going go to town with. Now, I don't wanna forget all the other products that are in there, but Rosa is a, is a very key push for us this year. >>Fantastic. All right. Manu. >>I think our customers, it's getting super competitive. Our customers want to innovate just a >>Little bit. >>The enterprise customers see the cloud native companies. I wanna do what these guys are doing. I wanna develop features at a fast clip. I wanna scale, I wanna be resilient. And I think that's really the spirit that's coming out. So to Joel's point, you know, move to worlds containers, serverless, DevOps, which was like, you know, aha, something that's happening on the side of an enterprise is not becoming mainstream. The business is demanding it. The, it is becoming the centerpiece in the business strategy. So that's been really like the aha. Big thing that's happening here. >>Yeah. And those architectures are coming together, aren't they? That's correct. Right. You know, VMs and containers, it used to be one architecture and then at the other end of the spectrum is serverless. People thought of those as different things and now it's a single architecture and, and it's kind of right approach for the right job. >>And, and a compliments say to Red Hat, they do an incredible job of hiding that complexity. Yeah. Yes. And making sure that, you know, for example, just like, make it easier for the developers to create value and then, and you know, >>Yeah, that's right. Those, they were previously siloed architectures and >>That's right. OpenShift wanna be place where you wanna run containers or virtual machines. We want that to be this Yeah. Single place. Not, not go bolt on another piece of architecture to just do one or the other. Yeah. >>And hey, the hybrid cloud vision is working for ibm. No question. You know, and it's achievable. Yeah. I mean, I just, I've said unlike, you know, some of the previous, you know, visions on fixing the world with ai, hybrid cloud is actually a real problem that you're attacking and it's showing the results. Agreed. Oh yeah. >>Great. Alright. Last question for you guys. Cause it might be kind of fun, 10 years from now, oh, we're at another, we're sitting here, we all look the same. Time has passed, but we are not aging, which is a part of the new technology that's come out in skincare. That's my, I'm just throwing that out there. Why not? What do you guys hope that you can say about the partnership and, and your continued commitment to community? >>Oh, that's a good question. You go first this time. Yeah. >>I think, you know, the, you know, for looking into the future, you need to look into the past. And Amazon has always been driven by working back from our customers. That's like our key tenant, principle number 1 0 1. >>Couple people have said that on this stage this week. Yeah. >>Yeah. And I think our partnership, I hope over the next decade continues to keep that tenant as a centerpiece. And then whatever comes out of that, I think we, we are gonna be, you know, working through that. >>Yeah. I, I would say this, I think you said that, well, the customer innovation is gonna lead us to wherever that is. And it's, it's, it's gonna be in the cloud for sure. I think we can say that in 10 years. But yeah, anything from, from AI to the quant quantum computing that IBM's really pushing behind that, you know, those are, those are gonna be things that hopefully we show up on a, on a partnership with Manu in 10 years, maybe sooner. >>Well, whatever happens next, we'll certainly be covering it here on the cube. That's right. Thank you both for being here. Joel Manu, fantastic interview. Thanks to see you guys. Yeah, good to see you brought the energy. I think you're definitely ranking high on the top interviews. We >>Love that for >>The day. >>Thank >>My pleasure >>Job, guys. Now that you're competitive at all, and thank you all for tuning in to our live coverage here from AWS Reinvent in Las Vegas, Nevada, with Dave Valante. I'm Savannah Peterson. You're watching The Cube, the leading source for high tech coverage.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here, remote in Washington, DC, not in Palo Alto, but we're all around the world with theCUBE as we are virtual. We're here recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerating IT modernization) announcements with CUBE alumni Kevin Jackson, Kevin L. Jackson, CEO of GC Global Net. Kevin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thank you very much, John. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> It's great to have. You always have great insights. But here, we're recapping the event, Citrix Launchpad: Cloud (accelerator IT modernization). And again, we're seeing this theme constantly now, IT modernization, application modernization. People are now seeing clearly what the pandemic has shown us all that there's a lot of projects that need to be up-leveled or kill. There's a lot of things happening and going on. What's your take of what you heard? >> Well, you know, from a general point of view, organizations can no longer put off this digitalization and the modernization of their IT. Many of these projects have been on a shelf waiting for the right time or, you know, the budget to get right. But when the pandemic hit, everyone found themselves in the virtual world. And one of the most difficult things was how do you make decisions in the virtual world when you can't physically be with someone? How do you have a meeting when you can't shake someone's hand? And they all sort of, you know, stared at each other and virtually, of course, to try to figure this out. And they dusted off all of the technologies they had on the shelf that they were, you know, they were told to use years ago, but just didn't feel that it was right. And now it became necessary. It became the way of life. And the thing that really jumped at me yesterday, well, jumped at me with Launchpad, the Launchpad of the cloud is that Citrix honed in on the key issues with this virtual world. I mean, delivering applications, knowing what the internet state is so that you could select the right sources for information and data. And making security holistic. So you didn't have to, it was no longer sort of this bolted on thing. So, I mean, we are in the virtual world to stay. >> You know, good call out there. Honing in was a good way to put it. One quote I heard from Tim (Minahan) was, you know, he said one thing that's become painfully evident is a lot of companies are going through the pandemic and they're experiencing the criticality of the application experience. And he says, "Application experience is the new currency." Okay, so the pandemic, we all kind of know what's going on there. It's highlighting all the needs. But this idea of an application experience is the new currency is a very interesting comment because, I mean, you nailed it. Everyone's working from home. The whole work is shifting. And the applications, they kind of weren't designed to be this way 100%. >> Right, right. You know, the thing about the old IT was that you would build something and you would deploy it and you would use it for a period of time. You know, a year, two years, three years, and then there would be an upgrade. You would upgrade your hardware, you would upgrade your applications, and then you go through the process again, you know? What was it referred to as, it wasn't modernization, but it was refresh. You know, you would refresh everything. Well today, refresh occurs every day. Sometimes two or three times a day. And you don't even know it's occurring. Especially in the application world, right? I think I was looking at something about Chrome, and I think we're at like Chrome 95. It's like Chrome is updated constantly as a regular course of business. So you have to deploy this, understand when it's going to be deployed, and the customers and users, you can't stop their work. So this whole application delivery and security aspect is completely different than before. That's why this, you know, this intent driven solution that Citrix has come up with is so revolutionary. I mean, by being able to know the real business needs and requirements, and then translating them to real policies that can be enforced, you can really, I guess, project the needs, requirement of the organization anywhere in the world immediately with the applications and with this security platform. >> I want to get your reactions to something because that's right on point there, because when we look at the security piece and the applications you see, okay, your mind goes okay, old IT, new IT. Now with cloud, with the pandemic showing that cloud scale matters, a couple themes have come from that used to be inside the ropes concepts. Virtualization, virtual, and automation. Those two concepts are going mainstream because now automation with data and virtual, virtual work, virtual CUBE, I mean, we're doing virtual interviews. Virtualization is coming here. So building on those things. New things are happening around those two concepts. Automation is becoming much more programmable, much more real time, not just repetitive tasks. Virtual is not just doing virtual work from home. It's integrating that virtual experience into other applications. This requires a whole new organizational structure mindset. What's your thoughts on that? >> Well, one of the things is the whole concept of automation. It used to be a nice to have. Something that you could do maybe to improve your particular process, not all of the processes. And then it became the only way of reacting to reality. Humans, it was no longer possible for humans to recognize a need to change and then execute on that change within the allotted time. So that's why automation became a critical element of every business process. And then it expanded that this automated process needed to be connect and interact with that automated process and the age of the API. And then the organization grew from only relying on itself to relying on its ecosystem. Now an organization had to automate their communications, their integration, the transfer of data and information. So automation is key to business and globalization creates that requirement, or magnifies that requirement. >> One of the things we heard in the event was, obviously Citrix has the experience with virtual apps, virtual desktop, all that stuff, we know that. But as the cloud grows in, they're making a direct statement around Citrix is going to add value on top of the cloud services. Because that's the reality of the hybrid, and now soon to be multi-cloud workflows or architectures. How do you see that evolve? Is that something that's being driven by the cloud or the app experience or both? What's your take on that focus of Citrix taking their concepts and leadership to add value on top of the cloud? >> To be honest, I don't like referring to the cloud. It gives an impression that there's only a single cloud and it's the same no matter what. That couldn't be further from the truth. A typical organization will consume services from three to five cloud service providers. And these providers aren't working with each other. Their services are unique, independent. And it's up to the enterprise to determine which applications and how those applications are presented to their employees. So it's the enterprise that's responsible for the employee experience. Integrating data from one cloud service provider to another cloud service provider within this automated business process or multiple business processes. So I see Citrix is really helping the enterprise to continually monitor performance from these independent cloud service provider and to optimize that experience. You know, the things like, where is the application being consumed for? What is the latency today on the internet? What type of throughput do I need from cloud service provider A versus cloud service provider B? All of this is continually changing. So the it's the enterprise that needs to constantly monitor the performance degradation and look at outages and all of that. So I think, you know, Citrix is on point by understanding that there's no single cloud. Hybrid and multi-cloud is the cloud. It's the real world. >> You know, that's a great call. And I think it's naive for enterprises to think that, you know, Microsoft is sitting there saying hmm, let's figure out a way to really work well with AWS. And vice versa, right? I mean, and you got Google, right? They all have their own specialties. I mean, Amazon web service has got great compliance action going on there. Much back stronger than Microsoft. Microsoft's got much deeper legacy and integration to their base, and Google's doing great with developers. So they're all kind of picking their lanes, but they all exist. So the question in the enterprise is what? Do I, how do I deal with that? And again, this is an opportunity for Citrix, right? So this kind of comes down to the single pane of glass (indistinct) always talks about, or how do I manage this new environment that I need to operate in? Because I will want to take advantage of some of the Google goodness and the Azure and the AWS. But now I got my own on premises. Bare metals grow. You're seeing more bare metal deals going down now because the cloud operations has come on premises. >> Yeah, and in fact, that's hybrid IT, right? I always see that there are an enterprise, when enterprise thinks about modernizing or digitally transforming a business process, you have three options, right? You could put it in your own data center. In fact, building a data center and optimizing a data center for a particular process is the cheapest and most efficient way of executing a business process. But it's only way cheaper and efficient if that process is also stable and consistent. I'll say, but some are like that. But you can also do a managed service provider. But that is a distinctly different approach. And the third option is a cloud service provider. So this is a hybrid IT environment. It's not just cloud. It's sort of, you know, it's not smart to think everything's going to go into the cloud. >> It's distributed computing. We see (indistinct). >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, in today's paperless world, don't you still use a pen and paper and pencil? Yes. The right tool for the right job. So it's hybrid IT. Cloud is not always a perfect thing. And that's something that I believe Citrix has looked at. That interface between the enterprise and all of these choices when it comes to delivering applications, delivering the data, integrating that data, and making it secure. >> And I think that's a winning positioning to have this app experience, the currency narrative, because that ultimately is an outcome that you need to win on. And with the cloud and the cloud scale that goes on with all the multiple services now available, the company's business model is app driven, right? That's their application. So I love that, and I love that narrative. Also like this idea of app delivering security. It's kind of in the weeds a little bit, but it highlights this hybrid IT concept you were saying. So I got to ask you as the expert in the industry in this area, you know, as you have intent, what do they call it? Intent driven solution for app delivering security. Self healing, continuous optimization, et cetera, et cetera. The KPIs are changing, right? So I want to get your thoughts on that. Because now, as IT shifts to be much faster, whether it's security teams or IT teams to service that DevOps speed, shifting left everyone talks about, what's the KPIs that are changing? What is the new KPIs that the managers and people can work through as a north star or just tactically? What's your thoughts? >> Well, actually, every KPI has to relate to either the customer experience or the employee experience, and sometimes even more important, your business partner experience. That's the integration of these business processes. And one of the most important aspects that people really don't think about is the API, the application programming interface. You know, you think about software applications and you think about hardware, but how is this hardware deployed? How do you deploy and expand the number of servers based upon more usage from your customer? It's via the API. You manage the customer experience via APIs. You manage your ability to interact with your business partners through the API, their experience. You manage how efficient and effective your employees are through their experience with the IT and the applications through the API. So it's all about that, you know, that experience. Everybody yells customer experience, but it's also your employee experience and your partner experience. So that depends upon this integrated holistic approach to applications and the API security. The web app, the management of bots, and the protection of your APIs. >> Yeah, that really nailed it. I think the position is good. You know, if you can get faster app delivery, keep the security in line, and not bolt it on after the fact and reduce costs, that's a winning formula. And obviously, stitching together the service layer of app and software for all the cloud services is really key. I got to ask you though, Kevin, since you and I have riffed on theCUBE about this before, more importantly now than ever with the pandemic, look at the work edge. People working at home and what's causing the office spaces changing. The entire network architecture. I mean, I was talking to a big enterprise that said, oh yeah, we had, you know, the network for the commercial and the network for dial up now 100% provisioned for everyone at home. The radical change to the structural interface has completely changed the game. What is your view on this? I mean, give us your, where does it go? What happens next? >> So it's not what's next, it's where we are right now. And you need to be able to be, work from anywhere at any time across multiple devices. And on top of that, you have to be able to adapt to constant change in both the devices, the applications, the environment, and a business model. I did a interview with Citrix, actually, from an RV in the middle of a park, right? And it's like, we did video, we did it live. I think it was through LinkedIn live. But I mean, you need to be able to do anything from anywhere. And the enterprise needs to support that business imperative. So I think that's key. It's it's not the future, it's the today. >> I mean, the final question I have for you is, okay, is the frog in the boiling water? At what point does the CIO and the IT leaders, I mean, their minds are probably blown. I can only imagine. The conversations I've been having, it's been, you know, be agile, do it in the cloud, do it at speed, fix the security, programmable infrastructure. What? How fast can I run? This is the management challenge. How are people dealing with this when you talk to them? >> First of all, the IT professional needs to focus on the business needs, the business requirements, the business key performance indicators, not technology, and a business ROI. The CIO has to be right there in the C sweep of understanding what's needed by the business. And there also has to be an expert in being able to translate these business KPIs into IT requirements, all right? And understanding that all of this is going to be within a realm of constant change. So the CIO, the CTO, and the IT professional needs to realize their key deliverable is business performance. >> Kevin, great insight. Loved having you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate your time highlighting and recapping the Citrix Launchpad: Cloud announcements. Accelerating IT modernization can't go fast enough. People, they want to go faster. >> Faster, faster, yes. >> So great stuff. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. I really enjoyed it. >> Okay, it's theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBES coverage, of AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. We're not there in person this year because of the pandemic, but we're doing the remote. This is special coverage of the public sector, we got two great guests, Manpreet Mattu, who was the Worldwide Public Sector of Startups and Venture Capital team with AWS, and Michael Jackson who's the leader, general manager of Public Health and Venture Capital and Startups. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me. Thanks for coming up. >> Okay, it's my pleasure, thanks for having. >> I loved love welcome to theCUBE. I just want to say that Amazon never forgets the startups, that's where are they were born and bred it's been a startup. It's always day one as the expression goes, but truly even with the success, not just in the enterprise and starts within public sector, it's still a startup agility mindset, just want to call that out and say congratulations. Okay, let's get into it. Tell us about your roles and your backgrounds and why you're here. >> So, I believe so, I'm the head of AWS Public Sector, VC and Startups team, and our mission really is to help our public sector customers, adopt innovation that is built by the startups. I've been with AWS for about two and a half years. And prior to that, I was in a similar role with Booz Allen, helping our public sector customers, adopt innovation data as well. >> Michael. >> Yeah, so I am the general manager of Public Health, for on the Venture Capital and Startups team. My career here at AWS began just over four years ago. I was brought on to the state and local government team, initially building the public health practice from inception, and I also built and led our U S elections business. And I'm really excited now to transition into this global role, to lead our public health VC and startups practice, and really democratize access to innovation for our startups in the healthcare space. >> Well, great journey. You guys are converging, the VC and startup teams are coming together. A lot of macro trends certainly are tailwinds for you guys. Obviously, the pandemic is forcing, more accelerated modern applications in public sector, and we've been covering more and more success stories, of the change happening quickly. As access to capital continues to be great, and agility with the cloud, how has that impacted your teams and your approach? Can you guys share how that's changed this year? Because there's more pressure now to be digital, there's more opportunities, there's more still capital flowing, how has it impacted your roles? >> Now, so at the very high level, Amazon invests in companies because, we want those companies to be successful. And AWS itself makes a substantial investment, in agility, the startup customers success. We have things like service credits and things like, business nurturing programs that we have built over the course of the last seven, eight years. For example, over the past, you had a loan, Amazon has provided more than a billion dollars in credits, through AWS Activate program, to help startups grow and scale their businesses. And not only that a total of more than three and a half billion dollars in credit to more than 140,000 startups, over the last seven years, all through the course of the Activate program. From more so, on the healthcare side, I would want, certainly MJ to also, speak through or speak to, the challenges that the health system has faced in the COVID times, and how AWS is helping the provider, healthcare providers and the startups, really achieve success, and help the patient populations on that note. >> Michael, weighing on this new programs, you guys are launching in the impact healthcare, I see where we're seeing the frontline workers, I mean, it's everyone seeing it on TV and the newspaper, and it's impacting friends and family, give us the update. >> Absolutely, so we're here today to launch a new program. We call it the Healthcare Acceleration program. And basically, there are two halves to the program, with an undercurrent or a recurring undercurrent, I should say. Just really quickly before I touch on that though, I'd be remissed if I didn't make note of the fact that, you're right capital is still flowing, and it's a really big deal particularly, as healthcare and public health becomes such a priority, but one of the strategic imperatives of our team's role, similar to the way we democratize access to innovation for startups, we also find it really important to democratize access, to resources for founders, underrepresented founders, so, that everyone can have a level playing field, and equal access to those resources and funding, and things of that nature. Getting back to some of the healthcare priorities, in particular, I don't have to tell you about, this pandemic where on the third, and possibly the deadliest wave losing over 1000 Americans per day. And so, not only are we interested in helping our customers, our enterprise customers inject innovation from startups so that they can address clinical aspects, of the pandemic and beyond, but there are underlying rippling societal implications as well. Things that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Things like mental health, behavioral health, including substance use abuse, clinical clinician burnout, things like social determinants of health, which lead to disproportionately impacted demographics. So, there's a whole lot to unpack and I'm sure we will, but at the highest level, that's what we're looking to help, our enterprise customers address, with the help of our innovative high potential startups. >> I mean, strategic focus, just go a little bit further on how important this is, because, programs are needed, there is burnout, okay. >> Yeah. >> You have mental health, physical health, everything in between. What are you guys launching? What's new? What can people take away right now from AWS, and what startups and when, 'cause a lot of people are changing their focus. I was seeing people leave their jobs, to have to get on this new mission. They're seeing the pain, there's a lot of entrepreneurial energy, happening right now here. Go further, please. >> So, you touched right on it. So, there are two sides. I mentioned there are two halves, and an underlying current, right? So, the two halves are the supply and the demand. The supply side is what we refer to as the startups, vetted high potential, high growth startups, in the health tech space, that we can help to accelerate their go to market, right? We can pair them with mentorship, credits, we call it the 4Cs. There's capital, mapping them potentially to investors, who are interested into accelerating their growth. There's code, technical support, whether it's cloud formation templates, or technical expertise, connections such as other startups, incubators, accelerators, etcetera, and finally mapping them to customers. So, that's, what's in it for the startups. And then on the other side, the enterprise side, again, there are so many enterprises from payers to providers and others who are looking to accelerate their efforts, to digitally transform their enterprise. And so, by partnering with AWS, and the Healthcare Acceleration program, they can trust that there are AWS powered startups, that are vetted and prepared, to inject that sense of urgency, that sense of innovation. And the underlying current, the dots that are being connected is, workforce modernization or economic development, because in many cases, you're right, people are losing their jobs, people are looking at ways that they can, modernize the workforce is locally leverage local talent. And so, entrepreneurship is a great way, to stimulate the local economy, and help older workers or workers who are looking to transition into a more relevant occupations, to do just that. So, this is an all encompassing program. >> Let's get into this health accelerator from AWS. This is something that is on the table, AWS Health Accelerator, who are the stakeholders, and what are the benefits of this program? >> Well, I mean, before we actually, go to the accelerator for me, I think there's this focus on the healthcare, as an industry, as a vertical, is very important to talk about. The industry is experiencing transformation. It is experiencing disruption and the COVID-19 pandemic, has only accelerated that. If you made, it has sort of magnified some of the stressors, which were already there in the system. If you combine that with the sort of the undercurrent that MJ mentioned from a technological perspective, the delivery of healthcare globally is going digital. So, you see technology is like artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, augmented reality, IoT based variables. All of these technologies are coming together, to enable applications, such as remote diagnostics, patient monitoring, predictive prescriptive healthcare. And we truly feel that this presents a tremendous opportunity to improve the patient experience, and more importantly, the patient outcomes, using these technologies, and these newly enabled applications through those technologies. And as an example, in the U S alone, there are 22 key healthcare AI use cases, that are projected to grow by, or to approximately around $22 billion by 2025. So, in AWS, we are collaborating with the wide spectrum of healthcare providers, with public health organizations, with government agencies, all around the globe to support their effort, to cope with the rippling effects of the COVID-19. And arguably, many of them are visible to us today, but I would argue that many many are not even yet, have been begun to understand by us and by our customers. So, that is the reason why we want to put some emphasis, on healthcare from a public sector standpoint. >> Yeah, that's a great call-out Manpreet, I want to just highlight that, maybe get an additional commentary because, the old days it was just the institution, the hospital and then you're done. And then it was okay, hospital plus the caregiver, the doctors, and the workers, and now the patient. So, holistically, you're calling out the big picture, the patient care, right. Their families, their environment, the caregivers, and the institution, and now the supply chain, all of it integrated together. That's where the action is. And that's where the data comes in, that's where cloud scale can come in. Is that right? Am I getting that right there? >> Yeah, that's absolutely. I'm sorry Manpreet. >> Welcome MJ, go on. >> I was going to say you're absolutely right. In fact, we like to look at it almost like a bullseye, right? So, at the center of the bullseye, like you said, usually, the first stakeholder that comes to mind, is the provider or the coordinator of care. Outside of there, you have the payer, outside of there, you have researchers. And in any even further outside still are your regulators, your healthcare agencies at the local state, and federal levels, including military health. So, it's a rippling effect of customers on that side, as well as you asked about stakeholders on the startup side, there's also a bullseye of influence. Starting with the founder herself, the founder, and her executive team, moving out from there to the startup, as an organization outside from there, we've got incubators and accelerators that are in place, to help accelerate that growth as well. And then farther out you've got investors, VCs, and investors, and so on both sides, supply and demand we're looking to tap into, and accelerate the growth, and make connections between the two. >> Yeah, (indistinct) but when I, in back in real life, when we used to go to games, you walk into the stadium, you buy your ticket with your phone, you go to your seat, concessions guys, deliver things there for you, the fan experience, the players are there. I mean, why can't we have that in healthcare? I was just everything is happening, right. Go for good, yeah. And I think that's the Nirvana, hopefully soon. >> We're working on it. >> Good stuff. I know, I just love the vision, I think is so relevant and super important. Now, let's get into this health accelerator. What's this all about? Let's get into that. >> So, the health accelerator will be, a multi-week on-demand program. Where we're going to map high potential vetted startups, to a number of resources, right. I mentioned before that there will be mentorship, there will be technical experts who will be able to, take these startups who have established some presence, but we want to accelerate their ability to go deeper specifically into public health, throughout that ecosystem that I just described, right? Starting with providers and coordinators, payers, researchers, regulators. We want to give them a way to go deep into this, heavily regulated industry, so that they can not only have access to the innovation that many startups would not otherwise, like Manpreet mentioned machine learning AI, but they also have access to the resources, to ensure their success. >> What kind of problems are you guys trying to solve with this? I mean, is there a specific vetting process, is there a criteria? Is there a bar to all over share some specifics? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, for the past few years, a lot of the major change challenges, for our public health customers have been the same, but they require a new approach. And I like to call our approach the HIGH FIVE. So, some of those challenges that have been traditionally, lingering for the past few years, equal social determinants of health. Social determinants, when we talk about that, we not only refer to the nonclinical contributors to a person's overall wellness. So, you think about issues like food deserts or recidivism homelessness, all of that transportation to access to care, right, all of that contributes. But then there's also disparities and health outcomes. When you think about socioeconomic differences, rural health, ethnic and racial minorities, so, that all factors into social determinants of health. Then there's also aging. Now, these are the strategic pillars that we like to focus on, or that we are focusing on. When I mentioned aging every day in the U S, 10,000 people celebrate their 65th birthday. Many of those individuals are suffering from comorbidities, from hypertension, diabetes, cancer, and now the lingering impact of COVID-19. And so, as these aging individuals continue to live longer, the goal is to improve the quality of their life as well. And so, many of them look to technology to age independently at home, etcetera. So, that's our second strategic pillar. The third, is mental and behavioral health. So, when I talk about mental health, I mean, everything from mild depression, all the way through suicide prevention, and especially these days with COVID-19, we see a lot of clinicians suffering from burnout. And so, it's important, that we take care of the frontline workers, those healthcare providers, and even outside of COVID-19, you think about the ways that the patient population, has continued to expand, and the growth within the provider market has not, or the pool of providers has not nearly expanded at the same rate. We've got people living longer, we've got more people than ever insured. And so, we need to leverage technology to help a stagnant, number of providers to treat a growing pool of patients, without sacrificing the quality of care. And then finally, we've got environmental health. From air quality to water purity. It's important to understand the correlation between, the environment and the health care of our population. So, those are the pillars. I know I mentioned the HIGH FIVE, the fifth is not specific to healthcare. I touched on it a little bit earlier, but the fifth is, it is democratizing access to innovation, to resources, specifically for founders from underrepresented communities. >> And that's great insight, Michael great, great Schaeffer pointed that out. Manpreet take us on the final word here. Venture Capital, Startups, AWS, what's the current state share with us, the current worldview from your perspective. >> Oh, so, bringing home this point that MJ mentioned, the strategic plan of focus areas. And if you, look at all those strategic areas there's, you can really sort of put those into two buckets. One is the patient side of the bucket, and then there's the provider side of the bucket, or the caretaker side of the bucket. And if the patient side, what we want to do is work with startups that are, really working across a broad spectrum of use cases, but to solve those two key challenges of the, one on the patient's side and other on the provider side. Then the end goal of providing patient experience, and patient outcomes. For the patient side, it's the patient experience, patient engagement, patient outcomes. So, the startups looking on those sides, on those use cases of criteria. And then we have the provider side where, we want to ensure that the providers have the right set of technologies, the right set of solutions, right set of innovation, to help them where healthcare operations. You have all seen in COVID times, how the provider systems are getting overwhelmed. And that's where the healthcare operations comes into play. Clinical decision support. Now, many patients cannot get to the hospitals. So, how do we provide through our startup partners for startup customers, those solutions where remote diagnostics, remote imaging or remote health delivery could be provided. Things like predictive and prescriptive health solutions. How can we work with our startups to provide, those sort of solutions to the providers, to again, at the end, the better the outcome of the patients, right? So, that's what we were looking at. And that's what this program is all about. Working with public sector provider side of the house and the customers understanding, and helping them understand the need as well, and then bringing the right set of startup solutions, and help solve those challenges that they are facing, and the patients are facing as well. MJ, I'm sure you want to close it out, with some thoughts too. >> Okay. >> Absolutely, I would just close it with this, our goal, like Manpreet said, is to match the high potential startups, with the, the enterprises who are desiring those solutions, and success for us, we'll have three traits. It will be valuable, meaning that there will be a true alignment between what our startups offer and what the market needs. It will be measurable, so that we can quantify the improvement and outcomes. And finally, it will be sustainable. So, beyond COVID-19 beyond the opioid crisis, beyond any situation or condition, we look to bring solutions to market through our startups, that are going to truly sustain a transformative approach to modernizing public health enterprises. >> Great job again, and important work and DevOps, impacting healthcare in all kinds of ways. And it's super important work. I'm glad you guys are doing it, and it's going to develop out beautifully, and if I can give you a high five, Michael, I'll give you a high five off in-person, but remotely, >> Virtual. >> Get virtual high five great program. We're going to spread the word, good work. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for doing it, I appreciate it. >> Thank you very much for your time. >> Okay, it's theCUBE coverage virtual, we are theCUBE virtual bringing all the coverage, super important work being done in public sector, cloud enabling it, great people important, and of course, happening at re:Invent. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back everybody jeff frick here with the cube coming to you from our palo alto studios with a cube conversation with a great influencer we haven't had him on for a while last had him on uh in may i think of 2019 mid 2019. we're excited to welcome back to the program he's kevin l jackson he is the ceo of gc globalnet kevin great to see you today hey how you doing jeff thanks for having me it's uh it's been a while but i really enjoyed it yeah i really enjoy being on thecube well thank you for uh for coming back so we've got you on to talk about citrix we had you last on we had you on a citrix synergy this year obviously covet hit all the all the events have gone virtual and digital and citrix made an interesting move they decided to kind of break their thing into three buckets kind of around the main topics that people are interested in in their world and that's cloud so they had a citrix cloud summit they had a citrix workplace summit and now they just had their last one of the three which is the citrix security summit uh just wrapped up so before we jump into that i just want to get your take how are you doing how you getting through the kind of covid madness from you know the light switch moment that we experienced in march april 2. you know now we're like seven eight months into this and it's not going to end anytime soon well you know it's it was kind of different for me because um i've been working from home and remotely since i guess 2014 being a consultant and with all my different clients i was doing a lot more traveling um but with respect to doing meetings and being on collaborative systems all day long it's sort of like uh old hat and i say welcome to my world but i find that you know society is really changing the things that you thought were necessary in business you know being physically at meetings and shaking hands that's all like you know although we don't do that anymore yeah i used to joke right when we started this year that we finally got to 2020 the year that we know everything right with the benefit of hindsight but it turned out to be the year that we actually find out that we don't know anything and everything that we thought we knew in fact is not necessarily what we thought and um we got thrown into this we got thrown into this thing and you know thankfully for you and for me we're in you know we're in the tech space we can we can go to digital we're not in the hotel business or the hospitality business or you know so many businesses that are still suffering uh greatly but we were able to make the move in i.t and and citrix is a big piece of that in terms of enabling people to support remote work they've always been in remote work but this really changed the game a lot and i think as you said before we turned on the cameras accelerated you know this digital transformation way faster than anybody planned on oh oh yeah absolutely and another one of the areas that was particularly um accelerated they sort of put the rockets on is security which i'm really happy about because of the rapid increase in the number of remote workers i mean historically companies had most of their workforce in their own buildings on on their own property and there was a small percentage that would remote work remotely right but it's completely flipped now and it flipped within a period of a week or a week and a half and many of these companies were really scrambling to make you know their entire workforce be able to communicate collaborate and just get access to information uh remotely right right well david talked about it in the security keynote you know that you know as you said when this light switch moment hit in mid-march you had to get everybody uh secure and take care of your people and get them set up but you know he talked a little bit about you know maybe there were some shortcuts taken um and now that we've been into this thing in a prolonged duration and again it's going to be going on for a while longer uh that there's really an opportunity to to make sure that you put all the proper uh systems in place and make sure that you're protecting people you're protecting the assets and you're protecting you know the jewels of the company which today are data right and data in all the systems that people are working with every single day yeah yeah absolutely they had to rapidly rethink all of the work models and this uh accelerated digital transformation and the adoption of cloud and it was just this this huge demand for remote work but it was also important to uh keep to think about the user experience the employee experience i mean they were learning new things learning new technologies trying to figure out how to how to do new things and that at the beginning of this uh trend this transition people were thinking that hey you know after a few months we'll be okay but now and it's starting to sink in that this stuff is here to stay so you have to understand that work is not a place and i think actually david said that right it's really you have to look at how the worker is delivering and contributing to the mission of the organization to the business model and you have to be able to measure the workers level of output and their accomplishment and be able to do this remotely so back to office is is not going to happen in reality so the employee experience through this digital environment this digital work space it's critical yeah i think one of the quotes he had whether i think was either this one or one of the prior ones is like back to work is not back to normal right we're not going to go back to the way that it was before but it's interesting you touched on employee experience and that's a big piece of the conversation right how do we measure output versus you know just time punching the clock how do we give people that that experience that they've come to expect with the way they interact in technology in their personal lives but there's an interesting you know kind of conflict and i think you've talked about it before between employee experience and security because those two kind of inherently are going to be always in conflict because the employee's going to want more access to more things easier to use and yet you've got to keep security baked in throughout the stack whether it's access to the systems whether it's the individual and and so there's always this built-in kind of tension between those two objectives well the tension is because of history security has always been sort of a a second thought an afterthought uh you know you said due to work oh security we'll catch up to it when we need to but now because of the importance of data and the inherently global connectivity that we have the the need for security has is paramount so in order to attract that in order to address that the existing infrastructures had this where we just bolted security on to the existing infrastructures uh this is when they when the data centers and we said well as long as it's in our data center we can control it but then we with this covet thing we'll just burst out of any data center we have to rely on cloud so this this concept of just bolting on security just doesn't work because you no longer own or control the security right so you have to look at the entire platform and have a holistic security approach and it has to go from being infrastructure-centric to data centric because that's the only way you're going to provide security to your data to those remote employees right right and there's a very significant shift we hear all the time we've got rsa uh all the time to talk about security and that's this concept of zero trust and and the idea that rather than as you said kind of the old school you put a a wall and a moat around the things that you're trying to protect right you kind of start from the perspective of i don't trust anybody i don't trust where they're coming from i don't trust their device i don't trust that they have access to those applications and i don't trust that they have access to that data and then you basically enable that on a kind of a need to know basis across all those different factors at kind of the least the least amount that they need to get their job done it's a really different kind of approach to thinking about security right and but it's a standardized approach i mean before present time you would customize security to the individual or 2d organization or component of the organization because you know you knew where they were and you would you would say well they won't accept this so we'll do that so everything was sort of piecemeal now that work is not a location you have to be much more standardized much more focused and being able to track and secure that data requires things like digital rights management and and secure browsers and some of the work that citrix has done with google has really been amazing they they looked at it from a different point of view they said okay where people are always working through the cloud in different locations from from anywhere but they all work through their browser so you know we could and i think this was something that the vice president at google said uh sunil potty i believe uh vice president of google cloud they said well we can capitalize on that interface without affecting the experience and he was talking about chrome so so citrix and and google have worked together to drive sort of an agent-less experience to order to enhance security so instead of making everything location specific or organizational specific they set a standard and they support this intent-driven security model yeah it's interesting sunil's a really sharp guy we've had him on thecube a ton of times uh over the years but there's another really interesting take on security and i want to get your your feedback on it and that's kind of this coopetation right and silicon valley is very famous for you know coopetation you might be competing tooth and nail with the company across the street at the same time you got an opportunity to partner you might share apis you know it's a really interesting thing and one of the the items that came out of the citrix show was this new thing called the workspace security alliance because what's interesting in security that even if we're competitors if you're suddenly getting a new type of threat where you're getting a new type of attack and there's a new you know kind of profile actually the industry likes to share that information to help other people in the security business as kind of you know us versus the bad guys even if we're you know competing for purchase orders we're competing you know kind of face-to-face so they announced this security alliance which is pretty interesting to basically bring in partners to support uh coopetition around the zero trust framework uh yeah absolutely this is happening across just about every industry though you're going away from uh point-to-point relationships to where you're operating and working within an ecosystem and in security just this week it's been highlighted by the uh the trick trick bot um activity this uh persistent uh malware that i guess this week is attacking um health care uh facilities the actual the u.s department of homeland security put out an alert now and this is a threat to the entire ecosystem so everyone has to work together to protect everyone's data and that improves that that is the way forward and that's really the only way to be successful so uh we have to go from this point-to-point mindset to understanding that we're all in the same boat together and in this uh alliance the workspace security alliance is an indication that citrix gets it right everyone has workers everyone's workers are remote okay and everyone has to protect their own data so why don't we work together to do that yeah that's great that's interesting i had not heard of that alert but what we are hearing a lot of um in in a lot of the interviews that we're doing is kind of a resurfacing of kind of old techniques uh that the bad guys are using to to try to get remote workers because they're not necessarily surrounded with as much security or have as much baked in in their home setup as they have in the office and apparently you know ransomware is really on the rise and the sophistication of the ransom where folks is very high and that they try to go after your backup and all in you know your replication stuff before they actually hit you up for the uh for the want for the money so it's it's there's absolutely that's right yeah go ahead i'm sorry i was just saying that's indicative of the shift that most of your workers are no longer in your facilities than now and at home where companies never really put a lot of investment into protecting that channel that data channel they didn't think they needed to right right one of the other interesting things that came up uh at the citrix event was the use of uh artificial intelligence and machine learning to basically have a dynamic environment where you're adjusting you know kind of the access levels based on the behavior of the individual so what apps are they accessing what you know are they moving stuff around are they downloading stuff and to actually kind of keep a monitor if you will to look for anomalies and behavior so even if someone is trusted to do a particular type of thing if suddenly they're you know kind of out of band for a while then you know you can flag alerts to say hey what's going on is that this person did their job change you know why are they doing things that they don't normally do maybe there's a reason maybe there isn't a reason maybe it's not them so you know i think there's so many great applications for applied machine learning and artificial intelligence and these are the types of applications where you're going to see the huge benefits come from this type of technology oh yeah absolutely i mean the citrix analytics for security is really a um security service right um that monitors the activities of of people on the internet and it this machine learning gives you or gives the service this insight no one company can monitor the entire internet and you can go anywhere on the internet so bob working together leveraging this external service you can actually have automated remediation of your users you can put this specific user security risk score so um companies and organizations can be assured that they are within their risk tolerance right right and of course the other thing you've been in the business for a while that we're seeing that we're just kind of on the cusp of right is 5g and iot so a lot more connected devices a lot more data a lot more data moving at machine speed which is really what 5g is all about it's not necessarily for having a better phone call right so we're just going to see you know kind of again this this growth in terms of attack surfaces this growth in terms of the quantity of data and the growth in terms of the the the rate of change that that data is coming in and and the scale and the speed with the old uh you know velocity and and variety and volume uh the old big data memes so again the other thing go ahead the other thing it's not just data when you have 5g the virtual machines themselves are going to be traveling over this network so it's a whole new paradigm yeah yeah so the uh once again to have you know kind of a platform approach to make sure you're applying intelligence to keep an eye on all these things from zero trust uh uh kind of baseline position right pretty damn important yeah absolutely with with edge computing the internet of things this whole infrastructure based data centric approach where you can focus on how the individual is interacting with the network is important and and uh another real important component of that is the um software-defined wide area network because people work from everywhere and you have to monitor what they're doing right right yeah it's really worked from anywhere not necessarily work from home anymore i just want to you know again you've been doing this for a while get your feedback on on the fact that this is so much of a human problem and so much of a human opportunity versus just pure technology i think it's really easy to kind of get wrapped up in the technology but i think you said before digital transformation is a cultural issue it's not a technology issue and getting people to change the way they work and to change the way they work with each other and to change what they're measuring um as you said kobe kind of accelerated that whole thing but this has always been more of a cultural challenge in a technology challenge yeah the technology in a relative sense of you is kind of easy right but it's the expectations of humans is what they're used to is what they have been told in the past is the right thing no longer is right so you have to teach you have to learn you have to accept change and not just change but rapid change and accelerated change and people just don't like change they're uncomfortable in change so another aspect of this culture is learning to be adaptable and to accept change because it's going to come whether you want it or not faster than you think as well for sure you're right well that's great so kevin i'll give i give you the final word as as you think about how things have changed and again i think i think the significant thing is that we went from you know kind of this light switch moment where it was you know emergency and and quick get everything squared away but now we're in this we're in kind of this new normal it's going to be going for a while we'll get back to some some version of a hybrid uh solution at some point and you and i will be seeing each other at trade shows at some point in time in the in the future but it's not going to go back the way that it was and people can't wait and hope that it goes back the way that it was and really need to get behind this kind of hybrid if you will work environment and helping people you know be more productive with the tools they need it always gets back to giving the right people the right information at the right time to do what they need to do so just kind of get your perspective as we you know kind of get to the end of 2020 we're going to turn the page here rapidly on 2021 and we're going to start 2021 in kind of the same place we are today well to be honest we've talked about a lot of these things but the answer to all of them is agility agility agility is the key to success this is like not locking into a single cloud you're going to have multiple clouds not locking into a single application you have multiple applications not assuming that you're always going to be working from home or working through a certain browser you have to be agile to adapt to rapid change and the organizations that recognize that and uh teach their workers teach their entire ecosystem to operate together in a rapidly changing world with agility will be successful that's a great that's a great way to leave it i saw beth comstack the former vice chair at ge give a keynote one time and one of her great lines was get comfortable with being uncomfortable and i think you nailed it right this is about agility it's about change it's we've seen it in devops where you embrace change you don't try to avoid it you know you take that really at the top level and try to architect to be successful in that environment as opposed to sticking your head in the sand and praying it doesn't absolutely all right well kevin so great to catch up i'm i'm sorry it's been as long as it's been but hopefully it'll be uh shorter uh before the next time we get to see each other yes fine thank you very much i really enjoyed it absolutely all right he's kevin l jackson i'm jeff frick you're watching thecube from our palo alto studios keep conversation we'll see you next time you

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover. Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Everybody welcome back to the Cube's continuous coverage of Discover 2020. That virtual experience. The Cube has been been virtualized really excited to have Marissa Freeman here. She's the chief brand officer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And, of course, he joined by Jim Jackson. Who's the CMO of HP? Guys, Great to see you Wish we were face to face. But thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >>Great to be here. Hope that you and your family and your friends are safe and well, >>and we're back at you both. Jim, let me start with you. So, uh, this kind of got dumped on you with this pandemic. Different mindset. You have to do a bit flip to goto virtual you talk about some of the things that you focused in on some of the things you want to keep. And some of the things you knew you couldn't. And you had to do things differently. >>Yeah, You know, we pretty much had to rethink everything about this event platforms, how we thought about messaging, how we thought about content. Um audience acquisition demos, really everything. And for us, it really all boiled down to having a vision. And our vision was to bring the Discover experience, all that energy, the excitement that you get the in person event. We wanted to bring that to all of our customers and our partners and our team members around the world. So for us, it wasn't about virtualized discover. It was about bringing the Discover experience to a 12 inch screen. In many cases for our customers and our partners and our team members, I think another thing that was really eye opening for us. Waas thinking of opening up the aperture and thinking, Hey, we can now take this and drive. This is the true global events and we can reach people all over the world, reach customers and partners that can't come to discover because they can't physically come to the event. That was a couple of things that really we had to put a lot of thought into, and it was really exciting for us. I think one other thing is now customers, and how we think about their experience at the event became very, very important for us because you know, at an in person event, it's three days, and we can you know, there's a lot of things people can do, but you have three days of content, and then people move on for us. Now. Our customers might go through three weeks or three months, and we really needed to think about that experience in a very simple, seamless, easy way for them so that they could to consume the content digitally in a way that made the most sense for them. So a lot of new thinking for us. But we're really excited about the opportunities that virtual brings in that digital brings >>now immerse. So I gotta ask you so No, no meter boards at least know for a physical meter boards, you know, How did you think about continuing that branding in a virtual event? >>Well, it's, uh, it's really a beautiful experience when you look at the the intro of the platform that we're on. It's beautifully branded all the way throughout. The branding is really coming through, though, in the content, um, and in the people, So we always say, Jim and I always say every year, Gosh, if we could just have every estimate on every prospect come to discover they would see our brand come to life they would feel are our purpose. They would understand, just with a new and different energized and fully charged a company, we are they would get to meet Antonio and Security. And Liz and Jennifer Income are honored and Jim and feel for themselves, uh, the power of the company. And now everyone can So the brand really is coming to life through the people. I appreciate that you love the the beautiful graphics, and we work really hard. Um, I'm all of that stuff, Sure, but the real branding is in the content itself. So >>now, Jim asses. Well, you were kind of lucky in the sense that, you know, this show wasn't in March or April. You had some time. So to see what others were doing. And you saw early on when this thing first hit, there were some the missteps there, There's there, still are even. But So what do you What do you tell people that is really unique about the Discover virtual experience? >>Yeah, I think a couple things and you're right. We did have a little more runway, and that was to our advantage. But we feel like we've taken full advantage of it. I think the first is coming back to that global experience that I talked about. So we're delivering this on 10 different with translating into 10 different languages, and that makes it easy for people to consume our key content around the world. We're truly delivering our content on time zones that are very appropriate, or our customers and our partners again, all around the world, in different Geos, we're bringing in our geo MVS where they are now having geo lounges, um, specific addresses and other things locally that really enables us to have that local experience. But derive it is making it part of a global event. I think another thing, Dave and you've been Teoh Discover. But you've seen that amazing Discover Expo Hall that we have out there with, you know, literally thousands of people and lots of demos. We had to figure out How do we bring that to a a ah, digital or a virtual experience? And I think the teams have done just an amazing job here. So what we did is we have 61 demos, and this is part of really 150 sessions. But if you just think of demos, we're going to deliver these live over 1717 100 times the first week. That's really, really powerful. This is >>live, meaning >>somebody from HP, a subject matter expert, talking to our customers, answering questions in real time. So that's unique. I think another thing that we're doing is we're not stopping after the first week. The first week is going to be extremely powerful and we can't wait for it. And but, you know, we're gonna extend, if you will, the value we're gonna double click and follow on Wave focused on SMB. Focus on software and containers for more of a developer, audience, Cloud services and other things like that, as well as data and storage. And then finally, I'll say, You know, we're really excited about the great speakers that we have Marissa >>talks >>about. You know, Antonio Qwerty, Irv etcetera. But we've got some great outside speakers as well. Lewis Hamilton from Mercedes Formula 16 time Formula One champion Simone Biles, uh, who's Olympian and world champion, 25 medals. We've got Steve Kerr and they're going to be part of a panel talking about performing under pressure, and we're all doing that. But it's gonna be again a great story we've got, um, John Chambers is going to be joining Antonio and talking about what great companies do during a crisis and how they prepare to come out of this kind of a situation to deliver better solutions to their customers. Soledad O Brien, who is moderating, are women leaders in I t session, and this is one of our most powerful sessions. In fact, Marissa is part of that as well. So we're really excited about this, the amount of things that we were able to bring together. And of course, we also have our CEO Summit and our Global Partner Summit happening at the same time. So we've got a lot of things that we've been able to coordinate all of this and really think about the experience from a digital in a virtual expect perspective to make it great for our customers and our partners and our attendees. A >>lot of rich content layers. Yeah. So what if you could talk about that here here to help Sort of the cultural aspects of that. What it means to your customers, your clients, your employees and your just broader community. >>Well, you know, Dave one when covert first hit the United States, we We had a lot of social media out there, a lot of digital media out there. And even before it came to the United States, when Italy and China were really suffering, we gathered as a team and audited every piece of content that we had pulled all back in. I met daily Jim and I and Jennifer temples. Teams met daily to talk about what is our tone of voice? What are we saying? How are we helping our customers get through? This time we knew how difficult it was for us with business continuity, remote workforce, we needed to help our customers and let them know that we were at the ready right now to help. So we chose to speak through the voices of our leaders. Antonio did several blocks and videos, and we rallied and redid the website completely to be all about over response and how we had many solutions for our cost. Most implement immediately from $2 billion financing Teoh setting up remote workforces, too, doing WiFi in parking lots and turning ships into hospitals. It ran the gamut, Um, and so it was really important to us that we conveyed a message of here to help. Ultimately, we ended up doing a television commercial. Antonio's voice. It was a personal letter from Antonio to his fellows, business leaders and engineers and said, Look, we know what you're going through. We're going through it ourselves. We're here to help. Here's how and it's been really motivating and successful and joy and driving people to find out more about what HP could do to help. So >>I would just add >>to what >>Murtha said. She outlined it really well. But we have some great customer examples and great customer stories as well. They're very emotional talking about how customers really needed our help and our combination of technology. People really came together to enable them to get their businesses up and running, or to address a pain point or problem for their audiences. The first point you know, there's the concept of here to help with the recovery and then here to help with the transformation as well as they look to the future. >>So how are you guys thinking about just sort of growth marketing strategies, branding strategies not only for HP but in the spirit of helping customers in this post isolation economy. Merson. Maybe you could start start us off. >>Well, we we've been talking about how this crisis has brought the future forward, nor our doorsteps. So where our customers may have been on a digital transformation path and they were accelerating it. Now there's there's an impetus to do it right now. So whether you're in recovery, um, or whether you're one of the customers for whom this crisis created a surge of demand and you needed to scale way up, these are the moments of transformation that our company is. Is there to help you with Jim? Do you want to build on that? >>Now? I think you hit the highlights there, Marissa, you know, again for us, I think we wanted to just be authentic and true to who we are as a company. And, you know, our purpose is to advance the way people live and work. And I think we live that during this time and will continue to live that as we go forward. It it's really core to who we are. And what we saw is that many of our customers really valued the fact that when they needed us the most, we were there for them and we were there for them all around the world. And, um, you know, and our goal is to continue to do that and continue to delight them and to be the best transformation partner for the future. >>I mean, culturally, we obviously re observe all this stuff, but culturally, you kind of be kind of had a heads down approach to all of this. I mean, there was there was not a hint of ambulance chasing in what you got. How you guys approach this. So I mean, I think I think culturally that here to help message it seemed like a very strong roots in citizenship. Um, you know, And then, of course, with social uprising, respect for individuals that seemed to shine through. I don't know. I know versus deliberate or that's just again cultural. Maybe >>it's it's all of the above. You can't change who you are and we need at Hewlett Packard Enterprise are people who care about other people our purpose. As Jim said, Our purpose is to advance the way people live in or every one of us every day gets up and goes to work or goes to work at home at HP to do just that. That is who we are. And so it would be an authentic for I think, true to this crisis in any other way. >>I think I wanna make an observation and see if you guys to respond. So we always talk about technology disruptions. Mercy you mentioned about, you know, the future was put forward. I'm sure you've seen the wrecking ball. You know, the folks in the building, the executives very complacent. A digital transformation not in my day. And in the 19 wrecking bald covert 19 survey, you probably saw that Who's who's leading your digital transformation CEO CTO or Covert 19. But it's really now. I mean, if you're not digital, you're not doing business. So but my observation is that it seems like despite all this technology that global disruptions are going to probably have a bigger impact in this coming decade, whether it's pandemics of social upheaval, of natural disasters, etcetera. But technology can play a huge role in supporting us through those things. Jim, I wonder if you have any thoughts on that comment. >>I mean, I think it's it's a great question, you know, if you think about it, What what happened with the macro economy Cove? It It's been a catalyst for, I think, everybody to understand that they needed to really accelerate their digital transformation. And, more importantly, they need a partner who can help them on that journey as well. I mean, if you just look at what we're talking about here >>with >>this event, right, most of h p e. And, um, you know, our >>competitors to >>cancel their virtual events >>are canceled their physical >>events rather, and they're moving now to a digital event in any way. This is going to be the new normal for us, right? So I think as we go >>forward, we're gonna >>see this only continue to accelerate. And for us, you know, our edge to cloud platform as a service strategy plays really well to helping customers accelerate that digital transformation. And, you know, it just kind of comes back to what Marissa said. You know, here to help is very very HP in terms of it's authentic and it's here. We want to be here to help our customers in their biggest hour of need. And we're doing everything we can and will continue to do that for the future as well. >>Versus, you know, having done many, many discovers we've noticed over the last several years you guys made a much bigger emphasis on the sort of post discover which a lot of organizations don't have a big physical event, and it's sort of on to the next thing. And how do you see the post from a branding standpoint? Messaging, etcetera. How do you see taking advantage of that from a virtual standpoint? And what have you learned? >>Well, we've been on our own digital transformation journey, and, you know, through Jim's leadership, we have built a pretty serious digital engine, which allows us to have a personal relationship with the customer, meet them where they are on their terms. For example, with this platform, it's even using your now because we we actually will know what content would see what sessions, what demos someone interested in. Maybe they put it, you know, on their schedule, and then didn't get to do it. So we'll go back to them later and say, Hey, we saw that you wanted to do this. It's still here. Why don't you come and have a look and then watch to that We do sort of the Netflix engine, the been newsworthy playlist of If you like that, you like this. And if you like this, you like that and we bring them through the breadcrumbs all the way through. And it's a self directed journey, but we're there to help. And that is really the true power of digital is to have that interaction, that conversation with the customer and where they want to be and with what they want to learn and read about. We'll see. >>Yeah, And everything, of course, is instrumented gym. We'll give you the last word and you were involved, as was Marissa in sort of the new HP. The new branding and the whole purpose of that was really to get Hewlett Packard enterprise focus and really back to sort of the roots of innovation. And I wonder if you could comment on from a strategy standpoint, innovation and from a competitive standpoint, you know where you're at over the last several years, we've obviously transformed as a company and where you see your competitive posture going forward. >>Yeah, you know, for us, um, we're so excited about this event because this is a great opportunity for us to showcase progress against our edge to cloud platform as a service strategy, and we roll this out last year. It's differentiated. It's unique in the marketplace. It demonstrates the transformation happening across as a service and software at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. So we are a company in transition, aligned to what we feel, our companies, our customers, biggest pain points. And when you look at some of the acquisitions that we've made some of the organic investments that we've done, we're just very well positioned to deliver against, you know, some very unique pain points that our customers have. Plus, I think another thing is, at the end of the day, really, what our customers are saying is, help me take all this data and translate that data into insight and that insight into action. You're going to hear us talk about the age of insight and how we're really again unifying across edge the cloud to deliver that for our customers. Stone. We're excited for this event because you're going to hear a significant industry revealed, focused around cloud services around software and really a lot of the things that we've been talking about. And we're going to show a lot of progress as we continue on that journey. And then, you know, Murtha mentioned digital. I'm really excited about digital because that enables us to understand and learn and help our customers and deliver a better experience for them. And then finally, you know, huge opportunity for us. Two. Take this message out globally, you know? Ah, great opportunity for people all around the world who maybe haven't heard from HP for a while to see our message, to feel the new energy to see who we are to see. Uh, you know that we're doing some very interesting things that we can help them. So we're excited. There's a lot of energy right now inside the company, and, uh, we're ready to kick it off and get rolling here. >>Well, it's quite amazing. I mean, we started off 2020 with the gut punch, but the reality is, is that 20 twenties? A lot different than 20 pens. If it weren't for technology and companies like HP here to help center, you know, we would not be in such such good shape and good in quotes. But think about it. The technology is really helping his power through this. So Jim Morrison, Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Thank you, HB. Everything you're doing for customers in the community. Really? Thank >>you for having us. Thank you for having me. Good to see you. >>Great to see you guys to and keep it right there. Everybody, this is Dave Volante for the Cube. Our continuous coverage of hpe discover virtual experience in 2020. We're right back right after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside at Dave Vellante. We are joined by Gavin Jackson. He is the senior vice president and managing director EMEA at UI path. Thanks so much for coming on the phone. You are brand spanking new to the company. You were at AWS for four years, joined UI path in September. I want to start this conversation by having you talk a little bit about what, what appealed to you about UI path and what do you want to make the leap after four years at AWS? >>Yeah, so I've, I had the privilege to be of really having a really close proximity to enterprise customers and getting the opportunity to listen to what they really wanted when they were talking about their digital transformation journeys. And as it turns out, the sort of cloud first and the automation first eras, if you will, our operating models are to two sides of the same coin. If you think about what the cloud proposition has been over the last number of years, it's really been about sort of reducing or eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting so that builders can build. And then that turned into an operating model principle and then became sort of cloud first as the same thing for the automation world. Uh, you know, we are reducing and eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting of, of, of, of, of product, um, uh, uh, business processes and tasks and everything else, whether they're complex tasks or simple tasks, removing that so that builders can build and business people can innovate and uh, giving them the freedom to do what they need to do as business owners. >>No, I'm going to keep pushing on this. There's similarities and differences because we're seems to break down is where RPA is focusing on the citizen developer or the, the end user. I'm afraid of AWS. I won't go near it. I see that console. I go, Oh, call my techies. Hey, you know, AWS is, you know, you gotta be pretty technical to actually leverage it. At the same time I'm thinking, well maybe not. Maybe my builders are building things that I can touch, but help us square that circle. >>So I think your, the world is trending towards as much automation as possible. So if it can be automated or if you can reduce the, the, uh, the, the, the burden to get to innovation. I think, you know, technology is moving in that way. Even in coding. I think the trends we're seeing, whether it's AWS or anyone else, is low to no code. And so we, we occupy a world within the RPA space or the intelligent automation space where we're providing tools for people that don't need a requirement or, or a skillset to code. And they can still manufacture, if you will, their own automations. And particularly with a release that we have, we're just today, which is studio X. It really kind of reduces the friction from a business user who has zero understanding of how to code to build their own automations, whether it's kind of recording a process or just dragging and dropping different components into a process. Uh, even like even I could do that. And that's saying something. I can tell you >>your alter ego is Tony stark. Yes, exactly. Yeah. So just in terms of this idea of democratizing the, the automation, the building, you said even just someone who is pretty decent at excels. Yes, very much so. What will this mean? I mean, what, what, what does, what does that bode for the future of how work gets done? Because we, that is at the core of what you're doing is scientifically understanding how and where work gets done. Where are the bottlenecks, where are the challenges and how can RPA fix this? >>So I think ultimately like a lot of technologies, it's really about the exponential curve of productivity and whether you're looking at a national level or global level or company level, a human level at every level, productivity have declined really over the last number of years and technology hasn't done a great job to improve that. And you can say that some technologies, I've done a good job, again, I'd use AWS as a good job in terms of the proliferation or the prolific. You can get more code out and more, more progress there, but overall productivity has declined. So our sort of view of the world is if you can democratize automation, if you can use a Oh, add a digital workforce to your, to your, to your teams, then you'll have an exponential curve of productivity, which are human level is important at a company level is important and national level is important and probably at global level is important, right? >>We're at this tipping point for technology really unlocking a lot of value. One of the things that your former boss, Jeff Bezos said was bet on dreamy businesses that have unlimited upside. These, these streaming businesses, customers love them. They grow to very large sizes. They have strong returns on capital and they can endure for decades. I wonder if you could put UI path in that context of a dreamy business. >>What does he know? Right. I mean, no is absolutely right. I mean, so, um, and this is one of the reasons I was attracted by the way to do UI path because I think, I think that the robust themselves, if you can just kind of look at the subcategory of the robot. Um, I think it's on a similar curve to how Gordon Moore was talking about the Intel microprocessor in 1965 and the exponential curve of progress. I think we on that similar curve. So when I sort of project five years from now, I just think that the amount that robots will be able to do, the cognitive kind of capabilities that we'll be able to do are just phenomenal. So, um, and customers, customers give us feedback all the time about to, to things they love and they value what we do. The value is important because it's very empirical for the first time they can actually deploy a technology and see almost an immediate return on that technology. >>Whether it's a point technology solving one process or a group of processes, they can see an immediate empirical return. The other thing that I like to measure and I quite like is that they value it. Sorry. They, they, they love, they love and value it. So they love it. Meaning it actually induces an emotion. So when you, when you watch the robots in action and they watch something that has been holding your team back or that has been stifling productivity or whatever it is, people get giddy about it. It's quite fascinating to see, comment about Gordon Moore and tie that to digital transformation. When I think of digital transformation, I think of data like what's the difference in a business in a digital business? That's how they use data. They put data at the core and for years we marched to the cadence of Moore's law and that's changed. >>It's not what the innovation engine is today. It's machine intelligence, it's data and it's cloud for scale. Where do you guys fit? I mean obviously AI is a piece of that, but, but maybe you could add some color to where RPA fits in that equation. So I think that's an important point because there's a lot of miscommunication. I think about really what it means when you talk about digital transformation and what it means to be digitally transformed and really digitally transformed. You're really talking about a category of customers which are large more institutional enterprises and governments because they have something to transform. What they're transforming into is more of a digital native sort of set of attributes, more in search and mindsets. And these companies are, to your point, they're very data hungry. They harvest as much data as they can from, from value, from data. >>They're very customer centric. They focus on the customer experience, they use other people's resources. Know the cloud being one great example of that and the missing point from what you said is they automate everything they born automated. So part of the digital transformation journey is that if it can be automated, it will be automated and anything that's new will be born automated. So let me ask you a follow up on that. Is there a cultural difference in AMEA versus what you're seeing in North America in terms of their receptivity to automation? I mean there are certain parts of of Europe which are more protective of jobs. Do you see a cultural difference or are they kind of, I mean we do see even some resistance here, but when you talk to customers they're like, no, it's wonderful. I love it. What are you seeing in Europe? >>So I don't, I don't see much of a cultural difference there. And I actually don't, I don't see yet. I haven't seen any feedback yet. It's very, I'm very new still, but I haven't seen anybody talk about really the, this technology is a technology to take jobs out. I think most people see this technology as a way of getting better performance at the humans, you know, pivoting them towards more. So I would say like in some markets in my, in my, in my prior life, in many prior lives, I would say that there are some countries like France for example, that would have been a little bit more stayed within their approach to new technologies and adoption, not so with regards to automation. They see this as a real gain productivity increase. I think that's true for people who have tasted it. But I do think there's still some reticence in the ranks until they actually experienced it. That's why we will talk to some customers about it. They'll have bought Athens and just just to yeah, to educate people on what's possible to let them try to build their own robots and then people, then the light bulbs go off. >>Yeah. That's 0.2 is that it, that it's taking away the aggravations, the frustrations, the mundane, the drudgery. And then you said people get giddy about those things when they don't have to do that anymore. Um, but then the question is also so, so what creative things are you doing now? So how are you spending your time? What are you doing differently that makes your job more interesting, more compelling? And I think that that's the real question too. So what is the, okay, yes we're saving some money and people aren't having to do this mundane tasks. But then what are, what is the value add that the employees are now bringing to the table? >>Yeah, so an actually said it and they've made the right point as well in terms of the mechanism for doing that is that part of the battle here is to spark the imagination and just like anything really just let it like in back in the Amazon world is sort of our spark in the imagination. If you can, if you can imagine it, you can build it. It's the same thing really with within our world now is it is figuring out with customers what things, what tasks did they do that they hate doing either a user level or a or a or a downstream level. What are the things that they really want to do that they need our help to harvest. And so we do the same sort of the same sort of things that we would have done with AWS where we did lots of hackathons and your bulldozer technology partners in with us and we were sort of building all of this. >>We do the exactly the same thing with the RPA space. It's exactly the same. This is really important because creativity is going to become an increasingly important component because if productivity goes up, it means you can do the same amount of work with less people. So it is going to impact jobs and people are going to have to be comfortable to get out of their comfort zone and become creative and find ways to apply these technologies to really advance, you know, drive value to their organizations. And actually I look at this as well as a longterm technology, right? As a longterm technology, as something that's important for my children. I have three and they're still very young, so 1210 and six but eventually they will go into the workplace with these skills embedded. They will just know that the, how you get one done is you have your robot do a whole load of task for you here and your, your job is to build and to be creative and to harvest data and to manipulate data and serve customers and focus on the customer experience. That's really what it's all about. The real brain. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Kevin, a pleasure having you on the show. Great luck at UI path. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for J for Dave Alante. Please stay tuned for more from the cubes live coverage of UI path coming up in just a little bit.

you live from Las Vegas it's the cube covering you I pat forward America's 2019 brought to you by uipath welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of UI path forward here at the Bellagio in Las Vegas Nevada I'm your host Rebecca night co-hosting alongside Dave Volante we are joined by Gavin Jackson he is the senior vice president and managing director amia at uipath thanks so much for coming you are brand spanking new to brands thanking you AWS for four years yeah joined UI paths in September yeah I want to start this conversation by having you talk a little bit about what what appealed to you about UI path and what more do you want to make the leap after four years at AWS yeah so I had the privilege to be west of really having a really close proximity to enterprise customers and getting the opportunity to listen to what they really wanted when they were talking about their digital transformation journeys and as it turns out the sort of cloud first in the automation first eras if you will are operating models at to two sides of the same coin if you think about what the that the cloud proposition has been over the last number of years it's really been about sort of reducing or eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting so that builders can build and then that turned into an operating model principle and it became sort of cloud first it's the same thing for the automation world you know we are reducing and eliminating the undifferentiated heavy lifting of Tata a product of business processes and tasks and everything else whether they're complex tasks or simple tasks removing that so that builders can build and business people can innovate and given them the freedom to do what they need to do as business owners think about AWS we obviously follow them very closely yeah anybody but it strikes you didn't thank you such are filters yeah what's the analog so what I think we again I would say that we are we are providing tools so the builders could build but at the same time our our products that works across the entire business stack whether that is sort of automation first as an operating principle across all businesses or whether it's across a business persona whether it's a CFO or somebody in accounts or a salesperson or whatever might be we're building tools that take the mundane tasks away from those users so that they have the freedom to go and serve their customers or or innovate within finance or do the do the job that they really love doing and that's really important for the business it turns out there's not a lot of value and a lot of the work that people do every day so if we can remove some of that then innovation will have an exponential curve of progress and that's what we're focused on today yes yeah again there are similarities there so if I understand the you're shifting one date asked allowing people freeing them up to do so that they can have a strategic impact in their business yes yeah yeah I think it is so if you look at even the technology paradigms and how cloud and AWS evolved and then also the layer on how uipath is evolving in the same way so you have computing and compute power started really with the mainframe and went to distributed servers and then to virtual machines and then from virtual machines it went to hosted virtual machines in the cloud and then from then it went to containers and now we're in this world of server lists we're in the cloud right so effectively the logic lives in server lists and the infrastructure sort of disappears and that provides massive scale in the automation world you started off with big monolithic processes you then had sort of network processes with software and data in the middle of all of that networked RPA really came in as an early sort of tool to help automate a lot of that a lot of processes and now in the realms of sort of automation as a function where in the end like the end game really is where automation is the application and the the applications themselves the data sources the processes really disappear so that the best done analogy I can come up with a metaphor acting um up with is I'm a Marvel fan I'm a geeky kind of Marvel fan of my favorite character is his Iron Man or Tony Stark and more specifically the Jarvis AI so what's happening all the time with with Tony Stark in the Jarvis a is he's interacting with his AI user interface all the time and what's happening in the background is that Java she's working with probably you know a hundred different applications and a hundred different data sources and everything else and rather than having you know a human go and do what the integration work that robots are doing that for him and it's just coming back as a as an outcome yeah I'm gonna keep pushing on this yeah similarities and differences because where it seems to break down is where our PA is focusing on the citizen developer the the end-user I'm afraid of AWS I won't go near it I see that console I call it my techies hey you know AWS is you know you got to be you know pretty technical to actually leverage it at the same time I'm thinking well maybe not maybe my builders are building things that I can touch but help us square that circle yeah so I think you the world is trending towards as much automation as possible so if it can be automated or if you can reduce the the burden to get to innovation I think you know technology is moving that way even in coding I think the transit we're seeing whether it's AWS or anyone else is low to no code and so we we occupy a world within the RPA space or the intelligent automation space where we're providing tools for people that don't need a requirement or or a skill set to code and they can still manufacture a few world their own automations and particularly with a release that we're just announcing today which is Studio X it really kind of reduces the friction from a business user where's zero understanding of how to code to build their own automations whether it's kind of recording a process or just dragging and dropping different components into a process even like even I could do that and that's saying something I can tell you yes exactly yeah this idea of democratizing the the automation the building that you said yeah very much so what will this mean I mean what what does what does that bode for the future of how work gets done because that is at the core of what you're doing is typically understanding how and where work gets done or the bottlenecks where the challenges and how can our PA fix this so I think ultimately like a lot of technologies it's really about the the exponential curve of productivity and whether you're looking at a national level a global level a company level a human level every level productivity has declined really over the last number of years and technology hasn't done a great job to improve that and you can say that some technologies have done a good job again I'd use a TBS is a good job in terms of the proliferation or the how prolific you can get more code out and more more progress there but overall productivity has declined so our sort of view of the world is if you can democratize automation if you can use or add a digital workforce to your to your to your teams then you'll have an exponential curve of productivity which a human level is important company level is important a national level is important and probably at global level is important you know you guys might be right place right time as well yeah because I remember you know all the spending in the 80s said receive growth everywhere except the Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Solow yeah [Laughter] [Music] you guys are hitting it right at the right time yeah you be able to take credit for a lot of it but yeah your thoughts on that in terms of productivity depending yeah I think it is pent up I think that is where where we're at right now and it's ready to be unleashed and I think that these technologies are are the technologies that will unleash it I think really what's happened over the last number of decades probably is that the six trillion dollar IT industry they exist today has largely kind of increased productivity or performance of other technologies it hasn't really increased output so whether it's sort of you know the core networking when Cisco started core networking there was a big increase I would imagine in connectivity and outputs then the technologies that were laid on top of that maybe less so and it was just really kind of putting bad band-aids on problems so it was really technology solving technology problems rather than technology solving human output problems and so I think that this is now the most tangible technology category that really is turning technology into value and productivity for technology really unlocking a lot of value one of the things that your former boss Jeff Bezos said was bet on dreamy businesses that have unlimited upside these these dreamy businesses customers love them they grow to very large sizes they have strong returns on capital and they can endure for decades I wonder if you could put you iPad in that context of a dreamy business what does he know right I mean nobody right I mean so and this is one of the reasons I was attracted by the way to DUI path because I think I think that the robots themselves if you can just kind of look at the subcategory of the robot I think it's on a similar curve to how Gordon Moore was talking about the Intel microprocessor in 1965 and the exponential curve of progress I think we were on that similar curve so when I sort of project five years from now I just think that the amount the robots will be able to do the cognitive kind of capabilities it will be able to do are just phenomenal so and customers customers give us feedback all the time about to two things they love and they value what we do the value is important because it's very empirical for the first time they can actually deploy a technology and see almost an immediate return on their technology whether it's a point technology solving one process or a group of processes they can see an immediate empirical return the other thing that I like to measure I quite like is that they value it so they think they love it they love and value it so they love it meaning it actually induces an emotion so when you when you watch the robots in action and they watch something that has been holding your team back or there's been stifling productivity or whatever it is people get giddy about it it's quite fascinating to see comment about Gordon Moore and Ty that's a digital transformation when I think of digital transformation I think of data yeah what's the difference in a business in a digital business it's how they use data yeah they put data at the core and four years we march to the cadence of Moore's law and that's changed its that that's not what the innovation the engine is today it's it's machine intelligence it's data and it's cloud for scale where do you guys fit I mean obviously AI is a piece of that but but maybe you could add some color to where our PA fits in that equation so I think that's an important point because there's a lot of miscommunication I think about really what it means when you talk about digital transformation and what it means to be digitally transformed and really to see transformed you're really talking about a category of customers which are large more institutional enterprises and governments because they have something to transform what they're transforming into is more of a digital native sort of set of attributes more insurgent mindsets and these companies are to your point they're very data hungry they harvest as much data as they can from from value from data they're very customer centric they focus on the customer experience they use other people's resources oh the cloud being one great example of that and the missing point from what you said is they automate everything they've to meet it so part of the digital transformation journey is if it can be automated it will be automated and anything that's new will be born automated so let me ask a follow-up on that is there a cultural difference in amia versus what you're seeing in North America in terms of the receptivity to automation I mean there are certain parts of of Europe which are you know more protective of jobs do you see a cultural difference or are they kind of I mean we do see even some resistance here but when you talk to customers they're like no it's it's wonderful I love it what are you seeing in Europe so I don't I don't see much of a cultural difference there and I see don't I don't see yet I haven't seen any feedback yes Peres I'm very new still but I haven't seen anybody talk about really that this technology is a technology to take jobs out I think most people see this technology as a way of getting better performance out of humans you know pivoting them towards more so I would say like in some markets in my in my in my prior life in in many prior lives I would say that there's some countries like France for example that would have been a little bit more stayed within their approach to new technologies and adoption not so with regards to automation they see this as a real and game productivity increase thank you I think that's true for people who have tasted it yeah but I do think there's still some reticence in the ranks until they actually experience it that's why we'll talk to some customers about it they'll have bought a Thon's and just a yeah to educate people and what's possible to let them try to build their own robots and then people then the light bulbs go off that it's taking away the aggravations the frustrations the mundi the drudgery and then you said people get giddy about those things you don't have to do that yeah but then the question is also so so what creative things are you doing now so how are you spending your time what are you doing differently that makes your job more interesting more compelling yeah and and and I think that's the real question - so what is the okay yes receiving some money and people aren't having to do those mundane tasks but then what are what is the value add that the employees are now bringing to the table yeah so in actually sit and it takes made the right point as well in terms of the mechanism for doing that is the the part of the battle here is to spark the imagination just like anything really just let you like it back in the Amazon wild it's all of our spark in the imagination if you can if you can imagine it you can build it it's the same thing really with within our world now is figuring out with customers what think what tasks do they do that they hate doing either a user level or a downstream level what are the things that they really want to do that they need our help to harvest and so we do the same sort the same sort of things that we would have done with AWS where we did lots of hackathons and you bought lots of technology partners in with us and we would sort of building all of this we do exactly the same thing with the RP a space it's exactly the same this is really important because creativity is going to become an increasingly important because if productivity goes up it means you can do the same amount of work with less people so it is going to impact jobs and people are gonna have to be comfortable to get out of their comfort zone and become creative and find ways to apply these technologies to really advance but you know drive value to their organizations and actually I look at this as well as a long term technology whereas a long term technology is something that's important for my children I've three and they're still very young so twelve ten and six but eventually they will go into the workplace with these skills embedded they will just know the how you get work done is you have your robot do a whole load of tasks for you here and your your job is to build and to be creative and to harvest data and to manipulate data and and serve customers and focus on the customer experience that's really what it's all about the real brain works I've been a pleasure having you on the show at uipath thank you so much appreciate it i'm rebecca night for j4 day Volante please stay tuned for more from the cubes live coverage of uipath coming up in just a little bit

>> Narrator: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE, covering Citrix Synergy, Atlanta, 2019. Brought to you by Citrix. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin here, at Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, Georgia, with Keith Townsend, and we're pleased to welcome to theCUBE, Kevin Jackson, the founder of GovCloud. Kevin, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for the opportunity. >> So this has been an exciting day. Keith and I have been geeking out all day, starting with the keynote this morning. Talking about employee experience is so relevant, theCUBE covers a ton of technology events, we don't often hear about employee experience as a catalyst to digital transformation, but it is. >> No, absolutely. Citrix, the keynote today was just very impressive. Not because of technology, and not that it wasn't impressive, but it was the focus. Today's world has really been focused around digital transformation. What processes in your organization are the right ones? And Citrix has developed and is delivering tools to help organizations understand those processes which should be digitized, and it's really about the employee experience because companies in the commercial world, in the consumer space, have really focused on consumer experience and customer experience. Those that have been successful in doing that have seen their market share grow. Well, this is all about looking at your employee experience. Instead of looking outside, look inside. If you're able to improve your employee experience, you get more efficiency, you get better employees, and you get better products and services. >> So Kevin, talk to us about the importance of examining your processes prior to automating. I was visiting my parents the other day and they're remodeling their home, and I said, you know, I made a joke about how we automate in ITS, I said you know what, you guys are moving much too slow, I'm going to buy you two more saws, so you can go faster. And a lot of times I feel like that's the way we tackle automation and process improvement. What have you seen out in the field, and where should companies start versus where they do start? >> So one of the biggest problems companies have is their history. They have a process that they've done for years, in their eyes it's been very successful, and I'm not saying it wasn't successful, but it was successful in a different era, successful in a different environment. Today's environment moves much faster. It's much broader. It's not regionalized. It's international. So organizations need to understand what their processes are, and which of their old processes can actually be effective in the new environment. Many of them can be, but they need to be tweaked. They need to be updated. They may need to be entirely changed. When those processes were designed, you didn't have customers with smart phones that can access your products and services. We're going from a physical world to a virtual world. So the first thing is to understand which processes need to be digitized. Maybe the saws were a good thing, but maybe they weren't. Maybe they need a level to go faster and to go better, to improve the quality of the output, not necessarily cutting more wood. >> So these changes are subtle. How does Citrix help kind of break down the processes and help you determine? You know, one of the things that we learnt, early cloud. It's not wise to put everything in the cloud up front, it's what makes a difference and moves the ball. David talked a lot this morning about employees want to move the ball forward. How does Citrix help move the ball forward in determining what processes should be automated? >> Yeah, great question. One of the biggest problems with cloud computing is sort of the adoption of the cloud-first policy. People misunderstood that policy and many companies misunderstand the implementation of that today. Cloud-first doesn't mean put everything in the cloud and get rid of all your legacy, it means evaluate cloud first and make a decision as to what data should go in the cloud and what processes should go in the cloud. Any organization of any significant size is still going to need legacy data centers. They still may need managed services, and cloud computing would be part of that hybrid mix. So what Citrix is doing is providing the tools so that you can get the data about the processes and understand which data should go in the cloud, which data should stay in your legacy data center, and which data could be managed by manage service providers. So customers, Citrix customers that actually leverage this intelligent workspace have the required tool to do digital transformation. >> When you're out talking with customers in different industries, public sector, government, where are they in understanding how critical the employee experience is, from recruiting and onboarding, to actually those employees interfacing with their customers? I mean, it's such a critical function. >> Oh, absolutely, and digital transformation is really not about the technology as much as it's about the culture. Organizations that undergo this journey oftentimes forget about the cultural transformation that needs to occur within the organization. And that means training, that means education, and it also means redefining the roles within the organization. Citrix provides many of the tools for helping employees understand their role, redefining their role, educating employees. So all of this is critical to digital transformation. >> And that's not easy to do, as well. I think this morning, and I've heard this recently from a number of events I've covered, is there are five generations active in the workforce today. So you've got my parents, the baby boomers, you've got the generation younger, too, younger than I am, who were born on smart devices, and there's different expectations, there's different levels of technology expertise, so companies like Citrix have to really balance that employee experience across five generations with very different expectations. >> Yeah, absolutely. I was talking to a colleague of mine and he was relaying a story to me when an employee was working an application, right? And he finished the task, went home, came back the next day and all the work was gone, and the employee was saying, "What happened? "I worked hard on it, it took me hours." And the manager said, "Well did you save it?" And he said, "Well what's that?" (laughs) Because if you're born in the cloud you don't press a button to save, it's automatic. This was a millennial that was born with technology and actually didn't understand the concept of having to save something, because it was always in the cloud. This is cultural, and you need to address this culture when you are improving and modifying your business processes. >> So when you're an organization of any size you can look at this employee experience journey and be overwhelmed, and think, wow. You know what, you could hear a story like that and say, "Where do I start to change?" Like my SAP app, you're still going to have to hit save, that's not going to change tomorrow. So where's the starting point? >> Really, the starting point is data. Collecting data, understanding the data, interpreting the data, because then you can make the appropriate decisions within the context of what your organization or industry is doing. Although I do a lot of public sector, most of my work today is in commercial industry, and employees are in an environment that's forever changing, where their context changes from second to second. They're doing one application then doing another application. They're responding to a client or customer, then responding to a colleague, and then immediately responding to the manager. This context switching is normal for computers but it's not normal for people, so this is important as you move forward in the world. >> So what I'm hearing is a term, an SAP coin, X-data, experience data. The idea that you need to collect, as much pressure as we're under to transform digitally, the first step is to collect and analyze the data. One of the questions I put towards another analyst was where is this data coming from? I know the data is because people are doing stuff, and there's a trail somewhere, but where do I go first to start as the indicator to collect this data to analyze? >> Well the old school method of doing that would be a survey, or you would observe a worker. Now the actual act of conducting a survey or observing work changes the work process. All right, so the data that you get from that can also be colored or flawed based upon the observer. Citrix experience, their desktop has artificial intelligence built into it. The worker can actually do their task, unbeknownst to them that they are being observed, that the data is being collected with respect to that process. Don't get scared, this is not George Orwell in 1984, though that's been a while, I guess. It's not Big Brother looking at you. The data is anonymized, right? It's not about you, it's about the task that you're completing. So you now have a tool to collect real data and you can continue to collect that data because processes have a life, they change. So you can monitor that, and update and tweak it. >> And an important outcome of that data collection and analysis is delivery, using it to deliver a personalized experience to the user, regardless of generation, how born in the cloud they were or not. >> Absolutely. And now, you're heading back to that cultural aspect. The digital transformation is really cultural transformation. >> Then another aspect, no, output of that, is that you could correlate this X-data with operational data and see where there's human error. So your processes analysis, you champion process analysis, you can say, okay, where are we making the most mistakes, because we're having a human translate something from one screen to another, while we see where this error rate is coming up and now we can automate or modernize this process to improve the overall not only employee experience but customer experience as well. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's important to understand not just the investment that you're making in any process, but the return you're getting from that process. By collecting data, you can determine if value is being delivered not just to the organization, but to your customers. So this ROI, return on investment, is often not just about money. It's about the value of the employee, and you can actually measure that value. Measure what they're doing, measure the return, and drive better environments, better employees, better outcomes based on the data. >> And that's got to elevate up to the C-suite as a business imperative, to understand that ROI, because those are employees that in many facets are involved and connected with those customers who are paying for products and services. So those employees, whether they're in sales or marketing, or finance, or legal, or a contact center, they're critical touchpoints to your customers. If their experience isn't great and they decide to leave, that customer experience, that's a possible brand reputation challenge. >> No, absolutely. And you touched upon touchpoints, right? In the past, you basically knew how your client was going to interact with you. Dissimilarly, you need to understand how your employee interacts with the organization. They're not going to just be in a cube interacting with the IT every day. They may be at home. They may, in the very near future, not today, they may be interacting with Alexa to get your information, or through Alexa with one of your clients and one of your customers. How do you manage that touchpoint? Well, with tools like Citrix, they are actually giving you the ability to normalize data across multiple channels, across multiple touchpoints, so you can make sure you have the same experience, the preferred experience with your clients and customers as well as with your employees. >> Serious impact. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for joining Keith and me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> It was very enjoyable, thank you. >> Good, our pleasure. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live, day one of our coverage of Citrix Synergy 2019. Thanks for watching. (percussive music)

(tech music) >> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain, it's the CUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017 brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid everybody this is the CUBE. The leader in live tech coverage. This is day one of our coverage of HPE Discover 2017. I'm Dave Vollante with my co-host Peter Burris. Jim Jackson is here, he's the senior vice president of the Enterprise Group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Happy to be here. Good to see you again and Jason Newton, vice president of global marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Guys, it wouldn't be a Discover without some big news, transitioning to Antonio. We're about to hear the key note but Jim, set up the week for us. The big news that we can expect. Show us a little leg. >> Yeah well first of all, thanks for having us here guys. We're really excited for this week. It's gonna be probably one of our biggest weeks of innovation. We've got a pretty amazing Discover lined up. So you're gonna see us talk about AI in the data center, so bringing predictive analytics from our Nimble acquisition it's called info site. We're extending that to three par so that really helps our customers predict and anticipate problems and solve them in advance. So that's really software-based leading with that. Another area is we're bringing consumption-based capabilities. A whole new suite of consumption offerings. We're branding it HPE Green Lake and it's really, think of purpose-built solutions for things like backup, SAP, data like environments but it's really outcomes as a service. So we're not able to give our customers the ability to have infrastructure as a service, and now outcomes as a service. And the other part of making hybrid IT simple that you're gonna hear about is how we're really helping our customers unify and manage that multi cloud environment. So applications are sitting in public clouds, private clouds, what we're hearing from our customers is, hey we need to be able to manage this a lot easier and have holistic ability to see all of that. So you're gonna see us talk about that on main stage as well. So new brands, a lot of innovation. We've also got some partnerships that we'll be rolling out later today. So a lot happening. >> Jason, you've spent a lot of time, sweat, toil, blood on branding. Obviously you're a big part of the branding exercise. Up leveling the messaging, we had you on two or three years ago, and you said, look, we're gonna change things. We're gonna shift the focus from product and widgets and really talk about what customers care about. How has that gone? Where are you at with that? It resonates extremely well with customers. In fact we just got out of a panel where we had four of our top customers, ABV, Dreamworks, IKEA and Nokia. And we just spent an hour just talking about their digital transformation journey and what they're all about. The room was packed. I think we had over 400 people who were in there. That's showing that we can be an innovation partner to those customers enabling them to share their stories at a venue like this is really powerful. >> We're becoming much more software and services led and it's really all about experiences. Providing that experience that our customers are looking for. >> Just follow up to that, so a lot of people think oh well HP, spun merge it's software business but you're leading with services and software. So help us clear that. >> We're doing a ton in software today. So if you just think of our software portfolio. We have HP 1V to manage our customers complete infrastructure estate, service storage and networking. We extended that last year with composability so HP and Synergy, we have over a thousand new customers since we announced that last year actually at this event. So we're seeing a lot of progress. Synergy enables our customers to really have one environment that can flex to the needs of multiple different applications so reduces over provisioning. AI, I talked about AI in the data center. So what we're doing with info site, that's software based, we're extending that to 3PAR and you'll see us extend that to other parts of the portfolio going forward. Nyara, and on the Aruba side of the house, software based. Aruba is very software centric and then of course, we'll be announcing this afternoon our code name project new stack, really about helping to manage that multi cloud environment. A lot happening in the software space and an area that we're very focused on. >> One of the things... By the way, we think that those three things that you mentioned, automation in the data center, on-premise capabilities and a cross multi cloud approach to management and managing your assets, absolutely spot-on. And we think ultimately and here's a question, we think that what's going to drive the determination is what does the data need? So talk to us a little bit about how you are articulating the idea of data as the new value source, the new value and hardware infrastructure and software and these capabilities, making it possible for the work to exist where the data requires. >> Yeah and I'll start maybe you can pile on a little bit. Our conversation starts with apps and data so we're starting the dialogue there and you know what we're seeing is you know really moving from large data centers, or only large data centers to centers of data that are really everywhere, right? So we're starting to see that edge really starting to proliferate and drive a lot more change, and what our customers are saying is wherever might, regardless of where my data sits, I need to manage it, I need to secure it, I need to process it, I need to be able to translate it into insight and that's really what our strategy is all about. We've been talking for the last couple of years about making hybrid IT simple. and we're really doing a lot in that space. So for example, we announced the acquisition of cloud technology partners and really what we're trying to do there it's the foremost authority really in helping customers understand how to migrate applications to to AWS or even to Google or Azure, and when you combine that with our on-prem capabilities, it really now starts to talk about data, we want to say your data is what matters and we want to help you manage that holistically. The software investments that we're doing enable you to have that complete view. And then from a consumption perspective, some of the things I talked about earlier, rolling that out right, making it easier to consume this as a service and only pay for what I use. So, we are in alignment. It all starts with data and wherever that data sits, it's how do I manage it? >> And that's why Aruba is such a great asset for us, because a lot of people think about Aruba as you know, you just replace copper wire and WiFi ... And hey, don't get me wrong, it's a money-making great business, but if you'd asked Kierty, he'd probably say we're a data business, right? >> Peter: We did ask him, and that is what he said. >> Is that what he said? Well, good, we're on message then. We're on message today, alright, yeah. I mean, because that's where the action is happening, that's where the data is being created, and so everything that they're doing around the the security 360 platform, the mobile first platform, everything is centered around, how do I draw a value in context from that data? >> Well I want to ask you about Aruba, because when you acquired Aruba, we said wow, this is a great business, it's gonna be a growth business, but is it a strategic weapon for HPE? Is it a strategic infrastructure component? From a messaging standpoint, It's all about the intelligent edge, that you've up-leveled that. Where'd that come from? Maybe take us through sort of the anatomy of-- >> Well I mean, the message is just exactly what we were saying. That if if value is gonna be created at the edge, if the data's gonna be coming from the edge, we have to drive a whole lot more intelligence into that edge in order to collect, process, analyze, secure the data that's coming in and make use of it, right? So I mean, that's where the genesis of the intelligent edge came from. >> Yeah, I mean I would say the other thing about Aruba that we're really seeing is all about experiences. So when we talk to our customers about Aruba, they're looking to deliver a different experience. Whether it's in retail, whether it's in stadiums, whether it's in the campus space. It's all about delivering a better experience. And that's really the value prop behind Aruba. Very software centric, open software, mobile solution. The other thing is, it's enabling us to engage more and more with parts of the company, customers that we might not have had as much engagement before. You know, the c-suite, you know, talking more with the line of business. because what they're focused on is how do I deliver that better experience? And Aruba's really playing a key role in doing that. We also have the view that ultimately, and you started the conversation about data, and we totally agree. But it has to be thought of from the edge, to the core, to the cloud. So whether we engage with Aruba, whether we engage with our core data center, capabilities, and our strengths there, or with services ... That's enabling us to holistically have a much more strategic conversation with our customers. So we're excited about that. >> I'd like to dig a little bit on this notion of AI for the data center, or AI for managing IT (mumbles). We'd like to talk about the difference between a breadth-first, which is I'm gonna do this, like in this big broad way, and we'll figure out how we're gonna get the components to participate, versus a depth-first. Which is, let's lean on suppliers, who know that hardware, know the software best, and ask them to create simulacrums, you know, digital representations that then will allow me to apply AI machine learning, et cetera. We like the depth-first approach, but customers ultimately want to see this bloom into a breadth approach. Talk to us a little bit about how individual elements are being represented, but in a coherent consistent way, so that you can get to a broader, overall set of automation across entire infrastructure. >> Well, I mean, I think that you're seeing the paradigm shift now. I mean for decades we've been chasing this idea that we can make the one tool to rule them all, this sort of magic management environment, one single pane of glass, everyone says that right? >> I've written a lot of research papers that suggested that, right? >> Right? And look, I think that's, we're done, alright? And the only thing we can do now is, how do we embed intelligence to make the infrastructure so smart it can take care of itself? And that's ultimately the experience that our customers are telling us that they want, right? Is, I don't want to be an expert on IT anymore. I don't wanna touch this stuff, I don't want to deal with it. >> Peter: Not just want, need. >> Right? I can't handle it, right? I mean, the scale and speed of everything is beyond the capacity ... I can't hire enough people to take care of it. So you know, I think starting there and saying, okay we're gonna start embedding that type of intelligence. Right now it's mostly predictive analytics type of stuff, but increasingly you're gonna see more true AI come in not just in the data center, with what we're doing with Nimble, right? But also with Nyara. Now we call it introspect, right at the edge. How do we start weaving that across to do a variety of things? Whether it's maintenance or performance optimization, or security. I think thinking of it like a continuous platform across the infrastructure is gonna give you that depth and kind of breadth of control that you're looking for. >> So that leads to kind of an ecosystem question, and I liked your comments on that. Because the question of breadth or depth, the answer is yes, you got to have both. The ecosystem posture has totally changed in the last year or so, subsequent. Because we had PWC on today. We've had Veam on earlier. These are-- >> Jason: They love us. Partners that you're putting forth, yeah. >> Jason: We're making them money. >> For sure, right. But they are partners that previously, you know, you wouldn't have profiled. Whether on stage, on the Cube, wherever. >> Jason: Yeah. >> How has the ecosystem evolved? >> I mean it's opening up a whole new set of opportunities for us. You know, if you think of when we had ES, a lot of people just felt like, hey we were gonna compete with them, right? Now that ES has spun out, we actually created another great partner in ES, but we've got a whole host of other SIs that want to engage with us. They want to take our capabilities in IT systems. Our consumption capabilities, and then align it with a value prop that they'll bring. So you talked about Veam for example, right? Data availability is really, really important for customers. So taking HPE and Veam together, we're able to deliver a great solution from data protection to recovery. Really powerful stuff, and we're seeing some great opportunities out there in the marketplace, and a very strong ROI. I mean, we have some data that says, hey over five years, is a 200% ROI. Another area, when you think of just partnering, right? Is what we're doing with our channel partners. So we're giving them more solutions that are channel centric, that we're driving through our channel organization, yeah. And then, we just announced a relationship a couple weeks ago with Rackspace. It's a managed private cloud, open source solution. We're using our consumption capabilities, combined with with Rackspace, their environment. And this is giving our customers the flexibility to now spin up very quickly, a private cloud environment that they're looking for with a lot of the public cloud capabilities. Very strong economics behind it. And then the edge, that's the other area we're seeing lots of new partnering opportunities as the edge continues to expand. So we believe that innovation is a team sport, and we're leaning in really hard, and I know you know the Gartner's and the IDCs don't track who are the best partners, but I think if they did, we would be at the top of the list. >> Well, probably a lot of this activity was going on previously, so it's not like you're starting from ground zero. >> Jim: Correct. >> But you just, from a marketing standpoint, you really didn't talk about it, because you had colleagues, whether it was from EDS or the software division that's saying, hey, don't talk about that, help us out here. So, how has that changed the way in which you market? One of the big values is your go-to-market. I mean, people are drooling to now partner with HPE. >> Yeah, and one of the big reasons is honestly, is point next. Because they see the value in what Accenture or PwC, or Wipro can bring from understanding a business, or whatever, versus the deep technical knowledge of a point next to come in, and what they really love is the consumption model stuff that we've been able to wrap around it. They see that customers want, that in order to move fast with less risk, right? You've gotta have some sort of financial lever that says, okay, I can start small and I can grow over time. I'm not putting all my money out in one place and we've been building that with flex capacity over the last several years. You're gonna see, well, I guess we announced yesterday, a new Green Lake ... Making that even simpler to consume. Every one of our partner says, I wanna take your IT expertise in that consumption based model and wrap it around a total solution. And that's what's like white-hot right now, and there's unlimited opportunity right now from ... As Jim said, edge to core to cloud. >> And we have another one we're gonna announce on stage in a couple of hours, so we're pretty excited about that as well. >> Well, you see that in the numbers too, yeah. >> Jason: I think we might have a clue what that is. >> We're excited about that. >> Yeah, I know, it is. Well, look, and you kind of you kind of gave something of a preview when you talked about the three things that you want to be able to do. Because there's one brand that hasn't been mentioned yet. But ultimately the business is recognizing that the technology questions that we're raising here are crucial to their future success, but they don't want them to be a continuous source of antagonism. >> Group: Right. >> So they recognize that they need the capability, but they want to dramatically simplify the degree to which it's evasive. I once had a CIO tell me that the value of my infrastructure is adversely proportional to the degree to which anybody in my business knows anything about it. So how do you then take steps to ensure that your customers don't know anything about the infrastructure, even though they have the infrastructure where the data demands, which is gonna be at the edge, and on premise? >> I think that's some of the things we're focused on now. So software to make infrastructure much more frictionless. And you're not really worrying about managing that infrastructure, it's just there to power the business, to deliver the business. Consumption-based offerings with Green Lake, this is truly purpose-built stacks for specific things, because our customers are telling us, I don't want to have to set all that up and manage it, but I want that outcome, and I only want to pay for what I use. So those are just a couple of examples of how we're trying to simplify it. Because ultimately it's all about the experience and the outcome and being able to translate all that data into insight. >> Well, when you're simplifying your face to the world, we heard in the last earnings call, new reporting structure going forward. Hybrid IT ... intelligent edge, and financial services, which is exploding, the consumption base modeling 22% growth last quarter. So organizationally, presumably, you've started to take that shape, and that's how you're presenting your face to the world. Is that right? >> Yeah, and that's helping us to really break down some of the silos, that has existed in this company for a while. And you're seeing that really, really becoming much more unified in terms of how we go to market, and how we think about engaging with our partners how we engage with our customers. >> Are your customers breaking down those silos at a consistent rate? Are you a little bit ahead, a little bit behind? How would you evaluate that? I think it's a transition, it depends on which customer, which sector. We still see some of some of them that are maybe a little behind. Some that are a little bit ahead, but really everybody wants to start the conversation much more about, how do I move faster? How do I accelerate my business? It's all focused on outcomes starting at that data level, and then how can you help me? And this is where I think some of the acquisitions that we've made, like CTP are very empowerful, and then all the software capabilities that we're bringing as well. So we're leading the dialogue much more around that. >> And the only way they're gonna get there is to break down those silos. >> Jim: Absolutely, absolutely. And we have to help them do that, right? We have to help them do that and give them the solutions to do this. >> So Jim, I want to go back to a point that you made about those other two research firms, Gartner and IDC I think it was. But you said that if they were measuring the value, or if there was a magic quadrant for who is the best partner, you guys would be up in the upper right hand quadrant? But partners in this world, especially here in Europe, are more than just the big guys. >> Jim: Yes. >> How are you taking steps to ensure that that large mass of crucially important companies out there, that still where a lot of that innovation, a lot of that excitement really is, are coming with you, are able to move with you? Because your ability to certainly provide them with financial support is important, but your ability to show them the future, and have them see their business in the future, is going to be crucial to whether or not they stay with you. >> And I think we're doing a couple of things. We created our Pathfinder program, I'm sure you guys are aware of that, right? So these are some of the newer partners coming up, we're actually investing in them, helping to scale them, because we think it's going to be unique innovation. Another area is this program that we have called Cloud 28 Plus, where we have a whole network of providers, service providers, ISVs, SPs, that's part of a network that we're able to grow and kind of scale that ecosystem, so I don't know if you want to comment anything more on that, but-- >> Jason: Up to 700 now (mumbles). >> Yeah, so Saviea is very passionate about this obviously, but he's done some some really good things-- >> Peter: And he should be passionate about it. >> But that gives us an ecosystem now of partners who are part of that HPE ecosystem, but different use cases, different compliance needs, they sit in different regions, so we're able to give our customers a lot of that flexibility. >> Alright, gotta give us something on the key note. Just a tidbit. What can you share? A little nugget? >> I mean, you know-- >> Dave: Teaser. >> Some themes we've talked about. You'll hear the word friction free a lot, how do we make things invisible? And really demonstrating how with services and software, and consumption-based service models, can we do that for customers? You'll hear a lot of those themes. We'll highlight some of the things we've announced over the last 24 hours, a few weeks. So we'll emphasize what we've done around Nimble and info site, and the importance of AI in the data center. We'll obviously spotlight point next, and Anna and her energy, she's gonna be out there and really firing people up. And a few surprises in the software space that will come today, that it'll probably cause the market to do a bit of a double take and say who is that that's doing this again? Yeah, it's us, it's HPE doing that. >> And you'll see us also talk about a little bit of a vision in terms of how we see the market starting more at the edge, bringing in AI, composing for different kinds of environments, and then how HPE has really been able to invest, so we're gonna start to show that over the last couple years, we have had a very clear agenda where we want it to go, and now that's all coming to fruition, so we'll start to show all that holistically in terms of our technology vision. So that's another thing that we're gonna be highlighting. >> Great. Perfect timing, we can hear the announcement. Keynotes are coming up, we'll be broadcasting those on our twitch channel. Siliconangle.com/twitch You can go to HPE.com and see the keynotes as well. Gents, great energy, awesome to see you. >> It's great to see you guys, thank you. >> We'll be watching the college football ranks. You guys have a fun little rivalry of Ohio State here. >> The Ohio State. >> Dave: ... Yale, but nobody cares. >> Baker for Heisman. >> Dave: Gents, thanks very much for coming. >> Thanks guys, appreciate it. >> Keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (soft tech music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover 2017 brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Hello and welcome back to Las Vegas for theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Discover 2017 or HPE Discover 2017. This is theCUBE, our flagship program from SiliconeANGLE media. We go out to the events, and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconeANGLE. with my co-founder, Dave Vellante, my co-host. Our next guest, Jason Newton, Vice President of HP Marketing Pan-HPE Market cross HP, and Jim Jackson, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Group Marketing. The big dogs here at HP laying out the show here for 2017. Guys, great show again, our seventh year, appreciate it. But this year, more than ever, is a seminal moment, obviously everyone knows what's going on in the news, is a huge shift in the market place, what's happening at the show, set the scene for us, what's the backdrop? You guys lined up all the messaging, you have the whole set up to the show, tell us: what is this show about this year? >> First, welcome to Discover, guys! We're really excited to have you guys here. And you know, we got a lot going on at this show, so for example, yesterday, we had our Global Partners Summit so we brought out top 1300 partners, and we had an amazing session with them. This week starts Discover, so it's going to run for the next three days. We've exceeded our tenants targets, so we're feeling really good about it. I think what that shows is there's a lot of interest, a lot of energy, a lot of passion, for what Hewlett-Packard Enterprise can bring. You know, I'm not going to go through all the mechanics of the separation and the spin merger, but I would say that that was all designed to make us a faster, more nimbler company, and one that is really aligned to where we want to take our partners on their digital transformation journey. You know, what we're seeing today, is digital transformation is impacting every single customer and every single industry, and digital business is technology, and really, that's where we play and that's why we're so excited to get our story out. And when you look at over the last year, there's a lot that's happened at this company around really innovation, acquisitions, and ecosystem. Just look at some of the innovation that we've brought to the market, Synergy. Amazing innovation, it created a new category, it really enables our customers to now get a public cloud experience, but on PRIM. And we're hearing from a lot of customers, I want to leave my applications on PRIM, but I need that capability. So we're delivering that with that kind of innovation. Another one is HPC. High growing market, we're leading in that space. What we're doing in the storage flash space, we rebooted, and rebranded our services organization, it's not called Pointnext. We want to help our customers point next to whats' next for their business. When you look at the Edge, just amazing innovation happening there, whether it's Aruba technology, whether it's what we're doing with all of our Edge compute solutions, so just a tons of things happening and then when you layer on top of that all the acquisitions. SGI, we're already the leader in HPC, we have 140 of the top 500 systems, SGI makes our position that much stronger. That's a hot market, it's growing at six to eight percent. SimpliVity, when we brought our capabilities, our UI from our technology, combined it with the data services from SimpliVity, we now have the leading HC solution in the industry. When you look at Niara, that gives up additional capabilities at the Edge to help secure that. When we look at Cloud Cruiser, we can help customers understand and balance what's happening across their workloads. And then Nimble gives us just an amazing portfolio across storage. We're really the leader now in the storage space when you look at the ability to dress almost any use case, from MSA to SimpliVity, for customers looking for more of that hyperconverge play, to Nimble, to 3PAR. Our strategy, super simple. Make hybrid IT simple, power the Intelligent Edge, and it's not just the compute, it's to bring the analytics so that we can translate insight into action, and really to bring the services to help our customers on their journey. And those services are our Pointnext services complimented by our partner services. So, you know what, we're fired up, we're excited, there's a lot happening. >> You guys got so much going on and we've documented the whole spin merge thing 'till the cows come home, we've already done that. You guys got a lot going on, a lot of customers are talking a lot of people are talking about you in the industry, at an industry level, certainly at a partnership level, you guys have always been customer focused. We heard that, you mentioned that, they kind of want to know: what is HP going to do now? You're going to put the stake in the ground, they want to know what's happening, where is the phoenix coming from out from all this decoupling, and more agile messaging, it's a lot of corporate governance, corporate development, I get that, what's next? When are you guys going to put the stake in the ground, you going to be aggressive, when are we expecting to hear from Meg Whitman? >> This week, right, you're going to see it this week. I think that's why we're so excited, this is our opportunity to bring our story together and talk about the innovation and the outcomes that we're delivering for our customers. We are playing offense, and you're going to see that this week. You know, I think one of the themes about this whole week is really about outcomes. I just hosted a panel, with four amazing customers, we had Dreamworks on there, we had CenterPoint Energy, we had CallidusCloud, and I had one more, can't think of it, Merck. And just amazing stories in terms of their digital transformation journey and how HPE is helping to enable that. You're going to hear that on main stage, we're going to have additional customers, Symmetry, others, talking about their digital transformation journey. So, we're really fired up about the main stage, and the story that we're going to get out today. Backstage talking with the executives, they're ready to rock and roll. You know, we know we have a great story and we need to package it, we need to send it out there to the marketplace, and that's what's going to happen later today. In addition to the outcomes, and I think that's what's different about us maybe from some of our other competitors who come to these similar events and just have a bunch of products, we're really talking about how our technology is enabling outcomes but you're going to see a lot of innovation today as well really themed along our strategy. We're going to highlight and roll out the next generation of our compute experience. We're going to talk about how we're delivering the industry's most secure industry standard servers. That's complimented by a whole set of announcements we did last week on our storage portfolio, and the software defined space updates to our synergy solution to HP OneView, and then we're going to be previewing our multi cloud hybrid stack, which will be available later in the year. When you look at the edge, new campus solution, core solution, so what we're really doing is if you think of a data center course which we're bringing that to the campus, so we can essentially now manage from the ceiling, to the side, to the floor. So we're bringing all the capabilities. Asset tracking capabilities coming in as well. Pointnext, we're bringing in new innovations to the marketplace around Consume. Jason, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the IOT Edge stuff that's coming out as well. >> Yeah, I mean we think, a core part of our strategy is to power the Intelligent Edge. We think that's where all the innovation is going and increasingly, you know, we think about data and getting insights from data, right? Going forward, we're going to start thinking about how do I take data and put it into action, right? The Edge is a place, and there's lot of different places that we can bring technology to bear to put into action and create value and so, tons of examples of what we'll be talking about with customers and really interwoven within that are the need for analytics, you know, big data, high performance computing, having a renaissance because of that, and the need for hybrid computing right because the stuff needs to be secure and it needs to be driven by applications, and so it really is a great way to try to exemplify why our strategy is the right strategy and why it's a winning one, because those are the unique elements that are going to power this world going forward, and we've got 'em. >> 43% of data will be analyzed at the Edge by 2020, so think about that, right. >> Yeah and we actually think that it'll be much higher over time, that moving around all this data is going to be challenging, I know you're working on the speed of light problem in the labs, and that number I think will increase. So, I wanted to ask you about messaging because messaging in very important. It clarifies your vision and it underscores your relevance to customers and previously a lot of the HP and now it's HPE, messaging was very product centric, and one tended to get lost in that. How have you sort of transformed your messaging architecture to address things like outcomes and business impacts. >> Yeah, you know customers today, it's really about outcomes, right, so technology matters but if you just look at making hybrid IT simple, as an example, that's a easy statement to say, hybrid IT is not simple. So when you, think of the messaging though, of how we're talking to our customers about that it's really at multiple different levels and let me give you a couple of examples. It's, first of all, the services from Pointnext, how do we come and engage them, and help them characterize their applications, understand their environment, and ultimately give them a roadmap with the right mix of technology, not only for today, but for the future. So, that's an example of leading much more with services in terms of our Pointnext services, in terms of how we're engaging our customers. Getting very disciplined in terms of when you think about okay how do I want to run my hybrid IT environment? We believe it runs best on a software defined infrastructure solution, Synergy gives us that. So, customers are telling us, hey I want to have more on PRIM, or I want to be able to run my applications on PRIM but I need the same experience that I can get from a public cloud, we can now do that with Synergy. Fully programmable, we're seeing amazing interaction with it we have almost 400 customers engaging, and that pipeline is continuing to grow. And then I think the third part of it, when you talk about solutions, again it's not just about technology, it's how do I want to consume this, right? So, we're hearing from our customers, you know, I need, not all of them want to just buy it from us and install it. So, we do amazing things here that we probably haven't gotten out to the market, and you're going to see us get a lot louder this week about that. For example, through our flexible financial services organization, we have amazing capabilities to really engage with other parts of the line of business, the CFO, and talk to them about how do you really want to finance this, what kind of business relationship are you looking for? With Flexible Capacity services, we bring amazing capabilities to help our customers get a public cloud experience on PRIM, so it's sitting on their environment, we're managing it, they only pay for what they use. The other part of it is, it is customers are telling us increasingly, hey you know what I want to actually have a network of service providers that I can get services from. We have done that through our Cloud28+ and our service provider partner ready program, we have a whole set of service providers optimized for infrastructure, for applications, many of them are located close to our customers, so just a few examples, I think of how we're trying to bring this all together, and a solution message is really elevating it and saying: what is the outcome you're trying to drive, starting there, and then looking at engaging them holistically across all of that. So you're seeing more and more of that. Our demos highlight that, that's the stuff we're trying to highlight at the show. >> Dave, can I pile on to the message piece, too, as well? His messaging guy here, for Jim. You know, there's a lot of noise also out on the marketplace, and I think one of the keys is the advantage of being a more focused company now, we can be much more simple, and forthright and direct in our messaging, right, in terms of who we are, what we're about, what's our strategy, what are the elements that we're putting in place to execute that strategy and it's I think it's really important because you don't get but 60 seconds, right, in front of a customer, or to grab their attention off a Twitter feed, or whatever and so, simplicity is really really important, and I think the advantage of an event like this is it brings our strategy and that message to life, I mean it's three dimensional out there right. It's living and breathing, we bring the customers forward first, that's the lead of every message because that's what other customers want to hear about, what are you going to do for me, right? >> Well, lets talk about the messaging and how it translate, from as I always say, if you got the sizzle you better have the steak, to use that old expression. Just as a random example, the user experience is changing significantly in IT, I mean yesterday I was delayed coming in Southwest coming from Silicone Valley and, you know they sold my seat, they didn't have to drag me off the plane, but you know I'm getting some help in the analog face to face but I got on Twitter, had to DM Southwest, instant channel to Southwest. That proves that the interface to technology in a digital business is changing. Now IT is transforming in a similar way, how are you guys taking the messaging of simplicity at the same time as the product evolution is shifting and architectures are changing. The people who have to consume and manage this stuff, their work is changing, so how do you guys talk about that because that's really where the meat on the bone is sitting that's where the rubber is hitting the road, your thoughts? >> I'll start, and maybe Jason you can pile on, you know I think Jason poked at it, we are a much simpler company today, so our strategy is very clean. It's to make hybrid IT simple, it's to power the Intelligent Edge, and it's to bring the services to help our customer go along that journey. So just starting with that simple message means that we can get out whole organization, our partner organization, on message in terms of what we bring and how we can help them to do that. I think the other part this that's really important is we view innovation today as really a team sport, and as we become more focused, we're actually leaning in a lot harder to our partner ecosystem. Whether it's our traditional partners, like Microsoft and SAP, whether it's new partners like Docker, Mesosphere, you know bringing the containerized environments, or actually curating a new set of partners for the future with Partner Next. Because it is about getting it down the simple thing of what's the outcome you're trying to drive, what's the technology, and the ecosystem and how can we be the company to help bring that forward? And I think that's a lot of the simplicity that you're going to see. You know on stage later today, I think why we're so excited about this is, you know you're going to hear Meg talk a little bit about the journey we've been on but more importantly the outcomes that we're delivering for customers and then what we're going to do is we're going to feature three customer scenarios, talking about what they have done, what their journey has been, their outcomes, their experiences and what they can do today, and then of course, how HP technology is enabling that. >> We had in our opening, Dave and I always talk about this, because we love the shiny new toy. Certainly I'm from Silicone Valley, he's from the east coast but the reality is that all this stuff about declining markets here and there is always a shift to another growth market, even on PRIM, you know, people might buy and consume and interface differently with technology but it doesn't mean that the data is slowing down, it doesn't mean that the value creation is changing, it's shifting. So I think that has really been something that I think you guys have had online, maybe lost in some of the tactical things but, you know, from new style of IT, to this, it's been kind of a cadence that you've been on it's not like you guys are groping for messaging. >> What goes down, yeah, and you can't just snap your fingers and be the transformed company that you want, right, but we're moving at break-neck speed on that and it does all go back to the advantage of that strategy, and the world you just described, right, you want to be nimble. You know, there may be something next month we've never heard of that disrupts the entire container market, right, containers become oh that's so yesterday, we want to be the company that's ready to pounce on the next thing, right, and we're geared to do that. You know, competitors - >> John: (mumbles) containers in microseconds is kind of a big deal, and it's coming out of the labs. >> Well you know, the other thing, I want to just add, so you talk about customers, you start with the customer the technology business is always moved faster pretty much than any business, but now, every customer is technology company, and so they're accelerating the pace, so you've got to accelerate that pace with them and be that provider. Digital transformation is all about data, it's all about becoming a technology company. So what's the message to your customers in terms of your role in helping them accelerate their transformation? >> Well, I think you pretty much hit it, right, in the statement that I use is digital business is technology. You are not going to seed with your digital transformation unless you have the right technology foundation and that's what we heard from those customers on the panel. It's about speed, it's about flexibility, it's about having the right technology that enables me to deliver services back to my internal clients at the speed I need to do it. And you know, that's where our innovation is really focused today, and that's why we're seeing a lot of customers coming to us and saying I want to understand how you did it for CenterPoint, or for Dreamworks and how we can take advantage of that. The other part of it is, technology is a big part of it but it's also the learning and the expertise that we can bring to actually make that technology work in that customer environment - we know how to do that. We're proven in doing that, and I think that's something because we're close to the technology, we not only have the right innovation, we have the right expertise to make it work for our customers, and that's important. >> I don't even think it's early innings either, Dave, I think it's not the game hasn't even started and I think you know one of the things that we believe and we're doing some research on is, we think asset evaluations is going to be completely data driven. Data will be an asset and that will impact the evaluation mechanism to >> Dave: Data is the new currency! >> John: To companies' value, so I think the shift is so early. So, riding the wave, guys thanks so much for coming on theCUBE we really appreciate it. Looking forward to the keynote from Meg Whitman to hear the messaging. Congratulations as you guys continue to - >> Dave: We're fired up! >> Jason: He's fired up. >> Dave: There's a lot of energy, Meg's fired up >> Jason: She's going to bring it today - >> Dave: Antonio is fired up, there's a lot of energy at the company, and you know, we're just excited to get our story out and engage customers. Thanks guys for the opportunity. >> Live here from HPE Discover, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, we'll be back with more live action. Three days of wall to wall coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(mumbling) >> Voiceover: Covering Sapphire now. Headline sponsored by SAP HANA Cloud, the leader in platform as a service. With support from Console Inc., the cloud internet company. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burris. >> We are here live at SAP Sapphire. This is SiliconANGLE Media's The Cube. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal to noise and want to do a shoutout to our sponsors SAP HANA Cloud and Console Inc. at console cloud, connecting the clouds together. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris. Our next guest is Reggie Jackson, winner, athlete, tech athlete now, entrepreneur, overall great guy, and a cube alumni. Four years ago, we interviewed him here at SAP Sapphire. Welcome back, Reggie, to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. John, thank you very much. It's good to be here with old friends. We were havin' a little conversation about baseball there, but good to see you guys. Yeah, and obviously, the baseball, we were just talkin' about the whole fisticuffs and the glee of the grand slam walk-off. >> Reggie: Good stuff, good stuff. >> It's a good pivot point in some of the things that you're workin' on in here, the conversations in the tech world, which is social media and that notion of celebrating in a world of Instagram and Snapchat and social media. Certainly, ya flip the bat, the views go up. But then, baseball has these (laughing) unwritten rules, right. So does corporations. And so we're now a new era. Is baseball safe now with these unwritten rules and should they maintain those, certain things that have kept the game in balance? But yet with social media, the players are their own brand. And you certainly were a brand, even back in your day, which is a pioneer. What's your thoughts on that? >> You know John, Peter, I don't like the idea of someone going out of their way to promote their brand. Some of the great brands to me in history, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, the great Jim Brown, Joe Montana, Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan would be a prominent example where technology and TV enhanced who he was. And he had someone behind him to enhance his brand, Nike, Phil Knight, who was a real pioneer. I'm not so in favor, I'm not in favor at all of someone manufacturing themselves as a brand. And I hear players talk about their brand and about trying to create something. If you're great, if you deserve it, I don't think Stephen Curry works on his brand. I think he works on bein' a great player. I think he works on bein' a great teammate. I think he does his best to maximize his skill set. And he's nothing but a gentleman along the way. He'll celebrate with joy once in awhile, with the Curry moves, which we've come to recognize. But for guys that talk about the manufacturing of their brand, there's something about it that's manufactured. It's not real, it's false. And I don't like it. I think it's okay, the Snapchats and the Google+ and all of the stuff, Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff, all of the things that go along with trying to create some hubbub, etc. I'm okay with that. >> So you're saying if it's not deserved. People are overplaying their hand before earning it. >> A lot of it, John, a lot of it. Joe Montana didn't work on his brand, he was great. Jim Brown didn't work on his brand, he was great. I don't want to use Jimmy Brown. I want to use Montana because even young people today will know Joe Montana. Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, they're not about their brand. They're about being classy, being great, being part of a team, being a leader, presenting themselves as something that's respected in the NFL, across the United States. Go ahead, Pete. >> So even though it's cheaper to get your name out there, you still believe in let your performance speak for itself. >> You got to be real about it. Ya got to be who you are. If you're not a great player, get out of the way. Get out of the space. So manufacturing your brand. I played with the Yankees. I was in the era of Cosell and Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner. We won championships with the team. I was part of something that helped me become recognized. And so in our era, the Sandy Koufax's became brands because they were associated with greatness around them. They stood out and so they earned that tremendous brand. >> We were just watching Graig Nettles gettin' taken out by George Brett in that big game and also the pine tar, we kind of gettin' some good laughs at it. You look at the balance of personalities. Certainly, Brett and Nettles and your team and you had a great personality, winning championships. Worked together as a team. And so I want to ask you that question about the balance, about the in baseball, certainly, the unwritten rules are a legacy and that has worked. And now in a era of personalities, in some cases, people self-promoting themselves, people are questioning that. Your thoughts on that because that applies to business too 'cause tech athletes or business athletes have a team, there are some unwritten rules. Thoughts on this baseball debate about unwritten rules. >> Pete and John, I'll try to correlate it between some tech giants that have a brand. I just left a guy with a brand, Bill McDermott, that runs SAP. Even Hasso, the boss. The face now of SAP is Bill McDermott. Dapper, slender, stylish, bright. It comes across well. So maintaining that brand, to me, relates to SAP, bills a great image for it. He's stylish, he's smooth, he's smart. He's about people. He presents himself with care. So that is a brand. I don't think it's manufactured. That's who he is in real life. If you take a look, and I'll go back to Steph Curry because that name resonates and everyone recognize it. That style of cool, that style of control, that style of team and care. And he presents to us all that he cares about us, the fan, his team, his family. And so those are things and I think you can go from the tech world. Bill Gates had a brand. Brilliant, somewhat reclusive, concerned about the world, concerned about the country, concerned about his company. And so that resonated it Microsoft because that's who he really was. Some of the people today don't really recognize that Jobs was thrown out of Apple. He was pushed out. All of his brilliance, which was marketing. And the gentleman there that really was the mind for the company, Steve Wozniak, happens to be here at SAP Sapphire. Today, I think he speaks. But those brands were real, not manufactured. And so, in today's world, I think you can manufacture a brand. And then all of a sudden, it'll crumble. It'll go away in the future. But the great brands of whether it's Jackie Robinson or whether it's Jack Welch or whether it's George Steinbrenner and the Yankee brand, those brands were real. They were not manufactured. Those guys were eccentric. They were brilliant. Go ahead. >> And also, they work hard. And I want to point out a comment you made yesterday here at the event. You were asked a question up on stage about that moment when you hit the home runs. I think we talked about it last time. I don't necessarily want to talk about the home runs. But you made a comment I'd like you to expand on and share with the audience. 'Cause you said, "I worked hard," but that day during warm-ups, you had batting practice. You made a comment that you were in the zone. So working hard and being great as it leads up to that. But also, in the moment, 'cause that's a theme these days, in the moment, being ready and prepared. Share your thoughts on what you meant by you had a great batting practice and you just felt it. >> I'm going to take it to what you say is in the moment. I remember when I was talkin' about it yesterday, which you reference to, when I had such a fantastic batting practice. I walked by a coupla sports writers in that era. Really well-known guys, Dave Anderson, New York Times. I can't think of his name right now, but it'll come to me, of the Daily News. It was like hey man. >> John: You were rockin' it out there. >> I kind of hope I didn't leave it out here. (laughing) That was in the moment and at the same time, >> I mean, you were crushing it. >> Yes, when the game started, I got back in that moment. I got back in what was live, what was now, what was going on. Certainly, I think our world now with the instant gratification of sending out a message or tweeting to someone or whatever certainly in the moment is about what our youth is and who we are today as a country, as a universe. >> But you didn't make that up. You worked hard, but you pulled it together in the moment. >> A comment with that is I went and did something with ESPN earlier this year in San Francisco, in Oakland with Stephen Curry. They said, "Reggie, we want ya to come up "and watch his practice, his pre-game." And it was very similar to your batting practice, where people come out and watch, etc. And so I was looking forward to it and I like to go to the games about an hour and a half or two hours early so I can see warm-up and see some of the guys and say hello. And I got a chance to watch Steph Curry. I know his dad. And happened to be the first time I went this year, the dad, Carolina, the Panthers were in town. Not the Panthers. Come on, help me, help me, help me. >> Peter: The Wizards? >> No, no, no, the Carolina. >> Peter: Carolina Panthers. >> The Carolina Hornets. >> John: Hornets. >> Were there and I know his dad, Dell Curry. And we talked a little bit. But then, Steph came out and I watched him. And I watched the dribbling exhibition. I watched the going between the legs and behind the back and the fancy passing, etc. And I watched the shots, the high-arcing threes, the normal trajectory threes, the high shots off the backboard and things like that that he did. The left-handed shots, the right-handed shots. And the guy asked me what I thought of the show. And I said, "Well, it's a cool show, "but I'm going to see all that tonight." And me watching him, the behind the backs, the between the legs, the passes, the high-arching shots from three, the high-arching touches off the glass. He does all that. >> John: He brought it into the game. >> Yeah, I said so, (laughing) >> Peter: That is his game. >> It's not a show, but that's his game. >> So Reggie, you did an interesting promotion, Reggie's Garage, where you bought a virtual reality camera and you created a really nice show of your garage demonstrating your love >> Reggie: 360. >> Peter: of cars, 360. Talk a little bit about that. And then if ya get a second, imagine what baseball's going to be like as that technology becomes available and how some of the conversation that we're having about authenticity, the fan coming into the game. >> An experience. >> Is going to change baseball. Start with the garage and how that went and then how ya think that's going to translate into baseball, if you've had any thoughts on that. >> In the technology that was used, certainly I enjoyed it. While I was doing it, I noticed where the cameras were in different spots. There was one on the floor of my car. There was one in the backseat. And then there was someone following us as closely as they could. But you could see everything. You'd see the shift and you could see my feet. It was like you were with me. When we did the 360 inside the garage as well, you could listen to me and then you could use your finger and spin around. And they had these special headset and special glasses that you could look around, just with your headset on, and see all around the room. Behind you, in front of you. And so it's an experience that I think is going to become part of who we are as a nation, who we are as a people watching television, that you're going to really feel like you're in the room. I think it's going to be exciting. And I think it's going to be fun. And when you're talking about products, when you're talking about my website, if you will, with the focus on automotive parts, where a guy can go in and shop and get any part he wants for a vehicle, you really can build a complete car from my website. You can buy a frame. You can buy body parts. You can buy a horn, an engine, brakes, tires, grills, turn signals, the whole nine yards. And it gives you an experience through 360 video of really walking into the store, walking into the building, walking into the stadium and looking around to see the hot dog stand, see the dugout, see the pitcher and the hitter, to see the parts in the garage, to see the cars and take a look and view at everything that's there. >> How are players going to react to havin' the fans virtually right there with them? >> I don't think it bothers you. I don't think ya notice. I don't think they'll show anything that will affect the player that he's going to be concerned about. I think you'd have to be sensitive if they start microphoning, start micing up and then the looseness of the language would impact. So I don't think they'll go that far. But I do think the more that you can see, the more attractive the game becomes, the more interested that you can get people. When I broadcast baseball for ABC back in the 80's, I always tried to broadcast for the lady of the house, while she worked, while she cooked the meal, she didn't have time to think about a backup slider or the fastball that painted the outside corner, the changeup, etc., the sinker. I tried to broadcast for her interpretation so I could attract another fan to the game. So I think that the technology and the viewing that you'll see from behind home plate, from under the player's feet while he's running down the bases and the slides and things of that nature, Pete, I think are going to be exciting for the fan and it'll attract more fans, attract a new type of television it's going to produce, etc. So it's exciting. >> Reggie, thanks for comin' on The Cube again. Appreciate your time. I ask ya final two questions that I want to get your thoughts on. One is obviously the cars. Reggie's Garage is goin' great. And you shared with us last time on The Cube, it's on YouTube, about you when you grew up and decide football and baseball. But when you were growin' up, what was your favorite car? What was that car that you wanted that was out of reach? That car that was your hot rod? And then the second question is, we'll get to the second question. Answer that one first. What was you dream car at the time? How did ya get >> Reggie: The dream car >> John: hooked on this? >> at the time. I had a '55 Chevrolet that I bought from a buddy by the name of Ronny Fog. I don't even know if he's still around anymore. Out of Pennsylvania. I had $300 and my dad gave me $200. I'd saved up mine from workin' for my dad. But my dream car was I went to school with a guy named Wayne Gethman and another guy named Irwin Croyes. I don't know Wayne Gethman anymore. But from the age of 16, I reengaged with Irwin Croyes, who happens to be a business investing type guy in the city of Philadelphia, right where we're still from. He's a car collector. And he drove a '62 Corvette and so did Wayne Gethman. And I always wanted one. And I now happen to have four. (laughing) >> He who get the most toys wins. Final question, 'cause you're such a legend and you're awesome and you're doin' so much work. And you're very active, engaged, appreciate that. Advice to young athletes coming up, whether they're also in business or a tech athlete or a business athlete. But the sports athletes today got travel ball, you got all this stuff goin' on. The idols like Stephen Curry are lookin' great. Great role models now emerging. What advice do you give them? >> John's got a freshman in high school. I got a junior in high school. What would ya say to 'em? >> You know, I'll tell ya. When you're young, the people you want to listen to are Mom and Dad. No one, and I'll say this to any child from the age of eight or nine years old, five, six years old to 17, 18, 19, 20, all the way up, now my daughter's 25. All the way up to the end of your parents' days. No one cares for you more than your mother or your father. Any parent, whether it's a job or whether their success in life, number one in that man or woman, mom or dad, number one in their life is their children. And so for kids, I say if there's any person you're going to listen to for advice in any path you want to walk down, it's the one that your parents talk to you about or how they show you. That is what I would leave as being most important. For kids, anything, idea that you have that you believe you can do, whether it's the athlete like Stephen Curry that has created shots and done things on the basketball court that he envisioned, that he thought about. Or whether it's the next Steve Jobs who happens to be Mark Zuckerman, who I don't know Mark is 30 years old yet. >> John: He just turned 30. >> It's an idea. He's born around the same time. He's born this week. His birthday is in this week. My birthday's tomorrow. >> John: Happy birthday. >> But thank you. Anything that you can think of in today's world of technology. With places like Silicon Valley where they take dreams and create foundations for them. I had a dream about a website that would sell automotive parts and you could go to my site and buy anything for your car. We've got about 75,000 items now. We'll get to 180,000 in a few months. We'll get to a half a million as soon as my technology is ready for it. But we have things to pay attention to and look into and issues to make sure that we iron out that aren't there for our consumer, for ease of navigation, ease of consumption and purchasing. Any idea that you have, take time to dream. It's much more so than taking time to dream when I was a young kid. Because my father would say, "Stop daydreamin' "and wastin' time." >> John: Get to work. >> Reggie: In today's world, for our children, I say take time to create a vision or to create something new. And go to someone that's in the tech world and they'll figure out a way of helping you manifest it into something that's a reality. >> Listen to your parents, kids. And folks out there, dream, build the foundation, go for it. Reggie Jackson, congratulations for being a Cube alumni again, multi-return. >> Peter: Thank you very much. >> John: Appreciate it. Congratulate on all your continued success. You're a legend. Great to have you on. And thanks so much for comin' on The Cube. >> Peter: And happy 70th birthday. >> John, Pete, always a pleasure. >> John: Happy birthday. >> Thank you very much. >> Have some cake for Reggie. It's The Cube, live here in Orlando. Bringin' all the action here on The Cube. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris with Reggie Jackson. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR, This is "Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante". >> Black Hat 22 was held in Las Vegas last week, the same time as theCUBE Supercloud event. Unlike AWS re:Inforce where words are carefully chosen to put a positive spin on security, Black Hat exposes all the warts of cyber and openly discusses its hard truths. It's a conference that's attended by technical experts who proudly share some of the vulnerabilities they've discovered, and, of course, by numerous vendors marketing their products and services. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis", we summarize what we learned from discussions with several people who attended Black Hat and our analysis from reviewing dozens of keynotes, articles, sessions, and data from a recent Black Hat Attendees Survey conducted by Black Hat and Informa, and we'll end with the discussion of what it all means for the challenges around securing the supercloud. Now, I personally did not attend, but as I said at the top, we reviewed a lot of content from the event which is renowned for its hundreds of sessions, breakouts, and strong technical content that is, as they say, unvarnished. Chris Krebs, the former director of Us cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency, CISA, he gave the keynote, and he spoke about the increasing complexity of tech stacks and the ripple effects that that has on organizational risk. Risk was a big theme at the event. Where re:Inforce tends to emphasize, again, the positive state of cybersecurity, it could be said that Black Hat, as the name implies, focuses on the other end of the spectrum. Risk, as a major theme of the event at the show, got a lot of attention. Now, there was a lot of talk, as always, about the expanded threat service, you hear that at any event that's focused on cybersecurity, and tons of emphasis on supply chain risk as a relatively new threat that's come to the CISO's minds. Now, there was also plenty of discussion about hybrid work and how remote work has dramatically increased business risk. According to data from in Intel 471's Mark Arena, the previously mentioned Black Hat Attendee Survey showed that compromise credentials posed the number one source of risk followed by infrastructure vulnerabilities and supply chain risks, so a couple of surveys here that we're citing, and we'll come back to that in a moment. At an MIT cybersecurity conference earlier last decade, theCUBE had a hypothetical conversation with former Boston Globe war correspondent, Charles Sennott, about the future of war and the role of cyber. We had similar discussions with Dr. Robert Gates on theCUBE at a ServiceNow event in 2016. At Black Hat, these discussions went well beyond the theoretical with actual data from the war in Ukraine. It's clear that modern wars are and will be supported by cyber, but the takeaways are that they will be highly situational, targeted, and unpredictable because in combat scenarios, anything can happen. People aren't necessarily at their keyboards. Now, the role of AI was certainly discussed as it is at every conference, and particularly cyber conferences. You know, it was somewhat dissed as over hyped, not surprisingly, but while AI is not a panacea to cyber exposure, automation and machine intelligence can definitely augment, what appear to be and have been stressed out, security teams can do this by recommending actions and taking other helpful types of data and presenting it in a curated form that can streamline the job of the SecOps team. Now, most cyber defenses are still going to be based on tried and true monitoring and telemetry data and log analysis and curating known signatures and analyzing consolidated data, but increasingly, AI will help with the unknowns, i.e. zero-day threats and threat actor behaviors after infiltration. Now, finally, while much lip service was given to collaboration and public-private partnerships, especially after Stuxsnet was revealed early last decade, the real truth is that threat intelligence in the private sector is still evolving. In particular, the industry, mid decade, really tried to commercially exploit proprietary intelligence and, you know, do private things like private reporting and monetize that, but attitudes toward collaboration are trending in a positive direction was one of the sort of outcomes that we heard at Black Hat. Public-private partnerships are being both mandated by government, and there seems to be a willingness to work together to fight an increasingly capable adversary. These things are definitely on the rise. Now, without this type of collaboration, securing the supercloud is going to become much more challenging and confined to narrow solutions. and we're going to talk about that little later in the segment. Okay, let's look at some of the attendees survey data from Black Hat. Just under 200 really serious security pros took the survey, so not enough to slice and dice by hair color, eye color, height, weight, and favorite movie genre, but enough to extract high level takeaways. You know, these strongly agree or disagree survey responses can sometimes give vanilla outputs, but let's look for the ones where very few respondents strongly agree or disagree with a statement or those that overwhelmingly strongly agree or somewhat agree. So it's clear from this that the respondents believe the following, one, your credentials are out there and available to criminals. Very few people thought that that was, you know, unavoidable. Second, remote work is here to stay, and third, nobody was willing to really jinx their firms and say that they strongly disagree that they'll have to respond to a major cybersecurity incident within the next 12 months. Now, as we've reported extensively, COVID has permanently changed the cybersecurity landscape and the CISO's priorities and playbook. Check out this data that queries respondents on the pandemic's impact on cybersecurity, new requirements to secure remote workers, more cloud, more threats from remote systems and remote users, and a shift away from perimeter defenses that are no longer as effective, e.g. firewall appliances. Note, however, the fifth response that's down there highlighted in green. It shows a meaningful drop in the percentage of remote workers that are disregarding corporate security policy, still too many, but 10 percentage points down from 2021 survey. Now, as we've said many times, bad user behavior will trump good security technology virtually every time. Consistent with the commentary from Mark Arena's Intel 471 threat report, fishing for credentials is the number one concern cited in the Black Hat Attendees Survey. This is a people and process problem more than a technology issue. Yes, using multifactor authentication, changing passwords, you know, using unique passwords, using password managers, et cetera, they're all great things, but if it's too hard for users to implement these things, they won't do it, they'll remain exposed, and their organizations will remain exposed. Number two in the graphic, sophisticated attacks that could expose vulnerabilities in the security infrastructure, again, consistent with the Intel 471 data, and three, supply chain risks, again, consistent with Mark Arena's commentary. Ask most CISOs their number one problem, and they'll tell you, "It's a lack of talent." That'll be on the top of their list. So it's no surprise that 63% of survey respondents believe they don't have the security staff necessary to defend against cyber threats. This speaks to the rise of managed security service providers that we've talked about previously on "Breaking Analysis". We've seen estimates that less than 50% of organizations in the US have a SOC, and we see those firms as ripe for MSSP support as well as larger firms augmenting staff with managed service providers. Now, after re:Invent, we put forth this conceptual model that discussed how the cloud was becoming the first line of defense for CISOs, and DevOps was being asked to do more, things like securing the runtime, the containers, the platform, et cetera, and audit was kind of that last line of defense. So a couple things we picked up from Black Hat which are consistent with this shift and some that are somewhat new, first, is getting visibility across the expanded threat surface was a big theme at Black Hat. This makes it even harder to identify risk, of course, this being the expanded threat surface. It's one thing to know that there's a vulnerability somewhere. It's another thing to determine the severity of the risk, but understanding how easy or difficult it is to exploit that vulnerability and how to prioritize action around that. Vulnerability is increasingly complex for CISOs as the security landscape gets complexified. So what's happening is the SOC, if there even is one at the organization, is becoming federated. No longer can there be one ivory tower that's the magic god room of data and threat detection and analysis. Rather, the SOC is becoming distributed following the data, and as we just mentioned, the SOC is being augmented by the cloud provider and the managed service providers, the MSSPs. So there's a lot of critical security data that is decentralized and this will necessitate a new cyber data model where data can be synchronized and shared across a federation of SOCs, if you will, or mini SOCs or SOC capabilities that live in and/or embedded in an organization's ecosystem. Now, to this point about cloud being the first line of defense, let's turn to a story from ETR that came out of our colleague Eric Bradley's insight in a one-on-one he did with a senior IR person at a manufacturing firm. In a piece that ETR published called "Saved by Zscaler", check out this comment. Quote, "As the last layer, we are filtering all the outgoing internet traffic through Zscaler. And when an attacker is already on your network, and they're trying to communicate with the outside to exchange encryption keys, Zscaler is already blocking the traffic. It happened to us. It happened and we were saved by Zscaler." So that's pretty cool. So not only is the cloud the first line of defense, as we sort of depicted in that previous graphic, here's an example where it's also the last line of defense. Now, let's end on what this all means to securing the supercloud. At our Supercloud 22 event last week in our Palo Alto CUBE Studios, we had a session on this topic on supercloud, securing the supercloud. Security, in our view, is going to be one of the most important and difficult challenges for the idea of supercloud to become real. We reviewed in last week's "Breaking Analysis" a detailed discussion with Snowflake co-founder and president of products, Benoit Dageville, how his company approaches security in their data cloud, what we call a superdata cloud. Snowflake doesn't use the term supercloud. They use the term datacloud, but what if you don't have the focus, the engineering depth, and the bank roll that Snowflake has? Does that mean superclouds will only be developed by those companies with deep pockets and enormous resources? Well, that's certainly possible, but on the securing the supercloud panel, we had three technical experts, Gee Rittenhouse of Skyhigh Security, Piyush Sharrma who's the founder of Accurics who sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, who's the former Head of Product at VMware. Now, John Furrier asked each of them, "What is missing? What's it going to take to secure the supercloud? What has to happen?" Here's what they said. Play the clip. >> This is the final question. We have one minute left. I wish we had more time. This is a great panel. We'll bring you guys back for sure after the event. What one thing needs to happen to unify or get through the other side of this fragmentation and then the challenges for supercloud? Because remember, the enterprise equation is solve complexity with more complexity. Well, that's not what the market wants. They want simplicity. They want SaaS. They want ease of use. They want infrastructure risk code. What has to happen? What do you think, each of you? >> So I can start, and extending to the previous conversation, I think we need a consortium. We need a framework that defines that if you really want to operate on supercloud, these are the 10 things that you must follow. It doesn't matter whether you take AWS, Slash, or TCP or you have all, and you will have the on-prem also, which means that it has to follow a pattern, and that pattern is what is required for supercloud, in my opinion. Otherwise, security is going everywhere. They're like they have to fix everything, find everything, and so on and so forth. It's not going to be possible. So they need a framework. They need a consortium, and this consortium needs to be, I think, needs to led by the cloud providers because they're the ones who have these foundational infrastructure elements, and the security vendor should contribute on providing more severe detections or severe findings. So that's, in my opinion, should be the model. >> Great, well, thank you, Gee. >> Yeah, I would think it's more along the lines of a business model. We've seen in cloud that the scale matters, and once you're big, you get bigger. We haven't seen that coalesce around either a vendor, a business model, or whatnot to bring all of this and connect it all together yet. So that value proposition in the industry, I think, is missing, but there's elements of it already available. >> I think there needs to be a mindset. If you look, again, history repeating itself. The internet sort of came together around set of IETF, RSC standards. Everybody embraced and extended it, right? But still, there was, at least, a baseline, and I think at that time, the largest and most innovative vendors understood that they couldn't do it by themselves, right? And so I think what we need is a mindset where these big guys, like Google, let's take an example. They're not going to win at all, but they can have a substantial share. So how do they collaborate with the ecosystem around a set of standards so that they can bring their differentiation and then embrace everybody together. >> Okay, so Gee's point about a business model is, you know, business model being missing, it's broadly true, but perhaps Snowflake serves as a business model where they've just gone out and and done it, setting or trying to set a de facto standard by which data can be shared and monetized. They're certainly setting that standard and mandating that standard within the Snowflake ecosystem with its proprietary framework. You know, perhaps that is one answer, but Tony lays out a scenario where there's a collaboration mindset around a set of standards with an ecosystem. You know, intriguing is this idea of a consortium or a framework that Piyush was talking about, and that speaks to the collaboration or lack thereof that we spoke of earlier, and his and Tony's proposal that the cloud providers should lead with the security vendor ecosystem playing a supporting role is pretty compelling, but can you see AWS and Azure and Google in a kumbaya moment getting together to make that happen? It seems unlikely, but maybe a better partnership between the US government and big tech could be a starting point. Okay, that's it for today. I want to thank the many people who attended Black Hat, reported on it, wrote about it, gave talks, did videos, and some that spoke to me that had attended the event, Becky Bracken, who is the EIC at Dark Reading. They do a phenomenal job and the entire team at Dark Reading, the news desk there, Mark Arena, whom I mentioned, Garrett O'Hara, Nash Borges, Kelly Jackson, sorry, Kelly Jackson Higgins, Roya Gordon, Robert Lipovsky, Chris Krebs, and many others, thanks for the great, great commentary and the content that you put out there, and thanks to Alex Myerson, who's on production, and Alex manages the podcasts for us. Ken Schiffman is also in our Marlborough studio as well, outside of Boston. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters, and Rob Hoff is our Editor-in-Chief at SiliconANGLE and does some great editing and helps with the titles of "Breaking Analysis" quite often. Remember these episodes, they're all available as podcasts, wherever you listen, just search for "Breaking Analysis Podcasts". I publish each on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com, and you could email me, get in touch with me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or you can DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts, and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on "Breaking Analysis". (upbeat music)